16
In my next session with Doctor A, I was silent. This time he sat on the brown velour sofa, reclining slightly. It was supposed to put me at ease but I was rarely at ease in his presence, even after so much time, so many years of my life poured out to him. My fingers curled around the edge of the plastic chair’s seat, white-knuckling.
If I could fill up the space intended for confessions with inconsequential statements then maybe something could be delayed. I believed that, even though it was stupid, because of course Doctor A knew about the pack, he had ordered it himself.
He smiled and leaned forward as if he had trapped me, though I had not said anything. What’s your mind doing lately? he asked me. The usual question.
The light was thin and skittish. Whenever I lied to him I fixed my gaze on the constellation of small freckles below his left eye, or on his nose, which I knew looked like making eye contact. But this time the lie would not come. My stomach growled and broke the tension. Doctor A laughed. Hungry? He offered me a peppermint. My teeth broke the sugar disc at once and my mouth flooded with saliva, so much it felt like it would run out.
Did you receive something, Calla? he said. Has something come to your door?
I didn’t speak, switching my eyes to the window instead, the blinds pulled half down, so that the sun came through in slices.
Fear of being banished is an intrinsic human fear, he said. It confirms our status as something other, something unredeemable, which is a suspicion we always have about ourselves. To be banished is to see the abjection latent in you recognized.
He paused. Maybe you want to see it recognized.
Maybe I want to see it recognized, I agreed silently.
Be ready to go at any minute. Keep the pack in your car. The summons will come and it will come at any time, and then you must go. If they catch you, I can’t help you. He paused. In recognition of your good service, they will give you a chance. I’m sorry that it has to be this way, he said, and he really did seem to mean it, for a minute.
My breath caught. Another chance at the lottery?
No. You know better than that, he said, shaking his head. What would be the point? It would come out the same. You can’t change your ticket.
I imagined myself grown but back there in the lottery station with the gown-clad girls, standing in the line as if I deserved it. I remembered the recurring dream I’d had since adolescence, where I cut my palm open on a sheet of metal and out of my wounds oozed not blood, but an ink-like substance the colour of deep indigo.
A chance to escape, he continued. A journey, I suppose, like your last one. But running away, instead of towards. Some people think of it like a test.
Tell me what to do and I’ll do it, I said.
It’s a little too late for that, he said. You can only do your best.
I wept to hear his answer, kind as it was, because he sounded so truly disappointed in me for the first time ever.
Do you have a family? I asked when I stopped crying.
I can’t talk about that with you, he said. Sorry.
Later R came over when I called. It was unexpected, the acquiescence, but I was grateful for it. He came with a bag of food—shining vegetables, good cheeses, a loaf of the bread I liked.
What are you doing? I asked as he set everything on the table—plates and cutlery and a jug of water with ice and lemon.
I’m trying something out, he said, positioning a knife next to the plated bread. Nasturtiums from the garden in a jar. He checked the label on the cheeses and pointed out the ones I was allowed to eat.
How do you know? I asked.
I managed to find out some things, he said. One of my colleagues gave me this.
He handed me a photocopied leaflet listing foods I should not eat and behaviours I should not engage in. They were all my favourite foods and some of my favourite behaviours. No matter. I would renounce anything. R watched me reading it.
I’ll need that back, later, he said.
Could you get into trouble? I asked. I was touched.
Maybe, he said.
You don’t need to do anything, I said. I’m a blue-ticket, remember?
I know I don’t, he said.
In bed he put both his hands on my face. We looked into each other’s eyes properly, holding the gaze. His were so dark they were almost black. I put my hands on his face too. He stroked my cheek, let his thumbs come to rest on my temples.
You’re trying something out again, I said, and he nodded.
Looking at him like that provoked a rush of feeling that I resented and embraced simultaneously. It was hard to know if it was real, or just another thing that my body was tricking me into. I realized he was, fundamentally, a good person. This made me feel so sad that I had to look away.
When he was asleep I wrote down Biochemical reaction! and All intimacy is manufactured in the notebook where I was counting the bloodless days.
Then I wrote Guard yourself better. I wrote Be bold, and be ready.
17
The supermarket made me feel safe. Even in childhood I had believed that nothing bad could happen in a place of plenty. I loved the relief of the air conditioning, the hyperreal colours under the lights. The supermarket reminded me that my heart was not shrunken and dry yet. The bananas, apples and peaches were arranged in troughs, and a summer smell rose off them. I loved walking around the aisles with my wire basket held loosely in my hand, considering the options, the simplicity of articulating a need and satisfying that need. Salt. Oranges. Strong cheddar. There was a cash machine in the foyer. Every time I visited the supermarket I withdrew money, not too large a sum, nothing to raise suspicion. I kept my body very still as I waited for the crisp notes to come out, inspected my nails as if bored, as if not thinking about a single thing, then when I got home I folded them into the secret places of my rucksack, my jacket.
