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

is disappointed in that sending his children off to university for three years only seemed to have the effect of alienating his children from him. He’s a clever man but he is exasperated with the world. He is also infuriating when he can’t see further than his nose. By which I mean I hope he is infuriating to the reader.

For American readers “The Quiz night” in the early section of the novel is a common feature of British pub life. Teams for three or four players will assemble and pay a few quid into a “pot”. Then a quizmaster will pluck up a badly whistling microphone and hit them up with a series of General Knowledge questions. What was the name of Elvis Presley’s first wife? (“Mrs Presley” won’t cut it.) By what name is the former country of Burma now known? This kind of thing can be spread across an entire evening. The winning team takes the pot and – what do you know – it’s always the same team who wins.

Danny, Mick and Phil travel from this cosy world of provincial British pubs to the opium-growing borderlands of Thailand and Myanmar (formerly Burma, but you knew that). There are very few places on the planet that can support the effective cultivation of the opium poppy, even though the raw plant is still the basis of the heroin trade. You need very high altitude, hot weather in the daytime and the sudden swoop of low temperatures at night. This combination makes the poppy sweat during the day and the sap then crystallises overnight for harvesting.

The giant folded mountains of the region mentioned above and Afghanistan are the main production centres. I found Thailand/Myanmar much more the culturally interesting a place to send my three reluctant companions. The people living in these mountains are neither Thai nor Burmese. They are impoverished ethnic hill tribes with animistic belief systems. They worship the spirits. These people migrated from Tibet a few hundred years ago and brought the secrets of the poppy with them. The spirit gates and fertility swings I describe in the novel are taken very seriously. They are meanwhile terrorised by the Myanmar government and by opium-gangs alike.

I witnessed all of this when I spent some time living in the jungle with the ethnic hill tribes. I was definitely a tourist rather than an anthropologist but the time I spent there gave me some insight. Spirit gates are erected in the village and are carved with wonderful grotesque and vulgar figures. It is taboo to touch a spirit gate. They exist to signal to the spirits that they have free and unimpeded passage through the village. I was told in no uncertain terms that I should ask permission of the spirits before doing anything. For example before bathing in the river. I was warned that if I didn’t ask the spirits for permission before bathing that I would get a serious stomach upset. I must say I complied and I was fine.

Opium was grown by the villagers. They have no medicine or pharmaceuticals and the drug was mainly considered as a relief for people in their old age. Problems started when young people copied western tourists in using the opium recreationally.

Into this walk Danny, Mick and Phil. It’s all a long way from the cosy British pub on a rainy Tuesday night, which of course was my intention. It’s an adventure story as I say. But it also turns out to be a book about love and friendship.

Graham Joyce

June 2013

1

Oh that Charlie of mine, how I wanted her back.

When a baby is born the fontanelle at the top of the head yawns open. You fill the hole with shimmering, molten, free-running love, where it sets and hardens over the hole with something like bone. But for the first few weeks of a baby’s life you are intoxicated by the extraordinary scent of its head. The chemical fix. A gift from the gardens of paradise. You want it all the time, and you only get it when you cradle that baby in your arms.

After the first year this perfume thins out, but it never deserts the child entirely. So you keep hugging. Every time you pick up that infant you look for an opportunity to get her hair under your nostrils so you might get a hint, a hit, once more, of the perfume of heaven. It’s still there when she’s six years old. And even at eleven. And though between the ages of twelve and fifteen she pushes away your fatherly embrace, she still comes to you when she’s tired or hurt or unhappy. Then at seventeen it seems she’s more likely to come back to you, relaxed in your company again, not afraid to take a hug. And you’re still getting it. That scent. That charge. The love amalgam, fixed and hardening there from Day One. It’s still there.

And it’s there on the October afternoon, with the golden leaves spinning all around you when you hug her and kiss her and wave her away to her life.

Yes how I wanted her back. My Charlie. Just for two minutes. Just so I could hold her, and sniff her hair to check that she was all right. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because she was rotting in a prison cell in some Far Eastern jail. And it made me want to howl like a dog.

I was struggling to assemble a flatpack chest of drawers when Sheila called to tell me that Charlie had turned up in some place called Chiang Mai. The flatpack contained one hundred and thirty-three individual parts, not counting the screws and the small tube of wood glue, and the suppliers had enclosed a Chinese diagram. There were no instructions on the diagram, just pictures, and arrows that made me think of the bowmen of Agincourt. I couldn’t make sense of any of it.

‘Are you there?’ Sheila said.

‘Of course I’m here.’ I was there all