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

return without conditions. But it seems that’s too much. So what he hopes for is that his children will grow up to do the things he likes doing and to like the things he likes. But why should they? So he can’t have that either. Also too much to ask for. So what he then hopes is that his children will at least grow up to speak in the same voice as his, so that they might talk together and not be divided in his own hearth.’

I could hear myself ranting, but I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t speaking the words; the words were somehow speaking me. They ripped from my mouth with an ugly sound, like the tearing of cloth. Something was breaking up inside me. ‘But why is it I can’t even have that? Why is it my children talk in voices I don’t understand? Where are my children behind these strange languages? Who gave them these shrill, incomprehensible accents?’

Something in me had hardened, crystallised, and not against Charlie, but against her position. As for the opium, I’d seen how good it was, how damnably selfishly good. I liked it. It was all about me and nobody else. It was about my insignificant little cry, my pathetic bleat against the uproar of life, and my little bleat, so it seemed to me, was as important as hers or anyone else’s. I could see how luxurious it was to sink into a magnificent selfishness like that, one which had no bottom, and through which you could go on falling and falling and falling. You could be asked to undertake the rewiring of hell and it would seem like nice work.

‘Yes, all along, it was me. I somehow terrorised my own son and daughter into putting on masks and affecting voices so that they wouldn’t have to talk to me. And you know something? I don’t even know how I did it.’

‘Stop it, Dad,’ Charlie said.

‘Why, Charlie? For two years you haven’t had the basic courtesy to phone us at home, if only to say you were all right!’

‘That’s not true. I spoke with Mum regularly before I came out here.’

‘What?’

‘Yes. You just didn’t know about it.’

‘What?’ I was stunned.

‘I told her I’d stop calling her if she told you. It seems hateful now. But I was so angry with you.’

This piece of information tilted the world ninety degrees. I had absolutely nothing to say. It meant that Charlie and Sheila had made a pact to keep in contact but to exclude me. To keep me in darkness for nearly two years. I looked at Phil, and I heard my voice fracturing as I said, ‘Did you know about this?’

I saw him swallow. He nodded. He tapped his fingertips together, trying to frame a response. It was Charlie who reached out a hand to my shoulder. ‘Don’t! Don’t touch me!’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to touch me!’

Coconut’s machete protruded from under my sleeping bag. I picked it up. ‘You know what it feels like to hear this? I’ll tell you. It feels like this.’ I closed my left hand over the blade and dragged the razor-edged knife sharply downwards. The palm of my hand opened up in a grisly, bubbling incision. Then I ran from the hut before they could see my face, in which loss, in which perdition was complete.

‘Dad!’ Charlie shouted.

I ignored her. She came after me.

‘Dad! Come back!’

I turned. She stood on the porch, pointing at me.

‘Dad. Please.’

The pain in my hand seared. I had to close my fist to stop the blood flowing on to the red earth. But as I stood there, bleeding, I realised something that instantly took away the pain. ‘Charlie. You’ve stepped over the threshold.’

She hugged herself, and looked up at the sky in dread. Then she looked back at me. Her mouth formed an O. ‘Yes.’

We just looked, giving each other galaxies of space, and when she finally stepped back inside, I followed her. There she instantly took my hand, putting the wound to her mouth. ‘Charlie,’ I said. ‘You broke through.’

‘I’ll do it, Dad.’ she said. ‘Tonight. I’ll do it for you.’

‘Charlie. Come here. My heart.’ I held her. ‘And you, Phil.’ He came to me, and I put my bloody hand on his shoulder. I was bleeding all over them. The three of us leaned together in an embrace of utter depletion, and my hand pumped with pain.

I heard Mick suck his teeth.

Later, with a bandaged hand, I walked up to the poppy fields. Some of the villagers stopped work to regard me strangely. I was trying to get things straight in my mind. I couldn’t determine whether I’d actually gone there in my drug-induced condition or whether I’d pipe dreamed the whole thing. I looked for a likely spot where I might have sat down with the Lord of the Poppy, casting about in the red dirt for scientific evidence of that absurd encounter. What’s more, the memory of it was like a mosaic with stones missing or crumbling even as I tried to piece it together.

On my return I found Mick standing by the radio in the centre of the village, and in earnest conversation with Phoo. Mick beckoned me over. Jack’s henchman looked shifty, nervous. ‘Tonight,’ Mick said, ‘Charlie is going to make that walk.’

‘Oh yes?’ I doubted it, somehow.

‘Too right she is. And during the commotion this boy is going to get us back on the road to Chiang Mai. Isn’t that right, Phoo? Chiang Mai?’ Mick flashed his wallet.

Phoo didn’t seem persuaded. ‘I no so sure.’

‘Let’s step in the hut,’ I suggested.

The three of us went inside the generator hut, where the useless Calpol was still piled high in cartons. We squatted. Mick took a huge wad of dollars from his moneybelt and unrolled it. ‘This now,’ he said, peeling off a few banknotes. ‘And all this later.’

‘Oooooooh. Ooooooooooh.’ Phoo shook his head. ‘No so sure. Jack find out, he kill me for