Blue Ticket

by Sophie Mackintosh

  How are you feeling, how are you feeling? I said to myself. What is your mind doing?

  My heartburn was bad and I was longing to push my nose into wet, newly cut grass. Foods I had hated I thought of suddenly with passion, and foods I had liked I now despised. It was galling, to be so tricked about everything.

  I camped in the field, though I was not supposed to be there. I would sleep through the day and move at night, I decided. I would get better at this. The field was full of huge brown cows, milling around the far end with looks of great alarm. I picked up small rocks to throw at them but was too afraid of provoking a stampede, too tired to stay awake, so I let them be.

  And then night-time, before I knew it. Pooling dark inside the canvas. I lay on the hard ground listening to the heavy creatures around me. When I unzipped the tent, the air and grass were wet. In the distance, by moonlight, I could see mountains still. When I breathed deeply my lungs felt new, and this newness soaked into the rest of me. It was possible that every time I saw a mountain, even my thousandth mountain, I would be possessed by an involuntary gratefulness. It was enough to see it. To remember. With slow movements I packed up my things. The cows were doleful. They did not want to crush me to death after all. I touched one of them on the head, its soft ear. Goodbye, I said.

  Up the road there was a bus stop. I waited there for some time in the dark. One large bus passed but did not stop. The people on their own journeys, looking out of the windows, illuminated by reading lights above their heads like spotlights.

  Another bus came soon enough. It too was large, with high, plush seats that were worn and smelled of old sweat. North, the driver said when I asked the destination, which was good enough for me. An old man was sitting near the back so I sat in the middle, where it was darkest. I didn’t want to be near anyone.

  Soon the old man came and talked to me anyway, like I knew he would. He peered over the seat. I leaned against the window, away from him. My cheek wet on dirty glass, pretending to be asleep.

  You’re not sleeping, he said. He pressed one hand against the window behind me.

  My eyes closed, then opened. There were no lights to be seen, just countryside. A car overtook us, graceful as a deer.

  Don’t be rude, he said.

  I’m tired, I said. It’s late.

  Where are you going, he said. He smelled faintly, sweetly, of piss. In the darkness of the bus I could only really see the shadow of him behind me. I shifted slightly.

  I’m going to meet my husband, I said.

  He laughed. Husband, sure, he said.

  R. He’s an emissary, I improvised. I was in love with my made-up husband who could keep me safe. This tall and kind man trailing me across the country, saying come back to me, saying let’s be a family. Always I had taken pride in being alone and now all this, the soggy desire to be boxed in a house with people I was bound to. I tried to own this new desire the way I had owned others, but it was shameful to me.

  You wouldn’t be on this bus if you had a husband, he said. He tapped the pack with his hand. I know what you’ve got in here.

  I’m sleeping now, I said.

  I’ll keep your secret if you do something nice for me, he said. His hand moved to his belt buckle. I tried to evaluate the strength of my body versus his as he took a long drink from a bottle in a brown paper bag. Brandy? he asked, but I shook my head.

  Come on, he said, we don’t have all day. He fumbled with his zip; I heard the sound of it giving way, sensed the outline of what he held. I didn’t need to see it. He made a cooing noise, like a dove felled. I wanted to make a hard object from the flat of my hand and push it upwards into his nose, the way I had learned to break a man’s face, but I didn’t have it in me. I stood up and took my pack, walked down the aisle of the lurching bus to a seat nearer the driver. The man shouted, Frigid blue bitch! and then fell silent, otherwise occupied.

  I stood by the driver. Let me off, I said. I don’t care where, just let me off.

  You want to get off here, in the dark? The driver kept his eyes on the road. Two long hard beams of light running smoothly over tarmac.

  What did my friend do that was so bad? So bad that you want to be left here in the middle of nowhere?

