Blue Ticket

by Sophie Mackintosh

  Sometimes I became aware that there was somewhere I could not go. And I wanted to go there. Who wouldn’t, when told it was impossible? Motherhood was the last perversion; otherwise known as loving and being loved. It was the only one closed off to me.

  I want. There was a purity to that feeling that other sensations lacked, a simplicity, even as it remained the most complicated thing in the world.

  Sometimes I would still go out looking for trouble. Sometimes I would sit up at a bar on the other side of the city and order drink after drink, staring at someone until they stared back, and then the dance began—inelegant but replete with its own pull and push. These rituals felt important to me. They made an object of my desire, helped me to feel out its edges and crevices. And yet the shape of it slid away from me like water.

  Choice is an illusion, said a woman redoing her lipstick next to me in the bathroom mirror of a bar one evening. Don’t you ever think about how everything is just completely futile?

  I hadn’t actually said anything. I do even now have that sort of face where strangers often talk to me, ranting or confessing, like I am someone they already know. This woman was more beautiful than me. She had hair feathering around her jaw, a mouth painted the colour of dark blood. Maybe she was very drunk, or maybe she was an emissary, designed to show us what good blue-ticket women looked like and felt, how free one could be if one totally embraced what one was given. I wasn’t sure if emissaries did operate like that, but I had my suspicions. I wanted to kiss her anyway, because I still believed in beauty, because I wanted her good attitude to infect me, because I was also drunk, because I was never satisfied.

  I saw this sort of woman everywhere once I started to look. I had counted myself among their number, and then one day they seemed like secret agents out to seed the word of independence, of pleasure-seeking and fulfilment. Isn’t this good, they said from beneath the canopies of nightclub smoking areas, from tables where they sat alone, from cars and train carriages and beds, some in elegant suits or other uniforms to show their importance. They made impressive things and spent their time on worthwhile pursuits and I had been one of them, and the togetherness had sometimes felt like being one of a flock of lovely birds pushing through the hot space of the sky, and it was good, that was the thing, it was really so good, but now there was something happening to me, and I found I had little control over it.

  But what’s wrong with being exploratory, I justified to myself. Just being intrepid in my wants. I had always wanted more, had believed that this was an intrinsically good thing, that even when you didn’t know exactly where a want would take you, going along with it could be illuminating. Fun, at the least.

  (Do you want to end up dead? I had been asked by my doctors over the years.

  Not always, I said. Not usually.)

  Some nights I dreamed I was caught in a dark room with no windows or doors, a room from which there was no way out, and there was a pain in the centre of my chest, below tissue and bone, a pain that was part of me, though I resented and feared it.

  On the road all those years ago I had seen something I do not think I was supposed to see. The white-ticket girl in the back of a car driven by an emissary from the lottery building. She had rolled the window down, a sliver of her face pressed to the gap. She looked wild, but I do not think she was being stolen away. She was being protected. I considered waving the car down and asking if I could get in too. I wondered if I had missed some vital instruction, and I watched the sleek lines of the car as it went down the road, until it was no longer visible.

  It wasn’t fair. Sometimes I came out from the dreamed dark room with those words on my lips, as if I had been saying them over and over. It wasn’t fair.

  When I thought about burning my life to the ground, which I was thinking about increasingly often, I wondered whether there were white-ticket women who wanted to burn theirs to the ground too. To be alone and unbeholden to all, and to find the glory in it—because there was glory in it; I could still see that glory as if from a distance, like it was somewhere I had left, the light of it far from me now and unreachable.

  In its place came desires so alien that I could only assume they had been inside me for a long time, like splinters or shrapnel waiting to be pushed to the surface. Desires I had never even encountered. Like: holding a soft thing with large eyes, or humming a song without words. In the supermarket I cradled a hemp bag of sugar, six pounds in weight, then put it back immediately.

  I spent a lot of time thinking about the curling hands of infants, about hot milk. I thought of the idea of someone coming home to you every day, of the concept of need and being needed. I opened a bottle of red wine just like my father, and by the end I was reaching for my locket and looking at the unspoiled blue and thinking: white ticket. I was thinking that a mistake might have been made somewhere and actually the life I had stepped into was the wrong one. Road not taken, or rather a road closed off to me.

  I could not tell Doctor A about any of this. I could not ask him who gets to decide, who had been behind the machine in the lottery station all those years ago, the cramps of that first bleed twisting my stomach up like a wet sock.

  I could not ask anyone. It was between me and my desire: stringy as the rind of a bean, me and it alone at night, with the moon shining down, and the only path visible was one absolutely forbidden to me.

  And yet I wanted it, wanted it, wanted it.

  HOME

  1

  Eighteen years after the lottery. I stood in the bathroom of my home, milk-pale, meeting my own gaze in the mirror without cringing. On the floor below the sink there was a bottle of vodka from the freezer, a tumbler, tweezers and a small pair of pliers. A wedge of lime on the edge of the glass. I wore only my underwear, a white cotton bra and knickers, stuck to me with sweat. I poured another drink, put a folded-up flannel in my mouth to bite on. Crouched my body over, put my hand tenderly inside myself, and braced. I was forever amazed at the places your mind could compel your body to go. It didn’t feel strictly possible that they could act in such opposition, but then the proof was everywhere.

