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

Her arm was swollen with the new tattoo, her fingers twitching over it, though Khiem had slapped her hand, told her not to touch it. Nabao stoked a pipe for her, to which I turned a blind eye. The idea, and this was directed by Khiem, was for me to take an identical tattoo. I’d been made to understand that this would draw some of the bad spirits out of Charlie and on to me.

Right.

Jack seemed to have appointed a new lieutenant, one who went by the name of Phoo. One of the new poppy-spangled bandits, he wore an impressive bullet belt round his waist. Phoo spoke English, after an extraordinary fashion. I don’t know why he was there at the tattooing exactly, other than that he seemed fascinated both by us and Khiem’s enterprise.

‘He fuck-good medicine, Khiem, yep,’ said Phoo enthusiastically. He had a beautiful, toothless, wide-mouthed smile and spectacular wrinkles around his eyes. Aged somewhere between twenty-five and sixty-five, Phoo was a chatterbox, very different from his predecessor in Jack’s private army. It occurred to me that killers come in many different shapes and sizes. ‘Khiem cure me snake-bite onetime. Fuck-good. Me dead. Oooooo! Him cure me jungle-medicine, fuck-good, tee-hee-hee! He cure Charlie fuck-good.’

Phoo had ‘explained’ Khiem’s desire for Charlie and I to take this tattoo. ‘Him say you father carry spirit for she. You carry spirit for she? Oooooo! Take mark. Tee-hee-hee! Him say you take tattoo hep you find way to she world.’ Phoo was an enthusiastic translator, nodding vigorously, smiling radiantly.

I’d never had a tattoo. Most of the blokes I knew, like Mick, had taken them on while teenagers and now felt pretty sheepish about it. I know it’s in vogue: Charlie already had one on her shoulder. These university-educated middle-class kids sporting Celtic knots and fortune-cookie Chinese mottoes. Soppy Oxford brats frantic to look like they’ve been round the corner, taken a scratch. I thought it was a brainless thing when I was a youth, and now I just find it depressing. But Khiem’s intentions were serious, and I had to go along with it.

‘At least,’ I said to Charlie when she was preparing to take hers, ‘you’ll have earned this one.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said sharply.

‘You kids. You’re desperate. You wear tattoos as a badge of experience. Only you don’t have any experience.’

Charlie looked hard at me with those chromium and blue eyes. ‘You don’t give an inch, do you, Dad? Why is it so important for you to keep us knee-high? Huh? Why?’

I failed to answer, and I must say I was a little shocked when Khiem produced from his tool-kit his poppy-head incisor as his tattooing implement. He laid it out before us and mushed up some jungle plant to make an indigo-coloured dye. A lot of ritual went with it. Still more pots of incense were lighted: the stuff was beginning to give me a headache. Khiem held his poppy incisor up to the sun and with half-closed eyes muttered an incantation.

I looked at Mick and was about to say something when Phoo stopped me with a gesture. The smile had gone from his face. ‘Don’t say him fuck. Don’t say him joke. No for any part you. Onetime chance you say free to him go.’

I didn’t understand this, but I felt suitably reprimanded.

So Charlie had gone first, sitting inside the door. Just as she refused to come out, Khiem was adamant about not going in, so it was performed on the threshold. Khiem produced another jungle herb from his bag, crushing it to rub it on her skin. Some kind of anaesthetic, it didn’t stop Charlie from wincing when the first, aggressive, deep puncture was made.

‘You OK?’

‘Do you see me crying?’

‘Hey!’ I said. I was getting fed up with this. ‘What made you such a bloody hard case?’

‘Don’t worry, Dad. You’ve got it coming.’

And it did hurt. Of course it hurt; progressively less with each triple puncture, though I noticed that Khiem scraped up some other dark substance from among his gear before dipping the poppy incisor into the dye. I suspected it was opium, and that this was dulling the pain in my arm with each successive puncture, in which case I was slightly compromised.

Knee-high? Is that what I did? Try to keep them knee-high? Charlie’s words made me think again about the day I hit Phil. Not a slap or a prod or a push, but a stiff punch to the side of his jaw with a closed fist, and so hard that it knocked him off his feet. And not because he’d chopped up some book, either, but because I’d had a furious row with Sheila.

Sheila had said how the kids were taking up less of her time and how she wanted to go out to work, and though I’m ashamed to say this now, I said no. No, no, no. Charlie at that time was into everything, dance classes, drama groups, sleep-overs with friends, and she seemed to need us less and less. Phil too. He was twelve and had just discovered masturbating. I know this because I found two or three cunt magazines under his bed. And here was Sheila telling me she wasn’t dependent on me any more either. We’d had a blue-blazing row. And then this episode with Phil. Why did he get punched in the mouth?

Because of the cunt books, probably.

Not because I’m a prude. It’s only pictures. And what are pictures? And what if pages were wings? No, not because I disapproved, but because I hated their youth. Hated it. Because their youth meant that it was flowing away from me. All going. My little tribe. My tin-pot empire. Flowing away.

Oh Phil, I’m sorry for that wild punch. It swings back at me every day. How could you know what a child your father was?

And by Christ, Khiem’s tattoo did sting.

During the application of the tattoo, Phoo chatted away quite happily, and we learned some interesting things about