Stupefying Stories: July 2013 (Stupefying Stories II)

by Russ Colson

  Shortly after that, Bewley’s went bankrupt and the site closed. I see Watson, the estate manager, from time to time, spending the creditors’ money on cheap aftershave and flavoured condoms. Priyanka appeared after the firm went bust. I’ve seen Watson talking to her, standing too close, red-faced.

  She tells us that the Receivers keep her on to try to sell what they built. But she doesn’t seem to have shifted any and the site is still locked up. Today she stands at the counter holding a piece of paper. From a distance, it looks like a letter or a shopping list.

  “Don’t leave her there, it’s not like we’re busy,” I say to Ben. All our druggy patients have been in, gulped down their ‘script’—their methadone—and left. The school run is over and it’s too early for the geriatric bus-pass jockeys.

  Ben brings the paper back into the dispensary. “Have we got this? Can’t read it.”

  A private prescription, written on fancy letterhead paper from a psychiatric unit I’d never heard of, before Priyanka started bringing them in. Unlike the usual National Health Service computer-generated jobs it’s hand-written. Three different antipsychotic drugs.

  I nod. “It’s the same as she always has. Make sure you make a note of it. Then you can tell me how long the law says we have to keep the private prescriptions.”

  Ben starts writing. The last six entries in the book, stretching back over the same number of months, have been for Priyanka Wong. Identical prescriptions. Nobody else ‘round here can afford private medicine.

  From the dispensary, I watch Priyanka Wong standing in the shop, drumming her fingers on the counter. I pride myself on my bedside manner, garnered from years of working in old loony bins in grounds of their own, where inmates roamed free before the authorities closed the places down and turned the patients out to roam the streets. I put all my customers at their ease, even the psych ones. But today Priyanka looks right and left as if expecting someone to drop a giant butterfly net over her head. Ben types the labels and gets boxes off the shelves.

  “It takes practice, reading good old-fashioned doctor handwriting,” I tell him. “When I was your age, prescriptions were all hand-written. We had it tough. And they used Latin for the instructions a lot of the time. We had to do exams with pretend prescriptions, it was all ‘capiend hora somni’ and ‘fiat pulvis, pone in capsula’.”

  “What’s that? Something to go in your car?”

  Sometimes I worry about him. He doesn’t seem to have quite the right attitude. “Go on, show your ignorance. It means ‘let it be made into a powder and put in a capsule’. Fiddly business, pouring powder down a tiny funnel.”

  “I was joking, lighten up. But it sounds more like alchemy than science. How old did you say you were?”

  Priyanka Wong looks at her watch and mutters. She picks up pack after pack of medicine from the counter, looks at the label, and throws it down. Her movements grow more and more exaggerated until it looks like she is juggling boxes, one at a time. Reverend Call-me-Trev from the church across the High Street comes in and stands behind her at the counter, holding a National Health Service form.

  I give it to Ben. “Here you are, a little treat. An ointment you’re going to have to make by mixing two others together. Secundem artem. You can look that up and tell me what it means when I come back. I’ll go and calm Priyanka Wong down before she wrecks the shop.”

  Secundem artem is another blast from the past. It’s a way of saying ‘turn this crazy list of ingredients into something a patient can take’. Another translation is ‘time-consuming messy nuisance’. Ben can work that one out for himself.

  Priyanka Wong grabs the Reverend by the wrist.

  “You man of faith! You speak language of ancients?”

  He smiles. Pats the hand that has grabbed his.

  “I had to learn New Testament Greek when I was training, if that’s what you mean, but I’ve forgotten most of it. Sorry.”

  I go back into the shop. Priyanka Wong pushes her face into mine until our noses are almost touching.

  “You speak language of ancients?”

  I lean away from her and purse my lips. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” First Ben suggests I came out of the ark, now her. “Have a seat.” I point at the chair we’ve put next to the counter. “Won’t be long now, as the vet said when he bit off the puppy’s tail.”

