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

his book. At that moment, in the middle of all my troubles, a passage stood out as if illuminated. De Quincey was talking about something called ‘The Dark Interpreter’. He said that the Dark Interpreter was a part of every man and woman’s nature. It exists, to use his exact words, ‘in the dark places of the human spirit – in grief, in fear, in vindictive wrath’. More than that, it was a being, and this being comes to stand next to you at certain times in your life.

De Quincey met the Dark Interpreter when he was helplessly watching his own child crying in pain over some childhood illness. The next day, he noted that his child had made a spurt in its powers of observation and behaviour. In other words, it had learned through suffering, and De Quincey himself had learned through his suffering. The dark had been interpreted.

Thinking about Charlie, I understood this perfectly now. But I had the strangest notion that the Dark Interpreter had been stalking me here all the way from England, and at times I’d been dimly aware of his presence. In the gazebo in Chiang Mai. Or in the Buddhist temple where I’d had the odd sensation of someone beside me as I’d squatted with my eyes closed. In the night when I attacked our assailant and blacked out. Or here in this village, right now, while we were waiting to be found out for what we’d done.

The Dark Interpreter was a guide – a terrifying one – to help us make sense of all this suffering and rage. It was the opium, De Quincey said, that in his case woke the being. I put the book face down at the page where I’d been reading these things. Charlie chose that moment to raise her eyes, and as our eyes met I once again felt at my side this extraordinary presence, and I was so flooded with ruined love for Charlie and Phil that I started to blub.

Charlie cradled me like a mother. ‘There,’ she said. ‘There.’

At some point late in the afternoon a very subdued Nabao brought us a pan of noodles. Her sprightly attitude was absent as she laid the dish on the table. I got the impression that she was still loyal and brave enough to do this, but that she wanted to be quick about it. Nothing in her attitude suggested to me that she knew anything.

Phil returned in a highly agitated state. He’d been walking to and fro in the poppy fields. ‘Did anyone feel the jolt?’ he said.

We all turned.

He smiled thinly. ‘When we landed. I felt it. We’d been falling for some time, though of course it doesn’t feel like it. When you’ve been falling for a long time, I mean. It feels normal. Like every day is the same, perfectly ordinary. You stop feeling the air rushing past you. But then there’s the jolt. I felt it. That sudden jolt, and I knew we’d landed. We’re on the lowest platform, aren’t we? The one reserved for people like us. This is the lowest platform of hell.’

‘Phil,’ Charlie whispered.

I’d had that falling feeling too, but not in the way he meant.

‘We’ve got to tell someone.’ Phil said this emphatically. ‘That would be the correct thing to do.’

‘No,’ Charlie said firmly. Then she went over to Phil and took his hand. ‘That is the worst of all possible scenarios.’

‘We’ve got to tough it out, Phil.’ I said. ‘The four of us. Tough it out.’

‘I’ve been up in the fields, talking with God. I’ve been asking Him if we should tell somebody about what happened.’

‘And what did He reply?’ Charlie asked.

‘He told me,’ Phil said, ‘to start by telling Rupert Bear.’

With the dusk came Jack. It was a terrifying time. Phil was obviously disintegrating under the strain, and I was afraid his urge to confess might present itself at any moment. We’d had to endure the spectacle of watching Phil, hunkered in the corner of the hut, whispering a long confession into the ragged ears of Rupert Bear. I didn’t hear what he was saying, but when I saw Jack coming I hissed at Charlie that she should keep Phil back, talk to him, calm him.

We watched from inside the hut as Jack approached and placed a half-bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label on the porch. This time he had Khiem, the old sorcerer, with him. ‘Be careful,’ Charlie breathed.

Mick and I went out on to the porch. Jack didn’t have his whip, and his gun was holstered. Jack and Khiem squatted, then Jack picked up the bottle, unscrewed the cap and handed it to Mick. ‘How is your leg?’

‘Sore.’

‘Here, drink.’

Mick and I exchanged a glance. Jack looked at me and said, ‘I posted a man in the generator hut, hiding behind the boxes of Calpol. Someone came in to tamper with the generator. We’ve got him.’

‘Was it Khao?’ I blurted. I felt simultaneously sick and relieved.

Jack squinted at me. ‘Not your business who it is, dear boy. My business. OK? I now know for certain it was the same person who put the pictures in your hut. Jack has solved at least one of your problems. My only problem now concerns my missing nephew. Can you help me on that?’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘Have you seen him?’

I gulped on the whisky. ‘No.’ I didn’t like this whisky-bearing, polite Jack any more than the whip-cracking version.

He tilted his chin at Mick. ‘You?’

‘No.’ Mick wiped his mouth.

Again he was looking at us for too long. At that moment I despised the itching pores of my skin for dribbling sweat. Quite suddenly he said, ‘Khiem here wants to help you.’

Khiem nodded fractionally at the mention of his name.

‘Khiem says he doesn’t like this hut,’ Jack continued. ‘Full of bad spirits. He says Charlie invited them in. The only way is to burn the hut to the ground.’

I instantly flashed on an image of our assailant in the moonlight, coming to burn