Maya didn’t think she could ever fall in love with someone who didn’t know the difference between your and you’re, but she did, almost seven years before she first laid eyes on Train Man. It was the first time she’d ever been in love, other than with Leonardo DiCaprio. Maya had battled with Clara over the Romeo+Juliet poster for so long, that when she finally took custody of it from Clara’s bedroom at the top of Flowers Towers, and triumphantly flew down three flights of stairs to her bedroom on the ground floor, she chose to ignore the fact that it was torn in the top right-hand corner. Maya was the proud owner of the poster and kissed it goodnight. Every night. Leonardo was Maya’s first love.
When love hit Maya for real, it occurred to her that it hadn’t happened at first sight like it had when she saw Leo on Verona Beach. It wasn’t like that with Jon. Maya’s love for Jon grew more steadily.
It started in the university library on the south coast. Maya couldn’t concentrate because the tall guy with shaved blond hair, a soft round head like a tennis ball, was parading around the library talking loudly to his friends, Being Charming. It was confidence Maya hadn’t seen before, and although her default setting would have been to be annoyed by the distraction, it was an intriguing enough distraction to keep her from Picasso’s Women. Jon had a cheeky look in his glacial eyes.
Jon enjoyed Being Charming. Charming male friends, charming female friends, charming strangers. Charming the woman who stamped that day’s date (3 February, if you must know) wonkily into Jon’s books.
Jon walked past Maya and smiled. Later, when Jon told Maya that he fell in love with strangers every day from just a passing look, Maya thought back to their first encounter in the library. She hadn’t fallen in love at first sight, not like she had with Leo, not like she would later, on a drizzly train platform. But she wondered whether Jon had fallen for her at that moment, if it was love at first sight for him, or whether he was just Being Charming.
Maya next saw Jon when he turned out to be a friend of her friend, as people are in the small community of a small university, studying Drama & Performance – and oh what a performance. Sitting opposite each other in a curry house, Jon held court with an anecdote about how he had outsmarted a lecturer, earlier in the day, on the language of Christopher Marlowe.
By Easter Maya had fallen in love. Jon would walk through the library, falling in love with strangers but leaving little notes of declaration only on Maya’s desk. It was terribly romantic among the ISBN numbers. They were each other’s first love and Maya wanted Jon to be her last as he stroked her shiny straight hair in his student digs at night, sombrely reciting Doctor Faustus as she fell asleep against his torso.
When they graduated and Maya walked straight into the editorial assistant job at Walk In Wardrobe, she couldn’t help but feel the prickle of Jon’s reaction. Maya had run the entire kilometre from the tube station to their Finsbury Park flat-share in heels to tell Jon face to face that she’d just been offered her first proper job – and when Jon’s steely smile dropped she couldn’t help but notice.
‘What’s wrong, baby? I thought you’d be pleased.’
‘I am,’ he said, releasing Maya’s arms from around his neck. ‘I’m just worried about the audition tomorrow, I can’t think of anything else right now.’
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.