by Graham Joyce
‘I too. Perhaps we are similar chaps, you and I?’
I doubted it. No one I knew used the word ‘chaps’. I wondered where he’d learned to speak English and to stroll around with his hands stuffed behind his back. ‘I’m here about my daughter,’ I said.
‘I know that.’ He cut me off with a wave of his hand. ‘I know why you’re here. I know all about it.’ He stooped to pick up a lump of soil and he offered it to me. ‘Can you tell if this is good for the poppy, by looking at it? It needs to be rich in alkaline.’
He held out the lump of soil for so long that I was forced to take it from him. I crumbled it between my fingers. ‘I’m sure I’ve no idea.’
‘Then come with me.’
We pushed our way between a troop of workers and I saw that Jack was leading me towards a solitary figure bent over the pods on the upper slopes. ‘Why grow these beans between the poppies?’ I asked, genuinely curious.
He let a finger drift skywards. ‘To confuse the government spotter-planes.’
We reached the solitary worker, and a curious figure he was. Unguessably ancient with wisps of grey hair growing long from the back of his otherwise bald head, the man was not to be distracted from his work. He failed to acknowledge the presence of either of us. ‘This is Khiem,’ Jack said, laughing. ‘He’s angry with me because he says the incisions should be made in the midday heat. But I’m in a hurry to get as much done as I can today. Modern farming, what?’
Jack spoke to Khiem in a language which I didn’t think was Thai. Khiem slowly raised his head to stare at me with eyes as black and shining as the carapace of a beetle; and from beneath eyebrows of such steep, horseshoe curves I thought they must have been painted on. Khiem wore the hill tribe costume but it was gloriously decked out with poppy flowers. He’d woven the flowers into his belt, on his sleeves and had cross-patterned his tunic with them. He looked to me like a figure from a fairytale. He stooped and scooped up a lump of red soil, just as Jack had done earlier.
‘I asked him about the quality of the soil,’ Jack said confidentially.
Khiem balled the nugget of soil between his fingers, sniffed it and then took a bite from it. He swirled it about inside his mouth like a wine connoisseur over a glass of claret. But he didn’t spit it out. He appeared to swallow the soil before making some laconic remark to Jack. Then he returned to his work.
Jack looked at me obliquely. I was sure this little demonstration had some gnomic significance, but I couldn’t work out what it was. ‘Khiem,’ he said, ‘is the one who decides where to sow the crop. Which field. Which slope. He prefers these mountain hollows above the ridgelines. He says the soil is still as sweet as when he chose this spot. The people in this village think he is half man, half spirit. He’s a kind of sorcerer. Khiem is the true Lord of the Poppy.’
‘Even though you own the field, presumably.’
Though Khiem couldn’t possibly have understood our conversation, he turned from his labours and fixed me with such a penetrating gaze I wished I hadn’t made the remark. He jabbed a finger in my direction and spoke, animated and angry, to Jack. Some of the other workers a short distance away looked up from their labours.
‘He says the crop will be good if the Lord of the Moon is allowed to do his work. He says why don’t you take your daughter away from the village, so the Lord of the Moon can do his work?’
I was astonished, as much by the nature of this outburst as by the knowledge of my situation that it revealed. I was lost for words.
‘Come on,’ Jack said. ‘Let’s go.’
We walked back to the village. ‘How does he know who I am? What’s all this about the moon?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone in the village knows who you are.’
We arrived at one of the huts at the edge of the settlement. He motioned me to sit down at the long rustic table outside. If Jack was king of the heap, the heap didn’t seem to afford him many more luxuries than the rest of the villagers. Inside, however, I noticed three modern nylon backpacks. Jack went inside and unzipped one of them, returning with cigarettes and one other object. This object he placed at the far end of the long table.
It was a bottle. Not any old bottle, but an unopened bottle of Johnny Walker Scotch whisky. The amber liquid rippled with hue as it was struck by the strong sunlight. The light flared on the contours of the glass. Placed at the end of the table it was like an apparition, a mirage. I had to drag my eyes away from it.
