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

call the book Confessions of an English Opium Drinker? Perhaps he thought it didn’t sound so good.

Before discovering opium, what he used to do whenever he had a headache was to dunk his head in icy water. I can’t think what good that did him, but evidently the opium was much better. Not only did it relieve his headache, it also gave him ‘an abyss of divine enjoyment’. He was shown ‘celestial pleasures’ in the ‘Paradise of Opium-Eaters’. But he also knew, even in that first rush, where it was taking him, because he added that he experienced the ‘lowest depths of the inner spirit’. I take that to mean he knew, right from the beginning, that he was on a staircase down.

The book slipped from my hand as I fell into a doze. De Quincey, in his early nineteenth-century frock-coat, was leading me down a staircase, lighting the way with a candle. He was an irritating little chatterbox, and I wasn’t listening to him because I was too preoccupied with what was happening at his feet. The staircase was forming beneath us as we moved down it. Sometimes we had to wait a few seconds for it to manifest and solidify, and I was nervous because the descent seemed to go on for ever. The odd thing about the dream was that I’d been brought there by De Quincey to install electrical wiring all the way down, about which he was very happy; but I kept rubbing my chin and thinking, heck, this is going to be a big job.

When I woke Mick was standing over me, silhouetted, the sun behind his head. I couldn’t see his features, but in my befuddled state his figure looked ominous, menacing. I sat up too quickly. My head swam. ‘What’s cracking off?’

Mick stripped off his shirt and shorts and belly-flopped into the pool, as if he wanted to hurt the water. The huge splash was a deliberate affront to the tranquillity of the afternoon. He climbed out, jiggled his finger aggressively at the wax and water in his left ear, and flung himself on the sunbed beside me, face averted.

Phil came over to find out the latest.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘Do you know that bar up by the Tha Phae Gate?’ Mick muttered into the pillow of his sunbed.

‘Yes.’

‘I think we’ll try that one tonight.’

That was all we could get out of him.

16

Mick was in a leery mood that evening. He showered with bellicose energy, blowing like a harpooned whale, water and foam everywhere; he shaved with minute attention, flicking his razor aggressively at the soapy water; and he triple-dosed on the after-shave lotion. He was, he announced, preparing for a skinful of ale, and when I indicated I might be content to hang around the hotel, he told me to go ahead, that I should only do what I wanted to do. ‘Stay in with Cardinal Cunt,’ he snorted.

In the end I thought I’d better tag along, just to act as a smoking brake on a wheel already spinning before we’d left the hotel grounds. ‘I can’t believe,’ Phil said, ‘that the pair of you are cheerfully marching off to a brothel.’

‘It’s a bar, not a brothel for crying out loud!’ I told him.

‘As far as I can see, all bars in this town are brothels!’

‘Come out with us.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘The father and his friend go a-whoring.’

‘Don’t stand there arguing with him,’ Mick shouted. Then, ‘Thighland by night!’ he roared to the otherwise empty hotel lobby, and we left Phil to write his postcards.

These vixen girls, they grab your hand, pinch your arse and stroke your thigh trying to reel you into the bars. The escape policy is to be jocular and friendly as you pass on by, but Mick wasn’t in a pass-on-by mood. He was soon draped by gorgeous Thai whores while I sat next to him nursing a beer and disappointing their friends. Nonetheless, after standing these girls a drink he drained his own glass, and with a cry of, ‘Onward, Daniel!’ pitched in a reedy voice intended to mimic our dear consul, we were up and out and making progress to the next tiny, neon-lit grotto brimming with teenage sirens.

The girls didn’t let him go easily. They had a good nose for a man in a storm, and in the third cavern he actually walked out with two petite prostitutes hanging from his neck. They made it twenty yards down the street, ultimately dropping off him like petals from a blown rose. It wasn’t until the sixth bar and his twelfth beer, somewhere along the Kotcasan, that he began to slow down.

I was getting a bit worried about the state of his head. He was still the custodian of my money, and I suggested he give it back to me.

‘Fuck off,’ he said, standing two more starry-eyed virgins a drink. ‘None of this is coming out of your stash.’

‘That’s not what I’m worried about.’

‘Mick’s in the chair. Enjoy yourself. Talk to one of these little ticklers.’

I guess I was being cold with the girls, but I didn’t want to encourage them, or make them think I would pay to have them. I made some remark about AIDS.

‘Look!’ he snorted, nostrils flaring, nose-hair bristling at me. ‘We’re joking. We’re laughing. We’re singing. That’s all we’re doing. I’ve never been surrounded by so many pretty, smiling girls in my life. What I will do next, I don’t know. But I’m not fucking stupid. Now get that sour, kicked-dog expression off your face, loosen up, and get off my back.’ He turned his attentions to his pretty entourage.

I wasn’t offended. I went to the bar and ordered myself another beer. A girl with hair like a bolt of shimmering black silk glided on to the next stool, sliding a draughtboard under my nose. ‘Wanna play?’ She showed me perfect teeth and a mythological Thai smile. ‘What your name?’

‘Daniel, evidently.’

‘Daniel Evidently, pleased to meet you. Me, Air.’