Blue Ticket

by Sophie Mackintosh

  I followed her up the stairs, knife in my pocket. She whispered into her child’s ear, the soft language again. Together we went into a room lit dimly amber. Stand in the corner, she said to me, growing braver. Stand with your hands visible.

  I chose to trust her. My palms, displayed nakedly to her, were hard and sheened with sweat. Life line, heart line, sun line. Old magic from the countryside, the other girls holding my hands in theirs, predicting things.

  This is how you lay a baby down, she told me. With exaggerated slowness she placed the child on its back. Do not put the baby on their side, she said, with sudden vehemence. The baby could die if they are left on their side. This is important to remember. Nobody will tell you this but I’m telling you now.

  The baby put a foot into its own mouth, athletically.

  This is how you wrap a baby, she told me, pulling a blanket over it, making sure its arms were free. This is how you make sure the baby does not get too hot. Babies cannot control their temperature. They cannot regulate their emotions. They are wholly dependent on you. They are terrifying, even I can admit that.

  She touched the baby’s bald head again and then set the mobile spinning, shadows dancing on the wall.

  What if you didn’t want it? I asked, as I watched the baby release its foot from the blanket and wriggle. What if you couldn’t?

  I wanted it, she said. I don’t know about anyone else. I don’t want to know.

  I hesitated. Do you know what happens to the blue-ticket mothers that are caught?

  No, she said. How should I know?

  We left the baby’s room and she moved silently to another, a bedroom where her husband was sleeping. I watched him from the doorway. He made no noise, not even breathing. He seemed dead. I wished him dead. I wished them a fracture in their happy life. The woman opened her wardrobe and found some garments, handed them to me wordlessly. She lifted a finger to her lips. The husband turned over but did not wake.

  I have not slept a full night in months, the woman told me, in the hall. I long to sleep the sleep of the fathers.

  Help me, I asked her. Please help me.

  She shook her head.

  No, no, she said. Her shoulders hunched up to her ears. You really have to go now. I’ve done too much. More than you deserve.

  I left the house, and outside I held up what she had given me to the light of a streetlamp. A blue blanket, a pink flowered dress. I looked back once more towards the house. In her pool of golden light, protected light, I saw her lift up a telephone and press the numbers one by one. She looked out of the window and made eye contact with me, then turned away.

  The pain was everywhere. I started to walk, and then I started to run. It was harder once I reached the sand, but I knew I could do it. I knew there was no other choice.

  4

  I was alone again and it felt right. The word abandoning came into my head, the image of Marisol’s face when she discovered me gone, but I couldn’t really think about it, I was busy with the pain, with forward motion. Something had clicked into place. The feeling was leading me somewhere, down the beach, skirting the edge of the dunes, searching for safety.

  Above me, just beyond my eyeline, a staircase; a small box of light. They used to peel the martyrs of their skin. A woman in a bar had told me that one night, at the stage of being drunk when the universe starts to reveal things. They used to say that transcendence was something more than bodily. If you’re attached to your body you can’t get anywhere.

  Said who? I’d asked at the time. Who are they? And what do they know about my body?

  Soon, blue morning, a sky washed with light. I felt cold. I looked down at my stomach, and there it was, undeniable. The sand gathered around my feet like snow.

  No more houses, no more mothers and fathers. The occasional sound of a loud car on some road parallel, very far away.

  As I walked, I wondered about sly Valerie and her black eye. I wondered about the old woman in the bed and breakfast, and the woman I had seen at the swimming pool, serene in her childlessness the way you could be serene in your motherliness. They were a chorus, asking me, What do you even want it for?

  I don’t know, I told them. I’ve got this far and I still don’t know. But I think I am finding peace in that, regardless.

  On a large piece of driftwood I sat for a second. I smoothed my thoughts. Lichen and barnacles were already colonizing this thing that had been a tree for many years. The sea had taken it in and spat it out, made it new. It occurred to me that it was not too late to just go in and swim for a while.

