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

Each bottle was labelled Calpol.

I unscrewed the cap of one. It was Calpol all right. The same sticky, pink paediatric medicine used every night at home by millions of mothers to soothe their children’s coughs, colds and other complaints. I thought of millions of infants in their urban homes at night, dreaming their Calpol dreams. But I couldn’t understand what this massive consignment of the stuff was doing here. I pulled down another box, slit it open and took out another white carton. More Calpol.

‘Find anything interesting?’

I turned round quickly.

It was a Thai male, a man about my own age. In contrast to the villagers he was dressed in Western T-shirt and camouflage shorts. He leaned casually against the frame of the door, an expression of amusement on his face, but his eyes were cold. I noticed a revolver in a leather holster on his belt.

I’d been caught red-faced and sticky-fingered, and I couldn’t think of a word to say.

He came forward, extending a hand that wanted shaking. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Jack.’

25

The man who called himself Jack beckoned for me to follow him out of the hut. He didn’t seem unduly worried that I’d been caught sniffing around the consignment of Calpol. It was of no consequence. He led me through the huts, his leather gun holster creaking slightly as we walked, towards the slopes where the villagers were harvesting the poppies.

‘Let’s inspect the crop, shall we?’ he said. He might have been an English gentleman-farmer, holding his hands behind his back as he stepped up the slopes, hardly waiting for me to follow.

Without interrupting their work the villagers were careful to acknowledge him, not with a wai but with a slight bow of the head. There were smiles, there were jokes. He was clearly respected by the villagers, though it was plain he was not of them.

‘We’re hoping for a good season,’ he said, his English impeccable.

The villagers were engaged in two different types of activity, each involving a specialist tool. Most were collecting resin from the poppy heads with a curious crescent-shaped tool, its curve fitting snugly around the pod so that the opium latex could be scraped on to its pan. The others, mostly women, were incising fresh pods with a three-bladed pricking tool. I felt like a visitor from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. ‘Jack’ noticed me observing closely.

‘Ah! You like to look! Like to see what you can see? Eh?’

If this was a reference to my earlier snooping I pretended it missed me. ‘Always.’

‘I too. Perhaps we are similar chaps, you and I?’

I doubted it. No one I knew used the word ‘chaps’. I wondered where he’d learned to speak English and to stroll around with his hands stuffed behind his back. ‘I’m here about my daughter,’ I said.

‘I know that.’ He cut me off with a wave of his hand. ‘I know why you’re here. I know all about it.’ He stooped to pick up a lump of soil and he offered it to me. ‘Can you tell if this is good for the poppy, by looking at it? It needs to be rich in alkaline.’

He held out the lump of soil for so long that I was forced to take it from him. I crumbled it between my fingers. ‘I’m sure I’ve no idea.’

‘Then come with me.’

We pushed our way between a troop of workers and I saw that Jack was leading me towards a solitary figure bent over the pods on the upper slopes. ‘Why grow these beans between the poppies?’ I asked, genuinely curious.

He let a finger drift skywards. ‘To confuse the government spotter-planes.’

We reached the solitary worker, and a curious figure he was. Unguessably ancient with wisps of grey hair growing long from the back of his otherwise bald head, the man was not to be distracted from his work. He failed to acknowledge the presence of either of us. ‘This is Khiem,’ Jack said, laughing. ‘He’s angry with me because he says the incisions should be made in the midday heat. But I’m in a hurry to get as much done as I can today. Modern farming, what?’

Jack spoke to Khiem in a language which I didn’t think was Thai. Khiem slowly raised his head to stare at me with eyes as black and shining as the carapace of a beetle; and from beneath eyebrows of such steep, horseshoe curves I thought they must have been painted on. Khiem wore the hill tribe costume but it was gloriously decked out with poppy flowers. He’d woven the flowers into his belt, on his sleeves and had cross-patterned his tunic with them. He looked to me like a figure from a fairytale. He stooped and scooped up a lump of red soil, just as Jack had done earlier.

‘I asked him about the quality of the soil,’ Jack said confidentially.

Khiem balled the nugget of soil between his fingers, sniffed it and then took a bite from it. He swirled it about inside his mouth like a wine connoisseur over a glass of claret. But he didn’t spit it out. He appeared to swallow the soil before making some laconic remark to Jack. Then he returned to his work.

Jack looked at me obliquely. I was sure this little demonstration had some gnomic significance, but I couldn’t work out what it was. ‘Khiem,’ he said, ‘is the one who decides where to sow the crop. Which field. Which slope. He prefers these mountain hollows above the ridgelines. He says the soil is still as sweet as when he chose this spot. The people in this village think he is half man, half spirit. He’s a kind of sorcerer. Khiem is the true Lord of the Poppy.’

‘Even though you own the field, presumably.’

Though Khiem couldn’t possibly have understood our conversation, he turned from his labours and fixed me with such a penetrating gaze I wished I hadn’t made the