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

said, in a warm Irish brogue, ‘Well, what about ye?’ Mary O’Connel, it turned out, was an aid worker, operating with an outfit I’d never heard of called Frontline Aid. She was helping with the refugee crisis, she said.

‘What refugees?’ I asked crassly ‘Are there any?’

‘Jesus, just a few miles over there, only about a hundred thousand of the poor fuckers, so there is.’

I didn’t know anything about this, and Mick, coming to join us, admitted that neither did he. It seemed there were masses of Kareni people – yet another hill tribe – being pushed out of Myanmar and into the more tolerant Thailand. I asked why, and her armed escort slipped away to join our two guides. ‘Because the Burmese are bastards,’ Mary told us. ‘Killing. Raping. Burning the villages. They want these mountains for themselves.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? To control the opium you fucking idjit!’ she said gaily.

Of course. The poppy. Misery everywhere.

Mary was in the Hmong village to pick up supplies which had been relayed there. She was waiting for elephants to transport both her and the supplies back to what she called Camp Three, but the mahout was late. ‘Are you boys having a nice holiday?’

I invited her to have some lunch with us – and not just to hear what an invitation like that sounds like in a Hmong village in the Thai jungle, but because I wanted to ply her with questions. She’d assumed we were holiday trekkers, and when I explained what we were doing, it seemed to resolve something for her.

‘You know, I thought it odd to see a trek coming through here. You used to get them all the time until the warjacks moved in. It’s been pretty unstable round here for a while. Lot of desperate people roaming around.’

‘That why your guide is tooled up?’ Mick asked her.

‘Wouldn’t be good to be around here on your own. Easy target and all that. It’s the bandits you’ve got to watch for. They say that if the villagers don’t rip you off, and the opium gangs suss you’re not from the government, and the KMT don’t think you’re Chinese, then all you’ve got to worry about is the bandits.’ She laughed pleasantly.

‘Where are you from?’ Phil asked.

‘Belfast. Home from home.’

I asked Mary if she’d heard of any farang girl living in the villages nearby. She hadn’t. She consulted her Thai guide. He didn’t answer directly, but had a long conversation with Coconut and Bhun in which they kept nodding in my direction. He knew no more than did Mary. Bhun and Coconut were giving her man a good listening to, and I didn’t like the way they kept looking at us. I felt an intuitive unease about whatever it was he was saying.

After lunch Mary, Mick, Phil and I went to the water to bathe our tired feet. I learned a lot about the region from Mary, particularly about the opium crops. Opium, she told us, was a cure-all medicine for the hill tribes. It was not considered unrespectable for a person to use the opium as a comfort in old age, and many did. But the young tribespeople had been corrupted by the spectacle of Western trekkers trying a smoke for larks. It made the practice seem more desirable. The Western youths could always jet back to their lives at home, far away from the call of the poppy; but the young people here were left with the temptation in their backyard for every day of their lives. The path to addiction was very short.

The Thai authorities, under pressure from the West, had begun to burn the opium crops to deal with the heroin epidemic at source. The hill tribe addicts were therefore driven into the town where they were introduced to processed heroin rather than field opium. This in turn meant the use of shared syringes, which had spread infection among the ethnic people. The crop burning had caused a new AIDS epidemic.

‘A mess, here and at home,’ Phil said.

‘Well, yes,’ Mary answered. We all went quiet for a minute or two.

I got up and left the others chatting as I had a poke around the village. These people had nothing that would make anyone want to spend any length of time there, and I couldn’t imagine Charlie wanting to stay put. Sure, she might have hung around for a while to smoke some opium, but even so the life of a subsistence farmer is limited in its attractions. Maybe they slaughter a pig every other month to represent a big day in the calendar. What Oxford-educated city girl is going to be impressed by that?

I tried to take a picture of one of the huts, but a Hmong woman came out and angrily waved me away. I’d been warned that some of the hill tribes didn’t like it – that they thought you were stealing their essence – but the Lisu hadn’t seemed to mind having their souls trapped inside my Olympus Trip. Suitably chastened, I returned to the river and took a shot of Phil wading in the water and of Mick and Mary chatting at the river’s edge. They were talking and laughing. I was about to say something when the mahout arrived with his elephants at a trot.

There were three of the magnificent behemoth creatures. They thundered into the village, and stood with overwhelming presence, stinking and cooling like steam engines on a railway platform. We watched the cumbersome process of the loading of supplies. There was a high platform with a ladder for mounting the elephants. Mary climbed on by stepping from the platform on to the elephant’s head and thence into a wooden seat roped precariously along its back. We shouted lots of encouraging and jolly remarks but I wasn’t feeling jolly. The deeper we moved into the jungle and saw things like this, the lower was the lodging of my spirits.

‘I’ve seen everything now,’ Mick said, after we’d waved her away. I could tell he