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

in its execution, they took their long army knives out of their belts. I heard myself swallow. But each laid his knife flat across the palms of both hands, stepped forwards and offered them to us. ‘For cutting vines,’ Coconut said, his eyes slightly damp. ‘And trees. Take.’

It was bewildering to have to guess whether they were leaving these as weapons for which we might have need or as tokens of apology for failing to see the journey through to its end. We hesitated before taking the blades. ‘When you want to come back, send word,’ Coconut said. ‘I will come here for you.’

‘Sure,’ Mick said. ‘We’ll call you on the telephone. Do we have your e-mail address? We’ll fucking well e-mail you.’

Some of this sarcasm must have come across, because Coconut said, ‘Send word: Coconut, Chiang Mai, come now. These people will pass message on, next village, next village, and I will come here.’

I think he actually wanted to believe it himself. ‘Thank you, both of you,’ I said, though I didn’t feel it. They waid us, and we made Western handshakes, and then they turned and were gone. The Akha boy, who had watched all this – rather stupidly and with his mouth hanging open – turned to us and said, ‘Ha!’

I was a bit anxious that they’d made a gift of those ferocious-looking blades. I’d taken one; Mick the other. After we’d got underway, with the knives tucked into our belts, I kept my hand hovering near it, waiting for bandits to leap out from the foliage at any moment. I heard skitters and movements on the parched jungle floor that had my fingers flexing around the teak handle. The landscape, too, with its red earth and glistening green vegetation reminded me of every unpleasant Vietnam movie I’d ever seen in my life.

But nothing happened, and in a trek that went on for almost five hours we met no one except for the time when we passed through another very small Akha village, and where our boy guide sang out to everyone, apparently very proud of his lucrative responsibility for leading three ridiculous, sweating, pink-faced giants through the poppy fields.

And the poppies there were growing in gay profusion. The previous opium crops we had seen were nothing more than allotments. Here, entire slopes were devoted to the bloom. I noticed that beans or some similar vegetable were grown between the plants, confusing the crop. White, red and purple flowers were spread over the green vegetation like the laundry, hung out to dry, of a convocation of priests. I noticed that many of the flowers were blown and beginning to drop their petals. Under the bright sunlight, the flowers gleamed waxy, an hallucination of the gardens of paradise.

We walked through field after field. I wondered if it were possible to become drugged by mere proximity. Though I tried to make a mental note of the route, and the position of the sun, it was hopeless. We walked along intersecting pathways, and we followed narrow animal trails, and we walked through stretches of pink-leafed jungle where there was no trail whatsoever. I would have had no idea how to return to the Akha village even if I’d wanted to.

‘Earlier I asked you how your legs were,’ I said to Phil along the way. ‘I’d appreciate a straight answer.’

‘My legs are fine. Thanks for your concern. How’s your leech bite?’

‘Fine. It’s fine.’

I gave up. Thank you for your concern? Where did this incredible formality come from? I’d never before realised how impeccable good manners were just a mask for hostility. Every time I tried to get past Phil’s riddles and his double talk he shrank back into a language as exact as a cube of ice.

We heard the village before we saw it. At first we were confused, because even though there was no possibility of electrical power in this place, what we were hearing sounded like a massively amplified radio; or rather some kind of singing which was certainly not like the Thai music we’d heard in Chiang Mai. It was a male voice, swooping and reverberating and booming. I don’t know if it was meant to intimidate, but it succeeded. My guts churned.

With the hills rising steeply on all sides, the boy led us into a natural basin. The slopes had been cleared of trees for farming, and a mist shrouded the remaining vegetation. Bamboo huts huddled on the valley floor, close together but in two separate clusters, and even as we approached I could see that the construction varied from those we’d seen before. The roofs were made from some giant, parched leaf, and all the huts were built on very short stilts.

From these details I’d already guessed that this was not an Akha village, and I sensed the nervousness of the boy guide as we went towards the nearest cluster of huts. I can’t remember what I was feeling as we crossed those last few hundred yards. In any event, all detail of those moments prior to entering the settlement has been swamped by what followed, for it was here, in this unprepossessing village, that I was to find my daughter, Charlie.

23

Charlie Charlie Charlie. My wonder-girl, my daughter-in-flight, the little fist enfolding my heart the moment she entered my life, my beacon, the silk flag of my love for all that is good in a bad world.

I’d found her.

What happened in those eerie moments of our entry into that village is torched into my memory. The sun in the sky became over-charged with energy and everything seemed to take place under a white light of strontium intensity. That strange rising and falling music, broadcast from within the village, amplified and slowed.

First a dog started to bark at our approach. As it leapt at us our Akha boy guide slapped it down with his bamboo staff. The dog yelped and the commotion summoned a man from within the cluster of huts. Stripped to the