Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  I returned to the radio set. It was broadcasting so loudly its blown speakers were fuzzing, not that anyone seemed to be taking much notice. It was from there, at one side of the cleared area, that I noticed a striking and peculiar structure.

  It was a crudely constructed arch, or perhaps more accurately a pergola, though it was not erected for trailing leafy plants. Nonetheless, it was still some kind of gateway, with uprights and crossbeams, but with each of the uprights fenced off to create a clear pathway. What really drew my attention was the cluster of objects in the fenced-off areas either side of the pathway.

  There were numerous carvings, crudely executed, of human figures. On closer inspection I saw that some of the carvings were no more than tree trunks, or tree branches inverted so as to resemble a pair of open legs. What made me gasp slightly were the huge, erect penises, carved naturally from the grainy wood or grafted on. There were five such ‘men’, all with boastful and healthy-looking bulbously erect pricks.

  They had their mates, too. Laid out in the dust were several female forms. The tree artist had carefully selected suitably thigh-like tree forks, suggestively bent at the knee, carved vulvas prominently displayed. Each carving had a pleasantly rounded belly, neatly smoothed by the artisan, and an attractive navel. Some of the figures ended just above the waist; others extended to a carved head, disproportionately small, concave and crudely representational.

  I leaned over to stroke one of the supine figures, but with my fingers inches from the smoothed wood I was arrested in the act by a small child pulling at my sleeve. Highly agitated, he flapped his free hand at the carvings. He was afraid, telling me not to touch. Evidently I’d just been saved from breaching tribal taboo.

  The boy was still shouting at me in a distraught fashion. Unnerved, I went back to Charlie’s hut without having accomplished my errand. When I got there I found Mick asleep and Charlie awake. She was sitting upright and was being fed by the old woman from whose hands I’d swatted the opium. The crone scowled at me as I entered the hut.

  Phil looked at me and shrugged.

  24

  A long dark night lay ahead of me. On returning to the hut to find the old woman dribbling broth into Charlie’s mouth, I’d naturally attempted to speak to Charlie. But this time there was no recognition; no ‘Daddy’ as in the first moment of our arrival; no banter about the Postman of Porlock or whatever; nothing, not a flicker of interest. She gulped the soup and failed to respond to anything I put to her. Meanwhile the old woman watched me with critical eyes, and with her lips pursed in what I took to be the suppression of a smile.

  ‘Has she said anything to you?’ I asked Phil.

  ‘Nothing.’

  But she’d been sitting upright, waiting for me when I entered the hut. Expecting me. Both Mick and Phil looked sceptical when I told them this. I began to doubt it myself. Almost as if our brief conversation had taken place in some imagined or telepathic universe. My sense of what was real and what wasn’t real in this place was already becoming unthreaded.

  When I gave up trying to communicate with Charlie, the old woman nodded. She shuffled forward, once again producing opium from the folds of her gown. With it this time came a small ceramic pipe and a box of matches. She jabbed her finger at Charlie.

  ‘No,’ I said firmly.

  The old woman shrugged, and put the things away.

  I knew that if Charlie was addicted then she was going to have a craving. But I had no way of determining whether her current condition was attributable to the opium or to some other condition. All I could do at that moment was to withdraw the drug and see what happened.

  ‘The old woman’s intentions are benign,’ Phil said, reading my thoughts. ‘She’s obviously been the one looking after Charlie, feeding her, tending to her. Opium is probably the only medicine available to these people.’

  I knew he was right. I had to accept that this feeble old matriarch was not the pusher at the school gates.

  ‘Pipe,’ Charlie said in a whisper.

  The old woman looked hard at me, as if to say, what can I do? Her face was simian, very old, and yet her skin was oddly smooth. I couldn’t tell if she was prematurely old or immortally young. Except, perhaps, that her eyes gave it away. They were oddly translucent, like cellophane, as if burned out from staring at the sun. It made her seem other-worldly, shamanic.

