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

dragged himself to his feet. Phil made a noise, a release of air. Mick beckoned me outside, and I followed while the other two remained in the hut.

Outside it was still chilly, but I felt the temperature rising, even though the sun hadn’t come up yet. It was as if the sun was a vast machine, and I could hear the faint and distant rumble of it before it appeared in the sky. The entire village was sleeping. As we stepped down from the porch, Mick turned to me and nervously placed his fingertips first on my shoulder then on my breastbone. ‘Don’t panic, Danny.’

‘I’m not about to.’

Mick turned, staring somewhere above the neighbouring huts. ‘He’s under there.’

At first I didn’t know what he meant by under there. His eyes were fixed on the distance. Then he made a minimal gesture which made me realise he was referring to the cavity under the stilts of the hut. I ducked down to look, but I couldn’t see anything in the shadows beneath the stilts, and I said so.

‘Covered over, Danny. We covered him over with crap.’

I got down again. I had to crawl a little way inside. It didn’t smell too good under the hut. It reeked of garbage and pigshit. I could also smell petrol. I moved aside some debris, some pieces of bamboo and some torn strips of polythene and I saw a boot. I touched it. The boot was attached to a leg. I crawled back out.

‘Christ,’ I said. ‘Christ. I killed him.’

Phil had joined us now. ‘Not you, Dad,’ he said. ‘Not you—’

Mick spoke rapidly, hoarsely. ‘He was going to do for you, Danny. Really he was. He’d kicked you in the head. You were down. He was going to do for you, mate!’

I looked back at the entrance to the hut. Charlie was watching from the shadows. She nodded at me. She was very clear about what had to be done. ‘You can’t leave him there. He’ll be found.’

Mick and Phil were in such a fragile state they were relieved to be directed. I made Phil get the trellis I’d been planning to use as a stretcher for Charlie. I told Mick to crawl under the porch with me and together we dragged the body out by the feet. We also retrieved the petrol can. Mick mentioned a knife and I had to go back under to find it. While looking for the knife I found a discarded backpack.

Christ, Mick! I thought when I saw the body gashed at the neck. I figured Mick had caught him with a blow of such might it had half severed his head from his body. The man’s army fatigues were caked in blood. ‘Strip down to your underpants,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to move quickly before the villagers awake.’

Mick and Phil understood. After they’d stripped off we rolled the body on to the trellis. Phil and I took the front corners of the trellis and Mick took the back end. With the weight distributed that way the corpse wasn’t so heavy, and we hurried from the village along the very path by which we’d first arrived.

The crimson sun, like a dragon’s eye, came peeping up over the jungle hillside as we shuffled along the path, sweating, shivering, slipping. Three English men in underpants and training shoes.

I wanted to get us far enough away to avoid the body being found by villagers or dug up by scavenging dogs; on the other hand, we had to get back before the villagers were up and about their business. Half jogging, half shuffling, we hurried along the leaf-strewn path without speaking, our breath coming short. But the scrubby jungle was too open, and I couldn’t find the cover I was looking for.

It occurred to me that Mick and Phil were in shock. They behaved like silent automatons, responding immediately to everything I said.

About a third of a mile away from the village I stopped them. We were all panting heavily. I’d spotted a small cavity in the ground, beside a bush and broken red-clay boulders, about twenty yards off the path. We put down the trellis and I jogged over to check it out. It wasn’t the cover I wanted but it would have to do. We carried the corpse across the scrub and tipped it into the cavity, along with the fuel can and the knife. Then we rolled a few boulders over the body, but were unable to bury it completely.

‘Let’s get back,’ Mick panted.

‘Wait,’ I said. I insisted that we lay the trellis over the cavity, and cover it with leaves, sticks and broken stones, so that even if anyone were to walk across it they might not sense the trellis beneath their feet. This we did with trembling hands.

‘Let’s go,’ I said, at last.

We jogged back along the path, hopelessly out of breath. By now we were streaked with sweat and blood from the corpse. The sun was climbing higher in the sky and the day was heating up at an alarming rate. As we ran along the path all I could hear was our own heavy breathing, the three of us blowing and gasping, the sound of our panting rising like a mist above the vegetation, like stifled cries to God. As we approached the village I slowed the others down. I was afraid that everyone could hear our dreadful wheezing and hyperventilating.

Villagers were moving about the village by the time we got back. Cocks were crowing, and a dog was barking. We hid behind a bush and dashed in one at a time, making for the outhouse. There we stripped off our underpants, and splashed and soaped each other in a hyperventilating and hysterical frenzy, teeth chattering, murmuring, moaning, scrubbing off every trace of blood.

We went into the hut. Charlie sat cross-legged, eyeing our naked bodies like a baleful Buddha. She was calm. At that moment she was holding it together for all of us. ‘Lucky,’ she