Jack offered me a Western brand cigarette and seemed to forget about the whisky. He lit up, sat back, put his feet on the table and exhaled a thick, blue plume of tobacco smoke. ‘What you going to do about your daughter?’
‘I’m taking her home.’
‘How will you do that?’
‘I’ll carry her.’
‘Good luck.’
‘I have my friend and my son with me.’
‘Your friend is sick.’
‘He’ll get better. He’s strong.’
‘Which way you going to go?’
‘Chiang Mai.’
‘Sure. Which way is that?’
I made a general gesture. Something in that motion seemed to irritate Jack, because his pleasant demeanour seemed to switch in a fraction of a second. He leaned over the table and snarled, ‘You don’t even know what fucking country you are in!’
His eyes were frightening. Very cold. I did my best not to look intimidated. ‘I’ll get there.’
He smiled and leaned back, friendly again, puffing on his ciggie. ‘Seriously, which country are you in?’
‘Thailand?’
‘Ha! Dear boy, I was right. You don’t know.’
I tried to think how many times we’d crossed the river on our trek. ‘We’re not in Thailand?’
‘Well, you might have a point. See, some of these villagers argue about where the borders actually are. You might be in Myanmar – Burma to you. Or maybe these are Shan lands, and the Shan don’t respect the provisional borders. Either way, you don’t know where you are.’
‘Will you help me?’
‘Why the fuck should I help you, dear boy?’
‘Where did you learn to speak English?’
‘Charterhouse, actually.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘You haven’t heard of it? What sort of an Englishman are you? A lower-class one, obviously. I’m an old Carthusian. I was there for four years.’
‘Why only four years?’
‘Some local trouble here. Money ran out, temporarily. Only a liquidity problem but by the time my father could pay my fees again I’d decided that I hated it anyway. Why do you keep looking at that whisky?’
‘Do I?’
‘It’s as if you’re drawn to it. As if it has a grip on your soul, so to speak.’
‘I was thinking how much my friend would like a glass. He’s in poor shape. Glass of whisky would help set him up.’
‘Whisky is a rare commodity around here. Where you live, you can get the stuff in every corner shop. Rarity increases its market value, don’t you think?’
‘Would you mind telling me what that poppy man was saying about the moon?’
‘You should ask your daughter about that.’
‘I’m afraid she’s too out of her head on your dope to speak to me about anything.’
‘My dope? I don’t think that’s the case. Her condition has little to do with the small amount of opium she smokes. Most of the older people you see working in the fields smoke a little opium. They don’t lie in bed all day.’
‘Do you know what’s the matter with my daughter?’
He shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette in the red earth. ‘If you ask Khiem, he says that there’s an evil spirit hanging on to her. He says it lies in the hut with her, like a fat leech, or a vampire, draining off her life force. Khiem says it sucks her life essence through a hole in her big toe.’ He waved a hand through the air. ‘I don’t expect you to think much of Khiem’s diagnosis.’
‘A
nd what do you think of it?’
Jack stood up. The leather of his holster creaked again. ‘I think I’ve got one or two things to do. I think we’ll talk some more later. Take the whisky with you. But save a glass for me, won’t you?’ With that he strode off through the huts, to where the harvesters were still hard at work.
After he’d gone I vented a huge sigh. I’d been practically holding my breath throughout the encounter. The man terrified me.
I picked up the bottle and carried it rather self-consciously back to Charlie’s hut. I hadn’t got very far in my efforts to construct a stretcher, but at least I’d been given something that might put the sparkle back in Mick’s eyes. Meanwhile my head fizzed with questions about Jack the opium bandit. I knew he’d spent the last three quarters of an hour making an assessment of me, and had decided that I posed no threat. But I still had the feeling that while getting into this little kingdom of poppy cultivation had been relatively easy, getting out again was not going to prove quite so simple.
26
I was shocked, when I returned to the hut, to find Charlie up and about and nursing Mick, and not the other way round.
‘Charlie!’
