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

Secondly, make yourself useful; seductive and addictive to the planet’s dominant species, who will then do all the heavy spade-work, planting you, cultivating you, exporting you, taking risks for you, even fighting each other for you. Gradually you increase your control around the world. Get it? You’ve got time. You can wait. This is easy.’

He drew back, removing his hand, allowing me to appreciate the full import of what he’d said. I stared into his eyes. It was the most breathtaking load of cobblers I’d ever heard. ‘Cack,’ I said. ‘You’re talking cack.’

He turned my words over in his mind, squinted in savour of the rich insight they afforded, weighed them carefully. ‘That reaction,’ he said, ‘is part of it.’

We stared at each other for a moment, and without another word he shook my hand and turned. Then he was a silhouette, with the wind flapping at his hair and at the hem of his long hippy coat. I watched him go before spinning on my heels and setting off in the opposite direction. I turned up my collar and, weaving slightly, made my way home along a street of terraced houses.

There was a breeze at my back. I heard light footsteps behind me, but when I turned there was nothing there. At some distance further on I heard what I took to be a dog trotting behind me, or maybe it was just some litter blown along the pavement. I turned again, but to an empty street. So certain was I that someone was behind me I spent a minute or two looking up and down the lamplit street, into the stiff breeze. The wind moaned softly in an unlit alley between the terraces. I spent a moment peering into the shadows there.

Decker’s ramblings had me spooked.

I was not looking forward to the trip to Thailand. I don’t take to the heat. In the past I’ve spent a few grudging holidays in Spain with Sheila and the children, always retreating like a dog to the shade. Neither am I very keen on foreign food. I have an adverse reaction to spicy concoctions. A mild curry at the local Taj Mahal restaurant brings sweat blisters the size of commemorative coins to my brow: and I happen to know that a balti chicken jalfrezi is no more an example of Indian cuisine than is a plate of jellied eels.

Even trying to read the Frenchman Baudelaire was making me feel slightly queasy. For some reason, even though the poems were in English, the translators were always too lazy to translate the titles. Ridiculous, since the titles are always easy to translate. Les Fleurs du Mal for example means ‘Evil Flowers’. Un Voyage à Cythere means ‘A Voyage to Cythere’. I know that much and I don’t even speak French. So why do they make a big deal of not translating the title? It’s because it’s poetry, isn’t it? Anything else and you would get your title thrown in with the price of the other translations.

Baudelaire took lots of opium as far as I could gather, and hashish too, and what I read was much more useful than the Keats or the Coleridge. Baudelaire talked about the similarities and differences between opium and hashish. This was more the sort of thing I’d been looking for. Both of them, he says, make you weak-willed, and both make you focus your attention on trivial and tiny details in such a way that you get fixed. But he also said that hashish is much more disturbing and intense than opium. This surprised me, because I thought that hashish was the drug of choice for these hippy types. Hashish, Baudelaire said, is a confusing fury, whereas opium is a gentle seducer.

I could see that. I could see Charlie going for the gentle seducer. I thought of Charlie being seduced along with other young girls fresh out of university, the dew still on ’em. When I felt that watery prickling again behind the eyes, I had to put down the book and uncap a bottle of whisky, evaporate the excess fluid with the heat of the grain.

I ran myself a bath, and while it was filling I warmed some milk on the stove for a hot chocolate drink, to try to sober up. I thought I’d give that deadbeat Baudelaire one last chance; and though the words wouldn’t keep still on the page it was while soaking in the tub that I read:

What sad, black isle is that? It’s Cythera, so they say, a land celebrated in song, the banal Eldorado of all the old fools. Look, after all, it’s a land of poverty.

Dozing slightly, I let the book slip into the water and had to retrieve it from under the soap suds. I fanned it out and spread it over the taps to dry, and fell to thinking about Charlie again, and what sad, black Cythera she’d got mixed up in.

9

I was expecting Lucy to return at around midnight. In the event she didn’t get back until nearer one a.m., though I didn’t mind in the slightest. Even so, the baby-sitting session had been something of a disappointment.

When I’d arrived at eight o’clock in the evening, Jonquil – it’s not for me to make remarks on the names parents inflict on their children – was already tucked up in bed and fast asleep. I spent most of the evening flicking between the numerous channels on Lucy’s TV set and not finding anything to entertain. It depressed me to think of the millions of people glued to this poor fare night after night. I started to have ridiculous thoughts about how the bright lights from the screen might be triggering signals in their brains, like opium does, to get them to tune in again and again, pointlessly and destructively.

I made four or five visits upstairs ostensibly to check on Jonquil, but really to look at her sleeping in her cot. I’m ashamed to say I