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 during 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.