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

somewhere, the tick and wheeze of a tiny generator. I followed the cable to the generator, which was actually stationed inside a small and otherwise unoccupied hut. It was a pretty old Honda IKVA petrol-powered contraption, though it appeared to be ticking over effectively.

The generator was screened off from the rest of the hut, but there was a gap in the bamboo screen at the rear. Passing through the gap I was surprised to find that the rest of the hut contained numerous identical large cardboard boxes neatly stacked one upon the other. The boxes, and there must have been four dozen of them, were sealed. I ran my finger along one of the seals. There was no way of telling what was inside the boxes.

I returned to the radio set. It was broadcasting so loudly its blown speakers were fuzzing, not that anyone seemed to be taking much notice. It was from there, at one side of the cleared area, that I noticed a striking and peculiar structure.

It was a crudely constructed arch, or perhaps more accurately a pergola, though it was not erected for trailing leafy plants. Nonetheless, it was still some kind of gateway, with uprights and crossbeams, but with each of the uprights fenced off to create a clear pathway. What really drew my attention was the cluster of objects in the fenced-off areas either side of the pathway.

There were numerous carvings, crudely executed, of human figures. On closer inspection I saw that some of the carvings were no more than tree trunks, or tree branches inverted so as to resemble a pair of open legs. What made me gasp slightly were the huge, erect penises, carved naturally from the grainy wood or grafted on. There were five such ‘men’, all with boastful and healthy-looking bulbously erect pricks.

They had their mates, too. Laid out in the dust were several female forms. The tree artist had carefully selected suitably thigh-like tree forks, suggestively bent at the knee, carved vulvas prominently displayed. Each carving had a pleasantly rounded belly, neatly smoothed by the artisan, and an attractive navel. Some of the figures ended just above the waist; others extended to a carved head, disproportionately small, concave and crudely representational.

I leaned over to stroke one of the supine figures, but with my fingers inches from the smoothed wood I was arrested in the act by a small child pulling at my sleeve. Highly agitated, he flapped his free hand at the carvings. He was afraid, telling me not to touch. Evidently I’d just been saved from breaching tribal taboo.

The boy was still shouting at me in a distraught fashion. Unnerved, I went back to Charlie’s hut without having accomplished my errand. When I got there I found Mick asleep and Charlie awake. She was sitting upright and was being fed by the old woman from whose hands I’d swatted the opium. The crone scowled at me as I entered the hut.

Phil looked at me and shrugged.

24

A long dark night lay ahead of me. On returning to the hut to find the old woman dribbling broth into Charlie’s mouth, I’d naturally attempted to speak to Charlie. But this time there was no recognition; no ‘Daddy’ as in the first moment of our arrival; no banter about the Postman of Porlock or whatever; nothing, not a flicker of interest. She gulped the soup and failed to respond to anything I put to her. Meanwhile the old woman watched me with critical eyes, and with her lips pursed in what I took to be the suppression of a smile.

‘Has she said anything to you?’ I asked Phil.

‘Nothing.’

But she’d been sitting upright, waiting for me when I entered the hut. Expecting me. Both Mick and Phil looked sceptical when I told them this. I began to doubt it myself. Almost as if our brief conversation had taken place in some imagined or telepathic universe. My sense of what was real and what wasn’t real in this place was already becoming unthreaded.

When I gave up trying to communicate with Charlie, the old woman nodded. She shuffled forward, once again producing opium from the folds of her gown. With it this time came a small ceramic pipe and a box of matches. She jabbed her finger at Charlie.

‘No,’ I said firmly.

The old woman shrugged, and put the things away.

I knew that if Charlie was addicted then she was going to have a craving. But I had no way of determining whether her current condition was attributable to the opium or to some other condition. All I could do at that moment was to withdraw the drug and see what happened.

‘The old woman’s intentions are benign,’ Phil said, reading my thoughts. ‘She’s obviously been the one looking after Charlie, feeding her, tending to her. Opium is probably the only medicine available to these people.’

I knew he was right. I had to accept that this feeble old matriarch was not the pusher at the school gates.

‘Pipe,’ Charlie said in a whisper.

The old woman looked hard at me, as if to say, what can I do? Her face was simian, very old, and yet her skin was oddly smooth. I couldn’t tell if she was prematurely old or immortally young. Except, perhaps, that her eyes gave it away. They were oddly translucent, like cellophane, as if burned out from staring at the sun. It made her seem other-worldly, shamanic.

She tried to tell me something about Charlie. She stroked her own shoulders and gestured outside the hut, maybe at the sky; she made utterly impenetrable signals. It was hopeless. She gave up, but with a cruel smile.

When we’d settled the matter of the opium, that Charlie wasn’t going to be given any while I was there, I tried to make the old woman understand that we would want something to eat. I pointed at Mick’s sleeping form; I pointed at my own yawning mouth. I made eating gestures. I then produced a few bhat from my