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.
But Maya doesn’t turn around to see who has caught Nena’s eye. She’s just desperate to see the wedding dress Nena has chosen.
‘Cool! Did you take a pic?’
‘Not allowed,’ Nena says, snapping back in to the conversation. ‘In case I copy it, which is a laugh, given I can’t sew on a button. Let’s go this weekend, yeah?’
‘Great!’
‘Just tell me if it’s too… womanly will you?’
‘Womanly is good,’ says Maya, straightening the thin belt on another vintage cotton sundress.
‘You can work it, Maya – even at a gig, you look like a fifties maven – I love this style evolution of yours – but I’m not sure I can pull it off.’
Maya thinks back to a year ago when her uniform of jeans and Converse suited her nicely, but she likes feeling a little more polished. Even if it didn’t work for James Miller.
‘With this hair? Hardly!’ Maya says, shaking waves that grew in the mosh pit to Hokusai like proportions. As Maya swats a dismissive hand in the air, she accidentally knocks the girl behind her at the bar.
‘Oh sorry!’ Maya says, going to turn around as the band strike up the fiery and feral first chords of ‘Hotel Yorba’. Nena stops Maya midway through turning as she drags her by the arm, down the stairs and through the double doors into the auditorium, where she jumps with such vigour she almost freezes mid-air. Hair swishing, skirt twirling. The couple upstairs at the circle bar are too embroiled in a heart-to-heart to hear the music.
*
Maya walks with some urgency up the platform. It is the first day in months that she has felt like there’s some unforced buoyancy in her stride – not the bounce she experiences when she goes running, but actual happy feet. It is exactly one year since James Miller waltzed up the platform and into her life, but Maya doesn’t know that fact. Today she owes the spring in her step to Nena and to Jack White, whose ‘Seven Nation Army’ charged her swiftly from her flat to the station in record time in ballerina flats, and whose image plays in her mind as she weaves through familiar faces as the train pulls in.
Last night, as the gig finished and Maya looked up at the ethereal and raucous raconteur standing on the monitor in front of her, holding his guitar aloft in triumph to bid her goodnight, Maya felt fierce and free and strong. And that perhaps there is life without love, because if that moment summed up her life, then she has a very good one.
The Superior Train creaks to a stop and the few Hazelworth workers get off, deliberately slowly to annoy the London-bound commuters in their haste for a seat. In her tardiness, Maya has to jump on the train halfway up, but leaps in, the full skirt of her floral ‘twosie’ (she coined that, too) just missing the doors as she wafts in and her tummy flashes the carriage under the gentle curve of the crop.
Close.
The train rolls out of the station and Maya keeps walking through from carriage to carriage, using her naked elbow, rather than her fingers, to press the buttons of the interior doors.
Phew, a seat.
Maya slinks into the aisle seat on a set of four with a little table separating the forward-facing two from the rear-facing two.
That was lucky.
Maya puts her new red leather tote, the same shade of red as the roses within her blooming top and skirt, on her lap and sees James Miller across the aisle. Already lost in a book. She takes a sharp intake of breath, which rolls out as a slow, dejected sigh. A girl with Chinese eyes and black hair cut into a blunt bob leans on James’s reliable shoulder, and gently scratches her nose as she closes her eyes. She is comfortable, restful, secure in his company. James Miller lowers his glasses and rubs tired eyes.
The theatrical desperation and crunching guitars of ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’ tear through Maya’s ears and shoot straight to her heart like electric shock therapy. Suddenly all the strength and hope she felt since last night pours into the red and green seat she’s sitting on and through the carpeted floor onto the tracks. Maya sighs. And wonders without being able to hear anything beyond the music in her ears whether James Miller heard her sigh. Or his girlfriend.
I hate Kitty Jones.
Maya tries not to look but can’t help herself from stealing a glance of the woman James Miller loves.
Of course he has a girlfriend, he’s beautiful. She’s stunning. Why would he have given me a second look?
Maya looks at the doll-like face of the woman in the short fuchsia dress with the tiers of horizontal frills dancing off her smooth light brown skin. Maya pictures the two of them entwined and gets up to walk into the front carriage up ahead.
I can’t do this.
*
A distorted dash of roses in bloom catch James’s eye as he rubs the sleep out of the inner corner. He’s tired. It was a late night. He’s not used to those. He’s been staying in and sleeping a lot and watching DVDs and smoking weed and having a glass of red wine and then another and not really wanting to talk to people. Last night was James’s first night out since Kitty left him. Dominic came into work with four tickets to a gig and James realised that he’d barely seen anything this year. When they’d finished working on hair you can whip and pubic hair you can whip off, James and Dominic walked up the road to their former agency, the one where Josie is still the receptionist, where they were joined by their ‘other single friend’ as Josie put it, Phil, before heading to Hammersmith.
James didn’t like being put in the ‘single friends’ bracket. He’s never been single. He doesn’t know what it’s like to not be part of a pair. Even over the years, when Kitty didn’t seem to like James much, she was a security blanket of weekends away, arriving at parties together, and signing cards ‘lots of love, James and Kitty’, even if it was always James who remembered to send them. His new single life feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable. It felt especially uncomfortable sending Mrs Jones a 60th birthday card signed ‘lots of love, James’, but James did it. And she sent one back saying that she was so very sorry and James would always be part of their family. James knew that wasn’t true. He would need to be phased out. Someone else would be going to their Boxing Day parties now. Not that he’d want to; Kitty’s the last person he wants to see. By screwing him over and lying to him for most of the time since they moved to Hazelworth, she finally succeeded in making James not like her very much. But he misses her. He misses the security blanket, he misses leaning his leg over her bony hips at night. Having someone to touch, even if she did sometimes flinch.
