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

by Zoë Folbigg

  ‘These are amazing!’ Nena says, rising past wool and cashmere into lace with a full inelegant mouth that would probably break Pierre Hermé’s heart. Maya knows the love that goes into making those bad boys, so she always waits until she is in the food hall to give the macaron her total appreciation. When Maya’s hair turned wavy and she moved out of London and in with her brother Jacob in Hazelworth, she bought herself a KitchenAid as a consolation present, and has been working hard to crack the secret of making the perfect macaron for the three years since. So far it’s evaded her.

  Maya and Nena reach the fourth-floor food hall and weave through white square tables and red and black chairs to their favourite spot in the corner that overlooks Oxford Street and Duke Street at rush hour; to the window where they can best see the top arc of the London Eye beyond the cranes and rooftops glimmering in the warm light of a summer evening.

  Nena grabs two sparkling waters so she doesn’t have to watch Maya unpeeling her own sticker seal and squirrel it onto the cover of a notebook safely out of Nena’s sight. Maya then unwraps the cellophane bag with care and precision, takes out the jasmine flower macaron and looks at it, misty-eyed.

  ‘Nena I love him.’

  ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘I know. But I can see myself with him. He looked so… right, I just wanted to bury my head in his neck and close my eyes. I’ve never felt like that about anyone.’

  ‘Not Jon?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Not even Leo?’

  ‘Not even Leo.’

  ‘God you have to take a photo of this guy and show me what you mean.’

  Maya suddenly feels protective and changes the subject. ‘How’s it going with West End Boy?’

  Nena twists her straight shiny hair with one finger then ties it expertly in a bun on top of her head. Without her usual flowers or hair adornments, Nena looks naked. A blank canvas ready for Act II tonight.

  ‘Oh he’s hot. We’re having a LOT of fun. Although it’s a bit annoying waiting for all the girls at the stage door to bugger off before he can bugger me.’

  Maya chokes on ground almonds and icing sugar, takes a sip of water to compose herself and gives Nena a mock disapproving look.

  ‘How long will he be here for?’

  ‘His visa runs to the end of the year and I think he’s booked until Christmas, which is cool. We both know it isn’t anything heavy.’

  Maya marvels at how Nena can be so casual about someone she has given her body to, someone so in demand, and washes down her fourth and final bite of the jasmine flower macaron with another sip of water. She folds the cellophane back over the remaining three.

  ‘I can’t eat the others, I’ve lost my appetite. I’ll report back on them later, but the jasmine flower gets a thumbs up,’ she says, tucking them carefully into her lilac scalloped-edge satchel.

  ‘Well rose and lychee is the mutt’s nuts. You should try recreating it, Maya.’

  Maya daydreams about one day finding patisserie alchemy, while Nena eats her remaining two macarons and talks Maya through the rest of the cast she’s working with.

  ‘Your life is so much fun!’ exclaims Maya.

  ‘Well maybe yours is about to get interesting, if you can get it on with Train Man.’

  Maya looks at her watch. ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘I have a class tonight, last one of the year,’ she says standing.

  ‘OK Sugartits, I’m going down to the beauty hall. Gotta get me some more paint. Gimme a hug. And text me if he is on the train tomorrow,’ Nena says, slinging her large holdall of tricks and costume changes over her shoulder.

  Tomorrow? Maya doesn’t know if she can wait that long to see him again. Her heart feels tight in her chest but her runner’s feet take her back down four escalators past lace, wool, denim and leather, and she skips onto a number 390 bus. All Maya can think about is how she hopes Train Man will be on her train home this evening.