  The baby kicked inside me. Don’t be morbid, they were saying. Anyway, you’ve already annihilated your life. If you want to look at it that way.

  To pathologize desire into flat compulsion reduces the possibilities of it. Which is not to say that I had not felt compulsion. But perhaps I was learning the difference, finally, between that and conviction. Between something enacted in the name of desperation, and something enacted in the name of curiosity. In the name of beauty. In the name of a sort of love.

  Call it maternal instinct. Call it accepting the impermanence of all things. Call it kindness, finally, shown towards myself.

  All right, I said to my baby. To my body. Just another part of the conversation we had been having my whole life. My body that was mine, and belonged to me, and always had.

  My child, waiting for me with endless patience. Not knowing the person I had been. Only the person I could become.

  I got to my feet.

  5

  There was only so far that I could go. The parameters of my body and what it could do were narrowing down to a sharp point. I went into the dunes again, pulled out the red tent. No one to see it here. No choice even if they could.

  There was no position right for my body any more, no good way to place it. In the end I got on all fours and let my belly hang to the ground. I leaned my face on to sand and it stuck to my wet cheek. I let myself make noises that I would never have made otherwise.

  Pain scrunched me up, tiny and ineffectual. Then it opened me up at the ribs, the pelvis, like I was being disarticulated on a butcher’s block. Then it was a horse bolting away from me. It was impossible to get a grip on it.

  Soft body learning to be hard on the country roads. Gravel; wet, steaming air in my nostrils. Body of tarmac and hotel rooms and swimming pools and bathrooms and clinics, body of ripped-up cuticles and appetite and sex with people loved and not-loved, a body forgiving every bad thing I could do to it. A body always going somewhere. Carrying me onwards. Never letting me down, yet.

  I thought of the border as a clear line between old life and new. I thought of it as an illuminated mark on the ground. You could step over and back. You could be in two places at the same time.

  Okay, I told myself. I peeled off my dress, my underwear, all of it ruined anyway. Sweat made my skin slick. My hands were shaking. I knelt like I was praying, I braced. I went up the ladder of the pain, rung by rung, until I was a long way above the ground. Until I was a long way above myself.

  In my head there was a shining white road and there were no cars approaching, and I lay down on it, and it was not gravel, it was smooth marble, and I waited for whatever was going to run me over to run me over. For whatever was going to peel me back up to peel me back up.

  Give yourself over to it, I told myself, the way I had told myself before in my old life, over and over, for every bad decision, every bad feeling, maybe I had been practising all those years, maybe I had been preparing myself without knowing. Surrender.

  Through everything I saw desire dimly in the distance like a sheet of rain, and it was infinite, refracted many ways. I was astonished and moved at the possibilities it held. How it had got me here.

  Deep pressure. I pushed, and nothing seemed to happen, but the urge to push didn’t stop and neither did I, it was the only thing my
body was capable of. My breathing was ragged, sobbing. I put my hand between my legs and touched something solid.

  Baby. Strange and full of life. She came out in a hot, tumbling way. I caught her in my hands. She was blue and then she was screaming—companion noise to my own, I realized, two parts in the same orchestra, playing from a single sheet. My body was still doing things. I was bleeding and then I was pushing something else out. Lung-like thing on a rope, pain’s aftershock racking my body. Surrender. The baby was still screaming but her skin changed from purple to red. Alien sea-creature. Surrender. I didn’t know if I loved her from the first second, I was too afraid to make those sorts of value judgements, but I knew that I would die for her, and that was more important. Surrender. I held my daughter. I pressed her skin against mine.

  6

  The sun was high in the sky. We watched each other with some fear, but even I could tell that I was the one more afraid. I held her tiny hand between my thumb and forefinger, very gingerly. Her palm was little bigger than a fingerprint. She was still marbled with fat and blood, glossy, like a steak just unwrapped from its paper. A little sand stuck to her. Facts came back to me: water in my plastic bottle, tepid. The cord, which needed to be cut off, like the woman had told me. I had no idea how to do it, was afraid to use my dirty knife, so in the end I tucked the strange, fleshy bag into the blanket alongside her. I quickly became used to the gore everywhere.

