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

connected, these two violations? The rape and my hitting Phil a long time ago. Apart from the fact that they’d been brought to mind by today’s events, I mean.

It was a cold night again. Before settling, Mick made a silent gesture and lifted his pillow to show me his knife underneath. I lifted the corner of my sleeping bag to show him I’d had exactly the same thought. We were certain that Khao and his men, or just one of them, might be out to pay us a visit in the night.

The thinness of the bamboo walls left me feeling very exposed. Every click or movement or stirring breeze outside had me on the alert, straining to identify every sound. Some animal was prowling out there for an hour. I heard it padding round, wheezing, sniffing at the hut. There was a strong moon, doing its work on the opium that had already seeped through the poppy heads; I hoped the brightness of the moon might keep intruders away. I was wide awake. Swords of moonlight sliced at me through the bamboo slats of the hut as I seethed about Charlie’s rapists. I lay in the dark with my fingers twitching on the handle of Coconut’s wide-bladed knife.

31

Sure enough, in the night, the attack came, and I was glad it did. I was in a volatile state, and something had to happen. I was boiling inside, but I’d had to shut down my feelings so hard I felt like I was moving around an ocean bed in a bathysphere. When the time came, when I heard the creak of a footstep on the porch, I was ready to break out, to come up for air, and then screaming.

I’d seen a television programme about the partners of rape victims. All uselessly angry, living with a rage that had nowhere to go. The interviewer was giving them a hard time: after all, she was saying, you aren’t the ones who have been violated, think of your wives for a change instead of yourselves. True enough, I thought at the time, but what does she know about being a man? I know this: if someone violates a loved one, then the rage to strike back is terrifying and holy. I don’t understand religion. But I think that if there was a God, this is one thing He would forgive; more than that, He may not forgive the man who stood apart.

I knew someone had come because I heard the animal foraging beneath the hut go skittering. I felt myself glide to my feet; almost as if my spirit left my recumbent, physical form dozing on the rattan pallet. I made no noise, though I saw Mick’s eyes flicker open. He too had been unable to sleep. I put my finger to my lips, to warn him, and he too produced his blade.

I could have been a wraith, a figure of dream, banded by moonlight coming through the bamboo slats, moonlight that flashed on the blade I held loosely at my flank. I felt a peculiar calm. I peered through a gap in the bamboo and I saw him set foot on the step up to the porch, and he was drenched in moonlight. It was the man Mick had flung into the dust. He carried some object I couldn’t determine, either knife or gun.

Phil sat up, rubbing his eyes, and I silenced him with a gesture. The man on the porch hesitated, straining to listen. It was then I realised the object in his hand was a petrol can. He began sprinkling fuel on the hut. The bastard had come to burn us.

I kicked away the bamboo door, stepped out on to the porch and brought the long knife down on his arm in a sweeping arc from high above my head. There was a brief communion of blade and moon, like fizzing sodium light, before a blow to my own head knocked me clean off the porch, and into a syrupy, all-encompassing blackness.

I woke later in the night, back on my pallet bed, and with a raging headache. The other three were awake, and a single candle was burning. They were sitting up, whispering, but they shut up when they saw that I had come round. They all looked at me strangely.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘Go back to sleep, Danny,’ Mick said in a hoarse whisper. ‘You’ve been having a bad dream.’

Bad dream? I felt the side of my head. A bruise was already forming around my eye.

‘A nightmare,’ Charlie said. ‘We had to sit on you.’

‘And I had to slap you,’ Mick said. ‘Here, drink this.’ He tilted a bowl of whisky at my lips.

Phil said nothing. His face was white like the moon.

‘Go back to sleep,’ said Charlotte.

I groaned. I went back to sleep.

When I woke again it was to the grey light of pre-dawn. The other three were still awake, and they were arguing. Charlie had a broom and was sweeping the floor in a vigorous, agitated fashion. Phil saw me open my eyes, and he quietened the others. My head still hurt.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

No one would say anything.

I rose and went over to a bowl of water, splashing some of it on the back of my neck. Then I went to my pallet, and lifted up the corner of the sleeping bag. Coconut’s blade was there, as it was when we’d settled down the previous night. I took it out and inspected the blade. There was nothing to suggest it had been moved by me or anyone else. I felt nauseated by the pain in my head. I looked at Mick. ‘No dream, pal.’

‘Tell him!’ Charlie said.

‘Not necessary!’ Phil hissed.

‘Tell me what?’

‘If one of you two won’t tell him, then I will,’ Charlie said. She got to her feet, and in that moment it seemed that Charlie was the strongest one of all of us.

‘Tell me what!’ I shouted.

There was a stand-off, then Mick also