Vines grew through a broken window in a tiny back bedroom, but in the second bedroom the glass had held, and there were damp-smelling single mattresses in both. A main room with a sink and a built-in cupboard, empty except for one abandoned pink glove. And a bathroom like the one in the house I had grown up in. Silty dirt and mould on the windowsill. Long spiders running their way to the plughole when we entered the room. I let myself stand in the quiet as if in a trance. I was forever being returned against my will. I would be leaving and returning my whole life. A cockroach ran across the floor; I put out my shoe and crushed its body.
That night we watched the sky darkening gradually. We kept it dark inside too, paranoid about attracting attention. No matches. Marisol put her finger to her lips every time I tried to speak. Quiet, quiet, she said. She doled out playing cards from a pack she had found in the glove compartment of the car. I wanted to ask more about her but I lay still on my sleeping bag, pressing my hands over my lips to keep the words in. Guess, Marisol mouthed at me, indicating the cards, before turning them over. I got two correct. Queen of hearts. Three of diamonds. She touched my hair. It grew too dark to see and we climbed inside our sleeping bags. Moon through the window, lowing wind. I stayed awake listening to her breathing for as long as I could.
As I lay there I thought about what the lottery might have seen or not-seen inside me. What had been recorded and observed and commented upon for my whole life; the times I refused to play, or pulled someone’s hair, or buried dolls in the dirt. Had someone been watching when I chopped worms in half to see them regenerate; or when I touched myself under the covers of my bed in that cottage where I grew up, shamed and shameful, not even bleeding yet, a cavalcade of strange and intense images like the movement of water; or when I went into the forest and cried and drove my fists into knots of bark, scratched at my skin with brambles, pressed nettles to my shins and ankles? Was it ordained for me even then?
I should have spent my time in quiet contemplation and healthful pursuits. I should have smiled more, batted away the hand of the boy in the cinema, been less of that shadowy small person, watchful, waiting, dirt under her nails. The path of my life had been already unspooling.
In the morning I took my own pulse and found it full as a drum. More blood in my body. My legs went faster. I had a real reason to run. I should have liked to put on the old nylon shorts and do laps around the woods, avoiding holes and roots, testing the new capacity of my lungs in my changing body. I should have liked to live this new life within my old life. To await R coming in the door with yellow flowers, with a basket of apples. Pram ready in the hallway. Our life expanding to fit the new shape.
But there was only this.
2
We had meant to stay a night, maybe two. Suddenly we had been there for a week, and then longer. The lassitude seeped into our bones. It was hard to move on from somewhere like that. From the quiet that lay on the trees after rain fell, the earth muffled with brown leaves and pine needles.
Every day Marisol said it was time to think of leaving, but when it came to actually go she was as unconvinced as me. Let’s lie low, she said, eventually. Something is telling me to stay.
Like what? I challenged. What is speaking through you?
But I didn’t want to go either. I wanted to stay there for ever, in the same state of almost-motherhood. A state of possibility rather than reality.
I dreamed one night that I vomited up four objects wrapped in pearlescent membranes, each object wriggling. Each membrane contained a small spiked creature that pushed itself through into the world. They were dark purple, beetle-like. As I watched them they ran away into the grass and the earth. It took a while for me to realize it was a dream, and not something that had happened. I could feel them in my throat, almost taste them. It would not even have surprised me. There was nothing my body could do that would surprise me, now.
One represents you, Marisol said, when I told her about it. One represents me. The other two represent our babies.
She turned away from me to do something. To pour water into the one clouded glass we had found under the sink. I felt struck down by every movement she made. It was not unpleasant.
Maybe, I said.
I considered falling to the ground and kissing her feet, toe by toe. She was flushed, serene. As if this were a place she knew. Her throat rippled as she drank.
Let’s measure ourselves, she said when she put the glass down. Let’s keep a record to see how much the babies are growing.
We had nothing to measure with, no tape or ruler, so we used our fingers, from knuckle to tip, a private maternal unit of measurement. We counted the circumference of our bumps. Thirty-seven fingers, I said.
Thirty-nine, Marisol said, I’m bigger than you. I’ll grow and be as big as the world. She stuck out her arms and I thought about our bodies in communion. I thought about them sending out the echoing signals of whales or bats.
Another day, lying sprawled in the long grass where the cabin’s overgrown garden met the forest. We can breathe here, Marisol said. That’s something. When was the last time we really breathed? When was the last time we took account?
So we took account. We went deeper into the forest, talked as we moved, so the words felt easier to say.
My name is Calla, and I am going to have a baby. Soon. My name is Calla and this baby is mine.
My name is Marisol and I want to bring something into the world, she said. Something real.
My name is Calla and I want to be a mother because. Because.
I looked up into the sky, up at the leaves, searching for the best reason. It was difficult to think about why I had done it. I had to run at the wall of it, even if it risked breaking me apart.
Because it seemed like everything was telling me it was the right thing to do. Every cell in my body, I said. I tried.
