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

‘You got what you want!’ she said, her voice shrill. ‘Now you go!’

‘And if he doesn’t come,’ Mick said, ‘we’ll be back here tomorrow.’

‘And I get the police.’

‘You do that,’ Mick said, puce in the face. ‘And I’ll give ’em five hundred dollars and they’ll kick your fat arse all the way to Bangkok. I know how this country works.’

I steered him towards the door. ‘That’s enough. Let’s go. I really do need a glass of water.’

‘Water,’ said Phil. ‘Water is good.’

But there are more things in life to lose than just ‘face’. I knew a man who had lost a daughter when she was only seven. She’d contracted a rare form of leukaemia and he had to watch her perish.

You have two incontrovertible wishes when you are a parent. One is that you will die before they do, because it is terrible ill luck to have to bury one of your own children. The second is that you in turn will live long enough to see them grow to a ripe age. In the years when Charlie became ‘lost’ to me, even though I knew she was still alive and just not speaking to me, my mind often turned to this poor man whose little girl had died.

You see, he never got over it. There is no getting over it. The world for him after that was a changed place. He once said to me it was as if somehow overnight two or three of the colours of the visible spectrum had been withdrawn. The sense of loss shot through everything. Before this happened to him, he was a rather arrogant man, always treating everyone to his views on this or that subject; but, and beyond all his deserts, he was so humbled by nature through this event that he even seemed to discard his opinions.

Back at the hotel the afternoon following our shouting match in the British Consulate, Phil intuited what was in the back of my mind. ‘I think it’s time we asked God to help us, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Come into my room, where it’s quiet.’

I remember shaking my head at him, minimally, the way you shake your head when someone offers you a cigarette of inferior brand. I don’t believe in God, you see, so I had to stop this tiny voice inside myself from doing what Phil wanted, which was praying that Charlie was still alive.

I retreated to the shaded side of the swimming pool. There I found an English-language daily newspaper called the Bangkok Post, and in it I read a story which left a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the day. It was a case of drug smuggling. A mother with a baby in her arms had been arrested trying to leave Thailand. Her baby was dead. It had been dried, eviscerated and stuffed with high-grade heroin.

When some of the heat had burned off the day, I decided to visit a very old Buddhist temple we’d passed that morning. To be honest I thought it was a way of finding a few moments of quiet reflection on my own. I made all kinds of tactful remarks to Mick and Phil, that they needn’t baby-sit me, that maybe they had things of their own to see, but they stuck to me like shit on a baby’s blanket.

The temple was an oasis in the madness. The pagoda roof sweated and glittered like spun gold in the haze of the evening sun. Mick got his camera out to photograph the carved dragons at the entrance. He and I were about to take off our shoes to go into the shady interior – not Phil, he wasn’t going to smudge himself in the proximity of heathen idols – when we were distracted by a small movement a little way off. It was an elderly Buddhist monk in saffron robes, squatting under a bo tree. No, he wasn’t meditating: he was enjoying a cigarette.

Mick snorted. ‘A monk having a fag!’ he said. ‘That says it all!’

‘Not very spiritual,’ Phil agreed sniffily.

The ‘all’ that this scene spoke to Mick eluded me, but he approached the monk waving his camera. The monk was quite happy to be snapped. Then Mick sat down beside the monk and produced his own pack of ciggies. I took the opportunity to slip off my shoes and dart inside the temple. ‘Coming inside?’ I asked Phil.

He hung back. ‘No, I think I’ll take a stroll.’

I’d given him my permission to change out of his heavy serge trousers and his starched white shirt, but he was committed to sweating it out. ‘But it will be cool inside.’

‘No, I’ll not come in.’

Something about the expression on Phil’s face took me by surprise. His thumb stroked the leather cover of his scriptures, a nervous, smoothing tic I’d noticed before. I suddenly realised how he filtered all of this: the drugs, the prison, the prostitution, the heathen temples. We were in a trough, a hollow of deep sinfulness, treading a path of spiritual danger where even the beautiful old pagoda temple was an emblem of menace. Where I saw only a lacquered dragon, he saw a house of graven images; where I could smell only incense, he sniffed the breath of the serpent. The dragon within the temple rolled its lascivious tongue, waiting to lick him with all the poison impiety of a heathenish faith.

He waved his Bible at me in a parting gesture and hurried out of the temple grounds, as if afraid I might try to persuade him further. Letting him go, I stepped inside the temple.

It was indeed cooler within, but bright, not dark like a Western place of worship. The interior was painted red, like a lacquered box. A few tiny candle flames flickered at the foot of an immense brass Buddha, reflecting mildly on his polished breast, cheek and forehead. I sat down on the creaking, varnished teak floor.

The Buddha’s huge painted eyes