  For weeks there had been a new and dark feeling inside me. A strange, ravaging ghost that gave me recurrent headaches at my temples, and even dosing up with the extra tinctures prescribed by Doctor A, three sweet spots on the vein under my tongue, did nothing. It was a kind of desire that hadn’t felt so different from other desires at first, so I hadn’t seen the harm in nurturing it. I was used to wants that were instinctual, but this went somehow beyond. I hadn’t known I was capable of such hunger, or such grief. In the bathroom with my hand inside myself I knew that I was giving in to it, following it into the uncharted parts of myself. It was going to take me somewhere I could not come back from, and I welcomed it, a little afraid but mostly exhilarated, like I was about to plunge into open water.

  My fingertips brushed wire and the meat of myself. There was a feeling of fundamental wrongness, like an electric shock, and I realized I needed the tweezers. Oh please oh please, I said silently, imploring something I didn’t believe in. The flannel was slick with my spit. A third try, this time with the slender pliers I used mainly for small household jobs. A broken sink, a loose bolt. I was attending to myself. I was elsewhere. Inside me, something came loose and I tugged. My hand skidded. I pulled the wire out and it was so small, a wishbone. When I threw it on the floor it beaded blood against the white tiles. More vodka, poured from bottle to mouth, my stomach churning. Easy, easy, I said to my body, like it was a spooked horse. The worst is over now.

  2

  I had been seeing Doctor A for five years by that point. One day I had come in for my usual appointment to find him sitting on the reclining chair as if he had always been there. Nobody could tell me what had happened to my previous doctor. But Doctor A was my third one, and my favourite, if truth be told.

  A doctor is a sort of mother, Doctor A told me d
uring our first session, and I laughed because it was both absurd and true. That’s the kind of patient I’m going to be, just so you know, I told him.

  Doctor A listened well, but was not afraid to speak. Sometimes I wished he were more afraid to speak. It’s good for you, he said. It’s good for you to hear the things you don’t want to hear. He filled vials with my blood for mysterious purposes and observed the fluctuations of my weight and blood pressure. He nodded and gave me prescriptions written on yellow paper that I sometimes filled and sometimes crumpled into a ball and pressed down in the bins of the clinic bathroom, underneath used tissues, depending on how I was feeling that day. Occasionally I asked for specific pills but he always refused and said, Nice try! If you wanted something you had to go the circuitous route. Inventing symptoms, trying to trick him.

  Oh, you want the green ones, he would say, tapping his pen on his notepad in a way that transfixed me. He had very beautiful hands, though I tried not to notice how beautiful they were. I didn’t like to examine those kinds of feelings too much, but I was reminded when he came close to me or when he looked good that some women had sex with their doctors in order to obtain a positive report, or just because the transference was no longer resistible. Transference was seductive, I had to admit, though I had never slept with my doctor, and was proud of it.

  Mostly, though, I did not think much about Doctor A. He was just part of my routine, like morning laps around the green in the centre of our houses, neatly cutting up the slower runners. The other women and I wore similar nylon shorts, our lockets hitting exactly where our ribs shielded our hearts. Hello, we said sometimes, but more often we were silent. We lived outside the heart of the city, bounded by looped roads. It had been hard to sleep because of the traffic when I first moved, but now I needed the sound of it, the windows open wide to the white noise.

  Following each run I made the longish walk to the laboratory where I worked, my lab coat in a nylon rucksack. There was a comfort in knowing I was moving towards a place of total predictability. As I walked I smoked exactly two cigarettes and drank coffee from a white ceramic flask. My nails were bitten to the quick and I could not wear nail varnish due to my work. The further I got into the city the more people joined me, men and women walking ahead or behind, smoking their own cigarettes and drinking from their own flasks. I stopped outside the lab to stub the second cigarette out on to a stone wall and tie my hair back. Looped elastic once, twice. You don’t have to go in, I started saying to myself, kindly, but of course I always went in.

  3

  On Fridays when all the work for the week was done, the dangerous chemicals locked up, our supervisors brought out dark bottles of wine. We drank it together out of thick plastic tumblers that marbled the light, sitting on the wiped-down benches and swinging our legs. It was my favourite part of the day, of the week. We had waited for it all through the afternoon. The wine was sustaining as a soup, dark and rich in our mouths, and I could feel it benefitting me from the first sip, setting the wheels in motion, sparking the wildness up or dampening it down.

  We changed in the bathroom into our going-out clothes. My tights were laddered already. They were always laddered. The tiles of the bathroom were deep green edged with white, and the lights were weak. In our reflections, bouncing back at us from long mirror, from vast stainless-steel sink, we belonged to the night. The small window high up on the wall let in a sliver of the sky where it was a clear ultramarine, deepening.

