Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  I suppose Mick had a point. About the monk, I mean. Is it feasible that you would turn up at the Nirvana gates with a lighted ciggie on the go? I was ready to return to the hotel, to take a nap. I waited until Mick had achieved enlightenment and was struggling back into his sandals. I asked him one last time, trying to make light of it, ‘Are you sure that monk didn’t come inside while I was in there?’

  ‘Sure I’m sure,’ he said. ‘What’s eating you?’

  I was so disturbed by this experience I almost decided to explore it with Phil at the hotel. I tapped softly on his door. I seemed to have caught him in the act of sitting upright on a hard chair, since he returned to it as soon as he’d let me in.

  ‘Phil?’

  ‘Yes, Father?’

  ‘Phil. At the temple. Today.’

  ‘Yes, Father?’

  ‘What would you say? About something.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘No, it’s nothing really.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’

  It was a hell of a conversation. I had to let myself out, leaving Phil utterly nonplussed. I couldn’t stand the expression on his face as he sat on his hard chair.

  Much later, in my own room, I was having a dream. There was an old woman with a face carved out of wood. She was ringing a small temple bell, right in my face. The bell became the room telephone. I rolled over in bed and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Yes,’ I croaked. ‘Yes. I’ll be down in ten minutes.’

  Mick blinked sleepily from his bed. ‘What?’

  ‘Brazier-Armstrong. He’s in reception now. You go back to sleep. I can handle him.’

  ‘No fucking way,’ Mick said.

  14

  I found Brazier-Armstrong in the bar, perched on a high stool with his legs crossed. He was twiddling a straw in a tall glass full of some poisonous-looking green stuff. I suppose I was shocked at how young he was. I’d expected more formality, not this youth in a T-shirt and cotton trousers. Perhaps I wanted someone in a white suit and straw fedora. In fact he was in his thirties, but the long blond fringe dangling in his dewy blue eyes made him look fresh from the university debating club. He turned and caught me studying him.

  ‘Ah!’ he cried, jumping from his stool and extending a hand. ‘You must be Mr Innes! So glad to catch up with you at last!’ He made it sound as if I was the one being evasive. But he fixed me with smiling eyes and a huge grin, and shook me warmly by the hand as if we were old friends. As if we’d been together in the same debating team, it seemed to me. ‘Let me get you a drink.’

  ‘Juice,’ I said.

  I was expecting him to bring up the unpleasantness at his office, but he never mentioned it. He gave me a long, complicated explanation about how he’d been summoned to a neighbouring province to sort out a problem which, when he got there, was already solved. During this Mick slipped quietly on to the bar stool next to me. I introduced them to each other. Mick sniffed as they shook hands.

  ‘Daniel and I were just having a drink. Do let me get you one.’

  Mick looked at me and said, ‘I’ll have a beer, Daniel.’

  Brazier-Armstrong chattered about the size of the area he was expected to cover. His mouth seemed to produce an excess of saliva, because every now and then he stroked his lips with a long and elegant white finger. He was a bag of nerves with a diploma from charm school. Or from public school, more like. One of the more expensive ones. Brazier-Armstrong looked like he might be a useful number three bat on the Eton cricket pitches.

  A working-class bloke takes a mild dislike to you, and you know it immediately; whereas you can be utterly despised by a middle-class person, and you will never discover the fact until much later. I can see how this has benefited the middle rank; they depend on upward mobility, ingratiating themselves and minimising social conflict. The working mob has less to gain from dissembling.

  I don’t know whether to conclude from this that the middle classes are dishonest or the working classes are thick, but at that moment Mick was resisting all Brazier-Armstrong’s seductive smiles and gay chatter by staring at me with one eyebrow cocked at altitude. Half turning to the man he said, ‘So you’re the British Consul then?’

  ‘For my sins,’ Brazier-Armstrong replied with a gallant laugh, swinging slightly and a little girlishly on his bar stool.

  ‘God help us.’