  Call-me-Trev laughs. Priyanka Wong’s brow furrows. Her mouth turns down.

  “Really? You do that?” Agitation turns the trace of an accent into broken English.

  “No, no, forget it, just a silly joke. Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. How’s work? Business booming?”

  “What?” Priyanka gasps and her hands clench. This isn’t the effect I wanted.

  “I mean, are all the houses sold?”

  Priyanka breathes out and smiles. She flops into the chair.

  “You worried me a minute. But yes, nearly ready now. Only one to go. Last unit.”

  “Can I expect a sudden increase in church attendance?” Call-me-Trev asks. “With all those people moving in?”

  “I work with developer in America. We sell houses as time-shares. Americans haven’t worked out time-sharing schedule. So nobody can come yet.”

  Ben beckons to me with a pallet knife covered with ointment. “Tell Rev Trev I’ll be a while. This secundem stuff takes ages.” He shoves Priyanka Wong’s tablets into my hand. I hand them to her.

  “Once your last unit’s gone, I suppose you’ll be moving to the next site?” I ask.

  “If they send me. But I like to go home for a bit.” She pays for the prescription with a crisp new twenty-pound note. Then dips in her pocket and pulls out a piece of paper, screwed into a ball. “You do speak language of ancients. I hear you. I need this. Can you—”

  “You mean Latin? I don’t speak it.” I hand her change over. “Nobody does, do they? What about it, anyway?”

  The street door opens and six or seven people bundle in, all holding National Health Service prescriptions. Buggies fill the floor space. Kids paw at the bottles in the window display.

  “Never mind.” Priyanka Wong jams the paper ball into her pocket and, squeezing past the waiting customers, scurries out of the shop, shoulders hunched and head down.

  “OK, get going on the next one,” I say to Ben, ‘round the dispensary doorway. “We’d better keep our voices down. She heard us before.”

  I apologise to Call-me-Trev.

  “Think nothing of it, I’ve met people like her many a time,” he says, as he dumps an armload of bottles from our ‘all £1’ bin on the counter.

  “Yes, she tells us they’re sold and I go along with her. Keeps her calm. Usually.”

  Humour them, that’s another thing they used to say about people like Priyanka Wong. Not something they taught us at university, though.

  “She must be desperate to hang onto her job, poor woman,” he says. “Terrified her bosses will find out she hasn’t made a single sale since the company went bust. Though I’m not sure anyone would want to spend their holiday round here. But worry does that, makes you neurotic.”

  ¤

  The rest of the morning is taken up with the usual mix of prescriptions, low-value sales, and getting rid of the men with ‘love’ and ‘hate’ knuckle tattoos asking for the cough mixtures they think will get them high. The shop empties and Ben goes off for lunch before I can offer him one of my sarnies. I hope he’s not going to fill up on chips again.

  As Ben closes the door, Priyanka Wong slips into the shop and stands in the middle, holding that screwed up bit of paper in her hand.

  “People gone. You do this. Now!” she says, pushing it in my face.

  I spread out the paper. On it is written a formula, in Latin. A prescription for one pint of a tonic that was all the rage a hundred years ago. Mist. Ferri. c. Strych... I picture the dusty brown bottles that I never got ‘round to throwing out, untouched for years, on the shelf at the back of the dispensary. Iron perchloride. Strychnine
hydrochloride. Chloroform water. All there.

  “I don’t think I’ve got these. I’ll have to order them for you, if I can still get them. But this modern tonic is very good.” I scrabble for a bottle and pass it to her. “Why don’t you try it instead? Must taste better than that old stuff.” My stomach rumbles.

  “You do have what I need. I know it. I see. Bottles. Secundem artem.”

  “Okay.” I go back into the dispensary. You can’t see inside from the shop. Lucky guess on the part of Priyanka Wong, unless she can see ‘round corners. The hospital on the letterhead of her last prescription will tell me if the prescription is genuine. Maybe get her back in, modify her treatment. I pick up the phone, trying to muffle the click, but there’s just a continuous tone from the other end.

