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

to be. Bruiser though he was, he did enjoy the niceties; a fusspot trying to pass himself off as a slob, he made no disguise of his assessment of my living conditions. I suppose it didn’t look too good. I’d laid down a carpet, and Sheila had put up those pesky curtains with a pelmet. Beyond that I hadn’t got very far. In fact I hadn’t even got a chair: if ever I felt the need to take the weight off my feet I lay on the bed.

Scattered around the floor were dozens and dozens of paperbacks (I’m a voracious reader of science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime or anything with a decent story: if it hasn’t got a good story I can’t be bothered). Those and a stack of silver foil takeaway cartons. And a fair few beer cans. And a couple of whisky bottles. And the odd empty bottle of Courvoisier. Sure, the place was a tip, but despite the fact that I hadn’t got a chair to sit on, Mick seemed more concerned that I hadn’t got a TV set. He was appalled.

‘No TV?’

‘No.’

‘Get out!’

‘Don’t want a telly, thanks.’

‘Ridiculous. I’ve a spare you can have. Twenty-two incher. Text. Remote. I’ll bring it round. Spare video, too. Have it.’

I told him not to bother, but he persisted. I don’t know what happened but my head filled up with blood. My ears reddened and my face became hot. I’m not a shouter, but I heard myself bellowing, in a voice not my own. Screaming even. ‘I don’t want a television! Don’t want! No fucking vision! Tele-fucking-vision! Fuckee-telly!’ It sounded odd even to my own ears, but I continued in this fashion until I noticed that Mick, rather than being alarmed or surprised by this outburst, was actually suppressing a smile. I felt completely ridiculous. ‘Sorry.’

‘You don’t have to have one,’ he said jauntily.

Then we had a long feather-smoothing conversation about what crap there was on the TV; or rather Mick detailed a comprehensive list of crap programmes. He named all the crap actors, the crap presenters and the crap game shows. After a while he made an observation about the extraordinary number of books in the room. ‘Are they any good?’ he asked.

There was a kind of rhythm to the conversation tempting me to say they were all crap, which I think was what he wanted. ‘Some of them.’

‘I can see why you’re so good at general knowledge.’

That was the sort of remark that infuriated me about Mick Williams. He had a mind that needed to shoe-horn every available bit of information into this or that space. I mean how would reading science fiction in general help my general knowledge in particular? He was referring to my strength on the quiz team. I was general knowledge; he was sport, TV and pop music; and Izzy Ballentine was literature, mythology and history. That’s how we got by.

Mick dumped his gift bags of unsold fruit and shuffled into the bedroom, where the flatpack chest of drawers lay in disassembly on the floor. Hunkering down, he picked up a drawer handle and began to poke about in a plastic bag full of tiny screws. Then he discarded those things and began sorting the variously sized rectangular blocks of Formica on chipboard.

Clearly he’d begun his programme of ‘helping’ me. I stood in the doorway watching sort of sourly, and after a couple of minutes he put everything back where he’d found it, suggesting we should get a move on if we wanted to be in good time for the quiz.

Izzy was there before us, well into her third large gin and tonic. She had a peculiar way, did Izzy, of holding her cigarettes exactly perpendicular between first and second finger, so that she would have to tilt her head to get her lips under the cigarette, sucking the smoke down before blowing it straight back up again, quite vertically like a locomotive from the steam age. This technique, presumably invented to spare her the ravages of nicotine staining, had failed. Her fingertips were a rather putrid oak colour, and the weft of her shabby garments was slightly shiny with the tiny increments of tar that only forty ciggies a day can deliver. I often speculated what her students made of her, and I wondered if Charlie had been taught by people like Izzy, but at the unsavoury Oxford University.

All brains and no sense type of people, I mean. Much as I liked Izzy, somewhere along the high road of life she’d stumbled not just off the map but also off the table on which the map lay spread.

‘So I’ll be bereft,’ she said, funnelling smoke directly at the ceiling as I tabled the drinks. I’d been at the bar while she and Mick filled in our quiz sheet. Our team was called the Punk Rockers; I forget why. ‘Abandoned, without a team while my boys go giddy in Chiang Mai.’

I shot Mick a poisonous look.

‘She’s got to know,’ he said aggressively. A moustache of creamy beer froth rested on his upper lip. ‘I haven’t said anything else.’

‘Anything else indeed,’ said Izzy. That was how she talked. ‘Anything else indeed.’

‘In fact,’ Mick volunteered, ‘you might as well tell her the rest. Izzy here is an educated woman. She might know one or two things about it.’

‘Indeed about what?’ She could make that what sound like an arrow whizzing past your ear and splitting the plaster of the wall behind you.

‘About why Dan and I are going to Thighland.’

‘Thailand,’ I corrected, ‘and who said anything about us going? Who said anything about me going, never mind you coming with me?’

‘I thought it was settled!’

‘Settled?’ I protested. ‘When did this get settled?’

We stared at each other across the table. Mick’s cheeks were flushed and his eyes were slightly moist, as they always were in an argument. Izzy meanwhile peered hard at me through her spectacles, making it plain that, whatever this might be about, she was on