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

was outside and I jumped in a tuk-tuk. I didn’t even haggle over the fare.’

After that, Mick had made his way back to one of the bars we’d drunk in earlier, huddled over a beer and eyeing the girls with deep suspicion. Whatever feelings he had about putting his tongue halfway down a man’s throat all evening, he was disgusted with himself over the way he’d treated Mae-Lin. He was haunted by an obscure expression on Mae-Lin’s face; and by the inexplicable vision of the figure of himself reclining in the chair, grinning inanely as his corporeal self had tiptoed away across the dance floor.

‘The thing is Danny, it’s like a bit of me is still there, do you see? I feel like a piece of me got torn off. I feel like I left my balls there.’

I hadn’t actually got much in the way of wisdom on the subject to offer him. I mean, I could see why he was so distressed. You don’t normally get this sort of thing happening on the fruit and veg stalls of Leicester market.

I did my best to reassure him that he hadn’t got to scrub himself down with battery acid or anything like that. It was when we were talked out about Mae-Lin that I got him to tell me where he’d gone that afternoon before any of this had happened. True to his promise, he hadn’t gone to the consulate, not at first at any rate. He’d returned, instead, to Chiang Mai prison.

At the prison he’d sought out the official we’d met on our first visit. More folded notes changed hands, and, Mick told me, they’d had a long conversation about opium, farang prisoners, and our friend Mr Brazier-Armstrong. Mick had complained, in passing, that we never got to see much of the man, that he was never available and was of little help. That was, the prison official told him, because Brazier-Armstrong was always across the border in Laos or Cambodia, lying down with little boys.

Mick wouldn’t lie to me about that. It is of course possible that the prison official was himself lying through his teeth or simply relaying malicious rumours; but Mick, taking it at face value, went ahead and acted on that information. He went back to the consulate, where he spoke to Mrs Duongsaa. Brazier-Armstrong, he told Mrs Duongsaa, had twenty-four hours to set up an interview with the girl who’d stolen Charlie’s passport, or he would telephone the News Of The World and the Sunday Mirror in London with information about what the consul was up to in Laos and Cambodia.

And here, this morning, why, not even eighteen hours later, was the man himself, objecting ‘in the strongest possible terms’ to Mick’s behaviour. I wondered how many times in his career he had written those words in some piffling and effortless protest in the routine discharge of his office.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘What has he done?’

Brazier-Armstrong swept back his long fringe, and wiped his bespittled lips with an elegant thumb and forefinger. ‘I really don’t understand what he thinks there is to be gained by adopting this hectoring tone. My staff in particular feel very upset and provoked.’

‘Mrs Duongsaa?’

‘Duongsaa, yes. All this bullying is quite unnecessary. And, by the way, we are doing every single thing in our power to help you in your very difficult situation.’

‘I’m sure you are. Where have you been? Laos?’

‘No.’

‘Cambodia?’

‘No.’ He looked me in the eye. I actually thought he was telling the truth on that occasion, but some tiny oscillation in his iris made me suspect that what Mick had reported to me was true. The heavy dew of perspiration above his upper lip could have been formed by the morning heat, but he was afraid of me. He looked at me and he knew that I knew.

I sat in that pagoda calmly smoking a cigarette and gazing out on the green-tea river. The smiling Buddha at my right hand was telling me to keep calm but I wanted to break Brazier-Armstrong’s face. I was thinking not of the abused little boys, but of their parents. For all I know they might have sold their children into this vile bondage, and perhaps through rotten circumstances, but I couldn’t believe that none of them had been touched by shame.

I too had been touched by shame, for my daughter. ‘You’ve come here to tell me something.’

‘I’ve arranged the interview you wanted. With the girl who took your daughter’s passport.’

‘You’ve arranged it. When?’

‘This morning.’

‘Good.’ I was determined to show no emotion.

I finished my cigarette as he told me what time we should be there. He also suggested that Mick’s presence might be counterproductive.

‘And if I want him there?’

Brazier-Armstrong stood up to leave. As a parting shot he warned, ‘You should tell your friend to stop bribing the prison guards. He might think it’s all very simple. But another guard will become jealous and your friend might find himself on serious corruption charges.’

‘Are you threatening us?’

He stepped out of the pagoda and shuffled into his sandals. ‘I,’ he said emphatically, ‘don’t work like that.’ Then he hastened along the garden path, red in the face and plucking the spume from his lips with one of those manicured fingers.

I called him back. ‘By the way. You went to Oxford, didn’t you?’

He looked puzzled. ‘As a matter of fact, it was Cambridge.’

Same fucking difference.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you at the prison.’

18

I doubt if Claire Marchant had been to university anywhere. On this occasion she had her hair scraped back and she was not unlike my Charlie. Same hair colour, similar in the shape of her face – I could see how she might travel about on Charlie’s passport. Several weeks in prison had given her a sallow look but the only real difference was in the hooded character of her brow, and in her habit of peeping at you from beneath. It was not a shy peeping. It