July 2013
Maya stands on the steaming tarmac of the London-bound platform. Bumpy grey paving is trimmed by a bright yellow safety line, giving her the uncomfortable sensation of walking on Lego. It is Platform 2 and Maya had to dash from Platform 1, down some stairs and through the tunnel that smells of urine to get there. Every time Maya walks the subterranean gauntlet, she worries that this twenty-second necessity will coincide with a high-speed train passing on the tracks above, and that today will be the day the rickety tunnel roof finally gives in.
It’s an overcast, oppressively warm kind of day but Maya isn’t sad to be waiting for her train again. Soon she will be with her friends and they will have fun. They’ll talk about ideas for autumn/winter even though it is high summer, they’ll laugh about last night’s TV and they’ll help frame the future of affordable fashion (while also having a good laugh about the Christmas tree onesie that just arrived in the office).
Sometimes they go quiet for a few hours. Maya is very good at going quiet for a few hours, and getting lost in her world. When she was seven, Maya used to sit staring at a bookshelf in her parents’ bedroom. A dusty structure about two metres wide with four levels of shelves packed too tightly with books, as was her father Herbert Flowers’ storage solution. On the shelves Maya would place little wooden figures, about the length of her longest finger. The wooden figures had the same simple face with the same simple features, two black dots for eyes and a red curve for a smile, but they were dressed differently to give them their characteristics. One had long black wool hair and a red body, another wore a grass skirt, another looked like a policeman in blue. Maya’s mother had bought them as stocking fillers for each of the Flowers children the Christmas before and Maya would be transfixed by the dolls, creating rooms and antechambers in this dusty makeshift dolls’ house by pulling out books at strategic points. Then she would place the dolls in the various rooms or corridors, and sit and stare. As still as a wooden doll herself. Creamy skin, shiny poker-straight golden brown hair, delicate freckles that came out in summer. For hours Maya would stare and envisage whole scenarios and relationships between these unlikely associates. Herbert Flowers would wonder where Maya was amid the commotion of her siblings, but she was quiet upstairs, staring at the dolls, listening to imagined conversation, immersed in another world for an entire morning.
This morning is wet, but the rain has a mugginess about it, even at 8.16 a.m. Long ago, while working in a bakery in Mexico, Maya learned that such rain was called ‘chipi-chipi’, a misty humid fizz of a rain that does nothing but make souls wilt and hair rise. She stands on the platform reading the new-season lookbook, trying to come up with words to go with the pictures, but she can’t seem to concentrate. Same routine, same two-minute train delay on the platform departures board. Same glib faces.
Shall I make chilli tonight? she thinks while rereading the words ‘Aztec print’ three times. Not knowing why she can’t concentrate, Maya looks up across four tracks to the steamy smeared glass of the crowded ticket hall on the other side of the expanse. She can’t see that the person she’s been looking for all her life is in there.
Tardy commuters run the underpass from the ticket hall to the platform with a different kind of urgency. As the train approaches, Maya focuses on the lookbook. She could board this train and sit down with her eyes closed. She even knows without looking up that today the train is a Superior Train with green and red seats, more kindly spaced apart. Not one of the clapped-out blue trains with too many seats, packed together and stained. Matted gum with skin particles stuck to it, burrowing itself into the stale faux-velveteen upholstery. Inferior Trains have carriage-to-carriage doors you have to open by turning a greasy circular handle, too small for any normal person’s hand. The sound of this train alone is enough for Maya to know that it’s a Superior Train. Smoother, more solid, more buoyant. Automatic internal doors and carpet. A Superior Train gives Maya’s day an edge. Still she doesn’t look up and flips through the lookbook and circles keywords.
For a reason she doesn’t yet know, Maya is torn away from neon dogtooth and tartan and sees a new Train Person on the platform. Someone Maya has never seen get this train, at this time. Or any of the other trains she sometimes catches either side of it – but now won’t. And she can’t take her eyes off him as he hurriedly battles to close his umbrella as the train pulls in. New Train Person looks so different to the melee of men in suits or women in frumpy skirts and cheap jackets that they think make them look authoritative, with sleeves that are slightly too long so cuffs hang over their hands. The usual suspects she sees every day but never speaks to. The plain girl with the spherical head, whose facial features move so slowly she looks like an animatronic owl; the blonde woman with a tiny waist but inflatable-looking arms who anxiously pushes her way onto the train every morning, even though she’ll always get a seat; the man who reads his Metro tucked inside a copy of the Times Literary Supplement and thinks no one notices.
