“I’m going to take the kids and try to find something. Okay? Joni, do you hear me? The kids are coming with me, okay?”
As I left the tent and gulped down fresh air, Peter threw back his head, and Joni’s song was swept away by the torrent of his pain.
Standing on a plant pot to reach the window, I could see the black shape of a body slumped across the reception desk in the waiting room. The telephone hung on its curly cable in front of a poster urging the elderly to get a flu shot. Before I could tell him to stop, Charlie flung himself in a shoulder charge against the surgery door. It withstood his scrawny assault. The double glazing kept the buzz inside, but the onyx blanket that stretched over the body shimmered as the lock clattered, bringing back the taste of bile, the memory of plump flies spattering my skin.
“Round the back,” I said. We gathered our tools and found a window at the rear of the clinic. I slammed the sharp end of the crowbar into the glass, but it bounced off the surface, ricocheting out of my hands. The clangor of echoing metal joined the din in my head.
“Let me try,” said Charlie, his voice even higher than usual, but he could barely lift the sledgehammer. I took it from him, and his hands flopped down and resumed twisting his jogging bottoms into knots. The sledgehammer bounced away, too.
I knew what I would have to do. We went back to the car.
“Get in, Charlie.” I opened the passenger-side door and waved him in. He stepped away and started banging the heels of his clenched hands against his thighs.
“No.”
“You have to wait here.”
“No.” His arms were a blur as he beat his fists on his legs.
“I’ll only be a moment.”
“Don’t go inside with the buzz!”
“I’ll be quiet so the flies don’t get me. That’s why I have to go on my own.”
“You’ll die, just like Peter!” His eyes were glazed with panic. “And then I’ll die too.”
“Charlie.” I crouched down and held both his hands to stop him from beating his own legs. “Look at me, Charlie, look at me with your eyes into my eyes. That’s it. Peter’s not dead. But he’s hurting, and I need to get him some medicine. I’ll be really careful. Now please stay here.”
Before he started up again, I stepped quickly over to the surgery door and busted the lock with the crowbar.
The buzz rose, more languid than I’d seen it before, and settled again without bothering me. But the smell was like nothing I’d known. Instinctively, I turned to run back outside, but Charlie was there on the pavement, twisting his trousers around his fingers and waiting to pounce. So I forced my gorge down and gave him a small wave to show that I was still alive, not overwhelmed by flies. Then I clamped my hand over my mouth and nose, and edged round the waiting room as far away from the body as possible.
The first closed door revealed a consulting room. I went inside and shut it behind me. In a cupboard over the small sink, I found some cotton wool balls, which I dabbed with hand sanitizer and shoved up my nose. I stowed some basic supplies in my backpack and managed to get into the next room through an interconnecting door. It was a mirror image of the first, except with a stethoscope, which I swiped. I cracked open the door into the hallway and, as expected, faced straight into the reception booth.
The woman’s swollen foot dangled an inch from the ground, a court shoe fallen away and a hole in the flesh-colored tights revealing gaudy orangey-red nails against blackened toes. I wondered if she’d just had them done to go on holiday. Had she missed salvation by a day? I fixed the elastic sides of a mask behind my ears and moved down the hallway.
There was a second waiting room at the rear. It opened into another consultation room that was kitted out with surgical equipment, giant insect-eye lights, and a store of scalpels and syringes. My backpack was getting full, but none of this was what I had really come for. Back out in the smaller seating area, though, I realized what people had waited for here: the dispensary.
The counter was shuttered, and the door, bolted, but my crowbar made short shrift of the security measures. I stepped inside. The walls were lined with cubbies and shelves, the piles of mostly white boxes and jars ordered but not labeled. I turned to the nearest pile: Epilim. Stacks of the stuff—Epilim syrup, Epilim tablets, Epilim coated tablets, Epilim controlled-release tablets in 200s, 300s, 500s. So much Epilim. I picked up a box, turned it round and round, but none of the several printed languages told me what it was for. I ripped the cardboard flap and dragged out the folded paper instructions: Epilim is a medicine used for the treatment of epilepsy in adults and children. Epilim: epilepsy. Of course. I stuffed the box and the instruction sheet back into the cubby.
There were dozens—no, hundreds—of other names, all as strange and exotic and meaningless as Epilim. I ran my hand over the boxes, like a blind person who never learned braille. I muttered their names aloud but still didn’t understand. When I turned, my backpack swept a row of glass bottles to the ground, where one smashed and scattered golden-yellow capsules across the floor. A wet pop beneath my boot, and I tasted a familiar tang on the air: cod-liver oil.
I’d wasted all this time and found cotton wool and cod-liver oil. My heart flipped in my chest, dragging the air from my lungs with it, and I grasped the counter for support. It was stiflingly hot in this tiny room. The green mask blew in and out with my panting. I flung it away so I could breathe.
I had to focus. Focus on pain relief, just pain relief. A pile of little plastic pots stood on the counter, the kind that nurses use to dole out pills. I picked one up, and it took me back to my first C-section, asking for pain relief and being handed a little pot of pink pills. “Hope it’s the strong stuff,” I had said to the nurse, who smiled her seen-it-all-before smile. “Ibuprofen,” she said. I felt belittled.
But it had done the job. Even now, it would be better than nothing. I focused my eyes on the shelves and my mind on the few words of this foreign language that I did speak: ibuprofen, paracetamol, codeine, pethidine. After a few minutes, I found bottles of pink liquid, as well as suppositories. Good, better, I coached myself as I packed them into my backpack. We can do this. Now for the strong stuff.
I scanned the shelves for any names similar to morphine. Nothing. Why didn’t they arrange the drugs in types—painkillers with other painkillers? It made no sense. I stepped round and round until the cod-liver oil was a slick under my feet. I turned once more and noticed a cupboard under the counter. Inside was a large safe. A printed and laminated sign stuck to the outside read, “All opiates locked in safe. Safe is alarmed at night.”
So that was that. At least the drug addicts were protected.