Free Boys and Girls by Joseph Connolly

bathroom, if I couldn’t light up that first and blissful cigarette? And then I go mauve and hack up my guts in the time-honoured way and then I drag deep down into me another purple lungful, and then I’m OK, and then I’m calm and smiling, and then I’m off into another couple of packets, as the day wears on. I did manage it once, just the once, to give it up. Go cold turkey. Well Jesus. Worst afternoon of my entire life on earth.
    So that’s how my mornings begin – first the fag, then the coffee, and after that, all of the pills. Not nearly as many as I used to have to take, but still quite a colourful array. There was a time when it got completely out of hand. Go and ask him, Mylene said – this is when we were still married, of course, when she was still around. Go and see him and ask him, this bloody quack doctor of yours – lay out on his desk all the pills you take every morning noon and night, and ask him explain to you what each of them is, and why you take it: what does it suppress or promote, counteract or stimulate? And so, rather remarkably, I did that (never listened, in the normal run of things; half the time, of course, I didn’t even hear her). Well, he made a mighty great stab at it, give him his due, silly old sod (Damn, he’s even older than I am, David is – been my doctor since God knows when. And few are, you know, these days – or at least in my world, anyway. Older, I mean. Than I am). There were three or four that stumped him completely (he was man enough to admit it) but the gist of what he said to me then was that the majority of the others seemed to be a succession of fail-safe antidotes to the potential and deviant side effects of a good deal of those remaining, whose purpose still lay shrouded in pharmaceutical mystery. So I just stopped – stopped the lot. Next morning, and the one after, I didn’t swallow a single pill – very liberating, I remember the feeling. And do you know what? Shall I tell you? Within an extraordinarily short while, I was feeling close to death. So I resumed with a motley selection, which more or less restored a form of equilibrium, or at least kept me blanketed from the wilder excesses of behaviour, while still saving me from slumping into a virtual coma. The official diagnosis of (very) mild schizophrenia, of course – they call it something else now: the illness, it now has dual identity – thatcame later. I personally am of the opinion that they are lying or mad: Jesus, if anyone knows their own mind it’s me. I
never
see the other point of view, let alone go changing my mind – so how that mind can be schizoid …! Well I ask you. Meanwhile, I receive the diagnosis, and I nod. And since then, oh dear Lord, what can I not have ingested? Risperidone, Haloperidol, Carbamazepine, Lofepramine – they all sound like wizards or knights errant, don’t you think? Maybe? Magical crusaders. Of some quite ancient and arcane order. Or maybe not. Sodium valproate and Sertraline. Prozac – oh God yes, but of course: does anyone escape it? There may be one or two out there. Olanzapine and Clozapine (ugly sisters?). I think of them all as this collective of not at all chums but possibly aliens I was once at school with. Anyway. It comes and goes – and what, I ask you, doesn’t? I’m completely fine at the moment: not at all frenzied, nor sunk down into the depths. I can always tell when I’m on a fairly even keel because then I find myself dwelling on all of the other and lesser ailments – because there are many more, I do assure you: unlike with the eczema, I’ve barely scratched the surface. And I do seem to add to them on an almost weekly basis. The arches, my arches – that’s the latest thing, apparently. In danger of falling, is what yet another of these thirteen-year-old doctors is telling me now. How