Meeting Celia

Meeting Celia.

I met her on the internet. It seemed like too much of a coincidence: I only went on for five minutes, just to have a look...I was lonely, I don’t mind admitting it...and curious. Curiosity killed the cat...yes, I know.

So, there she was amongst an ocean of others, smiling at me with that lop-sided smile of hers. She looked continental. I picked myself up off the floor and sent her a message...

‘Hey Bella!’ I wrote, ‘In Italy, if a beautiful woman walks down the street, a man can call out to her or whistle, try to catch her eye somehow, and if he’s lucky, she might smile and glance his way, if he's very, very lucky...so here I am, calling out to you...hey Bella!’

It was a shot in the dark, so to speak. Four weeks later, I’d almost forgotten about her. She was a distant light, disappearing over the midnight horizon.

‘I’m Portuguese, not Italian,’ read the message.

I was ecstatic. That’s how I met her, ecstatically. Celia da Silva was the wild blackberry girl. I met her on the steps of the Tate Gallery in London, where I’d invited her to see an exhibition of Holbein’s perception of power. I thought I might embarrass her with Henry VIII’s giant codpiece but Celia wasn’t worried in the slightest; she just laughed and nodded her head knowingly. She was a good Catholic girl, she said. The gallery was packed so she pulled my arm and we perused the dark Tudor faces in contraflow, which caused a mutter or two amongst the sheep. We laughed some more, and fool that I am, I watched her femininity wake several sleeping walkers. Her auburn hair tumbled down her back, and her preposterously pointed cowgirl boots were so Latina. She actually wore patchouli oil.

We weren’t particularly interested in Holbein. In the afternoon we went to Camden Market where she bought some grass from some shady character she knew. While we were waiting for her friend to reappear, Celia tried on a hundred different leather coats. She looked amazing in all of them. She refused to let me buy one for her, and reached up and kissed my cheek. She caught me by surprise – I hadn’t expected it, and I flushed like a schoolboy, which made her laugh. We sat by the canal in Camden while she made ridiculously strong joints and rambled on about her job and her flat and the lazy bastard with whom she was sharing it, while I just bathed in her radiance. When people walked past us, I smiled at them happily; I had already begun to dream. We had dinner at a good restaurant on Upper Street, where she ate like a sparrow and I ate like a horse. She said she liked a man with an appetite, and I flushed again. Being the Englishman that I am, I escorted her home to Chiswick where she paid an extortionate rate for a broom-cupboard which she shared with this guy called Tiago. He never washed up and left pubic hair stuck to the soap - I wanted to kill him just for knowing her. I didn’t even kiss her on that first date; I shook her hand, continentally, full of plummy English reserve. Later, she said she was disappointed, but I walked away smiling.

Emails and text messages were her thing. She was hesitant to talk directly, even though her command of English was excellent. Very quickly, a virtual intimacy developed between us, despite the age difference. I’m a silly old fool, and one that still believes in love. I do, honestly, despite everything...and one thing I have learned as I have grown older, if not wiser, is that the memory of that consuming flame is one to be cherished. I love to love...

Messages travelled in flurries, while I walked atop fluffy white clouds, smiling at the suspicious pensioners in the village, playing childish practical jokes upon my long-suffering children and even loving up the three cats my ex-wife left behind when she ran off with her lover. I loathed those cats, but at the time, it felt like anything was possible.

I asked Celia to meet me off the train at Liverpool Street Station. I wanted the moment to be remembered, so I wrote:

‘Do you want to live forever? Please don’t contact me before we meet again. The next time we communicate, it will be with a kiss.’

Yes, I know – such schmaltz. My children told me it was ‘cringeworthy’. Was it cringeworthy? Very well then, so it was! I realised I’m either a hopeless romantic or a silly old fool, probably both, but the complete radio silence worked a treat. We had seven days to wait before we could meet again and the anticipation nearly killed me; I couldn’t think straight, I was acting completely out of character, messing about like an adolescent. The week crawled by, and I made things worse by counting the hours, calculating the minutes, daydreaming about meeting Celia da Silva, Wild Blackberry Girl. It was like holding your breath for too long. I was dizzy. Despite the agonizingly slow passage of time, I felt unashamedly happy.

I thought, this is how it feels to be alive, right here, right now.

Then I thought, it’s funny how I’ve been dead for so long without noticing...appearances can be so deceptive.

At last, after a million years of waiting, the day, the hour, the second has arrived. The train pulls out of the little city, and now at last I’m speeding towards the Big City where Celia da Silva, the Wild Blackberry Girl is waiting for me. She is drawing me to her. Factories give way to houses giving way to allotments and now green rolling fields. Wan winter sunlight strobes through poplar windbreaks as the train picks up speed. I’m meeting Celia.

