Celia, Celia

When I am sad and weary, 

When I think all hope has gone. 

When I walk along High Holborn, 

I think of you with nothing on.

Adrian Mitchell, “Celia, Celia.”

It started with cheese. 

The day before, my thumb had hovered over her profile, unsure. Her pictures—the half face; the slice of rib and hip bone; the one outrageous bikini snap—were undoubtedly gorgeous. But her bio, “sensual, delectable, spicy adventures,” was not to my usual taste. Indeed, that was just the problem. Since I had none—and by this I mean literally, I could no longer perceive flavour, biting into a raw onion and sensing nothing but the texture of sawdust—I avoided people who might remind me of this loss, preferring adverts that were more straightforward like, “fat-fingered dom will sit on face.” But in recent months I had begun to feel a swirling sense of dislocation. Like my body was coming apart at the seams and bits of me were leaking out. I suppose I was looking for someone to stitch me back together again. Thus, when I noticed her name, “Celia,” which was the same as my very own, it seemed like the sign I had been waiting for. Celia appeared from the gloom of my phone like some celestial being, a heavenly mirror to my hell, and my thumb thudded down with the decided heft of fate. 

The next day, instead of necking three Aunt Robertas and suggesting we go back to mine where I would produce the ropes, the paddle, and the special candles with which she would first restrain and then proceed to punish me, I sat close to Celia in the leather booth. When she told me she was a chef, I almost cried out, admitting, shamefully—the dimness of the room, the proximity of our bodies making the whole thing feel like Confessional—that food did nothing for me. I was sure that she could feel it, too. Is that not what she had seen in my own profile, the severe bob, the lost, lingering look, the desire to be—the word I preferred—disciplined? And is that not why, but half an hour later, I found myself in the gourmet cheese shop, Celia raising one ludicrously expensive, neatly packaged triangle to my face after another, saying, “This one is nutty,” or, “This like butter,” her wide eyes filled with the fervour of salvation.

In my apartment, Celia pulled out a dirty chopping board. “This place,” she said happily, “It’s disgusting.” Looking around the neglected kitchen, I had to agree. I had lost my sense of taste almost three years ago now, in another city across the Atlantic. I had lost other things, too, but I did not like to talk about them. I booked my passage on the Queen Elizabeth Cruise the next day (among other things, I did not like to fly), and never returned. 

Celia told me that she, too, was from another country, that she, too, missed home. When she said this, I wanted to correct her—I did not miss home—but something in her manner, so earnest, stopped me. We were the same height but where her hair was a thick, glossy brown, mine was pale; her eyes like two burning coals, mine grey and flat. She was gorgeous with her cupid-bow lips, her small, compact frame, her dark eyebrows that met in the middle like a caterpillar. Too gorgeous? I wondered. 

Celia said we were beginning with cheese because it contained the gamut of flavours: sweet, bitter, salty, sour, umami, she sang as if it were a nursery rhyme, as if I was a child. After she washed the board, she arranged the cheese. As she produced each one from the bag, I noticed her hands, scarred and calloused, like my own. Unlike Celia, who spent her days creating things, however, I packed them away, winding shrink wrap around six-foot paintings, the layers of plastic fusing against one another, and entombing them in MDF coffins. Now, I imagined Celia’s strong hands doing the same to me: twisting the discarded, sweaty plastic around my wrists, binding my arms to the elbow, like some exotic arm cheese, marbled by the blue lines of my compressed veins.

“Celia.” 

She pronounced our name differently, softening the “c” and flattening the “e,”’ and I felt myself jolted out of my reverie. I had the sensation of being suspended above myself, as though, when I landed, I would become someone else. This is what Celia seemed to promise me when she commanded: “Eat.” I obeyed, tipping my head solemnly to her fingers and as she placed the water cracker, smeared white, on my moist tongue, something spiritual occurred: I was young again, at Mass, waiting for the transubstantiation to take place. This cheese, Celia told me in breathy, wet whispers, was part donkey’s milk, part goat’s, which gave it its particular tang. A breeze moved through the room, I felt something stir within me, saliva pooled in my mouth, the cracker snapped and dissolved, and there it was, an echo, a shadow, a hint of—but no, I sat back defeated. The cheese, the cracker, like everything else, had no taste. It was just like the wadding I had spent that morning cutting into strips to wrap around a large clay pot. 

Obligingly, I tried the ten other cheeses Celia had bought. But the Saint Marcellin was like glue, the Abbaye de Belloc rubber, and the Saint Agur Blue a particularly nasty filler; and as each cheese failed to light my buds awake, Celia’s eyes grew dim. She wrapped up the cheese, climbed into my bed and curled into a tight, impenetrable ball, facing away from me. I lay beside her in a state of panicked anguish, counting the ridges of her spine. 