Good, said Marisol. Having a child is both the most rational and irrational decision possible, in this world. This fucking awful, beautiful world, which I can’t stop loving, though I have considered it, I have evaluated and counted the ways.
She stopped and kicked a tree stump.
I just wish I had known more, I said to her.
Would it have changed your mind?
I thought about the dark feeling. No, I don’t think so, I said.
My name is Marisol and I knew that I would be a good mother. I knew it. I thought I deserved the chance.
My name is Calla and I wanted to choose.
How absurd it had felt to think of myself as a mother even a few years ago. With my wrists as weak as a trussed chicken, and my hollow heart. I had been tired all the time. I did not change my bed sheets. I ate like someone was watching me. Furtive, standing over the sink.
Thinking of yourself like that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, Marisol said to me when I explained. It doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it.
She moved slowly, languorously, through a patch of sunlight. We went back to the cabin and in the bathroom we stripped naked and inspected our bodies for ticks. I found one behind her knee and levered it out with tweezers, then crushed it with my thumbnail, left a smudge of blood on her skin. I wanted to press my hot cheek to the back of her thigh and close my eyes, let myself rest there for a second, and so I did.
Oh, the things our bodies could still want us to do, the hope that remained in desire. I knew there was grief stored up in me like water trapped under the ground. I knew that I was never going to be the same, whatever happened. But I was still alive. I was still coursing with blood. I was skinless against the world, its terror, but its beauty too. Let it into you, I thought there, in the moments before she pulled me up and kissed me on the mouth for the first time. Let it into you.
3
Another woman came not too long after that, arriving almost as if we had called her. Her name was Lila and the look in her eyes was distant. We
heard a crashing in the bushes and ran towards the noise with our pistols out. She fell to her knees. Show us your ticket! we shouted at her, waving the guns at her head.
She opened her locket and we saw blue. She lifted her sweater and we saw flesh curving there. She put her face to the ground and wept hot tears on to earth.
We can’t lift you, we explained. You have to walk with us.
We took a hand each and helped her stagger back to the cabin. Pretty name, we told her once she was lying safely inside. She bolted down the hot chocolate we made for her. We stroked her thin hair. It’s all right, it’s all right, we told her. We helped her to get into the yellow bathtub and soaped her matter-of-factly with water heated on the camping stove, Marisol taking the front and I the back. She shivered in the air, angled her arms around herself. Lift up to the ceiling, we said. Stretch. We rinsed her armpits, the back of her neck, as gently as we could.
Lila was less far along than us. Thirty-five fingers. She had been trying to keep track, but she was not sure of the accuracy. We showed her how to measure and write her findings down in the notebook. Our hands are all different sizes though, she said. The three of us pressed our palms together to compare. There’s not much in it, said Marisol, whose hands were smallest.
In the notebook I was writing down lists of names that I no longer had to throw away. I wrote down every name I knew, every likely word that came into my head. I made up words just to fill the space. I wanted to scrawl these names along the walls.
Opal, Cloud, Cedar, Sparrow, Rain, Echo.
You almost had a different name, my father said once. It didn’t fit, he said, but he would not tell me what it was, or how he could tell when I was so new and unformed, how a baby was capable of shrugging off a name. This worried me. How a baby was its own person, its own mystery, something I had to protect with everything I had.
4
Lila was the best at the card game. When Marisol laid out the deck on the floor, she was able to guess correctly almost half the time. Sometimes she would get five or six in a row. I was jealous of her intuition and of the attention Marisol gave her because of it, but she brushed it off. Just guessing, she said, disappearing into the bedroom where she now slept.
Every day, certain animals came into the garden. We had no real food for them, only the remnants of whatever had stuck to the pan, which we shook into the grass. Some of the animals I recognized and some were new. Some were familiar but the wrong colour, white or golden where I would have expected them to be grey. They were small and rodent-like. No rabbits.
The animal chorus, Marisol called them. She liked to go and watch their approach. We did not think of catching them or eating them. Their noses twitched. Animals have souls too, you know, said Marisol. I was not even sure if I believed in souls; or, if they did exist, whether I had one myself, whether the baby had one. I sat on the ground and watched her watching them, and when she turned and caught me I flushed. She went back to the car every few days to check, to move, to bring back more food. Every time I could make myself quietly frantic at the idea that she might not return, but she always did, within hours.
She had not kissed me again and we had not spoken about it. But once, when we were sorting dandelion leaves together, she put her hands on my hands. Like this, she said, demonstrating, sousing the leaves in the container with water, massaging them gently to lift off the dirt. She put her head on my shoulder for a second, and I felt myself beautiful suddenly, like a flare of light.
When I combed my hair in the mornings I noted that it was growing back faster than expected. With my small knife I cleaned, very carefully, under my nails. I knew it was animal behaviour to groom yourself as a self-soothing activity, a neutral space between fight and flight.
The dark feeling was still there inside me. It was quieter, but I knew that, underneath, the pulse of it was growing as my pregnancy progressed. I understood it now not as an enemy, but a kind of symbiosis. Sometimes I visualized the dark feeling as an animal inside myself. It would be like smoke made real, but with fur, teeth. It did not seem merely theoretical given, of course, that there was literally another animal inside me already. I imagined the two of them nestled up together in the warm red cave of my body, in love with each other and familiar.
