Blue Ticket

by Sophie Mackintosh

  Afterwards, the four of us sat in the dark space of the main room. Our old lives seemed a long way away. The city felt like something from a film, somewhere I had never really been. I thought maybe I had never left the wild country after all, that my life in the city had been a delusion triggered by a parasite, that all along underneath I had been here.

  In the cold morning dew, Marisol and I went out alone, before the others were awake. We sat on the grass and kissed. Birds were singing, liquid and unafraid. Marisol aimed her pistol at them but did not shoot.

  When will we go to the border? I asked.

  Soon, she replied. But not today.

  Maybe I will go alone, I said, unconvincing even to myself.

  Oh no, she said. Come on. Don’t leave me with them. She pulled me down on to the grass so that my head rested on her bump. I could hear her heart, or the baby’s heart, or both in tandem.

  If these women can find us, the emissaries can too, I said, the sounds of her body filling my ear, lulling me almost against my will.

  Trust me, she said, again.

  When we got back, Therese accosted us, asking for some hair. Just a few strands, she said. Her eyes were very bright, the blue of a young child, filled with water. When we asked she said it was to perform a ritual. We came outside to watch her do it, cradling our bumps. She walked around the cabin three times with her eyes closed, slowly, feeling her way. She lit a match and held it to the hair, dropping it; the hair went up in smoke instantly and dissipated. She opened her eyes to ours. Done, she said. It smelled evil.

  Where did you learn that? we asked her.

  I made it up, she said.

  I hope you didn’t curse us, Lila said. She sat in the corner, her wiry legs crossed as if meditating, whittling little shapes out of wood. I checked what they were later, when they were scattered across the floor—fish, different kinds. The soles of her feet were filthy.

  Well of course not, Therese said, though she seemed nervous.

  We can each make our own magic, Marisol said.

  That evening the women squabbled over food. Therese had taken more without asking: rice and tinned tomatoes, all our portions exactly the same size for fairness’s sake, though we were living proof of how fairness could fail a person. Lila had snatched the pot back from Therese and thrown it to the floor, and Therese had cried.

  Where are the fathers of your babies? Therese asked, when things were calmer.

  Mine left, Marisol said shortly.

  Mine never came at all, I said. He won’t even speak to me on the phone.

  I don’t know mine, Lila said, shrugging. I never tended to have long-term things. If you know what I mean. I’m not actually totally sure who he is.

  No judgement, obviously, said Marisol.

  Mine will come for me, past the border, Therese said. We are going to have a new life together. He said I should go and I should be brave, he’ll find me there.

  She seemed peaceful. Marisol leaned into me, almost imperceptibly. I saw Lila’s eyebrows move up towards her hairline, but nobody said anything.

  Therese had brought along a nail file made of frosted glass and a pink bottle of varnish. She did the nails on our hands for us but did not do our toes. I hate feet, she said. They make me nauseated.

  I thought about the man in the last hotel and agreed. Blew on my own fingers and then on Marisol’s too, to make them dry faster.

  Doesn’t it remind you of the first days in the city? Marisol asked me that night, as we lay next to each other. The window was wide open and it was so dark that it felt like being underwater, no stars in the sky. All us women together in one place.

  I’d rather leave that behind, I said.

  That first winter in the city—it had been like a meal laid out for you. What do you want to do with your life? they asked. I had taken the required tests in a large cream-painted hall with plate-glass windows hot from the sun, several others around the same age sitting ahead and behind me in rows. By arriving alive, we had proved something about ourselves already. The teachers giving out the papers were tender towards us, letting their hands linger on the wooden desks with names carved in. There were maths and science questions but philosophy too, and theorems harder than any I had encountered at school. I did my best and eventually I received a piece of paper setting out my options. It was a kind of resuming. The lottery and the journey and the recovering were just dead space, a stutter, a bad dream. Just something you had to get through and then your life, the one you deserved, was yours again.

  I was sleeping back then in a building full of other blue-ticket girls also recovering from the journey. The bedroom walls were yellow for good health and mind. Every afternoon we were allowed to lie there in repose. I pinned up pictures of flowers that I cut from a magazine with safety scissors, taking great care around the edges, and we had mosquito nets above the beds. There was a hard and piercing happiness in that room. The happiness of having made it, with the rest of life there to step into.

  We were not in that room any more. Marisol wrapped herself around me. She put her hand to my throat. I didn’t know how she knew I would like that. Afterwards, when she kissed my forehead, I was wet and ashamed.

  8

  Now the baby moves you must give it a name, the others said when I woke up the following day. They had already breakfasted and seemed to have been discussing me. You can’t just keep calling it Baby.

  We can help you choose, Therese offered, hopeful. She followed Marisol and me around like a dog. It was hard to like her, though I knew this was ugly of me.

  I spent some time in silence that afternoon with my list, in the garden, batting flies away from my face. It felt like a decision too big for anyone to make but there I was, making it.

