Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  When the time came for Coconut and Bhun to leave, I thought they were never actually going to get away. They were clearly suffering terribly and in a manner surprising to the three of us.

  ‘Are they going to fuck off, or what?’ Mick wondered aloud.

  ‘They’ve lost face,’ said Phil.

  I felt bitter. ‘They’re dumping us.’

  With their packs hoisted they spoke quietly to each other, now unwilling to meet our eyes. Then, in a gesture almost ceremonial in its execution, they took their long army knives out of their belts. I heard myself swallow. But each laid his knife flat across the palms of both hands, stepped forwards and offered them to us. ‘For cutting vines,’ Coconut said, his eyes slightly damp. ‘And trees. Take.’

  It was bewildering to have to guess whether they were leaving these as weapons for which we might have need or as tokens of apology for failing to see the journey through to its end. We hesitated before taking the blades. ‘When you want to come back, send word,’ Coconut said. ‘I will come here for you.’

  ‘Sure,’ Mick said. ‘We’ll call you on the telephone. Do we have your e-mail address? We’ll fucking well e-mail you.’

  Some of this sarcasm must have come across, because Coconut said, ‘Send word: Coconut, Chiang Mai, come now. These people will pass message on, next village, next village, and I will come here.’

  I think he actually wanted to believe it himself. ‘Thank you, both of you,’ I said, though I didn’t feel it. They waid us, and we made Western handshakes, and then they turned and were gone. The Akha boy, who had watched all this – rather stupidly and with his mouth hanging open – turned to us and said, ‘Ha!’

  I was a bit anxious that they’d made a gift of those ferocious-looking blades. I’d taken one; Mick the other. After we’d got underway, with the knives tucked into our belts, I kept my hand hovering near it, waiting for bandits to leap out from the foliage at any moment. I heard skitters and movements on the parched jungle floor that had my fingers flexing around the teak handle. The landscape, too, with its red earth and glistening green vegetation reminded me of every unpleasant Vietnam movie I’d ever seen in my life.

  But nothing happened, and in a trek that went on for almost five hours we met no one except for the time when we passed through another very small Akha village, and where our boy guide sang out to everyone, apparently very proud of his lucrative responsibility for leading three ridiculous, sweating, pink-faced giants through the poppy fields.

  And the poppies there were growing in gay profusion. The previous opium crops we had seen were nothing more than allotments. Here, entire slopes were devoted to the bloom. I noticed that beans or some similar vegetable were grown between the plants, confusing the crop. White, red and purple flowers were spread over the green vegetation like the laundry, hung out to dry, of a convocation of priests. I noticed that many of the flowers were blown and beginning to drop their petals. Under the bright sunlight, the flowers gleamed waxy, an hallucination of the gardens of paradise.

  We walked through field after field. I wondered if it were possible to become drugged by mere proximity. Though I tried to make a mental note of the route, and the position of the sun, it was hopeless. We walked along intersecting pathways, and we followed narrow animal trails, and we walked through stretches of pink-leafed jungle where there was no trail whatsoever. I would have had no idea how to return to the Akha village even if I’d wanted to.

  ‘Earlier I asked you how your legs were,’ I said to Phil along the way. ‘I’d appreciate a straight answer.’

  ‘My legs are fine. Thanks for your concern. How’s your leech bite?’

  ‘Fine. It’s fine.’

  I gave up. Thank you for your concern? Where did this incredible formality come from? I’d never before realised how impeccable good manners were just a mask for hostility. Every time I tried to get past Phil’s riddles and his double talk he shrank back into a language as exact as a cube of ice.

  We heard the village before we saw it. At first we were confused, because even though there was no possibility of electrical power in this place, what we were hearing sounded like a massively amplified radio; or rather some kind of singing which was certainly not like the Thai music we’d heard in Chiang Mai. It was a male voice, swooping and reverberating and booming. I don’t know if it was meant to intimidate, but it succeeded. My guts churned.

