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

We were all sweating externally and quivering inside after the events of the morning.

Charlie noticed the broken leather strap around Mick’s neck. It had obviously been snapped off in the struggle, and Mick had lost his amulet. He was dismayed. Phil and I had a good hunt for the thing, but we couldn’t find it.

‘Your lucky rabbit’s foot,’ I said, trying to force an ounce of humour out of myself, but Mick was too upset to be teased.

After a while some village children came up to us. Mick let them stroke his hairy chest, which made them giggle. Within a moment there were three wide-eyed kids sitting on his knee and he was teaching them counting games and nursery songs, as if what had happened an hour earlier was a dream.

As I sat by the doorway talking to Charlie, one little girl made a garland from poppy petals and placed it around Mick’s neck.

‘I’ll make you a garland, Dad,’ Charlie said. ‘But you’ll have to bring me the flowers.’

I looked at her. She was utterly composed. How could she be, after what she’d been through? Yet she sat there with her hands in her lap, once again like a temple idol, looking back at me. It was then that I identified that elusive power I had seen in her. It was the awesome power of youth. It sat on her shoulders like a brilliant, silver carapace, barely chipped by her experiences. It gave no quarter. It forgave nothing and it surrendered to nobody. It could face any wild thing except its own inevitable foreclosure. I knew then that I had no answer for its terrible force.

‘What?’ Charlie said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. I pointed at Mick instead. ‘Look. He’s so good with them.’

‘Why didn’t he ever have children?’

I shrugged. It was not something we’d discussed.

‘The villagers say that a man without children is damned to a life of tears.’

‘Damned to a life of tears if you have ’em, too,’ I shot back, rather too quickly.

I reached across the threshold, held her hand and gave her a thin smile. She was beyond all recrimination; really that’s how I felt.

I looked again at Mick sitting in the dust, barechested and wearing his knee-length shorts, playing happily with the kiddies. He clapped his hands and sang for these mites with eyes like molasses, and he was anointed by a ray of golden light. His blond hair flared in the sunlight; his blue eyes by contrast seemed pellucid, cloudless. I experienced a sweet moment of dizziness, as if something strange was happening; he and the children were suspended an inch or two from the ground as they played, and tilted at forty-five degrees to the earth. I heard the tinkle of temple windchimes.

Charlie heard me gasp. ‘What are you staring at?’

‘It’s Mick. For a moment he looked like something from a picture book. It was like a vision of heaven.’

‘I saw it too,’ Phil said, coming up behind me and murmuring in my ear. ‘It was a moment of blessing.’ For once Phil was absolutely correct. I couldn’t argue. In our suffering and in the midst of our predicament we had been given a divine instant. ‘This balances what happened earlier. There’s an exact symmetry in our day. You know, this is all being watched by a higher power.’

Charlie squinted from one to the other of us. ‘Have you two been on the pipe?’

‘Do you know something, Dad,’ Charlie said to me that evening, when the four of us were snuggling down to sleep, the air temperature dropping fast. ‘I had such a vivid dream. I had a dream about Rupert Bear.’

Mick winked at me to say nothing. ‘What’s this about Rupert Bear?’ he said.

‘Oh,’ Charlie said fondly. ‘He’s this ragged old toy I had when I was a kid. In the dream he was telling me it was going to be all right. Do you remember him, Phil?’

Rupert was still there, stuck in the wall above her bed, but she obviously hadn’t seen him. Or rather maybe she had seen him but without registering the fact, and had thus gone on to dream about him. I’m quite prepared to believe that, anyway.

‘Rupert. Scary,’ Phil said.

‘Red with blue trousers,’ I offered. ‘Rupert Bear was.’

‘No! Yellow trousers with black check.’

It didn’t matter what the subject – she was quick to contradict me on the smallest details. ‘Was he? It was so long ago.’

I pretended to think about Rupert Bear so that the others wouldn’t know I was churning the earlier events of the day: my scuffle with Phil; the thought of Charlie’s rapists.

About Phil: I lied when I said I’d never hit him. I did, once. When he was about twelve years old. He’d taken one of my books and chopped the pages out so as to make a hiding compartment. I’d confronted him; he’d lied; I’d hit him, too hard.

Oh.

I told him that day that I’d hit him for lying. But I in turn was lying about that. I’d hit him because I’d just had a furious row with Sheila. Too hard: I hit him too hard. I remember the shock of pain and betrayal on his face. I saw some shadow creep out of him and turn its back on me that day. He never looked at me the same way after that. Over the years which followed I felt so bad about it that I think I denied to myself that it ever happened. This day’s scuffle had brought the scene back to me.

It also made me angry once more as I thought about Charlie’s rapists. It was a cold anger, one I’d never quite experienced before. Anger with ice at the heart of it. Anger that breathed out of you like ectoplasm, marshalling itself into a spirit or form external to your body. Phil was correct: I was determined to do something about them. I just didn’t know what. But my blood was knocking in my brain.

And why did these two things seem