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

wasn’t up to the mark: perhaps he was suggesting that somehow I was responsible for keeping Charlie here.

Not giving enough, in the way Charlie and Phil said I was not giving enough? Is that what he meant? I thought I’d been giving all my life. Fatherhood was like being the incised poppy. I took the incision every day like a man, and at first I was the dark loving juice to which they all returned. And then I was so afraid they might not return that I stopped the flow.

It’s hard, I wanted to explain to the Lord of the Poppy. So hard. They tumble into your hands, pink, wrinkled and vulnerable; like tiny shellfish from out of the roaring and infinite black sea, minute in your leathery grasp. And then before you can even smoke a pipe-length of life’s experiences they’ve outgrown you and climbed over your head; before you’ve even had time to explain to them the half of it.

And I wanted to explain the half of it, because I need to be needed.

But I never had the chance to put this important point to the Lord of the Poppy, for I was back in the hut. Phil in the corner on his knees, bare-chested now, praying. Mick surveying me with a baleful eye. And then Charlie was screaming and raining blows on my chest, blows to which I was almost oblivious. It seemed to happen at a distance, almost to someone else. Mick and Nabao pulled her away from me, yet all through this attack I remember talking, brightly and perceptively.

You see, I wanted to comfort her and tell her that just as we take the incision, so must we give out, and that she’d been right and I’d been stupid. There had been a day, oh, long before her departure for university, when I’d realised my children were beyond me, and I had indeed foreclosed on them. It was self-protection. I thought I couldn’t go on bleeding like that for my children. I wanted to explain to her that I thought I’d found a way to hover serenely above the uproar of life. I’d thought to control my love by withholding it and rationing it.

But now everything’s in order, I wanted to explain to her. Now I understand. We take it in, we give it out. I’d had to come all the way out here to be incised all over again. But I couldn’t get through to her; my lips mashed on the words and I couldn’t communicate the richness of this thought. I watched her hysterical sobbing as if she were a child crying over something quite unimportant, and I accepted another pipe.

Swish.

The leathery hand turned the leaf.

36

I slept after my opium marathon; or to be more accurate my opium session concluded with a sleep. I woke up the following morning with Charlie exercising a damp cloth around my face and neck. I was sticky with perspiration. I blinked at her. Though my head was something like straight again, my field of vision was still rich with residual opium disturbance. Soft contours were bleeding colour; sharp edges cast shadows. Charlie clamped her lips hard and refused to meet my eyes. That crease above the ridge of her nose was getting deeper.

‘The bastard’s awake,’ she called.

Mick was just outside the hut. He came in. ‘Back in the land of the living,’ he said. It was the sort of remark I’d expect him to make if we’d had eight or nine pints of Jubilee Ale down at the Clipper.

Other than the visual strangeness I had no hangover to speak of, at least not as with alcohol; though I did feel as though my insides had been pulled about a bit and, as I say, my eyes were still trailing something of the opium in me. My throat was very sore. ‘Water, please.’

Charlie folded her arms as if to say get it yourself, but Mick brought me some water. I sipped it and then I had to get up because my bladder was bursting. Before I went out Charlie said, ‘Well, did that change a single damned thing for anyone?’

I stopped. ‘Yes. It changed quite a lot, actually.’

Charlie and Phil glowered, waiting for more. I gestured to Mick that he should come outside.

He followed me into the out-house. ‘I don’t know what you were trying to prove, Danny,’ he said as I relieved myself. ‘But we’re no further on.’

‘No, we’re a lot further on.’ I could recall most of what transpired with absolute clarity, except that I was confused about what was actually event and what was opium-induced imagination which only felt like event. ‘Mick, tell me what you saw.’

He scratched his head. ‘You were babbling. Charlie couldn’t stand to see you getting further and further out of your head. I watched her. At first she made out she didn’t care, but it was eating her up. Phil, too; he was off his head just watching you. He followed you outside. I went to the poppy fields to get you but I ended up bringing him back instead. Then Nabao started to get agitated, thought you’d had enough. Looking at me, like. You wanted another pipe but I told Nabao to take it away. You were vomiting. You were hell-bent, Danny. Hell-bent.’

Vomiting? I didn’t remember that. I had a sudden flash of Phil running through the poppy field, dragging off his shirt.

‘How many pipes did I have?’

‘Look for yourself.’

Back inside, Nabao’s banana leaf strips were lying on the mat. I counted them. Fifteen pipes of opium.

‘You could have killed yourself,’ Charlie said.

‘I quite liked it. Might do it again, tonight.’

‘Ha!’ went Phil.

‘No, Phil,’ Charlie said. ‘It doesn’t happen that quickly. He’s learned nothing from this.’

Her superiority riled me. ‘Oh I’ve learned plenty,’ I raged. ‘Plenty. Shall I tell you – you and Phil – shall I tell you what it is a father wants? To love his children without conditions and to be loved in