Blue Ticket

by Sophie Mackintosh

  Unhappiness is cyclical, he said. Do not let your heart grow complacent. You won’t ever be immune to it. Nobody is.

  Sometimes our practice was like a sport. I enjoyed trying to beat him, though I knew I never could. And sometimes I sagged in the middle like an old mattress, and just could not take any more.

  He looked up at me. You’re very pale, he said. I can read your mood in your skin. Think about what your body is telling you.

  He passed me a tissue and I held it in my fist, let my eyes water a little.

  That’s good, he said. Get it out of you. He handed me the piece of paper. See you on Thursday, he said, and then the session was over and I almost ran out to the car, pressed my head against the steering wheel once I was safely inside.

  5

  The first time I brought R back to the low white house in the suburbs, I knew that all my neighbours would be at their windows, watching, ready to nudge me in the side when they saw me outside the house or on the green in the coming days.

  Nice tall man, they were going to say. What happened to the last one?

  In the kitchen I poured equal parts vodka and juice, to accelerate things. Umbrellas on the side of the highball glasses for romance. I put the small bunch of freesias that he brought me in the now-empty vodka bottle, rinsed. In the living room he had taken off his tie and his jacket and laid them neatly over the back of a wooden chair. I liked his manners, the nice swell of his arms, and when he took the drink I liked his smile too. I hoped he would pass them all on to our child. The thought made my heart freeze with alarm.

  We talked for a while about work. He asked about the experiments I was working on and I said that they were confidential, which was basically a lie, but I didn’t feel like talking about myself. He worked in one of the high glass buildings on the other side of the city and lived near his office in another, similar building. While he explained what he did he was animated and beautiful, but I couldn’t listen properly, I couldn’t let another second pass. I went over to him and sat on his lap and kissed him. Oh, he said, putting his arms around me.

  We took our second drinks to the bedroom. He became simultaneously businesslike and seductive as he unbuttoned then scooped the dress from my body, cursory admiration, pulling out a prophylactic in its little foil wrapper from his wallet before things went too far. He put it on the table next to the bed.

  You don’t have to, I said.

  I will, I will, he said, magnanimously, taking off his shirt.

  Part of me was afraid he would somehow sense the dark feeling where it moved under my skin. Sometimes before I slept I put my hands on my stomach and felt a deep pulse that I was sure must be its visible manifestation, but when I read up on this, surreptitiously, it turned out it was just an artery that kept me alive.

  I tried to be demure but it wasn’t really possible. I couldn’t help that I was a person with an appetite. Once or twice there was the threat of warmth, of connection, when he kissed the side of my head, and I didn’t want to like it, I knew liking it would bring its own problems. He stayed the night and didn’t bother with a prophylactic the second time, or the third time when we woke up. The act itself was vigorous, like doing aerobics. Afterwards I felt healthy as opposed to abject, my body humming softly. In the morning he left early and I didn’t mind at all, I preferred it that way.

  But after he’d gone I found myself not getting ready for work, instead filling a sock with flour to approximate the weight and feel of a baby’s leg. I had never held a baby’s leg in my hand, but my heart knew the sensation it was after. I had seen photographs.

  I lay prone on my bathroom floor, thinking the forbidden thought I want to die, though I was not sure it was true. True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.

  I knew objectively that to want the small flame of your life to do anything other than what had been given to you was unthinkable, but here I was anyway, doing it. I did not know what they did to the women who got pregnant illegally, though I assumed there must be others out there, I couldn’t be the only one. Was motherhood something that could be halted on command, something they could compel out of you once discovered? Was it something you had to see through regardless? I had not lived a life of complete badness, and I wanted to believe that might make a difference, but I knew it would not. There was no way to change your ticket.

  When I tried out the words I have attempted not to want it but I can’t help myself, they felt so good that I said them again, and then again. Please remember that I was not a survivalist, or someone instinctively good at being alive. Please understand that lots of mistakes were made, and some of them were necessary.

  Nice tall man, said my neighbour Iona the minute I went outside. She fell into step with me and sparked up her own cigarette, held out the flame so I could light mine. What happened to the last one?

  I killed him, Iona, I said to her. He’s buried underneath the apple tree. Dig it up if you don’t believe me.

  Inhale, exhale. A little break from caring. My want had been cracked open. Now I’d have to look inside and see what it contained. Now I had really gone and done it.

  She laughed. Oh, you’re awful, aren’t you!

  I agreed. I blew smoke out into the air.

  6

  I was early for my water aerobics class, so I bought a plastic cup of weak juice and sat in the café. From my table I could not see the children’s swimming session, babies bussed in from elsewhere in the city, the more docile suburbs where white-ticket women and their families flocked, but I could hear their heartbreaking noises. Another woman that I did not know caught my eye and grimaced at the sound.

  What a racket, she said.

  Yes, I agreed.

  Glad I don’t have to deal with that, the woman said. She returned serenely to her magazine, to her breakfast. She raised a piece of toast neatly spread with peanut butter to her mouth. She seemed truly happy. Her skin was smooth, her clothes seemed expensive. I wondered what she might do afterwards with her day, where she worked, what her house was like, whether she was bound to anyone or anything, whether she was thankful for her freedom.