  She tried to tell me something about Charlie. She stroked her own shoulders and gestured outside the hut, maybe at the sky; she made utterly impenetrable signals. It was hopeless. She gave up, but with a cruel smile.

  When we’d settled the matter of the opium, that Charlie wasn’t going to be given any while I was there, I tried to make the old woman understand that we would want something to eat. I pointed at Mick’s sleeping form; I pointed at my own yawning mouth. I made eating gestures. I then produced a few bhat from my pocket.

  She reached out for the bhat, and swatted the money clean out of my hand, just as I had done earlier with her opium. She fixed her perplexing gaze on me.

  The money lay on the floor between us. ‘You’ve made your point,’ I said.

  She wrinkled her nose, not understanding.

  ‘Boooo!’ I said, and she seemed happier with that. She left the hut.

  She returned with a large bowl of soup and noodles, and three spoons. I woke Mick, but he groaned and declined to have any, said he couldn’t face it; he went back to sleep immediately. The soup was thin and greasy, but it contained some aromatic spice which reminded me of sage and onion, and of home. Phil and I supped in silence.

  Later I tried to sleep but it was hopeless. My brain was firing on every cylinder, all smoke and no traction. I’d found Charlie, and yet I hadn’t. I was ready to take her home and yet I couldn’t. I lay on the pallet next to her, holding her foot while she slept. I don’t know why I held her foot. It was a part of her that wasn’t sore, but it was almost as if she’d jumped into another world, another dimension full of tormenting spirits and wild-eyed demons, and there I was holding her by the ankle, trying to drag her back into this world.

  In the night she and I actually had a conversation. It went like this:

  ‘Pipe.’

  ‘No, Charlie. No more pipe.’

  ‘Is that you again, Dad?’

  ‘It’s me darlin’. It’s me.’

  ‘You keep coming and going, Dad. Where’s Mum?’

  ‘I’m here for you now.’

  ‘Why are you holding my foot?’

  ‘To stop you from falling.’

  ‘Is it a long way down? Oh, I think it must be.’

  ‘I’ve got you, my baby.’

  And with that she slept. Later in the night she got up and with painful steps made her way to a pan in the corner of the hut. I helped her like I did when she was two years old, holding her over the potty. Then she stumbled back to her bed.

  Phil snored and twitched in his sleep through all of this. I tried hard to sleep myself but I lay awake, staring at the ceiling made of dried tobacco leaves the size of dinner plates. I sipped water. I got up to check on the snoring Mick. I placed my hand on his forehead: he had a raging temperature. I emptied my pack looking for aspirin in case he woke. I found the book I’d brought with me but which I’d forgotten, the Thomas De Quincey, which I’d failed to make much sense of earlier.

  My mind was racing feverishly. I tried calming myself by reading a bit more by the tiny light still burning, in the useless hope that its long-winded rhythms might slow my own hurtling thoughts and send me off to sleep. I supposed that De Quincey used to sit up writing by candlelight, which couldn’t have been good for his eyes. Then again, I suppose if you’re a laudanum hop-head, you don’t give much of a damn about the state of your vision.

  But in that tiny globe of light and lying there beside Charlie, I read a very strange thing. De Quincey was talking about the druggist in Oxford Street who sold him his very first opium, and he suggested that the man, the druggist, may not have been of earthly origin. I k
now how crazy that must sound, and of course it is crazy, but I report it here because at the time of reading it both unnerved and impressed me. De Quincey said that he often went back to the same spot in Oxford Street to look for the shop, but he could find neither it nor the druggist who’d dispensed his first opium. It was almost as if, De Quincey suggested, that the druggist, having completed his mission, had absconded to another world.

  It was minded of the strange things Decker had told me about this place. Perhaps it was because I was reading through the graveyard hours, and my mood was unspeakably low and confused. Or maybe it was because the night air still had a syrupy tang and I was conscious of being surrounded by acres and acres of opium poppies exhaling sweetly in the night. But I felt at that moment it was entirely possible that there might be a spirit of the opium, at large, roaming out there in the dark, looking for converts, searching out victims in the form of disciples, followers, supporters, benefactors.

