A thirteen-year-old girl collected her mother’s prescription from my counter every month for fourteen months, and every single time, before she walked away, she asked me the same question in the same words.
I am the pharmacist at Hollowell’s on Carraway Street. I have had my name over that door since 2011.
My name is Perpetua Dankworth-Ozoemena and I am fifty-six.
A child can legally collect a prescription for a parent. People do not know that, and it is true, and I have handed bags over the counter to children for twenty-nine years.
Usually they take the bag and they run. They do not want to be in a chemist’s. They want to be anywhere else.
This one did not run.
Her name is Saoirse Vandermolen-Achebe and she was twelve when she started coming.
Always a Tuesday, always between twenty past four and half past, which is straight after school.
She came in with her coat buttoned and she stood in the queue properly and she waited her turn even when the shop was empty.
And she would say her mother’s name and her mother’s date of birth, correctly, every time, without being prompted.
Then I would put the white paper bag on the counter.
And then, every single month, she would put one finger on the bag and she would not pick it up yet, and she would say:
“How many days is that?”
Not how many tablets. How many days.
The first time I thought she was asking about the dose, so I told her what it says on the label. One in the morning, one at night, twenty-eight of them.
She said, “So fourteen days.”
And I said no, love, twenty-eight of them, two a day, that is fourteen days, yes, but it is a monthly prescription so you’ll be back in four weeks.
And she looked at me the way you look at somebody who has just confirmed something unpleasant that you already knew, and she said thank you, and she took the bag, and she left.
Twenty-eight tablets. Two a day. Fourteen days of medicine in a box that has to last a month.
I should have stopped right there, in the first month, and I did not, and I have gone over why about four hundred times.
Because it is not an unusual prescription. Because the quantity is what the surgery sent. Because there are nine reasons that could happen and eight of them are innocent.
And because a very composed twelve-year-old in a buttoned coat does not look like an emergency.
Her mother is called Marisol and she is forty-one and she has an autoimmune condition that I am not going to name because this is her business and not mine.
I have met her three times in fourteen months. Twice in the first year. She is a tall, apologetic woman who says sorry about four times a sentence.
She works from home doing something with invoices and she does not drive any more.
Here is what I started doing instead of asking the real question.
I started answering the days question properly. Every month, while I had the bag in my hand, I would tell her the exact number.
“Twenty-eight. That’s fourteen days at two a day.”
And she would nod, once, like somebody writing it down.
In the April I noticed she had started arriving with a question of her own instead of waiting for mine.