  Chapter Eight

  James walks through the door of an unhomely home and dumps his backpack on top of a cardboard box that’s bursting at its parcel-taped seams. James had a lot of boxes to choose from but he slid his grey backpack from his shoulders down his back and onto the nearest, marked ‘Air -> Leonard Cohen’. Dark terracotta rectangles and circles on the walls tell tales of where pictures and plates once hung; a paler, sun-bleached hue envelops the rest of the room on a light summer’s evening as rays pour through dusty wooden blinds. The room is dominated by brown. The two-tone terracotta walls, the heart-wrenchingly dull boxes, the thin veil of beige dust on each slat of the pale brown blinds, all underscored by a dark brown carpet that highlights flecks in need of a vacuum. James makes a mental note to ask the landlord if they can paint the walls before autumn, so he and Kitty don’t feel like they’re living in a molehill.

  Clearing the boxes would be a good place to start.

  The boxes mostly contain books, vinyl and photo albums. Mementoes that punctuate their journey to this point.

  ‘It all takes up so much space,’ Kitty complained yesterday. ‘Why don’t you go digital?’

  It’s a question Kitty often asks and James just doesn’t answer. He silently plods on. The sentimental collector, even though it is quite difficult for him to open the front door amid his boxes of things. But this is his life, laid out before him in a small front room.

  James pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his smooth straight nose and looks at the shapes on the walls. He wonders what artwork might have watched the lives of others, then he sees the mantelpiece above the fireplace and realises that along with all the other brown cardboard in the room, Kitty won’t notice a tube lying along it until he’s ready to tell her about it.

  James can’t hear any noise from inside the house, just the sound, via televisions, of tennis balls bouncing, coming through open windows along the street.

  ‘Kitty?’ he calls, as he walks to a middle room starved of natural light, tripping over a box marked ‘Primitives -> The Streets’ as he goes. ‘Kit?’

  Still no answer.

  It’s 8 p.m. James has just got home from his first commute from Charlotte Street to the suburbs on the rainy morning that turned out good. The commute home went pretty smoothly, better than this morning’s journey when James almost missed the train because the woman at the ticket desk moved at the pace of a sloth. But tonight he left his friend Dominic in the Fitzroy Tavern at 6.30 p.m. and still made it home by eight.

  As James got off the train, turned right out of the station, across two roads and a park lined with copper beeches, he drank in his new surroundings. At the end of the park, he came to what felt like his neighbourhood and crossed two more roads into the quiet street of Victorian terraces. Open windows and blaring televisions revealed the state of play as James walked to 73 Sandringham Road, and the rhythmical knock of felt and rubber on polyester strings gave him a feeling of the familiar in an unfamiliar place. James even took off his headphones to see if he could gauge who was winning.

  In the windowless middle room housing nothing but a dining table and two chairs, James calls up a flight of stairs. A toilet beyond the kitchen at the back has recently been flushed.

  ‘Oh. You’re home,’ says a tall woman with short white-blonde hair as she tiptoes barefoot down the stairs and walks past James into the kitchen. Her limbs are almost as long as his. ‘I was in the attic room. How was the journey?’ She rummages in a box in the kitchen for food, like a hungry greyhound, and pulls out some cheese crackers.

  ‘It was OK. Took the same time, door to door, as it did from Tooting, I couldn’t believe it. I even had a quick pint after work.’

  ‘All right for some.’

  Kitty takes another cracker.

  ‘What are we having for dinner?’ she says with a full, dry mouth.

  ‘I dunno. Did you make it to the shops?’

  Wheaten lips tense. ‘No James, I’ve been busy unpacking upstairs. All day.’

&nb
sp; Wide, lovely eyes react quickly to diffuse a bomb. ‘That’s OK, I saw a chip shop on the way home, I’ll get us dinner from there. Gives us a chance to check out the local catch of the day.’

  ‘Hazelworth is no nearer the sea than London, you know?’ Kitty says flatly.

  ‘It was a joke.’

  James and Kitty moved to Hazelworth yesterday in time for Kitty to start her new job at Cambridge University.

