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

by Zoë Folbigg

The elfin-looking girl hands Simon his newspaper. He rolls his eyes and puts a palm to his forehead, as if to call himself a name.

  ‘It’s 6.18 a.m., I’m always a clutz at 6.18 a.m., this train is brutal!’ he endeavours.

  The girl smiles a knowing smile, looks back at her book, then glances up again fleetingly at the man with the crumpled newspaper. His silvery hair looks like he just ran his fingers through it and it stayed there. Floppy but back off his face, kissing his collar at the nape of his neck. His big nose gives him a look of cocksure confidence, as do the strong thighs that open outwards, as if waiting to snare her like a Venus flytrap.

  Without speaking a word, the girl returns to her book.

  Simon delves into his manbag, perched on the floor between sturdy feet. He lost her attention and wants it back again. Rummage, delve, search.

  ‘Polo?’ he proffers.

  The girl giggles and puts a thin delicate hand to a small mouth, knowing what he’s trying to do. Ordinarily this would annoy her: the spread legs, the faux fumbling bumbling Englishman, the arrogance. But this morning he is making her laugh. Maybe she just needs a laugh.

  ‘No thanks, I don’t eat sweets at 6 a.m.,’ she smiles politely.

  ‘Beats cleaning your teeth!’ he jokes.

  ‘Eww.’

  ‘So what’s your secret to looking so fresh-faced and minty at this time of day then?’ he asks, admiring her small opalescent features.

  Ears prick up across the aisle. The half-asleep students leaning against the windows next to them listen through closed eyes.

  ‘Oh I don’t know about that, I must just love my job.’

  ‘What do you do?’ he asks.

  ‘What do you do?’ she answers, raising a pale, perfectly arched eyebrow.

  Flirtatious, I like it.

  ‘Techie start-up, Silicon Fen,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t understand what you just said!’ she laughs, a husky laugh belying her fragile face.

  ‘Sorry, let’s start from the beginning,’ he says, blue eyes set deep behind his nose. ‘I’m Simon,’ this time he proffers a hand.

  ‘I’m Catherine.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Maya is winding down for the day, filing printouts of dresses, shoes, knits and jewels into box files marked by the week in which they will drop. Emma can’t believe it’s already the end of the day, even though she can see from her window seat that the sky is a shade of home time. LA is only just waking up and that’s when a lot of the stars FASH follows are getting dressed by their stylists and posting #OOTDs.

  ‘God I can’t believe it’s 5.30 already! Where did today go?’ asks Emma. She stands and sees Maya looking in a mirror at her desk. ‘Doing anything nice tonight?’

  Maya pulls down a lower lid to examine an unenthusiastic eye. Even though she had her eight hours last night, she just wants to go home to bed.

  ‘Oh,’ she lets out a sigh. ‘I’m meeting Game show Guy for a drink,’ she says, looking across at Emma while still holding the mirror in front of her left eye. ‘I really can't be bothered.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like you, Maya.’

  ‘Well we’ve got this one thing in common so my sister said I should go for it, but, I dunno… I think Clara’s just bored of Train Man chat.’ Maya looks back to her mirror and pulls the other eye down to her cheek, as if to find an excuse in her eyeball. ‘It’s definitely drinks, not a date.’

  Emma is as kind and as honest as usual. ‘You can’t force it, Maya – if you didn’t fancy him the first time you met, you’re not going to fancy him now are you?’

  Maya feels the feeling of compromise hug her throat.

  ‘Did you fancy Paul when you first met him?’ Maya asks, still searching. Apart from their boss Lucy, Emma is the only other married person on the editorial team, which makes her the only other proper grown-up.

  ‘Erm, no!’ she laughs, holding a sweet hand to a delicate nose. ‘It was a slow burn. So yes, maybe you should go for it with Game show Guy!’

  Emma and her husband met back in the good old days of magazines. She was website editor at HoneyBee where Paul sold advertising space. It took three Christmas parties and two Maggie’s awards – the industry's annual knees-up – before Emma finally agreed to go on a date with him, and they’ve been together for ten happy years, although the past four haven’t been without their struggles.

  ‘Well, you’ve got nothing to lose – as long as he pays.’