She looked at me, wide eyes all chromium and blue, like her mum’s. She’d tied her dry, once silky hair in a girlish pony-tail, exposing her slender neck. ‘Here’s the old boiler,’ she said lightly. After saying something provocative, like this, she had a way of touching her tongue to her lips – again a trait of her mum’s. ‘Didn’t expect to see you in this neck of the woods.’
Not the kind of greeting I’d expected, for sure, but I didn’t take it seriously. It was her way of making nothing of the spot we were in. ‘Come here.’ I threw my arms around her, squeezing her thin body to me. I nuzzled her neck. ‘I can’t tell you how relieved I am to see you on your feet!’
‘Ouch! I think you cracked a rib! You’re squeezing the air out of my lungs. Plus you could do with a bath, Dad. You smell like an Akha loincloth.’ I stood back to look at her. Again that touch of the tongue to her lips. There was a sheen to her eyes, which made me think she’d be OK, and a smile making me believe our differences could be set aside. Maybe I’d expected a zombie who wouldn’t recognise me. But she was smiling.
Or not smiling, exactly. The expression she wore was one of tolerant amusement. It was a facial cast I’d seen on her before, when one Christmas I’d had too much to drink at the Clipper and she and Sheila had helped me up the stairs to bed. It threw me. Given our situation, she looked altogether too composed. ‘I didn’t expect to see you out of your bed.’
‘I have occasional moments of lucidity,’ she said, ‘when I can get about the hut on my own.’ Yes, that old university-student way of talking; when I could never tell whether she was being serious or taking the piss out of her old man. I think on this occasion she was being serious. ‘Then this giddiness comes over me and I fall into a swoon. Plus I can’t abide strong sunlight.’
‘Is it malaria?’ Phil asked, hanging back in the shadows until this doubtless unnecessary display of paternal affection was over.
‘I don’t think so. Didn’t get the flu symptoms. At first it was terrible: fever, swollen joints, skin eruptions. My skin looked like a war zone and I got bad pains in my bones. That’s gone, but the fever hangs around on an intermittent basis. And I feel sort of feeble-minded. But that’s normal for you, hey Dad?’ She smiled again and levitated her eyebrows, inviting me into the joke.
I was about to answer when Mick groaned from his own sickbed.
‘I was just giving him some water,’ Charlie said.
I remembered the whisky I’d dropped to the floor on seeing Charlie. ‘Give him some of this instead.’
‘I don’t believe it!’ Phil exclaimed, thrilled by the degree of his own disapproval. ‘The stuff simply finds you! It really does! You come all the way to the jungle and it finds its way to you!’
With her eyes on Phil, Charlie answered him by unstoppering the bottle and taking a small swig for herself. Good girl, I thought: give your old man a break.
‘I see you’ve met Jack,’ she said, splashing some of the whisky into a bowl. I lifted Mick upright while Charlie tilted the bowl to his mouth. Mick glugged and smacked his lips, evidently to his satisfaction, before groaning and lying down again.
‘Brought any ciggies with you? Yes? Thank Christ!’
Phil shook his head as I reached for my pack. I have to say that Phil’s relationship with Charlie has never been much better than my relationship with him. Or mine with Charlie, come to that. Though they warred less. Anyway, when I suggested we might step outside the hut for a smoke she said, rather too quickly, ‘No. Stay here.’
We squatted down on a square of rattan. ‘How’s Mum?’ she asked. She was remarkably cool. She sat with her legs crossed under her, and with her hands dropped in her lap, like a stone idol. Anyone would think I’d just popped over to see her at college. In fact her manner was exactly like the times I’d visited her in her rooms at Oxford. It was as if, in the midst of all this, Charlie wanted to assert that she was in possession of some strange and secret power. Phil looked up to see how I would answer. I knew Sheila communicated with him frequently.
I decided now was not the time to tell Charlie we’d separated. ‘She’s longing to see you.’
Charlie tipped back her head, blowing a vertical stream of smoke at the leaf roof of the hut. Then she plucked at something in the corner of her eye.