  Nova was the name I had chosen in the forest, the name foraged from scraps, from things written and remembered and listed. I had picked it and never told anyone. The secret was out. I told my daughter her own name. Nova was a puckered thing, mottled, feathered on top with dark hair. She was unbelievably strange. I never wanted to be apart from her again.

  When she started to cry I put her on my chest, copying what I had seen. Come on, I told her. Eat something. Her mouth opened and closed. I had the idea she might take small bites from my flesh, leave tiny wounds, and I would welcome it, I would tell her to take whatever she needed. I needed to wash but had no idea how I was supposed to do that while carrying her. In the end I just pulled the dress the woman had given me over my bloodstained body, reasoning it was better than nothing.

  We slept in fragments. My whole body hurt. I didn’t know how to make the pain go away. Sometimes I stuck my head out of the tent to measure the progress from light to dark and back again. With my hands and eyes I scoped out the damage. I had been lucky, it seemed, to escape the physical catastrophes that Valerie had warned us about, though maybe they were yet to come, or maybe my brain was loosening in my skull even as I examined myself, and soon I’d walk us both into the ocean. The minute I thought about it I told myself to stop, but doing that made it impossible. To distract myself, I watched Nova sleeping, and then I slept myself.

  When I woke up, the light was filtering through the canvas, turning everything red. Nova’s face glowed. I lay still and listened, holding my baby tight to me. Shh, I whispered to her.

  There was movement; someone passed the tent, and then someone else. Voices too quiet to make out what they were saying. The zip of the tent started to move down. I watched it, reached for the knife.

  The face of a woman that I didn’t know. She was pale and impassive as the moon. It’s over, she said. Get out.

  I screamed at her—all my anger, all my fear, all of everything I had been storing up for the last days and months and years—but she did not react. She blinked one long, calm blink. Then I was pulled from the tent by decisive hands, my body protesting, still in pain. My mind went to the knife but in the confusion I was afraid of hurting Nova, so I let it fall and concentrated on cupping my hands around her instead. The baby has come already? I heard someone exclaim. Someone check the baby! Hands reached for Nova but I screamed again and they dropped away from her soft body, came back to mine. Nova’s screaming joined my own, the siren of her voice making my heart surge. Men and women dressed in navy. They didn’t speak to me, just led the two of us inland through the dunes until we came to their glossy cars, parked on the road beyond the beach.

  Beside the cars was a man in a long white coat. It was Doctor A. He waved from a distance away. Morning, he said when we were close enough to hear him. You did pretty well. He raised his eyebrows at Nova in my arms. I hope it was worth it, he said.

  I had a vision of myself kneeling on the floor and Doctor A as an executioner, coming towards me wearing a hood. Seeing him outside of the clinic felt wrong. He looked relaxed, jovial even. I wanted him to put his arms around me and tell me it was all a mistake.

  He opened the door of a gleaming red car with a white interior. It smelled like bleach and leather. I sat in the back with Nova in my arms. The locks of the doors clicked immediately behind us. Hanging from the rear-view mirror was an air freshener the shape of an opening rose. A bag of striped peppermints in the tray behind the gearstick. Want one? Doctor A asked. When I shook my head he put one into his mouth and started the car.

  His eyes met mine in the mirror. He seemed younger, almost my age. He paused to light up a cigarette, did not roll down the window. I had never seen him smoke before. Somehow it changed everything.

  So, he exhaled. Here we are.

  BORDER

  1

  He drove us a short distance to a long, flat, brick building, similar to the lottery station all those years ago. Perhaps I would always end up in the same places, regardless of how far I ran. The emissaries had followed us in their cars, pulling up one by one and getting out briskly, while we sat in silence, apparently waiting for something.

