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

over to him, but something made me pull up short. Phil was almost shouting, over and over, the first line of the Lord’s Prayer, barely drawing breath. ‘Our father which art in heaven our father which art in heaven our father which art in …’ But his face and clasped hands were smeared red.

I cried out, thinking he’d hacked himself. It was a yelp of horror.

When I knelt before him he barely even seemed to see me. He was shivering and his eyelids fluttered as he prayed wildly. I looked for the source of the blood but couldn’t detect an incision anywhere. Not until I put my fingers to his cheek did I realise the red substance staining his face and hands was not blood at all, but betel juice. He’d smeared himself with the stuff.

I pressed my hand over his mouth. ‘Phil. Phil. You’ll give us away, son. You’ll give us away.’

‘You can’t help me,’ he said, his voice flat.

I spat on to my hand, trying to rub the red dye from his face. He shrank away from me but I pushed him down in the dirt. I had to kneel on his chest to hold him down. I didn’t have enough spit. He struggled underneath me. I spat and rubbed at his cheeks, desperately trying to clean him. Tears squeezed from his eyes, mixing with the spittle from my fingers. I could taste the salt of his tears as I tried to lick the stains from his face, frantic to get him clean. I pinned him down and licked his cheeks again, using my T-shirt to rub his face.

He seemed to come round. ‘I’m all right,’ he said.

I was panting heavily, where he seemed suddenly calm. ‘You can’t let anyone see this, Phil.’

‘I’m all right. I won’t give you away, Dad.’

He wanted to stand but I didn’t want to let him go. Finally he pushed me off roughly and scrambled to his feet. ‘Let’s go back to the hut,’ I said.

‘Leave me. I’m all right. I’ll get cleaned up. I’m sorry.’

He didn’t want me. He jogged away in the direction of the village.

I stood quite still amongst the tall poppies. I couldn’t see any way out of this. Events were getting worse, not better, and I had no resources and no ideas. It was while I stood there despairing that one of the plants suddenly shed all its luxurious red petals. I don’t know why, but it made my skin flush. Then it happened to another, nearer this time, the petals falling to the earth with a dry whisper. Finally a third let go its white flower, very close to me. A kind of static parted the hairs on my forearms.

I had the bizarre and quite ridiculous notion that the poppies were communicating with me; or that some invisible being, some unseen presence, was drifting towards me through the crop, tentatively, a few paces at a time, in order to stand next to me, dislodging the petals as it passed. I felt a lick of fear. Then instantly I relaxed.

This presence I recognised.

Amid the splendid, tall poppies, under the hazy sky and the diffuse yellow sun, I had the clearest of insights. I knew exactly what I had to do. I had to go to the realm where Charlie was, to stand next to her.

I had an appointment with the Dark Interpreter.

35

‘Complete and utter madness,’ Phil seethed from his corner of the hut. ‘This is insanity! This is exactly how it starts.’ He seemed to have recovered from his seizure in the poppy fields. He’d washed the smeared juice from his face and hands at least.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing, that’s all,’ Mick said.

I shot him a look intended to say of course I don’t know what I’m doing but what other action is there? Mick’s objections were of a different character to Phil’s: he was uneasy about being marginalised by my actions. Banished to the role of onlooker, he didn’t like it. If I’d asked him, he would have joined me – no question – but what would have been the point of that? Anyway, I needed him straight.

Nabao had been recruited to administer the thing. She arrived with her gear and, obscurely, a pile of banana leaves. I’d tried to make her understand what I intended to do. She looked solemn, seeming to intuit what was necessary. Anyway, I gave her a pile of Thai bhat and she wasn’t going to object.

Out of all of them, the one most unnerved was Charlie, exactly as I’d anticipated. ‘Trying to prove some kind of a point?’ she said scathingly as she watched Nabao lay out her gear. Charlie wrung her hands, massaging her fingers as if trying to peel off a layer of skin. ‘Is this your big statement?’

‘Think of it as me coming to join you, Charlie.’

‘Don’t. Not on my account.’

Khiem’s rituals had been faithfully repeated at intervals. Candles flickering out in the hut had been renewed, as had the smoking bowls of incense. Meanwhile Nabao rolled a piece of opium between her fingers before impaling it on a pin. She lit a spill with a plastic cigarette lighter and flamed the ball of opium.

‘You’ve beaten us, Charlie. We’re stuck. So if I have to stay here, I’m going to be with you in spirit as well as in body.’

‘Lovely. But it won’t make me change my mind.’

‘I don’t expect it to. I just have to see things from where you stand.’

‘You’re about to make a big fool of yourself.’

‘Can’t improve on nature, Charlie. How many pipes do I have to smoke before I could call myself an addict?’

‘Dad, you are so fucking ignorant. It doesn’t work like that. It takes a while to get addicted.’ She cracked her knuckles, and added cynically, ‘You have to work at it.’

‘How many pipes could you go in one session?’ I asked her. ‘Ten? Fifteen? Twenty-five?’

‘Twenty-five pipes would kill an elephant,’ she said. ‘Why don’t