Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  Apropos of nothing, Lucy said, ‘Danny’s been reading Baudelaire.’

  ‘Baudelaire is cool,’ said Mark, twiddling with one of his earrings.

  ‘Which in particular?’ I asked, merely to make conversation. After all, it was still quite fresh in my mind.

  ‘All,’ he said shiftily. Then, ‘I don’t have the head to remember specific titles.’ This was put in such a way as to suggest anyone who could remember what they’d read was clearly an inferior person. I was about to challenge him when he changed the subject by snorting derisively at a well-known politician.

  ‘Mark’s a member of the local Conservative Party,’ Lucy said with levitated eyebrows.

  ‘Get out of here,’ I said, thinking she was joking.

  ‘So what are you?’ Mark said with a sneer and a curled lip. ‘Some kind of superannuated socialist?’

  I didn’t know what he meant by that but I was quite happy to take offence. ‘I’m not anything; it’s just that I can’t imagine you bottling chutney and selling raffle tickets for the local Tory fund-raiser, that’s all.’

  Lucy smelled trouble so she dived in with, ‘Danny told me he’s going to Thailand.’

  ‘Thailand? That’s amazing.’

  ‘Why amazing?’

  ‘For someone like you.’

  I looked at the fancy ironwork in his face and thought what I could have done with a pair of metal pliers. ‘What am I like?’ It must have come out like a growl.

  ‘Look, I’m only saying it’s good that someone of your generation is going out there. It’s a cool place to go.’

  ‘It is quite popular,’ Lucy said in desperation. ‘Really, very popular.’

  ‘You could say that.’ Mark had had enough. He drained his coffee mug and stood up. ‘I’m outa here. Really cool to meet you,’ he said, avoiding eye contact with me.

  Fuck that, I thought. ‘Like totally groovy to meet you, too.’ Well, it might have been laid on with a trowel, but at least it got me a bit of eye contact before he left. I mean, I can also do irony.

  After she’d seen Chuckles out the door Lucy said, ‘Sorry about him. He seemed interesting when I met him. It wasn’t until I’d brought him back here that I was thinking help!’

  ‘He’s got some fancy body plating.’

  ‘There was a stud in his tongue which you didn’t see.’

  I couldn’t imagine that. If I have even a tiny ulcer on my tongue I spend half my time scraping it against my teeth. ‘Why the hell would anyone want a stud on their tongue?’

  Lucy thrust out her own tongue and waggled it at me lasciviously. It was something I hadn’t even considered. I felt first my neck and then my face flush in a crimson tide.

  Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I made you blush!’

  There weren’t that many years between us, but Lucy represented a generation with whom I was completely out of step. No woman of my own day would make such a casual sexual innuendo. We’re more the seaside-postcard humorists. I decided it was time to leave before I made some silly mistake with Lucy.

  ‘Thanks so much for doing this for me,’ Lucy said, getting up to see me out.

  ‘I enjoyed it. Really I did.’

  She kissed me lightly on my cheek and our eyes met a moment too long. I loved the perfume she was wearing.

  ‘You’re a sweetie,’ she said, holding my arm.

  That’s what I mean. I didn’t know whether she was patronising me or telling me she wanted to fuck me. I’m just not good at these things.

  ‘When do you leave for Thailand?’

  ‘Two days.’

  ‘Promise to tell me all about it when you get back?’ She stood on the doorstep, waving me away.

  10

  ‘Jesus in pyjamas!’ Mick said. ‘You don’t need to smoke a pipe of opium.’

  This irritated me, because of the reference to Charlotte, but Mick had summed up my own initial impressions of Chiang Mai exactly. I don’t know if it was the jet-lag but I felt like I was dreaming with my eyes open; too stupefied even to speak. I could tell it irritated Phil, too, because he winced visibly every time Mick made free with the Lord’s name.

  Yes, Phil was in Chiang Mai with us. After I’d visited him in his refrigerated domestic chapel, Phil telephoned to inform me that he’d had a long conversation with God, and that God had told him that he should come to Thailand.

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ I recall shouting down the telephone receiver.

  ‘God wants me to.’

