‘One coffee for the lady with the notebook and camera.’ Tyler, the barista from Beached Heads, my favourite coffee shop in the whole of Brighton, places the coffee cup – the one decorated with yellow and white daisies that I love most – in front of me without so much as a rattle of the cup on its matching saucer. I’ve been in here a lot, have managed to grab the more private sofa at the back like I planned, and have basically been able to drink my body weight in coffee every working day without ever having to make it. Win-win-win.
‘Thank you,’ I reply. I have to keep my eyes on the coffee cup and not raise them anywhere in his direction because I’ve developed the most embarrassing crush on him. After my late-teenage Dylan crush I didn’t think I could be like this about someone – no matter how good-looking he was. I thought age, experience, plus a long-term relationship, had acted like weedkiller on that particular type of emotion. However, that weed was clearly lying dormant, waiting for the right combination of circumstance and person to fertilise it and make it shoot up. Tyler, the apron-wearing, sous-chef-hat-donning owner of Beached Heads, is my new crush.
With horror I realise he has pulled out the chair opposite me and is sitting himself down. When it isn’t seven in the morning, the place is usually busy, alive with the hum and thrum of people who have stopped off for a drink and a stare at the sea. ‘I’ve got to ask, what is it that you do exactly?’ he asks me.
‘Exactly?’
‘Or even vaguely,’ he says. ‘You’ve been coming in here for nearly two weeks now, meeting different people, taking photos of their jewellery, of them, making notes. What is it that you do?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘If it was, I wouldn’t be asking. Also, I need to get confirmation before I decide whether or not I’m going to turf you out for conducting business on my premises.’
‘I’m a jewellery maker.’
‘Right. Right.’ He nods slowly. ‘How come you don’t actually make jewellery, then? Why are you always hanging around my place?’
I look up at him. He’s sitting back in the circular, leather armchair, his arms folded across his chest and his head on one side. He waits for my answer with an affected puzzled look. I have to smile. I just have to. ‘I like it here,’ I say.
‘More than you like making enough money to pay your mortgage?’
‘I don’t have a mortgage. I have a flat I rent with my mother. And a shop that I haven’t quite got around to opening yet. My, erm, landlord is not going to be happy with me, but in between meeting clients here and making the pieces they commission, the shop has taken a bit of a back seat.’
‘What’s your name, Nowhere Girl?’
‘Clemency Smittson. My friends call me Smitty.’
‘Do you want me to help you set up your shop?’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘Because I want to.’
‘Fair enough. I’d love you to help, but I’m not going to let you.’
‘Pray tell why not?’
‘Because the real reason why I haven’t done it is I’m not ready to. With most things, if I don’t do them even when I should, it’s because I’m not ready to or it’s because I really don’t want to. I can’t see how it’s going to look up here yet.’ I tap my right temple with my right index finger. ‘Until I can see it, there’s no point in trying to make it a reality.’
‘I do that,’ he says. Another grin. This one would quicken even the most uninterested person’s heart. ‘I’m not sure I approve of you taking advantage of my good nature by using my shop because you can’t be bothered to fix up yours.’
‘Erm, excuse me, but how much coffee do I buy? I’m pretty sure I’m keeping your business afloat.’
‘Ahhhh, so much delusion in one so young.’ Tyler grins as he says this.
We could be friends, I realise. This man could be my friend and I would be able to put down a root, ground myself to this place where I have washed up. Start to fill up my wall again.
‘Can I take a photo of you?’ I ask him before I think about it.
‘Are you going to make me some jewellery?’ he asks.
‘Would you wear it?’
‘Probably not,’ he replies. ‘No offence, but I’m not the jewellery sort.’
‘None taken.’ My fingers reach for my instant camera, raise it to my face. ‘Can I take a photo anyway?’
He grins again. ‘If you must.’
A reminder ricochets so painfully through me, I have to pause, my finger resting on the white plastic button unable to move. Lots of people say that, not just Seth.
I push the button, take a picture of my new friend.
I’ll write on the bottom later. I’ll put it on my wall with four blobs of Blu-Tack and it’ll be another patch on the wall; another moment to ground me in the now and here.
