How I found Jess in a Covid blighted city. Now I wait everyday to speak to her…

It happened outside a little old cafe in Istria as we sat under a skylight moon.

She looks beautiful, my daughter. Haughty and proud … I can smell coconut-oil in her hair on the salty night breeze from the Adriatic at the end of our ancient crumbling street.

Jess is 24 and I am three years short of 70.

We have spent nearly 20 years apart. In fact we have barely been together from the day she was born.

What a tragedy.

I actually lived in a village only six miles from her front door. Occasionally we would even pass on the street and pretend we didn’t see each other.

There is no doubt, and it is perfectly understandable that, like any child caught in the tail-spin of the incendiary break-up of her totally mismatched parents, our daughter suffered.

In fact on a rare meeting in a local beer garden a long time ago, she asked me with the defiant directness of her youth: “What did I do to make you hate me so much that you never wanted to see me?”

But that isn’t how it happened.

And no matter how it all happened …. and why we could pass each other like boats lost at sea – none of it should ever have happened to her. No child should ever be allowed to feel responsible for the failures and sins of their parents.

It was the parents who made a decade of mistakes.

So, here we are in the glorious city of Pula in Croatia, its beautiful wreckage of a Roman amphitheatre glowering in the distance like an ancient killer’s skull with a thousand empty eyes.

We are in the old town, near the harbour, on these ingle-nooked streets that still have embers from cooking glowing, dying and then coming back to life again.

There is no doubt that the world’s Covid panic has taken its toll here too … souvenir and trinket shops, cafes and bars are abandoned.

Some are boarded up like coffins.

It hasn’t stopped the locals who still have the ability to trade though, they hit the streets with all the charm and noise of their Italian ancestry, selling, cajoling, laughing, splashing carafes of red wine and cooking with panache.

***

Jess and her boyfriend have flown for four hours or more from the UK, masked-up like air-borne bandits on a coughing and sneezing elastic band to meet me and my wife.

Andrea and I have driven more than 600 miles from Slovakia, in our old black American sedan, to meet them.

And it’s gone brilliantly, that’s all I can say.

Lots of talking, lots of finding out about each other. And lots of laughter. It’s as if the love we lost never died. Now it’s like a wisp of a ghost wafting slowly over these historic cobbles, seeking us out, finding us.

And Jess and I are at almost total peace with each other.

I say ‘almost’ for one reason and at first it might seem a strange inconsequential one. But something happened.

We had a cigarette together.

Inconsequential yes. But it matters.

You see, I haven’t smoked at all, almost since the day Jess was born. I used to be a heavy smoker, particularly when I was writing in the metaphorical miserable garret of my tumble-down Victorian cottage in the Midland’s Village of the Damned.

They say that the addiction to tobacco is so strong that the moment you stub a cigarette out you want another. And already I’m back to twenty a day and feel unable to even make a phone call or meet friends in a local bar without sparking one up.

And I am also addicted to Jess, who I gave up 20 years ago too.

****

Now, I phone her, text her, WhatsApp her almost every day, sometimes three or four times – and if she doesn’t answer, because she is busy making her way in this strange old disease-ridden world, I feel stressed and uneasy.

So, I make another phone call or message almost immediately, trying to spark up a conversation.

And I think love, when you’ve lost it and found it again, does that to you doesn’t it?

That grey-blue smoke that you take into your brain and you soul and blow out of your mouth into the sky to watch it dissolve. Then immediately you want it back again …

A famous man said ‘you can’t turn back, you can’t come back, sometimes we push too far’
The next line says simply ‘one day you’ll open up your eyes and you’ll see where we are‘.

Well, that’s what I saw during those enigmatic and beautiful days in the breeze by the side of the Adriatic. I saw where Jess and I are.

And as I press ‘dial’ on my phone and light another cigarette, I know I never want to give her up again.

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