  I put the book aside. I suppose I’d still been reading with the aim of getting some sort of insight into what was going on in Charlie’s head. I hoped it would tell me what would make an intelligent young woman want to live her life with this monkey on her back.

  I could understand some of these jungle people smoking the stuff. What else was there to do round here? But Charlie had all the entertainments, distractions and accoutrements of modern life right at her fingertips. Pubs. Theatres. Concerts. The usual blizzard of consumer goods. Cinema. Television. Well, not television; sometimes the thought of watching yet another night’s television has been enough to make even me want to turn to drugs. But the other things.

  I thought about that for a while. Why did that list sound so distressingly inadequate? Sometimes I hate the sound of my own voice, and even the insidious whispering of my own thoughts. Theatre? Fucking hypocrite! There were two theatres in my town, and I’d never been to one of them in my life. Cinema? The last time Sheila and I went to the cinema they still had something called an intermission and a lady with ice creams on a tray. Shopping I detest, especially in the malls and the megastores. As for pubs, I could have slaked a beer, but I didn’t need the fake Regency decor or the horse brasses or the brewery’s shabby themed ambience. Or the quiz. God help us, there was the quiz. No, there were big questions forming about the nature and purpose of life itself. Questions that wouldn’t go down well in the Clipper on a Tuesday night.

  I tried to remember what I was doing with my ‘leisure time’ when I heard about Charlie. That was it, I was trying to assemble flatpack furniture. The tiny candle flame, the only light in the hut, wavered at the thought of the world’s flatpack furniture. It was late, and I was dispirited. Drugs were beginning to have some sort of a case.

  The next morning I prowled the village, looking for material with which I might improvise a stretcher. I would be put to assemble a flatpack again, but the task had been complicated by the events of the night. Mick’s condition had not improved. He was running a fever, and though we’d dosed him with aspirin it was apparent we would not be going anywhere for some time. Phil and I had to help him out of the hut to the bamboo outhouse, and stand nearby as he groaned his way through a dreadful example of the squits.

  ‘Hold him up!’ I shouted at Phil.

  ‘I am holding him up! It’s your end that’s falling down!’

  It was true. Mick was a dead weight, and as I felt myself dropping him my natural instinct was to blame Phil. The fact is, Phil was surprisingly strong and, though I didn’t tell him so, I couldn’t have managed the job without him.

  Mick was shivering wildly when we shouldered him back inside the hut. We laid him down on his bed and, wiping the perspiration from my brow, I turned to Phil. I looked at him and he returned a gaze of irritating soulfulness. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing.’ I didn’t want to say anything. When you’re at work, on a job and after lifting something heavy with another bloke, you maybe make the briefest eye contact, possibly offer a fractional nod in recognition of what you’ve just accomplished together, which is all I wanted from Phil. Thanks; good; done it; whatever. But no. I get this big beady-eyed spiritual gaze, like I should write a poem or a seven-verse folk song for him about us taking Mick out for a crap. He was driving me to distraction, so he was.

  After Mick had drifted off to sleep, and with Charlie also out for the count, I had to do something to stop myself from going mad. Constructing a stretcher, I thought, would at least afford me a practical method of working towards finding our way out of this place. I left Phil with the sleeping casualties.

  I had the long knife Coconut had given me, and I thought it might come in handy. I’d found a bit of trellis leaning against one of the huts. I didn’t know who it belonged to but I took it anyway. It would form the basis of my stretcher, though I needed to fashion a pair of long handles at each end of the thing if we weren’t going to shuffle our way through the jungle an inch at a time. My search took me to the far edge of the village, and it was there I realised why the place seemed so empty. Most of the villagers were out working the slopes.

  And the entire slopes on that side of the village, acre upon acre, were flush with the waxy, ecclesiastical colours of the opium poppy.

