It’s A Chemical Life

Troy had been seeing another woman; she’d known it for some time but somehow Alice just couldn’t feel angry or hurt about it. It was those darn yellow pills, Uxorelax, that she took for marital problems, they always seemed to remove all her anger and sadness making her feel unnaturally chipper.

That was the way that normal people handled things these days, wasn’t it? If you had a problem you took a pill. There was a little chemical miracle cure for everything, that’s what they always said on the commercials; loneliness, heartache, dissatisfaction with capitalism; you name it and they had a pill to make it feel better.

Troy was on pills too; a whole rainbow of coloured capsules to keep him on an emotional even keel. Things had never been worse at work; the company he worked for was going into a massive meltdown, he said and yet, a few milligrams of Mellotril , twice a day, took away those silly headaches like the threat of redundancy and bankruptcy.

Their daughter, Sandra, took pills aswell, for teenage problems. Angsterol and Pubertin. They really took the grief out of parenting. It was hard to imagine how parents used to cope before the advent of the Mood Modification revolution.

Ofcourse, sometimes Alice suffered awful relapses. Like when she looked at her sons empty bedroom for too long and started to remember that day that she’d found him swinging by his neck from his bedroom ceiling, still clutching his old childhood security blanket in hands stiffened by rigor mortis, but the Traumamol that her GP had prescribed for her was really working wonders to remove the shock and the grief and the guilt.
If only Peter, her son, had agreed to take tablets like everyone else, she thought, he could have been happy but he’d told her that he didn’t want to live in a lobotomized world.

She remembered the days when he’d even tried hiding her pills from her and tried to talk to her about writers and artists who had had to go through pain and sadness to create art. He’d said there would be no more art if there was no more genuine emotion.

Peter had wanted to be a writer. He’d even shown her a story that he’d written, she remembered, it was called:

THE QUALITY OF MERCY

“What’s wrong with my freak, doctor?”, asked Mr Spurning the freak show owner, angrily, “Why won’t ‘The Human Fountain’ flow no-more?”.

“Well. I’ve done all the usual tests, Mr Spurning; prodded her and poked her with all the usual instruments and I’m afraid to say that your daughter, I mean your freak isn’t much of a freak anymore. Your goose won’t be laying any more golden eggs from now on”, said the doctor.

“Well, what the heck am I supposed to do about it , Doctor? I’ve tried beating the little runt and all sorts but she just won’t do as she’s told and I have gambling debts to pay off, Doctor. I need my little human fountain to flow again”, said Mr Spurning.

“It’s just what happens, Mr Spurning. In the rare cases that I have seen of this condition, there is only so much water that can come out before the freak dries up and can’t produce anymore”, said the doctor.

“Well, thanks for nothing!”, yelled Mr Spurning, seizing his little daughter by the wrist and dragging her towards the door of the Doctor’s office, “Some doctor you turned out to be”.

“Wait!”, said the Doctor, “I haven’t finished. There is one known cure. Something that’ll get her
water flowing again. If you’ll just get your daughter to sit down once more”.

Mr Spurning pushed his daughter down into the leather bound seat in front of the doctors desk,
“Now you do as the doctor tells you, you hear!?”, he said to his daughter, scowling meanly.

Then the doctor got out a small doll from inside an office cupboard and gave it to the girl to hold
and he smiled warmly as he stroked the girls hair gently and then the girl looked up at him and began to cry.

“There you are Mr Spurning”, said the Doctor, smiling cruelly, “Your human fountain is flowing again”.
----------------------------------------------

She’d only really glanced at the story, although, after Peters suicide, she’d kept it locked in a cupboard with other things he’d written.

She remembered saying to him, “Peter, if you only took pills then you wouldn’t be bothered anymore about whether there was art or not. You’d just be happy like me and your father”.

She remembered too, how he’d dragged her to one of those funny Emo clubs in South street where all the women dressed in black and wore black make up and got up on stage to cry or get angry.

She’d started laughing at them all and then the club staff had asked she and Peter to leave.

And now there were the nightmares too. “A normal side effect of the pills”, her doctor said. She had this recurring dream of being buried alive inside a box lined with something fluffy like cotton wool or feathers, deep under the earth and no one could hear her and there were no pills inside the coffin to take away her fear or her pain.

She stood in front of the bay windows of her living room and watched the department of social cleansing go about their daily rounds; picking up vagrants and undesirables from the pavement and putting them in the back of their big, blue armour covered paddy wagon. There were a lot of jobless and homeless people these days, she thought, but at least they had the free pills that the government handed out to numb their pain and their sadness.

“How were things at school today?”, she asked, smiling as she came out of the living room to greet her daughter who she had just heard come in the front door.

“Fuck! Mother!”, cried Sandra, sobbing when she saw her father lying on the hall carpet with a bread knife buried in his chest and blood dripping down the front of her mother’s PVC apron, “What the fuck have you done?!”.

“What?”, asked Alice, suddenly starting to shake as she looked down at the floor and remembered a bad dream she had had not long ago in which she had stabbed and killed her husband, “I don’t really remember”.

And, as the reality of her crime and of her situation crept in upon her head from all sides, Alice reached into the pocket at the front of her apron and pulled out a blister pack of Memerase tablets, that were designed to suppress unwanted, unhappy memories, ”It’s nothing a little pill can’t fix”, she said.