  ‘But what about your duties to your church? To the people who need you? You’re an Elder, for chrissakes!’

  ‘This is a greater duty. God has been very clear to me in His direction. Charlie needs me there. You need me there. I’m coming with you and I won’t be put off.’

  Neither would he. I’d tried my damnedest to talk him out of it, but he was on a divine mission. I remember putting the phone down and sinking to my knees, practically biting the carpet and going, ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ over and over. By enormous ‘good fortune’ or by God’s design there was, for Phil, still a seat to be had on the same flight. But by even greater fortune, Phil had had to sit at the back of the plane while Mick and I had seats over the wing.

  In Chiang Mai the three of us drifted like perspiring wraiths through the swarming, spice-laden streets for over half an hour before uttering a word. I was pleased to see, at least, that Phil infuriated Mick by clasping in his right hand at all times a black, leather-bound pocket-sized Bible. Phil had the look of a man prepared at any moment to stop on the street corner in order to give any passing native the benefit of a few pages.

  But he couldn’t, because like us he was overwhelmed. Stepping from the capsule of the air-conditioned hotel was like being plunged into a glinting tropical aquarium; people as ornate fish gliding by in fluid ecstasy, breasting strange tides, bumping up against the coral of the bewildering street commerce. Even the air seemed like fishtank water in need of a change. Meanwhile busted chattering neon and fizzing sodium lights played on the contours of the night as if on the scales of a Chinese dragon, and Mick’s comment about opium pipes had broken our sweaty trance.

  In the alleys of the night market, food I couldn’t identify sizzled in the drum pans and the cartwheel-sized woks of street vendors, spicing diesel-thick air with onion and ginger. The throb of tuk-tuk motorised rickshaws almost drowned the shouts of little vixen girls waving from bars. Fairy lights blazed against a turquoise night sky and I mistook the flat orange moon for just another oriental lantern as my sleeves were tugged by tiny women in tribal headdress. The women I later learned to identify as Akha tribeswomen peddled trashy beads and silver bangles. Their lips were stained red. Some of them had teeth sharpened to points.

  With two of these pygmy women hanging from his arm Mick said, ‘I’ve seen everything now,’ but in a way which made you know he knew he hadn’t even started seeing.

  Phil, his head swivelling slowly, his throat working oddly like someone who found it hard to swallow, was in a state of shock. Tuk-tuk drivers slewed to a halt to offer him women, boys, massages, fake Rolexes. It was all bang in your face, right up the nostril cavity.

  ‘Vanity Fair,’ Phil kept whispering, obscurely.

  And in the sweltering heat, the three of us were steadily melting. Mick’s T-shirt soaked around his big belly and in big oval floods under his arms. His hair was plastered to his forehead like someone who’d just been for a dip in the river. Counter to the frantic street activity, the damp heat had us doped.

  ‘A beer,’ said Mick, ‘or I’m dead.’

  I hadn’t spoken to him in almost three hours, not since the most recent of our many arguments. ‘Yeah,’ I conceded at last. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Perhaps a refreshing cup of tea,’ Phil tried, preposterously.

  I can’t bear to tell you about the flight from London to Bangkok except to report that it was a nightmare. Correction: there was nothing wrong with the flight, or the airline, or the service or
anything of that sort. It was Mick who was the gibbering nightmare from the instant we reached Heathrow airport until the moment we touched down in Bangkok.

  The short hop from Bangkok to Chiang Mai was tolerable insofar as Mick, exhausted from his antics on the long haul, fell asleep to complete the second leg of the journey in a pink-faced stupor. I was furious with myself for ever having left home with the overstuffed oaf. I also had to contend with Phil’s silent disgust at Mick’s behaviour. The pair of them enraged me in different ways, one no less than the other. The entire enterprise had become a circus.

  It had been while Phil dithered uselessly and while Mick swayed and rubbed his sleepy face in the middle of the antiseptic arrivals hall at Chiang Mai airport that I arranged a hotel. You could command anything from an exploded mattress in a rotting cockroach farm (which Phil suggested would be acceptable) to an air-conditioned palace, and after I’d settled on a mid-range solution called the River View Lodge Mick emerged from his stupor to argue the toss about a taxi. He’d decided I was an easy target for rip-off merchants. It didn’t seem to matter that I’d found a driver prepared to take us to the hotel for only a hundred Thai bhat. Mick waved him away, bustled outside and returned with another smiling cabbie.

