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

was suspicion. There was an incipient curl to her lip too, as if a sneer was kept in permanent reserve for some comment or verbal assault directed her way. I didn’t like her much.

She wore green cotton pyjamas – reminding me of the outfits worn by ancillary workers in the hospitals at home – and plastic sandals. We met her in a stuffy holding room with no window and no fan. It gave me an impression of the sweltering heat of the cells. She sat at a small table where I was given a plastic chair.

For a moment we hunkered like chess players, and then I unpacked my bag with the soap and shampoo and all the guff. Sitting against the wall, also on plastic chairs, were Mick, Phil, Brazier-Armstrong and Mick’s prison officer wallet-friend. A female warder stood by the door looking bored. She stepped over to the table and checked the gear I had laid out.

‘They’ll only confiscate it and take what they want,’ the girl said.

‘Not if I encourage them to let you keep it.’

The girl knew perfectly well what I meant. ‘Can I go back to my cell afterwards?’

‘We keep her ’lone last night,’ the prison officer put in, with a beautiful, beaming Thai smile, ‘for help her ’member few things. She ’member good now.’

I understood the women were locked up six to a cell, but that was obviously preferable to a windowless solitary confinement. ‘You can have these things,’ I said as if I governed the slammer. ‘You can go to your old cell. But I need to know where and when you last saw my daughter.’

‘Why should I help you? I’ve been left to rot here. He,’ she said, jabbing a finger at Brazier-Armstrong, ‘is fucking useless. I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m on twenty years, possibly even a death sentence. What do I care?’

We’d learned that drugs traffickers often travel on stolen passports, for obvious reasons. But Claire Marchant had maintained the pretence for a long time after she’d been jailed. I had a father’s hunch as to why.

‘Claire, don’t your parents know you’re in here?’

She bit a fingernail.

‘You know, now we’ve found out your real name, we will contact them, and we’ll tell them what you’ve done and where you are. They deserve to know.’

And this hard-bitten little girl started weeping.

I saw it all there. She’d kept it from her folks. I don’t know how exactly, but so far she’d succeeded; they hadn’t got a clue that their daughter was banged up in Chiang Mai prison.

I let her cry for a minute or two and then I found her a tissue. I asked the guard if I could give her a cigarette. The guard nodded, and Marchant accepted a snout. ‘They don’t know, do they?’ She shook her head, looked up with wet eyes and blew a long funnel of smoke at the ceiling. Now she couldn’t look me in the eye.

‘My dad’s very old,’ she said. ‘He’s sick, bed-bound. I didn’t even want to leave him to go travelling but he said I should go, said there was no point waiting around until he kicked it. I know he’s only got a year or two. I thought if I pretended to be – you know – someone else, that he’d never get to hear about it.’

I thought about how long it had been since I’d heard from Charlie. ‘But doesn’t he expect to hear from you?’

‘I’ve got a friend who sends e-mails every fortnight. My sister at home prints them out and reads them to him. He thinks I’m in Australia right now. My lovely old dad,’ and here she started crying again, ‘I don’t want him to know about this. My lovely old dad.’

After that she told us everything she could. If Thailand’s role in the Golden Triangle of opium cultivation had shrunk in recent years, it seemed it was still the Golden Gate. Much of the poppy growing had been pushed out of Thailand into Myanmar and Laos, where the opium was refined into heroin. Then it had to come back into Thailand again, because only Thailand had the wide-open communications and regular business and tourist access to the West.

I understood from what she said that there are two methods of transporting the drug, either by mules or by ants. The principle of dispatching mules involves large consignments, a high-risk policy with the possibility of confiscation incurring huge losses for the drugs bosses. The alternative policy was one of sending an army of ants bearing small amounts of the contraband concealed about the person, knowing that some of the ants would be caught but minimising the overall risk as dozens of other ants found their way through. Claire Marchant had been stepped on.

Like a lot of tourists in Thailand, Claire had fallen in love with the country but without the means to stay there. The easy solution had presented itself, and she’d been picked up in the town of Fang having brought a packet of drugs, hidden in her vagina, across from Myanmar. It was, she said, the only time she’d done it. A boyfriend, she claimed, had talked her into it.

But I didn’t entirely believe that, because she’d stolen the passport from Charlie a couple of months before being caught, so I figure she must have known why she wanted someone else’s passport. In any event, she was herself smoking the stuff long before her arrest, and so was Charlie.

‘I was on a trek in the jungle, in the north. It’s the safe way to get opium. The Thai authorities want you to believe they’ve got rid of the opium crops but up there the tribespeople still grow it. They offer it to you in every village.

‘In one village, up near the border with Myanmar, we came across another trek. There were some English and American tourists. They’d been on the pipe, and a couple of them were sick. Their guides were upset, because they’ve been told to