by Zoë Folbigg
And Jon slunk back upstairs to their bedroom to read his script. Deep down, Maya knew he wasn’t happy for her but she chose to ignore it. He wasn’t that good an actor.
Maya also chose to ignore Jon falling in love with strangers every day in the street while he held Maya’s hand a little further away from him, almost hiding her with his swagger. She also chose to ignore Nena’s scoffs, that if Jon couldn’t get paid work as an actor, perhaps he should get paid work as a barman, a waiter or in a supermarket so Maya wouldn’t have to support them both. Maya thought it was easy for Nena to say, she had landed a job in the West End, and Maya asked Nena to use her contacts to help Jon.
But Maya only had herself to blame for her hair turning wavy. It happened more than two years after their first encounter in the library. Jon needed £5,000 to do a Shakespeare summer school course at RADA, and Maya gave him all the money she had saved for a deposit on a flat. Their flat.
‘I know it’s a risk but this could seriously be the thing I need to fine-tune my craft and give me the big break. I can feel it around the corner, Maya. And then it’ll be a house in Hampstead not a shitty flat-share in Finsbury Park. On me.’
Maya stopped looking at flats for sale and wrote Jon a cheque. She sent him off to summer school with a kiss on his nose and a breakfast muffin wrapped in a piece of kitchen roll with little daisies on it as she went to Walk In Wardrobe.
Maya gradually lost Jon over six weeks of sonnets, monologues and song. As Jon explored the depths of Shakespeare, he discovered the depths of Talia, and when the course ended on a Friday evening in late July, he never came home. Maya cried so hard that the tears ran into her hair and turned it wavy for good. Heartbroken and annoyed that her Seeing The Future skills had failed her. She hadn’t truly acknowledged the boy who couldn’t be happy for Maya’s success. The boy who mistook your and you’re. Your my first love, said the note in the library.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
June 2014
James looks at the ticket in his left hand as he waits for the doors to open and notices that it expires today. On Monday he will need a new one, but before that lies a celebratory weekend ahead. Celebrating a win for the new haircare account after he and Dominic gave a brilliant pitch to Cynthia and Mike from Fisher + Whyman; celebrating booking tickets to Jamaica for their September shoot for Femme; celebrating that Jeremy Laws, the chief creative officer of MFDD, has just given his wonder boys another pay rise; and celebrating that tomorrow will be the longest day of the year and he, Kitty, Dominic and Josie will be going to a festival on a farm in Suffolk.
As the doors swing open, James follows the other commuters out of the station. At the off-licence on the station approach James buys a bottle of Pimm’s, then nips into the corner shop to buy some cucumber, strawberries and mint and wonders how to tell Kitty about the pay rise. He’ll line up two drinks ready for when Kitty gets home and he’ll tell her they’re celebrating something. She’ll be pleased. James has noticed she’s been looking at house prices in estate agents’ windows recently – perhaps they will buy in Hazelworth after all. They ought to be able to now with their combined salaries.
Kitty usually gets home half an hour later than James, and as he waits to pay at the checkout he contemplates going back into the station to meet her from the train.
Go home. Line up the drinks. Order a takeaway. I can make her happy again.
James walks through the park, across two roads and turns right onto the quiet road with the Victorian terraces. He puts his key in the door.
Shit, I forgot the ice.
The door opens onto the living room and Kitty is already home. Sitting in the armchair in the front room. The television isn’t on and their big weekend bag with the birds on it sits on the floor, leaning against a skinny ankle that might snap under the weight of its contents, so bursting is it at the seams.
But we’re not going to Suffolk until tomorrow.
Kitty’s skin looks paler than ever and the light streaming through the front window makes her eyes shine like uncut diamonds.
James wonders if someone has died and feels panic in the pit of his stomach. The air certainly has a feel of the waiting room at a doctor’s surgery, that a death sentence is about to be delivered.
‘You’re home. Are you OK?’
Kitty looks up at James briefly and then to the Donwood on the wall behind him.
‘Kit? What’s happened?’
‘I’m leaving you,’ she says, looking at the wall and then down at her hands. She twists a pale opal ring on her longest finger.
