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

area of rattan was obviously for sleeping on, and a couple of moth-eaten blankets were folded in the corner. The rattan bed which looked so inviting was actually as hard as a gravestone. With the twilight came giant mosquitoes, and though you couldn’t see them they had a bite like a dog. We changed into long trousers and tried to cover up. Savoury smells of rice and ginger wafted from the guides’ hut.

‘Ugh!’ The cry came from Phil, struggling out of his trousers in the corner of the hut. He’d discovered two ticks on the back of his right leg. We went over to inspect. I must admit, I winced. They were knuckle-sized and bloated after a good day’s feed on Phil’s blood.

‘Let’s have ’em off,’ I said, reaching out to pinch one between thumb and forefinger.

Mick slapped my hand. ‘Not like that,’ he said. ‘You’ll leave its guts in Phil’s skin.’ He sucked his cigarette into a bright cone and held it to the tick until the parasite dropped off. Phil looked queasy. The cone had gone off the cigarette before he could burn the second, so he gave the cigarette to me. ‘Get a cone on that.’

I looked at the end of his ciggie. It still seemed to have half a tick stuck to it. I didn’t much fancy smoking tick, and I said so.

‘Just pull on the sod!’ Mick said. He didn’t fancy it either. We could simply have lit another, but we were concerned about conserving cigarettes.

‘You pull on it!’

‘He’s your bleedin’ son!’ Mick said.

I took the cigarette and pulled on it, exhaling quickly without drawing the smoke into my lungs. I held the glowing end to the tick. The damned thing didn’t seem to want to drop. I had to do it again before the horrible insect would let go of Phil’s leg. Throughout this Phil watched me closely. I had some antiseptic lotion in my bag. I rubbed it gently into his leg.

After the business with the ticks we sat outside, our heads leaning together, our limbs aching. Mick sighed and I said, ‘I know what you’re thinking, Mick. I could murder one, too.’

No sooner were these words out of my mouth than did a small Lisu boy appear, baggy pants pegged at the ankle like an apprentice genie, clutching three bottles of Singha beer, your wish is my command. We almost sent him back again when the kid told us how much he wanted, but Mick laughed and paid up, feinting a kick to his arse.

The beer was warm, but it was nectar. It bubbled deliciously on the tongue. It flooded the gullet and scraped back a sheath of dust from the swollen throat, chasing out the taste of bamboo and replacing it with the savour of hops. It restored balance, equilibrium. It was like being rubbed down with silk, and, since Phil had declined a beer, I was ready to fight Mick for the third bottle.

Mick looked at me, looked at the spare brew, and he laughed. In our exhaustion a kind of nervous hysteria was making us telepathic. Bhun came out of his hut with a steaming bowl of chicken fried rice, and stopped when he saw the pair of us giggling like morons.

There was a table outside our hut, rough-hewn out of teak, and Bhun and Coconut laid out the evening meal. In addition to the chicken fried rice there was a soup, two kinds of curry dishes and a plate of vegetables with ginger and noodles. There were also three tiny condiment dishes, containing ferocious spices. Jungle fare. In about half an hour of mess cooking these boys had rustled up what would not have been out of place in a high street restaurant. Even the service was polite, formal. All that was missing was the after-dinner chocolate mint and a cab home. We invited Bhun and Coconut to join us at the table, but neither would be prevailed upon to do so.

Phil held us up by muttering a brief grace, throughout which Mick practised jiggling his eyebrows.

Just as it was getting almost too dark to see, the headman’s boy arrived, struggling with a hefty plastic block and some wiry contraption. Immediately seeing what it was, I leapt to my feet. Bhun urged me to get on with my dinner, but a Boy Scout enthusiasm made me want to be useful around camp. The heavy object was a car battery; there was a length of cable with crocodile clips at either end; and a small fluorescent strip light. I had it rigged in half a minute, dangling the light from an overhead cross-beam. No electricity in the village, but with the car battery we had glorious illumination.

‘And there was light,’ said Phil.

‘Happy now?’ Mick said, wolfing his chicken fried rice.

Yes, I was happy. I returned to the table and tucked into my green curry and noodles with a new-found relish. I guess it was the first time since arriving in Thailand that I’d actually felt in control of events, even if it was just for a moment. Power source, bit of cable, and a phosphor-coated electrical discharge device (lamp, to you). And I was going ha ha ha. Bringing light to the jungle.

When we finished our meal, another lad brought bananas and papayas. The six-year-old beer vendor returned, too, hawking Singhas at vastly inflated prices, and we bought his entire stock. Mick calculated we were paying, almost to the penny, the same price we would pay in the Clipper for a pint of Old Muckster’s Jubilee Ale. It seemed fair, but I don’t know what it did to the village economy that night.

Phil sipped his mineral water. ‘You’d be completely lost without your jug of beer, wouldn’t you?’ This was his way of making a huge philosophical point, and the only answer he got from either of us was a deeply satisfied belch from Mick, so loud that it startled some live thing lurking under the stilts of the