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

thumped about a bit and let the door bang a couple of times, in the hope that she might wake, and cry, so that I might have an excuse to pick her up, comfort her, change her nappy, carry her downstairs with me. Ironic really. When Charlie and Phil were babies we used to tiptoe round them, praying that they sleep on for another half an hour so that you might get something done. Then of course the softest muffled footfall on a deep-pile carpet would resound like a pistol shot to bump them out of sleep.

‘Jonquil’s got a bit of a cold,’ Lucy had told me. ‘If she wakes up you can give her some Calpol. I’ve left it on the cupboard in the hall.’

Calpol, the paediatric all-purpose medicine. Baby-dope. When Charlie and Phil were babies themselves we got through gallons of the stuff whenever they were poorly and couldn’t sleep. Now as I looked at Jonquil, deliberately working a squeaky floorboard with my right foot, she slept on like the dead. Jonquil had a tiny green candle of dried snot under her nose. It reminded me of Charlie’s perpetually streaming nose. It also brought back the time when Charlie returned from her first term at Oxford.

‘Don’t say anything,’ Sheila had whispered to me when I came back from work that day, dumping my gear under the coats in the hall. ‘She’s got a stud in her nose.’

‘A what?’

Sheila tapped the side of her own nose. ‘A little emerald stud just here. I think it looks quite pretty. Don’t say anything.’

I moved through to the sitting room, where Charlie lounged on the sofa, watching TV. ‘Hi, Dad.’

I didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the tiny green stud in her left nostril. It had me mesmerised. After a while Charlie seemed to become aware of my staring. She flashed a smile at me before turning back to the TV set. ‘You OK?’

‘I’m OK,’ I said.

Maybe I shouldn’t have allowed myself to stare like that. But that nose stud, to me it looked for all the world like a tiny ball of snot. There it is. You spend the first five years of your child’s life wiping gunk from their noses, until they develop the competence to deal with their own streaming hooters. During that five years it becomes a reflex. Then the next decade or so passes in the blink of an eye, and your snot-nosed little girl comes home from the celebrated Oxford with an emerald stud. Well, you want to scrape it off. I know how unreasonable that sounds, but for a moment that’s how I felt.

‘What are you staring at, Dad?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How’s work?’

‘Fine. How’s yours?’

I knew she’d been studying a course called ‘Post-colonial Literature’. She gave a dismissive shake of her head, the sort that suggests there’s no point going into it with an electrician. ‘I brought a stack of work home with me.’

‘How’s post-colonial literature?’

‘Cool.’

Cool? We used to laugh at people who said things like cool. It belonged to an outmoded and faintly ridiculous generation of people who said groovy and dad-io and far-out man! I hadn’t heard it said in a while.

Maybe it wasn’t a very cool thing to do but I reached out and tried to flick the stud in her nose. Did I think it would fall off into my hand? It didn’t.

‘Ow! OW! What the HELL are you doing, Dad? Just what the hell?’

Sheila came rushing in from the kitchen.

‘He tried to rip the stud out of my nose!’ Charlie exaggerated, nursing her admittedly now inflamed nostril.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Sheila demanded of me.

‘Yeah,’ Charlie joined in. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’

I didn’t say anything. I went and ran a bath, locking the bathroom door against the pair of them.

The sight of Jonquil, red-cheeked, cherubic and superbly snot-nosed, summoned this back to me. To my delight she eventually did wake up and I was very happy to reassure her and to give her a small dose of the trusty Calpol. A sound, sticky, red, gooey, medicated, measured dose. I felt useful and wanted. It was what I was after, and Jonquil went straight back to sleep. Oh, that Calpol.

I was still thinking about the business of Charlie’s nose stud when Lucy returned, date in tow. When she introduced us, it made my thoughts about Charlie’s stud shrink to insignificance. This joker had several gold rings through his ears, a couple of hoops in his nostril and one more ring weighting his lower lip. In addition to that the sides of his head were shaved and the hair on his crown was dressed like a topiary fowl in a hedge of yew.

‘This is Mark,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ll make some coffee.’

The greater-crested Mark shook my hand limply. I had to suppress a smile what with all these fireworks going off in his face. ‘Nice to meet you, Mark.’ Then I followed Lucy through to the kitchen and told her not to bother on my account, and that I’d be on my way. I didn’t want to be a gooseberry.

‘Stay for coffee,’ she answered, but through gritted teeth, thrusting an empty mug into my hand. I stood there while the kettle boiled. Lucy put a spoonful of instant coffee granules into my mug, topped it with boiling water. ‘Milk?’

We returned to the sitting room together. Mark, feet up, had made himself comfortable on the sofa, but, seeing me returning with a mug of coffee for myself after all, put his feet back on the floor and chewed his bottom lip. The TV was still running, and a late-night political debate droned softly in the background. Lucy launched into an account of their evening. Mark grunted every now and again in agreement but kept an eye on the TV. Every time I looked at him I had that Christmas song going round in my head: five gold rings and a partridge in a pear tree. He stole a