  ‘Grab your bags,’ Mick told us. ‘I’ve chipped him down to a hundred and fifty bhat. You’ve got to know how to deal with these little Chinkies.’

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to, but you have to understand that Mick and I had had fourteen (I’d counted them while in the air between Bangkok and Chiang Mai) pretty fierce arguments over the past twenty-four hours, and he’d worn me into stony-faced submission. Phil was just keeping his head down.

  Ignoring the cooing girls and the pimping tuk-tuk drivers, we walked from the hurly-burly of the night market and managed to find a bar that wasn’t brimful of beautiful young prostitutes. Inside, grateful for the presence of giant electric fans, we hoisted our damp haunches on to sticky bar stools and ordered a couple of cold Singha beers. And a cup of tea for Phil. The rotating fans afforded scant relief, serving only to nudge the stifling air back and forth without cooling it. The full-on effect was one of being gently swabbed with a dirty bar towel.

  Mick tipped back his beer in one go (I heard it hiss against the heat of his throat), and ordered two more. He gave a scholarly burp. ‘At least the beer is all right,’ he said. I ladled the sweat from my eyebrows by way of agreement while Phil nervously stirred his tea.

  Despite the kaleidoscope of human activity going on in the street outside, my mind was on Charlie. It was frustrating to have arrived in this place without being able to dash to the prison to see her. The British Consulate in Chiang Mai had arranged with the prison authorities for me to visit the following morning at eleven o’clock. I was killing time, but I couldn’t keep my mind on anything else.

  Should I hug Charlie? Would they allow me to? Would they allow me to give her the things I’d brought with me? Sheila had filled a flight bag with soap, shampoo, cosmetic creams, jars of vitamin pills, magazines, books and God knows what else. ‘Take this,’ Sheila had said.

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘She loved this when she was a girl. Here, take it.’

  It was a moth-eaten Rupert Bear.

  I’d meant to add packets of cigarettes without even knowing if Charlie was a smoker. I suspected she was. Sheila in particular had disapproved of our children smoking, so I’d left it until I got to the airport for the duty-frees. It seemed ridiculous to deny an opium addict the comfort of a few snouts.

  ‘Stop thinking about it,’ Mick said, trying to track the airstream of the fan with a lazy and contemplative swivelling of his chin.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Difficult,’ Phil said, ‘to not think about it. The father encounters the daughter in prison, so to speak.’

  So far Mick’s way of dealing with Phil and his double-talk was to ignore him completely or to make a tiny shake of his blond curls every time Phil spoke. His disappointment on discovering that there was to be a third member of the party was still advertised in his face. ‘That’s why you’re so tetchy,’ he said to me. ‘Because you keep thinking about tomorrow. Try to relax. Both of you.’

  The trouble had started even before we got on the plane at Heathrow. To begin with Mick wound me up by continually mis-pronouncing the word ‘Thailand’. He and I were in the duty-free buying cigarettes for Charlie when he’d said, ‘While we’re in Thighland are we going to spend any time in Bangkok?’

  ‘What? Why would we do that?’

  He’d shrugged his shoulders, casual. ‘Supposed to be a fun place, Bangkok.’

  ‘How do you mean, “fun”?’

  ‘Where they all go, like.’

  ‘Where who goes?’ I knew exactly what he meant.

  He stuck a finger in his ear, pretending to shake his earhole free of wax. ‘Sex tourism.’

  ‘You mean you’d like to go there?’ I remember smiling, encouraging.

  ‘Just have a squint at what’s going on, like.’ And he winked at me.

  I laid a carton of Marlboros back on the shelf and turned to him. ‘I’m not going out there for sex tourism,’ I said evenly.

  ‘No, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘I’m going out there for one reason and one reason only, and that reason is Charlie.’