  ‘I won the money, Emma, I ought to pay.’ Maya looks guilty, even though she won the money fair and square.

  ‘Well good luck, I want a full report in the morning.’

  Emma flutters out of the office, along with most of the other staff, back to the lovely husband she didn’t fancy from day one. Maya stays with Lucy to talk about the Christmas campaign, even though it is September. Maya doesn’t mind staying late. She likes her job, she likes how her boss entrusts her with such important projects, and is grateful for the distraction from her looming evening plans.

  Last year’s most searched item on the FASH website was ‘Christmas jumper’. That was over the entire year. Christmas is huge: December always has the company’s biggest sales day of the year, and there is always an elaborate Christmas party for all FASH employees in a Soho nightclub. DJs spin records. Canapés and cocktails are endless. Next Big Things sing on stage. Staff pretend to be rock stars in the dress-up corner and the photo booth, and Maya is under pressure to invent a new spin on FASHmas. Which is tricky, as last year’s was such a success. Maya came up with FASHmas Wonderland and Chloe and Olivia put together a magical ethereal look for the website, which went down a storm.

  ‘We need to go one better,’ says Lucy, perching on Maya’s desk in her pussy-bow blouse and pencil skirt. ‘And I know you’re capable of it.’

  Maya blushes.

  ‘We need to reinvent the wheel, give Christmas a whole new meaning to twenty-something women. Make it all about the fashion. The office party outfit, the Christmas Eve down the pub with your mates outfit, the Christmas Day outfit, the sparkly New Year’s Eve outfit – this has to be all we eat, sleep and breathe over the next few weeks to really nail the tone of it, right?’

  ‘Sure thing, Lucy, I’m already working on it.’

  Maya has already begun researching ideas in the evenings, but soon her nights will be taken up with marking and preparing too.

  When Maya started to feel guilty for having a fun and frivolous job in fashion retail, and not saving the world as her parents would have expected her to, she started volunteering as a Spanish teacher at night school. All classes at the Hazelworth Collective College are free and all of the staff are volunteers. It’s about sharing knowledge and paying back to the community. One evening a week, Maya teaches Conversational Spanish in a small classroom in the 150-year-old building next to the library. Maya has loved her evenings teaching at the college for the two academic years since she moved back to the town she was born. Last year she even tried a course herself, studying cake decorating, but realised by Christmas, when her angel Gabriel looked more like Simon Cowell, that sugarcraft wasn’t her strong point and perhaps she should stick to working on macaron shells.

  Teaching keeps Maya on her toes and she is a good, thoughtful teacher who listens as much as she speaks. That year she spent in Central America before university wasn’t wasteful soul-searching on Herbert Flowers’ credit card. Maya learned the language and worked her way from Ciudad Juarez on the Texan border down to Bogota, teaching English, learning Spanish, and doing stints as a waitress in bars and cafes along the way, so that when she returned in time to start university, and her sister and two brothers picked her up from the airport, she was ready for anything college life might throw at her. It was the bravest thing Maya had ever done, until she decided to stand up in front of a roomful of strangers and teach them.

  Next week Maya will meet her new students for the next academic year.

  Maya doesn’t mind working late tonight, she mig
ht not even touch up the lilting make-up on her face. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that she’s worn more make-up of late, in fact Sam is surprised how well Maya scrubs up compared to the wild-haired girl he has teased for a year and a half, but Maya has already made her effort for the day, for Train Man.

  ‘Right, I have to get back for the boys,’ says Lucy. ‘Let’s reconvene tomorrow. Have a look back over last year, look at the mood boards Chloe has put together for this season, and let’s have a breakfast meeting tomorrow to brainstorm ideas, right?’

  Maya wishes Lucy wanted to work even later, give her an excuse to get out of this meet-up, but now she’s the last one in the office. Just the sound of the vacuum sucking up a day’s fashion while the cleaner from Ecuador hums Rubén Blades salsa songs. Maya looks in her little compact mirror and steels herself.

  I wish I was meeting Train Man.

