That Girl From Nowhere (16 page)

‘I really, really don’t,’ I say to her retreating form. She doesn’t indicate as she turns the tight corner around our building and rides off at speed.

‘So much for it being wonderful news,’ I mutter.

Tyler’s coffee is going to have to be nothing short of spectacular to see me through this day.

‘I’ve had a few ideas about what to do with your pendant but the one I keep coming back to is a watch because of the connection with time.’

‘Oh, right,’ Melissa says. She sits on the other stool in my workshop and her attention doesn’t rest anywhere for long – she looks like a meerkat, constantly looking around, trying to take it all in. My workshop is neat and tidy. In general, I am not neat and tidy, my life is full of chaos and piles of paper and several dozen jobs I meant to finish. But wherever I work has to be immaculate, tidy, precisely organised. I have hung all my larger tools on the walls, there are designated pots for the files, the daylight lamp sits in the left-hand corner of my bench, in the right-hand corner is the soldering area.

‘It’s so cool in here,’ Melissa says suddenly. She spins herself on the stool. ‘I’d love to have a place like this to work in, instead of just an office.’

‘I’m really lucky, I know.’

‘It’s not so much luck, you have worked for this, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, not luck as much as good fortune from hard work.’

‘I suppose you’re right. About this watch idea …?’

‘I don’t really wear watches.’

I open up my sketchbook, already ashamed about how bad my sketches are. ‘Have a look at the idea I had,’ I say. ‘Excuse my sketches. The locket would become the watch, it’d be protected from knocks by the locket lid, and the strap would be made from linking the chain together in small sections, like this.’

Melissa stops fidgeting and visually exploring and gazes down at the lines I’ve made with a soft, 2B pencil. Her face, sceptical when she first looked, changes. ‘Actually, that looks kind of … nice. Classical, but still funky. If people even say “funky” any more.’ She turns her head to the side, examines the photo of the pendant pinned to the corner of the page and the drawing more carefully. ‘I really like it. So what’s the problem?’

‘Why would you think there was a problem?’ I ask.

‘Because you could have emailed me those sketches.’

‘Well, the only sticking point is I’m not a watchmaker, I’d have to outsource that and it would be a bit pricey. I don’t want to get quotes until I know you at least like the general idea.’

‘I do like the general idea, yes.’

‘Excellent, I’ll get some quotes and we’ll decide how to proceed from there.’

‘Great.’ She picks up my set-square that lives in one of the pots beside the soldering station. ‘What do you use this for?’

‘Drawing straight lines, mainly. It’s useful for checking I’ve cut a line straight if I cut a piece out of sheet metal, too. Also, I check edges where two ends of a ring meet because they need to be perfectly straight otherwise soldering is a nightmare. Well, nightmare is a bit of an over-exaggeration, but you get what I mean.’

Melissa nods thoughtfully. ‘I’ve been wanting to call you,’ she says like a wayward churchgoer finally returning to the confession booth.

‘I’ve wanted to call you. In fact, I did call you. You’re right, I could have done this by email or phone. I wanted to see you, though.’

‘I’m glad it’s not only me. And I’m glad you did call. I know I went a bit funny when you asked if I’d met my bio mother, but I don’t often get to talk about it all to someone who’s been there.’

‘Have you met her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not good?’

‘I don’t know what good is. We kind of get on, but she can be a bit full-on. I get it, I get that she’s been storing up all this love and emotion and she’s desperate for us to have some sort of relationship, but…. I’ve got parents. But then I feel guilty thinking like that because she’s only doing her best. And she didn’t want to give me up. It’s so hard sometimes. Hence the therapy.’

‘How did your parents take your deciding to search for your birth mother?’

‘They were supportive, up to a point. I didn’t realise until I was eighteen why they made such a huge thing of giving me a locket on my sixteenth birthday – and reminding me to wear it until it was something I put on automatically. I then can’t start wearing the other one, can I? Which kind of taints the locket I wear and makes me feel a bit odd about my parents, and it spurred me on to contacting you about making this locket wearable.’

‘That’s not fair of them.’

