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An Incident in the Dispensary

A Short Story by Andrew Low

It had been a hard winter. Snow had blocked the roads to the town on several occasions. Jamie could afford to smile now, with the promise of spring in the air, but it had been cold and miserable, especially when the pharmacy's heaters had packed up. It was colder up here in the hills compared to the coast. Colder, as they had told him, and definitely more cough mixtures for the country folks' horses.

Another summer was just around the corner. He studied the pear tree at the back door of the dispensary as he left the building. There would soon be signs of life on its branches. There was no point in complaining about the weather now. The evening was light and he felt full of hope.

He enjoyed this time of day, the work over and the accounts and invoices all finished. He looked at the hills stretching into the distance, trees and fields all quiet as the day drew to its close. He forgot at that time the niggling relationships in the company that often bugged him; the two counter assistants who were ever ready to belittle his knowledge and the memory of his boss's recent unflattering assessment, which could weigh a bit on his soul. Not everything could be sweetness and light, he told himself philosophically, as he walked away.

Driving back home he reviewed the day and his situation in his mind. He basically enjoyed the job, the customers were friendly and the journey to and from work was short and scenic. In fact the countryside charmed him. Now he let its gentleness soothe away the hard edges of the day. He went with the flow of his thoughts, deliberately banished customers and their questions and concentrated on the balmy evening. He would meditate a little at home, using the techniques of Sahaja yoga and the picture of the spiritual mother Shri Mataji. Then he'd address the rest of the evening. Maybe he'd take in a walk with his partner, down to the river or along to the farm on the edge of the village where they lived.

There was, however, one thing that Jamie could never consciously dismiss from his mind. He silently acknowledged it but considered as something strange or fragile in a locked cabinet or chest. He never forgot he held the key, but he seldom used it to revisit these memories of a dark and traumatic past.


It was the experience of his breakdown soon after college when several events had happened all at the same time, including the death of his father and a bitter split-up with a girlfriend. He had broken mentally, become a quivering wreck really, and heard voices in his head and exhibited what the doctors called unusual symptoms. It made him embarrassed to recall his twitching face and muscles in his neck, so he consigned it to the past.

The remembrance of it was like a sad time if he chose to summon it up, but he chose to concentrate on more harmonious areas of his life, his present job, the companionship and love of his wife, the Sahaja yoga, the social occasions with a few friends, books, cinema and all the minutiae of a blithe existence. Let the past rest forgotten.

The evening was uneventful; they walked to the farm then ate a meal in quietness. He was grateful for the rest and presence of his partner before the next day at the pharmacy.

It was the next day that it happened. It wasn't a small dispensary error he made, one he could easily forget, and the telephone call from the hospital brought the news. He had dispensed the wrong item, confusing two similar drug names from two physically close shelves in the dispensary, and the result was one of the patients had been admitted after collapsing on a pavement. She'd be okay, they told him as he listened with numbed feelings, but he should record the incident and inform the appropriate authorities. It was a devastating blow and it came out of a clear blue sky.

The mistake would have passed without much further comment in a normal situation. He apologised sincerely to the husband of the lady (the patient herself being still on the ward) and reported the details to the head office of the group of pharmacies. Jamie knew that these things happen. He was deeply saddened and genuinely sorry but he knew he must continue the job as usual.

Perhaps he wouldn't have broken down again if it hadn't been for the two ladies on the counter. They took the opportunity to bear down on him and twist his tail. He was guilty, he couldn't deny that, and the two ladies knew it. It was a silent subtle campaign, intended to inflict maximum misery. The target and victim was Jamie, but his fate, though doubtless miserable, was not one of total condemnation.


A pharmacy in early spring from the point of view of those who work there is not really that much different from a pharmacy in winter. Sure, in winter there are more coughs and colds and the summer means hayfever, sun lotions and insect bites, but basically the prescription mill wheels just keep turning. People just keep coming from the doctor's surgeries with prescriptions to order and dispense.

Jamie knew a lot of the job was not intellectually demanding, but it did require concentration and it could be taxing at busy times.

It was when he turned round from the dispensing bench to look at the two counter ladies sorting out some change for the tills that something deeply unsettling struck him. It was just a prosaic event in the workday life of the pharmacy but something sinister entered his soul “Oh, Dawn, look at this”, Judy had said. It was just the way she said it that sent a chill into his heart. Look at what, he thought? Rationally he knew Judy might only be referring to something in the change box. Instead a panic gripped him and he thought the pair were making an elliptical remark about the dispensing error. That was the beginning of the nightmare, and he knew that further down the road might lie irrational fear of hostility and persecution. He dreaded the fear of the old paranoia. If only fate would spare him.

