The song never meant much to us, speaking as it did of an age we hadn’t reached, but once we heard it playing tinily through the receiver, coming from the Lisbon girls, the song made an impact. Gilbert O’Sullivan’s elfin voice sounded high enough to be a girl’s. The lyrics might have been diary entries the girls whispered into our ears. Though it wasn’t their voices we heard, the song conjured their images more vividly than ever. We could feel them, on the other end, blowing dust off the needle, holding the telephone over the spinning black disk, playing the volume low so as not to be
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