‘They always said that they didn’t mind me searching, encouraged it even, but then when I actually did it, they started to get a bit funny. Really down on mothers who give up their children. Kept reminding me that I might find out something I didn’t like – that I could be a child of rape or incest or something hideous like that. It was true, but God, I didn’t need to hear it from them of all people. I think some of it was genuine concern, but there was a lot of jealousy too.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Are yours being funny?’

‘It’s only me and my mum now and it’s a different situation but she won’t admit she’s jealous, too.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’ That’s the kicker. I don’t know what to do. I want to meet my birth family again, properly, but then I don’t. What if, like Melissa’s parents said, I find out something I don’t like? It’s not as if I can simply not search for them, they’re in my life. Finding out things I don’t like will come from getting to know them. Something I can avoid.

‘Have you applied for your adoption papers?’ she asks.

‘Oh, no, it’s too late for that. Way, way too late.’

I explain to her the bare bones of the situation and she listens with her eyes wide and her mouth open. At the end of it, she is silent for a while. So am I. Listening to myself tell this tale to someone else who hasn’t been there makes it sound horrific. Horrific as in the emotional devastation those tiny, fragmented meetings have caused. It might have been better if it was planned. If everyone had a chance to think, to pause before each meeting, maybe I would not have this much panic rushing through me.

That is it. Panic.
Thank you, Melissa
, I think.
Talking to you has let me understand that I’m in a state of panic, even when I am not having a panic attack. You can’t think properly when you’re in a state of panic
.

‘You could still apply for your adoption papers,’ Melissa says. ‘It might stop anyone from rewriting history if you do meet them again. Some of the stuff in my adoption papers … It reminds me when my birth mother gets all misty-eyed about how she was wronged and I was “stolen” from her that at various points she could have made another decision. It wouldn’t have been easy by any stretch of the imagination, but still there was another path she could have taken that she didn’t. Some of it, of course, was from the social worker who seemed to be really judgemental, but some of it … Written by her, so there’s no doubt. I have to remind myself she was young and in an impossible situation but, you know, blah, blah …’ Melissa smiles. ‘I don’t say that to her, of course. I never say anything like that to anyone – no one wants to hear it. That’s why I wanted to call you – I got the impression you might understand.’

I nod. She’s got me thinking now: I should apply for my adoption papers. See if I can find out what was going on at that time, what was being said, possibly what they were thinking when they packed me up in that butterfly box and sent me to live with someone else.

‘What’s this?’ Melissa asks. She holds what looks like a mini chimney-cleaning brush with gold and black bristles on a thin metal rod.

‘It’s a polishing brush.’ I point to the others that sit in their stand. ‘Each one gives you a different type of finish – that one is for a satin finish, this one will give you a bit more texture. There’s also traditional sandpaper of different gradients that I use to smooth down edges. Plus those files. For me, the finish of a piece is everything – it’s an important part of making jewellery.’

‘Will you teach me?’ Melissa asks. When she says it she seems surprised herself.

‘Teach you?’

‘To make jewellery. Will you teach me how to do it?’

‘I’m not sure I could.’

‘All right, how about you make a ring or something and I come and watch you?’

‘If you want. But I’m sure you’ll find it pretty dull. I don’t because I love what I do, but you might.’

‘I really, really won’t. Tell me what all these tools are for and then another time I’ll come back and watch you work.’

‘Yeah, if you want.’

Melissa beams at me. ‘And if you want me to be with you when you get your adoption papers, I’d be more than happy to do that.’

‘Thank you, thank you so much.’

‘All right.’ She brushes off that moment of intimacy with a brisk tone. ‘Tell me what this is?’ She has picked up the saw that hangs on the hook at the edge of my desk, the thin but sharp filament-type blade only secured in the clamp at one end to make it less dangerous.

‘Come on now, Melissa, you don’t know what that is? And you can’t even guess?’

‘Hey, you! I wouldn’t take the Mick out of someone brandishing a dangerous weapon. I could saw bits of you off.’

I relieve her of my implement. ‘We call it piercing not sawing.’

‘Oh, right. What’s that?’

Piece by piece I take her through the equipment in my workshop, all the while the thought of applying for my adoption papers grows and grows in my mind.

