CHAPTER SEVEN

PAST

The beginning of our relationship was surreal; if ever I had fantasized about what the perfect girl looked like or acted like, it paled in comparison to what Angel was TRULY like and how she enhanced my life. If I were to compare her to anyone I had previously dated – it would not be fair – it would be like comparing a painting done with finger paints hanging on a refrigerator door held up with a magnet to Michelangelo’s art scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Angel rarely looked anything other than immaculate, even in jeans and a T shirt - they would be Dolce & Gabbana jeans and an Izzy Miyake or a Alistar McQueen T shirt. She only wore lip stick and eye liner - nothing else - and very little jewelry. She had amazing poise and grace to her movements. She would not grab something, she would place her fingers on it, pause a fraction of a second and then her thumb would engage it, pause for a fraction of a second and she would pick it up - a three step process of controlled movement - Never snatching, never rushing.

She had long legs and took long strides, even in 5” heals. I could be working and completely stressed out and Angel would, without asking, walk through the door looking in every detail the girl I had fantasized about meeting and being with since I was 14 years old. She walked in elegant long strides across the marble floor of the apartment, click, click, click, click, click, click and elegantly places a solid black tablet of glass polished to perfection, a perfect mirror image of her finger in its surface. As its mass hits the desk top, she would remove her finger in a graceful movement leaving one perfect finger print on the glass block. She’d lower a perfect, clean glass of ice cold white wine and pause, look up at me with head down and say softly “May I?”

“Of course,” I would say.

She would lift the glass to her lips and you can almost hear the ‘pu’ as her red lips part revealing glistening white teeth. They part further as they settle on the wine glass and she would take a small sip, no more, just a taste - before removing the glass. There is no lipstick on the glass; there is no trace of it ever having touched her lips, just the stripes of the wine as they flow down the edge of the glass.

A tongue would flick across her lips and she would gracefully place the glass on the coaster - all the while the glass was held with the stem, never the bowl, but her fingers would then pinch the bowl and just turn the glass to centralize it on the coaster.

This level of attention to detail, if most people did it could quit possibly drive you insane. But Angel did it with such exquisite elegance that watching it was like watching Japanese theatre. It was spellbinding, and it was all done for YOU. It was to make THAT moment of your day as enjoyable as it was humanly possible for it to be.

Imagine living with the absolute manifestation of your dreams, with someone who takes your life to a state of perfection that you yourself would simply NEVER do - even if you had the money and the time. You know when you go to a really expensive hotel and you’re amazed by the attention to detail and the luxury of everything and the standard of service? Well, it was like having a partner that brought that into your daily life and made it 100% bespoke, just for you.

Angel would take note that I liked - say Chorizo - but she would not just buy some at the supermarket. Angel would get her hot friend at the Italian Delicatessen to order in the very best Chorizo from Spain and she would ring the Domain Boyar brothers and ask which of their wines would go best with it and then she would unexpectedly arrive at my desk, completely out of the blue, with 4 exquisite open topped sandwiches with delicate rolls of Chorizo on top and a glass of the perfect wine.

She put as much attention into everyday life that most people do into a first date with someone really special.

There were so many facets of her personality that life would never, could never be boring. She was not always all elegance and sophistication. Angel is an amazing character actress in the style of Mr. Bean. She has a range of characters - and she could and did go into them randomly without notice. She would dress in a school girl’s outfit; this was her “sexually predacious school girl with learning difficulties” outfit. You know the type of schoolgirl I'm talking about - slightly autistic and obsessed with sex. Angel would have me - and others - literally in floods of tears. And she didn't just confine it to home - she could switch into this girl in a shopping mall, you could be stuck there for hours while she terrorized the men. She was the cause of two people crashing cars - MY CARS - because she was in one of her characters in the passenger seat and the drivers were laughing too much to concentrate on the road.

She had a level of control over her body I have only seen in Rowen Atkinson and she could be just as funny dancing. You know the saying - dance as if no one is watching- well, Angel could dance as if she was in her bedroom having a huge laugh with her sister and being silly - while an entire night club would be surrounding her, watching her and the DJ calling her out.

