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

as much as everyone else in Thailand. Coconut, the younger of the two with long, lank black hair, did the talking in strangled English, hard to follow. Bhun didn’t seem to speak at all, neither Thai nor English. For what was still a modest fee they agreed to cook for us and to negotiate with the hill tribes for places to stay en route. A commission settled the interests of the tour company, who provided small rucksacks and sleeping bags. We were told to leave our suitcases and most of our gear at our hotel in Chiang Mai.

Bhun and Coconut would be ready to leave early the following morning. We were to rendezvous at the office, where a truck would drive us to Ban Mae Kon, which was as far as the road would take us.

‘That’s it then,’ said Phil. ‘We’ve set our hands to the plough.’

‘What plough?’ Mick said.

I didn’t know what Phil meant either, but one thing was certain. We were going into the jungle.

Since that evening was going to be our last in Chiang Mai for some time, Mick was hell-bent on enjoying himself. He showered and shaved and slapped on the cologne. ‘We’re going into the jungle,’ he said more than once, ‘we don’t know what we’re going to find, and we don’t know when we’re going to get our next beer.’ Which was his way of telling me not to try to talk him out of drinking himself senseless.

Before we went out I tapped softly on Phil’s door. He opened the door very quietly. He seemed distracted, and I had the impression I’d interrupted him in the act of prayer. ‘Come with us,’ I said.

‘You know, a wild night on the town is not the solution to anything,’ Phil said. Mick had been needling him again. ‘We’d do better just to sit down and think hard, and I mean really hard, about what lies in front of us.’

‘We’ve no idea what lies in front of us.’

‘Exactly.’

He’d lost me again. ‘Phil, we’re going out to have a couple of beers and I’d like you to come with us. I don’t care to think of you here on your own.’

He blinked at me. ‘But that’s what you don’t understand, Father. Unlike you two, I’m not on my own.’

A sigh escaped my lips, and it sounded very much like the word fuck.

‘All right,’ Phil said, relenting. ‘I’ll come. But I’ve no intention of making a fool of myself.’

‘That’s good of you,’ I said. ‘And Mick will be relieved, too.’

As it happened Phil was rather more buoyant than I expected, and Mick was much more subdued. Like me, Mick was deeply apprehensive about what lay ahead. In the days we’d been in Chiang Mai, I’d started to get a little bit accustomed to the sweltering heat, the spicy food, the endless bartering over small exchanges. Mick, though, had never looked like he was away from home, but the jungle, without its bars and pool tables and hotels and ice-cold beers and Pepsi-colas was a different proposition.

Outside the Wat Pan Tong temple we passed an ancient Thai man squatting on the pavement. He had a sheet spread on the ground bearing odd merchandise. Mick stopped, turned, and went back. The old man was an amulet-seller. He had hundreds of amulets for sale, fashioned from metal, wood and terra-cotta. Mick fingered one of the amulets. The old man named a phenomenal price. Mick put it back again, and the old man picked out a more expensive looking thing which was actually dirt cheap.

‘You’re going to buy one?’ Phil said.

‘Shut up,’ said Mick, and after a little consideration he chose one with a hole so that it could be hung round his neck, and paid for it. The old man surprised us by holding the amulet in the air, swaying dangerously and wailing loudly as he blessed the object. Mick was mesmerised, and deeply impressed.

‘See that?’ he said after we’d moved on a few paces. ‘Made my skin flush, did that.’

‘He buys a heathen fetish,’ Phil said, ‘in the vain hope of good fortune beyond the wicket gate.’

‘Shut up,’ Mick said.

I examined the amulet for myself. It was a flat lozenge of terra-cotta stamped with a crescent moon, horns up, as it were. The moon radiated lines to the edge of the amulet. ‘Very good,’ I said. ‘You’ve just bought the Thai equivalent of a lucky rabbit’s foot.’

‘I don’t know who’s worse, Danny,’ Mick said, quickening his step, ‘you taking the piss in one ear, or him bleating in the other.’ We made our way to our favourite bar with Phil walking a few paces behind, like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, muttering darkly about Mick’s amulet.

I made a brief call to Sheila. I let Phil gloss the details for her. After that we had a few beers and even Phil consented to play a couple of rounds of pool with the bar girls, but none of us had much in the way of heart or conversation. Something was eating Mick. Looping his new amulet on to his neck chain, he was mumbling about ‘right speech’ and ‘right action’, but it was still a surprise when he told me, ‘Look Dan, I’ve got a small account to settle, type of thing. Got to put something in order.’

He asked me if, later in the evening, I would go with him to the Blue Valentine nightclub. He wanted to apologise for his behaviour to Mae-Lin.

‘Of course we can go.’

After that he cheered up. He wasn’t ready to go just yet, he said. He wanted to cruise the bars, drink some beer, tease the bar girls, break a few hearts. Pretty soon he was his old self. I looked at him, with one bar girl fanning his face and another feeding him slices of fresh pineapple, and for all the trouble he was I was glad he was coming into the jungle with me.

Phil didn’t think so. After a young Magdalene had humiliated him