She lit up her cigarette. Not at all! she said, blowing out smoke. Romantic trouble. You know how it is. Though perhaps you don’t, with that lovely man of yours.
Oh, that’s over, I said. She visibly brightened.
Let’s get a real coffee, she said, and I hadn’t the heart to say no.
In the coffee shop, taking a detour on our way to work, I observed Iona across the white laminated table. My only other friends were the women from the lab, and our friendships were strangely wipe-clean, as if confessions and intimacies under alcohol had no weight the next day. Iona was messy, blotchy with emotion. Her hair fell out of its pins. She was telling me about her latest misadventure, catching a man in bed with someone else, and how could she compete when all the blue-ticket women were just hard-nosed sluts who thought only of fucking. Not you and me, she clarified, we’re different, and it’s just worse for us because we have standards.
I didn’t point out that I had no standards and that in the past I had felt no compunction about borrowing other people. I just drank my coffee.
She stubbed her cigarette out in the crenellated amber ashtray, viciously. He never even took me away for the weekend, she cried. I bet your man did that.
Yes, once, I said. We went to a motel.
Once is enough. I just want to go on a trip! I don’t care who takes me, she said. To be taken is the thing.
The more she spoke the more disconnected I felt from everything. The drone of the coffee machine, the silvery sound as I ripped open a sugar packet and poured it into my cup. I wanted to shrink inside my stomach and hide in there with the baby.
It’s not so good, I said. It’s just another place.
In return I told her that R had left me so that he could pick a woman with a white ticket, and he was going to have a baby that was beautiful and push it around in a big pram. Even though it was a lie I grew weepy and Iona got out of her seat to stroke my back. How dare that imaginary woman have something I could not—how dare she do this to me! The circuits of my rationality were blown. Tears fell into my coffee. Iona lit me a cigarette and I knew I was not supposed to smoke, but I wanted it so badly, so I just tried not to breathe in and stubbed it out when it was two-thirds done. Iona fished it out of the ashtray and finished it off with no shame. I felt sorry for her, and for myself. I was no longer going to be like that—jumping for scraps, scrabbling for them.
I’m just tired of how hard it can be, she said. Her hand went to her locket, a movement reflexive and unconscious. I made the same gesture myself several times a day.
In that same café, another day, I sat alone by the window and drank a cup of hot milk with cinnamon, watching the women and the men go by. White paper bags, spring fashions, hair tied back. I scooped a spoonful of foam from the milk and let it fall to the red table. There was a burn like a wound where the plastic had melted. An emissary was buying a coffee at the counter, but he wasn’t watching me. He was tapping his fingers against his navy-clad thigh as if inventing a tune. Even though I had thought often about becoming a doctor, becoming an emissary had never crossed my mind. There were some futures I had never imagined for myself. But then not so long ago this would have been one of them, too.
23
Before I slept, I counted the days. I ticked off another one passed and survived, a tally in the notebook that I hid inside my pillowcase.
One hundred and ten. One hundred and twelve.
The nausea had stopped and I ate tomatoes on buttered bread, jewelled with salt; I ate sliced beef and chicken and tins of sardines too, ravenously. I drank milk by the pint, letting it drip down my front.
When an emissary came into the lab for any reason I awaited the tap on the shoulder, being led out to my car, the horrified faces of the women around me. They were never there for me, always for a meeting with somebody’s supervisor or something to do with security, though sometimes I fancied I could see their eyes flicking towards me, as if they already knew.
You look beautiful, the women in the laboratory told me at lunchtime. A group of them came to where I was sitting on a bench outside the building, eating a ham sandwich by myself. They exclaimed over my hair, my skin. They put their clean, dry hands all over me. You’re looking so well, they said. We’ve never seen you looking better. Come out with us tonight, you never come out any more.
I had one drink and poured the rest down the toilet, into plant pots, when I was getting ready. The poor sad fern on the edge of the sink in its green plastic pot. I had murdered it. I was murdering my life. I was creating something new, something bigger than me. It all felt very clear, though I’d only had the one glass to drink. I felt so insignificant, and yet still, there was a universe inside me that nobody knew about. Someone lined my eyes. Someone else stuck a cigarette into my mouth. I coughed and it fell into the wet sink. Let me curl your hair at the front, someone said. I gave my body over to them gladly.
I thought I saw R in the bar, went after him only to find it was someone else with broad shoulders and cropped hair. A city full of men like him, a country full. I would see him at every intersection, every supermarket, for the rest of my life. That was the price I had to pay. Apart from the obvious. In the mirror of the bathroom I barely recognized how good I looked. There was so much smoke everywhere, it was hard to breathe, and I drank my fizzy water and pushed through crowds to where the women were sitting draped around a table, a velvet couch, a blue glass bottle with one single sunflower in it in the centre. They all stared at me but maybe I was imagining it, there were two or more ways to interpret everything, of course I would choose the worst. I sat and did my best to touch their arms and laugh robustly at their jokes. I wanted to be remembered well. I wanted to be remembered at my best.