Back to home life - when Angel kissed you it was never a peck on the lips - you know how gorgeous female movie stars’ kiss in close up on the big screen. That is how Angel kissed, as if waiting for the Director to shout “CUT!”

EVERYTHING about Angel was taken to the pinnacle of perfection.

I remember going to see the Faberge Exhibition in London. It contained ….I think 9 of the Imperial Easter eggs and about 40 other imperial treasures all made by Carl Faberge for the Tsar and Tsarina. My one memory of the exhibition was “Everything I own is shit, NO everything I have ever seen is SHIT” I literally did not know that that level of perfection could exist - it was like having a ruler in centimetres and then suddenly finding that not only do millimetres exist but 1000 micrometers make up a millimetre and you had spent your life thinking a centimetre was the highest level of accuracy of luxury.

Living with Angel was like the Faberge Exhibition - I never KNEW that level of attention to my desires, my likes could exist, I never knew a girl could be MORE perfect in REAL life than I even dared to imagine her in my fantasy’s, I never knew that a kiss could be SO perfect or that a look could be SO seductive.

Now you need to know that when she was young, Angel trained as a gymnast – that is pretty much normal in Bulgaria - all girls train as gymnasts up to about 14 years old.

But Angel took gymnastics to the next level since she had very loose, flexible joints and practiced contortion. She developed a style of dance that was a cross between sensual dancing, and the 3D rotations in The Matrix.

For a start Angel was able to dance PERFECTLY in 5” heals. She could put her leg up behind her and her arm over her shoulder backwards and pull her leg over hear head, bend her body down to the floor and walk over her own head - SERIOUSLY!!

What was more impressive is she could dance in slow motion - as if in one of the matrix scenes. This is a matter of perfect balance and ONLY someone with Angel’s astonishing body control would be able to do this - she could pirouette on one leg whilst laying horizontally backwards and her outstretched leg would up and over your body and head - missing you while looking at the ceiling ……and she could do this either at high speed to in slow motion.

She could reach over backward, again in SLOW motion, and go back onto her hands and walk backwards over her hands and head and she could do ALL of this seamlessly and in tune to the music and for HOURS - the strain on her muscles must have been enormous.

When I say Angel is the single most talented person I have EVER met I am not using hyperbole. She is genuinely world class at character acting, comedy, dancing and art – no exaggeration. And when I say world class, I mean that she could have become famous for any of those, genuinely. I asked her to do more of her art for me, I also asked her to let me organize exhibitions of her art in London and New York but sadly she was not interested.

The feeling Angel gave was perfect purity of perfection. I quite literally could not imagine a girl more totally perfect, my imagination was stretched just to take in the reality of her, and day to day existence was ALREADY beyond the limits of my imagination.

And she was MY girlfriend. This pure, distilled, graceful, artistic, intelligent, funny, multilingual, deeply loving visage sent by the Gods was MY girlfriend. She took me in every way she possibly could to the heights beyond the top of Mount Everest in sensual and hedonistic pleasure - to a land where my daily life was so far beyond. Beyond the beyond that is the outer limits of human experience. This was a land that only movies touch upon and no one ever truly gets to live. She brought me to the edge of the stratosphere where the air is so thin you have to wear a space suit but the view - the view is all humanity stretched out before you and you can see the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space. You know that above you, there isn't even enough air to support your wings, there is no higher.

This is it.

Beyond this point there is no measurement of height, from here on it becomes - distance. As you glide in perfect tranquility at the edge of space, the sun so bright your visor is almost black, gasping at the beauty of life that you never thought possible.

THIS was life living with Angel.

At least it was like this in the beginning, when it was 99% of the time amazing and only 1% a nightmare. As time went on the ratio inevitably changed and by the end of our relationship it was only 1% amazing and 99% living in absolute sheer horror, a true nightmare that you could not wake up from no matter how hard you tried. And yet the reality of what she once had been seemed to taunt me, entice me to not leg go, to not give up even if ….for just a moment …..a crumb of her once perfect self could be tossed to me. I lived days, nights …YEARS of that nightmare because I truly believed that crumb was worth it.