  “I think you find their phone not work.” Nothing wrong with her hearing. “Come back and I tell you why I want. Then you help me.”

  She takes off her glasses and I look into her eyes, crimson—an albino, as I thought—but glowing as though lit up from inside. She doesn’t look like any albino I’ve ever seen.

  “You probably tell I’m not from ‘round here,” she says. “I come from a galaxy far, far away. Database tell me that how you describe.”

  “Right.”

  She’s madder than I thought. Barking mad. Best to humour her. Don’t break her world view. Don’t know what she’ll do if she gets upset.

  “It true. Listen. I’m sales rep for interstellar transport. Come to your planet by mistake. Crash-landed. Had to invent cover story while I fix my ship. Hide on building site. Chose two most popular earth woman names in database. Clever, no?”

  “No.”

  She frowns. “You say I’m stupid?”

  “No. I mean, yes, it’s clever.”

  “Engine mended. Use bits of machines builders leave. But now need fuel. Can make from earth medicines.”

  “What, all that stuff you had on prescription?”

  “Yes.” A consistent world view, if a crazy one. “But a shock!” She hits her forehead with a clenched fist. “It not work. I need ferri chloridum and strychninae hydrochloridi as well. And chloroformum. I find in database, in language of ancients. You do. I pay.” She pulls out a wad of banknotes and hands me another brand new twenty. I don’t ask where she got them.

  “You like this money? Mr. Watson the builder does. He found me building my ship. Said I could stay on the site if I gave him notes each week. He calls me his little money tree. But database tell me it doesn’t grow on trees. I’m—how database put it?” She frowns, and looks upwards, cupping her chin in her hand. “Yes, victim of my own success, because he like it so much he want fifty thousand. If I not give, he call police.”

  “What? That’s criminal. You’re a victim alright. You should get the law onto him.”

  She shrugs. “It’s OK. I say come back later. There plenty more where that came from. Database show me how—”

  “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know,” I tell her, putting my hands over my ears. She stops. I lower my hands. “You’ll have to hang on a bit for this prescription,” I tell her. “You’ve copied this straight out of an old book. I can’t give you a pint of it. The nearest I can get is half a litre. And see those squiggles here?” I point at the prescription. All the units are in minims and drams, the sort of thing you used to see listed on the back of exercise books when I was a kid. “We went metric years ago. I’ll have to look for a conversion table.”

  Anything to get rid of her. All this humouring is wearing me out. But I don’t suppose there’s any harm in giving her the stuff, unless she swallows the lot in one go.

  “If you can’t find, I ask database,” Priyanka Wong, or whatever her name really is, calls from the shop. She reaches in her pocket. “Look! Better than Blackberry. Better than iPhone. Buttons not needed.” Something grey and heart-shaped sits in the palm of her hand. There’s a screen at the top, glowing red like her eyes. She raises the screen to her forehead, lowers it. A face like hers appears, speaking in a foreign language I don’t recognise. I stare at it.

  “You like? This is old version. New one send answer-voice straight into your head. But this is OK, it tell me 10 drams are 36.966911953 millilitres. You measure.”

  “I think I’d better work it out for myself.” Whatever else the powers that be end up hauling me over the coals for, it’s not going to be mistakes with arithmetic.

  The book with the table takes five minutes to unearth, stuck at the back of the shelf behind the formularies. If she wants this medicine again, I’ll get Ben to make it.

  I don’t know about alchemy, but when I’ve finished it doesn’t look like anything has been turned into gold. I hold the beaker up to the light. The mixture inside is the tawny colour of an early morning urine sample and looks about as appetising. I pour it into a bottle and label it ‘Space Ship Fuel’ to keep her happy, contravening all sorts of pharmaceutical regulations in the process, never mind ones about forged prescriptions, counterfeit banknotes, and money laundering. If you’re going to humour someone, you might as well do it completely.