But increasingly on subsequent days, when I walked about the town, I could sense women gathering at the edge of my vision. Women looking at my body and wondering. They walked a few paces behind me and swapped looks with each other and whispered at the supermarket as I walked past, holding my head high, basket protective in front of my stomach.
In the pool changing rooms, the women watched me too. Iona joined me for water aerobics and she pinched the skin of my waist. The shock of it made me jump away from her.
Surprise! she said.
That hurt, I said.
No it didn’t, she said. It couldn’t have.
Her eyes were bright. They roamed over my stomach. I took up my towel. I had a vision of them surrounding me in the showers while I sat on the floor with my knees up to my chest, the water coming down.
Afterwards, hair wet in the evening air, I went to my car and saw that one of the wing mirrors had been smashed. Seeing my own face broken that way gave me a falling-away feeling. I drove off as quickly as I could, and when I got home I closed the door behind me and locked it and sank to the floor.
I was leaving them behind—I was saying their lives were not good enough for me. They were right to feel betrayed. I could understand it. And yet at the same time I felt abandoned. The white-ticket women would never accept me. It was lonely to feel like that, a true loneliness. I wanted someone to be happy for me. There was not one person who would be.
24
The summons came before work one morning. While the emissary dropping off the pack had been discreet, there was no need for discretion now. In fact it was better that everybody knew, so that there was no way back. If I tried to return, my law-abiding neighbours would pelt me with vegetables, or worse. I would return to find the windows of my home smashed and my objects ransacked, and if I dared show my face they would drive me away again, or kill me with their bare hands.
A knock at the door came when I was washing up. Then another.
One hundred and twenty-five, I repeated to myself. I leaned over the sink and rinsed my hands. I was already dressed, my hair pulled back tightly. A week ago I had put the pack in the boot of the car, along with my old sle
eping bag and a handful of clothes.
I went outside to meet the emissary. He was holding a yellow envelope, sealed. He looked like someone’s father, an old and cheerful man who couldn’t do anyone any harm. Good morning! he greeted me, handing it over. He took out his cigarettes and lit up with a long wheeze.
The knocking had drawn the interest of my neighbours. They came to their doors in their nightclothes and work clothes, taking in the sleek black car of the emissary, his fresh navy uniform indicating the importance of his visit, and the envelope in my hands. I didn’t dare to meet anybody’s eyes, not even Iona’s, but I heard her exclaim, Calla! What have you gone and done now?
You’ve got to go at once, the emissary said to me. You get half a day’s head start, as an acknowledgement of your good service. He stretched out his arms. Everything about him seemed relaxed. It seemed possible that things weren’t as bad as I thought.
There was whispering. I could feel their eyes on my stomach. Someone started to hiss.
Five minutes, he said to me. Don’t just stand there.
In the house I opened the envelope, but it was empty. I checked the stove was off and took my car keys from the drawer, picked up the kitchen scissors and my toothbrush and my notebook, slipped my denim jacket on to my shoulders. Congealed yolk on the plate in the sink, a bright smear. I ran back outside to where the emissary was waiting.
Ready? he said, throwing his cigarette to the ground but not stepping on it. That’s the spirit. Thanks for making this easy.
The hissing grew as I checked the boot. I couldn’t help myself and looked back to find a wall of women, hard-faced, inching past the territory of their front doors. Their feet crossed their thresholds. Some did not have shoes on. The emissary raised his hand as if conducting an orchestra, and they paused, but when I opened the door to the driver’s seat they started to surge forward again.
Order, please, the emissary proclaimed. He blew a red whistle shiny as an apple, long and true. I could hear it even with the doors of the car closed, even as I started up the engine. The leather was hot under my legs already. I sweated through the thin fabric of my trousers.
Half a day. Twelve hours. The roads were long and winding. The country was vast. I did not know where I was going. The map was still in the boot. I had to just press my foot to the pedal and go. Someone slapped the bonnet of the car as I started to move, then others slapped the boot, the back window, but I didn’t see who. I accelerated. Somebody threw something soft and it hit the car with a thud.
The early-morning glare was dazzling. In the mirror I could see my house was already being swarmed, the home that was mine and only mine, where I should have lived out my days. Nobody was running after me. I pulled out on to the road and was gone in minutes; it was that easy to be banished, it was that easy to leave and be left behind.
ROAD
1
I filled the car with petrol the first chance I got. Having a car at all was a problem, I knew. There was no emissary in the garage, though there was a security camera that I tried not to look at. There were women before me who had escaped, there must have been, because it was inconceivable that there could not be, because believing in something is the first law of survival.
I drove for hours, taking main roads for speed, though I had no idea whether the promise of the head start was real. In a lay-by, fronded with red dust, I eventually stopped to rest. I placed vitamins under my tongue and then I pushed the driver’s seat back all the way and put my head between my knees as if faint, and I started to cry, cringing my body in on itself.
I was a warm-blooded female animal. I was a doll with another doll inside of me. I was the chicken I opened up one day only to discover that the stomach had been left in by mistake, a pearlescent bag still full of grain from its final meal.
On the car’s clock, the display told me that soon the twelve hours would be up. Soon there would be emissaries spreading out from the place where I had made my home, looking for a car like mine, a woman like me.
