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

this as a perilous spiritual journey, when the dangers were material and very real.

I began to feel a deep sense of despondency, and I felt guilty for allowing the pair of them to come with me. It was starting to go wrong, and now I saw little prospect of finding Charlie. We were in the remote jungle on the word of a thieving, drug-smuggling girl convict, entering territory that scared even these hardened guides. I began to be haunted by terrible visions of myself dying in some forgotten and dreadful place, far from home, far from everything I loved.

Jealous? Phil had called me jealous. Was he talking about Sheila, and the affair? Or did he mean Charlie? Was he accusing me of being jealous of Charlie; or of him; or of both of them? I thrashed at some overhanging bamboo and pushed the notion aside.

It was madness, this entire trek. Preposterous. I lashed at the bamboo again, and my teeth started chattering, as if I was chilled. Sunlight dappled the rubbery leaves as a shape formed at the periphery of my vision, a shape which I took to be a bird or an animal. It was no more than a shadow, a silhouette even, but then the thing swooped down from the jungle canopy and started to close around me. It was like a heavy, damp cloak settling on my shoulders and pressing a great weight down on my lungs. I felt a rancid breath on my neck. There was corruption in the air, and a sound like a veil tearing. I tried to lash the thing away, and when my hand passed through it a moment of hideous panic followed. It was the loneliest thing I had ever experienced in my life.

‘Stop! Stop!’ I was hyperventilating. The others came to a halt. ‘Something jumped on me. Out of the trees.’

‘Nothing on you now, pal,’ Mick said.

‘We’ve got to turn back. At once.’

I started babbling nonsense until Mick put his big paw on my shoulder. ‘Take a deep breath,’ he said. ‘Hold it in.’

‘I can’t do this.’

‘Yes, we can. Take a breather, old pal.’

I did what he told me. Phil shuffled uncomfortably and the guides looked on.

‘Is it all right?’ I asked Mick at length.

‘It’s all right.’ He had one hand on each of my shoulders and he was looking deep into my eyes.

‘Is it?’

‘It’s all right. Take a sip of water. It’s just one foot in front of the other, Danny. One foot in front of the other.’

I’d completely lost it. I felt unstitched. Nothing physical had come at me from the trees. I was jumping at shadows, shivering at an encounter my mind had constructed out of jungle light and shade. I don’t know what the guides made of my outburst, but I was very close to flight; I mean literally running, fleeing, back the way we’d come. It was the oddest thing. I had this fantastic idea that I’d come upon some malignant spirit, some other-worldly force at the exact centre of my panic.

I felt, too, that it had singled me out for attention.

But then perhaps not. When I had recovered enough to dismiss the thing as a figment, it was made worse by Phil laughing – slightly hysterically – and saying, ‘Yes, I had my own encounter with him earlier this morning! Ha ha! Ha!’

I stared at my son, laughing at me in the jungle. Then Coconut said, ‘On. We go on.’

After that I managed to get my breath back and to resume the march, and it didn’t happen again.

When we reached the Akha village, I realised that I’d seen some of this tribe before, in Chiang Mai, touting bracelets and beads to the tourists. They were different again to the Hmong and the Lisu, almost a pygmy race, and some of the women were so tiny I mistook them for children. Once again they saw an opportunity to milk us for a few bhat, pressing on us the usual rubbishy gewgaws. Their aggression in this was alarming, and as they got up close I saw that quite a few of the old women had their teeth sharpened to points, and that their lips were stained purple.

‘Phil! Hey Phil!’ Mick said. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘That depends,’ Phil said, trying to fend off the attentions of one tiny, dagger-mouthed matron, her lips puckered like the leather drawstring on a miser’s purse, ‘on what you are thinking.’

‘What I’m thinking is: you wouldn’t want those jaws round your wedding tackle, would you Phil?’

The next morning, as Coconut and Bhun prepared to pull out, I made one last effort to retain their services, but not even an offer to triple their payment would induce them to go a step further. Shortly after our arrival in the Akha village they introduced us to a young Akha man – a teenager possibly – who had agreed to take us on from there. Our spirits had been lifted when the Thai-speaking young man claimed, through Coconut, to know of a farang woman living in a village at the distance of half a day’s trek. Coconut said it corresponded with the place Claire Merchant had indicated on the map.

The boy, who spoke no English, had also babbled a great deal which Coconut had either not understood or chose not to tell us. When questioned, he hadn’t actually seen the farang woman himself, but he’d heard of her. He said she was a ‘guest’ of the village. When I asked Coconut what that meant, he said he didn’t know.

When the time came for Coconut and Bhun to leave, I thought they were never actually going to get away. They were clearly suffering terribly and in a manner surprising to the three of us.

‘Are they going to fuck off, or what?’ Mick wondered aloud.

‘They’ve lost face,’ said Phil.

I felt bitter. ‘They’re dumping us.’

With their packs hoisted they spoke quietly to each other, now unwilling to meet our eyes. Then, in a gesture almost ceremonial