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

gazed down at me, neither sympathetic nor hostile, but yet involved. Suddenly I vented a deep, distressed sigh. The sigh was so noisy and overstated that I felt embarrassed for myself; I even looked round, but the temple was otherwise empty. It was as if I’d been holding my breath since stepping off the plane. Then it happened again, involuntary as a sneeze with my body shaking slightly, and my profound sigh was absorbed into the nooks and crannies of the temple.

I’d spent the last forty-eight hours steeling myself against the gaudy carnival of life outside; the Ferris-wheel of exotica; the sensual onslaught; the terror at what I’d find in Chiang Mai prison; the disappointment and speculation that had followed. Now the simple act of walking into the temple had punctured my distress. I closed my eyes and held my head in my hands, waiting for another discharge to rip through me.

After a good while, I don’t know how long, I felt a quiet presence come up from behind and settle down next to me. I didn’t look up. If it was Mick I wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. His sleeve brushed mine. Perhaps he saw my distress, but I was glad that for once he had the sensitivity not to say anything. It was so quiet in there that I heard his level breathing, at least until it fell into rhythm with mine, or perhaps mine with his. He sat there with me for ten minutes, and his silent presence had a calming effect. When I opened my eyes he’d gone again. I got up and walked outside.

Mick was sitting under the bo tree, bathed by the hazy light. The monk had gone. I sat down beside him, taking one of his proffered cigarettes. He was chuckling to himself. It turned out that the monk had spent several years in Birmingham, and his English had a heavy Midlands inflection. Mick had been treated to a short lecture on Buddhism, and decided I too should have some of the benefit. He started telling me about the Eightfold Path: right words, right action and the rest of it.

‘That’s great, Mick. You’ve shared a snout with a monk and now you’re a Zen master.’

He was stung. ‘Don’t take the piss!’

‘Shall we go?’

Mick scrambled to his feet and kicked off his shoes. ‘Let me have a look inside the temple first.’

‘But you’ve already been in.’

‘No I haven’t. I’ll only be a minute.’

‘Well who came in while I was in there? Was it the monk?’

Mick looked at me oddly. ‘No one went in.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Not while I’ve been here. Why?’

‘Nothing. You go inside.’

Mick had to be mistaken. A very distinct someone had squatted down next to me. I’d clearly felt them brush against my clothes. I’d heard them breathing. My skin flushed at the thought. I shivered, and concluded that the heat was getting to me. I felt dizzy again.

I suppose Mick had a point. About the monk, I mean. Is it feasible that you would turn up at the Nirvana gates with a lighted ciggie on the go? I was ready to return to the hotel, to take a nap. I waited until Mick had achieved enlightenment and was struggling back into his sandals. I asked him one last time, trying to make light of it, ‘Are you sure that monk didn’t come inside while I was in there?’

‘Sure I’m sure,’ he said. ‘What’s eating you?’

I was so disturbed by this experience I almost decided to explore it with Phil at the hotel. I tapped softly on his door. I seemed to have caught him in the act of sitting upright on a hard chair, since he returned to it as soon as he’d let me in.

‘Phil?’

‘Yes, Father?’

‘Phil. At the temple. Today.’

‘Yes, Father?’

‘What would you say? About something.’

‘Yes?’

‘No, it’s nothing really.’

‘No?’

‘No. Not at all.’

It was a hell of a conversation. I had to let myself out, leaving Phil utterly nonplussed. I couldn’t stand the expression on his face as he sat on his hard chair.

Much later, in my own room, I was having a dream. There was an old woman with a face carved out of wood. She was ringing a small temple bell, right in my face. The bell became the room telephone. I rolled over in bed and picked up the receiver.

‘Yes,’ I croaked. ‘Yes. I’ll be down in ten minutes.’

Mick blinked sleepily from his bed. ‘What?’

‘Brazier-Armstrong. He’s in reception now. You go back to sleep. I can handle him.’

‘No fucking way,’ Mick said.

14

I found Brazier-Armstrong in the bar, perched on a high stool with his legs crossed. He was twiddling a straw in a tall glass full of some poisonous-looking green stuff. I suppose I was shocked at how young he was. I’d expected more formality, not this youth in a T-shirt and cotton trousers. Perhaps I wanted someone in a white suit and straw fedora. In fact he was in his thirties, but the long blond fringe dangling in his dewy blue eyes made him look fresh from the university debating club. He turned and caught me studying him.

‘Ah!’ he cried, jumping from his stool and extending a hand. ‘You must be Mr Innes! So glad to catch up with you at last!’ He made it sound as if I was the one being evasive. But he fixed me with smiling eyes and a huge grin, and shook me warmly by the hand as if we were old friends. As if we’d been together in the same debating team, it seemed to me. ‘Let me get you a drink.’

‘Juice,’ I said.

I was expecting him to bring up the unpleasantness at his office, but he never mentioned it. He gave me a long, complicated explanation about how he’d been summoned to a neighbouring province to sort out a problem which, when he got there, was already solved. During this Mick slipped quietly on to the bar stool next to me. I introduced them to each other. Mick