  There was a silence while we absorbed the waves made by this remark. Brazier-Armstrong let his shoulders dip, and his face became serious. ‘Joking apart, we might need a wee bit of God’s help the way this case is turning out. At the moment I’m doing everything in my power to make sense of a very hairy situation. I’ve come here directly from the prison. I can tell you’ – and here he resumed some gaiety – ‘that you’ve got them running around like headless chickens.’

  ‘It’s not funny,’ Mick said.

  ‘Indeed not. Not funny at all. I was about to update Daniel on what we know.’

  ‘Let’s have it then,’ I said.

  ‘The girl in the prison. Her name is Claire Marchant. She was arrested on drugs trafficking charges. She was carrying what now appears to be your daughter’s passport. She has admitted that she stole it.’

  ‘When? Where?’

  ‘This we don’t know. She doesn’t look unlike the passport photograph, so she has been successful in passing herself off to the Thai authorities since her arrest.’

  ‘When did she steal the passport? Can’t you make her tell us?’ Mick put in.

  ‘We’re trying to get this information. The trouble is that Marchant has got nothing to lose. Assuming she doesn’t get the death penalty, she’s already facing life imprisonment. I’m afraid she’s not in a co-operative mood.’

  ‘No problem,’ Mick said, slamming down his beer and climbing off his stool. ‘To the prison. Slip the guards a few dollars for five minutes in the cell with her. Let’s go.’

  Brazier-Armstrong pushed at some imaginary force between his knees. ‘Slow down, gentlemen! There are ways of doing things in this country. I can understand any impatience you might be feeling—’

  ‘No you fucking can’t,’ Mick said.

  ‘— but there is a correct procedure and it will get us what we want. You’ve been patient up until now. Just a little longer, and we can unearth whatever there is to know. I’m going back to the prison right now to interview Marchant myself.’

  ‘Can we come along?’ I asked.

  ‘The prison authorities said no. I already asked. I appeal to you, Daniel, to leave this to me. I can deal with the unpleasantness and the waiting around at Chiang Mai prison. Meanwhile I recommend that you both relax as far as possible and take advantage of the many pleasures Chiang Mai has to offer. Let me take the strain.’ He was already up off his stool as Phil showed up. ‘I will report back to you as soon as there is anything to tell you.’

  He jabbed out a hand that wanted shaking again, saw Mick’s face and thought better of it. Then he was gone. We watched him leave the hotel grounds to wave his finger at a passing tuk-tuk.

  Mick was disgusted. ‘His shit’s still yellow. Daniel.’

  ‘Who was that?’ Phil wanted to know.

  ‘Let’s give him a chance,’ I sighed.

  ‘And another thing,’ Mick said, picking up the bar tab. ‘The little runt didn’t pay for the drinks.’

  15

  Brazier-Armstrong failed to get back to me, as he’d faithfully promised he would, within the next twenty-four hours. In that period he became Mick’s favourite topic of conversation. It had come as a shock to him to see the type of floppy-haired individual responsible for representing British interests abroad. As a tax-payer he speculated about how many Brazier-Armstrongs there were dotted about the globe, and at what expense; as my friend and aide in this expedition, he doubly hated him for his apparently ineffectual offices.

  I couldn’t get quite so steamed up about the prat. It wasn’t his fault that Charlotte had come this way to be parted fro
m her passport by a drugs runner. Even though I was half out of my mind with frustration I knew that blaming this soppy public schoolboy wasn’t going to help the situation.

  Phil, like me, thought we should give the man a chance to do his best. Mick on the other hand wanted to return to the consulate and kick his arse with a spiked boot. Meanwhile we flopped by the hotel pool, drank beer (or tea in Phil’s case), had another foot massage (or didn’t, in Phil’s case), and ate a green curry (yes, he joined us for that) which made those familiar giant blisters of sweat appear on my forehead before I’d even dipped my spoon in the stuff.

  So we lounged by the pool. Where Mick sported dazzling fluorescent lime-green knee-length swimming trunks, Phil lay on his sunbed in stiff white shirt, black trousers, black socks and black shoes. After half an hour of this, and wickedly taunted by Mick, he allowed himself to take off his shoes and socks, neatly stowing them under his bed.

