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

had not after all proved to be a Pilgrim’s Progress, not the treading of a difficult but steady path to grace or redemption, but a sudden tilting plunge into hell. Back home he was an Elder of his church. Here he was a murderer. How was he going to find a way out of hell? I didn’t even know if there was a way out. If I could have exchanged my soul for his, and accepted his penalties in an afterlife, I would have done so without a moment’s hesitation.

But I couldn’t.

‘Is there anything, anything at all, I can do?’

‘No, Dad. Nothing.’

I wanted to cry for him. My dumpy little boy, whom I’d also lost. There was no fixing this. I was learning that there are so many things a father cannot fix. I even made a silent appeal to the God in whom I have no belief: you saw what happened, surely you cannot blame this boy? Come the moment, Phil had placed the affiliations of blood even above his deepest religious convictions.

Would not any God, of any stripe, forgive that?

Though exhausted from the flight from the village, we were wired, and a long way from sleep. Charlie, Mick and I drank heavily with no apparent effects. We sat in the hotel room, chain-smoking and sighing. We talked continuously, though not about anything with gravity. Every so often one of the group would look at the locked door of our hotel room.

Until I couldn’t stand it any longer, and it was to Phil I turned. ‘But why in God’s name couldn’t you tell me what had happened? Why couldn’t you say? Then at least I might have understood what you were going through.’

Mick answered for Phil. ‘He was protecting you.’

‘Protecting me? It wasn’t me who needed protecting! You were going out of your mind up there, Phil! Out of your mind.’

‘Danny,’ Mick said quietly. ‘It’s true that Phil had some wobbly moments. But it was you who was going out of your mind.’

All three looked at me intently. I thought of the spirits I’d begun to see massing in the village. I thought of the opium, and of the paranoia. ‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. There was never any danger of Phil letting us down.’

‘What was driving Phil crazy,’ Charlie added, ‘was the prospect of not keeping you together.’

It was later, at Bangkok airport, that Charlie took off Mick’s lucky amulet and handed it back to him. ‘I really value this,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to let you keep it.’ He offered it to her for a second time.

‘Why?’

‘I want you to make a promise,’ he said, taking a swig from a bottle of Singha beer. ‘You’ll give it back to me only when you have your next dope.’

Charlie clamped her lips. The crease in her brow writhed momentarily.

‘Nothing need be said,’ Mick suggested. ‘No harsh words. No criticism. We’re beyond that now. Only after all that’s happened I think you owe it me, to tell me if and when that day comes. Don’t take the amulet off me if you can’t at least do that.’

‘How much of an addict are you?’ I said. I had no idea of the implications of her addiction, nor of sudden withdrawal.

Charlie looked at me. She took the amulet and put it round her neck. I could have kissed Mick.

There were other deals going on. Phil turned to me and said, ‘You made a promise, there in the jungle.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. You said you’d go to church with me every Sunday. For a year!’

I thought about it. For one disgraceful moment I was about to bring up the fact that Mick had had to put him across his shoulder. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. Phil pushed out his bottom lip, and then he sniffed with apparent satisfaction. He even took a sip of my airport beer to seal the contract.

He’d been entirely correct about this jealousy thing. I could see that now. And I’d driven them all away with it, Sheila, Phil, Charlie. Phil and Charlie, I now realised, both had to go to places where I wouldn’t follow them. Or at least, if I did follow them, then it was to places where they’d each got me on their own terms. And if I could follow my daughter into the jungle, then I could follow my son into his evangelical church. Not to bring him back – that wasn’t the point any more. It was just to say: I’m here. With Mick’s arm-twisting help, I managed to wring out of Phil a reciprocal promise that he would come over to see us once a week.

From Bangkok airport we telephoned Sheila. Charlie and Phil took turns talking to her, though Sheila appeared to spend most of the time crying. Then I had a few words. We made it sound as though we’d come to the end of a fabulous holiday.

‘Are you coming back too?’ Sheila said evenly.

‘Well, I’m not staying here.’

‘Stop it. You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, I know what you mean. We’ve got a lot to talk about, Sheila. All of us.’

In the air somewhere between Bangkok and London, with Charlie sleeping next to me, I fell into a doze. I dreamed I was on the jade-green river on a raft made out of aeroplane parts.

39

It seems only moments ago. A lotus flower unfolding in a single hour of the morning sun. And a lifetime in another incarnation.

Charlie meanwhile, leaning against my shoulder, continues to slumber, hugging her Rupert Bear. Her hair blows minutely in the soft airstream from the overhead vent of the pressurised aircraft cabin. One arm is held down on her lap and the other points up oddly above her head. She has resumed her flying position, the one I would spend hours watching when she was in her infant cot. Mick’s amulet hangs from her throat. I think Phil’s particular sacrifice will always weigh in her karma, not his.

Karma. Do I sound like a hippy now, or a Buddhist?