  With the hills rising steeply on all sides, the boy led us into a natural basin. The slopes had been cleared of trees for farming, and a mist shrouded the remaining vegetation. Bamboo huts huddled on the valley floor, close together but in two separate clusters, and even as we approached I could see that the construction varied from those we’d seen before. The roofs were made from some giant, parched leaf, and all the huts were built on very short stilts.

  From these details I’d already guessed that this was not an Akha village, and I sensed the nervousness of the boy guide as we went towards the nearest cluster of huts. I can’t remember what I was feeling as we crossed those last few hundred yards. In any event, all detail of those moments prior to entering the settlement has been swamped by what followed, for it was here, in this unprepossessing village, that I was to find my daughter, Charlie.

  23

  Charlie Charlie Charlie. My wonder-girl, my daughter-in-flight, the little fist enfolding my heart the moment she entered my life, my beacon, the silk flag of my love for all that is good in a bad world.

  I’d found her.

  What happened in those eerie moments of our entry into that village is torched into my memory. The sun in the sky became over-charged with energy and everything seemed to take place under a white light of strontium intensity. That strange rising and falling music, broadcast from within the village, amplified and slowed.

  First a dog started to bark at our approach. As it leapt at us our Akha boy guide slapped it down with his bamboo staff. The dog yelped and the commotion summoned a man from within the cluster of huts. Stripped to the waist, he wore a pair of baggy trousers pegged halfway down the calf muscles. He carried some sort of gardening adze. On seeing us, he stopped dead. My impression was one of seeing a man witnessing a supernatural phenomenon: Mick, Phil and I might have been ghosts.

  The Akha boy stepped forward, speaking rapidly in a tongue which was not Thai, although I heard the word farang two or three times as the boy motioned towards us. The man pointed inside the village with his adze. At last he swung his shoulders away from us, indicating that we should follow.

  We passed the shadowy entrances to a number of huts. Three or four women squatted around a patch of canvas spread on the floor outside one of the huts, preparing tumorous green vegetables. Without interrupting their work they watched us go by.

  The man with the adze stepped inside a darkened hut, and, sensing something momentous, I squeezed my way in front of the boy, anxious to be next. A single candle flame burned inside, barely affording us enough light to see the figure, eyes closed, seated in the cross-legged lotus position on the bamboo pallet at the back of the hut. There was a yeasty odour in the hut. My stomach squeezed. Weird music vibrated the air. I let the backpack slip from my shoulders and kneeled beside the pallet.

  ‘Charlotte,’ I said. ‘Charlotte.’

  She was thin, gaunt even, but by the light of the single candle flame I didn’t think she looked so terrible. Her eyes flickered open, and flared with recognition. Very softly, almost inaudibly, she said, ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Yes. It’s me.’

  ‘I knew you were coming. I just knew.’

  Then I said, and I don’t know why, ‘I’m the postman of Porlot.’

  ‘Daddy, it’s Porlock. And not a postman at all.’ Then she yawned, broke the lotus position to stretch out on the pallet, and closed her eyes. Her breathing changed. She seemed to have gone to sleep.

  I felt Mick and Phil pressing behind me. ‘Is it her?’ they said. ‘Is it?’

  My hands were shaking. Not just trembling, but shuddering
and jolting. My teeth chattered. I couldn’t manage an answer. Phil tenderly linked his arm in mine, and Mick on the other side did the same. ‘Easy,’ Mick whispered, ‘easy.’

  I calmed a little, and releasing them I spread myself on the bed beside Charlotte. I held her head on my shoulder, hugging her, and the very first thing I did was to smell her hair. I knew exactly what I was after. That scent; that pure charge; the love amalgam and the herald note from Day One, sealed in under the fontanelle; the perfume of heaven. I inhaled her. I opened my nostrils to it, and I got that hit. I absolutely got it.

  I lay there, still trembling but experiencing a voiding of relief and exoneration. I’d found her. I could take her home. We could all go home.

  Or so it seemed.

  I don’t know how long I lay there, but when I’d recovered, I soon discovered that Charlie was not merely asleep. I’d been deceived by that moment when I found her sitting upright and she’d spoken to me very softly. I tried shaking her, patting her face, pinching her. I was alone in the hut with her: the others had stepped outside when they’d seen me climb on the pallet.

