Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  ‘Is Mum there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right. Dad, I’ll come straight out with it. I’m in a difficult situation and I need five hundred quid.’

  ‘What kind of difficult situation?’

  ‘Don’t ask. Please just say yes or no.’

  ‘Are you pregnant?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Is it yes or no? I really need this favour, Dad.’

  ‘Charlie, where the hell have you been all this time? Do you know what it’s like for us?’

  ‘Yes or no. Dad. Yes or no.’

  Daughter or not, nobody has the right to behave like that. Not a word, just give me the money. ‘Yes, you can have it.’

  There was a sigh at the other end. ‘Thanks. I’m in London. I’ll give you an address. You can post me a cheque.’

  I wasn’t having that. ‘Don’t bother. The money is here for you. To collect.’

  ‘I don’t have time to do that, Dad.’

  ‘What do you need it for?’

  ‘Are you going to send it or what?’

  ‘No; you’re coming here to collect it. You could be here to pick it up faster than I could post it to you.’

  Then she got angry. ‘Always strings with you, Dad. Always strings.’

  ‘Being a father is one long string, Charlotte.’

  The line went dead. End of conversation.

  Like I say, I never told Sheila about this, and I never told Mick either. I had this slimy feeling that maybe Charlie wouldn’t be in a Chiang Mai prison if I’d just scribbled a cheque and posted it off. But I couldn’t do that. Fact is I was burning up with anxiety and hurt and sorrow, and I’d wanted to use her need for that money as a lever to get her back into our lives.

  Mick, meanwhile, in the amber light of the sticky boozer, motioned a fat hand in front of my face, bringing me out of my wistful stupor. He leaned forward another fraction and fixed on me one of those irritating gazes clearly intended to see right to the bottom of your soul. ‘You’ll need a bit of help,’ he said. ‘And I’m the man who is going to help you.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘That’s right. Me.’

  And at this point my heart, which I thought couldn’t possibly sink any lower, went down like the Titanic.

  4

  ‘You came then,’ said Phil.

  ‘Yes, I came.’

  Phil, my son, had this habit of stating the obvious whenever he felt uncomfortable. He often seemed uncomfortable in my presence. I’d decided that I ought to pay him a visit before flying off to Chiang Mai, to put him in the picture. We were not close, Phil and I. Not like Charlie and I were close, at least before the bust-up. I always sensed that Phil disapproved of me in matters never expressed; and he knew what I thought of his lifestyle.

  He lived in a post-war semi-detached house on the outskirts of Nottingham, about an hour’s drive away. Sheila and I usually saw him once or twice a year, most commonly at Christmas, when he fulfilled the religious duty of honouring one’s parents by visiting us. He would always bring with him Christmas gifts of extraordinary parsimony: a packet of dates for Sheila, a plastic letter knife with fish handle for me. Last year he brought a toothbrush for Charlie and when I told him she wouldn’t be around for Christmas he made a point of extracting the toothbrush from under the tree where he’d left it, so as to take it home with him.

  ‘Shall I take your coat?’

  ‘I’ll keep it on,’ I said. His house was always freezing.

  We went through to the cheerless lounge where two winged armchairs were drawn up near the fireplace. Why, I don’t know, because there was no fire burning in the grate. Over a dozen plastic chairs were lined up with their backs touching the walls. A pair of bilious green curtains draped the windows. Over the mantelpiece hung the room’s only extravagance, a large wooden cross of polished oak. We sat. The stiff old leather of my chair creaked noisily.

  ‘Well,’ Phil said. ‘Here we are.’

  You couldn’t fault his logic. There we were. In his freezing house, with me already wondering why I’d bothered. ‘Aren’t you going to offer me a drink of something?’ I said rather sharply. ‘It’s basic hospitality you know. Basic good manners. To offer a cup of tea or something. Surely you haven’t forgotten that, have you?’

  ‘Sorry, Father,’ Phil said, jumping up. Why couldn’t he call me ‘Dad’? ‘There is tea, but no milk. Shall I go out and get some?’

  ‘I’ll take it without milk,’ I said. I didn’t want the damned tea, I just wanted him to behave like a decent human being. He went out to the kitchen to put the kettle on, and I followed him.

  Phil was a laboratory technician. He’d had the same job since leaving university, and was currently supervising some research into samples of skin taken from people’s bottoms, or so he told me. Three years older than Charlie, Phil had studied biology at Durham University, and it was while he was working with biotoxins that he’d contracted Christian Fundamentalism. I don’t know how a scientist can claim to believe that every word of the Bible is true, but we had exhausted that argument years back. Phil, in his uniform of white shirt, black trousers shiny at the knee, and black patent-leather shoes, had his back to me as the kettle boiled. As I looked at him I thought of the two, Charlie on opium and Phil on fundamentalism, and God help me I wasn’t certain which was the worst.

  He made the tea in two mugs, and from a single teabag, squeezing the teabag against the side of my mug with a spoon. I snatched up another teabag and dropped it into the cup. ‘I want to be able to taste it,’ I said. He wrung his hands at this extravagance and looked away.

  Back in the lounge under the louring cross I told him what had happened to his sister. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, hunched over, his ear slightly inclined: look how I listen. When I’d told him the details, he steepled his fingers under his nose and nodded sagaciously. I waited some moments before he said, very slowly, ‘She’s in an exceedingly dark place.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  He leaned back in his chair and began to sum up what I’d just said, like a judge at the end of a case in the Crown Court. ‘There’s Charlie, she’s tempted into drugs by some person, she thinks it’s an easy pleasure; she gets deeper and deeper into this evil scene; she travels to a distant place, and probably needing money to support her insatiable habit, she allows herself to be talked into trafficking drugs; she is caught and spends her days languishing in prison.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve just told you.’