  I lay on my own sunbed trying to ignore the pair of them by opening one of the books I’d brought with me. My fantasies had turned to England, and misty, damp autumnal mornings or to the sudden, short downpours of April. I thought of walks along the foggy canal towpaths and of mud-squelching football pitches. I was homesick already.

  My book was A Season in Hell by Rimbaud. I was still determined to get to the bottom of what these dopers were up to. Of course, given recent developments, I had no evidence that Charlie had any connection with drugs whatsoever. But I suspected otherwise, especially if she’d allowed drugs traffickers like that creature in Chiang Mai prison to get near enough to steal her passport. I was raking through these books looking for references to opium and its effects.

  As for Rimbaud, well. A complete prick. I won’t even waste your time telling you what this one was about. Half of it sounded like it was scribbled by a teenager giddy on his first bottle of cider. The book would still be lying on the bottom of the hotel swimming pool if Mick hadn’t fished it out. So I moved on to trying to make sense of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

  I almost gave up on that, too. You plough through several pages of complete waffle before he even mentions opium. There is a lot of musing about De Quincey’s childhood, and then several miserable passages about a rotten time he was having in London where he got mixed up with a prostitute called Ann. I don’t see what that has to do with opium, but you keep reading it in the hope that soon he will get to the point.

  Finally, after much whining about how difficult life is (this a young gentleman of the early nineteenth century – he ought to have thrown in his lot with the common people for a week), we get the thing named. One of his cronies from Oxford University suggested he use opium to treat a headache. (Oxford University – there’s that place mentioned again – someone ought to take it down brick by brick.) While studying at Oxford he started to use opium on a regular basis. If he hadn’t, I daresay he would have written a better book.

  It was while we were sweating by the pool that we got a message from Brazier-Armstrong that made Mick apoplectic with rage. He’d been ‘called away’ for a few days and would report back to us the instant he returned.

  ‘The little shite!’ Mick roared. He pulled on his shirt and shorts and buckled on his moneybelt.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Phil said, ‘you’d better keep him on a tight leash.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ I shouted

  ‘You two stay here!’

  I trotted after him, in wet swimming shorts and bare feet, to the front of the hotel. ‘I don’t want you causing trouble at the consulate. You’ll make things worse.’

  ‘I’m not going to the consulate.’ He flagged a tuk-tuk from across the street.

  ‘So where are you going?’

  The tuk-tuk driver gave me a wide, toothless grin as Mick hoisted his bulk into the back of the three-wheeler. Mick barked at him to go and I was left standing in a cloud of filthy exhaust.

  I went back to the poolside. Phil was also on his feet by now. ‘I’m not certain how wise it was of you,’ Phil opined, ‘to bring Mick along. We’ve got to take steps to contain him.’

  ‘Contain him? What do you suggest, Phil? Extra Bible classes?’

  I flung myself into the pool. I was worried. On the one hand I was afraid Mick might do something stupid to spoil any possibility of assistance and co-operation we might have. Brazier-Armstrong was elusive and ineffectual, but his local knowledge and contacts were all we had. On the other hand, Mick’s blundering around was making things happen. If relations got too bad I could always blame everything on him and send him home. With Phil still glowering at me from under angry knitted brows I dried myself, ordered a whisky from the bar, and buried my head in Thomas De Quincey so I could stop thinking about these things.

  It wasn’t easy. The De Quincey is written in a long-winded and old-fangled style, very different to today. Maybe it’s the pace of today’s life that makes writing so different. Perhaps in those days they had all day to say things in. Either that or we’ve got less things to say, but whatever the reason, old De Q was taking me round the houses before he was going to actually give anything away about this opium business.

  One rainy Sunday afternoon he’d gone down from Oxford to London and, on the advice of a student friend of his, he bought a shilling’s worth of laudanum from a chemist in Oxford Street. (I don’t know why Oxford keeps cropping up – this sort of thing can make you paranoid.) I had to read on a bit before I found out that laudanum is opium dissolved in alcohol, so I suppose he was getting the double effect. I remember pausing at this point to look at the glass of whisky in my hand. I’d been feeling so strange and queasy since arriving in Chiang Mai I had the crazy idea that maybe these Thailanders lace their booze with opium.