  ‘Such a cliché!’ joked their London friends about them moving to the Shire as they approach thirty. Although a family home proved hard to find in the time they had before Kitty’s new job started, so they’re renting for now. And they can’t even think about kids until Kitty has been in her new job long enough to qualify for maternity leave. But Hazelworth would be a great place to raise kids, they could see that from the coffee shops and playparks and the market square when they did their recce and looked at some rentals. Kitty stumbled upon Hazelworth before she knew it was family-friendly. When she dropped a pin in an old road atlas to work out which town was equidistant from London and Cambridge, Hazelworth was slap bang in the middle. The decision was made. And the nice estate agent who showed them five Victorian terraces that day said that Hazelworth is full of London and Cambridge commuters, so that seemed perfect for them. It’s just a coincidence that Hazelworth might also be a nice place to raise kids.

  ‘I bought you a present,’ says James proudly, hoping for complete disarmament.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ she snaps.

  ‘As a good luck for next week – come here.’

  James takes Kitty by the hand and into the front room and presents her with the tube sitting on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Ta-da!’ he says quietly.

  Kitty can’t remember the last time her hand was in his. It feels strange, even though it’s a hand she first held when she was sixteen and she knows its shape, its contours, its smoothness better than she knows her own. This evening James’s hand feels strange, but it is soft and comforting because Kitty has been using her hands to unpack boxes, remove dust, hang clothes, and pull out rusty nails from crumbling walls. She is surprised by how nice it feels. Kitty is a scientist and works in a lab, where her dry hands infect mice with viruses to see if three days later they will wilt or rise from the ashes. She has just won a post in Cambridge and starts next week. Another lab. Further research into the genetics of memory T cells. Hoping to save the world thanks to mutant mice.

  Her hands needed some tenderness, but the unfamiliarity of someone so familiar makes her let go.

  ‘I need some cream,’ she says. ‘I hope you bought me hand cream.’

  ‘No, it’s this. Here.’

  James hands Kitty the cardboard tube. Her face flushes with self-consciousness. She doesn’t like being put on the spot. She pops open a white disc at one end and pulls out a poster, then starts to unravel it. As paper unfurls, it reveals monochromatic dystopian chaos in lino cut. Cars sink into waves under a shower of meteors under the Hollywood hills. She examines it with an unmoved gaze in her cement-grey eyes. She doesn’t like it.

  ‘We don’t need any more artwork, this house won’t have enough walls.’

  ‘It’s Stanley Donwood.’

  ‘It’s hideous, James, it makes me feel really stressed,’ Kitty says, dropping the print on the floor and walking out of the room and back upstairs.

  James listens to the thud of footsteps overhead and looks down as the ends scroll back together, leaving a little bit of chaos peeping out from the living-room floor.

  Chapter Nine

  It is twenty-three hours and fifty minutes since Maya first saw Seth or Milo or Train Man.

  Please please please let him be a commuter and not a tourist.

  Maya has got to the train station early so as not to look flustered or dewy, and is already standing at the front end of the platform, where the first carriages will stop. It’s a sunnier, fresher morning than yesterday, reflecting the optimism burning inside her. Gone are the sweatshirt, jeans and Converse in favour of a soft black T-shirt tucked into a large fulsome skirt in a black and white graphic print that swings into swathes at her calves. Red wedges with a raffia heel give Maya the oomph her average-height legs need.

  The clock ticks. 8.16 a.m.

  There's still time.

  Maya rummages in her satchel.

  8.17 a.m.

  Please come.

  She starts to feel ridiculous but still she reapplies lip balm.

  8.19 a.m.

  Shit. What if he’s further back and I never know. I committed too soon.

  Hang on. Did Maya just see Train Man coming through the ticket barrier on the other side of the tracks?

  Not sure from this far up. If it was, he probably won’t make it.

  8.20 a.m., an Inferior Train pulls in.

  I could cry.

  The train departs at 8.21 a.m., on time for once. Maya feels small, hope squashed like the flies the train driver is trying to look through on the windscreen in front of him.

