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

when I began to suspect that she wasn’t actually putting any opium in the bowl, or that I was smoking some placebo, or that she was setting me up with tiny doses. I thought this because nothing seemed to be happening.

I’d smoked all five pipes of opium and I felt absolutely nothing. Except that my tattoo wasn’t stinging anymore.

Charlie listened in dismay as Phil got her up to speed on me and Sheila, and I was enormously amused by the expression on each of their faces. Charlie, arms folded stiffly, gazed down at me with her features moulded into those of a mother who, intensely annoyed by the antics of her child, is powerless to act. I’d seen that facial cast on Sheila many times when Charlie was a child herself. I’d probably worn the same expression myself once or twice over the years. Phil meanwhile had taken out his pocket Bible to wave under my nose as he spoke, sermonising like a street-corner preacher but about my life. It made me snort again. Finally I looked over to Mick, perhaps to see if he too thought it funny, but he only regarded me lugubriously. With his perspiring face darkened by shadows and with his poached-egg eyes, he too looked faintly ridiculous and I laughed. The fact that none of them seemed to find the situation amusing made me cackle with laughter.

‘It’s not this dope that’s making me laugh,’ I tried to explain to Mick. ‘Really it’s not. It’s the expression on everyone’s face.’

His dumb response only made me laugh more.

‘You’re going to overdose if you keep smoking it at this pace,’ Charlie said.

‘That’s the idea,’ I said, and this banal phrase seemed so witty that I found myself giggling again. Charlie shook her head.

What happened over the next couple of hours is not easy to recall. I lost track of how many pipes I had. I got fixated on the swish of Nabao’s banana leaves, so much that I found I could replay it in my mind – the turn of the leaf as it was placed upon the pile, swish, leaf, swish, leaf, until I wasn’t certain whether I had merely replayed the image in my mind or whether Nabao’s sinewy hand had actually turned a new banana leaf. The thing which surprised me most was not that I went into any kind of trance – which was what I’d expected – but that the procession of my thoughts actually came to seem like real events in front of me. That is, the interior world became exterior, and vice-versa.

And the world was not transported into a beautiful place, as I’d expected. The phrase ‘the milk of paradise’ which was buzzing around my head like a fat bee seemed inappropriate. A swattable phrase. Rather the world had muddied its colour palette, so that I was in a tea-brown or dirty orange universe, almost identical to this one, but seeming to intersect this world at a very slight tangent. A double vision.

‘Perhaps it’s the light,’ I said aloud, commenting on this, meaning that the orange glow of candlelight was playing with my senses. Mick answered, but frankly I didn’t care to pay any attention to what he was saying. I kept thinking what an old world was this one that I was seeing, unspeakably old, and spent, and over-evolved. That sounds as if I became unnerved by it, but that was not the case. I felt totally neutral, and not at all anxious.

Actually it’s not true to say that I felt neutral. There was something else going on, beneath my perceptions about the ancient character of this opium world. Whatever it was, I liked it. It took me a time to appreciate that what it was was a scent in my nostrils. When the certainty clicked in me, I remember going ha! It was that new-born baby smell. The fontanelle. The original, pungent love amalgam, but to the power of nine.

Of course there was no baby anywhere near, and I knew the earth had opened up its fontanelle to me.

Physically I felt so comfortable that I didn’t want to move. The blood in my veins had been replaced by silk. But intellectually I felt very stimulated, and fascinated by this strange world. I got up and walked out of the hut.

That is, I believe I got up and walked out of the hut. I clearly remember taking a walk out to the poppy fields, but Mick afterwards told me I’d only been gone a few minutes before coming back and smoking another pipe; but that would not have been enough time for all the things to have gone through my mind.

Swish, the hand turned the leaf.

Perhaps I only thought it, and my thoughts deceived me, but I remember walking to the opium fields and standing amidst the poppies. The villagers had gone, having completed the day’s harvesting. My legs felt like rubber and my muscles had turned to a kind of slush. Progress was difficult, and when I got there I sat on the red earth looking up at the incised pods. I was struck by the number of poppy heads weeping. Not just seeping opium, but suffering with it, and yielding.

Then back in the hut. Charlie, crying now. And Phil, kneeling by my side, hands clasped around his pocket Bible, whispering unwanted prayers in my ears, a whisper like a dry banana leaf turning.

I saw very clearly how we are all of us incised by the experiences of life. We are pricked, we weep, we yield. And the substances we weep and we bleed harden in the cold of the night, under the moon. I had very fanciful notions about where this stuff went; about the varying quality of this stuff; about who was collecting it and why. It seemed to me that our first breath as a newborn baby comes to us sharp as a blade, as an incision. We take it in. We give it out in