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

Plus she was altered. Her hair had been bleached by the sun so that although her pony-tail fell lank across the back of her neck it sported the kind of highlights that might have been fashionable in England. The blueness of her eyes was exaggerated by the caramel colour of her rather dry skin, and what I took to be residual lipstick I quickly realised was the same stains of berry juice I’d seen on the natives. Plus there was a strike-line, a vertical crease above the ridge of her nose, not a scar but a fold formed by the knitting of her brows. I hadn’t seen that before.

She took another swig of whisky and dragged hard on her cigarette, whore-tough to my eyes, but I was beyond disapproval of those things. ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘controls the opium around here.’

The Thai authorities, she told me, had changed their policies on hill tribe opium-growing. After torching crops and condemning huge numbers of tribespeople to heroin addiction and AIDS, they had relaxed the rules on cultivation of the poppy for personal use. The opium gangs – under the leadership of men like Jack – had purchased land around the villages which they rented back to the villagers for the cultivation of opium. Jack and his men were always one jump ahead of the government, though Charlie told me the authorities were happy for it to stay that way, so significant was the opium dollar to the Thai economy. The opium dollar moved to Myanmar, it moved to Laos, it moved back to Thailand. It was always there; it just didn’t stay still.

The villagers respected Jack. He got them top prices for their raw opium and he never cheated them. He brought them gifts. He paid for the children to stay in Chiang Mai, to go to school. He was a great believer in educating the people. He’d worked hard to earn the unswerving loyalty of the villagers.

He also controlled a company, she’d been told, of about a hundred and fifty men, possibly more. In that terrain it represented an unassailable force protecting his crops. He’d managed over recent months to prevent tourist interests from bringing in trekkers or adventurers into the area.

‘You were only allowed in because Jack wanted you to come,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ She wagged a finger at me. ‘Stay on his right side. He’s a killer, that one.’

I think I’d guessed most of this from my first encounter with Jack. The only thing I couldn’t possibly know was why he’d let Mick, Phil and I into his domain, and whether he intended to allow us out.

I spent the rest of the morning talking with Charlie about small things, about home, the neighbourhood, family. There was a toughness about her, a coolness which rankled. As if she was somehow aloof from these things, superior, as if she knew things we didn’t. That sense of unspecified power I’d recognised earlier. I was sure it was just an affectation. Her manner still suggested we’d dropped by for a surprise visit, not struggled through the jungle to rescue her. Then by way of contrast she would display a tender aspect. She did everything she could to make Mick comfortable, finding him a better pillow, mopping his brow with a damp cloth. As for Phil, she kissed him and pinched his cheeks as if he were a boy of ten, and showed a deep interest in his tedious Christian life at home.

‘Any girlfriends on the scene?’ she asked him.

‘No,’ he said. Then, ‘Maybe. Well, there is one I’ve got my eye on.’ He blushed the colour of the rosy earth.

How easy it was for Charlie to get that titbit of information from him. He’d sooner part with his money than tell me such a thing. It made me recall how Charlie had always been – even though Phil was her elder, and male and all that nonsense – the bright star in the family firmament, and that he had had to love her from the shade. He coughed, flapping away the cigarette smoke but really waving away our interest in his love life, and stepped outside, leaving Charlie and I, and Mick sleeping.

‘What did you mean when I arrived?’ I said. ‘When you said you’d been expecting me?’

She looked puzzled. I explained how she’d been sitting upright when I first came into the hut.

‘I don’t remember that,’ she said.

I explained it again, and told her how we’d had a brief exchange about the postman of Porlot. Or Porlock. That crease above the ridge of her nose only deepened as she knitted her brows. I changed the subject, telling her how I’d visited Phil before coming out here. I tried to make her laugh by mocking his lifestyle. Outside the village radio started up again, blaring out weird music, deep, resounding masculine voices moving up and down the scales. It had obviously been designed to be heard in the fields while people were working. It made me think of radio ga-ga blaring out in the factories and sweatshops of England while the workers toiled.

‘You’re too hard on Phil,’ Charlie said.

‘Nonsense.’

‘Yes you are. Can’t you see how he’s suffering while he’s here? How hard it is for him?’

I made some dismissive remark, suggesting it wasn’t exactly easy for any of us.

‘But the point,’ she said, rather sharply, ‘is that you were always too hard on him.’ I must have looked stung by this, because she softened. ‘Can I use your leg as a cushion?’

‘Sure.’

She lay with her head on my thighs, chain-smoking my cigarettes. ‘Phil is sensitive. He has big needs.’ Don’t we all have big needs? I thought, but I didn’t argue. ‘You know, Dad, there are a lot of things you’re unaware of.’

‘I daresay.’

But you make out you know everything and that you’re always right. You always do. Why do you do that?’

If this really was something I had a particular habit of doing, it was