  The flowers were blowing. Giant petals, like radiant parachute silks, trailed across the fields. It was a beautiful morning. In the sunlit haze of the daybreak the villagers wore their vibrant ethnic dress. They crouched at the poppy heads, moving backwards through the plants, bobbing, settling at a poppy head, and retreating, like bees working the flowers for nectar. The sky flaked gold. The villagers, aware of me watching them, were not at all distracted from their work.

  There were no suitable trees around for me to cut for my stretcher handles, so I retraced my steps. Back in the cleared area in the midst of the village, the totem radio sat proudly on its rickety table, though it had ceased broadcasting some time in the night when the generator had been shut down. I decided to check out the generator hut again.

  As I’d feared, there was nothing inside I could use. I looked over the big, neatly stacked pile of cardboard boxes at the rear of the hut, intrigued about what might be inside them.

  I checked the doorway of the hut, from where I could scan the cleared area of the village. There was no one about. If any of the villagers were lurking inside their huts it was doubtful that they could see into the shadows of the generator hut. I hesitated for a moment and then ducked back inside.

  The cardboard boxes were well sealed. I had to wrestle one down to the floor before I could open it. I tried to slide my blade under the masking tape sealing the boxes, so that I could quickly reseal the box after I’d had a peep inside; but the blade was too thick and I couldn’t get under the tape without gouging the cardboard. Instead I decided to slit the tape at the joint of the flaps; afterwards I could put the box underneath some of the others to disguise it.

  I scored the blade along the sealed joint, and the box popped open. I heard a light scuffle outside the hut. I waited, holding my breath. It was nothing. I checked at the door again, but the clearing was deserted, silent.

  I returned to the box to open the flaps. The perspiration from my brow was running into my eyes, and I had to stop to wipe my forehead with my T-shirt. Inside the open box were a number of smaller white cartons, each quite heavy. It was a tricky business extricating one of the white cartons, so tightly packed were they, but at last I managed to inch one of them out. Inside the carton were six brown bottles.

  Each bottle was labelled Calpol.

  I unscrewed the cap of one. It was Calpol all right. The same sticky, pink paediatric medicine used every night at home by millions of mothers to soothe their children’s coughs, colds and other complaints. I thought of millions of infants in their urban homes at night, dreaming their Calpol dreams. But I couldn’t understand what this massive consignment of the stuff was doing here. I pulled down another box, slit it open and took out another white carton. More Calpol.

  ‘Find anything int
eresting?’

  I turned round quickly.

  It was a Thai male, a man about my own age. In contrast to the villagers he was dressed in Western T-shirt and camouflage shorts. He leaned casually against the frame of the door, an expression of amusement on his face, but his eyes were cold. I noticed a revolver in a leather holster on his belt.

  I’d been caught red-faced and sticky-fingered, and I couldn’t think of a word to say.

  He came forward, extending a hand that wanted shaking. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Jack.’

  25

  The man who called himself Jack beckoned for me to follow him out of the hut. He didn’t seem unduly worried that I’d been caught sniffing around the consignment of Calpol. It was of no consequence. He led me through the huts, his leather gun holster creaking slightly as we walked, towards the slopes where the villagers were harvesting the poppies.

  ‘Let’s inspect the crop, shall we?’ he said. He might have been an English gentleman-farmer, holding his hands behind his back as he stepped up the slopes, hardly waiting for me to follow.

  Without interrupting their work the villagers were careful to acknowledge him, not with a wai but with a slight bow of the head. There were smiles, there were jokes. He was clearly respected by the villagers, though it was plain he was not of them.

  ‘We’re hoping for a good season,’ he said, his English impeccable.

  The villagers were engaged in two different types of activity, each involving a specialist tool. Most were collecting resin from the poppy heads with a curious crescent-shaped tool, its curve fitting snugly around the pod so that the opium latex could be scraped on to its pan. The others, mostly women, were incising fresh pods with a three-bladed pricking tool. I felt like a visitor from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. ‘Jack’ noticed me observing closely.

  ‘Ah! You like to look! Like to see what you can see? Eh?’

  If this was a reference to my earlier snooping I pretended it missed me. ‘Always.’