Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  Mick snatched up the diagram and studied it suspiciously. His nose twitched a couple of times as he turned the thing on its side, as if that would help. Izzy returned with the drinks. ‘What the devil’s that?’ she wanted to know, setting the drinks down on the table.

  ‘It’s an IQ test,’ Mick said.

  ‘Instructions for sticking bits of wood together,’ I told her.

  ‘Ghastly things. Too complicated,’ she said. This was a woman who taught Latin and classical Greek to children with iron rings through their noses and lips.

  ‘Made in Thailand,’ Mick observed, reading the small print at the foot of the diagram.

  ‘That’s funny,’ I said.

  ‘Why is that funny?’ But I didn’t have to tell them why it was funny because the quiz got underway again and there were other things to think about. Mick’s nostrils twitched. Though I pretended to study the answer sheet I could see him watching me. ‘I’m not falling for that,’ he snorted, before question number one got fired across the Clipper’s bows.

  I kept my head down.

  2

  The following day I called the Foreign Office on the number Sheila had given me, and asked to speak to a Mr Farquar-Thompson. It wasn’t very satisfactory, since I had to call from a customer’s house. I was rewiring a lady’s house – yes, I’m a sparks by trade – and since my cellphone bill had gone unpaid I asked for permission to use her phone. I offered to pay for the call but she refused, extracting an alternative payment by standing next to me and fingering the button at the neck of her blouse throughout the entire call.

  Farquar-Thompson had to get the file. At first he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Then when he returned he spoke about Charlotte’s case with surprising authority. I was trying to get as much information as I could without letting on to the lady standing next to me. All through the call I wanted to shout, ‘Where the fuck is Chiang Mai? When is the next flight?’

  ‘We can arrange visiting rights,’ Farquar-Thompson intoned, ‘and we can pass on supplies.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘She has a lawyer looking after her interests, but I have to tell you that the case looks cut and dried. She was caught in possession of a fairly large quantity of the stuff. A mule, I think is the expression. Or is it an ant? We put a lot of pressure on the Thai authorities to stamp out drug dealing, so they in turn like to come down heavily on drug traffickers, particularly Western ones.’

  ‘What’s she facing?’

  ‘As I said to your wife, she would be unlucky to be handed a death sentence, though I have to say we can’t rule it out. She may however get life, or twenty years.’

  The room tilted. Maybe Farquar-Thompson heard me gulp.

  ‘We’ve arranged a decent legal team, Mr Innes, and she is visited by embassy staff.’

  I could imagine. ‘How often?’

  ‘As frequently as we can possibly manage. You’ll let us know if you intend making the journey out there?’ He was tying up the call.

  ‘Yes, of course I’ll be going out there. Thank you. Thank you for your help.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Hands trembling, I put the receiver gently back on its cradle. The lady whose phone I’d been using informed me that, after a great deal of consideration, she wanted another double plug socket in her kitchen, just there, above the work-top, so that it would be handy for the liquidiser and the toaster.

  Charlotte, whom Farquar-Thompson told me was languishing in a Thai prison, was my only daughter. She was twenty-two at the time. I also had a son three years older, but fathers are more tender towards their daughters and it was Charlie whom I doted on and whom I indulged until, just after her eighteenth birthday, I waved her away to Oxford University one bright sunny October afternoon. The whiff of autumn was on the breeze that day, mashed leaves, mushrooms, fallen damsons, and I will admit to basking in a certain pride: both her mother and I left school when we were sixteen. Her teachers also told me that getting to Oxford is quite an achievement if you haven’t had the benefit of a private education or friends at the BBC.

  Bright girl.

  Well I don’t know about any of that, and I don’t know what they teach you at Oxford, but Charlie came back with gold rings inserted through nostril, bottom lip and belly-button. That was just the ones I could see. She’d also cultivated the politics of an international terrorist, which she would turn on me like a flame thrower. My sweet-natured little girl. Then it seemed that every time I opened my mouth I was confirmed as a moral idiot. Oxford somehow convinced her that she was a princess of folktale, handed over at birth to the family of swineherds.

