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

there was the quiz. No, there were big questions forming about the nature and purpose of life itself. Questions that wouldn’t go down well in the Clipper on a Tuesday night.

I tried to remember what I was doing with my ‘leisure time’ when I heard about Charlie. That was it, I was trying to assemble flatpack furniture. The tiny candle flame, the only light in the hut, wavered at the thought of the world’s flatpack furniture. It was late, and I was dispirited. Drugs were beginning to have some sort of a case.

The next morning I prowled the village, looking for material with which I might improvise a stretcher. I would be put to assemble a flatpack again, but the task had been complicated by the events of the night. Mick’s condition had not improved. He was running a fever, and though we’d dosed him with aspirin it was apparent we would not be going anywhere for some time. Phil and I had to help him out of the hut to the bamboo outhouse, and stand nearby as he groaned his way through a dreadful example of the squits.

‘Hold him up!’ I shouted at Phil.

‘I am holding him up! It’s your end that’s falling down!’

It was true. Mick was a dead weight, and as I felt myself dropping him my natural instinct was to blame Phil. The fact is, Phil was surprisingly strong and, though I didn’t tell him so, I couldn’t have managed the job without him.

Mick was shivering wildly when we shouldered him back inside the hut. We laid him down on his bed and, wiping the perspiration from my brow, I turned to Phil. I looked at him and he returned a gaze of irritating soulfulness. ‘What?’ he said.

‘Nothing.’ I didn’t want to say anything. When you’re at work, on a job and after lifting something heavy with another bloke, you maybe make the briefest eye contact, possibly offer a fractional nod in recognition of what you’ve just accomplished together, which is all I wanted from Phil. Thanks; good; done it; whatever. But no. I get this big beady-eyed spiritual gaze, like I should write a poem or a seven-verse folk song for him about us taking Mick out for a crap. He was driving me to distraction, so he was.

After Mick had drifted off to sleep, and with Charlie also out for the count, I had to do something to stop myself from going mad. Constructing a stretcher, I thought, would at least afford me a practical method of working towards finding our way out of this place. I left Phil with the sleeping casualties.

I had the long knife Coconut had given me, and I thought it might come in handy. I’d found a bit of trellis leaning against one of the huts. I didn’t know who it belonged to but I took it anyway. It would form the basis of my stretcher, though I needed to fashion a pair of long handles at each end of the thing if we weren’t going to shuffle our way through the jungle an inch at a time. My search took me to the far edge of the village, and it was there I realised why the place seemed so empty. Most of the villagers were out working the slopes.

And the entire slopes on that side of the village, acre upon acre, were flush with the waxy, ecclesiastical colours of the opium poppy.

The flowers were blowing. Giant petals, like radiant parachute silks, trailed across the fields. It was a beautiful morning. In the sunlit haze of the daybreak the villagers wore their vibrant ethnic dress. They crouched at the poppy heads, moving backwards through the plants, bobbing, settling at a poppy head, and retreating, like bees working the flowers for nectar. The sky flaked gold. The villagers, aware of me watching them, were not at all distracted from their work.

There were no suitable trees around for me to cut for my stretcher handles, so I retraced my steps. Back in the cleared area in the midst of the village, the totem radio sat proudly on its rickety table, though it had ceased broadcasting some time in the night when the generator had been shut down. I decided to check out the generator hut again.

As I’d feared, there was nothing inside I could use. I looked over the big, neatly stacked pile of cardboard boxes at the rear of the hut, intrigued about what might be inside them.

I checked the doorway of the hut, from where I could scan the cleared area of the village. There was no one about. If any of the villagers were lurking inside their huts it was doubtful that they could see into the shadows of the generator hut. I hesitated for a moment and then ducked back inside.

The cardboard boxes were well sealed. I had to wrestle one down to the floor before I could open it. I tried to slide my blade under the masking tape sealing the boxes, so that I could quickly reseal the box after I’d had a peep inside; but the blade was too thick and I couldn’t get under the tape without gouging the cardboard. Instead I decided to slit the tape at the joint of the flaps; afterwards I could put the box underneath some of the others to disguise it.

I scored the blade along the sealed joint, and the box popped open. I heard a light scuffle outside the hut. I waited, holding my breath. It was nothing. I checked at the door again, but the clearing was deserted, silent.

I returned to the box to open the flaps. The perspiration from my brow was running into my eyes, and I had to stop to wipe my forehead with my T-shirt. Inside the open box were a number of smaller white cartons, each quite heavy. It was a tricky business extricating one of the white cartons, so tightly packed were they, but at last I managed to