  I could tell from the way the man was hunched over that he was still holding himself, even from several seats away. I was glad I couldn’t see it. Squirming, too-alive flesh. A fish or a plucked bird. Not R stretched out on the bed of the love motel, long and beautiful even under artificial light, my eyes and my hands, the taste of the beer on my lips. Everything good could be made ugly, it was inescapable.

  Let me off, I said. I’m not kidding.

  On your head be it, the driver said. He pulled over to a lay-by, idled the engine. Get out then if you’re going to get out, he said. He started to move the bus before I had made it off and I jumped on to the gravel, skidding, scraping the flesh from my knee. The two men were laughing at me, I could hear the laughing even with the doors closing. Go fuck yourselves, I shouted as the bus pulled away, which was not very brave of me because there was no way they could hear, no way they would care if they did.

  I kept walking. The backpack hurt my shoulders and in the dark there was the illusion of going nowhere, which might not have even been an illusion, but all I could do was put one foot after the other and see what happened. As I walked, I realized I was lonely. I wanted to tell someone about the violence bubbling under my skin, and to hear another person’s private desires in return, to find communion in that. To swim together in the depths of wanting, moving out from the land’s edge to somewhere else.

  And I thought of the baby, doing their own kind of swimming. My body was the only ocean they had ever known. I felt so protective when I thought about this that I could almost fall over. I wanted to curl my body into a soft sack of flesh and bury myself deep in order to keep safe for them. I wanted to emerge from the earth and know I had ferried them, perfectly, to the shore.

  9

  The sun was high in the sky by the time I reached the next town. I walked through the houses of the outskirts until the streets became small and winding, houses pressed close to each other, and then tasteful shops with ceramics in the window, bakeries, little bars with the shutters still down. At the heart of it I came to a large freshwater lake. I took my shoes off and walked across the lake’s beach, made up of small white pebbles, until I reached the icy water. I let it come up to my knees. It was perfectly still. The water was slate grey. The water was a kind of blue. I knew that blue was a relatively new concept in terms of colour, that for a long time we had not recognized or seen it, that colour sense was a gradual unveiling, and that being pregnant felt like that. There had been something in the world that my eyes had not picked up on, and now it was everywhere. I didn’t even want to see it, didn’t want my perception to have been so altered. I didn’t want to know that everything was trying to kill me. Strange, to be so truly vulnerable.

  This was the kind of place where mothers lived, where white-ticket women lived. They were somewhere nearby. I saw pairs of them walking together with their arms linked, no babies, net shopping bags filled with fruits and vegetables. In a shop I picked up a black maternity dress with yellow spots and a white leotard for a baby. Here, perhaps I could be who I wanted to be. I didn’t have to be a woman hounded off buses, a woman tricked into bathrooms, a drinker, a slut, a piece of shit. My hands skimmed over the shrunken vests, the socks like egg warmers or knitted thimbles, striped hats. I would not be sent away like I had been in the city, I would refuse it.

  Don’t you want to try it on? the woman at the counter asked. Her hair was done up in a complicated braid, her cheeks very pink. No, I said. She slipped them into a paper bag for me and I left at once, walking as quickly as I could. I looked around for emissaries, stretching their legs on a lunchtime walk or reading the newspaper at a table outside.

  In
a café up a side street a safe distance away, I ordered a pot of tea and sat outside, sunglasses on, pretending to read the newspaper. The news was all bad. The ashtray was full. The kind waitress came to empty it and to bring me my tea. Are you on holiday? she asked. I nodded. Oh, you’ve come to the right place, there is no place more beautiful than here, she told me, she was glowing with certainty, she didn’t even seem to notice my silence or the bad way I smelled or my jeans still rolled up and wet from the lake. I was performing motherhood the way I had performed adulthood, all those years ago. I was acting like it was something I deserved and could do.

  It didn’t take long before I saw a father with one of the large prams, the design slightly different here to the ones I saw in the city. He seemed harassed, in a rush. I tried to make myself invisible. The waitress ran outside and hailed him, pressed an offering of a small cake into his hand and then looked into the pram. Oh hello, beautiful, she said to the baby. Oh, aren’t you a lovely one.