The next morning, Celia was still asleep while I made the mushroom tea (the only thing I used the kitchen for) I hoped would make me look like I was in my twenties again. I did not want to see Celia and I assumed she felt the same. The night before, she had refused to touch me; and I believed this was because I failed her in some way. Her cold refusal, her personal restraint, was a punishment far worse than if she had gagged me with a block of blue and tied me to the leg of the bed, whispering into my ear what a worthless little worm I was. While Celia snored next door, I slinked out of the apartment, the shame sticky on my skin. 

 It was a surprise, then, when I returned late that evening to find her in my kitchen. I blinked stupidly at her, my heart thudding with the same erratic excitement as the pots on the stove. 

Pileća Bela Čorba was a stew that her father made on special occasions, she explained as I watched her lift a whole chicken, its pale skin puckered at the grooves of its thighs, and plonk it into a pot of boiling water. As she diced carrots, onion, and celery, jewelled piles that grew on the board as if by magic, she told me not to touch anything. I sat straight on the stool, my back aching and legs losing sensation in a way that made me feel right and good. Celia was wearing one of my tank tops, and as her arm moved, so, too, did her breasts, imperceptibly, through the ribbed, white fabric. Her shorts had ridden up and clung to the double bulb of her behind; a shiver of hope ran through me.

Celia pulled the chicken from the boiling water and placed it on a plate. The once taut flesh hung seductively from the bones. “Now Celia,” Celia said, my heart doing a backflip. “Watch.” 

She dug her nails into the space between the joints, pulling leg from thigh and wing from breast, and I felt myself become undone. The possibilities circled through my mind: Celia binding my legs and arms and trussing me up like a chicken, stuffing my mouth with herbs and boiling me in a pot of water. When I’m nice and pink, sliding a red-hot finger into me. 

Celia replaced the torn flesh into the pot, adding the diced vegetables and two roughly chopped potatoes. In another bowl she mixed a yolk with sour cream. When the potato was cooked, she added the egg mixture to the pot, stirring continuously. Then she ladled two bowls with the steaming, pale yellow stew, topping them with shocking flashes of parsley. I was, I realized as she placed mine before me, hungry; something I had not felt for some time. But when I lifted the spoon to my mouth, I tasted nothing. That night Celia slept facing me. Angel curls frizzed into a halo around her face, her mouth was slack, a puddle of drool forming on the pillow. We still had not touched and I buried my face into the pillow, screaming noiselessly into the soft cotton.

The salad was meant to shock my taste buds into action: Celia chopped three different varieties of chilli, thirty in total—small shrivelled red things, long turgid green forms, and bulbous orange ones—along with garlic, lemongrass, and ginger. The smell alone made my nose run and eyes stream, and this I took gratefully. I would have liked Celia to rub my tear ducts with her fingers, but she remained distant on the other side of the kitchen island. Telling me when to taste, when to chew, how to swallow, what cutlery to use. There were many rules but, even though I followed them to the letter, I remained unable to taste a single thing. Not the Trippa alla fiorentina, nor the Bouillabaisse, nor the Confit de Canard. Celia became frenzied as each dish, more elaborate than the next, did nothing to me. Her hands flew across the chopping board, her face was pink with exertion, steam poured from her mouth, as from the oven, the pots, the kettle. Still, she refused to punish me for my failure: she returned to the bed, defeated, mere inches away, but a chasm I knew I could not cross. 

“Celia,” Celia said on the seventh night. “I have an idea.”

We had been doing it all wrong, she told me. She had thought that if she poured her heart and soul—and her blood, sweat, and tears—into a dish, then I would be able to taste it, because that thing—what was it, love, humanity, faith?—would be so overwhelming. It would unlock me. But, she said now, it wasn’t about what she did, but what we did together. This idea terrified and bored me; I liked watching Celia move about the kitchen briskly, telling me not to move. I didn’t think I should do more but, if anything, less—punished for my insufficiencies, treated with the same care and attention Celia gave when slicing a pepper and pitting its seeds. 

But this was impossible to say to Celia. Something about the way she spoke—happy and angry, outraged and hopeful—and the way she cooked—placing the bowl of boiled clementines in front of me as if she owned the place—meant I was unable to contradict her. I would never. Thus, I found myself picking up a fruit and, as per Celia’s instructions, squeezing it in my palm. 