  I’ve taken a special interest, he said, as though he could read my mind, which possibly he could. You just never seemed maternal at all, so, professionally, it’s quite irregular.

  He twisted around, reached one slightly damp hand to my bare forearm. Fingers circling my wrist. Besides, we’ve been through so much together.

  Out of the car, he led me inside alone, through empty white corridors to a sparse room with windows overlooking the sea, a single bed with pink sheets and a lacy valance. He sat on the bed and gestured for me to do the same.

  I remember what my son was like at this age. Looking at a newborn always brings it back to me. May I?

  He was already reaching for her, prising her out of my arms. He handled her like someone who was used to babies. A father after all, a white-ticket woman at home. Nova started to cry.

  Oh, I didn’t mean to set her off, he said. Babies, you know. Well, actually, I suppose you don’t.

  He laughed a little. Nudged my knee with his, as if I were in on the joke.

  I was very tired. I wanted to kill him. I would murder him and eat of him. I would daub Nova in his blood. I hated watching her in his large, beautiful hands. I hated thinking of him as a father. I hated thinking of him throwing balls in the garden or putting children to bed.

  Nova was still crying and my dress was wet with milk. It was terrible. I cried then too, from the humiliation. To be an animal in front of him. I was turned inside out and there was nothing that would put me back the way I had been, I would be wet and alien for all time, skinned.

  It’s interesting for me to see you like this, he said.

  I wanted to hide my face, but instead I made myself stare back at him.

  I need to examine you both, he said, putting Nova down on the bed.

  He unpacked his kit—the inflatable orange band, the vials for my blood, the spirometer. After so long without a check-up there was a hint of the occult to those objects. I capitulated, mindful of the changes my body had gone through. I breathed out as hard as I could when instructed, I lay down on the bed with my legs apart, I let the signs of my body be translated. My thighs were smeared with blood, still, down to the knee. He dabbed at my skin with gauze, antiseptic, water, then when I was cleaned up he pushed his latex hands inside me. Only a couple of stitches, he said from between my legs. You’re a little torn. I f
elt him piece my skin back together, sharp pain, then something different. Don’t move, he said. An object scraping inside me, the little wishbone of wire. My body tensed. No, no, I said.

  You want to move, I can tell, he said, but if you move you’ll do yourself some real damage.

  So I lay still. When he was done he handed me a tissue and I realized I was crying. He reached into his briefcase and withdrew a syringe.

  Antibiotics, he said. In case you caught something nasty on the road. You want to stay well for your baby, don’t you? Arm out, please.

  No, I said, wresting myself away. I don’t want that.

  Honestly, Calla. You don’t have a choice. He took up my arm again. I shut my eyes. My veins were small, but the needle slid in with ease. Almost immediately I felt fogged, heavier. I watched stupidly as he picked up Nova again. Put her down, put her down, I said. I tried to stand but it was difficult; I listed sideways and back on to the bed.

  Sleep, he said, turning with her in his arms. When you’ve rested you can have a nice hot shower, wash all that mess off you properly.

  Panic grew in me. He was not putting her down, he was walking out of the door, but I was already falling, the adrenaline in my body fading to nothing.

  In the night I awoke alone. I banged on the door and shouted for her, but nobody came. I tried the windows, I pulled everything off the bed and checked underneath it, and then I put my face into the pillow and howled. My stomach, still swollen, was the only proof she had ever existed. The pain still in my body.

  The room had an en-suite and eventually I staggered into it. It hurt to pee, my feet splayed on the yellowed tiles. Dying carnations in a flower arrangement next to the mirror. I was tired of the dressing-up of death and ugliness and all the rest of it. I thought I could hear a baby crying from somewhere, very faint, but perhaps it was the whine of the lightbulb in its electrical socket, perhaps it was the air conditioning. My body knew it wasn’t Nova. I had to believe that, to believe my body telling me it was not my child crying in a locked room without me. I couldn’t allow myself to fall apart. I had to be a knife. I had to find a way out and back to her.