This man is different. He is tall with slim legs and reassuring shoulders and has hair that is so dark brown it could be black, windswept to the side in the chipi-chipi, or is it meant to be like that? He has olive skin, wears black rectangular glasses, a black V-neck jumper, despite the warm air, and grey skinny jeans, the exact same shade of grey as the pair of jeans Maya is wearing today. She watches him walk past her, heading towards the front end of the platform alongside the braking train and stares, small, pillowy mouth open in wonder. Everything feels comforting, everything feels like home. It’s a feeling Maya hasn’t had for years and doesn’t want to go away. Maya steps out from the hollow shelter of the leaking 1930s roof and walks up the platform after him.
As Maya hobbles on Lego behind this wondrous New Train Person and sees his equine legs striding out ahead of her, she has the sensation of a reassuring palm, gently pressing into the small of her back, urging her along.
*
In the carriage no one talks, everyone seems tense, and Maya tries not to look across the aisle at this man as he reads One Hundred Years Of Solitude. She can’t help it.
Is he married?
Maya pictures her beautiful train fellow swimming in an infinity pool somewhere tropical with a ridiculously glamorous woman with ridiculously long legs wrapped around him. A disheartened heart gazes down.
He’s not wearing a ring.
This man, Train Man, is sitting diagonally from Maya, on the opposite side of the carriage. Two seats face two seats, separated by a little table with gum stuck to its underbelly. The table in front of Train Man has crumbs on it but he has taken off his glasses to read (ahh, short-sighted) and puts his glasses on the crumbs. He is in the corner next to the window, not sitting in the direction of travel. Maya doesn’t know that facing backwards makes Train Man feel uncomfortable – it doesn’t even cross her mind. Maya is facing forwards in her set of four seats, and she leans her head in towards the window but doesn’t touch it.
I wish I were sitting opposite him to see if his soul is as lovely from that angle.
Maya wants to look at Train Man’s unbespectacled eyes but instead she hides her head in the lookbook. Maya crosses a tightly clothed leg and doesn’t realise the toe of her orange Converse boot points to him.
The train stops at its one stop before the final destination and the unfortunate commuters get on. Unfortunate because they live in this unfortunate town. Unfortunate because the remaining few seats have gone now. Unfortunate that, although their fare is seventy-six pounds cheaper a month, they live in a less attractive, more thoughtlessly built modern town and they will have to stand. Maya wishes she wasn’t such a snob. Her Clause IV parents wish she wasn’t such a snob, but they try to see the funny side.
What’s his name? He looks like he has a nice name. Bookish but sexy. Perhaps Seth or Milo, yes, I like Milo. What do you do, Milo?
Maya’s imagination starts galloping with the horse in the field under the viaduct and flies along the track past swathes of red poppies jutting out of the cornfields. Maya thinks that Train Man must have started this job recently, perhaps today, as he’s new on the train and she would definitely have spotted him before.
He must work for a record company or maybe he’s an architect or a literary agent or something equally creative and cool.
He looks cool and Maya, looking down at her thin marl sweatshirt with a cartoon of a rainbow on it, grey jeans and Converse, suddenly feels in need of improvement. She thinks of her wardrobe packed with cute vintage dresses and fulsome skirts she saves For Special, knowing that they’re being neglected while she puts her life on hold. She feels a pang of guilt.
I should treat every day as if it is special.
With the sound of a horn, the train enters a tunnel and makes the top window above Train Man blow open. Wavy hair flies across Maya’s face, which she peels away and tames by tucking it behind her ear and smoothing it down.
I need to up my game and revisit my wardrobe. Maybe actually brush my hair in the morning. I should make more of an effort for work anyway, Lucy always looks so polished.
The sudden clatter of the open window pulls Train Man away from his novel and he looks up at the unfortunate commuters who have had to stand up. His gaze around the carriage, familiarising himself with newness, gives Maya her first proper insight into Train Man’s eyes. Wide, lovely eyes of the darkest brown, separated by a straight nose – a nose Maya thinks is the most beautiful nose she has ever seen. She can see his eyes clearly as he looks up without his glasses on. Big and inquisitive. She’s seen that shade of brown before. The seventy per cent cocoa solids that bring together the two shells of a Plantation Paineiras chocolate macaron that she saw in a shop window in Paris.
Maya hopes Train Man isn’t feeling nervous about his new job, if it is a new job; there’s a slight sadness about his gaze.
Did he see me look?
Maya looks away, closes her eyes and tries to fall asleep so she can free herself. The imprint of those beautiful eyes shines behind flecked eyelids as Maya starts to drift off. Eyes Maya has sought all her life and which finally arrived, two minutes late, nineteen minutes ago.
I hope I don’t dribble.