  Chapter Twelve

  Maya always absorbed facts like a sponge. Like her brother Jacob. Facts and miscellany were Jacob and Maya’s thing in common, their Special Memory skill, and one that led Maya to go on to develop her Excellent General Knowledge skills. Jacob, Maya’s younger-but-not-youngest brother, used his Special Memory skill to plots stars and planets in the night sky. At eleven he could tell his father precisely when Swift Tuttle would be arriving in the Perseides, even though his sisters and brother didn’t know whether he was even speaking English. When the four Flowers siblings were children, Clara’s skill was confidence in front of a crowd. While Maya would cringe given an audience, and once broke down during a trumpet recital – which is tough given how hard it is to play a wind instrument when you’re crying – Clara always shone on stage and owned every school production. Florian, the youngest but the largest of the Flowers, found his special skill in growth. Florian was so tall, unlike the other average-height Flowers children, and no one really understood why. As an adult, Maya sometimes wondered whether it was all the Weetabix Florian had eaten as a child that had made him so tall. Or was Florian always destined to be tall, and the eight Weetabix he piled into his breakfast bowl in a soup of thick creamy milk were just a necessity, feeding his fast-growing bones?

  Maya and Jacob’s Special Memory skill enabled them to remember all manner of bizarre facts and data. They could recount every registration plate of every car their parents had ever owned.

  ‘Mum’s Fiesta?’ one would ask the other.

  ‘A689 RMJ,’ they’d shout proudly in unison, letters and digits tumbling past milk teeth in a race. Sometimes Jacob would say ‘E655 FBM’ out of the blue, and only Maya would know he was talking about the Volvo estate their parents had bought shortly after Florian was born. Children speaking a secret language of DVLA data.

  Maya’s friends at school always marvelled at how she remembered there were 206 bones in the human skeleton, that the Luddite revolution started in 1811 or that Belmopan was the capital of Belize, especially when Maya wasn’t ever the cleverest girl in class.

  And her magical memory came good for Maya on that day, five months ago, when she went on a game show and won five thousand pounds. Nine contestants from the usual demographic, and Maya hadn’t fancied her chances at all. But she played a mean game, remembering facts she’d never even learned before.

  Where did that come from?

  She was stunned as she took the cheque after the grand final, smiling confidently as though it was a breeze. Gary from Edinburgh thought the smile was a wee bit conceited, and tried not to look angry while he feigned happiness. I shouldn’t have fallen for her friendly banter, I should have played hardball.

  And here Maya is, in a pub off St Christopher’s Place, looking for the face she can’t quite remember. Facts not faces, that’s what Maya is good at. Except for the face of the beautiful man on the train. She has seen it every morning for two months and feels like she knows every line and pore, even though Maya hasn’t seen him smile yet so she doesn’t even know about the dimple. But Maya knows Train Man’s reading face and his inquisitive face extremely well. Both are beautiful, both break her heart.

  As the game show hasn’t yet aired, Gary from Edinburgh is fuzzy in Maya’s memory. She sits at a table peering through the smoked-glass window, tired and ready to go home. Maya circles the stirrer in her gin and tonic and looks up at the door to see a soft-waisted man with small features and round wire glasses over pale, earnest eyes enter the room.

  That’s him.

  Gary recognises Maya instantly and walks over to kiss her awkwardly on both cheeks. Maya remembers everything now. Gary from Edinburgh looks like a chubby schoolboy who has been wronged, and for a second she feels guilty about winning. Maybe she was a little manipulative to be so friendly to the man standing next to her in the semicircle of wobbly voices.

  ‘Hi!’ Maya says, friendly again.

  ‘Hi, how’s it going?’

  ‘Great thanks. Welcome to London!’

  Gary from Edinburgh goes to the bar and buys himself a Jack Daniels and Coke before they sit at opposite sides of a dark rectangular table next to the window.

  ‘What are you doing down here?’

  Maya is friendly but absolutely not flirtatious because she doesn’t fancy Gary from Edinburgh in the slightest.

  ‘I’m here for a legal workshop in Bow, work have paid for me to come down so that’s nice. And hopefully it’ll be a little more successful than my last trip down here!’ Gary gives a wry smile.

  Ahh yes, he was a solicitor.

  ‘Gary, thirty, a solicitor from Edinburgh.’ He’d had to say it five times into the camera because the man from Newcastle to their right was so nervous he kept fluffing his line and everyone had to repeat themselves again. And again.