  Maybe her day looked like mine. Before coming to the class I had spent some time on an interesting paper for work, scrubbed the bathroom, floor to ceiling, with diluted bleach, so everything was clean the way I liked it. Later I intended to get down on my knees and crawl around for R in the living room, right there where a baby might, in another world, flail and pick things up to chew. We would drink fancy vermouth and it didn’t matter if I drank enough to throw up, if I drank enough to ruin the next day, because there were days and days afterwards, endless days marked only by my choices. I had walked to the train station with a spring in my step. My time belonged to me, my life was only mine.

  Now, hearing the noises of the children, that all evaporated. A trigger, a reflex. I dug my fingernails into my palms and drank the juice down. But I avoided tears—by now I was used to this intrusion before our sessions in the pool. It was a matter of desensitization. The dark feeling swelled in my chest like a balloon.

  Nearer the water, when I had changed into my black lycra costume, I saw some of the children lagging in the pool. They were very small. They laughed and laughed. The chlorine got me right at the back of the throat. I forgot something, I said to the others in my class, and went back into the changing rooms, into the communal showers, crouching down and hitting the water button with my hand as I did so to disguise the sound of my weeping. By the time I recovered my composure, all of the other women were in the pool.

  The lifeguard on his red chair waited for me to get in, too, before pressing the button on the tape player. Music rang out. I moved my arms up, and around, lowered myself under. The women pirouetted next to me, splashing in smooth controlled arcs. When I was under the surface I could see their limbs all around me. It
was like being inside a strange animal. When we stood up at the end to be congratulated by the lifeguard, the water streamed from our bodies and we felt cold, under the high and vaulted ceiling; we did not feel alone, we were not alone.

  7

  Trust is integral to our practice, Doctor A said. Trust that I know you better than you know yourself.

  I didn’t want to do that necessarily, but there was a certain relief in giving myself over to him. There was a relief in being given permission, the same way there had been relief in knowing that there were some paths my life would not take.

  I told him once about how I had thought about becoming a doctor myself, and he had laughed at me. He said that being a doctor required a very specific sort of person, and that, with all due respect, that was not the sort of person I was, but I knew that already, didn’t I?

  For example, he told me, I was injected with a solution that stopped my heart for ten seconds. As part of my training. So I could technically die and then come back to life.

  So you could feel superior to us? I asked.

  So I could understand and help you, actually, he replied.

  A rare intimacy, among interactions designed to approximate intimacy. He knew that was my weakness, that I was both repulsed and flattered when he let me in. I couldn’t resist.

  What did you see? I asked him.

  I didn’t see anything, he said. It was like being in a room with all the curtains closed. I have never forgotten it. You don’t want to be in that room.

  But what if I’m already in that room?

  I think he smiled at that, but his reddish facial hair was longer than usual, obscuring most of his mouth, so it was hard to tell. I could see that he looked tired. It was difficult to pin an age on Doctor A, but that day I put him at around forty-five. The next time I saw him it would be something different. Sometimes I sat outside in my car waiting for him to emerge from the clinic, but though I saw everybody else leave I never saw him walk out, even when it was dark.

  8

  R and I settled into a pattern quickly. When I got the train or drove to his part of the city we had sex in his clean, spare apartment and then went down to the cheap restaurant a street away from his building to eat plates of eggs or pasta. In the lift we did not speak but sometimes we looked at each other, maybe even a smile, and sometimes in the lift there was another man who lived in the building and R would say Hello, and I liked to hear his voice when not addressing me. It felt like overhearing a telephone conversation or opening somebody else’s mail. I already sensed that I was not going to become a full part of his universe, and had made my peace with it. R cracked his knuckles and adjusted his collar in the mirrored wall of the lift, every time. I thought how these insignificant quirks of physical routine built up eventually into a reluctant intimacy, whether you wanted them to or not. I watched my reflection beside his. We looked very good together. We ate our food like we hadn’t eaten in years, our knees occasionally jostling under the precarious wooden table.

  He came to act less respectfully with me fairly soon. No more talk of prophylactics, for example. I started to mind a little, even though it was part of my plan. It would have been nice to have some sort of feinting towards love, even when he was telling me in bed, breathlessly, that I was a worthless slut. Instead I just responded, More. More! The proclamation of my entire life. I could be very agreeable, when I wanted to be.

  He came to my house too. In my bed I felt the imprints of other blue-ticket women on his body, as if he had absorbed them; what they liked, how they behaved. I wondered where they were, those women past or present, how they had ended up in his arms. You must pay the bill of grief coming your way, I told myself every time he went home at night. The house empty. The neighbours still asleep in the houses around. Each time, I raised my legs above my head, planted my feet on the wall above the headboard. Gravity could not be altered. Gravity was on my side. Then in the morning there would be dirty footprints above the bed—very faint, but still there—and every time they were heartbreaking to me, as if they belonged to my ghost, as if they belonged to me in a different world.

