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

was shocked, when I returned to the hut, to find Charlie up and about and nursing Mick, and not the other way round.

‘Charlie!’

She looked at me, wide eyes all chromium and blue, like her mum’s. She’d tied her dry, once silky hair in a girlish pony-tail, exposing her slender neck. ‘Here’s the old boiler,’ she said lightly. After saying something provocative, like this, she had a way of touching her tongue to her lips – again a trait of her mum’s. ‘Didn’t expect to see you in this neck of the woods.’

Not the kind of greeting I’d expected, for sure, but I didn’t take it seriously. It was her way of making nothing of the spot we were in. ‘Come here.’ I threw my arms around her, squeezing her thin body to me. I nuzzled her neck. ‘I can’t tell you how relieved I am to see you on your feet!’

‘Ouch! I think you cracked a rib! You’re squeezing the air out of my lungs. Plus you could do with a bath, Dad. You smell like an Akha loincloth.’ I stood back to look at her. Again that touch of the tongue to her lips. There was a sheen to her eyes, which made me think she’d be OK, and a smile making me believe our differences could be set aside. Maybe I’d expected a zombie who wouldn’t recognise me. But she was smiling.

Or not smiling, exactly. The expression she wore was one of tolerant amusement. It was a facial cast I’d seen on her before, when one Christmas I’d had too much to drink at the Clipper and she and Sheila had helped me up the stairs to bed. It threw me. Given our situation, she looked altogether too composed. ‘I didn’t expect to see you out of your bed.’

‘I have occasional moments of lucidity,’ she said, ‘when I can get about the hut on my own.’ Yes, that old university-student way of talking; when I could never tell whether she was being serious or taking the piss out of her old man. I think on this occasion she was being serious. ‘Then this giddiness comes over me and I fall into a swoon. Plus I can’t abide strong sunlight.’

‘Is it malaria?’ Phil asked, hanging back in the shadows until this doubtless unnecessary display of paternal affection was over.

‘I don’t think so. Didn’t get the flu symptoms. At first it was terrible: fever, swollen joints, skin eruptions. My skin looked like a war zone and I got bad pains in my bones. That’s gone, but the fever hangs around on an intermittent basis. And I feel sort of feeble-minded. But that’s normal for you, hey Dad?’ She smiled again and levitated her eyebrows, inviting me into the joke.

I was about to answer when Mick groaned from his own sickbed.

‘I was just giving him some water,’ Charlie said.

I remembered the whisky I’d dropped to the floor on seeing Charlie. ‘Give him some of this instead.’

‘I don’t believe it!’ Phil exclaimed, thrilled by the degree of his own disapproval. ‘The stuff simply finds you! It really does! You come all the way to the jungle and it finds its way to you!’

With her eyes on Phil, Charlie answered him by unstoppering the bottle and taking a small swig for herself. Good girl, I thought: give your old man a break.

‘I see you’ve met Jack,’ she said, splashing some of the whisky into a bowl. I lifted Mick upright while Charlie tilted the bowl to his mouth. Mick glugged and smacked his lips, evidently to his satisfaction, before groaning and lying down again.

‘Brought any ciggies with you? Yes? Thank Christ!’

Phil shook his head as I reached for my pack. I have to say that Phil’s relationship with Charlie has never been much better than my relationship with him. Or mine with Charlie, come to that. Though they warred less. Anyway, when I suggested we might step outside the hut for a smoke she said, rather too quickly, ‘No. Stay here.’

We squatted down on a square of rattan. ‘How’s Mum?’ she asked. She was remarkably cool. She sat with her legs crossed under her, and with her hands dropped in her lap, like a stone idol. Anyone would think I’d just popped over to see her at college. In fact her manner was exactly like the times I’d visited her in her rooms at Oxford. It was as if, in the midst of all this, Charlie wanted to assert that she was in possession of some strange and secret power. Phil looked up to see how I would answer. I knew Sheila communicated with him frequently.

I decided now was not the time to tell Charlie we’d separated. ‘She’s longing to see you.’

Charlie tipped back her head, blowing a vertical stream of smoke at the leaf roof of the hut. Then she plucked at something in the corner of her eye.

‘Darlin’, we need to be going as soon as we can.’ I said this as gently as possible, but she looked away and shook her head. Then she stared hard, very hard, at the earth floor. It was unnerving. For a moment I think she was away; gone from me, the hut, the village, everything. She was in another place. I’d seen that too before, when we used to visit Sheila’s grandmother in the Pastures Hospital.

I called her back softly. ‘Can you tell me about Jack?’

She looked at me through rinsing eyes. ‘Stay on the right side of him, Dad.’

‘What’s the score, then?’

She started to tell us what she knew about Jack. As she spoke I was able to study the young woman who, until this very moment and in this precise place, I’d always seen as a little girl. Now, even in her illness, I had to acknowledge that she knew more about what was happening here than I could begin to guess at. All my life I’d tried to find ways to explain the hidden mechanics and the invisible rules of a