Pulp burst through skin, and the juice dribbled onto my elbows. I was shocked by the heat, by the softness, by the ripe tang. That day I had worked with several animal balloon sculptures. The artist was nineteen and had become famous on Clown Tok. The sculptures had to be handled in a temperature-controlled room, to stop them from deflating and it was all I could do not to scratch my nail across the latex. I had returned home with fantasies of Celia digging her nail into my flesh but now, as I crushed and squeezed next to her, my arms mirroring hers, and hers mine, our skin stained with the fruit and flecks of citrus, this feeling seeped away into the mess. When Celia blended the fruit—pulp, skin, pith, and all—with eggs, sugar, ground almonds, the mixture whirring chaotically, her shoulder tensed, accentuating the dip in her collarbone, and a new desire replaced it. 

I wanted to fill Celia’s collarbone with the velvet mixture; and for Celia to do the same to me. To bake cakes in the shape of Celia’s and Celia’s cavities: myself multiplied in her and her in me, to become something together and make something new. A rich, buttery sweetness filled the room, and I could barely keep myself upright on the stool. I was a child again, incense ringing through the high-arched room, my eyes rolled back to heaven. My skin prickled and there was a dry rasp in my throat. There was another presence with us, I was sure, filling up my windbag of a body and seeping out of my pores. 

But of course, the cake turned to paste in my mouth. 

It was this that broke Celia and I. That night, she did not sleep, but rather stayed in the kitchen. The countertop was littered with jars of pickles and jams in primary colours, the walls hung with herbs like talismans. In the fridge food had begun to rot, and the faint smell of decay lingered in the rooms of the apartment. When I saw her in the morning she would mutter, “More salt, perhaps,” or “Truffle,” “Trotter,” “Pistachio pesto.” I wasn’t doing too much better. At work, I found myself poised before a large painting, about to hammer through the canvas. Another time I awoke with my arms above my head, staggering under the weight of an earthen pot. I placed the pot gingerly on the ground and smoked three cigarettes outside to calm down. An inventory of extremely rare watercolours came in. Each painting had to be sealed in tissue and cardboard and stacked in specially made boxes. The work was monotonous and painstaking but I drank litres of coffee to keep myself focused. Despite this, on the third day, I blacked out again, and found myself on the threshold of the warehouse, in my outstretched arms a priceless watercolour, about to offer it to the torrential rain outside.

Two weeks after Celia arrived in my apartment, I went to work with a feeling of dread. That morning Celia had been monosyllabic while I made our mushroom teas. Gone was the usually vivacious and dominating chatter I had become accustomed to. I hovered by her, hoping she would tell me what to do, but she sighed with such force that I retreated to the sofa. My apartment was on the ground floor at the back of the building where natural light did not reach. For the past two weeks, it had felt like Celia and I were cocooned in some nether space—safe and separate, Celia, the unknown twin I had been searching for—but now it seemed more like a dungeon, or worse—purgatory. Celia hurled her mug into the sink, and said to the spilled liquid, “I think to myself, why not, this will be fun. I like a challenge.” I said nothing, feeling her accusatory eyes turn to me. “But you, I do not think you want to be helped.” 

At work, the guilt ran through me in cold, clammy rivulets. That day I was handling large-scale animatronic sculptures. The artist had used found materials—metal, plaster, cardboard, wool, dog hair—to create skeletons that mirrored the proportions of Neanderthals. They were heavy and had to be hefted, two of us at one end, two at the other, into custom-made coffins. As I picked up a leg, I was struck by the musty smell, not unlike our storeroom, and as I arranged one hand under the knee-joint, the other under the pelvis, my fingers caught on a strip of sandpaper. I do not know if it was because of this tingle—this memory of pain—or if it was because I was already preoccupied—with Celia, with myself—but as I inched my way across the room, the four of us walking like crabs, the sculpture transformed, like Pinocchio became a real boy, into a corpse. I was no longer in the warehouse, but, rather, in a different place and time. The funeral march ringing far off and, in my hands, the cold and pale body of my mother. The leg was thick and fleshy, ribbed with sinew and fat. Somewhere else, her voice sour on my neck, “This, Celia, is what it means to be a martyr.” Forcing me to look, forcing me not to close my eyes. The weight of her fell upon me—why is it that a dead body is so much heavier than a living one?—and I crumpled, losing my grip on the cadaver. The horror of it as it rolled away, falling, as if in slow motion. My mother’s voice calling out shrilling, “This is what it means to be good.” But as it hit the floor, rather than the dull thud of flesh, came the crunching sound of metal, the cracking of resin and the crumple of cardboard. My colleagues blinking at me in undisguised alarm and fear. The sculpture wrecked on the hard concrete floor. Its head separated from its neck, it now rolled, with ever-increasing echoes, down the long, brightly lit room. As it caught the light, glinting wickedly, a new vision came to me, surfacing from the murky depths: Celia the night before, her chin tipped upward, her fragile neck exposed, me hovering above, a leather strap in my hand. Something fused in my mind; Celia, my mother, the long dreary Sundays, the days by her bedside. When I hovered above Celia, strap in hand, did I hope that by squeezing the life from her, I would expel something within me; or was it simply that I had had enough? 