  ‘No, you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the—’

  ‘This isn’t a jaunt or a holiday or your chance to get your fat leg over, I’m going because my daughter, Charlotte, is rotting in a filthy prison in a place called Chiang Mai.’

  ‘Keep your hair on, Danny—’

  ‘We’re not going to look at nude women dancing round poles and sticking ping-pong balls up their fannies, so if you’ve got any of that in mind you go your own way as soon as we land in Bangkok, right?’

  Then he started getting angry. ‘Calm down, for Christ’s sake! Look at the state of you! I was only saying—’

  ‘I know what you were saying and you’re not on.’

  ‘— that there are things to look at while we’re there and you don’t have to walk the length and breadth of Thighland with a face like a bag of spanners. That’s not going to help Charlie, is it?’

  I stormed from the duty-free shopping zone in search of the suddenly preferred company of Phil, concluding what was the first of our many disputes over the next few hours. And here was Mick chugging beer in a Chiang Mai bar after his appalling behaviour, telling me to relax. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to find somewhere to eat.’

  Eating was the last thing on my mind. The heat had drained my appetite, and even if it hadn’t the million and one pavement cafés and street vendors hadn’t helped. Everyone in Chiang Mai and his sister and his sister’s boyfriend was in the chomping business, from the classy silver-service eateries down to the fruit-laden bamboo mat in the rat-snarling gutter.

  ‘What do you fancy?’ I said. ‘Dog in cashew nut sauce or monkey with mango?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Mick said. ‘It’s just like the Chinese takeaway, or the curry house. Isn’t it, Phil?’

  Phil cleared his throat, touched his nose and refused to take sides.

  Fine for Mick. In fact he was in his element. Back home he loved nothing better than Indian or Chinese food, whereas anything remotely spicy makes me sweaty and nasty. ‘I’ll find something back at the hotel.’

  ‘Phhhht,’ Mick went in disgust. ‘Phhhht.’ He knew that all the hotel offered in the way of food was a bar with complimentary crisps and peanuts in bamboo dishes.

  But I knew better than to try to come between Mick and the imperative of his bowels. He made it quite clear on the plane that, even if he were to be denied the fleshpots of Bangkok, he was going to more than compensate his belly with whatever culinary adventure might be on offer. He had the cabin crew running back and forth to the galley for the entire flight in the service of his belly. From the moment we boarded the plane he started. When we were waid by one of those stunningly b
eautiful and self-effacing air hostesses, Mick touched her elbow and said, ‘Now, don’t pray to me darlin’, just fetch the gin.’

  The trouble with Mick is that when these women smiled back at him, he actually thought he was making a big hit. He didn’t understand that it was in their culture to smile, to be compliant; he was too accustomed to the contrary and disagreeable nature of Western women.

  ‘I’m in here,’ he whispered to me as we took our seats on the plane. ‘These girls think I’m a god.’

  ‘It’s called a wai,’ I remember telling him.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A wai. When they put their hands together like that.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Don’t take the piss.’ I should have known it was going to be like that not only for the duration of the flight but for the entire period we spent in Thailand. He would summon a hostess, put his hands together under his nose and offer a deep, fulsome wai and then would whisper to them confidentially, ‘See that tiny little dinner you just brought me? Do you think you could find me another one?’ And it would work every time. Another thing he found hilarious would be to catch my eye, and thereafter wai me as a prelude to breaking wind. Then he proceeded to get rip-roaring drunk.

  Meanwhile in the bar the giant fan nudged the dirty warm air hither and thither. ‘I’m fucking starving,’ Mick roared. ‘Let’s eat.’

  We made to pay for the beer; or at least Mick and I did. I hadn’t noticed Phil dirty his hands with money since we’d arrived. I couldn’t figure what denominations I’d got in front of me and I accidentally handed the barman a monster note. Mick snatched it back and paid the tab himself. ‘Give me your money,’ he bellowed.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re in a state.’ This was his favourite phrase. He was always telling me I was in a state. ‘Look at you: nearly gave that chap a ten-quid tip. No wonder the little fucker was smiling. You can’t think straight. Your mind is in another place. Give me your fucking money. I’m in the chair.’