As the spring afternoon draws to a close and the sun on Marylebone’s rooftops bathes London in a magical glow, the communication Maya craved since the first moment she saw Train Man almost a year ago finally appears on her screen, sitting in her email inbox like a hand grenade. 5.08 p.m. Subject matter: The Guy From The Train.
‘God, he’s emailed me,’ Maya says flatly, betraying the flip, kick, stab, she can feel in her stomach. After Cressida’s appointment this morning heralded a new, quiet office order, Maya didn’t feel it was the right time to blurt out to Emma and Olivia, or anyone else for that matter, how she’d finally given Train Man the note.
‘Who’s emailed you?’ asks Emma, her canny intuition knowing this blurting might be something important.
‘Hush, I’m on a call,’ waves Cressida dismissively.
‘Did Train Man reply?’ Sam swings around in his chair.
‘Train Man?’ shouts Olivia gleefully, clapping her hands together.
Damn.
If Maya had just stayed quiet, opened the email, read it and digested it in silence, she could have coped with whatever was written with gentle dignity. Now she’s blown it. At least Chloe and Holly didn’t hear, lost as they are in instagossip.
Alex stands up, smooths his hand delicately up his ice-cream-perfect quiff of hair and pushes circular horn-rimmed glasses down his nose inquisitively.
‘Erm, Maya, do we have news?’ he asks over his spectacles.
Cressida, phone in one hand, furrows a fair brow and puts an index finger to her pout with the other hand, to tell the team to shush again.
‘Shit man,’ whispers Sam. ‘What does he say?’
Maya,
Thanks for the note – sorry if I seemed dazed on the train, I was battling hay fever.
It was really sweet of you but unfortunately I have a girlfriend, and I don’t think she’d be impressed if I went for a drink with you.
What you did wasn’t silly though, it takes a lot of guts – I’d never have the courage to do something like that.
Happy birthday!
James
He’s called James. James, Maya thinks to herself. Nice reliable name. Three sentences and a friendly sign-off. Underneath, it says James Miller, Account Director, MFDD – whatever that means.
Four eager faces look at Maya hopefully. She reads it again, surrounded by people she wants to disappear but feeling bad that she’s about to let them down. Maya’s like that you see, worried about disappointing her friends, even though she is devastated herself.
I have a girlfriend.
‘What does he say?’ badgers Sam, pretending not to read the screen.
I don’t think she’d be impressed.
Maya wants to cry. There’s another woman Train Man wants to impress. A woman he loves. Maya’s face is hot. She knew this would happen. Life never works out as it should.
I have a girlfriend.
It would have been too good to be true otherwise.
I don’t think she’d be impressed.
‘He has a girlfriend,’ Maya casually waves.
A collective moan rises up into the strip lighting of the fading day, but Emma is silent, she can tell how much the email is hurting Maya.
‘Fuck him,’ says Olivia, bringing her brash brilliance to diffuse a clearly awkward situation. ‘You’re gorgeous, his loss.’
Cressida puts her palm over the mouthpiece of the phone that’s still clamped to her ear and looks across the desk at Olivia crossly.
‘Guys, can you keep it down please? I’m on the phone to HR for my staff discount code.’
Everyone gets back to work. Maya rises out of her chair and walks through the glass doors to the canteen and straight past the food stations that long stopped serving cooked breakfasts, lunches and snacks. Her face is burning hot, her heart shrinks with every step she takes. As Maya crosses the canteen, the low silver pipes of a hip industrial ceiling make her feel like she can’t breathe. She swipes her pass and goes through the identical glass doors on the other side and walks in a daze until she gets to the ladies’ toilet. Maya opens the door and walks in. She looks down at her feet so people won’t notice her eyes welling up, even though the bathroom is empty. They are nice shoes, her favourite pair in fact. Maya made an extra effort today, as she has for the past eleven days. She should feel as gorgeous now as she did when she bought the shoes three weeks ago, with her forty per cent staff discount, but every step that distances her from Train Man’s words makes Maya feel smaller, weaker, more hopeless. Maya turned twenty-eight eleven days ago. It’s not even her birthday.
Maya looks in the mirror and puts a damp paper towel over her red face to calm it. Her friends probably think she’s crying, so she fights it. Maya is always the calm one. The controlled one. And really, no one died. Not today anyway.
I suspected this might be the outcome.
Although Maya can’t explain why, she’s still surprised by it. Maybe it serves her right for thinking she had a chance.
Of course Train Man has a girlfriend, he’s too beautiful.
But part of Maya is surprised because she could see herself with Train Man, together in a happy future. Not a Hollywood future either. A real one, where hair greys, smiles thin, but lovers still hold hands, despite having seen the worst of each other. Her intuition was wrong, it has failed her.
Maya used to have great intuition and Seeing The Future skills. Like the time in her early twenties when she won a weekend trip to Paris. As Maya took the coin out of her purse to buy the raffle ticket, she had a vision, a flash of her sister Clara giggling with her along the edge of the Seine, smiles smattered with ice cream, as they were just six weeks later. Or the time someone burst into the back garden of the Flowers’ family home when Maya was eight. She was making perfume under the old elder tree, grinding rose petals with water. The perfume would never smell like the beautiful rose-shaped soap on her mother’s dressing table, but Maya tried for a whole summer to nail the elixir, and sometimes splashed it on her face while she sat looking in Dolores Flowers’ triptych mirror. Maya ground rose petals in solitude as the skinny man with the beard ran down the side of the house and burst through the garden gate at the back of their Georgian house on the hill. Before the man opened his mouth to speak, Maya knew that Clara was lying in a heap in the middle of a road three streets away.
I must have got this one wrong.
Maya concludes that her Seeing The Future skills can only fully function where Clara is concerned. After all, Maya’s Seeing The Future skills had already failed her catastrophically in her twenties, the time her hair turned wavy.