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

Mick shook his head. He picked up his bottle of doxycycline and tapped a pill into his giant, pink hand. ‘Here.’

‘That’s no use.’ I knew you needed to take these things before you travel, and then for some weeks after.

‘Take it. We’ll divide up what we’ve got. Right, Phil?’

Phil gritted his teeth. ‘I wish you’d had more forethought, Father. Though I suppose that’s what we’ll have to do.’

‘Then you two won’t have enough.’

‘Take it,’ Mick growled.

‘Then all three of us will be at risk. Where’s the sense in that?’

Mick raised his fist at me. ‘Take the fucker or I swear I’ll chin you.’

‘Shut up, you big fucking stupid dumpling.’

Mick moved surprisingly fast for such a big man. He grabbed my face and forced the pill into my mouth, holding his hand over my jaw. Phil danced out of my way as we struggled. ‘Is it gone?’

‘Fnnnghhhh ohffff!’

‘I said is it gone?’

‘Neff! Ifff fone.’

‘Is it gone?’

‘I said it’s gone! Get off me, you tub of lard!’

He’d almost dislocated my jaw in the process. I walked away, my blood up; and then I saw Bhun watching us silently from the other hut. Our eyes met, and he nodded minimally. I turned back to our hut. After all, I wasn’t going anywhere.

Sometime in the night, after we’d forgotten about the nonsense with the pills, we were all three awake, with Mick and I smoking cigarettes. The candles had burned out and we sat in darkness. All I could see were the two coal-ends of the lighted ciggies. At least the smoke seemed to discourage the mosquitoes.

Mick had been sitting on a question for a while. I heard him exhale in the blackness before he said, ‘Now then, Phil. Have you got over your little paddy?’

He was referring to Phil’s outburst in the Chiang Mai bar. ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Phil.

‘Believe in that, do you? Brimstone. Hellfire. Believe in it? Eh?’

No one could see another’s face in the dark. If they could have, this conversation would not have proceeded past first base.

‘Yes.’

‘So you think,’ Mick said, ‘that Danny and me are on the side of Satan, sort of thing?’

‘No. I don’t give you that much credit. You don’t get out of it as easy as that. It’s not about choosing sides.’

Pause. Drag on cigarette. ‘What’s it about, then?’ Coal-end fattening like a luminous red maggot in the dark ‘Tell me. I’m interested.’

‘No you’re not. You’re just trying to mock.’

‘Not at all. I’m trying to learn. I mean those girls in the Chiang Mai bars. Damned, are they?’

Long pause from Phil. ‘We wrestle, and not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world: we wrestle against spiritual wickedness in high places.’

Long pause from Mick. ‘Gosh,’ he said. ‘Don’t you get tired? What with all this wrestling?’

After a while I said to Phil, ‘What about Charlie? Where does she figure in your scheme? Did Satan lure her with opium?’

‘No.’

‘What did, then?’

‘Jealousy.’

This baffled me. ‘What was she jealous of?’

‘Not her jealousy. Yours.’

‘Eh?’

‘Think about it. Now if you don’t mind I’m going to sleep.’

I would have gone to sleep too, if I could. But that remark of Phil’s: it sat there, hunkered in the darkness like another member of the party, looking back at me.

That was in the chill of night. Now the jungle had heated up quickly and we were slowly ascending the steep side of a ravine. We were shivering the nights and sweating the days. The blisters on my feet were rubbing again, I had a thumping headache from lack of sleep, and my mosquito bites itched like crazy. We trekked on in silence. I looked back to see Mick, brow furrowed, fingering his amulet.

I was still thinking about Phil’s strange remarks in the night. Meanwhile the jungle vegetation changed dramatically as we climbed or descended the sides of a ravine or as we came closer to a river. After passing between towering, spindly trees with fluffy balls of leaves only at the very top, we crossed a stretch of jungle that was smoking and smouldering. Orange flames licked at charred, blackened logs strewn over wide expanses of silver ash. The smoke was choking. I tied a handkerchief around my mouth. Coconut told us it was controlled fire, slash and burn, but I saw little evidence of its management. After that we descended sharply, and had to wade thigh-deep across a river. Downstream was an Hmong village, where we were to make a noon halt.

The Hmong looked very different to the Lisu. They wore black tunics and indigo skirts with embroidered aprons, and masses of silver jewellery: necklaces, amulets and the like. The women tied their hair on their heads in a bun, and within seconds of our arrival they were waving small wedges of opium under our noses. When they realised we weren’t interested, they wanted to sell us silver bracelets. I bought one to give to Charlie, if I ever found her.

Coconut and Bhun prepared lunch for us. It was while we were surrounded by chattering Hmong dope-and-silver dealers that Bhun touched my elbow and pointed to the river edge. ‘Farang,’ he said, and he nodded encouragingly.

I spun round. Sitting with her feet in the water’s edge was a young European woman. Alongside her was a Thai male, also with his feet in the water. He had an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.

No, it wasn’t Charlie.

But I was astonished to see any European woman there. ‘Where are you going?’ I heard Phil shout over his shoulder as he battled to extricate himself from the attentions of Hmong women.

The lady at the water’s edge had long, brown hair, tied in a pony-tail. She wore a tattoo on her arms – some sort of Chinese or Thai symbol I supposed. I walked right up to her, and said, ‘Good afternoon.’

Both she and the armed Thai spun round to look at me. Shielding her eyes from the sun, she smiled broadly and