whitebait, panic attacks, pearls and opals

Outside the window, the woman is feeding the seagulls again. I know she’s there before I see her, I know the gull on top of the car has spotted her her first from the way he is trying to scare off the other circling birds. Every day, this woman throws fish to them. Every day, she emerges from her car, wearing the same wool hat, carrying the same Morrisons bag, and the gulls, recognising her gather on car roofs, the road, in the air; they scream and squall, squabble and fight over the whitebait she flings at them.

I am perplexed by this woman. I don’t know where she gets so much fish from. I don’t know why she feeds the gulls, only five minutes from the sea where the pickings are rich and fresh. I don’t know how she can stand to touch so many fish with her hands so bare every day. She is always alone. She is always dressed the same. Her car is never clean. Something like sadness hangs on her, or I have hung my own on her; it is never possible to tell.

Because I am perplexed by her, I notice her every time she arrives to feed the gulls. This morning I look at her throwing handfuls of fish as I sit eating breakfast. Behind her, men are erecting scaffolding against a white wall. I have not noticed this wall before and because I have not noticed it, I suspect it might be newly painted. As she empties her bag, the gulls hover in that way they do. It is then I realise that perhaps all she wants and needs is to be of use in the world. How nice and neat it must feel for her wants and needs to line up like this once a day, every day.

In Ava Anna Ada, as Ada dies, she finally finds the comfort she’s been looking for all of her short life when she realises she is about to be of use in the world, no longer consuming but consumed. Perhaps this is bleak, perhaps this could-be-bleak thinking is a symptom of her illness, tell a doctor a thought like this and they’ll likely pathologise it, they won’t be thank you for your logic.

After the woman leaves and the gulls depart, the men continue to build the scaffolding. They have with them a machine for something else. I can’t see this machine but I can hear it. The noise of it is extraordinary. Someone walks down the street, holding a tray of seedlings, two mothers push buggies after the school run, a man is washing his car. They are all being so useful, and there I am, watching them.

I have been watching for hours. Perhaps this is my greatest use in the world, perhaps a paltry one at that, but I like to see. Maybe this is why I hate the true dark. Why I prefer to wake with the curtains open. Why I had a panic attack in a hotel room last week because of its too-absolute-dark-ness. It is a type of death to be unable to see. I lay earlier this morning when I woke, watching the sky. It was as milky as an opal then, and I thought of my grandmother’s opals, specifically a tiny ring inset with three opals, tiny diamonds between them; engraved on the inside. I cannot remember the specifics of the engraving now, although if I tried hard enough, I could. Maybe I can and I don’t want to tell it. I know it belonged to her namesake, a namesake found in the Clyde the day after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. How it must’ve been then, to be half German, half Scottish, to live in a lime-rendered house and come out to find it painted with slurs. I loved that ring, a ring so tiny everyone said it must’ve belonged to a child. Only she wasn’t a child. A ring I fitted easily at 17. Some circumferences tell their own story.

I lay watching the sky change, thinking how opals were my grandmother’s favourite stone, how much she would have loved this sky, but now I am writing this I remember I am wrong and it was rubies she loved the most, but now I have written that I wonder if I am still wrong, and it was simply that my grandfather bought her rubies the most frequently. I try then to think of what she wore after he died. I think I remember her in pearls the most, and when I talk of her pearls I am not talking of a simple string of pearls although she loved these too; I am talking about a pearl necklace so rare that when it was valued, the valuer couldn’t put a price on it. The story is that when my grandmother’s grandmother came of age at 21, each of the workers on their coastal estate, contributed a pearl to this necklace. They are not big pearls, they are not cultured pearls but saltwater ones; harder to form, harder to find. The necklace is heavy and beautiful and strung with I don’t know how many pearls. Before my first wedding, my grandmother offered me a selection of necklaces to wear. I sat on her bed, as she pulled out boxes from her vast jewellery collection. I didn’t think it special then, for someone to possess so much jewellery, I just thought it how things were. Ten years earlier, my mother sat me on her own bed, opened her own jewellery box and brought out a heavy necklace of South African gold belonging to my father, under it, the first photograph I saw of him. I thought before that, if I saw his face, it would make my own face make more sense. It didn’t. After that, I knew secrets lived in jewellery boxes.

I sat on my grandmother’s bed, that summer I was 21, going through those boxes of necklaces. I put the pearl one on for the first time. It sat heavy on my neck, I felt like a grown up in it. I wanted to wear it, it would’ve gone with the cream silk I’d chosen for my dress. It was perfect. I took it off, put on another chain, a delicate one with a ruby and diamond pendant. You could hardly see it there against my skin, brown still from a spring driving around South Carolina with the windows down, my father’s country music up loud. I was young enough then to still be trying to make sense of things. I chose to wear that necklace. In the one photograph I still have from my first wedding day, it’s nearly invisible.

I want her pearls now. I want to see them again. I want to imagine myself the type of person who could wear them easily to a midweek lunch in the way she used to, like they were nothing at all, over her cashmere jumper. I want to imagine myself the sort of person with boxes of necklaces in her top drawer, satin and silk underwear beneath them. I want to imagine myself the sort of person who keeps things and cares for things carefully. I want to imagine myself the sort of person who does not leave their jewellery behind in hotel rooms. I want to imagine myself the sort of person who remembers to construct themselves carefully every morning. I want to imagine myself the sort of person who makes themselves up with great care. I want to think I have become the sort of person who would chose a necklace that might draw attention.