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

I left Jack, and when I returned to our hut Charlie was asleep again. Mick was up and looking better. I recounted some of my conversation with Jack. He’d told me to tell them that Mick was Little John and Phil was Friar Tuck. I don’t know who I was in this scenario.

‘How is she?’ I asked, indicating Charlie.

‘She just flakes out,’ Phil said.

‘Out like a light,’ Mick added.

I felt very tired. ‘I don’t know where the fuck I’ve brought you two blokes.’

Mick must have caught the note of despair in my voice because he reached for the whisky bottle. ‘Let’s have a drop of the demon alcohol,’ he said. ‘You’ll feel much improved.’

‘No he won’t,’ said Phil.

‘Yes he will,’ said Mick. ‘The one spirit keeps the other spirits away.’

30

It was good to have Mick up and about the following morning. He said he still felt frail, but he wanted to stretch his legs so I agreed to show him the villagers harvesting opium in the fields. After he’d had a coldwater shave we men sat outside the hut, discussing the Charlie problem and breakfasting on jackfruit and papaya left by Nabao. I suggested we might have to dope Charlie so deeply that we would be two days out of the village before she recovered. Phil reminded me that Charlie had said the villagers tried something similar; she’d told him that her panic on waking was so great that she’d immediately retreated into a coma lasting three days.

‘You don’t have to hit every problem with a sledgehammer,’ said Phil, diligently carving segments of papaya.

His precision, his parsimony with the fruit, made me want to give him a fat lip. It was still early morning and already I was dribbling with sweat, and at that moment I hated the boy. I wanted to kick him. ‘Is that what I do?’

He popped a perfect cube of papaya into his mouth, nodded and chewed. ‘When someone has fallen into the Slough, what they need is a helpful arm, not a boot up the rear.’

The Slough? What was he talking about? My mind went winging back over twenty years and I flashed on a picture book I used to read to Phil at bedtime. A sweet little boy in oversize pyjamas, he would cling tight to my arm as I read to him, as if we shared a turbulent physical journey through the picture-book landscape. The book was a children’s version of Pilgrim’s Progress. I’d chosen it for the illustrations. The Slough of Despond. Vanity Fair. Doubting Castle.

So this was what Phil was jabbering about all the time! Phil hadn’t come out here to help me or to help Charlie. He’d come on a spiritual quest, to brace himself against hardship and temptation. He was on a hair-shirt holiday, for nothing other than his own selfish salvation. Pilgrim’s Progress and those gaudy illustrations flung back in my face, after all these years, like a pot of paint.

While chewing on sour jackfruit and wiping beads of sweat from the bridge of my nose, I suddenly remembered Rupert Bear lying squashed at the bottom of my rucksack. I went to get my pack, as much to get away from Phil’s carefully cubed fruit as anything else. It had been Sheila’s idea that I bring Rupert Bear. I’d wanted to tell her not to be so stupid, but some deeper wisdom inside me allowed him to be packed along with my other things, and I’d transferred him to the rucksack when we’d left Chiang Mai.

Chiang Mai! How that exotic and mysterious town with its pearly-green river and morning mists seemed like a vision of home, a second home. I wished I was there, with iced drinks and foot massages and proximity to an airport. With my thoughts on the comforts of Chiang Mai, I emptied my rucksack and dug out Rupert Bear.

Rupert Bear was, but for a few months, as old as was Charlie. Out of all the soft toys you can give a child, and for no rational reason, one gets elected as favourite. More than a favourite, it’s a comfort, a companion and a condolence. It’s a friend to sleep with, something to stroke, and what’s more, it speaks. It articulates many concerns. Parents can learn a lot from asking it direct questions, or by listening to its demands. Over the years Rupert Bear was misplaced many times. The resulting hunt was anxious and fraught. One sneaky effort by me to buy an exact replica to replace the loss caused more problems than ever. It obviously didn’t smell right; that is to say it didn’t smell faintly of curdled breast milk, perspiration, posset, soap, vomit, dribbled juice, spilled Calpol, the breath of bedtime stories, whispers, strung-out kisses, fevers, dreams, nightmares … the complete harness, the smoking night potion that mutates it from the rank of just another soft toy to a creature of feather and fur and bone and essence. The things that make its spirit familiar, the things that make it a talisman. Sheila had had the instincts to push on me the thing idle maturity would have rejected.

‘What the fuck are you going to do with that?’ Mick laughed.

‘I’m going to give him back to Charlie,’ I said.

Rupert Bear had faded and was a bit threadbare at arse and ear, but considering he was over twenty years old, he was wearing well enough. I went inside and at first I put Rupert Bear under Charlie’s nose as she slept. I might have left him there, but I decided instead to stick him in the wall above her head. It was easy to part the bamboo and to shove him in the gap, so that he could preside over her opium dreams.

There was always something strange about the world of Rupert Bear. Stranger than Rimbaud and Coleridge and De Quincey and all of those fellows, I mean.

Later, while Mick, Phil and I sat outside our hut, we saw Khao – Jack’s