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

‘How was the quiz tonight?’ she blurted in the hallway as I picked up my coat.

‘We won.’ Thanks to the fragrant hippy we’d beaten off a close challenge by the Fireside Tendency.

‘You keep winning, don’t you?’ Sheila said.

6

After work the following day I stopped off at the central library. I had a few new books to take out. I used books the way some people use alcohol, to obliterate the noise of the outside world. It was an old reflex, to stop me thinking too much about Charlie, but this time I wasn’t after the familiar escapism.

‘Not your usual cup of tea, Mr Innes,’ Lucy observed, efficiently stamping my loans. Lucy had been efficiently stamping my books for several years. I remembered her from when she started out with a white face and hair dyed as black as a crow. All that book-stamping had at least put some colour in her cheeks; and, over the years, in her hair, which had changed from soot-black to rocketburst silver and then, after a brief flirt as a carrot-top, to henna red. Then Lucy had a year off to have a child of her own, and when she returned I don’t suppose she had time to mess about with hair, so we discovered she was actually a blonde, and a very pretty one too. A single mum with no spare time on her hands, she still read every volume of fantasy and science fiction in the library. We had that in common.

‘Mugging up on poetry,’ I said defensively.

‘What’s this one? Looks very technical.’

She flicked through the pages of a book I’d found about drugs: I wanted to find out more about the stuff. I’d also picked up a couple of books by John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, because Izzy had said they were mad-for-it dope fiends. I was hoping they might have something to say, but unfortunately they were just books of poetry. I took them anyway.

‘He was a dope fiend, you know, Coleridge was,’ I said to Lucy, trying to sound like I knew all about the bloke.

‘The postman from Porlock.’

‘Pardon?’ I said.

‘He was whacked out of his head writing what was going to be his best poem, and then the postman came, and he never finished it.’

‘Really?’

Lucy’s trained fingertips leafed through the pages to point out a title. I made a mental note to look at that one later.

‘I know someone who knows you.’

‘Oh?’ I said. I always felt slightly nervous in Lucy’s proximity, and I never knew why.

She clasped her hands under her chin as if she was going to tease me about it, but when she saw me blinking stupidly, she said, ‘Decker Townsend. He’s in your quiz team.’

I thought for a minute. ‘Hippy type?’

She laughed. ‘Kind of. He’s a dope fiend, too.’

‘Is he?’

‘Not really. Maybe a bit. He’s all right is Decker. Decent type. Says you’re good at general knowledge.’

Then someone else wanted their book stamping, and I passed through the turnstile musing on the fact that I’d been cheerfully co-operating in a pub quiz with a drugs bimp.

I’d made myself macaroni on toast for supper but I couldn’t face it. It’s awful stuff. I scraped the yellow gloop into the bin and had a beer supper instead, settling down with my library books. Farquar-Thompson had told me that an unusual feature of Charlie’s offence was that she was caught trafficking opium, not heroin. I didn’t understand the distinction at first, but from reading the library book I gathered that you needed the raw opium poppy juice as a base to make heroin. Since they had the laboratories for making heroin in Thailand, it didn’t make any sense to be transporting the opium. A small quantity of heroin was much more valuable on the street than the raw opium.

I didn’t read anything in the book that hinted why Charlie might be trafficking opium. There was plenty of other information, however, and very little of it made me feel better. I read that in 1993 governments around the world were invited to celebrate International Drug Reduction Day. China joined in the celebrations. It rounded up a hundred traffickers, put them through a show trial and brought them to a packed sports stadium where a football match was about to be staged. Before the kick-off there were dancing girls with multi-coloured silk streamers, painted dragons, kite-flying displays and martial music. Then all hundred drug traffickers were lined up and shot by firing squad. Then the football match was played.

International Drug Reduction Day celebrations, Chinese style.

This sort of thing wasn’t funny. I’d brought Charlie up to be a football fan. After a few more chapters of this stuff I put the book aside, had another beer, and turned to Keats and Coleridge.

I couldn’t get on with either of them.

I’m not a great one for poetry, and my eyes wouldn’t stay on the words. The Keats was the worst. It was like being given a cake, which was all currants and no crust to leaven the thing. I couldn’t fathom it. I was looking for something that might let me know why Charlie, a happy young woman (at least on the face of things), might want to ruin her life with drugs. Or anyone else for that matter. Well, if Keats was a dope fiend, there was nothing in his poetry that was going to help me.

The Coleridge I liked a little better. At least I could understand it. I read the one Lucy had pointed out, the one he’d written while blasted out of his brain. It was called ‘Kubla Khan’. It did stop quite suddenly, so the story of the postman might be true for all I know or care. He mentioned the milk of Paradise and I wondered if he was talking about the drug, but there was nothing to say why you take the stuff in the first place.

My mind turned to the