Free Jubilee by Shelley Harris

in his briefcase. At work he’s extremely careful, ingenious, even. He visits the drugs cupboards on a strict rotation, and always when no one else is around. He could write his own prescriptions, but that would need careful management: a different pharmacy each time, and scrupulous record keeping. So he’s explored other sources, going to his GP for a consultation. Satish sat in her office and they had talked shop for a bit, while he wondered what to tell her. The truth had seemed too complex, she’d misunderstand. Instead, he cited an upcoming conference and his own pre-speech nerves. They’d laughed about it together. She had prescribed quite happily: blue pills in a blister pack, an adult formulation. He keeps a bottle of water in the garage to wash down the tablets. He has everything covered.
    Satish watches for signs of cognisance in those around him: a searching look from a colleague, a quizzical one from Maya. He checks himself in the mirror frequently, but there’s only him, the way he’s always been. He audits his face, his hands, but there’s nothing to see. He knows it’s coming, though. Someone’s going to find him out.
    The medicine’s not always doing what it should, either, but he won’t increase his dose – he’s strict about that. So here he is, at 2 a.m, downstairs in his lounge and not asleep or even sleepy, trying to keep himself occupied. He’s organising the CD collection (alphabetical, by artist). On the coffee table are piles of cases, decanted from their shelves, and a smaller pile of discs beside them. They’ve become untethered during incidents that will, he knows, be denied by everyone he lives with. He may as well do this himself.
    He’s trying to track down a Robbie Williams case when his mobile phone, filed on the mantelpiece with his keys and wallet, pings at him. It’s a text from Colette: sorry sory sorry there r reasons
    He replies:
    Go to sleep .
    The thing to do is to make sure all the CDs are rehomed, then redistribute the ones which shouldn’t be downstairs anyway. Some of Asha’s have found their way here, and –
    r u awake!?
    Go to sleep. Not an approp
    He struggles with the word, all fingers and thumbs, before giving up.
    Not now .
    The reverse will also be true; there is a growing pile of CDs in Maya’s car. Not all of them have cases, either, so that means he’ll have to match them up –
    hang on
    Satish looks at the phone, waiting for more, but nothing comes. He wonders whether he’s sleepy enough yet: nothing. An itching in the veins tells him he needs to be moving, doing something. He goes back to the pile.
    The CDs are like a chronicle of his life. Of their lives, his and Maya’s. A chaotic one, which won’t be ordered in the ordering of it, Abba next to the Bombay Vikings, Oasis a forerunner to the Pogues. Satish considers a different arrangement, by person, or by chronology. He could trace their years together in this way, from his time as a Senior House Officer back in the early Nineties. He’d noticed Maya at work and had gone to pick her up one night before some group event. Arriving at her room he had heard music coming from behind her door: a foul-mouthed, stomping song he had later learned was called ‘Bottle of Smoke’. The lyrics contained words he’d barely ever said, and yet there she was, listening to it, singing, and thudding: was she pogo-ing? He knocked on the door and the thudding stopped. The music was turned off and Maya appeared: puffed out, flushed.
    ‘Right, soldier,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’ His scrotum tingled.
    Maya made everything new. Satish was a dynamic young doctor, and his provenance, to a girl born and raised in Portsmouth, seemed glamorous. After three weeks she saw him naked, the scar on his arm dismissed as a botched vaccination. A year later, he asked his parents to arrange the marriage. They still have the song from their wedding. Satish is looking at it now, ‘Bindya Chamkegi’. Maya insists that the mix