Clem, I’m not sure what’s happened, or why you couldn’t speak, but if you need me I’m always here. Aš tave myliu. I’ve always loved you. I miss you. S x

I’ve read that message over a hundred times – every day I call it up and stare at it and allow the beads of hope to string themselves together until a long and seemingly endless chain of possibility has been spun around my heart. Maybe I should give him another chance. Maybe we can work it out. It’s these messages that make me think about giving him another chance. The desperate, angry, demanding, ‘talk to me’ ones strengthen my resolve, but these ones that remind me that I’m loved by him, how much I love him … they’re the ones that make me want to try again.

There’s a picture in the original butterfly box that lives at the bottom of my wardrobe of Seth and me on our first foreign holiday together, where he learnt that phrase – to write it and to speak it. It was one of those trips that nothing remarkable happened on, but it was so special because we were together and for as long as I could remember that was enough. Being together, talking, messing about, planning his next move at work, were more than enough for us.

I sat in the window seat of our room in the very expensive hotel that we stayed in, staring out over the square. It was March, but there was so much sun. The air was soaked with it and I sat wearing Seth’s large Aran jumper and a pair of knickers. I had my camera in my hand and was trying to capture the light, snatch it from the world outside and store it in the photo that would come out of the camera. None of the angles seemed to fit properly, none of them would show how beautiful the light was, the city was. None of them ensnared that brilliant red-orange of the terracotta-coloured bricks of the square, none of them showed the perfect lines of the sandstone town hall building. Through the camera lens, everything seemed flat and ordinary and bland, instead of vibrant and lively and
alive.

‘Come back to bed,’ Seth called. He was face down in the soft, white sheets, covered by the thick duvet.

‘Not until I’ve taken the perfect photo of the way the sun hits the town, what it does to it.’

‘Coming back to bed is far more fun. Come here and I’ll prove it to you.’

‘You’ve got nothing over there that interests me, buddy.’

‘Not even a huge lump of amber that I bought when your back was turned yesterday?’

‘Show me, show me, where is it?’ I dashed to the bed, climbed on and bounced up and down. ‘Show me, show me.’

Seth rolled over and grabbed me, tugging me down on to the bed beside him. ‘That was too easy.’

‘Lying about materials for my work.’ I laughed. ‘Are there no depths to which you will not stoop?’

‘Apparently not. Although I did buy you some amber yesterday so I’m not technically lying, but rumours of its size may well have been greatly exaggerated. The man who sold it to me said it was a superior quality so it cost a bit more.’

‘Right,’ I said. I handed Seth the camera as he had a longer arm than me, the distance at which he held it would make a better picture.

‘Click’ went the camera, and it snapped us as we mostly were at that time: dishevelled, together. Seth placed the camera on the bedside table. ‘You don’t sound like you believe me. He was a good bloke was Irmantas,’ he said.

‘I’m sure he was.’

Seth shook his head in despair. ‘Can I get my jumper back?’

‘No, I’m wearing it.’

‘I’m cold.’

‘Well, get back under the covers then.’

‘I can’t. I need to go do something and I need my jumper. The others are all the way across the room.’

‘What, you mean our room that is the size of a postage stamp?’

‘I’m cold,’ he insisted.

‘Oh, for the love of—’ I replied. I struggled out of the jumper and threw it at him. It landed over his head, draped down on to his face. He removed it and underneath the large woollen folds he had a huge grin. I realised a moment before he threw the jumper across the room out of reach that I’d been scammed for the second time in less than a minute.

‘You make it so easy!’ He laughed, his face filled with the mirth and kindness I’d noticed in him the first time we met. He was older, his face more lined than back then, but his smile, his innate pleasure at the life he had, was still there – it ran through him like the barely formed words in rock. Dylan, who dipped in and out of my life at the best of times, had all but dropped me when I got together with Seth. This was his prediction come true and, Dylan claimed, he couldn’t stand to watch us be loved up when we were both still too young to be that settled. Dylan spoke as though me falling out of love with him and in love with Seth way before New Year’s Eve 2003 was somehow done to spite Dylan.