‘Smitty? Clem?’ he called as he entered our flat, almost at a run. Obviously he’d seen Lottie parked outside and thought I had changed my mind about everything. ‘Are you home?’ Excitement at the thought of me being back and the hope of what that might mean danced all over his face, and flowed through his voice. In his hands he held the shiny black dome of his motorbike helmet. He carefully slid it on to the hall table then unzipped his jacket. ‘Are you …’
My face obviously told him that I wasn’t back. I wasn’t home. I hadn’t changed my mind.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, a little more sober, a tad less giddy.
I pointed at the boxes, unable to tell him what else I’d actually been doing. ‘Finishing off my packing.’
‘Please come home. Talk to me. We can sort this out.’
‘No, Seth, it’s over. I’ve told you that. How many more times? It’s over.’ I grabbed my jacket from where I’d dumped it on the cubic mountain of my boxes in the corridor and slipped it on, hoping it would cover what I’d hastily shoved in my back pocket before running out of the bathroom to hide the other pieces of evidence.
‘Don’t I deserve better than this?’ he asked loudly.
I said nothing, but instead moved to leave.
He stepped into my path. ‘How does this even work anywhere except in your mind? We make love for the first time after weeks and weeks apart, then you tell me it’s over and you’re moving to Brighton as soon as possible. Then you spend the night on the sofa, go to stay with your mother the next day and refuse to talk to me. How is that any way to treat someone? Anyone? Let alone someone you love?’
If you’d told the truth, if you’d just admitted it, this wouldn’t be happening, I thought. ‘Look, I’ll call or text next time,’ I said. ‘Arrange a proper time to come and finish this off so we don’t have to see each other. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come here without warning you. I thought you were at work all day today. Do you want me to leave my key?’
He glared at me. Angry, confused, hurt. All mirror images of what I had felt since I found out about him and her.
‘Stop it, Smitty! Talk to me.’
Talking was our thing. We rarely argued, would simply get short and snippy with each other, and when that lost its appeal, we’d make up without actually making up. I wasn’t sure we knew how to argue properly, how to shout and scream and slam doors. Mum and Dad had never done it and I’d never seen the appeal of all that noise to get your point across. But then, neither of us had ever really done anything that needed shouting about, until recently. I could yell at him for what he’d done, and I could see how angry he was, how bewildered and hurt by my refusal to talk to him – so angry he could probably shout, too. But it was all too much right now. If he’d only answered in the right way. We would have been in a difficult, fraught place but we’d be there together, working through it with each other. But the lying on top of what he’d done? That was what had ended this. I could not get over betrayal and lying. Not right now.
‘We had a chance to talk and you said there was nothing to tell,’ I reminded him.
And there it was again: the flash of panic that I might know, the rationalisation that it’d be impossible for me to know. ‘If you’ve got something to say, just say it and stop playing games,’ he said. The rage was bubbling out of him into every word.
‘Do you want me to leave the key?’ I asked. We had nothing more to say to each other and I didn’t want to be in the flat any longer, especially not with what I had secreted away in my back pocket moments before he entered the flat.
He glared at me again. And again I saw the almost perfect reflection of what I felt. ‘Keep the key. Don’t keep the key. Makes no difference either way to me,’ he eventually said. He shrugged. ‘What I want doesn’t matter to you, does it?’
Seth’s body brushed against mine when he headed towards the kitchen at the end of the corridor. He couldn’t stand to look at me, nor to watch me leave.
He stood at the kitchen window, though, his hand against the glass, watching as I left the building and then got into Lottie. He didn’t move while I started her up and pulled away from the kerb. I suspected he stood still and expectant for a long time after I’d turned the corner out of sight, probably hoping I’d change my mind and come back to him.
At the first litterbin I saw, I pulled Lottie over, fished the plastic white stick I had weed on earlier out of my back pocket and threw it in the bin without looking at the result. I didn’t need to, not really. I knew what it would say.
‘I’d like you to tell me a story about you. Not the jewellery, but you,’ I say to the woman beside me.
‘Me?’ she replies.
‘Yes.’
Like the photos I take, I collect other people’s stories like a magpie collects shiny things. Sometimes I wonder whether I would need to collect so many stories if I knew where I came from. Then I would wonder if I’d be able to do my job, make and relove jewellery, if I didn’t spend time trying to unwrap the layers of who my clients were, to find the right use and look for their forgotten, unused, discarded pieces of jewellery. If I didn’t sometimes feel like that forgotten item at the back of a bedside cabinet, would I try so hard to make other things special and lovable?