  I went prowling for other fathers, for as many as I could find. They slipped around corners, moved through the aisles of shops. Some were tall and some were short, some were handsome and others less so, but all had the pram and all were accosted, by men and women, wherever they went, though not with the same energy as in the city, where families were rarer to see. I tried to hear the sound of the babies. I could not picture my own father pushing around a pram, but I knew that he must have. I wondered what kind of father R would make one day, if he would ever be one, if he would take the gifts reluctantly or hold the baby up for everyone to see with such pride that it was like he thought nobody had ever seen one before.

  One of the fathers had red hair and a beard. He reminded me of Doctor A; for a second I thought it was him. I found a coin in my purse and dropped it in his bag. Thank you, he said. Can I? I asked, conscious of my sweat, my unwashed hair. He pulled back the blanket a little reluctantly. The baby was asleep, swaddled like something you needed to unpeel. I wished to kiss her face but that would cross a line. Instead I touched her on the cheek, one finger. It was hard not to cry but I managed it.

  She’s really beautiful, I said. I smiled in what I hoped was a winning fashion, eyes wide, but I did not register to him beyond a mouth, a set of teeth. He was a father now, overheated and stressed out, and so by definition he could not be tempted. Thanks, he said, already looking to where he needed to go.

  I let them move onwards, waited before following a safe distance behind. It was difficult because every few minutes the father was required to stop so that the baby could be looked at, and it was harder to hide than it would have been in the city. All the buildings were painted shades of white, and some of them had ivy or honeysuckle dripping down.

  The father walked faster. He reached the edge of the town and then started on a pavement that led to the suburbs. It was riskier to follow him here; I lost my nerve, let myself fall back further, until the shape of him was tiny in the distance, the bag on his shoulder now full of coins and cakes and other offerings. I thought about what it would be like to pull him to the ground and press my body to his. I would seduce all the fathers and pummel them with my fists, and they would like it. I would crawl into the homes of the white-ticket women and overturn the beds where they and their babies lay, to be their nightmares, if I could not be them. I was vengeful and wanted it all.

  The baby, my own bad baby come from badness, was sucking the marrow from my bones. I pitched my tent on a patch of hard ground surrounded by trees, and there I slept away the ragged, compromised hours of the afternoon. In my dreams I saw the woman called Marisol, walking through fields of sunflowers, lying down next to me on the gravel, so real that I expected her to be there when I awoke, but she was not there, and my body was covered in thousands of tiny bruises where I had moved around on the ground, my injured knee was throbbing, and I understood in a way that felt new that my skin was nothing but a membrane holding in organic matter, that I could spill everywhere like a glass of water if anything wounded me.

  10

  The clean town and daylight weren’t for me. I needed neglected roads, patches of earth ripe with decay and mud where I could pitch my tent. In a roadside bar, between buses, I nursed beer mixed with lemonade and threw darts, practising my aim. I watched men come in and sit alone, couples unsteady on their feet, dancing with hands at waists, shoulders, faces. They were my favourite, they had eyes only for each other. It would have been easy to resent them for it, but one weak drink in and I became benevolent, like an angel, deciding to forgive them their happiness.

  I remembered comfort in bodies—comfort in my own and others’. Desire was a leveller. It put us on the same plane. Allowed forgetting and forgiveness. Into my beer I reminisced like an old man about mouth after mouth, about tucking the hair of a woman whose name I didn’t remember behind her ear so she could hear me better as I spoke into it, about pressing my shoulder into the arm of a man whose name I didn’t remember either and him not pulling away, the thrill of his complicity.

  You are made for this life and not the other, Doctor A had said to me once. Think about all the joy you let run through your fingers like it is nothing. The problem with you is that you don’t take advantage of your freedom in the way that you should. I mean, you could do anything. He paused. Almost anything.

