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

I could see him, he couldn’t see me inside the darkness of the hut. He was stooped slightly, his posture suggesting he was listening hard. I noiselessly moved to within inches of where he was standing, and put my mouth to the bamboo. Since the days when Charlie and Phil were very small, I’ve been able to produce a very passable imitation of Daffy Duck, and I did one now, very loud.

Khiem fell off the porch in surprise.

I mean the sound somehow seemed to blow him off the porch, and to see Khiem rolling around in the dust made me laugh so hard I had to bite my hand. I grabbed the canvas at the door and ran outside, flapping it wildly, moaning and clutching my hair as if it was on fire. Then I ‘pulled myself together’, spat into my hands as if I meant business, and ventured back inside the hut with my fists raised.

I re-hung the canvas at the door and peeked through the cracks in the bamboo. Khiem’s head swayed back and forth, like a punter at the ringside of a bout of Thai kickboxing. The expression on his face was so fraught I was taken over again with a fit of silent laughter. My ribs were cracking. I sank to the floor and had to squeeze my sides to stop any noise coming out of me.

I couldn’t remember when I’d last laughed so hard. It was like being taken over by a spirit, and the more I thought about it – stuck in the jungle with a sick friend and a doped-up daughter and trying to mend a generator while a village witchdoctor listened outside – the more I fell prey to this fit of hysterics.

Someone lifted the canvas at the door to find me lying on the floor clutching my ribs. It was the bearded Thai, one of Jack’s henchmen. He’d brought me some tools. Khiem stood behind him, observing. I had to pretend that I was holding myself in pain. The bearded Thai scowled and tossed a bag of tools on the floor.

It was a gaily patterned handcrafted villager’s bag, and inside was a collection of the very tools I’d seen the opium harvesters use in the fields. Two crescent blades, a standard knife, and a three-bladed incisor for pricking the poppy seedheads. I sobered up. ‘What’s this? I can’t use these!’

The bearded Thai simply sneered, and turned about-face. I followed him out, protesting, looking for Jack to complain to. Jack was nowhere about.

With Khiem watching, I went back into the hut. The smile had been wiped off my face, but I still had plenty of ideas. The penknife I carried in my shorts pocket – sometimes I felt like a fucking Boy Scout – had a small screwdriver blade. I thought I might be able to improvise.

But I didn’t need to. No sooner had I begun to dust down the machine with a bit of cloth than did the cap fall off the spark plug and into my hand. It had simply worked loose. I replaced the cap, whipped the starter cord and the generator coughed into life. I quickly stalled it again. Not wanting Khiem, or anyone else, to think I’d had too easy a victory over the spirits of the generator, I sat and smoked a cigarette, waiting until I was good and ready. I expect these Oxford professors do the same: make out it has taken them years to write something about Keats or Thomas De Quincey, something that they’d dreamed up while smoking a fag.

Before I started the generator I had another poke around the hut. The cartons of Calpol were still there, but there was little else besides a short coil of electrical cable and some engine oil. At last I tugged the starter cord and the engine sputtered into life. The dreadful broadcast swelled from the radio, filling the air again. I made sure the engine was ticking over nicely, and went outside.

Khiem regarded me strangely. I didn’t know what else to do, so I walked over to the radio, snapped it off, thought better about it, and snapped it on again. After a few moments Jack and his henchmen appeared. Jack looked very pleased with me; the bearded one less so. ‘Hey! You did it!’

‘It was nothing. Here, take these back.’ I offered him the ‘tools’ I’d been given. ‘They weren’t much help.’

Jack wrinkled his nose at the farmer’s bag, and said something derisory to his bearded henchman. The beardie shrugged and obviously made some excuse. ‘Good chap. Jack always pays, right? I paid you already with that whisky, didn’t I? What’s your name again?’

‘Dan.’

‘Jack always pays, right Dan?’

‘Right.’

He gave me a cigarette. Beardie’s face was expressionless, inscrutable as they say, but his eyes betrayed him, and he was staring at me in a way which made me feel quite nervous. I heard myself babbling. ‘That’s a useful generator. You could power a lot more than a radio—’

‘I know that,’ Jack said, cutting me off. I could see he was a man who didn’t like to be told things.

‘All you need is some cable and a few more bulbs and you could light the whole village.’

‘I know that, too.’ He sniffed. ‘That’s why I had the damned thing brought here. But tell me what I need. Tell me.’

I made a quick estimate of the length of cable and enough fluorescent bulbs to make one for each hut and a few spares.

I was doing my best to sound like a lackey rather than a coloniser. Jack squinted at me, puffing thoughtfully on his cigarette. ‘I get them brought in by elephant and you fix it for me, Dan? Yes?’

I didn’t know how long he expected me to stay, but I heard myself saying, ‘Sure. It’s easy enough.’ If Jack really did pay his debts I’d illuminate his elephant’s dick for him. I suddenly had trade. I had currency. ‘All you’d need is a socket and you