Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  Dad! He called me dad, and not father. ‘I’ll be along soon, son,’ I said as tenderly as I could. He had a point about being rested, but I wasn’t going to be ordered around by him, church Elder or not.

  Then Phil completely lost control of himself. Out of nothing he detonated. ‘You two,’ he roared, ‘have no earthly idea where you are. You ignorant dogs! Look around you! We’re awash – awash! – in a foaming tide of sin and you can’t even see it. Whores! Drugs! Booze! Gluttony! Usury! Why don’t you understand where you are? Does it have to be spelled out to you? This is iniquity! Depravity! This is a heathen place! This is a platform of stink and corruption and darkness and you think it’s a joke. Well I’m here to tell you that you’re going to get an almighty wake-up call!’

  The bar girls, tittering at first, had gone quiet. Phil was purple in the face, his hair lit by the green and red neon bar lights, and he wasn’t addressing just Mick and I any more, but anyone and everyone. His eyes were like pools of boiling pitch. Flecks of white spittle flew from his lips like spindrift. He’d completely lost it. For the first time in my life I felt afraid of, and for, my own son.

  ‘I’m sorry for you,’ he shouted, recovering slightly. ‘Sorry, yes, sorry for you, for what’s coming. And as for you, Father, all I can say is that for you I’ll save my strongest prayers.’

  It was his parting shot. He stormed from the bar and climbed into a waiting tuk-tuk. The driver revved his engine and belched a dirty and sulphurous cloud of diesel smoke as it departed.

  ‘Fuck off in your lawnmower,’ Mick shouted after him, too late.

  I scratched my head and sighed. ‘I don’t know where I went wrong with that one, I really don’t.’

  ‘What’s usury?’ Mick wanted to know.

  By the time we fetched up at the Blue Valentine our mood had changed, and we’d both become light, jaunty. I knew why. It was an antidote to Phil’s outburst. Even though I didn’t take his words seriously, his behaviour weighed heavily on me. He’d let go flocks of dark birds and now they were settling along the path before me.

  So maybe it was self-consciousness, or maybe it was fear, but we were like boozed-up schoolboys, grab-arsing and noisy and laughing at anything. Somehow we’d dragged four girls from the Corner Bar with us on the promise of paying to get them into the nightclub. We were a rabble.

  The Blue Valentine dance floor was busy enough that night. It was a more upmarket place than the street bars, and I could see why the girls had wanted to come with us. The dance floor was awash with bubbling, turquoise, blue and tangerine light. Someone up there was spinning Soul classics. ‘Harlem Shuffle’ by Bob and Earl struck up. Mick dragged the five of us on to the dance floor, where we shimmied in a tight circle. I don’t dance much myself – can’t be doing with it – but that night I was up for it. Wild, extravagant dancing. I also dance a lot with my face once I get started, and the girls found it hilarious if no one else in the club did. I don’t know what the funky chicken is exactly, but I recall I did that, too.

  I remember Charlie digging out some old records of Sheila’s when she was sixteen. Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, The Temptations. She played them at full belt, amazed that her parents had some of this stuff. She had a boyfriend at school who was into retrospectives. For about two days Sheila and I zoomed up in her estimation, and she began asking us about when we were courting (courting, who uses that expression nowadays? Sometimes I feel about as contemporary as Thomas De Quincey.).

  But Mick was the Soul Man, and I loved to watch him dance. For such a fat bastard, he was an ace dancer. In fact he could have danced a professional off the mat. Turn down the lights, pump up the Soul music, and this slob, this lard-machine, this pink-faced blubber-bank was fluid and light and graceful on his feet. He was Nijinsky. Women who wouldn’t normally look twice at him always wanted to dance with him when they saw what he could do, but he always preferred to dance alone. He would attract small crowds who would gather round and egg him on. Just as they did in the Blue Valentine that night.

  A couple of times I glanced up at the female silhouette ghosting the dais behind the turntables. Mae-Lin had clocked Mick but was pretending not to have; though what with the commotion he was making on the dance floor she couldn’t miss him. I saw her gazing at him when his back was turned. Once I saw them make eye contact briefly, and I could have kicked myself for having missed it, but I suddenly realised she was communicating with him through her choice of music. I thought back over the last two or three discs. ‘Stand By Me’, ‘Respect’, ‘Reach Out’; the hits kept talking over the music.

