Blue ticket: I was not motherly. It had been judged that it wasn’t for me by someone who knew better than I did.
Blue ticket: There was lack in my brain, my body, my soul, or something. There was a flaw I should not pass on. A warmth I was missing.
Blue ticket: My life was precious enough as it was. I wasn’t to be risked.
Blue ticket: Some called it a noble sacrifice, others a mercy.
It meant a different thing every time I thought about it.
Years were frenetic, then calmer. They ticked with the inevitability of a metronome, some fallow and some interesting. Things could happen to a blue-ticket woman the way they might not for a white-ticket. Spirit of adventure. In practice, life felt smaller than that expansiveness promised. In the dark night I stood in my kitchen, smoking, watching the lights of my neighbours go off one at a time. I no longer asked men the age of my father to hit me in the face or stayed up for three nights at a time. I lived a mostly quiet life. My impulses were not always as uncontrollable as they seemed. By now I knew broadly which ones could make me happy, and which would not.
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.