5
The three of us stayed quiet and devotional in the days, standing guard. But when the baby moved for the first time, I could not stay silent.
Look! I shouted to the two women. Look!
There was nothing to see, really, but I pulled my jumper and my T-shirt over my head and walked into the garden in my bra, my skin goose-pimpling with the strangeness of it. Bubbling, twitching movement, but no dents or shapes pushing my skin out.
I swear it was happening, I told them both when they arrived. Marisol put her hands on my stomach. Lila hung back. Her hair was wet. She had been bathing in the stream, had run up the whole way when she heard me call. You can touch, I told her, but she was shy and maybe afraid.
Mine hasn’t moved yet, she said.
Mine neither, Marisol said. Soon they will.
It felt strange to be the first, for once. For the rest of the morning I tried to provoke a response from the baby. I jumped lightly on the spot and stretched out my body on the floor, stood with my ankles in the cold stream, hoping the temperature would trigger something in me.
In the afternoon I walked alone through the trees, distracted, longing to feel the movement again. The proof, the otherworldliness. I stuck my face up into the light. I remembered what it had been like to be in the forest before. To lie down on the floor, on earth and foliage. To sleep a long time under the leaves.
That night, Marisol finally came to me and pressed her body against mine. I put my hand inside her; I pressed my own face into the mattress and let my shoulders uncurl, my arms reach out over my head. She tasted of citrus, of sour beer. She hissed thinly through her teeth as if I’d bitten her, and so I did. Being touched was painful and raw in its unfamiliarity. I cried afterwards, and she stroked my hair and said, It’s all right.
Were you thinking of me when I was thinking of you, on the road? I asked her when I had stopped crying.
Yes, she said. I was.
Words meant nothing, I still knew that, but they gave me comfort anyway.
In the morning, Lila eyed us slyly, like we were her parents. Marisol and I did not speak of it. There was no need. It was just there. It was part of everything falling into place.
Or, to look at it another way: it seemed too good to even look at directly, so I didn’t let myself look at it. I let it sit there. I let it just exist.
6
I washed daily in the bathtub: damp rag, body slippery with Marisol’s hard yellow soap, a slip of boiled water, shallower than an inch. Marisol came in to sit with me. She liked to see my body in the underwater light of the bathroom, greenish from the foliage growing up outside. I never told her to leave me alone, not once.
Swamp monster, Marisol said, massaging soap into my hair. Queen ant.
I curled my hands into mandibles, then tentacles. I splashed the water on to her until she was soaked, but she remained uncomplaining. She stretched up and took off her light cotton sundress, pale pink, darker where the water had hit it. Underneath she wasn’t wearing anything. The hair running down from her navel and covering her legs was a comforting fur. She got into the bathtub with me with some difficulty. Our stomachs were looking fantastical already, and with her long hair tied on top of her head her proportions seemed even stranger. I didn’t know how much tighter my skin would have to stretch. I didn’t know when the baby would come. I didn’t know a thing. Sometimes this could feel liberating.
Did you love the father? Marisol asked.
Not sure, I said truthfully. Did you?
Yes, she said. She scooted the water around with her hands, put them on my shins. Are you jealous?
No, I said, and again it was the truth. She moved her hands down to my ankles and left them there, holding them as if they were wrists, as if she were about to lead me somewhere.
Do you think the father thinks about you and the baby? she asked, leaning towards me.
No, I said.
I wished I’d had some sort of signal when it happened all those months ago. Some sort of acknowledgement of conception’s strange magic. The spark of a fire against dry leaves. The things that happened to your body without you realizing.
Maybe I did love him a little, I said. But he couldn’t do it.
She kissed my wet hair. She kissed my mouth with her own mouth open.
He can go fuck himself, she said when she pulled away from me. They can all go fuck themselves.
7
Marisol had a craving for strawberries, so I took Lila out to find some, as a surprise. During our foraging we heard a rustling, a sniffling. We thought it could have been an animal and we almost ran, but then there was a moan that sounded too human. We pushed through into a clearing and found a woman, lying on the ground. She seemed hurt at first, but she was just lost, dehydrated, overcome with it all. She cried a lot at us, in fear and then relief. We gave her water and helped her back with us, with some hesitation. I’m Therese, she said unprompted. I’m pregnant.
Well, don’t go telling everyone, Lila said, as we pulled our new arrival through the undergrowth.
Marisol didn’t say anything about risk or about resources, though another mouth would be an imposition. Instead she inspected Therese’s locket. Once more we boiled water as a woman sat, stripped and cold, in the bathtub. Once more we washed her together, briskly. The glass fogged up. She was tense at first but soon relaxed. Thank you, she said, as I rinsed her hair with water. I’ve come such a long way, you really wouldn’t believe the journey I’ve had. But I clearly didn’t want to know about her journey, and she fell quiet, let us finish our work.
Blue Ticket Page 12