  Girlhood was gone. Girlhood was over and dead for us all. We didn’t miss it. In its place, anything could happen. We envisioned parties studding the city, people we were destined to meet waiting for us in pools of streetlight, in the places we expected them least. If you were a blue-ticket your life could change at any time, you could make it change at any time, and we were alternately complacent and anxious about the possibilities contained within that freedom.

  After doing our hair we helped each other with our makeup, shared a lipstick around like a cigarette and then shared real cigarettes around after that, walking to the bars, still passing a bottle of the wine from hand to hand. I tilted it to the sky and drank deeply. Some ran down my chin and I wiped it off with my fingers. I loved the ritual, the film of the alcohol on my lips, the hairspray smell, how we lifted up each other’s hair to spritz perfume at the soft skin where the neck met the jaw. I even loved how sometimes I fell before we had reached the bars, kerb coming up to sky, and my friends rallied around to pull me back up, a skinned knee maybe, my shins permanently bruised. No judgement. Bringing me back up to where I should be.

  There was a man in the third bar we went to, drinking beer from an unmarked glass. He was over a head taller than me and that was the first thing I noticed, and the second was his broad and slightly curved shoulders in black cloth, the shoulders of a kind person, as if he were aware of the space his large man’s body took up, and while not apologetic for it, he did not walk unthinkingly through the world. That will do, I thought.

  The other women fell away. He and I drank short, honey-coloured cocktails that sent out a halo of warmth in the darkness of the bar. His name was R and he was older, but not by too much. He paid for the cocktails with a flourish. A roll of notes kept in his back pocket, his shirt bleached white. It was hard not to touch him. Much later on, when we had moved to a table in a corner, and when we were drunk, very drunk, I showed him the blue ticket in my locket, but only for a second. Snapped it open then closed, like a hungry mouth. Some men would have been put off, but not him. He flipped a beer mat between his fingers. Good, he said. I prefer it that way.

  I took a mouthful of the golden drink to stop me saying anything rash. He put his hand on my knee and left it there. Desire turned up in me with a kick, a skipped heartbeat. All of my colleagues had gone and I hadn’t even noticed. Outside the bar he gathered me into a lightless corner and on to him. He kissed me hard on the mouth and I put my fingers through his belt loops and pulled him against me for a second, several seconds, before pushing him away, both my palms against his chest, then running to the train station over the street covered with rain, exultant, my body full of the dark feeling, not turning back, though I knew he would be looking.

  The dark feeling by then was a shimmering, liquid thing, like a pool of blood or a black opal. It was a kind of raging joy, is how I can best explain it. I sobbed while I waited for my train, but I wasn’t sad.

  On the way home the train was too bright and there was one other person on it, a woman with red hair and a long skirt, two spots of colour high up on the bones of her face, who met my eyes dead on and then stood up and walked down the train carriage to sit elsewhere, and I thought perhaps it was my weakness that had repelled her, that she had sensed it inside me and she wanted no part of it. Or maybe we were just two drunk women on a train and she wanted to be left alone.

  So I met my own eyes in the window instead, the sheer dark as we passed through a tunnel, and my face was pale and drawn, my hair was a mess, and when I got in I walked straight into my bedroom and lay down fully clothed, a thick taste in my mouth. And I knew very well what sort of woman I was, and I did not want to be that woman any more—not the sort you would move away from on the train, not the sort that would allow herself to be kissed by strangers, crudely, where the empty bottles from the night were set out in boxes—and I thought Please, I thought Please, please, please, like a charm, until sleep took me over.

  4

  Memories from the earlier parts of my life didn’t come to me during sessions with Doctor A, even when he dimmed the room and put his hands on my head like a charlatan. All I did was sweat until my eyes stung and my skin was clammy.

  Tell me about your journey to the city, Doctor A asked me, leafing through his notes. The journey where your life began.

  Nice try, it was my turn to say.

  I never spoke about that to him. Not even about the swooping of bats, their fingernail-scrape sound still just
audible to me back then. Not about watching a group of tiny frogs running across the road one early morning for a full ten minutes, my own survival suddenly thrown into perspective. I had to hold on to some things. They weren’t important to anyone but me. They contained no mystery to unlock, they were not clinically significant. They were just there.

  Do you ever think you might be too manipulative to treat? Doctor A asked, pleasantly, like I had a choice about seeing him. He met my eyes.

  I mean, who isn’t, I replied, equally pleasantly. This was the sort of rapport we had established. He took his glasses off.

  You seem unstable, he said. You are drinking too much because you are very unhappy. You know that the body possesses its own feedback loops. And you know that you’re driving them through your own negative actions. You make things worse and worse. And then what happens?

  You tell me, I said.

  Doctor A was in one of his stern moods. I wished he would be smiling and indulgent instead. I wished he would offer me one of the red-striped peppermints in the glass dish on the coffee table between us. The window was open a crack and I could hear traffic outside in the distance, a humming beyond preternatural stillness. He wrote down something on his pad. I watched the dictaphone as it spun, taking down every word I said, every word I had ever said to him in this light green room, and felt faint, suspended.

  My unhappiness is a long time behind me, I said. My unhappiness is a skin that I have shucked off.