  I chose, but I don’t want to tell anybody the name, I said when I came back in, the door swinging behind me. Not until the baby is born. Everyone shrugged, but left me alone. It felt good to have that kind of secret inside of me—nothing sordid, nothing damaging. A little sun-warmed stone in my stomach.

  I’m your mother, I said to the baby later in private, but coming out of my mouth it seemed presumptuous. Someone was going to call me out on it. Mother, I tried out again, flushing bright red.

  When we remembered, we measured our bellies again and wrote the figures down. We put up a tent in the main room so that there was somewhere to be alone, a pocket of privacy in the claustrophobia of the cabin. At night I slept on the bare mattress breathing in the smell of Marisol’s hair, the shape of her skull tucked under my chin.

  9

  We need more supplies, Marisol said one day. We’ll have to find a supermarket. It might take some time.

  I don’t want you to go, I said, privately. It’s not safe. Send one of the others.

  I had started to indulge the dream of staying in the woods for ever. Of raising my child on trapped rabbits, berries, the occasional chocolate bar. I wondered who the baby would look like, and whether Marisol and I would raise our children as siblings, build the cabin into something beautiful, bend the landscape to our needs. I was embarrassed by my own sentimentality. As if she would want to do that with me.

  We’re all hungry, Marisol said. We need to look after our health. And there are only a few tins left in the car. She touched her hand to my cheek. Don’t worry, she said, kissing me on the corner of the mouth.

  We drew blades of grass to decide who would stay; me and Therese picked the two longest pieces. We waved the others off at the door.

  Marisol and Lila were gone all day. Therese sat on the floor, eyes closed, as if meditating. Night fell without them and brought a hard rainstorm which revealed leaks in the roof. We found what we could to collect the water, empty cans and containers, but it was not much good. Therese was slow, and I lost my patience and shouted at her. I didn’t always like that hardness in me. I didn’t think I had alway
s been cruel. I apologized to Therese but she sulked, crawling into the tent, the safe zone, and when she came out it looked as if she had been crying. The rain would not have dared to come in if Marisol were there, I believed. She would repel it, cause the clouds to seal up. Through the night I thought intently of her beautiful face. I felt feverish, overwrought. In the morning there was still damp everywhere; ants swarmed the ground and we had to beat them away with our shoes. The animal chorus gathered on the lawn but Marisol was not there to watch or to feed them, so they dispersed.

  That afternoon, when the ants had gone and the sky was grey but holding, I sat on the bubbled orange linoleum of the bathroom floor with my white underwear in my hands. There was pinkness spotting the fabric, the way there had been that day back in the city. I drew my knees up as far as I could to my body. The baby wasn’t moving.

  All this to end here, I told Therese very quietly when she came to find me after an hour, knocking on the door until I opened it. All the things left behind only to end like this.

  Therese knelt down on the floor with me. Come on. It could be normal, she said, reaching out her arms, and I surprised myself by letting her hold me. It could really be nothing, she repeated. Who knows what our bodies are supposed to be doing right now.

  It’s because I’m not fit to be a mother, I told her. I knew my body would win over in the end.

  That’s not true, Therese said. That’s absolutely not true.

  It was the first time I had said it out loud to someone. Of course Therese would say it wasn’t true, because she was in the same boat. If we didn’t have belief, we had nothing. I hated her a little, again, even with her kindness.

  Tell me about your happiest day, Therese said. She held my hands in hers, tightly.

  I told her about the day I got my first job. How I received the call and then I walked through the city in the way that was becoming a part of my routine, and it was one of the summer days where the air is clear, where there’s the promise of a long evening and joy inside it. I met a friend at a bar and we sat outside. We talked for a long time and ate small bitter olives. Everything filled me. It wasn’t a remarkable day. But the warmth; the possibility. Later I walked home by the canal. There was a beauty in my solitude. I thought I might never be lonely again.

  That’s a good one, Therese said. A good one.

  There was nothing to be done. I put on clean underwear and took the bloodied ones to soak in the stream. With the pistol cold in my hand I walked to a distance away in the trees and pressed it to my head. It was real and it was solid. I considered my options. I considered the idea that I had brought it on myself. I let the gun fall back to my side. When I felt the baby move, I had to sit down with the shock.

  Don’t do that to me, I said to the baby, privately. I was talking to them always by then, the way I had talked to myself before. Maybe I had always been talking to them.

  You can’t do that to me, I said to them. You can’t.

  10

  Marisol and Lila arrived with food in their packs and another woman, but it was different this time. Blood was jammy at her temples, her eye was swollen purple, though she seemed hostile rather than afraid. I was so fixated on her injuries that it took me a while to notice that she did not seem to be pregnant. They led her into the bathroom. She protested at first as we stripped her clothes and shoes off, businesslike. She slapped my hands away as I undid buttons. I glimpsed the sharp plane of her hipbones. Fine, do it yourself, I said.

  She’s a white-ticket, Marisol explained. We found her near the road.

  Marisol stayed to watch over her in the bathroom. In the other room the rest of us unpacked bags of rice and pasta, oranges and lemons to guard against scurvy, tinned tomatoes, large bars of dark chocolate, and asked Lila what had happened.