The train chatters silly old fool, silly old fool, silly old fool, but I don’t care. I’m alive. I'm here and now. My blood is red. It surges like molten lava.

The carriage door swishes open and I am assailed by an olfactory riot. Two old soaks stagger in, not quite beyond the pale but very close to the edge of it. She has the better elocution, but her rasping voice is scarred raw by cigarettes and alcohol. He is a brute, little and wiry, with a touch of the Nicholson about him. He’s eating some sort of hot meat pasty in that noisy way of people who are simply past caring. The smell is utterly noxious and all pervading.

‘I jus’ couldn’t get orf the phaggin’ train,’ he splutters, sending pasty detritus flying in an arc as he sits down heavily.

‘Yes, dahling,’ she croaks in return, trying to coax her thinning auburn hair into a semblance of order. She too sits down heavily, wheezing a little. He is younger than her by several years at a guess, but it's difficult to tell. She rummages in a sumptuous carpet-bag for a few moments before bringing out a small silver flask. ‘Here,’ she whispers breathlessly, looking up just in time to catch my eye and smile with painted lips but not with painted eyes. ‘Here luvvie, have a blast on this...’

He grabs the flask ill-humouredly and his head wobbles as he takes a long draught and I can see a thin bead of liquid escape down his badly shaven chin. ‘Steady, love,’ she complains, quietly she thinks but not so, ‘there’s no buffet service on these trains anymore...’ She gingerly stretches out a mottled pinko-grey hand to retrieve the flask, half expecting, it seems, a violent reaction.

‘Ah phaggit!’ he snorts contemptuously, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and re-applying himself to his pasty while she takes several shorter pulls. The carpet bag, the silk shawl, the leather shoes all speak of a fallen gentility. But at least they've found something in common, these two...they are not alone.

Silly old fool, silly old fool, silly old fool, chortles the train as we speed through the rolling green. I shut my eyes and daydream. I’m exhilarated.

Stations come and stations go. It's taking forever to get there. The train fills up with passengers and they too come and go, come and go. We are like waves, ebbing and flowing. My journey is telescoped through time; I have experienced vast infinity in the two hours it takes for the train to deliver me, and at the last, there is a delay of at least fifteen minutes. We must wait, all of us packed in sardine-style, without looking at each other, without sharing a word, even about the weather. I think about Celia, my Wild Blackberry Girl. Will she be there waiting? The seconds weigh heavy like lead.

The tunnel approach finally opens out and the platform draws up. I eat the apple I have been saving for the moment. I don’t know why, but I want to taste of Cox’s Orange Pippin when I kiss her. I am English. I drag my holdall out of the luggage rack and hoist it onto my shoulder as I step down onto the platform. Only a few more heavy seconds, passing in slow motion. My heart is beating wildly. It is a surreal moment. I’m saying, remember this moment, here and now, remember this moment, HERE and NOW, this moment HERE, NOW.

My bag feels like a kit bag, up here on my shoulder, and I suddenly have this delicious imagination. I see steam swirling. I hear the shouts of porters and the trilling of the guards’ whistles. I see homberg hats and wide lapelled suits. It's all gone black and white and grainy. I am now a soldier returning from the front on leave, hoping for a little respite from the horror, hoping to find a little human love, a little forgiveness. I have come to claim a peace in the rushing, pell-mell, tumultuous war that is life, a war that’s over before you know it. In this life, you’re dead before you’ve realised you’re alive! Not me...I’m alive...I can feel it...I’m here and now...I can feel the blood surging through my veins...I can hear my heart roaring in my ears. Celia will tell you. We're going to live forever. Right here, right now.
There she is, smiling that lop-sided smile. She unfolds into me. That first kiss, that first embrace, that soft ineffable, that first night, that fever of lovemaking, how we rose and fell and rose again, how we laughed, how we drank and laughed and loved and fell asleep laughing and woke again to love again, how we spent the whole weekend loving and laughing and feeling alive, together, here and now. Two human beings thrown together by virtual whirligig of fortune...the probabilities of realising the dreams of such a silly old fool are staggering.

How we laughed...there and then.

Of course, it didn’t last. I’m not such a fool that I expected it to. It was never the same after that first weekend of gentle pleasure - it wasn’t supposed to be. Normality is corrosive. I don’t mind, I have no regrets; perhaps Celia appeared at that time to help me remember how it feels to laugh and to love, to feel alive, to live there and then, because until I met her, I had quite forgotten myself. We'd tasted immortality, just for a moment; it was sublime. We were more than human, just for a moment. I wonder about this sometimes, when the sunshine strobes through the poplar trees. I cried when she disappeared from my life forever, without a bittersweet trace; I cried like the silly old fool that I am, knowing even as the tears rolled hot and salty down my weathered cheeks that the world would never seem the same again, not after meeting Celia.