  ‘Mick! Where are you, Mick?’

  He quickly appeared in the doorway.

  ‘I can’t wake her, Mick!’

  Mick came over and put a hand on her forehead. Then he rolled back the skin of her eyelid with his thumb. Her eyeball had almost disappeared. He sneezed, twice. ‘Is she doped up?’

  I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t really know what doped up looked like. I glanced around. There was a bowl of water beside her, the single candle, and an earthenware jar in which three flower heads floated in fetid water – perhaps the source of the bad odour. I was looking for a long pipe and a box of matches, or even a syringe – hell, anything. But there was no sign of drugs paraphernalia of any kind.

  ‘Help me get her up and out of here,’ I said to Mick. ‘Get Phil.’

  ‘Just a second, Danny. Let’s take stock of the situation.’

  I looked at his big face, orange in the candlelight. He was sweating profusely.

  ‘What do you mean, take stock? She needs attention. We get her back to Chiang Mai and on a plane to England, it’s as simple as that.’

  ‘Simple as that,’ said Mick.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Come outside a minute,’ Mick said firmly. I was still holding Charlie’s hand. ‘Let go of her. She’s been here for some time and she’s not going anywhere just yet. Come outside.’

  Reluctantly I released Charlie’s hand and followed Mick. Outside the hut, it appeared that the entire village had gathered. They were huddled seven or eight yards from the door of the hut itself. They were a pretty sullen bunch. Only the man who had led us there – the one with the adze – was chattering happily, seeming to have earned some status in having been the first to encounter us.

  Phil sat on the slatted porch of the hut, hunched over, fingering his pocket Bible.

  ‘You’ve been in there for over an hour,’ Mick said. This didn’t seem right, but I took him at his word. ‘While you were in there I tried this.’

  Mick approached the huddle of villagers, toothless old men, other men with loose turbans and machetes in their belts, women with suckling babies. He displayed several banknotes prominently, waving them in the air. ‘Bhat,’ Mick said loudly. ‘Dollars.’ He fanned the notes like a deck of cards to advertise their bounty. ‘Chiang Mai. Guide. Chiang Mai. Yes?’

  The villagers gazed blankly at him. He approached one of the stronger-looking men, waving the money under his nose. ‘Chiang Mai? Yes? Good?’ The man retreated a yard. Another responded similarly.

  Mick came back, tugging his pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. He gave one to me. He sneezed again, and wiped snot from his nose with the ball of his thumb. I noticed his eyes looked red and sore. ‘You see, I already tried to take things in hand. Thought I’d set it up while you were in there. This is the reaction I got.’

  ‘Where’s the kid? The one who got us here.’

  ‘Gone,’ Phil put in. ‘Long gone.’

  ‘They said something to him and he fucked off, pretty quick,’ Mick told me. ‘Now, I’m all for carrying Charlie out of here, carrying her on my back if necessary. But would you remember which way we came?’

  Remember which way we came? I don’t think, at that point, I could have found my way even to the edge of this thirty-hut village. But somehow the import of this still managed to escape me. I’d found my daughter, that was the material thing. Everything else was just logistics. Like Mick, I was prepared to carry her out if that was what was required.

  The audience of villagers, bored now with the performance, began to drift away.

  ‘Stretcher her out,’ I said. ‘We make a stretcher from bamboo, and we carry her. No problem.’

  Mick shook his head and ground his cigarette into the earth.

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘What’s to think about? Let’s do it!’

  ‘Danny, it took us about five hours to reach here from the last Akha village. Fast trekking. Carrying a stretcher between us, you can calculate twice that long; and that assumes we know where to go.’

  ‘We’ll make it, eh Phil?’

  ‘Listen to him, Father,’ Phil said, suddenly sharp with me. ‘You haven’t taken in a word of what Mick is saying.’

  ‘I’ve had time to have a look at this, Danny: we’ve got no food with us; we’ve got little water; we’ve got no map; and at the moment we’ve got no guide.’

