The Note: An uplifting, life-affirming romance about finding love in an unexpected place

by Zoë Folbigg

  Sometimes they go quiet for a few hours. Maya is very good at going quiet for a few hours, and getting lost in her world. When she was seven, Maya used to sit staring at a bookshelf in her parents’ bedroom. A dusty structure about two metres wide with four levels of shelves packed too tightly with books, as was her father Herbert Flowers’ storage solution. On the shelves Maya would place little wooden figures, about the length of her longest finger. The wooden figures had the same simple face with the same simple features, two black dots for eyes and a red curve for a smile, but they were dressed differently to give them their characteristics. One had long black wool hair and a red body, another wore a grass skirt, another looked like a policeman in blue. Maya’s mother had bought them as stocking fillers for each of the Flowers children the Christmas before and Maya would be transfixed by the dolls, creating rooms and antechambers in this dusty makeshift dolls’ house by pulling out books at strategic points. Then she would place the dolls in the various rooms or corridors, and sit and stare. As still as a wooden doll herself. Creamy skin, shiny poker-straight golden brown hair, delicate freckles that came out in summer. For hours Maya would stare and envisage whole scenarios and relationships between these unlikely associates. Herbert Flowers would wonder where Maya was amid the commotion of her siblings, but she was quiet upstairs, staring at the dolls, listening to imagined conversation, immersed in another world for an entire morning.

  This morning is wet, but the rain has a mugginess about it, even at 8.16 a.m. Long ago, while working in a bakery in Mexico, Maya learned that such rain was called ‘chipi-chipi’, a misty humid fizz of a rain that does nothing but make souls wilt and hair rise. She stands on the platform reading the new-season lookbook, trying to come up with words to go with the pictures, but she can’t seem to concentrate. Same routine, same two-minute train delay on the platform departures board. Same glib faces.

  Shall I make chilli tonight? she thinks while rereading the words ‘Aztec print’ three times. Not knowing why she can’t concentrate, Maya looks up across four tracks to the steamy smeared glass of the crowded ticket hall on the other side of the expanse. She can’t see that the person she’s been looking for all her life is in there.

  Tardy commuters run the underpass from the ticket hall to the platform with a different kind of urgency. As the train approaches, Maya focuses on the lookbook. She could board this train and sit down with her eyes closed. She even knows without looking up that today the train is a Superior Train with green and red seats, more kindly spaced apart. Not one of the clapped-out blue trains with too many seats, packed together and stained. Matted gum with skin particles stuck to it, burrowing itself into the stale faux-velveteen upholstery. Inferior Trains have carriage-to-carriage doors you have to open by turning a greasy circular handle, too small for any normal person’s hand. The sound of this train alone is enough for Maya to know that it’s a Superior Train. Smoother, more solid, more buoyant. Automatic internal doors and carpet. A Superior Train gives Maya’s day an edge. Still she doesn’t look up and flips through the lookbook and circles keywords.

  For a reason she doesn’t yet know, Maya is torn away from neon dogtooth and tartan and sees a new Train Person on the platform. Someone Maya has never seen get this train, at this time. Or any of the other trains she sometimes catches either side of it – but now won’t. And she can’t take her eyes off him as he hurriedly battles to close his umbrella as the train pulls in. New Train Person looks so different to the melee of men in suits or women in frumpy skirts and cheap jackets that they think make them look authoritative, with sleeves that are slightly too long so cuffs hang over their hands. The usual suspects she sees every day but never speaks to. The plain girl with the spherical head, whose facial features move so slowly she looks like an animatronic owl; the blonde woman with a tiny waist but inflatable-looking arms who anxiously pushes her way onto the train every morning, even though she’ll always get a seat; the man who reads his Metro tucked inside a copy of the Times Literary Supplement and thinks no one notices.

  This man is different. He is tall with slim legs and reassuring shoulders and has hair that is so dark brown it could be black, windswept to the side in the chipi-chipi, or is it meant to be like that? He has olive skin, wears black rectangular glasses, a black V-neck jumper, despite the warm air, and grey skinny jeans, the exact same shade of grey as the pair of jeans Maya is wearing today. She watches him walk past her, heading towards the front end of the platform alongside the braking train and stares, small, pillowy mouth open in wonder. Everything feels comforting, everything feels like home. It’s a feeling Maya hasn’t had for years and doesn’t want to go away. Maya steps out from the hollow shelter of the leaking 1930s roof and walks up the platform after him.

