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

sat. The stiff old leather of my chair creaked noisily.

‘Well,’ Phil said. ‘Here we are.’

You couldn’t fault his logic. There we were. In his freezing house, with me already wondering why I’d bothered. ‘Aren’t you going to offer me a drink of something?’ I said rather sharply. ‘It’s basic hospitality you know. Basic good manners. To offer a cup of tea or something. Surely you haven’t forgotten that, have you?’

‘Sorry, Father,’ Phil said, jumping up. Why couldn’t he call me ‘Dad’? ‘There is tea, but no milk. Shall I go out and get some?’

‘I’ll take it without milk,’ I said. I didn’t want the damned tea, I just wanted him to behave like a decent human being. He went out to the kitchen to put the kettle on, and I followed him.

Phil was a laboratory technician. He’d had the same job since leaving university, and was currently supervising some research into samples of skin taken from people’s bottoms, or so he told me. Three years older than Charlie, Phil had studied biology at Durham University, and it was while he was working with biotoxins that he’d contracted Christian Fundamentalism. I don’t know how a scientist can claim to believe that every word of the Bible is true, but we had exhausted that argument years back. Phil, in his uniform of white shirt, black trousers shiny at the knee, and black patent-leather shoes, had his back to me as the kettle boiled. As I looked at him I thought of the two, Charlie on opium and Phil on fundamentalism, and God help me I wasn’t certain which was the worst.

He made the tea in two mugs, and from a single teabag, squeezing the teabag against the side of my mug with a spoon. I snatched up another teabag and dropped it into the cup. ‘I want to be able to taste it,’ I said. He wrung his hands at this extravagance and looked away.

Back in the lounge under the louring cross I told him what had happened to his sister. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, hunched over, his ear slightly inclined: look how I listen. When I’d told him the details, he steepled his fingers under his nose and nodded sagaciously. I waited some moments before he said, very slowly, ‘She’s in an exceedingly dark place.’

‘You can say that again.’

He leaned back in his chair and began to sum up what I’d just said, like a judge at the end of a case in the Crown Court. ‘There’s Charlie, she’s tempted into drugs by some person, she thinks it’s an easy pleasure; she gets deeper and deeper into this evil scene; she travels to a distant place, and probably needing money to support her insatiable habit, she allows herself to be talked into trafficking drugs; she is caught and spends her days languishing in prison.’

‘That’s what I’ve just told you.’

He gazed at me soulfully. ‘Yes.’

I looked at the oak cross over the mantelpiece and I thought about lifting it down and tapping him on the head with it. So what did I want from him? I suddenly realised why I was there. It was a desperate and futile effort to try to begin to regroup my fractured family.

‘And you’re going over to Thailand to see her?’

Then I heard him apologising. About how much his time was taken up with the church (of which he was an ‘Elder’ at age twenty-five). About how many people depended on him being there for them. About how his house was a central venue for what he called ‘praising the Lord’. About how even if he could get the time off work—

‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Stop. Of all the people on this earth who I’d find it useful to have with me on a trip through steamy Asia, you’re last on the list, Sunny Jim.’

He managed to look relieved and insulted at the same time. Then he floated a finger towards the ceiling. ‘Let’s at least do something practical,’ he said. ‘Let’s pray for Charlotte.’

He put his hands together, closed his eyes, lowered his head and said, ‘O Lord—’

He didn’t get any further because I said, ‘Fuck off, Phil. This is your father you’re talking to. Your father. Not one of those emotional cripples down the evangelist’s revival. All right?’

His face flushed red. ‘Look,’ I said, more softly this time. ‘Look, I came here to put you in the picture. I don’t want anything from you. I don’t want you to fly out to Asia with me. I don’t want you to leave your church and come searching for your sister. I don’t even want your prayers. I just thought you might want to know what’s happening in your family right now.’ The admonishment was creeping back into what I was saying. ‘I thought you might want to know.’

‘Of course I want to know,’ he said. ‘I do care for you all.’

‘That’s a relief, Phil.’ But irony had a habit of bouncing off his valiant armour.

I felt tired and I felt small and I was ready to go. Phil was too far away from me to be of any help. He was camped out in the sight of the Lord, and his family, calling from the material plane, were a messy, earth-bound embarrassment. I stood up and announced that I was leaving. I offered him a handshake, this boy who used to hug me up until he was aged twelve.

‘But you haven’t even touched your tea!’ he protested.

‘No.’

‘What a waste,’ he opined sadly. ‘What a waste.’

5

On the following Tuesday Mick Williams insisted on dropping by my apartment before the quiz. The underside of the door scraped on some unopened envelopes as he squeezed his burly frame into my tiny apartment. He carried two plastic bags stuffed with over-ripe bananas, splitting melons, pulpy avocados and misshapen kiwi fruit. He looked around, sniffing. ‘Christ.’

Perhaps Mick, a chronically ingrained bachelor, had got his own life a little better organised than mine currently appeared