But I had to take some time to cry about my house, my poor house which had not done anything wrong, which was now full of people who hated me and all my belongings destroyed, and while it seemed trivial to cry about material things under the circumstances, all those things had added up to my life, and it was hard to think about that.
I wanted to talk to Doctor A, was almost frantic with the urge. I wanted to be back in the room of the clinic, the sound of the air conditioning full in my ears, but it was too far away, and I was too far apart from everyone already.
After the crying had passed over me I sat in the car with my arms around my knees and watched the farmers tending to their crops in the fields, on their knees with their palms cupped around budding greenery. Heads swooped by in hoods or gauze, protecting them from the pesticides. How good to be a person who grew things, who delved into the soil and waited. It seemed easy.
2
I stopped in a seasonal town, one that would probably be busy with day-trippers by high summer but now lay empty. Plastic rubbish studded the gutters of the main road. Most things were closed, but there was a public bathroom that was still open. I descended its steps and climbed over the turnstile. The floor was wet, as if recently flooded. Warped voices came from the men’s toilet, next door, or maybe just one voice that was refracted. The voice or voices did not come closer and soon stopped, which was worse.
There was a perfectly square mirror on the wall, rust-speckled. An idea came to me. I took the kitchen scissors from my bag, twisted my hair in one handful, sawed through it with the blade. My long hair was beautiful where the rest of me wasn’t, but I didn’t hesitate. It only took a few seconds and then it hung unevenly around my jaw. My head felt much lighter. I left it on the floor for someone else to find, stepping around the dark pelt of myself with great care.
There was one shop open after all, an all-purpose shop, selling everything from milk to screwdrivers. The fluorescent light stammered. In the back, next to some rolls of wrapping paper, I found a packet of stiff white card. It was glossy—card to paint or draw on.
Back in the car, I jumped every time I saw a man or woman dressed in navy. Dark and terrible things crowded at the corners of my vision, always revealing themselves to be a tree, the corner of a house, a shape cut from the sun.
There was a hotel open beyond the next town, on a small and winding road that led further into the mountains. The town of my childhood was further north too, but I would not go back. There were likely emissaries lying in wait there already. My paranoia was like a physical substance, a watercolour paint that tinted everything. And yet I parked the car like it was a normal thing to do, like everything was fine.
A boy with a bloom of acne across his forehead and a red shirt with no tie wrote down R’s surname on the register, gave me a gold key. Small act of rebellion. I had always preferred his name. Sorry, husband, I thought with satisfaction. I saw nobody in the lift, watched the numbers move until we got to my floor. A chime as we arrived, swirled paisley carpet giving way to square pale tiles in the corridor itself, and only one light on the ceiling working. I walked past eight blue doors. Mine was the last. Around the lock it was scratched as if people had had difficulty opening that door particularly. It opened with a click, and I locked it behind me.
I found a small kettle on the sideboard, filled it and set it to boil. I turned on the taps overhanging the avocado-coloured bath and held my hand under until the water was too hot. The light in the bathroom was too bright but I left it on so I could take an inventory of my body. The water was mineral-tasting when I dunked my head under the surface. Rust stains around the base of the taps. My stomach bobbed up like it was hollow. My hair stuck to my head and neck. There was a scratch on my ankle that I didn’t remember getting, and I thought about my own blood and the blood of the baby inside me mingling, whether there was any separation, whether I counted as one or two. P
oor baby, having to drink my blood. I put myself underwater again. I opened my eyes so I could see the light.
I wondered what R was doing. I could not imagine him naked in a bath, so vulnerable, so prone to drowning. I could only imagine him lying on my sofa, deciding that desire stopped there. I wondered if he was laying the groundwork for a life without me—looking for the new woman, somewhere in the city, with clean hands and cold eyes. Perhaps no white-ticket woman would have him, I thought viciously. But I knew that plenty would.
My father had moved from city to country. Better life, he had said. I thought about him and whether he might still be there in the house I had grown up in, going from room to room, sweeping the floorboards and having his friends over for beers and cards like the old times. Quiet life. Maybe he was dead. I had phoned him once from the city to tell him I had made it there safe. Safe had become a relative term. He had said Good, and Take care, and then somehow we had never spoken again, as if now his duty was done. I didn’t know if I missed him. I thought about the clear water of adulthood, the mud you had to swim through to get there. The girl in the other room, the only one granted a white ticket. Driving past me in the car, motionless, saved.
The peach paint of the walls was in need of touching up. I got out of the bath and drew the net curtains. A wave of nausea; I went back into the bathroom and gripped either side of the sink. My hair needed washing. I was sallow in the light. I was thinking only of goodness, and how far away it felt from me. Goodness was a country I could not get to. Goodness did not live in hotel rooms. Goodness was a state of permanence, not like the varying states of my body as it now existed. All the bodies that had passed through this room had left their dents in the mattress and fingerprints on the cups just like I would, left their sadness to accumulate like the dead skin of their dust. How many had been pregnant? The word still felt awful to say. Pregnant! I whispered. I didn’t dare speak it louder.
Blue Ticket Page 6