‘Darlin’, we need to be going as soon as we can.’ I said this as gently as possible, but she looked away and shook her head. Then she stared hard, very hard, at the earth floor. It was unnerving. For a moment I think she was away; gone from me, the hut, the village, everything. She was in another place. I’d seen that too before, when we used to visit Sheila’s grandmother in the Pastures Hospital.
I called her back softly. ‘Can you tell me about Jack?’
She looked at me through rinsing eyes. ‘Stay on the right side of him, Dad.’
‘What’s the score, then?’
She started to tell us what she knew about Jack. As she spoke I was able to study the young woman who, until this very moment and in this precise place, I’d always seen as a little girl. Now, even in her illness, I had to acknowledge that she knew more about what was happening here than I could begin to guess at. All my life I’d tried to find ways to explain the hidden mechanics and the invisible rules of a complicated world, and now the position was reversed.
Plus she was altered. Her hair had been bleached by the sun so that although her pony-tail fell lank across the back of her neck it sported the kind of highlights that might have been fashionable in England. The blueness of her eyes was exaggerated by the caramel colour of her rather dry skin, and what I took to be residual lipstick I quickly realised was the same stains of berry juice I’d seen on the natives. Plus there was a strike-line, a vertical crease above the ridge of her nose, not a scar but a fold formed by the knitting of her brows. I hadn’t seen that before.
She took another swig of whisky and dragged hard on her cigarette, whore-tough to my eyes, but I was beyond disapproval of those things. ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘controls the opium around here.’
The Thai authorities, she told me, had changed their policies on hill tribe opium-growing. After torching crops and condemning huge numbers of tribespeople to heroin addiction and AIDS, they had relaxed the rules on cultivation of the poppy for personal use. The opium gangs – under the leadership of men like Jack – had purchased land around the villages which they rented back to the villagers for the cultivation of opium. Jack and his men were always one jump ahead of the government, though Charlie told me the authorities were happy for it to stay that way, so significant was the opium dollar to the Thai economy. The opium dollar moved to Myanmar, it moved to Laos, it moved back to Thailand. It was always there; it just didn’t stay still.
The villagers respected Jack. He got them top prices for their raw opium and he never cheated them. He bro
ught them gifts. He paid for the children to stay in Chiang Mai, to go to school. He was a great believer in educating the people. He’d worked hard to earn the unswerving loyalty of the villagers.
He also controlled a company, she’d been told, of about a hundred and fifty men, possibly more. In that terrain it represented an unassailable force protecting his crops. He’d managed over recent months to prevent tourist interests from bringing in trekkers or adventurers into the area.
‘You were only allowed in because Jack wanted you to come,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ She wagged a finger at me. ‘Stay on his right side. He’s a killer, that one.’
I think I’d guessed most of this from my first encounter with Jack. The only thing I couldn’t possibly know was why he’d let Mick, Phil and I into his domain, and whether he intended to allow us out.
I spent the rest of the morning talking with Charlie about small things, about home, the neighbourhood, family. There was a toughness about her, a coolness which rankled. As if she was somehow aloof from these things, superior, as if she knew things we didn’t. That sense of unspecified power I’d recognised earlier. I was sure it was just an affectation. Her manner still suggested we’d dropped by for a surprise visit, not struggled through the jungle to rescue her. Then by way of contrast she would display a tender aspect. She did everything she could to make Mick comfortable, finding him a better pillow, mopping his brow with a damp cloth. As for Phil, she kissed him and pinched his cheeks as if he were a boy of ten, and showed a deep interest in his tedious Christian life at home.
‘Any girlfriends on the scene?’ she asked him.
‘No,’ he said. Then, ‘Maybe. Well, there is one I’ve got my eye on.’ He blushed the colour of the rosy earth.
How easy it was for Charlie to get that titbit of information from him. He’d sooner part with his money than tell me such a thing. It made me recall how Charlie had always been – even though Phil was her elder, and male and all that nonsense – the bright star in the family firmament, and that he had had to love her from the shade. He coughed, flapping away the cigarette smoke but really waving away our interest in his love life, and stepped outside, leaving Charlie and I, and Mick sleeping.