When I returned home, Celia was not there. 

Staring at my empty kitchen, it was as if I was back in church. The emptiness and the sorrow of that great, hulking building. The pulpit, the marble steps, the velvet curtain. The counter, the utensils, the kettle, the stretch of tiled floor. Expectant and yet meaningless without Celia. That final time in Saint John the Baptist’s, the failure of my life curled into the dark, damp corners, and I walked away with relief. Staring at my empty kitchen, now, it seemed to me that my reckoning had come.

First, I tied my feet to the bottom of my bed, using the Japanese knots I learned last year, which I knew could only be undone by another pair of hands. Then, I slipped one wrist into one cuff, the other into another set, and secured these to the outer posts. I do not remember sleeping, nor do I remember being awake. I was caught, as if in a fever, my body now shivering with cold, now burning with heat, Celia’s voice echoing through the room, repeating our name in a high-pitched monotone, like some kind of taunt. Caught in this torment I did something I had not done for a long time: I prayed to the saints who had burned before me, to the ones who had been flayed or buried alive. I begged St. Amalberga of Temse, patron saint of pain, and St. Lawrence, patron saint of cooking. I asked that my bones fall through my sinews, that my flesh feed someone else, that what festered in me would be released. And as I prayed, I felt the fringes of the underworld brushing my thighs, my armpits leaked, as did my eyes. But God is cruel and as the shooting pains began in my feet, sending sparks up to my bowels, my rib cage, my shoulders, I found myself resolutely there, wailing to the damp crack in my ceiling. 

As was customary in my apartment, the dawn came in darkness, and it was only the sounds of traffic outside that alerted me to the new day. Consciousness fluttered on my eyelids. It was perhaps this, my delirium, or perhaps the sirens that shrieked outside, but I was not aware of the presence in the room until it was above me, its blank face a hovering, damning shadow. My angel of death. But then the angel coughed, and I felt something dampen my face. And now the angel sniggered. 

I was disorientated, as if I had been underground for months. Celia was wearing a bright orange t-shirt with a fuzzy smiley face on the front that wavered between happy and confused as she moved her arms. Her dark hair was held by a pearl-coloured claw, and she smelt like lavender. 

A beam of sunlight shimmied through the grimy window and my kitchen, hitherto cast in darkness, lit up with brilliance. Celia turned to me, backlit by the light, so that her body glowed, her darkened face like a black hole. Her voice was stern and commanding as she told me to sit. As I resumed my position, something shifted. Celia did not smile or chatter or laugh, as usual. Rather, she began to work with a grimness that spread through the room. The solemnity of her movements settled something in me. Gone were the fancy ingredients, the spices, the herbs, the rare cuts of meat, the jellies, and the special oils. Instead, a box of eggs. 

As I watched the single orb bob in the water, I was reminded of a day, weeks before, when I had wrapped three hundred individually painted porcelain versions: each fragile, glittering object had to be held with special gloves and layered with tissue paper before being placed in a hand-made box, half-filled with foam peanuts, and nailed shut. If there was a tear in the paper, I had to start again. If there were too many peanuts the pressure would break the egg. Using a drill to seal the box would cause too much movement; instead, I used a tiny hammer and tapped, gently, for hours, like a small mechanical gnome. Two thirds of the way through my hands cramped, my eyes stung, and I had the overwhelming desire to hurl the egg across the room. Now, as another jerked before me, Celia’s stern gaze fixed on me, something miraculous happened. A desire to be that egg, held safely and burnt through by the water, surged through me until, with a gasp, I felt myself transformed. I was still on the kitchen stool, yes, watching Celia watching me, like a strange concave mirror, but I was, also, that egg, in the water. From far away I heard Celia tell me not to blink, not to move a muscle, telling me that if I did, I would regret it. I wouldn’t be able to bear the punishment she had in store for me. And now I was being lifted from the water, my body blushing and cleansed. And now Celia was lifting her palm toward me, the brown top of the egg in it. And now I was moving through the air. All thoughts fell away, and I knew then that I was held, completely and utterly. I knew, then, that something would change. She put it before me and placed her spoon on the mound. And then she cracked me open.