  But I could never have anticipated what happened next.

  Mae-Lin locked down the mood and tempo by playing a slow number, and stepped down from the dais. Tall, statuesque and beautiful, bathed in rippling blue light, she gazed directly at Mick. He was across the dance floor, looking back at her. Some of the clubbers were already drifting off the dance floor as reverberating electric organ chords counted in the storming power vocals of Percy Sledge, giving it all he’s got on ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’.

  I was mesmerised just watching them. Mick stroked his chin as he decided what to do next. Before the first few bars of the song were up he glanced over at me. I made the minimal gesture of nodding my head towards Mae-Lin. It was what he needed.

  With his big bear arms hanging limply at his side he moved slowly across the dance floor. The remaining dancers parted for him, pure choreography. His face was orange and black shadow in the ultraviolet light. His brilliant white T-shirt was all I could see of his torso, and he appeared to glide towards her, like a spirit. On reaching her, he swept her up. I saw her long arms clasp about his neck, and then I felt someone tugging at my own elbow, breaking the spell of a moment, a crystallised breath of unlimited grace, an instant of weightlessness.

  It was Air, one of the bar girls we had brought along with us. She was smiling. ‘Hey! Me think your friend love her long time!’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

  I don’t know what happened after that, and I never did ask Mick. I don’t need to know. It’s not important. I left the Blue Valentine, alone. I didn’t want to cramp his style or make him think he was being watched, or judged. His business.

  Even though we were going to have to make an early start, I wasn’t in the mood for sleeping. I got a tuk-tuk driver to take me across the Nawarat Bridge. There was a place I liked there on the riverfront, a short stretch of green grass on the embankment, a place where lovers and small groups of young people sat quietly in the haze and the relative cool of the night, right through to the small hours. The river was illumined by the lights on the bridge, and giant white moths flitted back and forth in the light. The colour of the night was oyster and sage.

  After a while, Mae-Lin and Mick strolled by, hand in hand. They were deep in conversation, and Mick was fingering the new amulet at his neck. I shrank into the shadows so they wouldn’t see me as they passed by. The air around them seemed to quiver. They passed into the haze leaving tiny ripples of light in their wake. I blinked. I wasn’t certain if it really was them, or just an hallucination of them. The moment was so singular and beautiful I had the feeling that every pair of lovers of every time must have strolled that embankment, that it was a place out of time.

  After they’d gone I sat there for an age, smoking cigarettes, watching the river, listening to it flow.

  19

  After three gruelling hours of it we got them to stop. Salt stung my eyes and my T-shirt was puddled around my midriff. I’d bought new training shoes in the Chiang Mai market, and they’d rubbed my toes into blisters. Mick slumped between spare clumps of parched, spiky grass and took out his water bottle. In his safari hat he looked like a game hunter from the old movies: the fat one who dies early so the plot can gather pace.

  ‘Little.’ Coconut jabbed a finger at Mick’s bottle. ‘Only little.’

  Phil leaned against a tree, fanning himself with a wide-brimmed straw hat he’d also bought i
n the night market. Bhun squatted, sullenly smoking a cigarette. Our guides didn’t have new training shoes. They wore cheap plastic flip-flop sandals. I’d assumed from this that the terrain wouldn’t be too challenging, and I’d been horribly wrong.

  We’d been driven up into the mountains in the back of a jolting songthaew truck stinking of diesel fuel, and where the red-soil winding road was too dusty we had the neckbands of our T-shirts hoicked up around our noses. It was a relief when the road ran out and we could get out of the choking, sweltering truck. Coconut took front position, followed by me, Phil and Mick. Bhun brought up the rear. I noticed that both our guides had a long-bladed knife, something between a commando knife and a machete, stuck in their belts. Our path continued steadily upwards, ascending towards the unblinking eye of the noonday sun.

  My first impression of the land was of scrub and red soil, and it was not until we got into the tree line that I realised why the road had run out. The terrain had become pleated in a succession of high peaks and deep ravines. We had to hike up testing inclines and then down the sides of steep ravines. The path down was the most punishing, ramming the ball of the knee into the socket with piston-hard slaps, twanging the ligaments.

