‘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.