Gold Dust

By Lucy Townsend

‘If you’ve got a minute I can show you,’ Val says, her voice husky and deep. ‘I can hand carve it you see – hearts, skulls, teddy bears’.

‘I was thinking a snake head.’ Tom nods earnestly.

Val rips open a packet of Bourbons and tips them onto a white plate. The edge is chipped, and her fingers leave a grey smudge on one side. He watches her put a biscuit into her mouth whole, stretching out her cheeks into squares, and then empty a clear Jiffy bag of blue wax rings onto her bench. She tells him they’ll be pressed into sand to make a mould. That they can be resized to fit any finger. That gold is £67 a gram but he could have it in silver and there are platers downstairs who can spray it with nine carats. ‘They plated a dead spider for me once,’ she says.

He hands over his mother’s engagement ring. Gold, a deep blue sapphire surrounded by a loop of seven small, uniform diamonds. Val nods approvingly and puts on a pair of magnifying glasses to inspect it. There’s something insect-like about her. She holds the ring up to the window which overlooks the brown smudge of the canal, and the light glitters around the stones.

Val has blond hair that is blue at the ends. There’s a small tattoo on one finger and another on the inside of her wrist. It looks like a tiny ghost but he can’t see it too closely and doesn’t want to be caught peeping. Her nails are bitten and his mum’s ring is resting between her dirty fingertips. Soon she will cut it into pieces, prise the claws apart with her pliers and remove the precious stones. When he met her in the pub the previous week, he knew she would change his life.

‘It’s just the polish’, Val smirks. Tom realises he has been inadvertently wiping the smudge off the plate of Bourbons with his cuff. ‘Oh of course,’ he laughs. ‘Sorry – I’m a clean freak. Guilty.’ She’s still wearing her magnifying glasses but now she’s looking at him.

They come up with the designs over a cup of instant coffee; a snake with two diamond eyes, a sapphire head and a looping body that will wrap around his pinkie finger. He hadn’t thought of himself as the type to wear jewellery before he met Val, but her conviction was intoxicating. He’d spotted her in the Fighting Cocks spinning the reels on the fruit machine. Her dirty fingers jabbing repeatedly against the green start button. Strawberry, strawberry, strawberry. She’d scooped the coins into her hands and offered to buy him a cherry vodka. ‘Cin cin,’ he’d said, and downed it with a sense of adventure.

Tom walks back to the bus stop along the towpath, slimy brown sycamore leaves beneath his feet, a few fluffy clouds (cumulus) in the blue sky above. He thinks about snakes and diamonds, and about the barges full of coal and bootleg whiskey that once drifted along these routes. He’d canoed these waters on a school trip once and he’d spotted three dead fish and a swollen pigeon drifting sadly along the surface. Now roving traders run floating cafes and gin bars along the bank. And he’d heard someone say they spotted a kingfisher.

Maybe a snake was the wrong choice.

Tom stops off at a pub boat, or a boat pub, complete with more fruit machines, sticky red swirly carpet and locally brewed beers. He rolls a one-pound coin into the slot and presses his finger to the start. Lemon. Apple. Strawberry. He presses it again and he wonders what his mum would have thought about her engagement ring being turned into a snake. And more so about him wearing it. What would his dad say? He imagines raised eyebrows, a soft shake of a head. He found it hard second guessing his parents’ opinions now they were no longer alive to give them. He thinks about Val and her dirty hands. Her microscopic gaze. The way she holds a pen and a hammer, and about how she might, right now, be liquifying the ring beneath the blue flame of her blowtorch. She wouldn’t shake her head, he thinks. She’s a yes person, and he wants to be too.

Tom stifles the urge to run back to her studio and save his ring, and instead presses the start button again, not waiting to see what fruit lands.

In two weeks, as promised, the ring is ready. It’s shiny, of course, but also soft and buttery. It looks like it could have been unearthed. Like it might have been part of a hoard, finally dug up from the mud and cleaned. Tom pulls it down over his knuckle and feels its hold over his finger. It’s cold. It grips. ‘I love it,’ he tells Val.

He gives over his payment and she hands him back the left over diamonds, which she has stuck into a lump of Blutac pointy ends up, like her winning strawberries in the fruit machine. ‘Do you want your gold dust?’ she asks. She tells him that she collects the precious dust that is left over from the filing and the polishing. It’s no more than a fingertip’s worth, but she’d swept it into a tiny plastic bag for him. ‘It’s so fine,’ she says. ‘On a sunny day it makes the air sparkle.’ He imagines her crafting his ring in a cloud of his gold dust, breathing it in and plating her perfect lungs.

Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash