Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  ‘What did you mean when I arrived?’ I said. ‘When you said you’d been expecting me?’

  She looked puzzled. I explained how she’d been sitting upright when I first came into the hut.

  ‘I don’t remember that,’ she said.

  I explained it again, and told her how we’d had a brief exchange about the postman of Porlot. Or Porlock. That crease above the ridge of her nose only deepened as she knitted her brows. I changed the subject, telling her how I’d visited Phil before coming out here. I tried to make her laugh by mocking his lifestyle. Outside the village radio started up again, blaring out weird music, deep, resounding masculine voices moving up and down the scales. It had obviously been designed to be heard in the fields while people were working. It made me think of radio ga-ga blaring out in the factories and sweatshops of England while the workers toiled.

  ‘You’re too hard on Phil,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Yes you are. Can’t you see how he’s suffering while he’s here? How hard it is for him?’

  I made some dismissive remark, suggesting it wasn’t exactly easy for any of us.

  ‘But the point,’ she said, rather sharply, ‘is that you were always too hard on him.’ I must have looked stung by this, because she softened. ‘Can I use your leg as a cushion?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She lay with her head on my thighs, chain-smoking my cigarettes. ‘Phil is sensitive. He has big needs.’ Don’t we all have big needs? I thought, but I didn’t argue. ‘You know, Dad, there are a lot of things you’re unaware of.’

  ‘I daresay.’

  But you make out you know everything and that you’re always right. You always do. Why do you do that?’

  If this really was something I had a particular habit of doing, it was news to me. ‘Maybe it’s something men do to protect themselves. Maybe it was to protect you and Phil and your mother.’

  ‘Protect from what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Right. You don’t know. There are lots of things you know nothing about.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Other worlds. All around us. Busy worlds going on, unseen. You’ve walked right into a world of spirits, did you know that?’

  What the hell was I supposed to say to that? When she was a teenager I used to say stop talking tosh, but right then she was too brittle to brook any argument. I put it down to the opium smoke billowing about in her brain. Though I did ask, ‘What’s this about the moon? Why can’t the moon work while you are here?’

  ‘The moon will eat itself.’

  ‘What?’

  Instead of answering me properly, she started to sing, and in a sweet, strong, melodious voice that took me by surprise. It was some kind of folk song, and Charlie’s voice was so good it easily beat back the sound of the radio in he village.

  And like a lovesick lenanshee

  She hath my heart in thrall

  Nor life I owe, nor liberty,

  For love is Lord of all.

  ‘I didn’t know you could sing,’ I said, when she’d finished. ‘How come you never sang for me?’

  ‘I was in a folk band when I was at college,’ she said. She squinted at me from her cushion of my thigh. ‘I thought you’d make fun of me.’

  That hurt. It went clean past my ribs and deep into my heart like the trimmest stiletto. ‘Why say that?’

  She dismissed the question with an airy wave of her hand. Then she closed her eyes, massaging her temples with her long brown fingers. She had lovely elegant fingers, did Charlie, and I noticed with some sadness how dirty were her fingernails. After a moment she complained of feeling tired, climbed on her pallet and instantly fell into a deep, deep sleep. I sat on the rattan mat, staring at her, and as I did so, the music blasting from the radio stopped abruptly.

  Mick snored on. I was in a shocking state of frustration. All I could do was stare uselessly at the two sleeping bodies in the hut, and having come so far I felt like a ship suddenly becalmed. On the other hand I was uplifted by the discovery that Charlie’s condition was nowhere near as bad as I’d first suspected.

  I went out again, to gather material for my stretcher. Phil sat under the shade of a bo tree, like a monk, reading his wretched pocket Bible. ‘Why don’t you put that away and do something useful?’ I barked.

  He stared at me for an inordinate period. ‘Like what?’

  I turned on my heels. When I reached the centre of the village I found Jack, Khiem and a couple of men standing around the silenced totem radio. These other two men were racially different to the villagers. One even had a beard. He was the first oriental I’d seen with facial hair since arriving in Thailand. The two were decked, like Khiem, with dozens of poppy flowers, though I didn’t get the impression they were hippies because each carried a sawn-off shotgun.

  Khiem, the Lord of the Poppy, pointed a finger at me as I approached and spoke a few words to the group. The bearded Thai looked at me with contempt. The other flashed me a beautiful, dangerous smile. ‘Khiem says you bring more bad spirits to the village,’ Jack called out cheerfully. ‘This is the second time the generator has broken down since you arrived here.’

  ‘What’s the fault with it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not a grease monkey,’ Jack sneered. ‘But I went to a lot of trouble getting that machine here on the back of a bad-tempered elephant. Now it falls apart every few minutes.’

  I saw a way to ingratiate myself with Jack. ‘Got some tools?’

  ‘Tools? You know about generators?’

  ‘I can take a look.’

  Jack slapped his knee and sent the bearded Thai away, presumably to find me some kit. Khiem looked startled. He whispered in Jack’s ear. ‘He wants to know what you’re going to do,’ Jack said.

  ‘Tell him I’m going to wrestle with the Lord of the Generator.’

  27

  The Honda IKVA generator was a decent bit of kit, but in poor repair. Even at first glance it looked clogged with red dust, and I hoped that the solution would be a simple one. As I’ve mentioned, I’m a sparks and not a mechanic, though the principle of a generator is not all that different from a motor car engine. I’d encountered a few temperamental generators whenever contracted for on-site work where they were required to drive power tools.

  First thing I did was to check that the fault wasn’t something completely daft, like no petrol, but there was plenty of fuel in the tank. I traced the hi-T leads back to the piston and checked out a couple of other bits of wiring. I hoped it wasn’t going to be a complicated problem with the armature, in which case I’d probably be fucked. It was while I was peering through the casing at the armature that I sensed someone watching me from the doorway.

  It was Khiem, our wild poppy man. His eyes were bulging and the veins on his forehead stood out like a pair of chicken’s claws gripping his skull. I could do no more while waiting for tools with which to unbolt the casing of the machine, so I made what I thought of as a few mystical passes across the generator. Khiem’s eyes widened still further. Then I whistled a bit at the hi-T leads and made an eerie but theatrical raising-up gesture.

  I soon tired of this tomfoolery, so I whisked the canvas from under the machine and draped it over the doorway: if I can’t see your magic, you can’t see mine. I didn’t care if he was offended.

  Khiem was hardly discouraged. Through the cracks in the bamboo I could see his figure outlined on the porch. Though I could see him, he couldn’t see me inside the darkness of the hut. He was stooped slightly, his posture suggesting he was listening hard. I noiselessly moved to within inches of where he was standing, and put my mouth to the bamboo. Since the days when Charlie and Phil were very small, I’ve been able to produce a very passable imitation of Daffy Duck, and I did one now, very loud.

  Khiem fell off the porch in surprise.

  I mean the sound somehow seemed to blow him off the porch, and to see Khiem rolling around in the dust made me laugh so hard I had t
o bite my hand. I grabbed the canvas at the door and ran outside, flapping it wildly, moaning and clutching my hair as if it was on fire. Then I ‘pulled myself together’, spat into my hands as if I meant business, and ventured back inside the hut with my fists raised.

  I re-hung the canvas at the door and peeked through the cracks in the bamboo. Khiem’s head swayed back and forth, like a punter at the ringside of a bout of Thai kickboxing. The expression on his face was so fraught I was taken over again with a fit of silent laughter. My ribs were cracking. I sank to the floor and had to squeeze my sides to stop any noise coming out of me.

  I couldn’t remember when I’d last laughed so hard. It was like being taken over by a spirit, and the more I thought about it – stuck in the jungle with a sick friend and a doped-up daughter and trying to mend a generator while a village witchdoctor listened outside – the more I fell prey to this fit of hysterics.

  Someone lifted the canvas at the door to find me lying on the floor clutching my ribs. It was the bearded Thai, one of Jack’s henchmen. He’d brought me some tools. Khiem stood behind him, observing. I had to pretend that I was holding myself in pain. The bearded Thai scowled and tossed a bag of tools on the floor.

  It was a gaily patterned handcrafted villager’s bag, and inside was a collection of the very tools I’d seen the opium harvesters use in the fields. Two crescent blades, a standard knife, and a three-bladed incisor for pricking the poppy seedheads. I sobered up. ‘What’s this? I can’t use these!’

  The bearded Thai simply sneered, and turned about-face. I followed him out, protesting, looking for Jack to complain to. Jack was nowhere about.

  With Khiem watching, I went back into the hut. The smile had been wiped off my face, but I still had plenty of ideas. The penknife I carried in my shorts pocket – sometimes I felt like a fucking Boy Scout – had a small screwdriver blade. I thought I might be able to improvise.

  But I didn’t need to. No sooner had I begun to dust down the machine with a bit of cloth than did the cap fall off the spark plug and into my hand. It had simply worked loose. I replaced the cap, whipped the starter cord and the generator coughed into life. I quickly stalled it again. Not wanting Khiem, or anyone else, to think I’d had too easy a victory over the spirits of the generator, I sat and smoked a cigarette, waiting until I was good and ready. I expect these Oxford professors do the same: make out it has taken them years to write something about Keats or Thomas De Quincey, something that they’d dreamed up while smoking a fag.

  Before I started the generator I had another poke around the hut. The cartons of Calpol were still there, but there was little else besides a short coil of electrical cable and some engine oil. At last I tugged the starter cord and the engine sputtered into life. The dreadful broadcast swelled from the radio, filling the air again. I made sure the engine was ticking over nicely, and went outside.

  Khiem regarded me strangely. I didn’t know what else to do, so I walked over to the radio, snapped it off, thought better about it, and snapped it on again. After a few moments Jack and his henchmen appeared. Jack looked very pleased with me; the bearded one less so. ‘Hey! You did it!’

  ‘It was nothing. Here, take these back.’ I offered him the ‘tools’ I’d been given. ‘They weren’t much help.’

  Jack wrinkled his nose at the farmer’s bag, and said something derisory to his bearded henchman. The beardie shrugged and obviously made some excuse. ‘Good chap. Jack always pays, right? I paid you already with that whisky, didn’t I? What’s your name again?’

  ‘Dan.’

  ‘Jack always pays, right Dan?’

  ‘Right.’

  He gave me a cigarette. Beardie’s face was expressionless, inscrutable as they say, but his eyes betrayed him, and he was staring at me in a way which made me feel quite nervous. I heard myself babbling. ‘That’s a useful generator. You could power a lot more than a radio—’

  ‘I know that,’ Jack said, cutting me off. I could see he was a man who didn’t like to be told things.

  ‘All you need is some cable and a few more bulbs and you could light the whole village.’

  ‘I know that, too.’ He sniffed. ‘That’s why I had the damned thing brought here. But tell me what I need. Tell me.’

  I made a quick estimate of the length of cable and enough fluorescent bulbs to make one for each hut and a few spares.

  I was doing my best to sound like a lackey rather than a coloniser. Jack squinted at me, puffing thoughtfully on his cigarette. ‘I get them brought in by elephant and you fix it for me, Dan? Yes?’

  I didn’t know how long he expected me to stay, but I heard myself saying, ‘Sure. It’s easy enough.’ If Jack really did pay his debts I’d illuminate his elephant’s dick for him. I suddenly had trade. I had currency. ‘All you’d need is a socket and you could run a television off that generator.’

  Television? Was this me talking? Sure, I will bring you game shows and garden makeovers; teenage soap operas and costume dramas; veterinary practices and lottery draws; award ceremonies and soft porn. I will bring you the the jewels of the Western living room. The whole fucking crash.

  Naw, I almost said, forget TV and stick with hard drugs. I wondered if Khiem could read my mind, because he was grinning at me like an idiot. Then he whispered something to Jack, and Jack said, ‘He says he doesn’t like the methods you use, but he respects your victory over the Lord of the Generator.’

  Khiem grinned at me again with his toothless, red-stained mouth. This occasion was the first time I saw him smile. I decided I liked Khiem.

  When I returned to our hut, Mick was sitting upright and the old woman – the wizened old dope dealer – was spooning soup into his mouth. Charlie was asleep again, and Phil too was sleeping off the heat. Was I the only one around here who could stay on his feet? The woman chattered away, giggling as she fed him. Mick blinked at her dumbly. ‘Who’s this?’ he asked me feebly. ‘Widow Twanky?’

  ‘Feeling better?’

  He scratched the back of his neck. ‘I feel like I’ve been shagged by all the sailors of the HMS Sheffield.’

  Yes, he was feeling better. The old woman didn’t let our conversation get in the way of her chatter. Her eyes twinkled and she seemed to find something terribly amusing in everything we did or said. ‘Been on your pipe, duckie?’ I asked her over-loudly.

  ‘Boo!’ she said, and laughed heartily as she rammed the soup spoon in Mick’s mouth. Then she jumped off her stool and started to fish about under the folds of her skirt.

  ‘Hello,’ said Mick. ‘This gets worse.’

  The old woman produced two small green packets, one of which she handed to me. It was a folded leaf, like a palm leaf. She mimed the act of chewing, striding around the hut, ruminating, indicating that we shouldn’t swallow, but chew.

  ‘More drugs?’ I said.

  She thrust the second packet into Mick’s mouth and mimed chewing again. Mick looked at me doubtfully and said, through a mouthful of greenery, ‘I’m wondering where she’s been keeping it, that’s all.’

  Maybe she intuited Mick’s remark. She giggled again, hitched up her skirts and danced a little jig about the place. She must have been ninety years old, but she was a live wire. I put my own leaf aside and picked up the whisky bottle instead. I was about to take a swig and she stopped dancing and became agitated, ranting, waving her hands in disgust at the whisky bottle. ‘Mai! Mai!’ she shouted, seeming particularly cross that I’d preferred the whisky to her packet of leaves. She waddled out of the hut, still cussing me.

  ‘Well,’ Mick said, chewing, ‘you’ve upset her, all right.’

  ‘You don’t know what she’s putting in your trap, do you?’

  ‘She comes here to feed me. Not going to do me any harm, is she?’

  I supposed he was right, but I didn’t say so.

  Mick wanted to know the latest. I told him about Jack, and about Charlie, and about the generator, and about my plan to construct a stretcher. But he admitted he felt as
weak as a kitten. I failed to disclose the fact that we didn’t know exactly where we were, or that we were unlikely to get help from either Jack or the villagers.

  Something dark red or purple from the leaf was bubbling on Mick’s saliva, but I didn’t tell him about that either. Then Mick said, ‘Who were the other people?’

  ‘What other people?’

  ‘In the hut. Who were they?’

  With Mick resting, and with Charlie sleeping, I had very little to occupy my time. I was less worried about Mick, who, with a constitution as strong as a farmyard horse, was on the mend. Charlie, however, seemed capable of sleeping eighteen hours out of a twenty-four-hour day. Though it had been a huge relief to talk with her, I reckoned we were still going to have to carry her out of the jungle, and the way things were going the prospect of doing that might be a few days off. Mick could barely make it unaided to the little bamboo outhouse.

  I was also worried about having upset the old lady who, so far, was the sole person in the village helping us, and for no apparent reward. She’d obviously tended to Charlie for some time, and now she’d taken it upon herself to minister to Mick with her herbs and potions and chewing packets.

  When I left Mick, his lips were stained red with the juice of whatever was in the packet she gave him, though he claimed it was acting on him like a tonic. He recommended it passionately, but one glance at his crimson-lipped mouthing was enough to make me stick with the whisky. I suppose my preference for a distilled grain was hardly less primitive, but the Scotch settled my stomach and steadied my nerves.

  My suspicion of her came down to the idea that she was stoking Charlie with opium, and that that was contributing to her weakness. Meanwhile Mick was still riding a high temperature, which explained his feverish remarks. He wanted to know about the people he claimed had been trooping through the hut. He complained that one time he opened his eyes and thought there must have been a party going on, so many people were there milling around in the dark. I told him he’d been feverish, and slightly delirious; he’d been seeing pink elephants.