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

mate as far as I’m concerned is your wife, and your children, and the family you build your life around. You stop having best mates when you’re fourteen. But I had to tread carefully, because he was seriously offended.

‘Well, sorry.’

‘Sorry bollocks.’

We sat in unresolved conflict, punctuating the silence with occasional sipping, swallowing and Adam’s-apple noises. Finally I threw up my hands and decided to tell him what I knew – which at that stage was next to nothing.

I told him about my position with Sheila and how she was still putting up my curtains; I underscored my difficulties with flatpack assembly furniture; and finally I spilled the beans about Charlie rotting in a Chiang Mai prison.

His face became steadily pinker. He looked as though he wished he hadn’t started it. ‘You’re making it up,’ he said at one point.

I assured him I wasn’t inventing any of it, and that I wished I was.

‘Where the fuck is Chiang Mai?’

‘Northern Thailand.’

‘So why aren’t you already there?’

I shrugged. We discussed what we knew about Thailand, which was very little. I was able to point out that it had once been called Siam, something that had come up in a quiz. He alluded to the sex-tourism industry of Bangkok, and then immediately regretted saying it. I’d heard that students went there to send e-mails home. We also pooled our knowledge of drugs. It was a bit limited: he’d once swallowed something called a Purple Heart when he was a teenager and I knew another sparks whose lad had witnessed things in Holland on a school trip. Finally, when we’d talked ourselves into silence, he mustered another two pints of Jubilee Ale.

‘So you’ll be going out there?’

‘Well, I—’

‘When did you last hear from Charlie?’

‘Two years ago.’

That wasn’t strictly true. Yes, it had been two years since I’d seen her face to face. But there had been a telephone call, about which I hadn’t even told Sheila; and that for very good reasons. The call had come out of the blue, about six months earlier, when things were getting particularly bad between Sheila and I.

‘Charlie? Are you all right? Why haven’t you been in touch?’

‘Is Mum there?’

‘No.’

‘Right. Dad, I’ll come straight out with it. I’m in a difficult situation and I need five hundred quid.’

‘What kind of difficult situation?’

‘Don’t ask. Please just say yes or no.’

‘Are you pregnant?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Is it yes or no? I really need this favour, Dad.’

‘Charlie, where the hell have you been all this time? Do you know what it’s like for us?’

‘Yes or no. Dad. Yes or no.’

Daughter or not, nobody has the right to behave like that. Not a word, just give me the money. ‘Yes, you can have it.’

There was a sigh at the other end. ‘Thanks. I’m in London. I’ll give you an address. You can post me a cheque.’

I wasn’t having that. ‘Don’t bother. The money is here for you. To collect.’

‘I don’t have time to do that, Dad.’

‘What do you need it for?’

‘Are you going to send it or what?’

‘No; you’re coming here to collect it. You could be here to pick it up faster than I could post it to you.’

Then she got angry. ‘Always strings with you, Dad. Always strings.’

‘Being a father is one long string, Charlotte.’

The line went dead. End of conversation.

Like I say, I never told Sheila about this, and I never told Mick either. I had this slimy feeling that maybe Charlie wouldn’t be in a Chiang Mai prison if I’d just scribbled a cheque and posted it off. But I couldn’t do that. Fact is I was burning up with anxiety and hurt and sorrow, and I’d wanted to use her need for that money as a lever to get her back into our lives.

Mick, meanwhile, in the amber light of the sticky boozer, motioned a fat hand in front of my face, bringing me out of my wistful stupor. He leaned forward another fraction and fixed on me one of those irritating gazes clearly intended to see right to the bottom of your soul. ‘You’ll need a bit of help,’ he said. ‘And I’m the man who is going to help you.’

‘Eh?’

‘That’s right. Me.’

And at this point my heart, which I thought couldn’t possibly sink any lower, went down like the Titanic.

4

‘You came then,’ said Phil.

‘Yes, I came.’

Phil, my son, had this habit of stating the obvious whenever he felt uncomfortable. He often seemed uncomfortable in my presence. I’d decided that I ought to pay him a visit before flying off to Chiang Mai, to put him in the picture. We were not close, Phil and I. Not like Charlie and I were close, at least before the bust-up. I always sensed that Phil disapproved of me in matters never expressed; and he knew what I thought of his lifestyle.

He lived in a post-war semi-detached house on the outskirts of Nottingham, about an hour’s drive away. Sheila and I usually saw him once or twice a year, most commonly at Christmas, when he fulfilled the religious duty of honouring one’s parents by visiting us. He would always bring with him Christmas gifts of extraordinary parsimony: a packet of dates for Sheila, a plastic letter knife with fish handle for me. Last year he brought a toothbrush for Charlie and when I told him she wouldn’t be around for Christmas he made a point of extracting the toothbrush from under the tree where he’d left it, so as to take it home with him.

‘Shall I take your coat?’

‘I’ll keep it on,’ I said. His house was always freezing.

We went through to the cheerless lounge where two winged armchairs were drawn up near the fireplace. Why, I don’t know, because there was no fire burning in the grate. Over a dozen plastic chairs were lined up with their backs touching the walls. A pair of bilious green curtains draped the windows. Over the mantelpiece hung the room’s only extravagance, a large wooden cross of polished oak. We