‘I’m not interesting enough to tell you a story,’ Melissa, the woman in front of me, says. She’s about my age, maybe a little younger. She’s well dressed in a suit jacket, smart jeans and white T-shirt, and able to meet me in Beached Heads at 3 p.m. Her fingers are bare of rings of any description and she has ordered a double espresso without even thinking what she’d like. From that I’ve guessed that she doesn’t have children and works flexible hours in a fairly well-paid job. I’ve also guessed she’s not married, engaged or in a long-term relationship. The double espresso makes her my kind of person.
‘Yes, you are,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry to contradict you, but I know you are. Everyone is. And it’s the people who say they’re not interesting who generally are the most interesting.’
‘OK. Erm …’ She raises her gaze up to the ceiling while she thinks. ‘Well, one of the things about me that people do think is interesting is that I was adopted.’
‘So was I,’ I say.
Her brown eyes, cautious and guarded before, are now alight with curiosity, wondering if she’s found a kindred spirit. ‘Really? What age were you adopted at?’
‘Birth. What about you?’
‘I was about one.’
Melissa relaxes a little now, she’s more comfortable with me. We have a point of contact, something that links us, unlike other people she meets. I remember once looking up the statistics on how many people were adopted each year in the UK, because I wanted to find out how many people out there were like me, and there were enough. Enough for me to know that I’d meet someone one day who’d understand what it was like to live with people who weren’t linked to you by blood, and DNA, and shared genetic history. It was comforting to know how many others there were out there, but beyond that momentary consolation, I didn’t feel better. It wasn’t as if any of the other people like me would be able to heal the fractured pieces of who I was.
‘Is this jewellery something from your birth family?’ I ask. On the royal blue velvet cloth laid out on the table in front of us is a large oval gold locket, the type people used to keep a lock of hair in, with a long, thick-linked chain. It’s a lovely piece – the simple locket case has a few swirly lines that radiate up from the bottom of the pendant.
‘Yes. My birth mother left it to be given to me on my eighteenth birthday. It’s all a bit Little Orphan Annie, but there you go.’ She shrugs her bony shoulders, trying to make light of what is actually difficult for her. ‘My parents handed it over and I’ve had it sitting in a drawer for years. When I saw your advert I thought I’d find out if there is something I can do with it.’ She points to the platinum locket that rests just below the base of her throat. ‘As you can see, I already have a locket that I wear all the time.’
‘Are you in reunion with your birth parents?’ That’s the language of adoption I’ve picked up from reading the internet. ‘Reunion’ instead of ‘contact’; ‘birth parents’ not simply ‘parents’. Knowing if she is or isn’t will all feed into what this piece becomes, how I reshape and redesign it.
Locks of her wavy brown hair fall forwards as she hides her face to pick up her duck-egg blue espresso cup and put it to her lips. After the sip, her fingers reach out, push at the chain of the locket on the blue velvet background. She makes odd shapes of the gold links with each prod and poke. I hear what she is saying, without words, loud and clear: that it is none of my business.
I have to get her back. I had her and now she’s pulling away from me again. If she continues to withdraw, there will soon be a gulf too wide for us to breach. I want to relove this piece. It’s important to her, this woman who seems to be just like me.
‘My, erm, birth mother left me a cardboard box that I used to sleep in.’
‘Really?’ Melissa raises her head, checking whether I am making it up. With that look she’s back, engaged with me again.
‘Apparently it’s a Finnish tradition dating back to nineteen forty-nine or something. The Finish government gives new parents a box full of baby things that they’ll need and the box doubles as a crib. I’m not an expert, but I don’t think my birth mother was from Finland even though she gave me to the social worker in the box and said I was to sleep in it for as long as I would fit in it.’
‘Do you still have it?’
‘Yes.’ All the butterflies on the box are hand-drawn and hand-coloured. The largest is on the bottom – its wingspan covers the entire surface, and the wings are mirror images of each other. Each colour is perfectly twinned; each intricate vein etched in black and reflected on the other wing. It must have taken her hours to do each wing, let alone the rest of them, each a different size, every one a unique, beautiful winged creature that looked fragile and lifelike. Sometimes I wonder why she chose butterflies, often I wonder why she spent so much time making something so beautiful and unique for someone she didn’t want around, most of the time I don’t think about it at all – it’s easier that way. Over the years my obsession with butterflies has waxed and waned, depending a lot on how I feel about my birth mother at any given moment on any given day. It’s the reminder of my box that makes Mum dislike butterflies. She doesn’t like to remember that I came to her in it instead of out of her body.
