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

rat-infested hole in the ground. Before the steps leading into the building was a statue of a Thai soldier bearing a dead infant in his arms. As Mick and Phil climbed out of the rickshaw I looked around. There was a compound of crashed vehicles. I could hear music coming from behind the small opaque windows of the cells. Towels and sheets were squeezed between the narrow openings of the windows, to air.

‘Ready, Father?’ I heard Phil say.

Mick touched my arm. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘This is it.’

He paid the rickshaw man and we went up the steps and into the prison building, three men in dark suits. A few dismal-looking Thais sat around on hard plastic chairs. A row of glass-panelled offices ran off to the right. The reception desk was empty. I was relieved to have some of my preconceptions defeated by the modern, sterile, municipal appearance of the place. Apart from the heat, it looked less foreboding than any British jug.

At last a Thai officer in a blue police shirt appeared. I waid him and told him who I was. He motioned us to sit down with the other waiting Thais. Phil kept sticking his finger inside his collar to air his neck. After some minutes another officer came and took us into a small office with metal filing cabinets and a giant rotating fan. He seemed in a bad mood. All three of us waid him, and when Mick offered a Western handshake I was appalled to see that he had, in the palm of his hand and folded the size of a postage stamp, a Thai banknote. The banknote was trousered in one deft move as the officer simultaneously motioned us to sit down.

The officer went outside.

‘You fucking idiot!’

‘I know what I’m doing,’ Mick said.

‘What?’ said Phil, who’d missed the sleight of hand.

‘We’ll all be doing ten years in this fucking steam bath if you keep trying stunts like that.’

‘Like what?’ said Phil.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Took it, didn’t he? Now listen to this. I’ve brought my life savings out here.’ Mick tapped his bulging moneybelt. ‘I’ve got it in big American dollar bills. If that’s what it takes, it’s yours.’

‘What’s going on?’ Phil wanted to know.

I stared at Mick with my mouth open. Life savings? I had no idea what that might mean. But he was offering it as a bribe to these prison guards. I felt dizzy. The officer returned, clutching a sheaf of papers. Now he was all smiles. ‘You wan see dotter, yeh?’

I nodded. ‘Please.’

‘Yeh, we got dotter yeh. But she no wan see you!’

‘I understand that,’ I said. ‘The consulate told us she didn’t want to see me. But I have some things for her.’ I patted my flight bag with the shampoos and the soaps and the cigarettes.

Mick was already folding another note into the palm of his hand, before the officer said brightly, ‘No problem. You her fadder. You good for her see. We make her see you.’

‘We’re very grateful,’ Mick said, offering a cigarette, careful to leave the open packet on the officer’s side of his desk. ‘Very grateful.’

‘We look after her good,’ the prison officer said. ‘Me fadder, too. We no throw your dotter to the sharks!’ He smiled and nodded and blew smoke. Mick and I smiled and nodded and blew smoke. Phil fingered his collar again, forcing a grimace. It was agonising. I was terrified that at any moment this was going to go wrong.

We smoked and smiled some more. Then the officer said he was going to see if she was ready for us.

‘I’m not sure about this, Mick. How are you going to try to float it?’

He was dribbling sweat from every pore, and it wasn’t just the heat. ‘I don’t fucking know! I’m winging it, Danny, I’m winging it. I’ll try to get a moment to speak to this guy.’

The smiling officer returned and beckoned us to follow him along the corridor. He unlocked a cage door and we stepped into a compound where a few female Thai prisoners were lounging in cotton pyjamas. They looked away, bored by us. The odour of stagnant hormones and dead energy was suffocating. Then we were taken into a holding room.

‘I’ll stay out,’ Mick said.

‘No! Stay! And you, Phil.’ It’s true: suddenly I wanted them both there with me.

‘She come now,’ our officer said. ‘Lady guard bring her.’

Charlie. I was going to see Charlie. We heard voices and the slopping sound of plastic sandals as they approached the holding room. The female officer came in first, bringing her reluctant prisoner behind her.

I didn’t recognise her. Our eyes met, and we searched each other. Nothing was said. She, Mick, Phil and I and the two Thai prison officers stood in silence in the sweltering room. Phil was shaking his head.

‘I don’t understand,’ Mick said at last.

I turned to the male officer. ‘You can throw this one to the sharks,’ I said. ‘This isn’t my daughter.’

12

She prodded my foot and I twitched again. ‘Heart,’ she said. ‘You got problem wiv heart.’

Mick, feet up next to me, let out a little cry and his foot masseur giggled. ‘This one got problem with—’ And she didn’t know the word, so turned to indicate an area at the side of her lower back.

‘Liver,’ I added helpfully. ‘He’s got a problem with his liver.’

‘Gercha!’ Mick shouted as his foot masseur gouged under his toes with the ball of her thumb. Mick was sceptical but I was impressed. I’d had a minor heart murmur for some time, and my foot masseur had gone straight to the diagnosis. As for Mick, who’d insisted on bringing a couple of bottles of beer in for the duration of the two-hour foot massage, it would have been surprising to find any liver there at all.

The massage had been Mick’s idea. After the fiasco of the prison we’d spent a dreadful afternoon wringing our hands, failing to get any sense