‘What the fuck…’ James says with a sigh, not a question.
‘Don’t even speak because then I’ll feel too guilty.’
‘What?’
‘It’s definite. It’s not me being flighty or moody or whatever you would want to call it.’
‘I don’t call you anything like that,’ James says, feeling a lump rise in his throat.
Silence.
James breaks it first.
‘You’re my girl; you have been since we were kids. What’s happened?’
Kitty looks angry.
‘Don’t make out like you were happy, James,’ she snaps, giving him a brief sideways glance to where he is still standing by the door, blue plastic bag in hand, mint slowly wilting. ‘Is this really what you want?’
James doesn’t say anything.
‘Anyway I’ve met someone.’
Silence and disbelief hang thick in the joyless air.
‘He gets my train. We’re moving in together.’
James is sickened by the impossibility of what he’s hearing. How could this be happening? Who could she have met on the train?
‘What’s his name?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘WHAT’S HIS NAME?’
In the eleven years they have been together, Kitty has never heard James shout in anger. Her eyes widen like a startled bird.
‘Simon. He works in Cambridge too. We’ve got a flat; we picked up the keys today. You won’t need to see me, unless we’re visiting the kids in Hazelworth, but that won’t happen often.’ She stares ahead, angry, still. Not a hint of excitement in her voice.
‘Kids? What kids?’
Kitty pushes ragged cuticles back with a fingernail.
‘Kitty, you never wanted kids!’
James is so baffled, he leans back on his backpack and slides down the inside of the front door until he is sitting on the floor, blue plastic bag still in hand.
‘How many kids? How old are they?’
‘Stop asking questions, you won’t change my mind. I’m in love with him.’
James glazes over, staring into the open doorway to the middle dining room that leads through to the kitchen. He floats up into the air and looks down at his pitiful body slumped against the door, seeing the top of his head, and Kitty’s in the armchair.
‘What about your stuff? What about our life?’
‘I’ll come back for more clothes when you’re out. And our life? I’m sure your mum and dad will get over it,’ Kitty says sarcastically, standing up.
James can’t move. He is frozen in disbelief.
‘Can I get past please?’
James leans his head back on the soft support of his grey backpack and closes his eyes. He thinks of the note, still sitting in the front pocket of his backpack, crumpled behind his back against the door. Purposeful, hopeful, kind. The kindest thing a stranger had ever done for him. How he wouldn’t even entertain the thought of going for a drink with a girl called Maya who gets his train, when all the while Kitty and a man called Simon were flirting and cheating and fucking and plotting on a train going in the opposite direction.
‘Please James, let me go.’
‘I am,’ he says flatly, standing in defeat to make way for Kitty.
Kitty picks up the weekend holdall and opens the door with her free hand.
A taxi outside waits for her and James wonders if it was there when he sauntered happily
down the road, because if it was, he hadn’t noticed it.
How many other things haven’t I noticed?
James’s mind races as Kitty walks down the short terracotta tiled path to the gate and doesn’t look back.
‘The station,’ she says, before a car door closes smoothly and a quiet engine purrs off.
James pushes the front door shut with his forehead. He turns and looks around the small front room and the fragments of their life together. His records. His artwork. A thank you card to James from Albert, the widower who lives next door, for helping him with the garden, sits at one end of the mantelpiece. At the other end of the mantelpiece he sees the invitation to Kitty’s mother’s 60th birthday party next month. ‘To James and Catherine, please do come to my party!’ it says, as dancing teapots and cake stands weave in a conga around a large 6 and a large 0. He wonders if Kitty was ever present since they moved to Hazelworth. How long has this relationship been going on for?
