Searching for Celia by Elizabeth Ridley

Author:Elizabeth Ridley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-62639-174-1
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2015-06-15T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Wednesday

9:34 p.m.

With Celia gone, I glance at my watch. A little after nine thirty. I have just under twelve hours until we meet again at the Circle of Lebanon. I haven’t slept in a day and a half, haven’t eaten since eleven o’clock this morning. My broken hand aches with a bone-deep pain and I am beyond exhausted. But Celia lives and breathes and walks the earth, a fact that, for the moment anyway, redeems all sorrows that ever I have felt.

It’s a five-minute walk to Waterloo Station, through the concrete urban landscape of South London, where the darkened sky seems pierced, sectioned by bent metal cranes, and the girders, beams, and scaffolding of endless construction sites are soiled by street grime and runaway graffiti.

I enter the station and descend to the platform for the Northern Line, where a lone busker plays the guitar very badly and sings plaintively off-key, and the walls are plastered with ads for cheap overseas holidays and billboards for current West End plays, mostly recycled Broadway musicals.

I stand with my back to the station wall, close my eyes, and breathe in the trapped, drafty scent of emptiness that fills the Underground at night. At this hour a cold and filthy odor rises from every surface as the dirt and breath and dust and sweat accumulated throughout the day settle into permanence, pressing against the brick walls, conspiring beneath the platforms, tiptoeing along the tracks. But even this lonely, desperate, and despairing smell can’t lessen the joy of having just seen Celia. I lean back and smile.

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