  Maya sinks into the seat of the Inferior Train and a puff of grey dust hovers in the space between the top of her head and the luggage rack. She swipes a bare arm in front of her face to clear the dust cloud and sees a figure through the thin glass rectangle of the internal door beyond it. Train Man turns a door handle and bows a little so he can walk through the too-small carriage door and into Maya’s life.

  Not a tourist. A commuter.

  Happy day.

  Black rectangles slip a little down his beautiful nose as he ducks his head. Maya is facing backwards today, and can see wide, lovely eyes look around the carriage, searching for a seat.

  Please sit near me…

  That’s the trouble with Britain. No one talks on public transport. In Mexico City Maya couldn’t hear herself think on the train while women shouted exuberantly across her. In San Salvador people chatted on buses so loudly that Maya didn’t even bother to listen to her iPod, although probably best she kept it out of sight. But this uptight British train carriage is so quiet, Maya can hear the sound of people clenching in their seat. Buttocks on polyester on dirty blue gum-stained seats. How is Train Man supposed to make a connection and fall in love with Maya when she can’t say a word to him? She wants to tell him she won a game show recently. That always makes people a) impressed, b) laugh and c) want to talk to her more. It’s the best chat-up line she’s ever had, but she’s not been able to use it.

  Train Man sits down across the aisle from Maya, also facing backwards, and Maya’s heart soars so high, even an Inferior Train can’t quash the wonderful feeling.

  If I were to raise my arm a little, I would be able to hold his hand.

  Maya can sense that Train Man is having a bad day. Nearly late. Flustered. Glasses not sitting properly on his nose. And now she gets the impression he doesn’t like having to sit backwards. But that’s not the thing that’s making him feel most uncomfortable today. Maya doesn’t know that this morning, as James walked along Sandringham Road, it didn’t feel like the happy kingdom he knew last night. The open windows of the terraced houses blaring out a British victory in the tennis were shut; the bright evening full of bounce and excitement at the prospect of giving a gift had turned flat; the really good fish ’n’ chips from his new local chip shop gave him a knot in his stomach. And the four hundred pound art print was still scrunched up on the floor where Kitty dropped it. Maya doesn’t know any of that.

  To make matters worse, as James sat down in his seat on a train he nearly missed, he remembered he should be preparing for a pitch he and Dominic have to deliver later in the week but all he wants to do is get lost in a book.

  He opens the backpack he only just placed on the floor between his legs and takes out his book.

  Maya tries to glance into Train Man’s bag for more clues by only moving her eyes and not turning her head.

  Calm, methodical, gentle. Words tumble onto James’s lap. He forgets the Donwood, he forgets the fact he should be reading up on depilator
y products and enters another world, oblivious to everyone around him. Oblivious to the girl he didn’t notice yesterday even though she was dressed almost identically to him. Oblivious to the effort she has made today in a fifties-style tight tee and swirly skirt. Oblivious to her soft chestnut-brown hair with caramel-tinged tips, her faint freckles, her small waist and her strong, if not spectacular, legs. James gets lost in One Hundred Years Of Solitude, in Macondo and a world away from Maya.

  Did he even notice me?

  Maya strokes her straightened hair, today’s more polished version of herself that Jacob laughed at as she left home this morning.

  ‘Sucking up to the boss?’ he teased.

  Of course he didn’t notice, he was looking for a seat, he’s not looking for me.

  Chapter Ten

  September 2013

  ‘Excuse me, you dropped this,’ says the girl with the Girl With A Pearl Earring in her hand.

  Simon knows he dropped it. In fact he did it on purpose because he wanted to talk to her, and he thought he’d be much more interesting to her than that tedious-looking historical book. So Simon engineered it so that The Times would fall off his lap and onto the girl’s feet. He pretended to be listening to music on his iPhone so that he might not have heard it drop, if he hadn’t already known that it had.

  Simon takes a headphone out of his right ear.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You dropped your newspaper.’