by Kevin Brooks
The very worst of my fears, the thing I dread more than anything else, is the fear of fear itself. It’s a truly monstrous thing, like a howling demon whirling around inside me, an insatiable beast that keeps getting bigger and bigger all the time . . . bigger, faster, stronger, hungrier. It feeds on itself, so the bigger it gets, the more it needs to eat, and the more it eats, the bigger it gets . . . and if it isn’t kept under control, it can end up dragging me, screaming, to the very edge of my sanity.
Moloxetine helps to keep the beast at bay. I know it’s still there. I can hear it sometimes, a distant low growl, and every now and then I can taste the foul odor of its demonic breath creeping into the back of my throat. But as long as I keep taking my fear pills — six a day at regular intervals, regardless of how I’m feeling — the beast doesn’t get any closer. But if I’m late taking a pill, or I completely forget to take one — which usually only happens when I’m feeling so (relatively) good that I can’t (or don’t want to) have anything to do with not feeling good . . . when that happens, the beast comes back with a vengeance.
It’s as if it’s there all the time, skulking around inside me, locked in a cage of Moloxetine’s making, just waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting for its chance to escape and come after me. And if the Moloxetine begins to wear off for any reason, the lock on the cage begins to weaken, and the longer I go without the drug, the weaker the cage becomes — the lock cracks and crumbles, the door swings open . . .
The insatiable beast is set free.
Which is why it’s so important that I never run out of pills.
Because if I do, I have to face the beast.
“It’s coming, Ella. It’s getting closer. I can smell its breath.”
Me too.
“It stinks.”
It’s only a smell, Elliot. It can’t hurt you.
“Yeah, but the beast can hurt me. It’s hungry. I need to put it back in its cage before it’s too late. I need the last pill, Ella. I need to take it now.”
Silence . . . the silence of Ellamay’s thinking.
Then, All right. Take it. We’ll just have to hope that we find Mum and Shirley sooner rather than later.
“And that they’ve got my prescription.”
Yeah.
I take the pill bottle from my pocket, shake it
like this
then I unscrew the cap and carefully tip the last remaining pill into the (slightly cupped) palm of my hand.
Make sure you don’t drop it, Ella says.
“Yeah, right . . . like I hadn’t already thought of that myself.”
She gives me an imaginary slap on the back of my head.
“Hey! I almost did drop it then.”
Sorry.
I pop the pill in my mouth and swallow it dry.
Bye-bye for now, Mr. Beastie . . .
Bye-bye.
“She’s left it running,” Dake said.
“What?”
“The car . . . she’s left it running.”
He was right, Jenner realized. Clouds of blue-gray exhaust smoke were still chugging out into the icy cold air, and as Jenner wound down his window, he could hear the low rumble of the idling engine.
He switched his attention to the mother, watching her as she opened the front door, shook the snow from her coat, and went inside. Jenner waited, staring hard at the still-open door.
“She’s left the door —”
“I know.”
There was no mistaking the signs. Leaving the car running, leaving the front door open . . . she wasn’t home for good. She was just stopping off for some reason. And any second now, she’d be coming back out and getting back into the car . . .
Jenner looked at his watch.
It was 12:31.
“All right,” he said, opening the car door. “Let’s get this done.”
It happened like this.
I have a renewable prescription for my fear pills, which basically means that instead of having to make an appointment with the Doc every time I need more Moloxetine, Mum or Shirley just hands in a duplicate prescription slip at the pharmacy in town. The pharmacy then sends it to the Doc’s office to be authorized, a doctor signs it (not necessarily the Doc), then it goes back to the pharmacy and they get it ready for collection. Each time it’s picked up I get a new prescription slip for another month’s worth of Moloxetine, and three weeks later, the process starts all over again.
We have to allow two working days to get the prescription, and we always put the request in at least a week before I’m due to run out of pills, so even if there is some kind of holdup, I still have enough Moloxetine to keep me going.
On the day before Christmas Eve (Thursday), I had six pills left of my last prescription, and another full bottle that Mum had picked up the week before. So I had more than enough pills to get me through Christmas and into the New Year, and there shouldn’t have been anything to worry about. And there wasn’t . . .
Until I opened the new bottle.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and I was in my bathroom, taking my third pill of the day. While I was there, I thought I might as well transfer the last six tablets to the new bottle. So I took it off the shelf, opened it up, and was just about to empty the old bottle into it when something caught my eye. The pills . . . the pills in the new bottle . . . they didn’t look right. I looked closer, peering into the bottle. The pills in there were small and yellow, like Moloxetine, but they weren’t quite the same. They were just a bit too small, a bit too yellow.
Unless . . .
Unless.
Maybe the pills had been redesigned. Maybe the company that makes Moloxetine had decided it was time to give them a new look. It was possible, wasn’t it? It didn’t make much sense to me — what’s the point of redesigning a pill? — but it wasn’t out of the question.
