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

which she would turn on me like a flame thrower. My sweet-natured little girl. Then it seemed that every time I opened my mouth I was confirmed as a moral idiot. Oxford somehow convinced her that she was a princess of folktale, handed over at birth to the family of swineherds.

You can’t always bite your lip. This was the daughter whose bottom I’d wiped, whom I’d taught to swim and to play football, whose spangly, glycerine-like tears I’d licked and for whom I’d interpreted the entire world and all its levers, pulleys and creaking mechanisms. Mick Williams would say I treated her with too much seriousness, but everything was flung back in my teeth. I’d worked extra weekends fixing double sockets in kitchens to put her through university, but that made me a capitalist lackey, whatever that is. I’d encouraged Sheila to stay home when the children were small, putting love before money, but that was me oppressing Sheila. I’d put good quality meat on the table, so I was a torturer of animals and a force-feeder of infants. In the holidays when Charlie was around, I used to look forward to coming home from a hard day’s graft just to see what further kind of a shit I was.

‘Hey, it don’t stop you staying here and sponging off us in the holidays, does it, sweetheart?’

‘There are plenty of places I could go! I don’t have to come here!’

‘Bugger off then!’

‘He doesn’t mean it,’ Sheila would say. ‘He’s winding you up, Charlie.’

‘I bloody do mean it!’

Really, I don’t know who was winding up who. Some of the deadbeats she used to bring home, I wondered if it was all for my benefit; you know, this one will kill him.

‘This is Pete.’ Or, ‘This is Zak.’

Pete or Zak was usually a white boy with dreadlocks and nose-stud: the rigid deadbeat uniform of a ‘traveller’ without the means to travel. Coming in behind him from the hallway, Charlie would sort of lob him across the lounge carpet like a smoking bomb. It would fall to Sheila to invite this new boyfriend to sit down, whereas I always wanted to say, no, please don’t, we’ve just had the upholstery shampooed. They weren’t always called Pete or Zak, but I found myself deliberately referring to them as if they were. I’d wait until Charlie and Sheila were out of the room before letting the Leicester Mercury dip into my lap.

‘Pete or Zak, can I ask you something?’

‘It’s Simon. Sure.’

‘You’re sure I can ask you anything? It’s sort of personal.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Are you black, Pete?’

‘Duh?’

‘Only these dreadlocks, Pete. I wondered if you were, perhaps, black. You know, with the dreadlocks.’

‘Uh, no. White.’

‘Confusing for old farts like me. But I want you to understand that if you were black, Pete, you would be perfectly welcome. In fact sometimes I wish Charlie would bring a proper black fellow home. And I only ask so I can tell people, you know, neighbours and stuff, when they ask.’

‘Right.’

Then I would go back to hiding behind the newspaper. Sometimes my cheeks would be splitting, or I’d have to stuff a handkerchief in my mouth to stop myself guffawing from behind the Leicester Mercury.

But somehow the arguments lost their humour or their levity, and one Easter vacation we had a stand-up knock-down blue-blazing row, and Charlie went back to university and we never heard from her again. Telephone calls went unanswered, letters were returned unopened. We know she graduated, because Sheila opened correspondence sent to her home address.

And then Farquar-Thompson from the Foreign Office. Thailand. Chiang Mai. Drugs courier. Twenty years to life. A steep curve, from naughty girl to that.

Farquar-Thompson had told Sheila that Charlie hadn’t wanted them to contact us. She hadn’t wanted help of any kind. That grieved me. That in the moment when she needed our help more than at any other time, she could allow a foolish quarrel to stand between us. But the Foreign Office had informed us anyway as a matter of policy. Plus, it seemed, there were legal bills to consider.

Normally I like to do a good job for people, but I rushed the wiring that day so I could get home early, just to think about things. I say home when I mean my cold apartment. I’d been there twelve weeks and I was still trying to make it habitable. Sheila, bless her, had come and put curtains up for me. My clothes lay around in faintly festering piles, hence the defeated effort with flatpack drawers and wardrobes.

Grabbing a bottle of malt whisky, I stepped over the half-assembled chest of drawers and went to bed, even though it was only just after four in the afternoon. I was thinking about the day Charlotte was born. I was there at the birth. I’d missed my son Phil’s birth, out of cowardice I suppose. But I was there when Charlotte arrived, and I was still reeling from the blood and the mess and the gas ’n’ air and the exhaustion of it all when the midwife took Sheila to get cleaned up and dumped Charlie in my arms, leaving us alone in the delivery room.

It’s a singular moment. You hold in your arms this fragile new life and you hear the click, click, click of the universe expanding into empty space.

Charlie looked up at me that day, and blinked. Her eyes moved like something from a Disney animated feature, and I don’t know why but I started bawling. Big fat hot tears of happiness down my face, even though a voice inside was saying stop it you big sap, they’ll be back in a minute. That was twenty-two years ago, and I’d never once cried since that day. Now I couldn’t get the memory of it out of my mind, and as I lay there in bed at four o’clock in the afternoon, I started bawling all over again. I saw Charlie’s life, with the messy salt pillar of tears I’d erected at either end