  ‘We’ll retrace our steps.’

  ‘Retrace? Danny, this is NOT AN EVENING’S STROLL DOWN TO THE PUB!’

  ‘I know what it is! I know we—’

  ‘Danny, shut up and listen! You never fucking listen! Never! Why don’t you ever fucking listen! This is the jungle! We’re in the jungle! We’ve got a sick woman to carry out of the jungle!’

  ‘Keep your hair on!’

  ‘You keep your fucking hair on! This needs some thought. We sit down and we think this through. There’s about two hours left before it starts to get dark, so that means we ain’t going anywhere tonight.’

  For a moment, in a kind of delirium and in a knock of blood in the brain, I saw Mick and Phil as just further obstacles in my way to getting Charlie out of this place. If they wouldn’t help me, I told myself, then I’d do it alone. I walked back inside the darkened hut, shook Charlie in frustration but to no visible effect, and then came out again. Of the villagers, only one old woman remained behind to watch us, a toothless hag with sugary black eyes. The sky tilted savagely again as I realised that Mick’s logic was inescapable. I was going to have to accept an overnight stay in the village before getting Charlie away.

  The old woman waddled up to me, pointing at the hut, smacking her lips. She had something in her hand for me. It was yet another wedge of the blasted opium. In my anger and impotence I slapped it out of her hand.

  The old woman seemed unfazed. With a hand supporting her creaking old back, she leaned down and with spindly, leathery fingers plucked the opium out of the red dust. Then she turned back to me.

  ‘Booooo!’ she said before hobbling away. ‘Boooooooooooo!’

  The three of us settled in Charlie’s hut. If there was any permission to be had, I didn’t know where it was coming from. I didn’t much care; all I wanted to do was tend to Charlie.

  I’d tried to deny it at first, but she was in pretty poor shape. The first thing I wanted to do was to wash her from head to toe. Phil helped me. She wore nothing but shorts and a rancid T-shirt, and when we stripped them off I realised she was developing one or two bed sores. Though a little emaciated, she was not starving, and apart from the chafing sores her skin was not in bad condition, so I concluded that the villagers had been looking after her. Someone had to maintain the candle, and put the flowers and water there.

  Phil soaked a flannel towel and proceeded to dab her. Mick had some antiseptic cream which he gingerly massaged into her bed sores. He w
asn’t looking too good himself: he was sneezing and he was exhausted. Don’t fall ill on me now, Mick, was my selfish thought. When we’d done everything we could for Charlie, I suggested to Mick that he lie down, take a breather while I looked for something to eat. I was only a little surprised when he acceded.

  I tried to raise his spirits by mentioning the word beer. It had worked in the Lisu village, but I knew that here things were going to be different. Up until now, all our needs had been attended to by the presence of guides. I had a few bhat in my pocket, and I stepped outside to see what currency it might have.

  The heat of the day was locked into the red earth, but the cooling air had a syrupy quality. Strange music was still emanating from the centre of the village, so I headed towards it. There was little activity going on. I sensed people inside the stilted huts as I passed by cautiously. Pots boiled outside unattended. Black pigs and scrawny chickens snuffled and scratched at the baked earth. Dogs lay quiet in the late afternoon shade.

  I reached the source of the music. A dust-clogged old Hitachi radio set was placed on a rickety table in the centre of the village like a sacred totem, and it was belting out loud ethnic music. Long thick cable trailed from the back of the radio set, and between the swells in the music I could hear, from somewhere, the tick and wheeze of a tiny generator. I followed the cable to the generator, which was actually stationed inside a small and otherwise unoccupied hut. It was a pretty old Honda IKVA petrol-powered contraption, though it appeared to be ticking over effectively.

  The generator was screened off from the rest of the hut, but there was a gap in the bamboo screen at the rear. Passing through the gap I was surprised to find that the rest of the hut contained numerous identical large cardboard boxes neatly stacked one upon the other. The boxes, and there must have been four dozen of them, were sealed. I ran my finger along one of the seals. There was no way of telling what was inside the boxes.