  Anyway, he drank this laudanum. I’ve no idea why he called his book Confessions of an English Opium Eater when he spent his time drinking the stuff rather than eating it. I felt slightly misled. When I thought of De Quincey I imagined him hiding in cupboards or dark rooms, chewing on some resinous black chunks of opium; this information changed the picture altogether. Now I pictured him sitting in front of a fireplace topping up his glass of laudanum from a decanter. So why not call the book Confessions of an English Opium Drinker? Perhaps he thought it didn’t sound so good.

  Before discovering opium, what he used to do whenever he had a headache was to dunk his head in icy water. I can’t think what good that did him, but evidently the opium was much better. Not only did it relieve his headache, it also gave him ‘an abyss of divine enjoyment’. He was shown ‘celestial pleasures’ in the ‘Paradise of Opium-Eaters’. But he also knew, even in that first rush, where it was taking him, because he added that he experienced the ‘lowest depths of the inner spirit’. I take that to mean he knew, right from the beginning, that he was on a staircase down.

  The book slipped from my hand as I fell into a doze. De Quincey, in his early nineteenth-century frock-coat, was leading me down a staircase, lighting the way with a candle. He was an irritating little chatterbox, and I wasn’t listening to him because I was too preoccupied with what was happening at his feet. The staircase was forming beneath us as we moved down it. Sometimes we had to wait a few seconds for it to manifest and solidify, and I was nervous because the descent seemed to go on for ever. The odd thing about the dream was that I’d been brought there by De Quincey to install electrical wiring all the way down, about which he was very happy; but I kept rubbing my chin and thinking, heck, this is going to be a big job.

  When I woke Mick was standing over me, silhouetted, the sun behind his head. I couldn’t see his features, but in my befuddled state his figure looked ominous, menacing. I sat up too quickly. My head swam. ‘What’s cracking off?’

  Mick stripped off his shirt and shorts and belly-flopped into the pool, as if he wanted to hurt the water. The huge splash was a deliberate affront to the tranquillity of the afternoon. He climbed out, jiggled his finger aggressively at the wax and water in his left ear, and flung himself on the
sunbed beside me, face averted.

  Phil came over to find out the latest.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  ‘Do you know that bar up by the Tha Phae Gate?’ Mick muttered into the pillow of his sunbed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think we’ll try that one tonight.’

  That was all we could get out of him.

  16

  Mick was in a leery mood that evening. He showered with bellicose energy, blowing like a harpooned whale, water and foam everywhere; he shaved with minute attention, flicking his razor aggressively at the soapy water; and he triple-dosed on the after-shave lotion. He was, he announced, preparing for a skinful of ale, and when I indicated I might be content to hang around the hotel, he told me to go ahead, that I should only do what I wanted to do. ‘Stay in with Cardinal Cunt,’ he snorted.

  In the end I thought I’d better tag along, just to act as a smoking brake on a wheel already spinning before we’d left the hotel grounds. ‘I can’t believe,’ Phil said, ‘that the pair of you are cheerfully marching off to a brothel.’

  ‘It’s a bar, not a brothel for crying out loud!’ I told him.

  ‘As far as I can see, all bars in this town are brothels!’

  ‘Come out with us.’

  He shook his head sadly. ‘The father and his friend go a-whoring.’

  ‘Don’t stand there arguing with him,’ Mick shouted. Then, ‘Thighland by night!’ he roared to the otherwise empty hotel lobby, and we left Phil to write his postcards.

  These vixen girls, they grab your hand, pinch your arse and stroke your thigh trying to reel you into the bars. The escape policy is to be jocular and friendly as you pass on by, but Mick wasn’t in a pass-on-by mood. He was soon draped by gorgeous Thai whores while I sat next to him nursing a beer and disappointing their friends. Nonetheless, after standing these girls a drink he drained his own glass, and with a cry of, ‘Onward, Daniel!’ pitched in a reedy voice intended to mimic our dear consul, we were up and out and making progress to the next tiny, neon-lit grotto brimming with teenage sirens.