James looks down and realises he’s still clutching a bottle of Pimm’s in a blue plastic bag and throws it towards the front door, sending it smashing against the corner of the room. Glass and Pimm’s and mint and strawberries all slide down the wall in a sharp and sticky mess and James slumps into the armchair Kitty had been sitting in. The seat is still warm.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Eight people sit around a large oval table, heads turned to face a TV screen at one end of it. Photographs spool. Pictures that Olivia has been in the office searching for since 7 a.m. Celebrities on the red carpet. Celebrities at product launches. Celebrities doing their grocery shopping. All pictures Cressida has asked Olivia to source for the daily two-hour meeting, and today, like most days since she joined FASH, Cressida doesn’t seem to like any of them. Everyone is silent, expectant, bored. Waiting for the new site editor to say something directional. Faces on the wall, onto which Cressida had pinned inspirational photos of supermodels and slogans like #iwokeuplikethis, #fashun and #airportswag, also watch, waiting, silent, expectant, uninspired.
Optimistic Alex tries to break the ice with chit-chat.
‘Cressida, do you have a sore throat today?’
‘What?’
‘Well, you’re wearing a neck scarf. And a very nice neck scarf it is too.’
Cressida looks at Alex and curls a plump top lip to reveal truculent teeth.
‘No. It’s just a scarf,’ she snaps. ‘I work in fashion.’
Liz looks meekly across the table at Maya, who gives her a reassuring smile. Since Cressida started, Liz, who Maya worked so hard to get out of her shell, seems to have crawled back into it.
Cressida studies a supermodel on screen. Lips pout and a finger twists.
‘The thing I have trouble with…’ she says profoundly, as if she is about to say something full of insight and zeitgeist, ‘is when does a dungaree become a jumpsuit?’
When did dungarees become singular? In fact this is something that has crept into the FASH vernacular in recent weeks. A striped trouser. A red lip. A colour-block heel. Maya makes a note to herself to bring back plurals.
No one answers. Maya looks around and wonders when people stopped laughing in their morning meeting. Their team get-togethers used to be joyful.
‘OK move on, next picture.’
Olivia fluffs up her fiery mane and scrolls through.
‘I’m not getting anything from these, Olivia. We’re meant to feel inspired to translate these looks, but none of these correlate with me. I mean, who even is she? I’ve never heard of that celebrity.’
Olivia’s tired face jolts awake.
‘She’s in a reality TV show our girls love,’ Maya interjects.
‘Urgh. So common,’ Cressida spits, as she continues to twist thin strands of honey-blonde hair around her forefinger.
Did Cressida just call our customers common?
‘Next!’
Maya feels the weight of tension and ill feeling in the room, so she opens her laptop for distraction, to look through today’s drop of new clothes for editorial inspiration while the team keep looking through paparazzi pictures on the screen.
Bored, miffed, disgruntled. Maya glances left then right and realises no one either side of her can see her screen, so she types ‘James Miller’ into Google.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of this.
A filmmaker, an author, an architect. None of whom are her James Miller. Maya knows from his email that James Miller is Art Director at MFDD, which she googled at the time and saw was an advertising agency, but now she can’t find anything else. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram. Clearly not for that James Miller anyway. A few online charity donations that may or may not have been from him but nothing else.
Cressida and Olivia are talking but Maya doesn’t listen. She’s wondering why she’s bothering to look up a guy who’s not interested.
Forget about him.
‘What was that?’ laughs Cressida.
‘Mosheeno, the new store opening last night, I’ve got lots of pics of models there in totally wearable looks,’ says Olivia, clinging onto the lifeline as she drags an arrow to a small blue folder on the big screen.
‘You mean Moskeeeeeno, right?’ Cressida looks disgusted.
Olivia’s face burns as red as her hair.
‘An easy fashion mistake to make,’ says Alex kindly. ‘I still think Versace rhymes with face.’
Cressida looks down at her notepad, flabbergasted, and shakes her head.
Maya wonders whether the James Miller and Kitty Jones who donated £50 to Dominic Kennedy’s London marathon fundraising page three years ago might be Train Man and his girlfriend.
That’s it. He’s in love with someone called Kitty Jones and I feel sick.
*
‘Darling, I’m not going to the party, I can’t face seeing them. If Catherine is there with that new man of hers I will feel outraged and sick just at the sight of them. What treachery! It’s so upsetting. I’m not going. Your father can go on his own if he must.’
