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

She reached out for the bhat, and swatted the money clean out of my hand, just as I had done earlier with her opium. She fixed her perplexing gaze on me.

The money lay on the floor between us. ‘You’ve made your point,’ I said.

She wrinkled her nose, not understanding.

‘Boooo!’ I said, and she seemed happier with that. She left the hut.

She returned with a large bowl of soup and noodles, and three spoons. I woke Mick, but he groaned and declined to have any, said he couldn’t face it; he went back to sleep immediately. The soup was thin and greasy, but it contained some aromatic spice which reminded me of sage and onion, and of home. Phil and I supped in silence.

Later I tried to sleep but it was hopeless. My brain was firing on every cylinder, all smoke and no traction. I’d found Charlie, and yet I hadn’t. I was ready to take her home and yet I couldn’t. I lay on the pallet next to her, holding her foot while she slept. I don’t know why I held her foot. It was a part of her that wasn’t sore, but it was almost as if she’d jumped into another world, another dimension full of tormenting spirits and wild-eyed demons, and there I was holding her by the ankle, trying to drag her back into this world.

In the night she and I actually had a conversation. It went like this:

‘Pipe.’

‘No, Charlie. No more pipe.’

‘Is that you again, Dad?’

‘It’s me darlin’. It’s me.’

‘You keep coming and going, Dad. Where’s Mum?’

‘I’m here for you now.’

‘Why are you holding my foot?’

‘To stop you from falling.’

‘Is it a long way down? Oh, I think it must be.’

‘I’ve got you, my baby.’

And with that she slept. Later in the night she got up and with painful steps made her way to a pan in the corner of the hut. I helped her like I did when she was two years old, holding her over the potty. Then she stumbled back to her bed.

Phil snored and twitched in his sleep through all of this. I tried hard to sleep myself but I lay awake, staring at the ceiling made of dried tobacco leaves the size of dinner plates. I sipped water. I got up to check on the snoring Mick. I placed my hand on his forehead: he had a raging temperature. I emptied my pack looking for aspirin in case he woke. I found the book I’d brought with me but which I’d forgotten, the Thomas De Quincey, which I’d failed to make much sense of earlier.

My mind was racing feverishly. I tried calming myself by reading a bit more by the tiny light still burning, in the useless hope that its long-winded rhythms might slow my own hurtling thoughts and send me off to sleep. I supposed that De Quincey used to sit up writing by candlelight, which couldn’t have been good for his eyes. Then again, I suppose if you’re a laudanum hop-head, you don’t give much of a damn about the state of your vision.

But in that tiny globe of light and lying there beside Charlie, I read a very strange thing. De Quincey was talking about the druggist in Oxford Street who sold him his very first opium, and he suggested that the man, the druggist, may not have been of earthly origin. I know how crazy that must sound, and of course it is crazy, but I report it here because at the time of reading it both unnerved and impressed me. De Quincey said that he often went back to the same spot in Oxford Street to look for the shop, but he could find neither it nor the druggist who’d dispensed his first opium. It was almost as if, De Quincey suggested, that the druggist, having completed his mission, had absconded to another world.

It was minded of the strange things Decker had told me about this place. Perhaps it was because I was reading through the graveyard hours, and my mood was unspeakably low and confused. Or maybe it was because the night air still had a syrupy tang and I was conscious of being surrounded by acres and acres of opium poppies exhaling sweetly in the night. But I felt at that moment it was entirely possible that there might be a spirit of the opium, at large, roaming out there in the dark, looking for converts, searching out victims in the form of disciples, followers, supporters, benefactors.

I put the book aside. I suppose I’d still been reading with the aim of getting some sort of insight into what was going on in Charlie’s head. I hoped it would tell me what would make an intelligent young woman want to live her life with this monkey on her back.

I could understand some of these jungle people smoking the stuff. What else was there to do round here? But Charlie had all the entertainments, distractions and accoutrements of modern life right at her fingertips. Pubs. Theatres. Concerts. The usual blizzard of consumer goods. Cinema. Television. Well, not television; sometimes the thought of watching yet another night’s television has been enough to make even me want to turn to drugs. But the other things.

I thought about that for a while. Why did that list sound so distressingly inadequate? Sometimes I hate the sound of my own voice, and even the insidious whispering of my own thoughts. Theatre? Fucking hypocrite! There were two theatres in my town, and I’d never been to one of them in my life. Cinema? The last time Sheila and I went to the cinema they still had something called an intermission and a lady with ice creams on a tray. Shopping I detest, especially in the malls and the megastores. As for pubs, I could have slaked a beer, but I didn’t need the fake Regency decor or the horse brasses or the brewery’s shabby themed ambience. Or the quiz. God help us,