  You can’t always bite your lip. This was the daughter whose bottom I’d wiped, whom I’d taught to swim and to play football, whose spangly, glycerine-like tears I’d licked and for whom I’d interpreted the entire world and all its levers, pulleys and creaking mechanisms. Mick Williams would say I treated her with too much seriousness, but everything was flung back in my teeth. I’d worked extra weekends fixing double sockets in kitchens to put her through university, but that made me a capitalist lackey, whatever that is. I’d encouraged Sheila to stay home when the children were small, putting love before money, but that was me oppressing Sheila. I’d put good quality meat on the table, so I was a torturer of animals and a force-feeder of infants. In the holidays when Charlie was around, I used to look forward to coming home from a hard day’s graft just to see what further kind of a shit I was.

  ‘Hey, it don’t stop you staying here and sponging off us in the holidays, does it, sweetheart?’

  ‘There are plenty of places I could go! I don’t have to come here!’

  ‘Bugger off then!’

  ‘He doesn’t mean it,’ Sheila would say. ‘He’s winding you up, Charlie.’

  ‘I bloody do mean it!’

  Really, I don’t know who was winding up who. Some of the deadbeats she used to bring home, I wondered if it was all for my benefit; you know, this one will kill him.

  ‘This is Pete.’ Or, ‘This is Zak.’

  Pete or Zak was usually a white boy with dreadlocks and nose-stud: the rigid deadbeat uniform of a ‘traveller’ without the means to travel. Coming in behind him from the hallway, Charlie would sort of lob him across the lounge carpet like a smoking bomb. It would fall to Sheila to invite this new boyfriend to sit down, whereas I always wanted to say, no, please don’t, we’ve just had the upholstery shampooed. They weren’t always called Pete or Zak, but I found myself deliberately referring to them as if they were. I’d wait until Charlie and Sheila were out of the room before letting the Leicester Mercury dip into my lap.

  ‘Pete or Zak, can I ask you something?’

  ‘It’s Simon. Sure.’

  ‘You’re sure I can ask you anything? It’s sort of personal.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Are you black, Pete?’

  ‘Duh?’

  ‘Only these dreadlocks, Pete. I wondered if you were, perhaps, black. You know, with the dreadlocks.’

  ‘Uh, no. White.’

  ‘Confusing for old farts like me. But I want you to understand that if you were black, Pete, you would be perfectly welcome. In fact sometimes I wish Charlie would bring a proper black fellow home. And I only ask so I can tell people, you know, neighbours and stuff, when they ask.’

  ‘Right.’

  Then I would go back to hiding behind the newspaper. Sometimes my cheeks would be splitting, or I’d have to stuff a handkerchief in my mouth to stop myself guffawing from behind the Leicester Mercury.

  But somehow the arguments lost their humour or their levity, and one Easter vacation we had a stand-up knock-down blue-blazing row, and Charlie went back to university and we never heard from her again. Telephone calls went unanswered, letters were returned unopened. We know she graduated, because Sheila opened correspondence sent to her home address.

  And then Farquar-Thompson from the Foreign Office. Thailand. Chiang Mai. Drugs courier. Twenty years t
o life. A steep curve, from naughty girl to that.

  Farquar-Thompson had told Sheila that Charlie hadn’t wanted them to contact us. She hadn’t wanted help of any kind. That grieved me. That in the moment when she needed our help more than at any other time, she could allow a foolish quarrel to stand between us. But the Foreign Office had informed us anyway as a matter of policy. Plus, it seemed, there were legal bills to consider.

  Normally I like to do a good job for people, but I rushed the wiring that day so I could get home early, just to think about things. I say home when I mean my cold apartment. I’d been there twelve weeks and I was still trying to make it habitable. Sheila, bless her, had come and put curtains up for me. My clothes lay around in faintly festering piles, hence the defeated effort with flatpack drawers and wardrobes.

