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

waist, he wore a pair of baggy trousers pegged halfway down the calf muscles. He carried some sort of gardening adze. On seeing us, he stopped dead. My impression was one of seeing a man witnessing a supernatural phenomenon: Mick, Phil and I might have been ghosts.

The Akha boy stepped forward, speaking rapidly in a tongue which was not Thai, although I heard the word farang two or three times as the boy motioned towards us. The man pointed inside the village with his adze. At last he swung his shoulders away from us, indicating that we should follow.

We passed the shadowy entrances to a number of huts. Three or four women squatted around a patch of canvas spread on the floor outside one of the huts, preparing tumorous green vegetables. Without interrupting their work they watched us go by.

The man with the adze stepped inside a darkened hut, and, sensing something momentous, I squeezed my way in front of the boy, anxious to be next. A single candle flame burned inside, barely affording us enough light to see the figure, eyes closed, seated in the cross-legged lotus position on the bamboo pallet at the back of the hut. There was a yeasty odour in the hut. My stomach squeezed. Weird music vibrated the air. I let the backpack slip from my shoulders and kneeled beside the pallet.

‘Charlotte,’ I said. ‘Charlotte.’

She was thin, gaunt even, but by the light of the single candle flame I didn’t think she looked so terrible. Her eyes flickered open, and flared with recognition. Very softly, almost inaudibly, she said, ‘Daddy?’

‘Yes. It’s me.’

‘I knew you were coming. I just knew.’

Then I said, and I don’t know why, ‘I’m the postman of Porlot.’

‘Daddy, it’s Porlock. And not a postman at all.’ Then she yawned, broke the lotus position to stretch out on the pallet, and closed her eyes. Her breathing changed. She seemed to have gone to sleep.

I felt Mick and Phil pressing behind me. ‘Is it her?’ they said. ‘Is it?’

My hands were shaking. Not just trembling, but shuddering and jolting. My teeth chattered. I couldn’t manage an answer. Phil tenderly linked his arm in mine, and Mick on the other side did the same. ‘Easy,’ Mick whispered, ‘easy.’

I calmed a little, and releasing them I spread myself on the bed beside Charlotte. I held her head on my shoulder, hugging her, and the very first thing I did was to smell her hair. I knew exactly what I was after. That scent; that pure charge; the love amalgam and the herald note from Day One, sealed in under the fontanelle; the perfume of heaven. I inhaled her. I opened my nostrils to it, and I got that hit. I absolutely got it.

I lay there, still trembling but experiencing a voiding of relief and exoneration. I’d found her. I could take her home. We could all go home.

Or so it seemed.

I don’t know how long I lay there, but when I’d recovered, I soon discovered that Charlie was not merely asleep. I’d been deceived by that moment when I found her sitting upright and she’d spoken to me very softly. I tried shaking her, patting her face, pinching her. I was alone in the hut with her: the others had stepped outside when they’d seen me climb on the pallet.

‘Mick! Where are you, Mick?’

He quickly appeared in the doorway.

‘I can’t wake her, Mick!’

Mick came over and put a hand on her forehead. Then he rolled back the skin of her eyelid with his thumb. Her eyeball had almost disappeared. He sneezed, twice. ‘Is she doped up?’

I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t really know what doped up looked like. I glanced around. There was a bowl of water beside her, the single candle, and an earthenware jar in which three flower heads floated in fetid water – perhaps the source of the bad odour. I was looking for a long pipe and a box of matches, or even a syringe – hell, anything. But there was no sign of drugs paraphernalia of any kind.

‘Help me get her up and out of here,’ I said to Mick. ‘Get Phil.’

‘Just a second, Danny. Let’s take stock of the situation.’

I looked at his big face, orange in the candlelight. He was sweating profusely.

‘What do you mean, take stock? She needs attention. We get her back to Chiang Mai and on a plane to England, it’s as simple as that.’

‘Simple as that,’ said Mick.

‘Well?’

‘Come outside a minute,’ Mick said firmly. I was still holding Charlie’s hand. ‘Let go of her. She’s been here for some time and she’s not going anywhere just yet. Come outside.’

Reluctantly I released Charlie’s hand and followed Mick. Outside the hut, it appeared that the entire village had gathered. They were huddled seven or eight yards from the door of the hut itself. They were a pretty sullen bunch. Only the man who had led us there – the one with the adze – was chattering happily, seeming to have earned some status in having been the first to encounter us.

Phil sat on the slatted porch of the hut, hunched over, fingering his pocket Bible.

‘You’ve been in there for over an hour,’ Mick said. This didn’t seem right, but I took him at his word. ‘While you were in there I tried this.’

Mick approached the huddle of villagers, toothless old men, other men with loose turbans and machetes in their belts, women with suckling babies. He displayed several banknotes prominently, waving them in the air. ‘Bhat,’ Mick said loudly. ‘Dollars.’ He fanned the notes like a deck of cards to advertise their bounty. ‘Chiang Mai. Guide. Chiang Mai. Yes?’

The villagers gazed blankly at him. He approached one of the stronger-looking men, waving the money under his nose. ‘Chiang Mai? Yes? Good?’ The man retreated a yard. Another responded similarly.

Mick came back, tugging his pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. He gave one to me. He sneezed again, and wiped snot from his nose