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

was trying not to snort, so I buried my head deeper into my pillow, blissful in the deepest of deep sleeps.

‘Danny! I know you’re awake! I need to talk, you bastard! Danny! Hey, Danny!’

17

I was wakened the next morning by a sound like a herd of pigs being driven to market. It was only Mick, snoring into his pillow. I got up and slipped quietly out of the room.

While he slept on I was enjoying a cigarette in the pagoda. Honey-coloured sunlight filtered through the haze, nestling in the folds and ripples of the swift-flowing green river, when Brazier-Armstrong showed up. Even though he wore dark glasses, I must say he looked terrible, like someone who hadn’t had a wink of sleep. ‘Good morning,’ he said, flashing me a very unconvincing grin. He made to step inside the pagoda.

‘Shoes,’ I pointed out.

‘Of course,’ he said, slipping off his sandals. He looked around nervously, perhaps for signs of Mick.

I love that. When you get someone who obviously thinks they are superior, and you are able to pull them up on some small matter of good manners or common courtesy. It’s terrific. I thought I’d lay it on a bit thicker for him. ‘You should always remove your shoes before entering a temple or a shrine. Always.’

‘I know.’ He was very short with me.

‘You can have a cigarette though.’ I offered him one. ‘They don’t seem to mind that.’

‘Not for me, thank you. Look here, Mr Innes, I really must object, in the strongest possible terms, to your colleague’s behaviour.’

Yes, I was Mr Innes now. One little chat about shoes and Brazier-Armstrong wanted to go all formal on me. Or perhaps it wasn’t the shoes. Perhaps it was about something Mick had told me in the night that had Brazier-Armstrong in such a state.

Mick hadn’t given up trying to wake me. In fact he’d got out of bed and whisked the sheets off me, grabbing and twisting my big toe until I had to give up faking, and we grabbed a couple of beers from the room fridge and took them down to the pagoda, where we talked for two hours. Yes, it was mostly about Mae-Lin; but Mick also revealed what he’d been up to in the afternoon, when he’d raced off in a tuk-tuk.

He was in a lather over Mae-Lin. The way he told it to me, he was smitten from the moment she’d entered the bar. I could understand that – as I told you, her appearance was nothing less than stunning. Speaking man to man as we sat in the pagoda, with night-lights burning at the foot of the Buddha, he disclosed that he’d nursed an erection from the moment she sat down next to him, and that it hadn’t subsided until her sudden revelation some hours later.

‘Hadn’t gone to do anything about it,’ he assured me. ‘To the Blue Valentine, I mean. Honestly wasn’t thinking about getting my leg over. Honestly. But I felt great, I mean really great in her company. His company. Her company. Oh, Jesus! Look, we necked a beer or two, and when the time came round for Mae-Lin to do her short DJ spot, I found out this gal was an R ’n’ B fan! The real thing! Knew the fuckin’ lot, a to z, side to side, top to bottom.’

Up until that point, all Mick was having to deal with was an inflating lust, but this complication exploded his condition into the raptures of dewy-eyed love. As well as storing in his head an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of pop music, Mick’s lean-to garage outside his house was where he filed his huge collection of Stax and Motown originals. Here Mae-Lin might come dangerously close to unseating his notions of confirmed bachelorhood. And there are, as everyone knows, two turntables on a DJ’s deck.

As he told it to me, Mae-Lin let him stand behind the deck at the Blue Valentine as they made their canoodling selections together for a half-empty dance floor. They came from behind the decks to dance together, smooching up close for Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, the works.

Then Mae-Lin cut the spot short so that they could sit together in the shadows, and hold hands, and kiss. It was accelerating out of control. The beer. The music. The smell of Mae-Lin’s hair. The seductive, heady atmosphere of a Chiang Mai evening. In the Blue Valentine, Mick encountered more promise of celestial bliss than anything to be found in the corrosive bowl of an opium pipe.

Why not? People fall in love. And if you walk away from that it’s like abandoning a new-born baby on the steps of a church.

But Mick still suspected that Mae-Lin was a prostitute. She reassured him several times on that score, but Mick persisted in asking her why, if she wasn’t after his money, she wanted to spend her time with a fat fuck like him. He couldn’t accept her claim that she simply found him attractive, and so in exasperation – and bloody good for her too that she did – she’d spilled the beans.

‘At first I couldn’t grasp what she was saying,’ Mick said, rubbing his chin. ‘I just sat there with this shit-eating grin on my face, as if my jaw was paralysed. I wanted to stop smiling but I couldn’t. She asked me if I were going to say anything, but I was clenching my teeth, smiling back at her, looking across her shoulder. I tell you I couldn’t move, Danny.

‘Listen while I tell you about my balls. They’d gone. Shot back inside my body, like. And they didn’t drop again until a couple of hours later. Makes you walk with a gait. But here’s the strangest thing: I seemed to be able to rise up from my seat and leave this smiling, grinning body behind me still sitting there. And I quietly walked out without a word to Mae-Lin or anybody. Then I