‘Do you mind if I see some of your photos?’ I ask Melissa. ‘The ones on your phone will do. It’ll give me a better idea, visually, of what your life is like and what the finished piece needs to fit in with. No worries if not.’
Unbothered by my request she hands over her mobile with the pictures screen up. I flick through them, watch her life unfold before my eyes. She has a sister, two parents. Her sister is younger, has two children. Her parents are both white-haired but were both probably once dark. Melissa isn’t, she is quite fair-skinned and light-haired, but if you didn’t know, you’d never know. She looks enough like them to pass for a blood relative, to be one of them. Unexpectedly and quite violently, a lump of envy forms in my throat. What would it have been like to have grown up with someone who looked even a little like me?
‘Mum, why don’t I look like you?’
Mum looked scared. I was four years old but I could tell she was a bit worried and scared. ‘You do, Clemency,’ she said. She picked up her big bag and took out her sewing. She didn’t look at me at all.
‘I don’t, Mum. I’ve got brown skin and you’ve got peach skin. I’ve got black hair and you’ve got yellow hair.’
‘That doesn’t matter. I still love you. No matter what you look like, I still love you.’
‘But Nancy looks like her mum. Why don’t I look like you?’ I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t tell me. She’d looked so worried and now she looked sad.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said again. ‘Nancy … It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I love you, no matter what you look like.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘OK, Mum.’ I patted her hand because I didn’t want her to cry and her eyes were all wet. It made her sad that I didn’t look like her, and I knew, even though she said it didn’t, it mattered lots and lots.
‘Can I ask you something about being adopted, seeing as you’re a stranger and I never have to see you again if I don’t want to?’ Melissa says. She speaks in a rush, obviously desperate to get the words out before she changes her mind.
I have given her back her phone, I have pulled myself together. It honestly didn’t matter that I didn’t look like my parents; that wherever we went when I was growing up, and even now, I stood out from the crowd as different, as other. Mostly it didn’t matter. ‘Sure,’ I reply. I’m going to lie. It’s easier to do that than to become ‘The Adopted Person’ whose experiences someone uses as gospel for every discussion they ever have going forwards about adoption.
‘Did you sleep around a lot?’ she asks.
I stop laying out the square, white-framed Polaroids of my previous work and designs on the table to look up at her.
‘I used to,’ she continues in her flustered rush. ‘I’ve met a few other people who were adopted and I’ve wanted to ask them if they did it, too, but I never got up the courage. I was really promiscuous at one point and my therapist – yes, I do that, too – suggested it might be because of stuff I’d internalised about what women who gave up their children were thought to be like back then. Nowadays it doesn’t matter, but I suppose people must have thought badly of women who got pregnant and then had to give up their children for adoption. She said it was possible that I’d been acting that out as a way of connecting with my birth mother. I don’t know if that’s right or not, but I was curious if you were ever like that? Or if it was just me? I hope I didn’t offend you.’
‘No, you didn’t offend me.’ My mother was madly in love with my father, I’m sure of that. In every version of my birth story I have thought up over the years, I know she was in love with my father and didn’t sleep around. I think she was just unlucky – they probably got caught out the first time they did it. And he panicked. ‘No, it wasn’t just you,’ I say to Melissa. So much for lying. ‘I did it too.’
‘Really?’ She closes her brown eyes and her face becomes a tapestry of sheer relief. She’s not alone. I’m not blood, but I do belong to the same group as her, the same family. I was adopted and I used to do the same thing as her. ‘I seriously thought there was something wrong with me. That I was the only one.’
‘I suppose I did, too. For me, it was about being wanted. If someone wanted me, even if it was just for sex, then it felt good.’
‘Yes! I was like everyone else because someone wanted me. Even if it was just wanting my body for sex. So many people take being wanted for granted.’
‘I know. But I’m not sure it’s only down to having been adopted. I mean, there must be loads of people out there who sleep around just because someone wants them.’
‘Maybe so, but it’s nice to talk to someone who understands.’
‘It is. It really is.’