  We went away, as a treat, to one of the love motels that everyone used. It wasn’t really a trip, only a little way out of the city. You could still see all the downtown lights from the balcony outside our room, where we chain-smoked in between fucking. The room itself was shabby white, pale pink covers on the bed and a plywood headboard painted with red and blue birds. I counted three cigarette burns on the duvet and lay down on my front, underneath it. He buried his face in my neck. You’re lovely, you’re beautiful, he said. They were just words. They were just sounds coming from a mouth.

  He had brought a plastic bag of beers, clinking gracefully. We filled the bathtub with cold water, the bottles, and ice we ordered from downstairs. When we were drunk I took out one of the bottles and wrapped it in a hand towel as if it were a baby. He did not seem to find it funny, but we still drank the baby-beer, passing it between us until it was gone.

  He spoke a little about his journey into the city. It sounded like a camping trip. The boys teamed up. Sometimes groups fought other groups. I was the tallest and the strongest, he explained. I considered myself a man already. There was nothing really in my way.

  We didn’t have the lottery, but don’t think it was easy for us. There was a note of hurt pride in his voice. Perhaps we passed on the same road.

  I hope not, I said, and he laughed.

  I know what the boys do on that road, I didn’t say.

  The beer stripped me of any inhibitions. I forgot about everything else except our bodies and knelt down on the floor, stretched my arms out over my head. Felt my hair fall everywhere, pulled from where I had tied it up. Pillow at my face. Hand at my neck, thumb right in its hollow. Physical action followed physical action. He pulled out and finished on my stomach and didn’t do anything to clean it up, switched on the television, laughed at an advert. I just lay there until it dried, taking pleasure in being unclean.

  But later, I pinned him sweetly to the bed with my hands. My body moved and moved. Stay with me, I told him. Stay right where you are. The fringed light fitting above us rattled. He slapped a satisfied hand on to my thigh. I waited until he was soft before I let myself lie down.

  When he was asleep I watched the lights from the cars on the road outside move over the ceiling, over and over and over, stroking the little smooth spot of my clavicle where his hand had pressed too hard. That spot was his favourite part of me and I couldn’t see why, what had made him fixate on this unassuming piece of bone among all the things that made me up. I had an idea it might be about fragility, and so I didn’t want to ask, I didn’t want to be disappointed or to disappoint, for I was not fragile, I was not protectable, I was dark wind and dust blowing across a landscape, and there was nothing anybody could do for me.

  I looked inside the cool shell of myself for guilt, and found nothing. Only my heart, tense as a fist. My thighs wet. I might have been pregnant already. There’s no way of telling now.

  9

  I knew that my bleed would stop if I was pregnant. That was the only thing I had been able to pick up across all the years of my adulthood, and even that could have been an urban legend. I bled as usual the first month. But when it was time for the second, there was a missed day. Then two, three, four. A queasy count. Ten. Eleven. Like hide and seek, or staying underwater during my swimming routine. I was hoping and not-hoping. I was indifferent. No; that’s a lie. I wasn’t indifferent at all. But to admit how much I wanted it was a shame even I couldn’t articulate. My mind tuned it out like static when I tried. So I just counted instead. Blameless, abstract numbers.

  Fifteen. Sixteen.

  My supervisor came to watch me squeezing a pipette of silver nitrate into a beaker of water. It dissolved almost at once. Lunar caustic, she said. That’s what they used to call it. Very beautiful.


  You’re a poet, I said. I pushed my goggles up, careful not to touch my face, my eyes.

  I had entered chemistry because of the comfort in it. Because you produced a specific outcome, a result known because the combination of substances had been tested many times before, because other people had carried out exactly the same procedure. Of course, you had to be careful about contamination, about the slight fluctuations that could tip the whole process off balance, into something else entirely. But I loved the repetition, the sense of something elemental at work, and the ability of science to explain itself.

  Sometimes my life felt like a faulty experiment. I followed all the instructions and yet I did not turn out to be the person I should have been. That was the problem with biology, I supposed, that it was a more inexact field—the bad science I had started to think of it privately, spitefully, but only because it didn’t go my way. True, I was not as careful with myself as I was with the materials in the lab. In the lab everything had its place, everything depended on the equilibrium of correct labels, cleanliness. Safe handlings and protocols. Rooms where only those with certain privileges could go.

  Not a people person, are you, Doctor A had said once, our first or second session. I had wished to be offended, but could not summon it.

  The numbers built up. I repeated them over and over, pumping foamed chemical soap in between experiments and lathering it carefully over my palms.

  Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.

  10

  You seem different, Doctor A said to me. You’re nervous. It’s like someone has told you a secret and asked you to keep it from me. What could this be, I wonder.

  I’m fine, I said.

  He got me to breathe into a spirometer to check the capacity of my lungs. I blew until my face was red and the room spun. He took my temperature with a thermometer that went into my ear and bleeped. I prayed for no blood test, no urine test, no palpation of my stomach, no internal exam.