  I can’t bring myself to call the police. She’d never be fit to plead. I won’t be the one who gets her sectioned for a psych assessment. And Watson would wriggle out of it once that happened. Anyway, that stuff wouldn’t burn if you tried to set light to it, so where’s the harm? I don’t suppose she’ll grass me up to the authorities. And if it helps her get away from Watson...

  I hand the medicine over. She grabs it, opens the door and runs into the street.

  ¤

  Half an hour later I finish my lunch and the shop fills with customers. Where does Priyanka Wong really come from? I can’t help thinking about those eyes. I tell myself not to be stupid, screw up my own eyes, and make a wish for an uneventful afternoon. You can keep your interesting times.

  Ben comes in.

  I ask him where you can get a hands-free phone that knows what you’re thinking.

  “What, predictive text?”

  “No, sort of reads your mind.”

  Ben stares at me. “You feeling OK, Jane? You look like you pissed yourself last week but only found out yesterday.”

  “Well, someone’s taking the piss. But I’m not quite sure who. Or where they’re taking it. Wish I’d gone out at lunchtime like you did. Where’d you go?”

  “To the Badger and Bushel for a swift half. Alcohol-free, you needn’t look at me like that. Had a game of pool. Got all the goss about the customers. You know that woman who’s always asking for plastic spoons? Well—”

  “Don’t tell me. Unethical.”

  “Okay, but here’s something really choice. Watson came in—”

  “Don’t talk to me about that bastard.”

  “Why, what’s he done? Run off without paying for his strawberry condoms?”

  Maybe I should go to the police. And tell them what? “He...I’m not sure, really.”

  “Barman said a loan shark’s after him. He was edgy as hell. I dropped my cue and he jumped like he’d been shot.” He nudges me. “Talk of the devil, here he comes now. Probably wants something for his nerves.”

  Watson forces his way past Ben into the shop. He gazes at the condom display.

  “I haven’t got your usual ones,” I say as he starts to speak. “They’re out of stock at the warehouse. It’s a supply-chain thing. And I sold the last bottle of your perfume yesterday.”

  “Not much of a manager then, are you, Janikins?” He picks up the aftershave testers and sniffs them.

  Ben stays in the open doorway, facing the street.

  “Don’t do that,” I say. “It puts the customers right off.”

  “No, look, there’s something going on down there. Lots of flashing lights. And smoke.”

  Sirens blare as a fire engine rushes past. I follow Ben’s gaze down to the end of the High Street. Blue lights flash through the tawny-tinged clouds billowing up from the wasteland.

  An old lady sidles past him and holds out
a wodge of prescriptions, like a conjurer asking me to pick a card. “Building site’s on fire. Kids, I expect. Little buggers.” An ambulance screeches to a stop behind the fire engine. “Wonder if anyone was in there? I’ll go and have a dekko. You’d better make some hot sweet tea.” She goes outside and, raising her hand to her brow, squints into the distance.

  From the doorway I smell the fumes swirling and roiling over the site. I’m not entirely surprised when, from the choking smoke, a plume of flame shoots upwards. At the top, miles away, I catch sight of something metallic sparkling in the sunlight like an arrowhead, shooting through the clouds.

  Watson knocks me into the doorframe as he pelts past me out of the shop and down the street.

  “I don’t think there’ll be anything to see,” I call after him. “And I think you’re going to have to find yourself another money tree—now that the last unit’s gone.”

  Judith Field was born in Liverpool, England and lives in London. She is the daughter of writers, and learned how to agonise over fiction submissions at her mother’s (and father’s) knee. She has two daughters, a son, a granddaughter and a grandson. Her fiction, mainly speculative, has appeared in a variety of publications in the USA and UK. She speaks five languages and can say, “Please publish this story” in all of them. She is also a pharmacist, freelance journalist, editor, medical writer, indexer and belting singer. She blogs at millil.blogspot.com.

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