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

at a frame of pool he laid down his cue, and suggested an early night for us all.

‘Fuck off,’ Mick said through a mouthful of pineapple.

‘Really,’ Phil said, his face reddening. ‘Tomorrow is going to be tough. We need to be focused and rested.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘you go back to the hotel and we’ll be along later.’

‘I’m afraid,’ Phil said, ‘that I’m going to have to insist.’

I was astounded. I looked at Mick and Mick looked at me. Then Mick got to his feet, brushing off the tiny bar girls in the process. ‘Well, that’s it then, if the man insists. Sorry girls, but I have to go. We’ve been called. Good night, sweetheart, and you my darling. Kiss kiss. One last embrace.’

I thought Mick was joking.

He was. He slumped back into his seat. ‘On second thoughts I’ll have another beer.’

Phil wasn’t amused. Sweat boiling on his brow he looked at me severely and said, ‘Dad?’

Dad! He called me dad, and not father. ‘I’ll be along soon, son,’ I said as tenderly as I could. He had a point about being rested, but I wasn’t going to be ordered around by him, church Elder or not.

Then Phil completely lost control of himself. Out of nothing he detonated. ‘You two,’ he roared, ‘have no earthly idea where you are. You ignorant dogs! Look around you! We’re awash – awash! – in a foaming tide of sin and you can’t even see it. Whores! Drugs! Booze! Gluttony! Usury! Why don’t you understand where you are? Does it have to be spelled out to you? This is iniquity! Depravity! This is a heathen place! This is a platform of stink and corruption and darkness and you think it’s a joke. Well I’m here to tell you that you’re going to get an almighty wake-up call!’

The bar girls, tittering at first, had gone quiet. Phil was purple in the face, his hair lit by the green and red neon bar lights, and he wasn’t addressing just Mick and I any more, but anyone and everyone. His eyes were like pools of boiling pitch. Flecks of white spittle flew from his lips like spindrift. He’d completely lost it. For the first time in my life I felt afraid of, and for, my own son.

‘I’m sorry for you,’ he shouted, recovering slightly. ‘Sorry, yes, sorry for you, for what’s coming. And as for you, Father, all I can say is that for you I’ll save my strongest prayers.’

It was his parting shot. He stormed from the bar and climbed into a waiting tuk-tuk. The driver revved his engine and belched a dirty and sulphurous cloud of diesel smoke as it departed.

‘Fuck off in your lawnmower,’ Mick shouted after him, too late.

I scratched my head and sighed. ‘I don’t know where I went wrong with that one, I really don’t.’

‘What’s usury?’ Mick wanted to know.

By the time we fetched up at the Blue Valentine our mood had changed, and we’d both become light, jaunty. I knew why. It was an antidote to Phil’s outburst. Even though I didn’t take his words seriously, his behaviour weighed heavily on me. He’d let go flocks of dark birds and now they were settling along the path before me.

So maybe it was self-consciousness, or maybe it was fear, but we were like boozed-up schoolboys, grab-arsing and noisy and laughing at anything. Somehow we’d dragged four girls from the Corner Bar with us on the promise of paying to get them into the nightclub. We were a rabble.

The Blue Valentine dance floor was busy enough that night. It was a more upmarket place than the street bars, and I could see why the girls had wanted to come with us. The dance floor was awash with bubbling, turquoise, blue and tangerine light. Someone up there was spinning Soul classics. ‘Harlem Shuffle’ by Bob and Earl struck up. Mick dragged the five of us on to the dance floor, where we shimmied in a tight circle. I don’t dance much myself – can’t be doing with it – but that night I was up for it. Wild, extravagant dancing. I also dance a lot with my face once I get started, and the girls found it hilarious if no one else in the club did. I don’t know what the funky chicken is exactly, but I recall I did that, too.

I remember Charlie digging out some old records of Sheila’s when she was sixteen. Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, The Temptations. She played them at full belt, amazed that her parents had some of this stuff. She had a boyfriend at school who was into retrospectives. For about two days Sheila and I zoomed up in her estimation, and she began asking us about when we were courting (courting, who uses that expression nowadays? Sometimes I feel about as contemporary as Thomas De Quincey.).

But Mick was the Soul Man, and I loved to watch him dance. For such a fat bastard, he was an ace dancer. In fact he could have danced a professional off the mat. Turn down the lights, pump up the Soul music, and this slob, this lard-machine, this pink-faced blubber-bank was fluid and light and graceful on his feet. He was Nijinsky. Women who wouldn’t normally look twice at him always wanted to dance with him when they saw what he could do, but he always preferred to dance alone. He would attract small crowds who would gather round and egg him on. Just as they did in the Blue Valentine that night.

A couple of times I glanced up at the female silhouette ghosting the dais behind the turntables. Mae-Lin had clocked Mick but was pretending not to have; though what with the commotion he was making on the dance floor she couldn’t miss him. I saw her gazing at him when his back was turned. Once I saw them make eye contact briefly, and I could have kicked myself for having missed it, but I suddenly realised she was