  I believed, sometimes, that he had a point.

  As the dawn came up I made myself a bed with my sleeping bag among the grass and the leaves, sheltered and well away from the road, but without the tent. I wanted to remember what it had been like the first time. I wanted to be a natural part of the landscape. Fatigue dragged at me. Summer had arrived, I realized. I fell asleep in sunlight and woke up in it, still safe. I lay there and listened to the chirruping of insects, birds.

  Another bar that night. A man with tattooed wrists, feathering cards out on to wet red leather. Ace of diamonds. Queen of hearts. He smiled a gap-toothed grin. I rested my face on my interlaced hands, looked up adoringly, but when he was in the bathroom I left.

  I have blindly obeyed you, I told my body. I have followed you wherever you want to take me. Now what?

  Now, I don’t know, my body said back. Just wait.

  In the next bar, the crowd was more talkative, people tried to engage me in earnest, and so I just removed myself from the situation. I walked until it became light and then I slept on the ground and then I walked some more, and I thought I could live my life like this for a while at least, I didn’t really need much more—I could just go, I could be free. Except that, in a new way, I would never be free again. The terse thrill of remembering this, for it did not feel like being trapped in the way that my old freedom had.

  As I walked I couldn’t help but think, Nothing that bad has happened to you yet. Maybe it was all a lie. Maybe I had got away with it, from it, maybe they had realized there were bigger things to concern themselves with. In the parking area of a roadside restaurant I pulled stale bread from the large bins outside, and I remembered that it could feel delicious to rip at food that way, in the clear air, all teeth and hands. When I slept I kept my knife in my hand; I was no longer drowsy on waking, but alert. I was remembering.

  Perhaps the run of luck made me too confident. I know that when I passed a hotel as I walked one night in particular dark, my back killing me, my feet took me up the path towards it before I could check myself. What’s the harm. The woman on the desk looked me up and down and I did the same to her, defensively: the cheap red suit with puffed sleeves, her yellow hair teased and then brushed down again. The glint of her locket chain where it slunk invitingly around her neck. Sweat ran down inside my T-shirt. I knew without looking that my feet were bloody inside my shoes.

  Maybe you want to be caught, I said to myself as I followed her up the stairwell. Maybe Doctor A has always been right. Despite myself, there was a pang when I thought about him. I was still unused to living without the weight of his instruction. It would have
been good to be told how to feel. To be translated. The bed had a slippery pale green bedspread, cold satin. It was like lying in water. I pushed it off the bed and among the sheets I started writing Doctor A a letter using the hotel’s stationery set that started In some ways I have loved you more deeply than anyone, but I caught myself in time and ripped, flushed it down the toilet in shreds, horrified at what my heart was capable of, its deceitful electricity. In the minibar there were whisky miniatures. Medicinal, I told myself, unscrewing the top of one with my teeth and spitting the lid across the room. The liquid burned in my mouth. There was a telephone on the bedside table. I picked it up and dialled R’s number.

  Hello, I said. I tugged on the spiralled cord that transmitted my words to his. My breath reflected back at myself.

  Who is this? he asked.

  Who do you want it to be? I asked.

  I could hear a woman in the background. She asked, Who’s that?

  I don’t know what you want, he said.

  I just want you to put the phone down on the side and go about your evening so I can hear what you’re doing, I said. Will you do that for me?

  There was definitely a woman. R, who is it? she said.

  Who’s that? I asked.

  He breathed hard.

  She sounds nice. I bet she’s a white-ticket, I said, and then I punched the wall, lightly, just thinking about it, just knowing that I was right, that the experience of me would have driven him into the arms of someone docile and warm.

  I refuse to discuss that with you, he said. What was that noise?

  Nothing, I said, examining my knuckles, which were not even grazed.

  Look, he said. I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t know what you want me to say.

  I want you to say that you love me, I said. I want you to come and rescue me and be a family with me and the baby past the border. I think it might be possible, but only if you come now.