  ‘Work have paid’. Was that a barbed comment? ‘More successful than my last trip’. That had a definite spike.

  Maya feels restricted and defensive.

  He should have known Earth’s surface is seventy-one per cent water.

  As Gary drinks his third Jack Daniels, the bitter tinge in his voice grows. Then he builds up the false confidence to ask Maya the question he’s been aching to know the answer to since his world unravelled. ‘What did you spend the winnings on?’

  Maya coughs into her second (and last) gin and tonic of the evening. She wonders what she ought to say.

  What’s the etiquette for this situation?

  Maya doesn’t know what Gary would like to hear, and as a people-pleaser, she just wants to extract herself from the situation in the easiest and friendliest way possible, but she’s at a loss.

  ‘I bought myself a Vivienne Westwood dress…’

  His face drops, so stubborn Maya decides not to tell him it was her first ever grown-up designer dress purchase, and came heavily reduced. ‘And I put the rest into savings, I’m hoping to buy a flat soon.’

  Pale, earnest eyes flicker with disdain.

  I needed to buy an engagement ring more than you needed a Vivienne Whatever dress, he thinks, picturing his ex-girlfriend in the arms of his old snooker partner.

  I bloody love my dress, Maya thinks, wondering if she ever got to go on a date with Train Man, whether it would be a bit much to wear it.

  They talk for a not-embarrassingly short amount of time and eventually laugh about their freakish combined experience. Just after 9 p.m. Gary’s friend with ginger hair whose name Maya doesn’t catch shows up. Maya is mildly offended by his arrival, suspecting he must have been Gary from Edinburgh’s Plan B for when he decided to downgrade this evening from a date to just drinks, although his arrival gives her a get-out card she is relieved to be able to play. Especially after they laugh hungrily at Maya for having confused the Home Secretary with the Defence Secretary on the game show – laughs tinged with meanness, so she makes her exit and wishes them a happy viewing for when the game show finally airs next week.

  Bitch.

  He’s not Train Man.

  Chapter Thirteen

  James looks out of the boardroom window and down onto the lights of Charlotte Street
below. The restaurants are starting to fill with post-work revellers. Leaves are turning to shades of rust and dust and the air looks crisper, even though James can’t actually feel it through the floor-to-ceiling window. His closest friend and partner Dominic is talking to their new clients, Sebastian and Duncan from Fisher + Whyman, two serious-looking men in three-piece suits, who are dressed far too smartly to be talking about pubic hair. Since the summer, when Dominic talked a mean pitch and James won them over with his creative vision, they can do little wrong in Sebastian and Duncan from Fisher + Whyman’s eyes. They can do little wrong as far as Jeremy Laws, their boss at the MFDD global advertising agency is concerned either. Winning the Femme campaign brings Fisher + Whyman, one of the world’s biggest health and well-being consumer goods producers, into the MFDD client list, and if the campaign they pitched is as successful as they promised, James and Dominic’s career trajectory will soar.

  James and Dominic have been a great partnership since they met at university in Leeds. Despite physical and verbal clumsiness, Dominic was always a charmer: talking the talk in the union bar, getting them out of scrapes in pubs, negotiating free drinks in the curry house, dreaming up straplines and slogans on their advertising course while James diligently sourced pictures or shot his own for them to use on undergraduate projects.

  Kitty moved up from Kent to Leeds to be with James and study microbiology, not wanting to break off their fledgling high-school romance, and she warmed to Dominic as much as James had. A softly shaped swarthy boy with Hobbit-like feet but a warm honest charm to his ineloquence. A talker, a seller, a player, always true to his word. James marvelled at how Dominic believed in everything he did, how he would get as passionate about pet food as he did about the charity campaigns they worked on.

  A long way from Leeds, Dominic and James are an award-winning advertising dream team, coming up with campaigns that bring a tear to any steely brand manager’s eye, let alone the housewives who hoped the hungry dog found its way home, the old widow would find love again or the priest would be reunited with his favourite whisky. And Dominic is fiercely loyal to his art director best friend. When rival advertising agencies tried to poach Dominic, as the more vocal half of the partnership, the better networker at conferences and creative festivals, he wouldn’t go anywhere without James. Quieter, more considerate, unable to bullshit.