I looked at the label on the bottle. I couldn’t make out the writing at first because my hand was shaking so much — as was the rest of me — and the only way I could read the label was by putting the bottle down on the counter beside the sink and leaning in close to it.
The wording on the label was exactly the same as it always is.
168 Moloxetine 50 mg Tabs
Take ONE six times a day
I picked up the bottle again and shakily tipped out a couple of pills onto the counter. Now that they were out of the brown glass bottle it was even more obvious how different they were. The yellow was totally wrong. And although they were only a bit smaller than they should be, their overall shape was nothing like my usual pills. My usual pills are kind of saucer-shaped. These were much flatter, like little disks.
I was still clinging to the possibility that there was nothing to worry about, that these pills were just the same old Moloxetine with a brand-new look, but even as I leaned down over the counter for a really close look at the pills I’d tipped out, I knew I was just clutching at straws.
I could feel the truth inside me, and it didn’t feel good.
And when I read the brand name printed on the new tablets, my gut feeling was confirmed.
Mectazone, it said.
Not Moloxetine.
Mectazone.
I straightened up and took a few steadying breaths, trying unsuccessfully to control my racing heart, then I went over to my desk, opened my laptop, and googled “mectazone.”
Mectazone, Wikipedia said, is a proton pump inhibitor that decreases the amount of acid in the stomach. Mectazone is used to treat symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux disease . . .
I didn’t know what a “proton pump inhibitor” was, and I didn’t know what “gastroesophageal reflux disease” was either, but it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference. The only thing that mattered was that these pills, all 168 of them, weren’t Moloxetine. I’d been given the wrong prescription. Which meant that I only had six fear pills left.
Six . . .
Enough to last me until this time tomorrow.
I could feel it now . . .
Deep inside me.
I could feel it beginning to stir.
Mum couldn’t believe it when I told her what had happened.
“They’re supposed to check it, for God’s sake,” she said, glaring at the bottle in her hand. “In fact, it’s supposed to be checked twice, by two people. Look . . .”
She showed me the label, pointing out two little boxes in the top right-hand corner. One was marked DISP, the other CH. Both boxes had been initialed; both sets of initials were different.
“They’ve both initialed to say they checked it,” Mum went on, getting angrier by the second, “but they can’t have, otherwise they would have spotted the mistake.” She shook her head again. “It’s unbelievable . . . it really is. I mean, what if you hadn’t noticed? What if you’d started taking the wrong medication? God knows what could have happened . . .”
She was right, of course. It was unbelievable, and it was perfectly natural for her to be angry. But one of the things about fear that makes it so powerful is that it totally overwhelms everything else — other feelings, other emotions — and although I was angry too, my fear was a hundred times stronger. The fear of running out of pills. The fear of fear itself. The fear of the beast.
So all I cared about then — as Mum carried on ranting and cursing — the only thing I was thinking about, was getting more Moloxetine.
I had six pills left.
It was Christmas Eve tomorrow. After that, the pharmacy would be closed for two days. If I didn’t get a new prescription by this time tomorrow . . .
No.
It was too gut-wrenching to think about.
“Mum?” I said.
Her eyes were still burning with anger as she turned to me, but almost immediately she recognized the look on my face — the look of fear — and she knew at once what I needed her to do.
“I’ll call the pharmacy right now,” she said. “We’ll get this figured out, okay?”
“Right,” she said, after she’d called the pharmacy, “I’ve spoken to the senior pharmacist, and everything’s all right. She was very apologetic about the mistake, and they’re going to give us a new prescription for Moloxetine.”
The snarl of the beast immediately began to fade.
I could still hear it though.
Just as I could hear the slight hesitation in Mum’s voice. It sounded to me like there was a “but” or a “however” coming.
And I was right.
“The only thing is,” Mum went on, “the pharmacy has to physically see the wrongly issued bottle of pills before they can give us a new prescription. Which means I’m going to have to go down there this afternoon.”
“Yeah, but you’re going to have to go down to pick up the new prescription anyway, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes . . . but not today.”
I frowned. “Why not?”
“They don’t have any Moloxetine in stock. They checked with the other local pharmacies, but none of them have any either. So they had to put in an emergency order for it.” Mum paused, giving me a worried look. I could feel the blood draining from my skin, and I guessed she could see it. “It’s okay, love,” she said, putting her arms around me. “It’ll be there first thing tomorrow morning.”
Yeah, but what if it’s not? I couldn’t help thinking. What if the delivery van gets stuck in the snow or breaks down or something? What if the driver gets sick, or the van crashes? What if I don’t get my pills tomorrow?
“Everything’s going to be fine, Elliot,” Mum said, quietly but firmly. She put her hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye. “I know this is really hard for you, but you will get your prescription tomorrow. You have enough Moloxetine for today, don’t you?”
“Yeah . . .”
“And enough for tomorrow morning.”
