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

I’m not even sure what a Buddhist is, but I don’t think I’m one. I don’t really care for any kind of creed. Religion is like the dope, which is like the whisky, which is like the stupid television. Same fuck of a different colour.

But I do believe in spirits. In ghosts. Only now I know what they are. They are not the dead. They do not come from an afterlife. They move about us. They live on our shoulders, or at our right or left hand, and they are created by our actions. I was followed all the way by one small spirit. It practically had to tug me by the sleeve that day in the poppy field before I would acknowledge it. It was the crying spirit of an absence of core in my life.

Phil is seated in front of me, along with Mick. I intend to keep my promise to Phil and I will attend church every Sunday for a year, no matter how unspeakably awful it is. And it will be unspeakably awful. But every week I will approach this awfulness with a glad heart, because it’s a means for me to get back to Phil, and if in some way it begins to unburden him, then I’ll do it. I’ll even take along my own teabags. Then there’s Mick. What can I say about him? A man who would go into the jungle with you; a man who would put his entire wherewithal at your disposal in a time of need. I’m in awe of him, too. Every step of the way his behaviour was impeccable and ultimately beyond reproach. A giant at my side. But he’s changed. I’ve noticed no fake-waiing and farting on the way home. A superficial difference, which I suspect is only temporary.

I think of what Charlie taught me, and I see how Mick’s desire to be needed by me is no different to my own desire to be needed by my children. Only he’s better at it than I am. More than anything I know that through his actions he gave me that grace and generosity – so deplorable in its absence up until now – to finally be able to call him my friend.

Next time I have some trouble, I’ll tell him about it first.

Because I have come a long way. As far, if not further, than any of them. All this time I have spent thinking of Charlie as a child and never as a woman. And all this time I spent pretending to be the great protector, when it was ultimately Phil who forfeited everything to protect me. It’s a shocking and humbling thing to realise how much your children have to teach you.

I’ve been a selfish child pretending to be a man. I allowed fatherhood to become a creeping cataract, preventing me from seeing the changing needs of those around me. But I didn’t know then what I know now. That you have to let them pluck from your heart with bruising fingers great, sparkling, golden, resinous chunks of love, and never ask under what moon they smoke it or where they spill it.

I remember when Phil was born. In those first days when I displayed him proudly and everywhere, and with the oafish grin of the neophyte father indelibly painted on my stupid jaw, a mean-spirited and mealy-mouthed old woman approached me and said, ‘Yes, and he’ll break your heart one day.’

Break your heart one day? I wish I’d known then what I know now, and I could have gainsaid the old harridan. Your children break your heart every day. You only have to look at them and your heart shreds. They lacerate it. Pulverise it. And then they mend it for you, each and every day, with a gesture or a smile or a sly glance, just so that it can be shredded and wrecked all over again. And all over nothing.

That’s what it means to be a father. That’s my definition: a father is a person with a mashed heart and a wounded hand. And that’s perfectly normal.

But you have to be so careful while your heart is being mashed over nothing, that your heart doesn’t harden when you can’t take any more. Because if that happens you’ve lost the possibility of salvation that becoming a parent gave you in the first place. Did I let that happen? I won’t again. I’ve stopped despising my children for what they are. My daughter is a drug addict. I’ll try to help. My son is a religious fanatic. So what? I’ve stopped hating them for the things that make them different from me.

The pressure changes in the cabin and I know we will soon be coming in to land. I make my way to the toilet at the front of the cabin, and in there I bolt the door behind me and I let myself cry.

I’ve got my family back. Not in the way I might have idealised, but they are there. Phil has a long way to go to work out his redemption, but at least now he will allow me to be with him in the enterprise. Charlie too has a lot of work of a different kind, and I have the feeling that she will or will not work out her salvation regardless of what I do. But – and it’s an important but – she’s still wearing Mick’s amulet. Seeing that amulet gives me the optimism I need.

I return to my seat and the safety-belt sign comes on before the plane makes its approach to Heathrow. The cabin lights go down and the air pressure changes again, and the plane begins its descent towards our uncertain future. I gently wake Charlie and get her to put her belt on. It’s not until touchdown, with the reverse thrust roaring and the unbuckling of passenger belts clicking over the cabin, that Mick turns to look at me from his seat in front.

He tips