  Grabbing a bottle of malt whisky, I stepped over the half-assembled chest of drawers and went to bed, even though it was only just after four in the afternoon. I was thinking about the day Charlotte was born. I was there at the birth. I’d missed my son Phil’s birth, out of cowardice I suppose. But I was there when Charlotte arrived, and I was still reeling from the blood and the mess and the gas ’n’ air and the exhaustion of it all when the midwife took Sheila to get cleaned up and dumped Charlie in my arms, leaving us alone in the delivery room.

  It’s a singular moment. You hold in your arms this fragile new life and you hear the click, click, click of the universe expanding into empty space.

  Charlie looked up at me that day, and blinked. Her eyes moved like something from a Disney animated feature, and I don’t know why but I started bawling. Big fat hot tears of happiness down my face, even though a voice inside was saying stop it you big sap, they’ll be back in a minute. That was twenty-two years ago, and I’d never once cried since that day. Now I couldn’t get the memory of it out of my mind, and as I lay there in bed at four o’clock in the afternoon, I started bawling all over again. I saw Charlie’s life, with the messy salt pillar of tears I’d erected at either end of it. I just wanted to hold her in my arms again, and for her to be my little girl.

  3

  Thursday night was snooker night, with Mick Williams, old pimento-face. Snooker is another of those games like darts or poker, designed by men to permit just enough chat to give the impression of sociability without anyone having to say anything. In fact if anyone starts talking with any degree of engagement or gravity, even if it’s just about football, then the game has to stop. And well, what’s the point in stopping the game to do something you could easily do if you hadn’t hired a table for a few hours? You don’t play snooker to talk.

  So the only discourse in the melancholy cavern of Osborne’s snooker house, with its lozenges of lime baize receding in tight formation into the gloom, was the convivial crack and chatter of crystallite balls. Until, that is, deep into the third frame and typically with myself in boss position, Mick Williams, with extraordinary delicacy, laid his cue on the immaculate green baize. ‘A moment, Danny.’

  ‘Go on then.’ I motioned affably, cue butt resting by my feet, blue chalky tip held out at a soldierly angle.

  ‘It’s been eating away at me, like.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Can’t sit on it any longer.’

  Mick Williams is always at his most infuriating in a snooker hall. In fact I don’t know why I play with the bloke, because sometimes I hate him. Passionately hate him. Something riles about the way he has to hoist his lardy gut on to the baulk when stretching for a shot; or about the way when, presented with an easy pot, he’ll rocket the pot-ball into the pocket with a totally unnecessary clatter and violence. Totally unnecessary that. And, after having done that very thing he’ll turn with a wry smile as if to say: there you are, that’s punished you.

  But to lay down your cue on the illuminated green while your opponent is twenty-three points ahead with only five colours left on the table, that is unforgivable. It’s cheating, no question.

  ‘Spit it out then.’

  He pirouetted round the baulk and dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘In the Black Dog Saturday night. Me and a few of the lads. Having a few jars, like. Few pints. Not bad in there; not bad at all. Black Dog. It’s all right.’

  ‘Go on.’ I knew exactly what was coming.

  ‘Saturday night, type of thing. Beers going down well. Lot of laughs. Look Dan, I don’t know how to put this.’ He plucked a tiny piece of lint off the baize, regarding it between his thumb and forefinger with an expression of horror. ‘No,’ he said suddenly. ‘Forget it.’

  And then he picked up his cue, took a reckless shot, and unaccountably potted the yellow. Then he sank the brown. The blue was sitting over the pocket, but he seemed to miss that one deliberately. Turning from the table, he wagged a finger, almost as if it was me he was angry with. ‘I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. Forget it.’

  ‘I would. If I knew what I had to forget.’

  He danced round the baulk again, wiping a fat finger under his nose like it was an expensive cigar before positioning himself sideways-on to me. Squeezing his cue by the neck in his big pink fist, he hissed, ‘Look. Don’t kill the messenger, like. I saw Sheila in the Black Dog. And she …’ Here he lowered his voice. ‘Well, she were with another bloke.’