  As Maya hobbles on Lego behind this wondrous New Train Person and sees his equine legs striding out ahead of her, she has the sensation of a reassuring palm, gently pressing into the small of her back, urging her along.

  *

  In the carriage no one talks, everyone seems tense, and Maya tries not to look across the aisle at this man as he reads One Hundred Years Of Solitude. She can’t help it.

  Is he married?

  Maya pictures her beautiful train fellow swimming in an infinity pool somewhere tropical with a ridiculously glamorous woman with ridiculously long legs wrapped around him. A disheartened heart gazes down.

  He’s not wearing a ring.

  This man, Train Man, is sitting diagonally from Maya, on the opposite side of the carriage. Two seats face two seats, separated by a little table with gum stuck to its underbelly. The table in front of Train Man has crumbs on it but he has taken off his glasses to read (ahh, short-sighted) and puts his glasses on the crumbs. He is in the corner next to the window, not sitting in the direction of travel. Maya doesn’t know that facing backwards makes Train Man feel uncomfortable – it doesn’t even cross her mind. Maya is facing forwards in her set of four seats, and she leans her head in towards the window but doesn’t touch it.

  I wish I were sitting opposite him to see if his soul is as lovely from that angle.

  Maya wants to look at Train Man’s unbespectacled eyes but instead she hides her head in the lookbook. Maya crosses a tightly clothed leg and doesn’t realise the toe of her orange Converse boot points to him.

  The train stops at its one stop before the final destination and the unfortunate commuters get on. Unfortunate because they live in this unfortunate town. Unfortunate because the remaining few seats have gone now. Unfortunate that, although their fare is seventy-six pounds cheaper a month, they live in a less attractive, more thoughtlessly built modern town and they will have to stand. Maya wishes she wasn’t such a snob. Her Clause IV parents wish she wasn’t such a snob, but they try to see the funny side.

  What’s his name? He looks like he has a nice name. Bookish but sexy. Perhaps Seth or Milo, yes, I like Milo. What do you do, Milo?

  Maya’s imagination starts galloping with the horse in the field under the viaduct and flies along the track past swathes of red poppies jutting out of the cornfields. Maya thinks that Train Man must have started this job recently, perhaps today, as he’s new on the train and she would definitely have spotted him before.

  He must work for a record company or maybe he’s an architect or a literary agent or something equally creative and cool.

  He looks cool and Maya, looking down at her thin marl sweatshirt with a cartoon of a rainbow on it, grey jeans and Converse, suddenly feels in need of improvement. She thinks of her wardrobe packed with cute vintage dresses and fulsome skirts she saves For Special, knowing that they’re being neglected while she puts her life on hold. She feels a pang of guilt.

  I should treat every day as if it is special.

  With the sound of a horn, the train enters a tunnel and makes the top window above Train Man blow open. Wavy hair flies across Maya’s face, which she peels away and tames by tucking it behind her ear and smoothing it down.

  I need to up my gam
e and revisit my wardrobe. Maybe actually brush my hair in the morning. I should make more of an effort for work anyway, Lucy always looks so polished.

  The sudden clatter of the open window pulls Train Man away from his novel and he looks up at the unfortunate commuters who have had to stand up. His gaze around the carriage, familiarising himself with newness, gives Maya her first proper insight into Train Man’s eyes. Wide, lovely eyes of the darkest brown, separated by a straight nose – a nose Maya thinks is the most beautiful nose she has ever seen. She can see his eyes clearly as he looks up without his glasses on. Big and inquisitive. She’s seen that shade of brown before. The seventy per cent cocoa solids that bring together the two shells of a Plantation Paineiras chocolate macaron that she saw in a shop window in Paris.

  Maya hopes Train Man isn’t feeling nervous about his new job, if it is a new job; there’s a slight sadness about his gaze.

  Did he see me look?

  Maya looks away, closes her eyes and tries to fall asleep so she can free herself. The imprint of those beautiful eyes shines behind flecked eyelids as Maya starts to drift off. Eyes Maya has sought all her life and which finally arrived, two minutes late, nineteen minutes ago.

  I hope I don’t dribble.

