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

It was a disconcerting moment. Mick’s face, crowned by wispy blond curls that should rightly grace a cherub and not someone resembling a bareknuckle boxer, was so close I could hardly focus. His lovely blue-curaçao eyes fixed on me without blinking. I could have blurted it out there and then, the whole thing, Charlie and Chiang Mai and the Foreign Office. But I wasn’t even sure I liked Mick Williams, let alone wanted to disclose the most intimate details of my life. Come to think of it, I knew as little about him as he did about me, even though he was as proficient at talking as I was the contrary.

A market trader, peddling squashy, over-ripe fruit and veg on Leicester market, he was a big man, a bruiser; but his blond eyelashes, pimento face and piggy eyes belied an intelligent and lively mind. He was also my snooker partner on Thursday nights, but quite apart from that he was too blustering and noisy to be the sort of person I would want to count as a friend.

He stared at me, waiting for an answer. I thrust my hands deep into my pockets and found there a ball of screwed-up paper. ‘Right,’ I said, smoothing out the flatpack furniture diagram on the table. ‘I’ve spent the whole day trying to work this one out, and if you can do it you’re a better man than I am.’

Mick snatched up the diagram and studied it suspiciously. His nose twitched a couple of times as he turned the thing on its side, as if that would help. Izzy returned with the drinks. ‘What the devil’s that?’ she wanted to know, setting the drinks down on the table.

‘It’s an IQ test,’ Mick said.

‘Instructions for sticking bits of wood together,’ I told her.

‘Ghastly things. Too complicated,’ she said. This was a woman who taught Latin and classical Greek to children with iron rings through their noses and lips.

‘Made in Thailand,’ Mick observed, reading the small print at the foot of the diagram.

‘That’s funny,’ I said.

‘Why is that funny?’ But I didn’t have to tell them why it was funny because the quiz got underway again and there were other things to think about. Mick’s nostrils twitched. Though I pretended to study the answer sheet I could see him watching me. ‘I’m not falling for that,’ he snorted, before question number one got fired across the Clipper’s bows.

I kept my head down.

2

The following day I called the Foreign Office on the number Sheila had given me, and asked to speak to a Mr Farquar-Thompson. It wasn’t very satisfactory, since I had to call from a customer’s house. I was rewiring a lady’s house – yes, I’m a sparks by trade – and since my cellphone bill had gone unpaid I asked for permission to use her phone. I offered to pay for the call but she refused, extracting an alternative payment by standing next to me and fingering the button at the neck of her blouse throughout the entire call.

Farquar-Thompson had to get the file. At first he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Then when he returned he spoke about Charlotte’s case with surprising authority. I was trying to get as much information as I could without letting on to the lady standing next to me. All through the call I wanted to shout, ‘Where the fuck is Chiang Mai? When is the next flight?’

‘We can arrange visiting rights,’ Farquar-Thompson intoned, ‘and we can pass on supplies.’

‘Is that all?’

‘She has a lawyer looking after her interests, but I have to tell you that the case looks cut and dried. She was caught in possession of a fairly large quantity of the stuff. A mule, I think is the expression. Or is it an ant? We put a lot of pressure on the Thai authorities to stamp out drug dealing, so they in turn like to come down heavily on drug traffickers, particularly Western ones.’

‘What’s she facing?’

‘As I said to your wife, she would be unlucky to be handed a death sentence, though I have to say we can’t rule it out. She may however get life, or twenty years.’

The room tilted. Maybe Farquar-Thompson heard me gulp.

‘We’ve arranged a decent legal team, Mr Innes, and she is visited by embassy staff.’

I could imagine. ‘How often?’

‘As frequently as we can possibly manage. You’ll let us know if you intend making the journey out there?’ He was tying up the call.

‘Yes, of course I’ll be going out there. Thank you. Thank you for your help.’

‘Not at all.’

Hands trembling, I put the receiver gently back on its cradle. The lady whose phone I’d been using informed me that, after a great deal of consideration, she wanted another double plug socket in her kitchen, just there, above the work-top, so that it would be handy for the liquidiser and the toaster.

Charlotte, whom Farquar-Thompson told me was languishing in a Thai prison, was my only daughter. She was twenty-two at the time. I also had a son three years older, but fathers are more tender towards their daughters and it was Charlie whom I doted on and whom I indulged until, just after her eighteenth birthday, I waved her away to Oxford University one bright sunny October afternoon. The whiff of autumn was on the breeze that day, mashed leaves, mushrooms, fallen damsons, and I will admit to basking in a certain pride: both her mother and I left school when we were sixteen. Her teachers also told me that getting to Oxford is quite an achievement if you haven’t had the benefit of a private education or friends at the BBC.

Bright girl.

Well I don’t know about any of that, and I don’t know what they teach you at Oxford, but Charlie came back with gold rings inserted through nostril, bottom lip and belly-button. That was just the ones I could see. She’d also cultivated the politics of an international terrorist,