  I picked up my cue and calmly turned to deal with the blue ball. If I could sink it, that would put the game beyond Mick’s reach.

  ‘You’d want a mate to tell you, Danny, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t you want him to?’

  I rolled an agonisingly slow shot the length of the table and the blue dropped into the corner pocket with a cosy cluck. I like to stay down for a second or two after the ball goes in. It’s a style thing. ‘I know all that,’ I said. Even though he was positioned behind me I felt his jaw drop. Lining up for the pink I added, ‘Sheila and I have been separated for some time.’

  ‘For some …’ A volley of spittle shot from between his teeth. His face, normally flame, turned a shade of puce in the low lighting. Activity stopped at the other tables. Other players were looking at us now. ‘How long?’

  ‘About twelve weeks.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell me?’

  ‘Well no,’ I said, lining up again for the easy pink. But I didn’t get a chance to sink it because Mick was buttoning on his coat. ‘Where are you going? We always play the five frames.’

  He’d holstered his cue and clattered it into the members’ rack before I could stop him. Breaching club etiquette and leaving the balls on the table, I followed him outside. He was so angry he hadn’t even stopped to pay for the frame. ‘Mick!’ I tried, striding out behind him. ‘Mick!’

  Mick wasn’t having any of it. He stormed into the Lamplighter, some vinegary, sticky-floored boozer I’d never been in before, and shouted himself a pint of Jubilee Ale, pointedly failing to order one for me. His face was on fire. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  ‘Made a donkey out of me.’ He picked up his foaming beer and took it to a table, where he sat, arms folded in a rib-cracking self-hug, his angry face averted. I shouted myself a beer and joined him at the table.

  ‘I was about to win that frame,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve been split up from Sheila for three months and I didn’t know anything about it. And I’m your pal. I’m supposed to be your best mate.’

  His best mate? This was complicated. I didn’t realise I was his best mate, nor he mine. We’d known each other for some years, true, but then only as snooker partners and quiz makeweights. I didn’t much go in for this ‘best mates’ thing; I didn’t see the point. Your best mate as far as I’m concerned is your wife, and your children, and the family you build your life around. You stop having best mates when you’re fourteen. But I had to tread carefully, because he was seriously offended.

  ‘Well, sorry.’

  ‘Sorry bollocks.’

  We sat in unresolved conflict, punctuating the silence with occasional sipping, swallowing and Adam’s-apple noises. Finally I threw up my hands and
decided to tell him what I knew – which at that stage was next to nothing.

  I told him about my position with Sheila and how she was still putting up my curtains; I underscored my difficulties with flatpack assembly furniture; and finally I spilled the beans about Charlie rotting in a Chiang Mai prison.

  His face became steadily pinker. He looked as though he wished he hadn’t started it. ‘You’re making it up,’ he said at one point.

  I assured him I wasn’t inventing any of it, and that I wished I was.

  ‘Where the fuck is Chiang Mai?’

  ‘Northern Thailand.’

  ‘So why aren’t you already there?’

  I shrugged. We discussed what we knew about Thailand, which was very little. I was able to point out that it had once been called Siam, something that had come up in a quiz. He alluded to the sex-tourism industry of Bangkok, and then immediately regretted saying it. I’d heard that students went there to send e-mails home. We also pooled our knowledge of drugs. It was a bit limited: he’d once swallowed something called a Purple Heart when he was a teenager and I knew another sparks whose lad had witnessed things in Holland on a school trip. Finally, when we’d talked ourselves into silence, he mustered another two pints of Jubilee Ale.

  ‘So you’ll be going out there?’

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘When did you last hear from Charlie?’

  ‘Two years ago.’

  That wasn’t strictly true. Yes, it had been two years since I’d seen her face to face. But there had been a telephone call, about which I hadn’t even told Sheila; and that for very good reasons. The call had come out of the blue, about six months earlier, when things were getting particularly bad between Sheila and I.

  ‘Charlie? Are you all right? Why haven’t you been in touch?’