Smoking Poppy by Graham Joyce (the read aloud family .txt) 📕

Mick’s side. If only to break the silence I told her, ‘My daughter Charlotte has been arrested for drug smuggling in Thailand. I’ve got to go out there.’

‘Good lord! Is she some kind of dope fiend?’ All tact, Izzy.

‘I’ve no idea. It’s all new to me.’

‘She’s innocent,’ Mick said. ‘We’re going to prove it.’

I put my glass down in amazement. ‘You don’t know she’s innocent!’

‘That’s the position we’re starting from. We’re going out there to prove her innocence.’

Everything with Mick was we this and we will do that. I wanted to ask him who the hell he meant by we. I felt like asking if he had a pet rat in his pocket.

‘All the best minds were dope fiends,’ Izzy said, ignoring the dispute. ‘Keats, palely loitering. Coleridge in caverns measureless to man. De Quincey. Baudelaire and the Club des Haschischins. Wilkie Collins—’

‘I’ll get some in before we start,’ Mick said jovially.

‘Dickens towards the end. Rimbaud. Mrs Browning. And you may depend if Keats was soaked in the stuff that both the Shelleys had a snifter or two. Poe, Crabbe—’

I stopped listening. Izzy’s list meant nothing to me. It became a drone in the background while I thought about Charlie lying on a feverish pallet in a stinking cell in Chiang Mai.

‘Look lively,’ Izzy said. ‘We’re about to be tossed one.’

Since quiz teams at the Clipper were technically supposed to comprise four players, we were occasionally assigned a waif or stray who wanted to take part. Amos Magnamara, landlord and quizmaster, was at that moment pointing one such in our direction. Personally I wasn’t bothered, and Mick Williams reckoned we actually performed better without the support of these loose players. This one was some kind of grey-haired hippy. He wore one of those humorous goatee beards and a single, glittering earring; plus he had what looked like the leaf of a tomato plant tattooed on the back of his hand. He nodded to us and as he squatted on Mick’s stool I noticed he was drenched in a sweet, exotic perfume.

Mick returned to the table, his hands easily spanning the three drinks. ‘Look,’ he warned the newcomer in his friendly way, ‘if you’ve come to grant us three wishes, you can start by climbing off my fucking stool.’

Sheila answered the door wearing a cotton nightdress. I’d got her out of bed. I tried to look over her shoulder and down the hall.

‘I told you,’ she said, reading my mind, ‘he’s never been here. Are you going to stand there all night?’

The house was extraordinarily tidy. Not that surprising when you considered Sheila’s claims that I was the one who habitually untidied the place. I sat down heavily in the lounge. Sheila hovered. ‘Do you want something to eat? I’ve got a nice bit of tongue in the fridge.’

My stomach churned. ‘No thanks.’

‘That chap phoned again today,’ Sheila said.

‘Chap?’

‘Farquar-Thompson. He said that when Charlie heard they’d been in touch with us, she repeated that she didn’t want either of us to go out there.’

‘She said WHAT?’

Sheila’s eyes were brimming with anger, and her anger infuriated me in turn. ‘She said she didn’t want to see either of us. She asked if we’d send some toiletries and some money but that she didn’t want to see us.’

I dug my fingernails into my cheeks as I felt the evening’s alcohol burning off at speed. I could scarcely credit it. Here was Charlie facing a twenty-year sentence, possibly even a death sentence, in some filthy foreign dungeon. I thought right now she must be the loneliest person on the planet, and still she didn’t want to see either of the two people who loved her most and without reservation.

I was trying to remember when it was that Charlie’s instinct to come to me had stopped. From the time a child begins to walk at around the first year they also start to fall. And that falling keeps happening for the first few years. They trip, they stumble, they fall, they bruise, cut, bleed; and some impulse drives them, some force, eyes full of starbursting tears and lip aquiver, back into your arms and you want it, you want to sweep ’em up and hold ’em tight and warm until it subsides: because you feel it twice, the bruise, the cut, it burns you, it sears you; they bleed you bleed; and hell, Charlie is lying there and it’s me who’s lying there in prison without a friend facing twenty years of my life rotting away.

‘She can say what the hell she wants. I’m going out there to see her.’

‘I’ll come,’ Sheila said.

‘No.’

‘Of course I’ll bloody well come!’

‘No.’

‘You just try and stop me.’

‘If you go, I don’t.’

Her sigh was like a sheet of ice forming over a hundred unsaid things. ‘You can’t go alone! I’ll get time off work!’ Sheila was a part-time supervisor at the supermarket, where she’d met lover-boy.

‘Not necessary.’ I wasn’t having Sheila exposed to all that. I forbade it. ‘I’ll ask Mick Williams to come with me.’

‘Mick?’ Sheila said. ‘Would Mick go out with you? Do you think he would?’

Her enthusiasm for this idea dismayed me. ‘He might. If I ask him.’

‘I’d feel much happier if Mick went with you. You know how angry you get. He could help you.’

That made me suspicious. I suddenly wondered if I was having my strings pulled. ‘You didn’t tell Mick to come with me, did you?’

‘Now when do I see Mick?’

‘I don’t know who you see,’ I said nastily. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. All I knew was that I was going to have to go to some steamy Asian place to see my daughter in a squalid jail. Sheila was looking at me strangely. I needed her to squeeze me. I wanted to stay there, back in my own house, in my own bed, with Sheila holding me while I recovered the strength to know what to do. I stood up.

‘You can stay, you know,’ Sheila said, also standing.

‘No. I’ve got