I nodded.
“Trust me,” she said. “It’s going to be all right. Okay?”
I nodded again.
It was all I could do.
Whenever Mum has to go out, she normally asks Shirley or the Doc to stay in the house with me. But that afternoon, they were both unavailable. Shirley was in York, doing some last-minute Christmas shopping, and the Doc was out of the country. Once a year, he does volunteer work overseas, providing medical care wherever it’s needed. This time he was helping out in a refugee camp in Lebanon. He usually stays away for at least a month, so he wouldn’t be back until the end of January.
“I’ll be okay on my own, Mum,” I told her.
“Are you sure?”
“You won’t be long, will you?”
She shook her head. “Half an hour at the most.”
“I’ll be okay.”
I stayed in my room while Mum drove down to the pharmacy to show them the wrong bottle of pills.
I wasn’t okay.
I could feel the beast pacing around in its cage now.
Its moment was coming.
It was ready . . .
Ready and waiting.
In twenty-four hours, it would have me.
I couldn’t think about it. All I could do was lie on my bed, curled up into a ball, with Ellamay curled up beside me.
I wasn’t too bad for the rest of the night. When Mum came back from the pharmacy, she assured me again that my prescription would be there first thing in the morning, and as long as I forced myself to believe her — and forced myself to ignore the part of me that couldn’t believe her — I just about managed to keep the worst of the sickening fear at bay. That’s not to say that I didn’t feel terrible, because I did. I was fear-sick all the time. Everything hurt. My head was a mess. I was all cramped up inside . . .
But I was managing.
Just about.
I was coping with it.
At just past midnight though, when I was getting ready for bed, everything suddenly caught up with me.
I was in the bathroom, and I’d just taken my last fear pill of the day. Before putting the bottle back on the shelf, I carefully tipped out the remaining pills and counted them. I’d already counted them at least a dozen times, so I knew exactly how many were left, but I also knew that if I didn’t count them again, I wouldn’t be able to rest.
So I counted them.
One, two, three . . .
Three.
I don’t know why it happened at that particular moment rather than at any other time, but it did, and it was awful. A sudden pain gripped my belly and a lurch of nausea welled up inside me. As I bent over the sink and threw up, the knot of pain in my stomach got worse, twisting and tightening like a belt of barbed wire, and when I heaved again — barely bringing anything up — it hurt so much that I doubled over and fell to my knees, and for the next few minutes, I just knelt there on the floor and retched, emptily and agonizingly, over and over again. The sheer strain of it sent a dizzying surge of blood to my head that made the room spin around and around, and when the retching finally stopped, and I tried to stand up — irrationally thinking it’d make me feel better — the floor tilted beneath my feet, and I staggered backward and stumbled over, cracking my head against the wall.
The next thing I knew, Mum was calling out to me from the other side of the bathroom door.
“Are you all right in there, Elliot? Elliot? Can you hear me? Is everything all right?”
“Uh, yeah . . .” My voice was a feeble croak (and the back of my head was throbbing like hell). I cleared my throat and tried again. “Yeah, I’m okay, Mum . . . I just . . . I won’t be a minute, all right?”
An hour or so later, as I lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, I tried to picture the moment tomorrow morning when Mum would come back from the pharmacy and put the bottle of pills in my hand. I tried to imagine the feel of the glass, the rattle of the pills as I shook the bottle
like this
and the familiar sharp clack as I unscrewed the plastic top.
But no matter how hard I tried, willing the feelings to come to me, I just couldn’t do it.
> As I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, I could hear the mocking laughter of the beast.
Her name was Kaylee Adams. She was twenty-one years old, and she’d worked at the bank since leaving school. She’d met Jenner a few months ago in a local pub. Her friends had warned her to stay away from him — he was a villain, a crook, he’d done time in prison — but that was precisely what Kaylee found attractive about him. She liked “bad boys.” She liked flirting with danger. She liked the thrill of it all.
The only thing Jenner liked about Kaylee was the fact that she worked in the bank. He didn’t find her particularly good-looking, or even good company, and he positively despised her pretentious attraction to him. He knew exactly what he was to her — a bored girl’s plaything — and although that sickened him, he was happy to take full advantage of it.
Kaylee had told him all about Gordon, as she always (sneeringly) called him. She’d told Jenner that although Gordon was almost thirty years old, he still lived at home with his mother, and she still treated him like a little boy.
“She’s always calling him at work to ask him stupid questions,” Kaylee said, “like what he wants for dinner, or did he remember to take his scarf and gloves with him this morning, stuff like that . . . it’s pathetic.”
Maybe it is, thought Jenner, but it’s a lot better than having a mother who was so messed up on drink and drugs when you were a baby that she regularly forgot to feed you, and quite often didn’t change your nappy for days, and didn’t even put up a fight when social services finally took you away from her . . .
“What about the father?” Jenner asked Kaylee.