Light comes through the whited-out windows and I stand in the middle of the shop with my eyes closed. I am trying to visualise what the shop should look like. The outside is olde worlde, with teal-coloured panels and triple-bevelled frames. The door has a brass bell and the wood is sombre, ancient. When I first saw it, especially with the wonderful workshop space that could have been made for me, I knew I had to have it.
Now, I realise it is too old-fashioned for me, for what I want this place to be. I want to do something different, new, not play it too safe. That is what I have done throughout my life: I have played it safe, done what others want and expect me to do, while trying to do what I want to do. I have tried for so long to fit myself around the shapes of other people’s desires, I am not sure who I am, what I want, what I need most of the time. Then, when what the person asked of me turns out to be wrong, I feel slighted and hurt; bereft and unwanted.
I need to stop that. Now.
When the police went through here and the workshop and the flat, they left a trail of disorder. They took apart everything I had built up in the last few months. I’d sat in the wheelie chair in my workshop, gawping at the mess they had made: every drawer – over a hundred in different shapes and sizes – had been emptied on to my bench and then, when there was no room, on to my chair and the floor. Every folder and box file, sample board and notebook, had been removed from the shelves and left scattered and open on the benches and floor. They had taken the protective oiled cloth off the rollers, they’d opened each pickling jar, they’d taken the lids off my pickling warmers. They’d even emptied the barrel polisher, which is packed with ball bearings, on to the sink’s draining board, and several of the small, metal balls which give an extremely shiny finish to textured metal that can’t be filed have rolled down into the plughole. Every shelf and wall cupboard had been cleared in the kitchenette and the contents left on my worktop or floor. Everything under the sink had been pulled out and left in the middle of the kitchenette floor.
In here, the devastation had been worse. They’d emptied every box, left the contents on the floor, some knocked over so findings and beads had obviously rolled away, like the ones Lily and Sienna spilt, never to be seen again. I’d felt violated, as if someone had marched into my head and emptied the contents all over the place for me to see how trivial and frivolous my life would seem to some. They had poked and prodded around to make sure they hadn’t missed anything then had withdrawn with nothing.
After the violated feeling I started to think about it – all of it, and realised I needed this. I needed someone to come storming into my work life and shake it up, force me to take stock and consider doing things differently. I had tacked pieces of my old ways of working on to this workshop. It was ordered and staged like the small space I had at Karina’s place up in Leeds and the spare bedroom at my flat. The ideal would have been to rip it all up then start again.
The police had ripped it all up, now I need to start again.
This place needs to be nothing short of what I want. It needs to remind me that I can do something right, I can put down roots and I can create something that grows and becomes successful. I have to stop being so passive in all of this. In my life. If I want to stop being from nowhere, I have to find myself somewhere to be. That somewhere is here.
I revolve slowly on the spot, trying to see the shelves, the cases, the stands, the area where I’ll sit and talk to people about their designs. Glass or wood or Perspex? Blond wood or mahogany? Stainless steel or white? Primary colours or pastels? I need to open the shop, I need to forge ahead, put all the stuff of the last few days behind me and go forwards.
I tip my head back, open my eyes. The ceiling is deceptively high for a shop that is quite small. Maybe I can suspend something up there. Some of my old tools I don’t use any more? Photos of my designs? I lower my head to look at the wall opposite. It is a large blank canvas. My photos. I’ll put my photos there. I will ask those who I make jewellery for if I can put up photos of them and their jewellery there as well as on the internet.
In front of that wall I will put two armchairs and a small table where people can sit while we chat about the jewellery they want made or reloved with the backdrop of others’ pieces behind them, and in front of them in an album.
I turn towards the window. I will display some of the pieces I sell on white velvet trays, in front of photos of people wearing them. I rotate on the spot, look at the wall which currently has heavy, dark wood shelving from one end to the other that reaches high up the wall. I can move them into the back where they’ll be helpful for organising my equipment. I will replace them with a wall of Perspex drawers, so customers can easily see the jewellery.
The floors will be white tiles, even though they’ll need cleaning every day, and the counter can be Perspex, too, but the front will have long thin tubes filled with different coloured beads, standing like test tubes of coloured liquid waiting to be experimented on in a science lab.
I can see it. I can actually see it. The images come to me in a rush, flashes and colours and panels, shades and displays. If I were able to sketch like my mother, I would be putting these images on the page, instead of storing them in my head. When it is finished I’ll have a launch party, I’ll invite all the clients I have down here, I’ll even invite my first family. Surely that won’t be seen as harassment? Surely they will, by then, have decided that I couldn’t possibly have done it and they will accept me back?
I’m deluding myself, I know. But I need hope. I need something to cling on to. I need them to realise that I can be a part of their lives. Not the be all and end all, just a little sliver of it. Just someone they would like to be around every now and again.