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

Apropos of nothing, Lucy said, ‘Danny’s been reading Baudelaire.’

‘Baudelaire is cool,’ said Mark, twiddling with one of his earrings.

‘Which in particular?’ I asked, merely to make conversation. After all, it was still quite fresh in my mind.

‘All,’ he said shiftily. Then, ‘I don’t have the head to remember specific titles.’ This was put in such a way as to suggest anyone who could remember what they’d read was clearly an inferior person. I was about to challenge him when he changed the subject by snorting derisively at a well-known politician.

‘Mark’s a member of the local Conservative Party,’ Lucy said with levitated eyebrows.

‘Get out of here,’ I said, thinking she was joking.

‘So what are you?’ Mark said with a sneer and a curled lip. ‘Some kind of superannuated socialist?’

I didn’t know what he meant by that but I was quite happy to take offence. ‘I’m not anything; it’s just that I can’t imagine you bottling chutney and selling raffle tickets for the local Tory fund-raiser, that’s all.’

Lucy smelled trouble so she dived in with, ‘Danny told me he’s going to Thailand.’

‘Thailand? That’s amazing.’

‘Why amazing?’

‘For someone like you.’

I looked at the fancy ironwork in his face and thought what I could have done with a pair of metal pliers. ‘What am I like?’ It must have come out like a growl.

‘Look, I’m only saying it’s good that someone of your generation is going out there. It’s a cool place to go.’

‘It is quite popular,’ Lucy said in desperation. ‘Really, very popular.’

‘You could say that.’ Mark had had enough. He drained his coffee mug and stood up. ‘I’m outa here. Really cool to meet you,’ he said, avoiding eye contact with me.

Fuck that, I thought. ‘Like totally groovy to meet you, too.’ Well, it might have been laid on with a trowel, but at least it got me a bit of eye contact before he left. I mean, I can also do irony.

After she’d seen Chuckles out the door Lucy said, ‘Sorry about him. He seemed interesting when I met him. It wasn’t until I’d brought him back here that I was thinking help!’

‘He’s got some fancy body plating.’

‘There was a stud in his tongue which you didn’t see.’

I couldn’t imagine that. If I have even a tiny ulcer on my tongue I spend half my time scraping it against my teeth. ‘Why the hell would anyone want a stud on their tongue?’

Lucy thrust out her own tongue and waggled it at me lasciviously. It was something I hadn’t even considered. I felt first my neck and then my face flush in a crimson tide.

Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I made you blush!’

There weren’t that many years between us, but Lucy represented a generation with whom I was completely out of step. No woman of my own day would make such a casual sexual innuendo. We’re more the seaside-postcard humorists. I decided it was time to leave before I made some silly mistake with Lucy.

‘Thanks so much for doing this for me,’ Lucy said, getting up to see me out.

‘I enjoyed it. Really I did.’

She kissed me lightly on my cheek and our eyes met a moment too long. I loved the perfume she was wearing.

‘You’re a sweetie,’ she said, holding my arm.

That’s what I mean. I didn’t know whether she was patronising me or telling me she wanted to fuck me. I’m just not good at these things.

‘When do you leave for Thailand?’

‘Two days.’

‘Promise to tell me all about it when you get back?’ She stood on the doorstep, waving me away.

10

‘Jesus in pyjamas!’ Mick said. ‘You don’t need to smoke a pipe of opium.’

This irritated me, because of the reference to Charlotte, but Mick had summed up my own initial impressions of Chiang Mai exactly. I don’t know if it was the jet-lag but I felt like I was dreaming with my eyes open; too stupefied even to speak. I could tell it irritated Phil, too, because he winced visibly every time Mick made free with the Lord’s name.

Yes, Phil was in Chiang Mai with us. After I’d visited him in his refrigerated domestic chapel, Phil telephoned to inform me that he’d had a long conversation with God, and that God had told him that he should come to Thailand.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ I recall shouting down the telephone receiver.

‘God wants me to.’

‘But what about your duties to your church? To the people who need you? You’re an Elder, for chrissakes!’

‘This is a greater duty. God has been very clear to me in His direction. Charlie needs me there. You need me there. I’m coming with you and I won’t be put off.’

Neither would he. I’d tried my damnedest to talk him out of it, but he was on a divine mission. I remember putting the phone down and sinking to my knees, practically biting the carpet and going, ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ over and over. By enormous ‘good fortune’ or by God’s design there was, for Phil, still a seat to be had on the same flight. But by even greater fortune, Phil had had to sit at the back of the plane while Mick and I had seats over the wing.

In Chiang Mai the three of us drifted like perspiring wraiths through the swarming, spice-laden streets for over half an hour before uttering a word. I was pleased to see, at least, that Phil infuriated Mick by clasping in his right hand at all times a black, leather-bound pocket-sized Bible. Phil had the look of a man prepared at any moment to stop on the street corner in order to give any passing native the benefit of a few pages.

But he couldn’t, because like us he was overwhelmed. Stepping from the capsule of the air-conditioned hotel was like being plunged into a glinting tropical aquarium; people as ornate fish gliding by in fluid ecstasy, breasting strange tides, bumping up against the coral of the bewildering street commerce. Even the air