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

news to me. ‘Maybe it’s something men do to protect themselves. Maybe it was to protect you and Phil and your mother.’

‘Protect from what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Right. You don’t know. There are lots of things you know nothing about.’

‘Such as?’

‘Other worlds. All around us. Busy worlds going on, unseen. You’ve walked right into a world of spirits, did you know that?’

What the hell was I supposed to say to that? When she was a teenager I used to say stop talking tosh, but right then she was too brittle to brook any argument. I put it down to the opium smoke billowing about in her brain. Though I did ask, ‘What’s this about the moon? Why can’t the moon work while you are here?’

‘The moon will eat itself.’

‘What?’

Instead of answering me properly, she started to sing, and in a sweet, strong, melodious voice that took me by surprise. It was some kind of folk song, and Charlie’s voice was so good it easily beat back the sound of the radio in he village.

And like a lovesick lenanshee

She hath my heart in thrall

Nor life I owe, nor liberty,

For love is Lord of all.

‘I didn’t know you could sing,’ I said, when she’d finished. ‘How come you never sang for me?’

‘I was in a folk band when I was at college,’ she said. She squinted at me from her cushion of my thigh. ‘I thought you’d make fun of me.’

That hurt. It went clean past my ribs and deep into my heart like the trimmest stiletto. ‘Why say that?’

She dismissed the question with an airy wave of her hand. Then she closed her eyes, massaging her temples with her long brown fingers. She had lovely elegant fingers, did Charlie, and I noticed with some sadness how dirty were her fingernails. After a moment she complained of feeling tired, climbed on her pallet and instantly fell into a deep, deep sleep. I sat on the rattan mat, staring at her, and as I did so, the music blasting from the radio stopped abruptly.

Mick snored on. I was in a shocking state of frustration. All I could do was stare uselessly at the two sleeping bodies in the hut, and having come so far I felt like a ship suddenly becalmed. On the other hand I was uplifted by the discovery that Charlie’s condition was nowhere near as bad as I’d first suspected.

I went out again, to gather material for my stretcher. Phil sat under the shade of a bo tree, like a monk, reading his wretched pocket Bible. ‘Why don’t you put that away and do something useful?’ I barked.

He stared at me for an inordinate period. ‘Like what?’

I turned on my heels. When I reached the centre of the village I found Jack, Khiem and a couple of men standing around the silenced totem radio. These other two men were racially different to the villagers. One even had a beard. He was the first oriental I’d seen with facial hair since arriving in Thailand. The two were decked, like Khiem, with dozens of poppy flowers, though I didn’t get the impression they were hippies because each carried a sawn-off shotgun.

Khiem, the Lord of the Poppy, pointed a finger at me as I approached and spoke a few words to the group. The bearded Thai looked at me with contempt. The other flashed me a beautiful, dangerous smile. ‘Khiem says you bring more bad spirits to the village,’ Jack called out cheerfully. ‘This is the second time the generator has broken down since you arrived here.’

‘What’s the fault with it?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not a grease monkey,’ Jack sneered. ‘But I went to a lot of trouble getting that machine here on the back of a bad-tempered elephant. Now it falls apart every few minutes.’

I saw a way to ingratiate myself with Jack. ‘Got some tools?’

‘Tools? You know about generators?’

‘I can take a look.’

Jack slapped his knee and sent the bearded Thai away, presumably to find me some kit. Khiem looked startled. He whispered in Jack’s ear. ‘He wants to know what you’re going to do,’ Jack said.

‘Tell him I’m going to wrestle with the Lord of the Generator.’

27

The Honda IKVA generator was a decent bit of kit, but in poor repair. Even at first glance it looked clogged with red dust, and I hoped that the solution would be a simple one. As I’ve mentioned, I’m a sparks and not a mechanic, though the principle of a generator is not all that different from a motor car engine. I’d encountered a few temperamental generators whenever contracted for on-site work where they were required to drive power tools.

First thing I did was to check that the fault wasn’t something completely daft, like no petrol, but there was plenty of fuel in the tank. I traced the hi-T leads back to the piston and checked out a couple of other bits of wiring. I hoped it wasn’t going to be a complicated problem with the armature, in which case I’d probably be fucked. It was while I was peering through the casing at the armature that I sensed someone watching me from the doorway.

It was Khiem, our wild poppy man. His eyes were bulging and the veins on his forehead stood out like a pair of chicken’s claws gripping his skull. I could do no more while waiting for tools with which to unbolt the casing of the machine, so I made what I thought of as a few mystical passes across the generator. Khiem’s eyes widened still further. Then I whistled a bit at the hi-T leads and made an eerie but theatrical raising-up gesture.

I soon tired of this tomfoolery, so I whisked the canvas from under the machine and draped it over the doorway: if I can’t see your magic, you can’t see mine. I didn’t care if he was offended.

Khiem was hardly discouraged. Through the cracks in the bamboo I could see his figure outlined on the porch. Though