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

but the villagers were completely silent. Stunned. They stood over us with bulging eyes. I knew we’d done something terrible. I tried to get Ben to put down the carving. Then one of the villagers started banging his cooking pot, you know, aggressively, right under our faces. The rest joined in. The din was awful. It went on and on. They screamed at us, banging these pots in our ears. I thought I was going to die. I remember vomiting and vomiting, and then I passed out.

‘When I came round I was in this hut. So was Ben. Someone had put a ring of burning candles around us. Then I fell asleep again, and when I awoke the candles had burned out and Ben was gone. He’d taken his pack and he’d left me.’

Charlie’s voice had become a monotone. She stared moodily at the floor. Mick suggested this must have been the time when Claire Marchant had arrived and stolen her passport.

‘Yes, my passport was taken. I remember someone coming in the hut and going through our things, but I couldn’t do anything. Nabao looked after me, as she has done ever since.’

‘Didn’t you ever try to leave?’ Phil asked.

‘Many times, Phil. In the following weeks there were occasional treks coming through. I packed my bag and got ready to leave with them. But I was never able to, because I can’t go outside the door.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘As soon as Mick is well enough, we’re out of here. We’ll hire some of the villagers to take us to Chiang Mai.’

‘I said I can’t go out of the door, Dad.’

‘We’ll pay them a king’s ransom and—’

‘Listen to me, Dad! Listen! You never listen!’

‘I think I see,’ Phil said.

‘See what?’

Suddenly Phil turned his volatile anger on me. ‘She’s told you she can’t go outside the door! It’s as simple and as complicated as she’s told you! Can’t you understand that?’

Understand it? No, I couldn’t understand it. Somehow I’d got it into my head that Jack or the villagers had some particular reason for keeping her there. I didn’t understand that her fear of the daylight was greater than her fear of spending the rest of her life in that miserable hut. ‘So what exactly are you saying, Charlie?’

She sighed, lit a cigarette, blew the smoke in a steady stream through her nostrils. ‘Someone put a hex on me for what we did.’

I wanted to laugh. ‘A hex?’

‘A spell. A charm. A curse. A malediction. How many ways do you need it making plain?’

‘Sorcery,’ said Phil softly. He’d become a tiny compressed ball of excitement and loathing. ‘Sorcery.’

‘Shut up, Phil,’ I barked. ‘There is no fucking sorcery.’

Mick had to come between us. ‘Right, let’s everyone calm down,’ he said, meaning me and Phil. Charlie was perfectly calm. She was hugging her knees again. ‘This is going to need thinking through.’

I’d heard of something like this. Fear of the open space. Panic. Fear of the wilderness – I’d been there myself a few days ago, had I not? Agoraphobia. But I hadn’t come this far to find that the obstacle in my way to getting Charlie home was psychological. Psychology belonged to a world of credit-card payments and microwave ovens and people with too much time on their hands. It didn’t have a place in the jungle, and I said that, too.

‘You’re out of your depth here, Father,’ Phil said spitefully. He was enjoying my bewilderment. ‘Way out of your depth.’

‘Look, what would happen if we tried to carry you out?’ Mick wanted to know.

Charlie blinked, and stared at him for an unreasonable length of time. ‘The villagers did that to me one time. It made things even worse. Please don’t ever try it.’

‘Just asking, like,’ Mick said. ‘Just asking.’

We were deadlocked. Of all the difficulties I’d anticipated, this had been the last. Reduced to silence, we were at last disturbed by a commotion at the door as Nabao waddled in with a huge pan full of noodle soup. Chattering and giggling, she made a great fuss of me. Charlie and Nabao exchanged a few words. ‘I don’t know what you’ve done,’ Charlie said, making a bid to leaven the awful mood, ‘but she says you’re her boyfriend.’

Nabao patted my cheeks and performed a little dance as she went out again.

In grim fellowship we ate. The soup tasted of curry and ginger. I tried to get to the bottom of Charlie’s condition. All she could tell me was that as soon as she tried to cross the threshold she experienced hideous panic attacks, induced because she felt something tearing at her. She was in danger of being swallowed or sucked in by something voracious waiting outside the door. It tried to shake her from the hut to its jaws, she said, into which she might fall and never stop falling.

She knew she was being punished, she said, for damaging the spirit gate.

Phil was right in that I was way out of my depth. I looked at Mick and, for the second time that day, he just shook his head at me. I was trying to think of what to say or do when the village radio snapped off again. I remember going, ‘Oh!’

My urge to fix the damned radio was only an expression of my desperate need to do something practical, a flight from the real problem in hand. I got to my feet and hunted through my pack for a bottle-opener, thinking I might be able to hammer it into some useful shape. As I did so, Charlie stashed her opium paraphernalia under her mattress, and I saw a blade flash there, a blade not unlike the one Coconut had given to me. I continued to rummage through my pack. ‘Do you have much need for that knife?’ I asked, trying to sound casual.

‘Oh, some guy was pestering me,’ she said, whore-tough again, in control once more. ‘I can look after myself.’

‘Right.’ I shot a glance at Mick. ‘I’ll be back