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

He glanced around. ‘Why?’

‘Just put a shirt on. You’re a disgrace.’

He shook his head as if I’d asked him to go native and wear a sarong, but he nipped back to the room, returning at length sporting a migraine-intensity Hawaii-style top. We had breakfast in the garden: English style bacon and eggs but with two tiny strips of bacon frazzled the way a spent matchstick is burnt. Mick growled, got up and lumbered to the kitchen. I don’t know what he said, but shortly after another two dishes arrived, this time lightly cooked. Mick demolished both his and my second plate, and then set about the fruit placed before us.

I tried a piece of strange orange fruit, but it wasn’t to my taste. Mick noticed and snorted.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘You’re fucking ignorant so you are,’ he said, mopping up the last of my egg with a roll of bread. ‘It’s papaya. Tried to sell it on my stall but no one went for it.’ He held a piece right under my beak. ‘Don’t you think it smells like a woman’s hole?’

I waved the papaya away and removed myself from the table, ostensibly to light another cigarette. Mick sniffed the piece of fruit himself, evidently with satisfaction, and popped it in his mouth. Then he set about the pineapple. ‘Have you tasted this? Marvellous! Beautiful! Su-bloody-perb! Have you? Have you tasted this?’

‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Very good.’ I was trying to think how to break it to him that I didn’t want him to come to Chiang Mai prison with me. I was going to have to tell him that I didn’t want him there when I came face to face with Charlie. I kept rephrasing it tactfully in my head, when really what I wanted to say was: leave us alone for a minute you big fat fuck.

‘“Very good”? Is that all you’ve got to say? Very good? Well I’ve got to get some more of this “very good” pineapple.’ With that he made lumbering purposeful strides in the direction of the kitchen once more.

When he returned bearing a plate of freshly sliced pineapple, I stamped out my cigarette and said, ‘Look Mick—’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, rivulets of pineapple juice coursing over his unshaven chin, ‘about when we go to the prison. I’ll go so far in, but when it comes to you seeing Charlie I’ll hang back, like.’

‘Oh.’

‘So’s you can see her on your own, type of thing.’

‘Oh. Fine.’

‘Father and daughter isn’t it? Brought together again. You don’t need me there. You might think you do, but you don’t.’

Phil, blinking and sleepy, joined us for breakfast.

‘Here he is,’ Mick said, apropos of absolutely nothing, ‘Cardinal Cunt.’

Deng, the hotel manageress, brought a message that we should call the British Consulate in Chiang Mai. Our previous arrangement had been to meet the consular official, a gentleman called Brazier-Armstrong, at the prison. I telephoned and spoke to a Thai lady, who told me that Brazier-Armstrong had been called away on an emergency. She confirmed that the prison was expecting us and that all we had to do was to present ourselves at the reception.

In the hour before our appointment at the prison I had a bad attack of the shakes. My stomach was in a dreadful state. I cursed Mick for the things he’d forced me to eat the night before and I swallowed half a packet of Diocalm, which helped my condition not a jot. My fingers shook so badly Mick had to do up my shirt buttons.

‘We’re going to roast in these,’ he complained.

‘It’s what we agreed. Stop whining.’ We’d all three brought our best suits with us, wanting to make the best impression possible. I wasn’t having Mick up there in his army-surplus shorts. So we wore collars and ties and heavy, dark English suits. ‘Just remember,’ I said, ‘if it moves, wai it.’

Mick placed the palms of his hands together under his nose. ‘I’ll wai like a bastard.’

I had the flight bag full of supplies for Charlie. ‘Cigarettes!’ I shouted. ‘I forgot the cigarettes!’

Mick produced two cartons. ‘Here. I got these while you were making a prat of yourself at the airport.’

I was touched by Mick’s consideration. ‘Did you think of bringing anything for Charlie?’ I asked Phil.

He was quite stung. ‘Of course I did!’ He fished a couple of items from his flight bag. One was a pocket Bible not unlike the one he carried about with him, the other was probably the very same toothbrush he had left over from Christmas.

Mick gave me an old-fashioned look.

We left the hotel in plenty of time. Mick spotted a bicycle rickshaw and hailed it. The cyclist, whom Mick insisted on referring to as a ‘coolie’, spoke no English. He seemed a little unhappy at the idea of squeezing the three of us into his rickshaw until Mick waved a banknote under his nose. We had to show him the prison on a map we’d picked up at the hotel.

Within minutes we were caked in sweat, making laboured progress across town. Chiang Mai was as extraordinary by daylight as it was by night. The old town was enclosed by a high eighteenth-century red-brick wall and a rippling moat populated here and there with turtles and frogs. Within its ramparts we were whisked through blossom-lined streets, alongside shining gold- and red-lacquered temples, and past crumbling, ancient chedis. The rickshaw dodged a line of monks in saffron robes and women bearing yoke-panniers. It was all fabulously exotic, but I wasn’t seeing any of it, because I had a deep, doomy feeling in the pit of my bowels. Mick shifted his weight uncomfortably in the rickshaw seat, and mopped his brow with a large white handkerchief. Phil, nursing his own well-thumbed pocket Bible, looked pale and unwell.

The rickshaw man peddled up the Ratwithi and delivered us into the yard of the women’s prison. I was surprised to find a modern building of white concrete; maybe I’d expected to see a