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

Let it in. Give it out.

Swish. The leathery hand turned the leaf.

Who was harvesting this human stuff? Was there a place where they could sell the love amalgam, a city where the rats run free? I had a smuggling plan. Get everyone hooked on this. Weeping. Bleeding. Hardening overnight on the bed pillows. Fairy bandits decked in poppy hoods scraping it from the sheets. Get the Western world on this stuff. Give it a name.

Love. I loved Sheila. Charlie. Phil. Let it in. You experience it. You cry. You laugh. Give it out. You take it in, you give it out. Drugs. Alcohol. Religion. Sex. When you get older you don’t cry quite so much. All music, all singing is a kind of weeping. Orgasm too, a kind of crying. Spilling, splitting, seeping, oozing seed, giving. Love lies weeping.

‘Don’t cry Dad, don’t cry!’ It was Charlie. She was unlocking my fingers from around a pipe. A leaf turned somewhere. Swish. ‘Please don’t cry! I can’t stand to see you cry!’

‘Am I crying?’ I didn’t think I was. I certainly didn’t feel sad. Not at all. The fact is, I didn’t care about any of this. I saw it all, flowing like a pearl-green river under an indifferent diffuse yellow sun, and I didn’t care. If I had to cry it was only like the poppy, because I was incised, and I was yielding. It was my time.

I remembered when Charlie was a little girl, and when she used to cry about small things, as children do, and sometimes I would respond by teasing her with a terrible affected boo-hooing of my own. Perhaps not a very effective way of responding, but this would often bring her round. The spectacle of her father pretending to blub was usually worse than whatever had prompted her own bout of sobbing. I suspected that what I was doing now was something of the same pattern. And yet somehow I’d moved beyond being troubled by either Charlie’s or my own distress.

The truth is I’d even allowed to get myself side-tracked. I didn’t care any more about why I was smoking these hilarious opium pipes. I mean, I knew it had to do with Charlie and what I was after, but that all got pushed aside. What’s more there were other people in the hut, lots of people, and I didn’t like the look of all of them. Some of these people were half centipede. One was feeding from Charlie’s foot. I smote it with a thought. I was able to chop the centipede in half simply by the power of thought. It shrieked and it bled and it withered, and I giggled, and the giggle made me cough.

Mick was patting my back, until the coughing fit subsided. ‘Enough,’ he whispered. ‘That’s enough.’

I wasn’t having that. I reached for another pipe. Nabao’s eyes were sugary black reservoirs.

Her hand turned another leaf.

Charlie was speaking to me but instead of hearing her I could actually see the words pouring out of her mouth, densely scripted, spiralling in the air. I tried to read these airborne, winging words but I couldn’t get them to add up: ‘Porlock’s poorlot postmen pertaining principally prior to poppy poppa pappa pipped piqued punishing paternally pisstaking and puppeteering podsqueezing papaver …’

Phil too was at it. His words came thrumming out in gothic script, like a cloud of insects swarming the hut, and making no more sense than Charlie’s. ‘Thou shalt therefore being of the Father that thou shalt with His only son and thou shalt get thee into the land of Moriah and God will Himself provide a lamb and behold thou hast not withheld thine only son …’

The sultry, sticky, smoky air became a dense, burning thicket of words, consuming itself.

The hand turned the leaf.

I asked if anyone was counting. I was back in the poppy field, and the Lord of the Poppy said to me, ‘Oh, we never stop counting.’

He looked only a little like Khiem, although he was sensationally tall and thin, maybe eight feet tall, and he was dressed in a tunic and a cape stitched with massive red, mauve and white poppy flowers tough as canvas. His treacle-brown pod of a face was a mass of warts. The reek of opium overwhelmed me. He seemed to have dozens of toes on each foot, all of which were half buried in the cracked, dry earth.

I was distracted by a movement at the top of the hill. It was Phil. He was running, running through the poppies, roaring, tearing off his shirt as he ran. I seemed to see this in slow motion as he went by. Then he disappeared over the other side of the hill.

I felt embarrassed by my son’s behaviour. The Lord of the Poppy looked at me as if I should say something. I didn’t know what to say so I asked, ‘Have you had a good year?’ It felt a bit stupid, but it was all I could think of.

This made him laugh. ‘The idea!’ he said. It made me laugh too. We chuckled long and loud at that, the Lord of the Poppy and I.

My new tattoo seemed to pulse and glow. I felt quite proud of it.

‘Can I have her back?’ I asked him. ‘You know, I love her very much.’

‘Sometimes that helps and sometimes it doesn’t. But I will ask my sister.’

‘Your sister?’

He floated a warty, pod-like finger at the sky. ‘The moon.’

‘Of course. Take me in return for Charlie,’ I suggested cordially.

‘Sorry.’ He turned to me and I noticed that his eyes were mirror-bright milky cascades. ‘You’re not quite up to the mark.’ It was then that I noticed he was weeping. Tears of milky but resinous sap tracked his leathery face. It was a shocking sight, this weeping of the guilty poppy. I sensed he was embarrassed by my seeing him this way. I was about to ask what he meant by saying that I