  We were driving, obviously, took a long route but found a supermarket in the end, she said. We got what we needed. And then on the way back we saw something by the road, like a pile of rags, and it was moving. I wanted to drive past but Marisol stopped the car to investigate. We couldn’t leave her there.

  I knocked at the bathroom door with clean clothes, and Marisol opened it a crack. Is everything okay? I asked her, passing her the things. Yes, she said. Her eyes were soft and wet. I couldn’t hear movement from the bathtub. Marisol turned away, closed the door.

  The white-ticket woman was called Valerie. That evening she had recovered enough to come and sit with us. We sat formally, straight-backed. We were wary. She took off her locket as a peace offering and put it on the floor in front of her.

  Pass it around if you like, she said. So we did, we passed it from person to person, we opened up the clasp and saw the clean whiteness inside. It did not burn us when we touched it. It did not leave a mark.

  Put it on, if you like, she repeated, and so we took off our lockets one by one and tried on hers. It felt heavier around my neck.

  Are you pregnant? Lila asked.

  I was, she said. But I’m not any more.

  Did you want to be pregnant? Therese asked, leaning forward.

  No, said Valerie. Not at all.

  She told us how when she realized what was happening she went to her doctor, who showed her the baby moving on a screen in the clinic. She was shown the heartbeat. Unlike the conversations we had known, Valerie’s doctor would not do anything about it. But we knew more than anyone how there were ways to go against the body, to make offerings of blood.

  How did you do it? asked Lila. She looked ghoulish, more animated than I had ever seen her before.

  I don’t want to talk about that, Valerie said.

  We sat there and listened and we were very still.

  My husband found out. He didn’t believe that it was an accident. He was disgusted with me. But it wasn’t his body.

  She spoke as if reading from a list she had gone over many times, as if she were used to parading her reasons, if only to herself. She smiled briefly, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

  He’ll take me back. What else can he do?

  My right hand held on to my left hand very tightly. Bone on bone.

  What was it like for you to be pregnant? asked Therese.

  It was like nothing, she said. It was just another state of the body. I was sick for a month. And then it was over, like it had never happened.

  But something did happen, said Lila.

  But it was like nothing had happened, Valerie said. Or it could have been. Being found out was my only mistake.

  Her knuckles were white.

  I stand by that statement, she said, though none of us had questioned it.

  Be kind to Valerie, Marisol told me afterwards, in bed.

  Valerie was asleep in the tent. She was the lowest priority physically. That was just how biology dictated it.

  She’s like us but different, she said. She did what she had to do.

  I had seen the spark of it, the kinship. There was an animal somewhere in Valerie too, a dark feeling. It had opened something up to her, made her decision possible. But I still didn’t trust her.

  You can trust her, Marisol said, as I knew she would. I have an instinct for people.

  Instinct isn’t always right, I countered. Marisol leaned on her elbow and looked at me in a shaft of moonlight.

  Then what are we doing here? she said.

  In a way we’re going against our most basic instinct, I said. The one for self-preservation.

  I don’t look at it that way, she said.

  The cool darkness around us, the sounds of breathing from the other rooms.

  I told Marisol about the bleeding that had passed over me as suddenly as the thunderstorm, how the fear had gutted me, how it had reminded me of all there was left to lose. I told her about the dark feeling. Did you feel it too, in your own way? I asked, eager, too eager.

  She took my hand.
Yes, she said, I felt it too. I felt it every second of every day. I feel it now. Like a beating heart inside my own heart, stronger all the time.

  We couldn’t sleep. We went outside to see the moon, sat in the grass. She leaned back, tucked her feet under herself.

  You’ve never told me about your old life, I said. She paused for a second, then another.

  You’ve never told me about yours, she said.

  Well there’s nothing really to tell, I said. You never asked.

  I suppose I think it’s not important, she said. None of that really matters now.

  But I still told her about sterilizing petri dishes, about going to the bars and swimming in the cold turquoise water with the cap pulled down low over my ears. I told her about walking around the city in the very late night or very early morning, how it was my favourite time, when dawn started stippling the sky and that city we had lived in seemed pure and empty, something waiting to be stepped into.

  That life feels so small, she said. So far away.

  Tell me something, I said. Just one thing.

  She stared at her hands. There is something I should tell you, but I don’t want to do it. You might leave if you know.

  I won’t, I promised, rashly.

  Maybe you should, she said. She paused, closed her eyes.

  I was a doctor, she said. Don’t say anything for a second.

  I tried to picture her in the doctor’s coat, and it was easy. Her hair tied back neatly and dark cotton clothes underneath. She would pull the latex gloves on to her hands and calm people down with soft words, her hands at their temples, teasing out their secrets, their thoughts. I was stupid not to have seen it. Her eyes opened and found mine, inscrutable. She placed her fingers on my arm.

  Don’t touch me, please, I said. Her hand lifted right away.

  See, now you want to go, she said. She seemed calm, regardless.

  I did want to go, I wanted to run into the trees and never come back.