  Coconut and Bhun didn’t speak. Mick made a bid for a jocular mood, but they weren’t having any of it. Then as Mick’s lungs began to strain against the incline, he too became silent. The sun thrummed through a thick, soupy haze which protected us from its furnace but which made the warm air unpleasantly moist. My own T-shirt felt like an eelskin vest while Phil, incredibly, was still wearing one of his white polyester Sunday-school shirts, and it was so wet I could see through it to his white, rather pudgy body.

  Now, as we slumped in the heat sipping water, and as Phil leaned his frame against the tree, I noticed a row of rat-sized red ants diverting from their path down a slender tree branch to creep across his shirt. I thought about not letting on, but when I did he hopped about like someone with a Roman candle in his pants, making that peculiar shuddering noise you equate with extreme cold. It gave the guides a laugh, anyway.

  Meanwhile Mick and I sat on limestone rocks, oozing yeasty, beery sweat and recovering our breath. The two guides stubbed out their cigarettes, hauling their packs, ready to go. Mick cursed under his breath and glugged more water.

  I decided to take control. ‘No!’ I barked. It came out a bit Germanic, but it had the desired effect.

  Coconut stood over me. ‘We go. Must reach number one village ‘fore nightfall. We go now.’

  We were told it would take us two and a half days of solid trekking to reach the village where Claire Marchant had stolen Charlie’s passport. The plan was to spend nights in the hill tribe villages along the way. There was no other possibility than to trust the guides absolutely, but I felt the need to pretend to be in control of events. I heard myself falling into a ridiculous pidgin English. ‘One more cigarette-time. Then go chop-chop.’ I lit up another snout to show I wasn’t moving. Coconut shook his head in disgust. Bhun appeared indifferent.

  Mick wore his infuriating broad smile. His snooker smile. ‘Where did you study guide talk?’ he wanted to know. ‘Was it in The Rover and Wizard?’

  Even Phil, too young to remember these comics, found that amusing. Phil had this rarely demonstrated but irritating little laugh, halfway between a cough and a snigger. ‘Himsay me top-banana fella!’

  I was shocked. ‘What’s this? A sense of humour, Phil? I think I prefer it when you’re a sack of misery.’

  ‘Lighten up!’ went Mick, and the bastard actually clapped Phil on the back.

  When I was ready I scrambled to my feet, slung my pack on my back and looked like business. I jabbed a finger at Coconut. ‘You boss-man. We go now.’

  Coconut glanced over at Bhun, his lip twisted into a scowl.

  ‘Did you see that?’ I said to Mick when we were underway again.

  ‘Yeah,’ Mick chirruped. ‘It was a look that said cunt.’

  For the next part of the journey I had to endure Mick parodying my pidgin English. ‘Oh! Many many big tree! Big fella him come here no-go chop-chop. Him fallee downee. Him say bye-bye! Him wannee drinkee plenty water me say no.’ And stuff like that. For about two hours.

  The two guides began talking across us, though Coconut, concerned about venomous snakes (he mentioned king cobras, and though we never saw one I did spot a luminous blue snake slipping quietly through the undergrowth), never took his eyes off the trail ahead. The vegetation altered and we were quickly enfolded in giant bamboo, banana stalks, royal palms and thorny liquorice. I knew the guides were discussing us, and it made me nervous. We’d placed ourselves in a dangerous position. They could easily slit our throats and take what money and documents we had with us. Up in the steaming jungle hills, no one would ever find us, or even care if they did.

  Back at the hotel we’d debated whether to bring our cash and passports. I wanted to leave most of it in the hotel safe, but Mick had read in a guide book about the unreliability of hotel safes in Thailand. No, he decided, it was safest strapped to his belly, and I didn’t argue. Though our guides didn’t know it, Mick was carrying his life savings in dollar notes, plus my cash and traveller’s cheques. I didn’t have a clue how much Mick’s savings amounted too, but judging by the tiny amount we were paying our guides, it was probably more than they could earn in twenty lifetimes. As for Phil, you could more easily take a strip of skin from his back than peel a note from his wallet, and I had no idea what he was carrying.