I stopped by the liquor shop out of habit, remembering too late that I was no longer allowed to indulge this impulse. The owner waved me over with one damp-looking hand. I was a highly valued customer.
Calla, my love. I have a terrific new Beaujolais just in, he said, pouring me some into a paper espresso cup. Try it, you really must.
I tipped it to my mouth after only a brief hesitation, and he refilled it. Beautiful, isn’t it?
It tasted like dirt. Lovely, I said, and bought a bottle to pour down the sink later on.
Hide in plain sight, I thought to myself. This is your fucking life.
In the pharmacy I collected everything I needed for the month, referring to Doctor A’s prescriptions: tinctures, vitamins, dark brown bottles with labels written in barely legible handwriting. The cool and air-conditioned air, my hand on the shelf for balance as I leaned down to take something from near the floor. I felt swollen with my own blood, and everything hurt.
18
One morning, a darker pink smear against pink cotton. Pink on the toilet paper. I sat on the floor of my bathroom and held my hands in fists, very quietly. I counted to a thousand and then counted to a thousand again, told myself, Do not run into the street and howl. Grief overcame me temporarily before I pulled myself back and placed more tissue paper inside my underwear. The day continued. I blamed lack of faith, cosmic instability, the lability of my own fears and thoughts. I checked once an hour. No more pink.
So it could end at any moment, I said to Doctor A. How am I supposed to cope with that?
Yet lots of white-ticket women manage all the time, he said. Interesting.
What if I deserve it? I said to him, like I knew he wanted. What if it’s because I’m not suitable?
He stretched out his arms. Time’s up, he said. Next patient.
In private moments at home, with the door locked, I rested my clasped hands on my stomach and pushed out. Just to see, I told myself. Three bloodless months gone by. Not
so long, really. My lungs, my diaphragm, burned with the strain. I held a pillow under my T-shirt. Just to see. In the mirror in the bathroom I stood on a chair so that I could look at my whole body, headless. I was frightened at the irresponsibility of the act, standing up there on the chair, of how one fall could undo everything.
Part of me considered falling. I am just being truthful. I would fall back into my own life, I thought, just like falling out of my bed after a bad dream. Then I got down very carefully from the chair.
The neighbourhood arts centre was showing a documentary, which I went to see one night with Iona. I had not realized that the documentary was about childbirth. A little reminder of how lucky we were, should we risk forgetting. We watched the hands of the doctors inside a woman’s body. Instead of the human sounds they had dubbed classical music over the top. Disgusting, muttered someone on my other side, but I could not see who they were in the dark. Iona passed me a bag of wrapped chocolates, which I waved away. My eyes stayed trained straight ahead.
An emissary on a chair by the door stretched out his legs and yawned, just visible behind the screen. White shirt, navy trousers and jacket, just like anyone else really. I had only once seen an emissary drag a person to the ground, pull them out of view, so quickly that it might not have happened at all, so quickly that nobody could react. Still, I was glad to be wearing a baggy shirt. And I made myself drink from the plastic cup of wine that somebody gave me, despite what I now knew. I wet my lips just barely, smacked them together so they would be darkly stained. During the documentary I hit upon the idea of spilling it down myself. On the screen the woman’s mouth was open in a scream of pain that had seemed to last for years, and not hearing it was almost worse, the ridged wetness of her throat visible, and something emerging where the gloved hands of the doctors were dredging. I realized with mounting horror that the same pain lived inside of me, just waiting for a chance to get out.
When the lights came up, people looked at me and the wine all down the front of my clothes. Oh, you’ve had an accident, Iona said.
She produced tissues from her bag and dabbed at my shirt, my jeans.
I’m so clumsy, I offered up as an apology. I’m so sorry.
Nobody else helped me as I scuffed at the wine mark on the concrete floor with a handful of paper towels. In the air outside, the wet cloth was cold against my skin, clinging to me, as Iona and I walked home in silence.
19
I assumed it was over with R, having not seen or heard from him since the night he made me dinner, but I didn’t know for sure until I saw him at the bar one evening after work. He came over to me. I was still attracted to him in a furious way, maybe even more so than before. My hormones were lighting up my blood. Everyone said I looked beautiful.
Before he arrived I had been flirting with a red-haired woman. My hand was on the smooth skin of her bare shoulder and I was laughing. The three of us made stilted conversation for a few minutes before he picked up my coat. Let’s go, he said to me. I was thrilled at the presumptuousness of it. The red-haired woman turned away to find a new target.
In my house he heated milk in a small pan, unsmiling. I pawed at him and took off his jacket. I pulled at his belt. Wait, he said, pouring the milk into a cup for me. I drank it obediently and then undid his trousers. I kissed him with my sticky pale mouth. He lay there on the sofa as if he had a headache, staying completely soft even when I stepped out of my dress and got on my knees, even when I draped myself, naked, over a chair.
I can’t see you in that way, now, he said, pushing me away. It’s just no good. You’ve ruined it all. He was angry at himself and at me.