Jamie focused his mind quite well on the prescriptions, answered the calls to the counter to give advice, but he was conscious that “they”, the two counter ladies and maybe some of the customers soon, might be out to get him. The memory of the locked past banged on the cabinet door. He braced himself. This need not be a place of martyrdom; some sort of alter where the sharp swords of hurtful words and hostility would hack him down. He determined that.

When he first mistook a customer's innocent request or a cough mixture for a coded attack against him for his dispensing error, he knew things were going to be tough. The customers, coughing as he spoke, had described his cough, dry and irritating, and simply asked for something to help, and on one level Jamie knew it was just a routine sale. In his fear her mistook it for a mean trick, a cloak and dagger thrust behind a mask of innocence. Maybe it had been a cough intended to repress and embarrass him. Jamie thought. Maybe the customer had heard about the error.

How does one defend oneself in a situation like this, Jamie asked himself. He imagined a pernicious stain slowly spreading on his soul. What of his reputation? What would people say of him? He was dazed and confused.


All day the prescriptions continued their relentless march. Jamie had been full of optimism and hope only the day before, now suddenly things had changed and looked bleak. He began to lose his focus and a lot of he general chitchat of the staff just washed over his head. He was still insightful though, and his immediate thoughts were on how he could responsibly ask for some time away from the pharmacy. He suspected an outrageous attack on his feelings, and he questioned the wisdom of staying in the place if he were to face hostility or criticism.

He heard laughter on the counter; a sort of silvery tone was in it, thin and high. Was that directed at him? By now, Jamie knew he wasn't thinking straight. What was that odd look on a customer's face? Was that man actually staring through the hatch at the spot where he dispensed the medicines and had made the mistake?

He could feel a physical nausea incubating inside now, a visceral fear. Dawn and Judy seemed to be leading a great life on the counter. It may well have been illusionary but they seemed to be whispering about his error to customers. He couldn't distinguish all the words, but he could definitely hear them talking, very near at the counter. Snatches of conversation reached his ears: “oh, yes, very ill…” or “yes, she had to go to hospital”, or “my, wasn't it quite a mistake, quite a big one really”. He was sure he heard Judy spit out, “He shouldn't be so careless”.

The pressure of the thing was escalating remorselessly in his mind now, up and up. Everything he heard and saw was channelled through the perspective of the wrong medicine being given. He felt himself a monument of human fallibility. Now when there was tutting and tetchiness about the length of the queue at the counter, it became a masked reference to the length of time the lady would have to stay in hospital. Requests for a large bottle of a certain drug, say aspirin, situated near the hatch, filled him with a fearful picture of the size of his mistake, this large botch-up. He was worried sick. The emotional violence that this awkward situation engendered in his mind was beginning to overwhelm him.

Jamie lasted a few days more then he'd had enough. The final straw came when he began to imagine that the drivers of the cars outside the shop were hooting their horns because of him. He began to feel a fear even of the passing traffic. His mind was definitely blasted, cracking into shred and pieces, like a soldier shell-shocked from the ordinance of the battlefield.


This was his battlefield and it was time to say no more. It wasn't that the customers were unfriendly or unpleasant; he'd heard none of them directly refer to his mistake, but his perception had shifted into a paranoid state. The customers weren't actually a jury waiting to return a verdict on a trial; they were just ordinary folk, going about the business of their decent lives. It was just that he felt guilty and ashamed. He didn't take himself for a simple man, but he felt like he'd fallen into a trap. “A springe to catch a woodcock” – wasn't that a phrase in Shakespeare's Hamlet, a trap or snare to catch a simpleton. Well, he'd been tricked like a fool, he felt naïve and quite unable for the crisis.

So Jamie left the job. He left with sadness in his heart, for he'd genuinely been anticipating a beautiful spring. That time of blossom and hope usually filled him with happiness. He turned away, and to an extent he felt like a coward. On the other hand there was no reason to linger in a place of hostility and criticism. There was no reason to endure the bludgering of his sense that would bring.

Jamie and his wife took a holiday in a remote cottage, and he recovered the balance of his reason. Away from the illusionary hurtful coughing and traffic, the brief period of isolation and quiet restored his strength. He returned to normality. He had his wife, his enjoyment of Sahaja yoga, a full life ahead of him still, and his sanity. He was free to start again, a free soul once more.

Published in Perceptions Magazine and at the website of Voices Forum