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They say you can pay anybody to do anything these days – especially in a city like Berlin with a few million people, half of whom spend their days sitting in parks or standing in dole queues, and would jump at the prospect of ready cash.
I only remember this useful fact when I’m halfway to the pharmacy. And by then I have no time to Google, explain, negotiate, and employ. I’ve wasted the last 24 hours listening to Glove Boy telling me everything’s going to be “just fine”, before acknowledging that a) I’ve only been believing him because I desperately want to, b) he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, and c) I need to take immediate action.
I slope at top speed through my neighbourhood, disguised in my gym gear, wearing my biggest sunglasses and earphones, even though I can hear nothing except the beating of my nervous heart. So slope-ish am I, so incognito and swift, that my friends the Rays pass right by me, chatting merrily to their dog, and don’t notice me – which is just as well because if I’m stopped in my mission and invited over for a charcoal latte (the latest health fad in our street) it’s possible nothing will be ‘just fine’ ever again.
The pharmacy is calm and quiet. A few customers are browsing things that would normally distract me (lipstick, sparkly key rings) and now seem entirely irrelevant. I’ve been rehearsing what to say all the way here – but what tone to take? Even in my own language the next few minutes would be painful; in German, I’m lost. I hover, peering through my sunnies to see which pharmacist is furthest from prying ears. The wrinkled crone with horn-rimmed glasses? The acne-ridden boy who’s forever sucking on a cough lozenge? The milky-skinned half-Japanese girl with the inscrutable stare?
Please let the crone serve me, I pray. Somehow I feel as if the medication I need will be more effective if dished out by someone with some life experience.
“KANN ICH IHNEN HELFEN?” It’s Milky Girl. For such a tiny person, she has an unbelievably booming voice.
I shuffle closer. “Die Pille danach…” I mutter, hoping like hell that my online dictionary is trustworthy. Apparently not. Milky Girl stares.
“Bitte?” she says loudly. “You want what pill?”
I shuffle, mumble. The morning-after pill… The pill one needs after a disastrous encounter with one’s boyfriend who has unaccountably used a condom so old that it’s probably been in his wallet since last century.
A helpful customer steps up. “She wants the MORNING AFTER SEX PILL,” he says in clear authoritative German, as if teaching a language class for the deaf. Every head in the room whips around. The show has begun.
Excruciatingly slowly, Milky Girl produces a tiny pill in a huge box. “If you speak up,” she warns in English, “you must come back.” Speak up? I’m bemused. I’m the only person in the room not doing that.
“She means spit up,” clarifies the customer. “She means throw up,” corrects the cough-lozenge boy.
It’s at that moment I realise, belatedly, exactly who could be here in my place. Or at least by my side. But Glove Boy is in a café making a ‘vlog’, which will consist of him holding a ciggie in one hand and an iPhone in the other, listening to his agent berating him for missing an audition, while his friend Karl films the whole thing, after which they’ll dissolve in maniacal laughter and a voiceover promises that the next vlog will be better.
There’s a blinding flash which even my sunnies don’t block out. I can also do better. If one doesn’t want to be left literally holding the baby, one can’t waste time with a 30-year-old party boy masquerading as a life partner. I pull off my sunglasses, thank the entire room, grab the box, and march out into a bright new future – one that will include no throwing up, and no returns.
Next month: When the man you thought was your ‘type’ is now your ex, what then? Is life going to become an endless series of auditions, in the search for the perfect leading man?
Words: Sarah Quigley