  Chapter Seven

  Maya races from the Egyptian columns of FASH HQ and turns left onto Oxford Street to the Ionic columns of Selfridges’ façade, where a familiar face is waiting under the black and white canopy. It’s a good job Maya has runner’s legs because she was already late, but now her nose, with its smattering of summer freckles, is beading and she looks even more dishevelled. You wouldn’t know from the now streaming sun that this morning was so dreary. Maya’s grey skinny jeans seem a little wintry for the way the day turned out, but she raided the fashion cupboard at lunchtime and changed out of her rainbow sweatshirt into a cropped T-shirt with illustrations of beetles and butterflies all over it.

  ‘Nice bugs,’ says her best friend Nena, looking at Maya’s chest and her widening enormous, feline eyes.

  ‘Thanks,’ Maya replies with a wink and kisses her friend’s cheek, wiping a smudge of white face paint off it as she draws away.

  Nena is wearing her trademark black vest top over skintight leather-look leggings and ballet flats. The blank canvas for whatever incarnation she has been today, which from the remnants of white face paint Maya is guessing a clown.

  They pause to let shoppers out of heavy brass and glass doors and enter the sweet and heady scented world of the perfume hall. They snake through the beauty department, where gurus from Henriksen to Hauschka promise skin salvation, bypassing Hermès for Hermé in the confectionary hall. This is what they do when they meet after Maya has finished work for the day, before Nena starts her evening’s graft. They will choose four macarons from the counter at Pierre Hermé, which they will take carefully up four escalators to the food hall on the top floor, where they will enjoy them with an unsullying sparkling water to clear the palette between flavours and a sullying gossip. When Maya and Nena first began this tradition, they would each buy the other four flavours, a different combination every time, but now they do away with that and choose their own at the counter with orange, grey, fuchsia and lime stripes above it to colour-match the confections sitting under climate-controlled glass.

  ‘So what’s new?’ asks Nena. Black, mischievous eyes, sparkling brightly despite their darkness.

  Everything about Nena sparkles brightly.

  Maya looks around the confectionary hall, bursting with women weighed down with designer shopping bags after a day of frivolity and she feels as unsophisticated as she did on the first sweet treat outing she made with Nena, who would become her last best friend, eating ice cream together on a south coast pier.

  The friends met on their first night at university, freshly arrived cohabiters in the same halls of residence. That sorry Sunday evening, when teary parents had long since headed back up the A3 and Maya’s mother Dolores had done her best to make breeze-block walls look homely, and the warden, a mature Scottish student in an Australian cork hat, read an unnecessarily unfriendly riot act on the rules and regulations of this cell-block style accommodation. Maya looked at the strangers packed into the windowless TV room to gauge faces: did anyone else find this approach a little heavy? There were, after all, 188 scared teens in the room. But as Maya looked around, only Nena’s face stood out. Bored at the back. Twirling a strand of long shiny black hair from the artwork piled high on her head and woven intricately in fabrics of turquoise, red and yellow. Dark skin that made it impossible to detect her ethnicity: was she Latin or Indian or Caribbean? Her huge eyes had whites around the edges like a lion pup but looked as though they were painted in thick eyeliner; her plump lips were raspberry red, even though she wasn’t wearing a scrap of make-up. She wore a loose black off-the-shoulder top over a black vest and leggings and delicate dusty-pink ballerina flats on small feet. Small but strong, a body like an acrobat’s. The sort of girl who stands out in a crowd, as she had earlier in the week when Maya noticed her and her tower of hair, not falling out of place while she jumped up and down to ‘Last Nite’ at Brixton Academy. They hadn’t spoken that serendipitous night; Nena hadn’t noticed Maya, but it was enough of a coincidence to be a conversation starter for Maya six days later.

  After the introductory sermon, Maya went over to Nena and said hello. Nena smiled and they never looked back.

  Almost a decade later, they are still the best of friends, as silly as each other, with strange hang-ups or ways of thinking that only the other would understand. Nena is scared of stickers and won’t ever eat fruit in case a gluey Cape, Enza or Del Monte logo touches her. Maya lines her home with conkers every September to keep the spiders out. It has worked for the two autumns she has rented a room in her brother Jacob’s house. Last year, Maya collected seventy-six conkers from the common near their parents’ home on the hill, lined them up along windowsills and doorways, and by the time they’d shrivelled up that December, Maya realised she hadn’t seen a single house spider all season. Jacob finds it somewhat annoying in autumn when he walks in from work, slips and almost breaks his leg on a conker, but ever since his big sister came to live with him, when her hair turned wavy, he let the small stuff slide. Plus he’s not that fond of spiders either.

