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

with the ball of his thumb. I noticed his eyes looked red and sore. ‘You see, I already tried to take things in hand. Thought I’d set it up while you were in there. This is the reaction I got.’

‘Where’s the kid? The one who got us here.’

‘Gone,’ Phil put in. ‘Long gone.’

‘They said something to him and he fucked off, pretty quick,’ Mick told me. ‘Now, I’m all for carrying Charlie out of here, carrying her on my back if necessary. But would you remember which way we came?’

Remember which way we came? I don’t think, at that point, I could have found my way even to the edge of this thirty-hut village. But somehow the import of this still managed to escape me. I’d found my daughter, that was the material thing. Everything else was just logistics. Like Mick, I was prepared to carry her out if that was what was required.

The audience of villagers, bored now with the performance, began to drift away.

‘Stretcher her out,’ I said. ‘We make a stretcher from bamboo, and we carry her. No problem.’

Mick shook his head and ground his cigarette into the earth.

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘I’m thinking.’

‘What’s to think about? Let’s do it!’

‘Danny, it took us about five hours to reach here from the last Akha village. Fast trekking. Carrying a stretcher between us, you can calculate twice that long; and that assumes we know where to go.’

‘We’ll make it, eh Phil?’

‘Listen to him, Father,’ Phil said, suddenly sharp with me. ‘You haven’t taken in a word of what Mick is saying.’

‘I’ve had time to have a look at this, Danny: we’ve got no food with us; we’ve got little water; we’ve got no map; and at the moment we’ve got no guide.’

‘We’ll retrace our steps.’

‘Retrace? Danny, this is NOT AN EVENING’S STROLL DOWN TO THE PUB!’

‘I know what it is! I know we—’

‘Danny, shut up and listen! You never fucking listen! Never! Why don’t you ever fucking listen! This is the jungle! We’re in the jungle! We’ve got a sick woman to carry out of the jungle!’

‘Keep your hair on!’

‘You keep your fucking hair on! This needs some thought. We sit down and we think this through. There’s about two hours left before it starts to get dark, so that means we ain’t going anywhere tonight.’

For a moment, in a kind of delirium and in a knock of blood in the brain, I saw Mick and Phil as just further obstacles in my way to getting Charlie out of this place. If they wouldn’t help me, I told myself, then I’d do it alone. I walked back inside the darkened hut, shook Charlie in frustration but to no visible effect, and then came out again. Of the villagers, only one old woman remained behind to watch us, a toothless hag with sugary black eyes. The sky tilted savagely again as I realised that Mick’s logic was inescapable. I was going to have to accept an overnight stay in the village before getting Charlie away.

The old woman waddled up to me, pointing at the hut, smacking her lips. She had something in her hand for me. It was yet another wedge of the blasted opium. In my anger and impotence I slapped it out of her hand.

The old woman seemed unfazed. With a hand supporting her creaking old back, she leaned down and with spindly, leathery fingers plucked the opium out of the red dust. Then she turned back to me.

‘Booooo!’ she said before hobbling away. ‘Boooooooooooo!’

The three of us settled in Charlie’s hut. If there was any permission to be had, I didn’t know where it was coming from. I didn’t much care; all I wanted to do was tend to Charlie.

I’d tried to deny it at first, but she was in pretty poor shape. The first thing I wanted to do was to wash her from head to toe. Phil helped me. She wore nothing but shorts and a rancid T-shirt, and when we stripped them off I realised she was developing one or two bed sores. Though a little emaciated, she was not starving, and apart from the chafing sores her skin was not in bad condition, so I concluded that the villagers had been looking after her. Someone had to maintain the candle, and put the flowers and water there.

Phil soaked a flannel towel and proceeded to dab her. Mick had some antiseptic cream which he gingerly massaged into her bed sores. He wasn’t looking too good himself: he was sneezing and he was exhausted. Don’t fall ill on me now, Mick, was my selfish thought. When we’d done everything we could for Charlie, I suggested to Mick that he lie down, take a breather while I looked for something to eat. I was only a little surprised when he acceded.

I tried to raise his spirits by mentioning the word beer. It had worked in the Lisu village, but I knew that here things were going to be different. Up until now, all our needs had been attended to by the presence of guides. I had a few bhat in my pocket, and I stepped outside to see what currency it might have.

The heat of the day was locked into the red earth, but the cooling air had a syrupy quality. Strange music was still emanating from the centre of the village, so I headed towards it. There was little activity going on. I sensed people inside the stilted huts as I passed by cautiously. Pots boiled outside unattended. Black pigs and scrawny chickens snuffled and scratched at the baked earth. Dogs lay quiet in the late afternoon shade.

I reached the source of the music. A dust-clogged old Hitachi radio set was placed on a rickety table in the centre of the village like a sacred totem, and it was belting out loud ethnic music. Long thick cable trailed from the back of the radio set, and between the swells in the music I could hear, from