The Right Treatment Read Free

hopped on the train, she managed to procure a bottle of water from a vending machine, now all she hoped was that she would manage to find two aspirin in the bag. Usually she had the foresight to carry them around with her.
    Never again, she thought, as she felt her stomach lurch and heave to the rocking of the train. Then she managed a wry grin at herself. If she had a quid for every time she had said never again, she’d be filthy rich and resting on her laurels. Aoife knew she would be having the exact same regrets tomorrow morning; hell, it was only Sunday, and a bank holiday, there was still tonight to be got through. As a general rule, Aoife’s weekend started on Thursday night and carried through to Sunday, when she would stay home and gently come down from her binge with a couple of drinks at home with her flatmate, Fiona. But bank holidays just extended the partying.
    Very occasionally Aoife wondered if she went too far, if it was time to grow up a bit. But hell, she’d been under her parents’ iron rule for more than long enough and she was determined to have a good time and not bow to conventionalism like them. Who cared what the neighbours, or indeed anyone else, thought? This was her life and she was going to make the most of it. When Fiona got all sanctimonious with her, she felt like screaming. She’d been living with that for years. Aoife didn’t know why Fiona had suddenly become so prudish. And anyway, what was it to her? Aoife rarely brought men back to their house; usually she stayed out so it was no one’s business but hers.
    It was the E that was the problem, Aoife knew. She didn’t do them all the time; well, maybe she had been doing them a bit much lately, but she intended to cut back, starting tomorrow. They made her totally feckless and her natural shyness and self-loathing disappeared, albeit temporarily. She talked to total strangers, danced like a lunatic, and lost all her inhibitions; hell, she’d even stripped her shirt off once or twice in clubs. For all she knew that could be what happened last night—she may have left the club topless. Not that anyone but Aoife was aware of her insecurities; everyone thought she was confident and outgoing. Only she knew just how much effort she put into that persona, how much it cost her every time she went out of the front door to plaster that happy-go-lucky face on herself. The tabs helped her.
    But unlike alcohol, one tab was enough to set her wired to the moon, on an up, and there was no telling just how much she was going to react to it; ‘good’ tabs could be explosive, ‘bad’ ones mainly nauseating. With a few drinks, that feeling came on you gradually and you could tell you were at the point when enough was enough. You could choose to ignore or heed the warnings depending on your mood. Ninety-nine percent of the time, Aoife heeded the warnings with alcohol; it just didn’t give her a good buzz. There was no early alert system in place with the E and once it kicked in, it was too late, good or bad. Aoife liked that. For years she fought to control herself, her learning difficulties, her antipathy toward her image-conscious, high-achieving, demanding family. It was so good to let go of control with an E. Every so often she had the blackouts, waking up in a stranger’s bed not knowing how she got there or who the person beside her was. But although she berated herself for it, Aoife liked how it made her lose her self-consciousness and her inhibitions. She made sure to keep her contraception up to date, using the merino coil, which only needed to be replaced every couple of years, so at least the risk of pregnancy was low but it was often hit and miss whether she had the sense about her to insist on a condom too. Those rare men she hung around for long enough to have the post-coital post-mortem always told her how wild she had been and she laughed and joked as if it was just a normal experience, but in truth she was secretly mortified; how