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

Television? Was this me talking? Sure, I will bring you game shows and garden makeovers; teenage soap operas and costume dramas; veterinary practices and lottery draws; award ceremonies and soft porn. I will bring you the the jewels of the Western living room. The whole fucking crash.

Naw, I almost said, forget TV and stick with hard drugs. I wondered if Khiem could read my mind, because he was grinning at me like an idiot. Then he whispered something to Jack, and Jack said, ‘He says he doesn’t like the methods you use, but he respects your victory over the Lord of the Generator.’

Khiem grinned at me again with his toothless, red-stained mouth. This occasion was the first time I saw him smile. I decided I liked Khiem.

When I returned to our hut, Mick was sitting upright and the old woman – the wizened old dope dealer – was spooning soup into his mouth. Charlie was asleep again, and Phil too was sleeping off the heat. Was I the only one around here who could stay on his feet? The woman chattered away, giggling as she fed him. Mick blinked at her dumbly. ‘Who’s this?’ he asked me feebly. ‘Widow Twanky?’

‘Feeling better?’

He scratched the back of his neck. ‘I feel like I’ve been shagged by all the sailors of the HMS Sheffield.’

Yes, he was feeling better. The old woman didn’t let our conversation get in the way of her chatter. Her eyes twinkled and she seemed to find something terribly amusing in everything we did or said. ‘Been on your pipe, duckie?’ I asked her over-loudly.

‘Boo!’ she said, and laughed heartily as she rammed the soup spoon in Mick’s mouth. Then she jumped off her stool and started to fish about under the folds of her skirt.

‘Hello,’ said Mick. ‘This gets worse.’

The old woman produced two small green packets, one of which she handed to me. It was a folded leaf, like a palm leaf. She mimed the act of chewing, striding around the hut, ruminating, indicating that we shouldn’t swallow, but chew.

‘More drugs?’ I said.

She thrust the second packet into Mick’s mouth and mimed chewing again. Mick looked at me doubtfully and said, through a mouthful of greenery, ‘I’m wondering where she’s been keeping it, that’s all.’

Maybe she intuited Mick’s remark. She giggled again, hitched up her skirts and danced a little jig about the place. She must have been ninety years old, but she was a live wire. I put my own leaf aside and picked up the whisky bottle instead. I was about to take a swig and she stopped dancing and became agitated, ranting, waving her hands in disgust at the whisky bottle. ‘Mai! Mai!’ she shouted, seeming particularly cross that I’d preferred the whisky to her packet of leaves. She waddled out of the hut, still cussing me.

‘Well,’ Mick said, chewing, ‘you’ve upset her, all right.’

‘You don’t know what she’s putting in your trap, do you?’

‘She comes here to feed me. Not going to do me any harm, is she?’

I supposed he was right, but I didn’t say so.

Mick wanted to know the latest. I told him about Jack, and about Charlie, and about the generator, and about my plan to construct a stretcher. But he admitted he felt as weak as a kitten. I failed to disclose the fact that we didn’t know exactly where we were, or that we were unlikely to get help from either Jack or the villagers.

Something dark red or purple from the leaf was bubbling on Mick’s saliva, but I didn’t tell him about that either. Then Mick said, ‘Who were the other people?’

‘What other people?’

‘In the hut. Who were they?’

With Mick resting, and with Charlie sleeping, I had very little to occupy my time. I was less worried about Mick, who, with a constitution as strong as a farmyard horse, was on the mend. Charlie, however, seemed capable of sleeping eighteen hours out of a twenty-four-hour day. Though it had been a huge relief to talk with her, I reckoned we were still going to have to carry her out of the jungle, and the way things were going the prospect of doing that might be a few days off. Mick could barely make it unaided to the little bamboo outhouse.

I was also worried about having upset the old lady who, so far, was the sole person in the village helping us, and for no apparent reward. She’d obviously tended to Charlie for some time, and now she’d taken it upon herself to minister to Mick with her herbs and potions and chewing packets.

When I left Mick, his lips were stained red with the juice of whatever was in the packet she gave him, though he claimed it was acting on him like a tonic. He recommended it passionately, but one glance at his crimson-lipped mouthing was enough to make me stick with the whisky. I suppose my preference for a distilled grain was hardly less primitive, but the Scotch settled my stomach and steadied my nerves.

My suspicion of her came down to the idea that she was stoking Charlie with opium, and that that was contributing to her weakness. Meanwhile Mick was still riding a high temperature, which explained his feverish remarks. He wanted to know about the people he claimed had been trooping through the hut. He complained that one time he opened his eyes and thought there must have been a party going on, so many people were there milling around in the dark. I told him he’d been feverish, and slightly delirious; he’d been seeing pink elephants.

I decided to put things right with the old woman. Since most of the villagers were working in the poppy fields, she was easy to find. Squatting outside her hut, which was adjacent to the one housing the generator, she was smoking.

When I say she was smoking, she was puffing away on a length of bamboo almost as tall as she was, and