  Bhun, the quiet one, shouted something up the line that made Coconut cackle with laughter. Coconut looked back at Mick and I, and then at Bhun. Seeing our discomfort, he made to pacify us. ‘Sanuk,’ he said.

  ‘Sanuk,’ Bhun repeated, and they both laughed again. Their laughter ricocheted off the tall, thin trees about us.

  ‘Who are you calling a sanuk?’ Mick growled.

  ‘Only sanuk,’ Coconut said, moving off again. He withdrew his long blade from his belt and hacked at a creeper hanging in his way. ‘Fun.’

  The vegetation became a thick, dry and scrubby tangle fighting for growth between spindly grey tree trunks of astonishing height, canopy upon canopy. The trees were festooned with parched, creeping vines, sometimes so defoliated that the vines looked like trailing masses of electrical cable. Unlike the trees at home, there were no low branches, and where the trees did sprout it was with large, papery leaves of greens, russets and reds. The dusty path ahead was sprinkled with huge, crinkly desiccated leaves. The ground breathed back at us, dry and hot.

  I tell you this as if I was interested, when really my thoughts were on Charlie. When walking great distances the mind turns in on itself, and after a while fails to register the terrain ahead. I suppose this seems quite dangerous. Sometimes the path up or down the side of a steep ravine went perilously close to the edge: quite possible to miss a footing and to roll maybe two hundred feet through the brush before crashing into a tree. Perhaps the mind has a third eye which takes care of this while the brain is busy with other thoughts.

  I was trying to find a dividing line.

  There was a time when Charlie thought I was like a young God, and that I knew the answer to everything, and that I could protect her from any external threat, and that all things came within the compass of my powers. All fathers permit this illusion, basking in it somewhat, knowing that it won’t last for ever. It meant that I was a fixer. From when she was very small she was accustomed to asking me to fix broken toys, bicycles, equipment. That’s what I did. That’s what I was there for. I liked that. I liked being the fixer.

  But then one day I was a downright idiot, a peasant. I don’t know how it happened, but it seemed that overnight, maybe around the time that Charlie was twelve or thirteen, I’d gone from being the wonderful, all-powerful fixer to being a complete chump, with no transitional stage. From being the oracle of wisdom it seemed that now everything I had to say was pure tomfoolery, to be derided in that feminine way girls and women have of insul
ting you without it seeming – initially anyway – to bite.

  And while I was walking through the jungle with my head down I was trying to remember the exact day, the first time this happened. The dividing line. Maybe that’s what I was doing here: trying to be the fixer again.

  ‘Hey! Look at that!’ Mick cried

  We stopped dead in our tracks. Mick pointed at the gnarled branch of a tree. The tree itself was utterly without foliage, but arrayed along one of its rotting branches, high in the sky, were seven sweet waxy white flowers, like a constellation of stars burning brilliantly against the far-inferior sun.

  ‘Orchid,’ Bhun said, nodding his head. It was the first English word he’d uttered since we’d met him.

  ‘He fixes the stars in heaven,’ Phil murmured, almost inaudibly.

  ‘Now that’s a sight worth coming here for,’ Mick said.

  I wouldn’t have gone quite that far, and as I retorted something to that effect Bhun scrambled up the tree, his gymnasticism astounding, to pluck one of the orchids. When he dropped down again, he offered it to Mick.

  Mick made as if to eat it, and the guides laughed. Then he put it behind his ear, fluttering his eyelids and making coy, suggestive faces. The guides laughed some more. ‘Sanuk!’ they shouted. ‘You sanuk!’

  The tension between us eased somewhat. Mick began to point at some of the strange fruit we’d seen along the way.

  ‘Jackfruit,’ Bhun said.

  ‘Taste good?’

  Bhun didn’t understand, so Mick tried again, holding his fingers to his mouth. ‘Jackfruit. Him good eating?’

  I was glad to get my own back. ‘Him plenty-plenty good chop-chop.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Bombast and Denial,’ Phil said heavily. ‘You’re children. Both of you.’

  Late in the afternoon, exhausted and weary from the trail, we reached the first village where we were to overnight. The trees thinned as we dipped into a valley, and some of the area had been cleared for agriculture. On the valley floor in a natural basin clustered no more than fifteen huts. A dog barked in the village.