I wanted to force tenderness out of him. I wanted to put my arms around him and apologize for what I had done and put my dignity to one side and beg him Please, please, let’s work this out together, it’s very frightening to be doing this, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.
But I didn’t—I wasn’t capable of being vulnerable for him. Hysteria bubbled up inside me. Instead, I put my white lab coat on over my nakedness. I’m your doctor, I said, giddy. Tell me how you feel, and I’ll cure you!
He looked at me. You know, there was a time when I thought I could feel something for you. But not now. Now you disgust me, he said, and then he left. I hammered my fists against the carpet, making no noise at all.
Afterwards I took a long bath and heaped bubbles on top of my stomach. I waited for terror, but none came that night. I dressed in a long soft nightgown and fell asleep peacefully, knowing, finally, that I was alone.
20
My neighbours went to Doctor A as well. It wasn’t out of choice; he was assigned to us. Our fears and secrets had a geographical trace. You could have pinned them on a map. It was astonishing how he kept it all straight. It was astonishing, too, the idea of him looking into other people’s brains. Glowing well-tuned things, so unlike mine, sludgy and stopped-up.
How are you doing? Doctor A asked.
Really well, I lied.
You’re lying, he said jovially. There are behaviours that give you away. I won’t tell you what they are or you’ll stop doing them. Dress off, please.
I slipped my yellow sundress over my head and stood there in my underwear as he measured my stomach with a tape measure. There seemed barely any difference, but it was enough to be quantifiable now. Three inches, he said out loud.
Tell me about your cravings, he said, snapping the measuring tape back into his hand. Tell me about your dreams. His breath was pond-like, yet not unpleasant. I closed my eyes for a second, concentrated on the needling whine of the air conditioning.
Apples, I said. Meat. Dirt.
Dreams or cravings? he asked, and I said Both, and he wrote something down in a notebook. With my back turned to him I put the dress back on, arms catching in the fabric. All along my skin, a thin film of sweat. I thought about killing him, about edging towards his desk and taking up the ornamental letter-opener he kept next to his pens, how easy it would be to do it, but when I turned back around he was looking at me already, and I flushed with guilt.
Keep a dream diary, he said. Write them down. Every single one. Blood pressure time.
He inflated the orange ring around my arm with a rare tenderness, as if fitting an animal for a collar. My arm felt dead, unattached to me, as if it could float away. The air drained from the plastic. The feeling came back.
When do I go? I asked Doctor A again. The waiting is killing me.
He just shook his head. I can’t say, he said. It’s different for every woman. It’s out of my hands now.
This time he had shaved his beard completely off. It was hard to get a handle on his ever-shifting face. Sometimes I wondered if Doctor A was nothing more than a figment of my imagination, a hallucination called up by the smell of new paint and antiseptic.
Do you think I’d make a good wife and mother? I asked Doctor A. Forget about the journey for a second. Forget that I’m a blue-ticket.
No, he said smoothly, with no hesitation, and I was furious. I stood up and knocked the chair over.
You’re just proving me even more right, Doctor A said.
Why can’t you be kind to me? I said.
That’s not my job, he said. What good would I be doing if I just told you what you want to hear?
He righted the chair and indicated that I should sit down, and I wanted to walk out but I sat and buried my face in my palms and let him continue.
That night I dreamed that I gave birth to a stone, and that I put the stone in my mouth and swallowed it, and I woke up ragged with grief. I couldn’t write it down.
When Doctor A’s receptionist rang me in the week I lied and told her that I had stopped dreaming altogether, that sleep was just a weighted blanket now, and though she made a sceptical noise I stuck to my story. My dreams were between me and me alone. Their shame and strangeness. I have to h
ave something, don’t I? I asked my reflection, and she backed me up in silent affirmation.
21
In the clean spring evenings I spent some time hoarding names. I wrote down words that chimed with something inside me: Supernova, Mercedes, Desert. I ran my hands gingerly over produce in the supermarket and turned the names over in my head. Cherry. Clementine. Names came back to me in early-morning waking, from everything I had seen in my life, everything drunk up and absorbed. Lux. Finn. Riley. Dylan.
I wrote down the names on pieces of paper, chewed the paper and spat it out in the toilet bowl so nobody would see these lists. But that wasn’t enough somehow, still tempting fate, so I started interspersing the names with innocent words. Milk, I wrote. Yarn. Chicken. And even these flat words were named and so had a new worth to them, a new gravity, for it was when considering names that I realized the responsibility, the reality of the act. You could name a child anything.
Pickle, I thought when I looked in the fridge at the jars stacked there, misted with cold. Rosemary.
I considered inventing a name, something that had never been heard before. But the world was full of named and catalogued things, and at least by naming the baby after something real I would be tethering them to the world. It was the only normality I could think to gift, apart from love itself.
22
Iona fell into step with me as I left the house for work one morning. Her eyes were red and body slack, as if the air were being let out of her. Everything okay? I asked automatically.
Blue Ticket Page 5
