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

I handed it over before the next question was put. For the rest of the round I sat on my stool, fuming. It seemed to me ridiculous that I couldn’t be allowed to answer whatever question I wanted, and as for Decker, well, I couldn’t exactly chin a bloke who had just brought me a pint of Old Muckster’s Jubilee Ale. At the break, I excused myself and went out the back.

When I returned to the table Mick was sharing a joke with Decker. Mick’s laughter was like a traction engine turning over on a cold morning. He threw his head back and rubbed his considerable belly. Where was that pointless hostility when I needed it? Meanwhile Izzy was still eyeing me like a kestrel on a nest of chicks.

‘Danny,’ Mick said, ‘you ought to have a word with Decker about Charlie. He knows a thing or two about that stuff.’

‘What stuff?’

‘Mick told me about the difficulty your daughter is in,’ Decker said soberly.

‘Tell the whole world, Mick.’

‘I thought he might know a bit about it, that’s all.’

‘You thought Izzy might know a bit about it. I’ve spent the whole week reading Ode to a Fucking Nightingale as a consequence.’

They all looked blank at that, and then the next round of the quiz started up.

We won again, and no little thanks to Decker, who could give the rest of us a run in all our specialist areas. We were getting some funny looks from the Fireside Tendency. By the time Decker had helped me get another round of double gins and double Old Muckster’s, I’d realised he wasn’t my man. Mick’s directness had given me the opportunity to ask him if he’d ever known Charlie, whom he hadn’t; and to ask him what he knew about opium, which he said was very little.

‘Hardly likely,’ Izzy said, blowing a head of smoke at the nicotine-coloured ceiling, ‘to come clean about it if he did.’

‘Whacky-baccy man, I’d say, looking at you.’

Mick was brilliant like that. Here was a fellow with a cannabis leaf silver earring, and a cannabis leaf tattooed on his hand (of course I knew it wasn’t a damned tomato plant) and there was Mick tentatively suggesting that the man smoked cannabis.

Whatever he was, he wasn’t the man who’d first given the filthy stuff to my daughter. The bell rang for time and the boy came round shouting at us to leave, and Mick told the boy to bollocks, as he always does.

‘By the way,’ Decker said as the boy hovered for the drained mugs, ‘Lucy says to tell you she would like you to baby-sit if you’re still willing.’

It took me by surprise. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Tell her it’s fine.’

‘Baby-sitting?’ Mick spluttered. ‘You can’t baby-sit. We’re off to Chiang Mai Wednesday.’

It was true. It had all been settled. Of course, I wanted to go the very next day, but this was the earliest we could manage. In any event, Charlie wasn’t going anywhere, was she?

‘Who’s going to Chiang Mai?’ Izzy wanted to know.

‘I told you about that,’ Mick snarled. ‘Last week.’

‘Aincha got ’omes to go to?’ the glass collector wanted to know.

‘I’m sure I can’t remember,’ Izzy grumbled, putting on her coat. No, she wasn’t talking to the glass collector.

As usual we were the last to leave. There was that reassuring slam of the door behind us and the sound of three angry bolts shooting home. Still grumbling, Izzy peeled off in one direction and Mick departed, slightly unsteady after the strong Muckster’s, in another.

I walked a short distance with Decker in the direction of town. Before he too peeled away, he stopped me. ‘What have you got against me, then?’

I was a bit taken aback by this directness. He struck a match for his cigarette, and the orange flare lit up his face. For a second I saw lines and shadows etched around his eyes and at the downturn of his mouth; carelines I hadn’t really noticed before. He wasn’t much younger than me, maybe only a year or two. He had a light scar on the side of his jaw. Then the match went out, and I suddenly got the impression I’d underestimated him altogether. Our fragrant hippy had been around the corner.

‘What do you mean?’

‘All that glaring and glowering at me over my shoulder. I mean, if I’ve done something, I’d like to know what it is.’

For a minute I felt a flash of anger. Then it passed, and I don’t know why, but I decided to come clean with him. After all, I had been pretty stupid about it. ‘I’m sorry, pal. Head’s in a state. Nothing against you. I keep looking for someone to blame.’

‘Normal,’ he said. ‘It’s normal.’

A breeze picked up from the far end of the street. It stung my eyes.

‘I’ve been out there. Thailand. Laos. Burma.

‘Watch out,’ he told me. ‘Dreamland? Fuckin’ dreamland.’

I stared at him, measuring his words.

‘It comes back at you,’ he told me. ‘Like your dreams. It’s whatever you want, or don’t want. Drugs? They’ve got everything. Religion? The ground exudes spirituality. Sex? You can have three young girls worshipping your prick if that’s what you want.’

He took a quiet drag on his cigarette.

‘Danny, it’s a cracked mirror. No, that’s wrong, it’s the other side of a cracked mirror, the silver-metal amalgam-side of a cracked mirror, and you can’t always get back.’

I couldn’t decide if he was a lunatic, or just drunk.

‘Decker,’ I said. ‘What about the stuff?’

‘Stuff?’

‘Opium.’

He narrowed his eyes at me, leaning forward, creating a sense of conspiracy. ‘Two theories: one, the plant evolved quite naturally. Two, it changed and developed as cultivated by human beings. Look Danny, opium is an intelligent plant. I mean a sentient, parasitic life-form, psycho-chemically generating the need for its propagation in human brains to ensure its further cultivation.’

‘What?’

‘Too right, what.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Imagine you are an alien colonising the planet. First disguise yourself as a non-aggressive plant.