Doctor of Thessaly by Anne Zouroudi

Author:Anne Zouroudi [Zouroudi, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408821275
Amazon: 1408821273
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2011-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

Early evening brought the townspeople outside. Youths gathered by the new fountain, shouting like louts, shoving and cuffing each other, impressing the passing girls with stunts performed on old bicycles. Slippered housewives made their way to the grocer’s for small necessities – a tin of milk for coffee, a little sliced salami for supper – and stayed there half an hour, gossiping.

The streets and alleys grew dark, and the green cross over the pharmacy door was lit. Behind iron grilles, the window displays were visible in the shop’s fluorescent light, and for some minutes, the fat man studied an arrangement of relics from an earlier age of medicine: cornflower-blue syrup jars – Syr Marrubii, Syr Rhei, Syr Simplex, Syr Rhamni – and a run of hexagonal poison bottles arranged from large to small, all stamped ‘Not to be taken’. The right-hand window carried advertising: a photograph of a woman with glowing, unlined skin, and before the photograph, a pyramid of jars of face cream linked by fine strands of cobwebs, the jars’ sun-faded labels painted with long-stemmed roses.

Pushing open the pharmacy door, the fat man found himself at the back of a gathering of black-clothed women, all shortened and bent in some degree by age – bandy legged, or hump-backed, or stooping a little at the neck – as if bowing under the weight of their years. Behind a counter carrying a till and a small stand of wintergreen lozenges, the pharmacist’s face had grown red, and his thin hair stood on end where he’d run his hands through it. Now, he leaned forward with both hands pressed on the counter, as though set in defence against attack.

At the front of the gathering, the most elderly of the women held up a box of blood pressure tablets, along with her health-service-issued booklet of entitlement, validated and stamped.

‘Eight years, I’ve been taking these,’ she was saying. ‘You know it, and I know it. And now for lack of a piece of paper, you deny me this medicine which keeps me alive.’

‘The law,’ said the pharmacist, ‘is very simple: no prescription, no free medicine. You’re welcome to pay. I can’t break the rules; it’s more than my job’s worth.’

‘You’ll kill us all,’ came a querulous voice from the back of the gathering. ‘You sentence us to death!’

‘You could catch the bus to town and see a doctor there,’ said the pharmacist. ‘Come back with a prescription, and the medicine’s yours.’

‘All that way!’ objected the woman at the group’s head. ‘Look!’ She opened up the booklet, flicking through the pages of ink-stamps and signatures in the pharmacist’s own hand, the records of the prescriptions he had dispensed. ‘All these, you gave me. All I ask is another box of what I always have.’

Without warning, the pharmacist reached out, and grabbing the box from her, opened it and pulled out two blister packs of tablets, one part used and one untouched.

‘How many of these do you have to take a day, kyria mou?’ he asked.

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