James sits at his desk having another hushed conversation. He doesn’t think he’s spoken to his mum in three years as much as he has in the past three weeks, but it’s been surprisingly comforting.
‘Mum, it’s OK. I’m OK. I’ll get through it. Don’t take it out on Mary and George. You should go to the party, they’re your best friends.’
‘Darling, I just can’t. Mary is embarrassed enough when she sees me in the street, I don’t want to make matters worse.’
‘What about Dad? He’d want to go, he’d want you to go. All your friends are going, you’d really miss out. None of our mates want much to do with Kitty, don’t let any more friendships fall apart because of what happened between us. I’ll be fine. Look, I’m going to have to get back to work, I have a meeting in five minutes. I told you about the promotion yes?’
‘Yes you did and I’m so proud of you. Well done darling.’
The plus side of heartbreak is that lately MFDD has seemed like a sanctuary to James. Focusing on products that either wash, condition or remove women’s hair suddenly doesn’t seem so pointless.
‘Well I say go to the party, have fun, and if you see Kitty and… him… just smile politely and talk to someone else. And lace their vol-au-vents with arsenic.’
‘Oh sweetheart, you are awful! Well I’ll think about it. I’ll see what your sisters say. They were meant to be going too.’
‘Sisters?’
‘Well, Petra is practically your sister too now they’re married.’
James laughs. How far his parents have come.
‘I have to go. But go to the party, say happy birthday to Mary from me, and tell Dad, Fran and Petra that I’ll come home in a few weeks. I just don’t really fancy a trip back to Kent right now.’
‘I know. I understand. You look after yourself. You are eating aren’t you?’
‘Yes Mum. Got to go.’
‘Bye darling. Love you.’
‘You too, Mum.’
; James hangs up the phone. He doesn’t have a meeting. He doesn’t have to go. But he is sick of going around in circles and thinking and talking about it. About her. He’s sick of sitting at home getting stoned and imagining what Simon looks like. He’s sick of wondering whether Simon was in his bed while he was working in South Africa. He’s sick of returning home from work and looking in their wardrobe to see if today was the day Kitty came for the rest of her stuff. He’s sick of it and just wants to run away from it all.
Chapter Forty
July 2014
At a grand circle bar in an old art deco theatre, Maya hugs her friend.
‘He’s amazing! You’re amazing! Thank you!’ she shouts among the muted ferocity emanating from the shy guitarist downstairs and back behind the double doors on stage. Just like the first time Maya ever saw Nena, at a gig across town, she is sparkling with sweat and wearing a black vest tucked into a very colourful, very heavy skirt.
‘You know if I never saw you again, this is how I would remember you,’ Maya says smiling.
‘Oh don’t say that!’ frowns Nena, as she pays for two small drinks in two small plastic cups.
‘And I still don’t know how you jump in that fabric.’
‘Hey I’m glad we could do it!’ she says, putting a tipsy arm around Maya’s hot shoulder. Both happy to be revisiting a favourite pastime from before Tom, before Nena took a permanent job and became TV talent, before she became a mother, of sorts. Nena downs her rum and Coke in one and decides she can’t hold back on her news, even if it is indicative of That Thing That Divides Them.
‘Speaking of fabric, I found it Maya, I found the dress!’
‘On FASH?’ Maya’s mouth tingles from the coldness of a dirty gig-bar ice cube.
‘Nope, in a little boutique in Islington. It’s so pretty. And very ladylike. Who knew?’ she says, twisting her hair into rope. ‘My mum started crying when I tried it on, which has to be a good sign – unless she hates Tom – but I don’t think she hates Tom. Anyway, I’d love you to see it before I make a decision.’ Nena is suddenly distracted by the couple behind Maya. A tall man with kind and soulful brown eyes behind black rectangular glasses looks down at a woman with hair as black and shiny as Nena’s, bluntly cut at the base of her neck. The woman stands with her back to Maya. The man is listening to her intently. Handsome face, handsome nose, thick dark hair slightly to one side. A thoughtful, listening face. Wide, lovely eyes. Nena drinks in his beautiful features, completely unaware of what it would mean for Maya to see him there.