  ‘Let’s get the macarons, I’ll explain upstairs,’ says Maya.

  At the counter Nena chooses the most colourful concoction she can: pistachio and raspberry compote; yoghurt and grapefruit; rose and lychee; passion fruit and rhubarb. As the French woman serving them hands Nena her cellophane bag she passes it straight to Maya to remove the sticker seal for her. Maya then chooses, following today’s high-summer leanings, and opts for lemon; jasmine flower; orange and basil flower; carrot and pistachio.

  ‘Oh my god, AMAZING,’ says Nena, sinking white teeth into passion fruit and rhubarb as they rise on the first escalator from leather into denim.

  Maya can’t wait for the fourth floor before she tells her friend the news.

  ‘I got it back. I got The Feeling!’ she bursts, clasping Nena’s bare brown shoulder.

  Nena chokes on crispy, powdery shell as she takes in a deep gasp.

  ‘THE feeling? Like Leonardo DiCaprio through a fish tank kinda feeling?’

  ‘Yep… Although the guy I’m in love with wasn’t looking at me like that. Or looking at me at all for that matter. But it was proper butterflies I haven’t had in, well, you know…’

  ‘Bloody hell, what does he look like?’

  Maya ponders. How can she describe those eyes, that beautiful full reading mouth, or the solid V at the base of his neck? How can she explain falling in love after nineteen minutes without sounding crazy?

  ‘He’s got that cool nerdy rock star thing. Dark. Hipster glasses. Mysterious. Beautiful. Oh my god, Nena, he shines. But quietly, unassumingly. He looked lovely. And he gets my train!’ Maya says with glee, as if this means they’re in a relationship. ‘Or at least I hope he will tomorrow. An
d the day after. Oh god, what if he’s a tourist?’ she says, running desperate fingers through her scalp.

  Nena has never seen her best friend behave so strangely, Maya is usually more measured and thoughtful than this. In fact it’s usually the other way around. But Maya’s eyes look so bright, Nena can see orange blossom shards floating among praline pools.

  ‘A Monday morning commuter train? He’s not a tourist,’ says Nena with authority. ‘Is he married?’

  ‘No ring.’

  ‘Did he give any signs of having a Special Someone?’

  ‘Well he’s very handsome and looks nice, so I guess he must. And he’s reading One Hundred Years Of Solitude, so he’s a romantic. And cerebral. He’d be in demand.’ Maya’s heart sinks a little at the prospect.

  ‘Let’s face it, any hot guy in London is in demand,’ shrugs Nena, taking the rose and lychee macaron out of the bag and raising an exasperated eyebrow. As if she’s ever had to make an effort for someone to fall for her. Nena has never had trouble finding love in London, no matter how much she pretends she and Maya are in the same single sisterhood. Nena is one of those people who is so vivacious, she could go to a party on her own, which she often does, and come home with five people’s numbers in her phone: men wanting to date her, women wanting to go for coffee with her, parents wanting to book her. She is a swashbuckler by day and a dancer by night. When the sun is up, Nena is a children’s entertainer, making kids marvel at how she can turn a balloon into a cutlass at pirate parties or how she can throw sparkles up in the air and make them land perfectly on her eyelids for little princesses. When the sun goes down, Nena wows the West End. She can’t hold a tune, but you know that dancer in the ensemble who you can’t take your eyes off when the leading lady is desperately vying for your attention? That’s Nena. Her father is a retired Brazilian dancer who joined the English National Ballet and fell in love with Nena’s principal dancer mother. That’s why when Nena walks she glides, and when she shakes her head with fierce attitude, her thick long black hair seems to move independently, falling gently into place of its own accord. Nena always has at least three boyfriends on the go. At the moment she is seeing Tony, the leading man in the West End’s biggest show; Darius, a waiter from her favourite Camden coffee shop around the corner from her flat-share; and Pete, the plumber who just did a great job in fixing her pipework.