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

‘It wouldn’t have worked out,’ Phil said to him. ‘Your tattoos were different.’ It was meant to be funny. I threw a small stone in the river and it landed with a tiny plop.

It was shortly after Mary’s departure that Coconut dropped his bombshell.

‘But you never said anything about this before!’ I exploded, forgetting about that loss-of-face thing.

He wanted us to go downriver by bamboo raft. He said it would be half an hour to an hour, what with the water level being low, and then we would abandon the raft and cut inland, saving, he said, almost half a day’s trekking. This I had no problem with. It was what came after that I found unacceptable. Coconut told us we would overnight in another village, and that the following morning he and Bhun would turn back, and we would be left to make the last half-day’s journey alone.

I had a feeling they’d been spooked by something Mary’s guide had told them, and I flipped. ‘Alone! You must be crazy! How are we going to make it alone through this lot? How? Just how do you think we’re going to do that!’

I was shouting at Coconut. Bhun tried to calm me by placing his hand on my forearm. ‘You dadda,’ he said. ‘Me dadda. Me unstand you. You my fren. We no ’low go there.’

Wrenching my arm away I appealed to Coconut. ‘What’s he saying?’

‘Bhun feel very bad. I feel very bad. But we not allowed to go there. Too dangerous for us. Them guys think we from government, maybe Bangkok, or maybe we soldiers. For farang not so dangerous. We can’t take you.’

‘Why didn’t you say this earlier?’

‘In Akha village we try to find you a guide. Akha man. Tomorrow take you where you want to go.’

‘Looks like we’re being relayed on,’ Phil said, while Mick nervously fingered his amulet.

‘It’s not as simple as that, Phil. What if we do find Charlie? We’ll need these two to bring us out again.’

‘From the look of things,’ Phil retorted, ‘I don’t see as we have much choice.’

An extremely old Hmong woman, hearing the commotion, came out of a nearby hut. She looked about two hundred years old as she waved a wedge of opium under my nose. She wouldn’t go away. I wanted to punch her in the face.

‘Sorry,’ Bhun said, stroking my arm again. ‘Sorry.’

22

No prevailing upon Coconut and Bhun could to get them to change their minds. They were both family men – something that hadn’t occurred to me before that moment – and they were not going to take the risk. Neither was in any sense a timid man, but they were not prepared to cross into the territory into which we needed to go. It was bandit country, a zone of lawlessness, and though Coconut tried to reassure me that the uncertainty for us was far less than the hazard to them, all their anxieties immediately transmitted to me. I asked the other two if we should turn back.

‘You’re fuckin’ joking,’ is all Mick said. ‘We go on.’

‘They make a journey. It gets darker,’ Phil said with a thin smile. ‘Swords, lions, dragons, darkness.’ I remember shaking my head: he might as well have spoken in the Hmong language. At least I could understand Mick.

This trick of Phil’s – of speaking in riddles – was getting to me. It riled me beyond reason.

The bamboo raft was one of many floating near the Hmong village. Bhun whittled some bamboo and expertly lashed a tripod together, from which he suspended our backpacks. We had to take off our shoes and tie them to the tripod, as the raft itself glided just under the surface of the water. Coconut steered from the front with a long, sturdy bamboo pole, and Bhun from the back. Though Mick, Phil and I were also entrusted with poles, we were pretty ineffective. At least the poles made us look a little more manly than we felt in the company of these all-action boys. The water journey passed quickly. I had a lot of things on my mind.

‘How’s your leg?’ I asked Phil, genuinely concerned.

‘Oh,’ he said lightly, ‘it’s not those two ticks that are the problem.’

I stroked my pole through the water and thought about what he’d said. Then it occurred to me he was talking about me and Mick. I turned and stared at him. ‘What exactly did you mean by that?’

‘You’re the one who knows everything,’ he said. ‘Figure it out.’

I took an aggressive step towards him and the raft wobbled. ‘Keep your mind on the job,’ Mick shouted.

The pea-green river ran swiftly. There were sections of white water where we had to glide the raft between smooth boulders. Bhun trained his eyes on the water, thwacking it occasionally with his pole. ‘Snake,’ he said.

We reached a spot where a herd of water buffalo wallowed. Here we abandoned the raft, laced up our shoes and continued our trek, but not before I had to pluck a leech off my thigh. Most of the walking was accomplished in a dismal silence, and I took my eyes off the extraordinary lush landscape. I looked back at Mick. He was suffering. His feet were badly blistered, he was sweating profusely, he was scratching his mosquito bites, and he had the shits. I wondered what sort of man would put himself through this for no obvious reason. If he’d thought this was going to be a jaunt with a bit of sex tourism thrown in, he was experiencing a severe re-education.

Meanwhile Phil, also caked in sweat, seemed to be retreating deeper and deeper into an inner world. His comments got briefer and more obscure. His remark about the other ticks suggested he regarded Mick and I as the burden he had to carry on this enterprise, and not the other way round. He was the still centre of his own private world. What’s more he seemed to regard