Veronica (Disorganised Attachment)

Beauty is both a blessing and a curse, I note, as I spot Veronica, young, blonde, uneasy on the station concourse. We’re at San Giovanni, waiting for the ferry to Messina. Around us, a criss-cross of train tracks and Italian signage. No sea in sight, but apparently, this concrete mess is the ferry terminus.

“Hi. I’m so confused.”
“I’m also confused.”

She keeps an eye on our bags while I order two espressos. We’re both heading to Catania, it’s half an hour before departure. Against a wire rail, we lean into the sun, we smoke. I carry a suitcase and black suit holder, curling my index finger around the hard hook of the hanger, fresh from a friend’s wedding.

She murmurs ‘Karl Gustavo’ a couple of times in her Hungarian accent before I realise she’s talking about Jung, dreams, archetypes. I like this girl. On the ferry, she shows me her latest works – Abstract Expressionism. Whorls of light and colour, pulsing, almost clumsy.

“This was my first sale. A guy in Belgium.” Later she confides to me, curled up like a cat – “don’t tell anyone, that painting took me five minutes.”

At Messina, she needs the bathroom, but the café won’t let her in until I buy us orange juice. How heroic. When she returns her hair is down, long tresses frame her face. What a reward, a living painting.

“I have the same eye colour as you,” she says. She tries to talk about Heidegger, something someone told her. Well, I’m guilty of the same. She’ll stay with her teacher in Catania, an older woman charmed by this stranded talent, this migratory bird dropped out of the flock, little Erasmus girl.

We make the platform just as the train rolls in. We don’t have tickets. Risk it? Yes, why not. We’ll buy online. Side by side, I offer my peanut butter sandwich; she devours two of my nectarines, books our tickets. I offer to pay her back. She smiles, looking out of the window. It’s already done.

After nearly an hour, a smart lady conductor in a peaked hat calls for tickets. Veronica hands over her phone. The conductor snarls.

“These are for tomorrow.”

A simple error. She had paid, but rules are rules.

“Pay 120 Euros, or get off.”

My jaw tightens. Other versions of me rail at the injustice. Appeal to common humanity. Invoke the Papal Bull. But there’s no point.

We step off, into some place you’ve never heard of, halfway down the peninsula. A passing schoolboy with a textbook under his arm gestures toward the water. Veronica squats on the sea wall, capturing photographs with an old SLR. I fetch another coffee, return half dancing. Do I catch her wide-eyed surprise? Is she studying me as a photographic subject? She examines the horizon, snaps willowy pink sunsets, we sit, smoke, talk, wander back to the train.

“At first I thought you were a lawyer.”
“You have artist’s hands.”

Waiting on platform one, Veronica folds my cumbersome suit holder, opens my suitcase and somehow packs it neatly inside. Now I have a whole hand free and my index finger is saved. What a useful woman.

A carriage pulls in on platform two, opposite. My heart sinks: we’re on the wrong platform. Another hour waiting in this comma of a town. But Veronica doesn’t miss a beat:

“We cross.”
“What?”
“Get down, follow me.”

Dear reader, I follow her. Picture us, a middle-aged man in formal clothes and suitcase stumbling after an art student with flowing wild hair on train tracks in a tiny Sicilian station, flinty gravel under our feet, facing down an angry red train, perched metres above, daring his engines to start.

As I clamber up the other side Veronica is already speaking with a male conductor in his perfectly pressed blue uniform with gold buttons, telling him in Italian that no, she didn’t just cross the tracks, officer, but in fact dropped her phone and was searching for it. And here it is, in her hand, what a relief.

He studies her with piercing blue eyes, pivots to me. I suppose I look sheepish, my face tilted as if to apologise for her reckless genius. He gazes for a long time, first at Veronica, then at me, then back to Veronica. After a full sonata, someone says something, there are beeps and mechanical noises, I am stepping in, lifting my case, the train doors wheeze shut.

Veronica has occupied a two-by-two seat, fully face down on the central table drenching it in her Aphrodite blonde shock, a Rothko sunset, our total moral collapse.

My hand gently squeezes her shoulder, I breathe in a hushed voice, “That was brilliant.”

At Catania train station her first port of call is, again, the bathroom. We loiter outside a restaurant, I pretend to read the menu, take in the disorder of vespas and hookers, the hum of Saturday night, she slips inside to pee. Walking to the metro she points out a woman in a tight dress, waiting for no-one in particular by a curve in the road, “Is she a whore?”

Metro ticket in hand, the delinquent angel and I approach the turnstile. This is how it goes: you go your way, I go to mine. So goodbye, then. She turns, walks two metres. Abrupt detachment, her back to me. The ticket hall echoes, we’re the only mannequins in this black and white theatre of farewells. The painter’s brush lingers – one final touch.

Veronica leaps at me, full power, into my arms, buries her fingers in the oily black-grey of my hair, folds her body against mine. I embrace her as if cupping Botticelli’s own masterpiece, golden tresses splashed across my chest, my heart.

Now she’s slipping down into the Catania metro, some deeper layer of the inferno in which we all burn, a final flicker of eyes across the barrier, goodbye then, by all the laws of god and men, sail safe in the belly of this good earth, this impenetrable hell, my broken Venus.