That’s why it’s nice to have Josie leaning on him right now as he tries to get lost in a new book. As Josie is lulled to sleep by the wheels on the tracks and lets out that puff of air that only a person in the process of falling asleep can do, James realises Kitty hadn’t been that tactile with him in a long time. He thinks back to last night. At the steamy bar upstairs at the Apollo, Josie’s delicate doll-like face belied the Essex drawl and obscenities that fell out of little love-heart-shaped lips. Sympathy and kindness darted with expletives.
‘I spoke to Kitty you know,’ she said. James looked away. He didn’t really want to hear about it. He knows Josie and Kitty have been friends for a long time, but he didn’t want to hear about nights out forging new friendships with this Simon guy.
‘She wanted to know if we all hated her, whether to cut all ties with the group. Or whether we’d wanna meet Simon one day.’
James downed the rest of his warm beer. Not asking what Josie’s response was, although he did want to know.
‘I told her “Dominic will always have Millsy’s back, he’s not bothered about making new mates”. I said I’d see her if we have girly nights out, but I don’t wanna force anything. Anyway, she lives up in Cambridge now so it won’t really happen.’
James looked at Josie and nodded his head in time to the bassline downstairs in the main room.
‘She asked how you were.’
‘What did you say?’ James replied, finally showing interest in Josie’s encounter with Kitty before shouting an order for four gin and tonics to the barman.
‘I told her you were doin OK, I didn’t wanna tell her we hadn’t seen you. Get her knickers in a twist with drama. Feel sorry for you. You’re better than that, James.’ As Josie said his name, she put her tiny hand on his on the bar and squeezed it.
From Josie’s tone, James suspected she wouldn’t make much effort with Kitty in the future, and he felt a bit bad that it pleased him.
After the show, Phil went back to his flat in Perivale and a drunken Dominic insisted on getting the train back to Hazelworth with James.
‘It’s miles away, Dom!’ Josie bellowed on a pavement in W6.
A ruddy Dominic was cheery to see his friend back out. ‘Josie, we’re going. Millsy, hail that cab!’
‘But Greenwich is way nearer, you loooon!’ bellowed Josie.
After one G&T too many and high on garage rock and blues, Dominic thought it would be a good idea to go back to Hazelworth and do a 6 a.m. swim in the local lido to help him train for the triathlon he will never do.
‘What about Brockwell?’ begged Josie, who wanted to get out of her heels and into her slippers.
‘Millsy’s not in Brockwell, come on, we’re going to Hazelworth, keep him company!’
‘Oh this blinkin’ triathlon. When are you gonna do it then, babes?’
The three of them fell into the black cab that took them all the way to the terminal. James tickled by the light-hearted row and the grand gesture of friendship disguised as pursuit of the perfect body – which Dominic often talks about but likes steak, chips and red wine too much to do anything about.
On this train, as her thick black hair sweeps into his olive neck, while the man they both love is swimming (at 8 a.m. not 6 a.m.), stinking of the glue-like toxins he emits when he’s hung-over, James thinks about Josie and Dominic. Their vocal rows do disservice to the deep-rooted love and tenderness they have for each other. Warmth, laughter, conversations. And that’s something James would love if he ever falls in love again.
*
Maya stands tall at the front of the classroom, reminding herself to stay strong. The Italian scene on the wall hasn’t changed since September: no one has moved. But inside the classroom so much has changed since this cohort first met. Jan and Doug have found a property in the Alpujarras that they now have enough vocabulary to renovate. Gareth ended up sitting his GCSE Spanish while Cecily did her A Levels, and in a month’s time he will find out he got an A* and she will have the grades to go to her first choice of university. Glyn is wearing a T-shirt that isn’t beige. Housewife Esther seems to have uncovered a passion for flamenco dance, which she’s even roped her husband Roger into joining at Hazelworth Leisure Centre on a Thursday night. Doctor Helen now knows how to treat a jellyfish sting in Spanish. Ed is going back to spend the summer in Argentina with his girlfriend Valeria before she moves to London to study politics. Nathaniel made ever such a slight improvement on his Spanish accent, while still managing to speak Castilian as if it’s the Queen’s English. And even Keith managed to raise a glass and say ‘Salud!’ after Maya poured everyone a tipple of home-made sangria to drink alongside the polvorones she had baked for the end-of-term party.
The empty chair remains. No one wanted to move Velma’s seat, lest it make her death seem permanent. And now it sits there in the centre of the front row under Maya’s nose, while her remaining pupils fill in their course evaluation sheets, a little light-headed from the sangria.
Maya pictures Velma boarding a plane to Miami. Being helped up the stairs. Charming the crew. Laughing alongside her fellow passengers. Showing off photos of baby Audrey. Heading to an exciting new chapter in her glorious Technicolor life.
Perhaps it’s better if I imagine she’s already there.