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

explained to me, to be trapped in the presence of any spirit which might have been passing at the moment the snap was taken. They feared that the spirit would not be able to leave them. They feared that the spirit would not want to leave them.

Images were living things. Images of themselves, photographs included, were living versions of themselves, at large in the spirit world.

In the middle of my dismissal of the primitive mentality the thought hit me that I had no photographs of myself and Charlie at Oxford: neither at the university nor in the town. I’d always dodged the camera’s eye.

Pleased with myself over the electrification of Nabao’s existence, I returned to our hut. Mick and Charlie were getting along like a house on fire. Charlie was sponging him down with a wet cloth. She had some jungle ointment which she’d put on his mosquito bites. They were laughing together when I entered the hut. ‘All those awful things you told me about Charlie,’ Mick said. ‘And none of them are true!’

This was meant as a joke. No, a half-joke. Or a jibe within a half-joke. Heck, I don’t know, but it rankled. But seeing her laugh made me feel good. I like to see people laugh. I like to see the laugh take over them, like a spirit that gets in them and pulls them out of shape.

‘I told Mick that anyone,’ Charlie said, ‘who would come through the jungle with my dad must be some kind of fucking saint.’

I don’t like that. Women swearing. Never have liked it. Back home I don’t even swear in front of Sheila.

‘It was hell,’ Mick said, ‘but if we can get out again, we’ll be laughing. Won’t we, Phil?’

‘I expect so,’ Phil said lugubriously. He looked hard at Charlie. ‘Though I have a strange feeling that it’s all going to be down to my sister.’

Charlie clouded over, running a hand through her hair. That mysterious power I’d identified in her darkened for a few moments.

‘You do want to go home, don’t you Charlie?’ I asked.

She hugged her knees and began rocking back and forth, pointedly failing to answer, so I put the question again. She closed her eyes, but hot tears squeezed out between them. She nodded her head, yes. I had the sudden notion that Charlie might be a prisoner here. ‘Is it Jack? Is it the villagers? Won’t they let you go?’

‘It’s not Jack or the villagers,’ Charlie cried. Without warning she collapsed on to her pallet, convulsed by huge, gulping sobs that made it difficult to hear what she was saying. ‘It’s me!’ I thought I heard her say, ‘It’s what I’ve done!’

I tried to comfort her, but I was of no help. Phil stood next to me, breathing stertorously, ineffectually biting a knuckle. Mick got out of his bed and came over, himself wobbly on his feet. ‘Steady on,’ he said. ‘Steady on, little Charlie.’

We watched helplessly, all three of us shocked by the measure of her distress. When her sobs began to subside she fumbled under her mattress and produced a pipe and other paraphernalia. She looked me in the eye. Her body language defied me to challenge her, and I knew we were in for big trouble.

‘That’s not going to solve our problems,’ Phil said. ‘Is it?’

I looked at Mick. He shook his head, leave things be. I watched her shave a bit of opium from a small block, heat it on a pin and then drop it into the brass bowl of her slender pipe. She puffed away on the thing, looking at me unashamedly. Her face had hardened. Her hair had fallen over one eye and she gazed at me balefully from behind the stray lock.

But the opium calmed her. It softened her features and restored a tender expression to her face. Contrary to my expectations – that she would go into a trance of some kind – she became rational and lucid. I realised this was the condition in which I’d first encountered her awake. But it was like a bad dream for me to see this. For a moment I felt that this couldn’t be Charlie, and that in the orange candlelight of the darkened hut this was some demon impersonating her.

‘I did something,’ she said. ‘I did something stupid. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time. But now I have to pay for it.

‘When I first came here this village was on the trekking route. I was with an American boy called Ben. Nabao sold us some opium. The other trekkers weren’t interested but Ben and I were up for it. We smoked, but it didn’t seem to have much effect, so we had several pipes. Next thing we were giggling like idiots. We went outside looking for water. My legs had turned to rubber. We kept falling over, and crawling on our hands and knees, still giggling.

‘Then suddenly the villagers came running out of their huts. They were pointing at the sky and shouting. We couldn’t figure out what was happening. The villagers had gathered every saucepan and cooking bowl and tin pan they could lay their hands on and they started bashing them with sticks, making a huge commotion. It was terrifying. My hair was standing on end.

‘We finally realised what was happening. There was an eclipse of the moon. A quarter-eclipse. They were bashing their pots and pans and shouting at the moon.

‘Ben and I were staggering about in amazement, laughing again and hanging on to each other. Then Ben stumbled sideways and he grabbed me as he fell. We crashed into the spirit gate in the middle of the village.’

‘What’s the spirit gate?’ Mick wanted to know.

‘I’ve been to look at it,’ Phil said. ‘Demons carved in wood.’

‘I’ll explain later,’ I told Mick, cutting Phil off.

‘The gate got pushed over,’ Charlie continued. ‘Ben clambered to his feet, holding on to one of those carved penises. He still thought it was hilarious,