  He gazed at me soulfully. ‘Yes.’

  I looked at the oak cross over the mantelpiece and I thought about lifting it down and tapping him on the head with it. So what did I want from him? I suddenly realised why I was there. It was a desperate and futile effort to try to begin to regroup my fractured family.

  ‘And you’re going over to Thailand to see her?’

  Then I heard him apologising. About how much his time was taken up with the church (of which he was an ‘Elder’ at age twenty-five). About how many people depended on him being there for them. About how his house was a central venue for what he called ‘praising the Lord’. About how even if he could get the time off work—

  ‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Stop. Of all the people on this earth who I’d find it useful to have with me on a trip through steamy Asia, you’re last on the list, Sunny Jim.’

  He managed to look relieved and insulted at the same time. Then he floated a finger towards the ceiling. ‘Let’s at least do something practical,’ he said. ‘Let’s pray for Charlotte.’

  He put his hands together, closed his eyes, lowered his head and said, ‘O Lord—’

  He didn’t get any further because I said, ‘Fuck off, Phil. This is your father you’re talking to. Your father. Not one of those emotional cripples down the evangelist’s revival. All right?’

  His face flushed red. ‘Look,’ I said, more softly this time. ‘Look, I came here to put you in the picture. I don’t want anything from you. I don’t want you to fly ou
t to Asia with me. I don’t want you to leave your church and come searching for your sister. I don’t even want your prayers. I just thought you might want to know what’s happening in your family right now.’ The admonishment was creeping back into what I was saying. ‘I thought you might want to know.’

  ‘Of course I want to know,’ he said. ‘I do care for you all.’

  ‘That’s a relief, Phil.’ But irony had a habit of bouncing off his valiant armour.

  I felt tired and I felt small and I was ready to go. Phil was too far away from me to be of any help. He was camped out in the sight of the Lord, and his family, calling from the material plane, were a messy, earth-bound embarrassment. I stood up and announced that I was leaving. I offered him a handshake, this boy who used to hug me up until he was aged twelve.

  ‘But you haven’t even touched your tea!’ he protested.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What a waste,’ he opined sadly. ‘What a waste.’

  5

  On the following Tuesday Mick Williams insisted on dropping by my apartment before the quiz. The underside of the door scraped on some unopened envelopes as he squeezed his burly frame into my tiny apartment. He carried two plastic bags stuffed with over-ripe bananas, splitting melons, pulpy avocados and misshapen kiwi fruit. He looked around, sniffing. ‘Christ.’

  Perhaps Mick, a chronically ingrained bachelor, had got his own life a little better organised than mine currently appeared 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 Mick’s side. If only to break the silence I told her, ‘My daughter Charlotte has been arrested for drug smuggling in Thailand. I’ve got to go out there.’

  ‘Good lord! Is she some kind of dope fiend?’ All tact, Izzy.

  ‘I’ve no idea. It’s all new to me.’

  ‘She’s innocent,’ Mick said. ‘We’re going to prove it.’

  I put my glass down in amazement. ‘You don’t know she’s innocent!’

  ‘That’s the position we’re starting from. We’re going out there to prove her innocence.’

  Everything with Mick was we this and we will do that. I wanted to ask him who the hell he meant by we. I felt like asking if he had a pet rat in his pocket.

  ‘All the best minds were dope fiends,’ Izzy said, ignoring the dispute. ‘Keats, palely loitering. Coleridge in caverns measureless to man. De Quincey. Baudelaire and the Club des Haschischins. Wilkie Collins—’

&
nbsp; ‘I’ll get some in before we start,’ Mick said jovially.

  ‘Dickens towards the end. Rimbaud. Mrs Browning. And you may depend if Keats was soaked in the stuff that both the Shelleys had a snifter or two. Poe, Crabbe—’

  I stopped listening. Izzy’s list meant nothing to me. It became a drone in the background while I thought about Charlie lying on a feverish pallet in a stinking cell in Chiang Mai.

  ‘Look lively,’ Izzy said. ‘We’re about to be tossed one.’

  Since quiz teams at the Clipper were technically supposed to comprise four players, we were occasionally assigned a waif or stray who wanted to take part. Amos Magnamara, landlord and quizmaster, was at that moment pointing one such in our direction. Personally I wasn’t bothered, and Mick Williams reckoned we actually performed better without the support of these loose players. This one was some kind of grey-haired hippy. He wore one of those humorous goatee beards and a single, glittering earring; plus he had what looked like the leaf of a tomato plant tattooed on the back of his hand. He nodded to us and as he squatted on Mick’s stool I noticed he was drenched in a sweet, exotic perfume.

  Mick returned to the table, his hands easily spanning the three drinks. ‘Look,’ he warned the newcomer in his friendly way, ‘if you’ve come to grant us three wishes, you can start by climbing off my fucking stool.’

  Sheila answered the door wearing a cotton nightdress. I’d got her out of bed. I tried to look over her shoulder and down the hall.

  ‘I told you,’ she said, reading my mind, ‘he’s never been here. Are you going to stand there all night?’

  The house was extraordinarily tidy. Not that surprising when you considered Sheila’s claims that I was the one who habitually untidied the place. I sat down heavily in the lounge. Sheila hovered. ‘Do you want something to eat? I’ve got a nice bit of tongue in the fridge.’

  My stomach churned. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘That chap phoned again today,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Chap?’

  ‘Farquar-Thompson. He said that when Charlie heard they’d been in touch with us, she repeated that she didn’t want either of us to go out there.’