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

communicating with him through her choice of music. I thought back over the last two or three discs. ‘Stand By Me’, ‘Respect’, ‘Reach Out’; the hits kept talking over the music.

But I could never have anticipated what happened next.

Mae-Lin locked down the mood and tempo by playing a slow number, and stepped down from the dais. Tall, statuesque and beautiful, bathed in rippling blue light, she gazed directly at Mick. He was across the dance floor, looking back at her. Some of the clubbers were already drifting off the dance floor as reverberating electric organ chords counted in the storming power vocals of Percy Sledge, giving it all he’s got on ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’.

I was mesmerised just watching them. Mick stroked his chin as he decided what to do next. Before the first few bars of the song were up he glanced over at me. I made the minimal gesture of nodding my head towards Mae-Lin. It was what he needed.

With his big bear arms hanging limply at his side he moved slowly across the dance floor. The remaining dancers parted for him, pure choreography. His face was orange and black shadow in the ultraviolet light. His brilliant white T-shirt was all I could see of his torso, and he appeared to glide towards her, like a spirit. On reaching her, he swept her up. I saw her long arms clasp about his neck, and then I felt someone tugging at my own elbow, breaking the spell of a moment, a crystallised breath of unlimited grace, an instant of weightlessness.

It was Air, one of the bar girls we had brought along with us. She was smiling. ‘Hey! Me think your friend love her long time!’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

I don’t know what happened after that, and I never did ask Mick. I don’t need to know. It’s not important. I left the Blue Valentine, alone. I didn’t want to cramp his style or make him think he was being watched, or judged. His business.

Even though we were going to have to make an early start, I wasn’t in the mood for sleeping. I got a tuk-tuk driver to take me across the Nawarat Bridge. There was a place I liked there on the riverfront, a short stretch of green grass on the embankment, a place where lovers and small groups of young people sat quietly in the haze and the relative cool of the night, right through to the small hours. The river was illumined by the lights on the bridge, and giant white moths flitted back and forth in the light. The colour of the night was oyster and sage.

After a while, Mae-Lin and Mick strolled by, hand in hand. They were deep in conversation, and Mick was fingering the new amulet at his neck. I shrank into the shadows so they wouldn’t see me as they passed by. The air around them seemed to quiver. They passed into the haze leaving tiny ripples of light in their wake. I blinked. I wasn’t certain if it really was them, or just an hallucination of them. The moment was so singular and beautiful I had the feeling that every pair of lovers of every time must have strolled that embankment, that it was a place out of time.

After they’d gone I sat there for an age, smoking cigarettes, watching the river, listening to it flow.

19

After three gruelling hours of it we got them to stop. Salt stung my eyes and my T-shirt was puddled around my midriff. I’d bought new training shoes in the Chiang Mai market, and they’d rubbed my toes into blisters. Mick slumped between spare clumps of parched, spiky grass and took out his water bottle. In his safari hat he looked like a game hunter from the old movies: the fat one who dies early so the plot can gather pace.

‘Little.’ Coconut jabbed a finger at Mick’s bottle. ‘Only little.’

Phil leaned against a tree, fanning himself with a wide-brimmed straw hat he’d also bought in the night market. Bhun squatted, sullenly smoking a cigarette. Our guides didn’t have new training shoes. They wore cheap plastic flip-flop sandals. I’d assumed from this that the terrain wouldn’t be too challenging, and I’d been horribly wrong.

We’d been driven up into the mountains in the back of a jolting songthaew truck stinking of diesel fuel, and where the red-soil winding road was too dusty we had the neckbands of our T-shirts hoicked up around our noses. It was a relief when the road ran out and we could get out of the choking, sweltering truck. Coconut took front position, followed by me, Phil and Mick. Bhun brought up the rear. I noticed that both our guides had a long-bladed knife, something between a commando knife and a machete, stuck in their belts. Our path continued steadily upwards, ascending towards the unblinking eye of the noonday sun.

My first impression of the land was of scrub and red soil, and it was not until we got into the tree line that I realised why the road had run out. The terrain had become pleated in a succession of high peaks and deep ravines. We had to hike up testing inclines and then down the sides of steep ravines. The path down was the most punishing, ramming the ball of the knee into the socket with piston-hard slaps, twanging the ligaments.

Coconut and Bhun didn’t speak. Mick made a bid for a jocular mood, but they weren’t having any of it. Then as Mick’s lungs began to strain against the incline, he too became silent. The sun thrummed through a thick, soupy haze which protected us from its furnace but which made the warm air unpleasantly moist. My own T-shirt felt like an eelskin vest while Phil, incredibly, was still wearing one of his white polyester Sunday-school shirts, and it was so wet I could see through it to his white, rather pudgy body.

Now, as we slumped in the