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

on the bank and where two natives sat around a small fire. They stared at us in astonishment, but Phoo made no attempt to communicate. ‘Hmong,’ he whispered as we drifted past the staring men.

I wondered if all the people along this stretch of the river were in Jack’s pocket. ‘Do they have cellphones?’ I asked.

Phoo cackled an answer. ‘Oooooooh! No cellphone for Hmong!’

He seemed much more relaxed now. The greater the distance we put between Jack and ourselves the more I felt we might succeed; but relaxed was something I wasn’t going to feel until we’d at least reached Chiang Mai. The drifting seemed endless, and the state of our nerves made the operation exhausting. After four or five hours the sky began to whiten, and we found ourselves in the grey light of a false dawn.

We started to pass individual natives up and about their business. Riverside activity increased. Natives smiled or stared at us, or more frequently ignored us. The jungle ahead began to blush pink and then the sun came up, boiling and rosy, flooding the river with red light.

Further downriver we saw more activity. It was a military camp. Thai army. Phoo became very tense. One armed soldier stood on the riverbank, watching us float towards him. He shouted something and his words echoed in the pink dawn mist, skimming across the river like a flat stone.

‘Bad!’ Phoo steered towards the bank. ‘You tell him I tourist guide,’ he said over his shoulder.

‘Why?’

‘He Jack man. Jack pay Thai army here. Army have cellphone.’

We banked the raft, and climbed off, grateful at least for a chance to relieve the punting posture we’d had to endure for the last five hours or so. The soldier seemed puzzled and suspicious. His comrades were busy striking camp some way off, though they appeared less interested in us than he was. He asked Phoo a lot of questions, and Phoo, extremely tense, replied mostly in monosyllables.

The soldier turned to us. ‘What you do here?’

‘Trekking,’ I said jovially. ‘Tourists.’

‘Trekking? No trek! No trek here!’

‘Yes,’ I offered with desperate brightness. ‘Best trek in Thailand! No tourists! Beautiful.’

The soldier barked at Phoo, who kept his eyes averted. ‘No trek!’ he said again to me.

Then I remembered I had a receipt in my wallet, written out by Panda Travel after we’d negotiated the services of guides on our way in. I made a big show of taking out the receipt and presenting it to the soldier as if it was a warrant signed by the King of Siam. ‘Panda Travel!’ I said.

He obviously couldn’t read the English, in which the docket was made out, but he pretended he could, squinting at the details and checking the Chiang Mai address, which was at least printed in Thai. ‘Chiang Mai!’ I added helpfully.

‘Chiang Mai?’

‘Yes, Chiang Mai. Panda Travel.’

‘Panda Travel!’

‘Yes,’ I said. I wondered how long we could spend repeating each other.

‘Ask him,’ Mick suggested to Phoo, ‘if he can sell us a few cigarettes.’

Phoo did so and the soldier laughed. He produced a packet of local brand and Mick peeled off a banknote from his wad. Charlie, Mick and I each took a snout and we smoked them, theatrically it seemed, as if the soldier had just saved our lives. The soldier laughed again. Mick bought the packet from him, and the large bill was expertly trousered.

But the soldier wasn’t entirely satisfied. He smelled a rat, but he couldn’t quite figure us out. We certainly had the look of a trekking group: four pink-faced Westerners and a Thai guide. The thing is, I too sensed something wrong, and I couldn’t work it out either. The soldier gave me back my Panda Travel docket and stepped over to the raft. He began to fiddle with the straps on our packs. He struggled first with the knots on the shoelaces, but couldn’t seem to unpick them. Phoo had made them doubly secure. Then he got bored and turned back to me. I was still smoking luxuriously.

‘Panda Travel?’

‘Yes, Panda Travel.’

I was making heavy weather of trying to sound casual. As I stood at the river’s edge I happened to glance down at the water. The pink morning light made a mirror of the water, and in it I saw a desperate and haggard individual with psychotic, boiling eyes staring back at me. It was an image of a man at the end of his rope.

With a minimal gesture the soldier waved us on. Phoo inched the raft back into the water and we climbed on board. We pushed off with an air of fanatical nonchalance, and the soldier stared after us until we’d drifted around a bend in the river and out of sight. ‘Will he contact Jack?’ I asked Phoo.

‘Maybe yes. Maybe no. Keep going.’

We wouldn’t know until we met Phoo’s collaborator.

About an hour further downstream and on reaching a small clearing, Phoo deftly guided the raft to the bank. A Thai man, completely expressionless and smoking a cigarette, waited under the trees. I could see a yellow Jeep parked higher up on a red-dirt track. As we put on our shoes the man helped Phoo untie the packs from the tripod and the two of them carried the packs to the Jeep. Then Phoo returned to the raft, gently pushing it into the flow of the river, where it sailed on minus its cargo.

Phoo rode up front with the driver and the packs, while we four sat in the back of the vehicle, avoiding eye contact with each other, hardly daring to believe we’d made it. We sat in silence. I knew why: it would tempt fate to celebrate too early. The Jeep bounced and jolted slowly along the dusty track, and after another hour we came to a proper metalled road. After that the Jeep made good progress.

There was a delay outside Chiang Mai as Phoo negotiated a songthaew driver who would take us into town. We were transferred to the back of the songthaew truck.

‘You