The Drug line – Chapter 4

‘The Drug Line’ is a short story about a group of people forced to share their time together in a hospital queue. The bare hospital walls provide the setting for a display of some of the complex facets of love. Read Chapter 3 here.

He’s not here. For the first time Harry sets himself down at the front of the queue. Normally this would have been satisfying, but he can’t help shaking the feeling that the reason Matt is not here has nothing to do with his transport, but is rather a manifestation of all his misery in the last few days. In yesterday’s tiny sampling of a conversation it seemed to Harry as though Matt was sitting in the queue to get medicine for someone else, someone he obviously loved, someone he was about to lose. Maybe that someone was now lost.

He sits down and descends into a gloom like a battered plane landing on a lonely runway. From a distance the rest of the queue might even think he was Matt, sitting in a slumped position, head crumpled in his hands. Grant is not fooled: “Feel strange sitting first in the queue?”, he asks. Harry drags his head out of his hands and answers: “Back in the day I would have been chuffed, finally beating the young kid. But I don’t think this is one of those games where the good guy comes first and the bad guy comes second. This is one where a good guy loses. Loses something valuable.” Grant recalls Matt’s sadness over the last few days and begins to piece it together with Harry’s cryptic statement, starting to realise what kind of loss Harry means.

Sister Mary knows. She doesn’t even yell her usual ‘Next!’. It seemed that she was about to, but upon noticing the empty seat at the front of the queue she just kept quiet, and pretended to look at something on the sheet in front of her. There’s an air of sorrow lingering, almost as though Matt’s absence created a vacuum that sucked out all the hope from the drug line.

Harry shuffles to the hatch, without being called. Before Sister Mary can comment he takes a risk and asks: “Did he lose her?”. Harry is not even sure that Matt had been in the queue for someone else, he also couldn’t be sure that it was a severe situation, and he certainly couldn’t be sure that whoever it was had finally been lost. But he knew. They all knew. They had been in the drug line with each other for long enough. Time together not only breeds familiarity, but a deeper connectedness that only voices it’s existence when one of the connections is broken.

Sister Mary nods, lips pursed, frowning. “He must have. She’s been on her last legs for a while now”. Harry is not sure what to say. “I’m sure he’ll be ok”, he answers, his quivering tone betraying the shallow words. Mary just shakes her head. Her hand pauses on the script, and while still looking down she says: “She’s all he had left. How is someone that young going to take care of himself? He can’t even get a job yet. Somehow I don’t think he’s going to be ok.”

There’s nothing more to be said, so Harry just waits for his prescription, his thoughts poking deep into the locker where the knowledge of his own frail health has been stashed away. He’s not sure why he’s so afraid of dying, since he knows all too well the loneliness of living that Matt is about to experience. Yet something keeps him standing in the drug line, begging for the little pills that keep him alive.

He puts his life in his pocket and moves away from the counter, without a word to Sister Mary, completely lost in his thoughts. As he’s about to walk out the door down the steps to the bus stop he pauses, turns, and looks back on the drug line. By now Grant is at the counter, briefcase in one hand and coffee in the other, not looking as composed as usual. Mel is there too, but she’s completely vacant, just a body in a waiting room. The room is so quiet they might as well all be ghosts in a graveyard.

The silence is broken with the sound of Grant’s leather shoes tapping the tiled floor as he walks toward Harry at the door. As he slides past with barely a nod, a voice calls him to halt. It’s Harry, and his hand is on his arm. “I have some urgent legal business I need to attend to, any chance you can help me out?”. Grant ponders for a second, wondering why Harry would choose such a time for legal advice.  Eventually he nods: “My office is just around the corner”.

They walk down the steps and turn into the busy street, Grant still wondering why it took Harry so many days in the drug line to ask for his help, and whether this has any connection to Matt’s absence…