The Posters on the Lamp Post Outside My Pharmacy

The view from the till

From where I stand at the till, I can see three lamp posts, a taxi rank, the side wall of a furniture shop and a bus shelter with no roof. I have worked at the same small pharmacy in Springs for twenty-one years, and for most of those years I have looked out at the same kind of posters stuck to those lamp posts. Yellow paper, red letters, a cellphone number written large. SAFE PILLS. SAME DAY. 100% PAIN FREE. Sometimes a smudged photocopy of a woman smiling, as if she had just won something.

I used to not see them at all. That is the honest truth.

The quiet ones at the counter

What I did see were the girls.

You learn to recognise a certain kind of customer in this job. She waits until the queue is empty. She picks up a lip balm she does not want, so her hands have something to do. She looks at the pharmacist, then at me, and decides I am the safer one, because I am a woman in my forties with reading glasses on a beaded chain and I look like somebody's aunt.

Then she leans in and asks, very softly, where she can go. She never finishes the sentence. She does not need to.

For years, God forgive me, I mumbled. I said things like "I am not sure, my sisi," or "Ask at the day hospital," or worst of all, I just shook my head and rang up the lip balm. I was raised in a church house in KwaThema. My mother would have pressed her lips flat if she heard the word out loud in her kitchen. I told myself it was not my business, and that I was only an assistant, and that the pharmacist would not want me getting involved.

Some of those girls walked out of the door and turned left toward the lamp posts. I watched them do it. I knew what the yellow paper said. I did nothing.

Lerato

I will call her Lerato, which is not her name.

She came in on a Thursday in winter, about nineteen, in a school-style jersey with the sleeves pulled over her hands. She bought painkillers and sanitary pads and asked me, without looking up, whether it was normal to bleed this much. I asked her what had happened. She said she had bought something from "a lady" and had been told to take it and go home and sleep.

I fetched the pharmacist. He told her plainly she needed to go to the hospital immediately, and I walked her to the taxi rank myself because she could barely stand straight.

She came back three weeks later to say thank you. She had been admitted for four days. She had lost a lot of blood and had an infection that frightened the doctors. She was alright now, she said, mostly.

Then she told me something I have not stopped hearing. She said she had asked in our pharmacy months before, and "the auntie" had said she did not know. She did not recognise that it was me. I did not tell her.

What I did not know

That night I sat at my kitchen table with my reading glasses on and my phone in my hand and I did what I should have done fifteen years earlier. I read.

I learned that termination of pregnancy has been legal in South Africa since the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act was passed in 1996. It meant that a woman in Springs did not need a lamp post. It meant there were registered facilities, public and private, where trained people do this properly and safely, and where she can be seen as a patient instead of a customer of somebody with a cellphone number and no surname.

I learned that the pills sold on those posters are often fake, or the wrong dose, or sold with no proper instructions and no check-up afterwards. I learned that the "same day, pain free" promise is just words on paper, and that the person who made it will not answer the phone when something goes wrong.

Learning to say it out loud

The next week I asked my pharmacist if we could talk. I expected him to tell me to stay out of it. Instead he said he had wondered for a long time why so many young women asked me and not him, and he was glad somebody was finally going to answer them properly.

We did not put up a poster of our own. I did not want anything that looked like the yellow paper. What I did was write down, on an index card I keep in the drawer under the till, the details of a few legal, registered places in our area, including the nearest government hospital and a couple of private options. One evening I went through the websites for proper abortion clinics to see how they explained things, so that I would understand what a woman would actually find when she phoned or walked in. What struck me was how ordinary it all sounded. Appointments, consultations, counselling, follow-up. The language of medicine, not the language of the lamp post.

Then I practised. I stood in my bathroom and said the words out loud to the mirror until my voice stopped shaking on them.

The first time I got it right

The first girl after Lerato came in on a Saturday morning with her friend. The friend did the asking. I did not mumble. I took the index card out of the drawer, wrote two names and numbers on the back of a till slip, and told her that this is legal in South Africa, that she should go to a registered abortion clinic or the hospital, and that she should please, please not buy anything from the numbers outside.

She looked at me like I had said something in a foreign language. Then her shoulders came down about two inches. She folded the till slip into a tiny square and put it in her bra, and said thank you, auntie, in a voice I still remember.

I do not know what she decided. That was never mine to know. My job was to make sure that whatever she decided, she did it somewhere with clean hands and a real name on the door.

What the counter taught me

Since that winter, when a woman asks about contraception, I no longer drop my voice as if we are discussing a crime. When someone needs a pap smear or a check-up and does not know where to start, I suggest she find a women's clinic she feels comfortable in, public or private, and I tell her that it is fine to ask questions there too.

The posters are still on the lamp posts. Somebody put up a fresh batch on Tuesday. Pink this time, for a change. I cannot stop them. What I can do is stand at my till, three lamp posts away, and when a girl leans in and starts a sentence she cannot finish, I can finish it for her, kindly, and give her a better answer than I gave Lerato.

I think about her often. I hope she never has to stand at a counter again and be told by an auntie that she does not know. Because I do know now, and I have stopped pretending otherwise.