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

seemed like fishtank water in need of a change. Meanwhile busted chattering neon and fizzing sodium lights played on the contours of the night as if on the scales of a Chinese dragon, and Mick’s comment about opium pipes had broken our sweaty trance.

In the alleys of the night market, food I couldn’t identify sizzled in the drum pans and the cartwheel-sized woks of street vendors, spicing diesel-thick air with onion and ginger. The throb of tuk-tuk motorised rickshaws almost drowned the shouts of little vixen girls waving from bars. Fairy lights blazed against a turquoise night sky and I mistook the flat orange moon for just another oriental lantern as my sleeves were tugged by tiny women in tribal headdress. The women I later learned to identify as Akha tribeswomen peddled trashy beads and silver bangles. Their lips were stained red. Some of them had teeth sharpened to points.

With two of these pygmy women hanging from his arm Mick said, ‘I’ve seen everything now,’ but in a way which made you know he knew he hadn’t even started seeing.

Phil, his head swivelling slowly, his throat working oddly like someone who found it hard to swallow, was in a state of shock. Tuk-tuk drivers slewed to a halt to offer him women, boys, massages, fake Rolexes. It was all bang in your face, right up the nostril cavity.

‘Vanity Fair,’ Phil kept whispering, obscurely.

And in the sweltering heat, the three of us were steadily melting. Mick’s T-shirt soaked around his big belly and in big oval floods under his arms. His hair was plastered to his forehead like someone who’d just been for a dip in the river. Counter to the frantic street activity, the damp heat had us doped.

‘A beer,’ said Mick, ‘or I’m dead.’

I hadn’t spoken to him in almost three hours, not since the most recent of our many arguments. ‘Yeah,’ I conceded at last. ‘Yeah.’

‘Perhaps a refreshing cup of tea,’ Phil tried, preposterously.

I can’t bear to tell you about the flight from London to Bangkok except to report that it was a nightmare. Correction: there was nothing wrong with the flight, or the airline, or the service or anything of that sort. It was Mick who was the gibbering nightmare from the instant we reached Heathrow airport until the moment we touched down in Bangkok.

The short hop from Bangkok to Chiang Mai was tolerable insofar as Mick, exhausted from his antics on the long haul, fell asleep to complete the second leg of the journey in a pink-faced stupor. I was furious with myself for ever having left home with the overstuffed oaf. I also had to contend with Phil’s silent disgust at Mick’s behaviour. The pair of them enraged me in different ways, one no less than the other. The entire enterprise had become a circus.

It had been while Phil dithered uselessly and while Mick swayed and rubbed his sleepy face in the middle of the antiseptic arrivals hall at Chiang Mai airport that I arranged a hotel. You could command anything from an exploded mattress in a rotting cockroach farm (which Phil suggested would be acceptable) to an air-conditioned palace, and after I’d settled on a mid-range solution called the River View Lodge Mick emerged from his stupor to argue the toss about a taxi. He’d decided I was an easy target for rip-off merchants. It didn’t seem to matter that I’d found a driver prepared to take us to the hotel for only a hundred Thai bhat. Mick waved him away, bustled outside and returned with another smiling cabbie.

‘Grab your bags,’ Mick told us. ‘I’ve chipped him down to a hundred and fifty bhat. You’ve got to know how to deal with these little Chinkies.’

I didn’t say anything. I wanted to, but you have to understand that Mick and I had had fourteen (I’d counted them while in the air between Bangkok and Chiang Mai) pretty fierce arguments over the past twenty-four hours, and he’d worn me into stony-faced submission. Phil was just keeping his head down.

Ignoring the cooing girls and the pimping tuk-tuk drivers, we walked from the hurly-burly of the night market and managed to find a bar that wasn’t brimful of beautiful young prostitutes. Inside, grateful for the presence of giant electric fans, we hoisted our damp haunches on to sticky bar stools and ordered a couple of cold Singha beers. And a cup of tea for Phil. The rotating fans afforded scant relief, serving only to nudge the stifling air back and forth without cooling it. The full-on effect was one of being gently swabbed with a dirty bar towel.

Mick tipped back his beer in one go (I heard it hiss against the heat of his throat), and ordered two more. He gave a scholarly burp. ‘At least the beer is all right,’ he said. I ladled the sweat from my eyebrows by way of agreement while Phil nervously stirred his tea.

Despite the kaleidoscope of human activity going on in the street outside, my mind was on Charlie. It was frustrating to have arrived in this place without being able to dash to the prison to see her. The British Consulate in Chiang Mai had arranged with the prison authorities for me to visit the following morning at eleven o’clock. I was killing time, but I couldn’t keep my mind on anything else.

Should I hug Charlie? Would they allow me to? Would they allow me to give her the things I’d brought with me? Sheila had filled a flight bag with soap, shampoo, cosmetic creams, jars of vitamin pills, magazines, books and God knows what else. ‘Take this,’ Sheila had said.

‘Whatever for?’

‘She loved this when she was a girl. Here, take it.’

It was a moth-eaten Rupert Bear.

I’d meant to add packets of cigarettes without even knowing if Charlie was a smoker. I suspected she was. Sheila in particular had disapproved of our children smoking, so I’d left it until I got to the airport for the duty-frees. It seemed ridiculous