Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  ‘Oh,’ Charlie said fondly. ‘He’s this ragged old toy I had when I was a kid. In the dream he was telling me it was going to be all right. Do you remember him, Phil?’

  Rupert was still there, stuck in the wall above her bed, but she obviously hadn’t seen him. Or rather maybe she had seen him but without registering the fact, and had thus gone on to dream about him. I’m quite prepared to believe that, anyway.

  ‘Rupert. Scary,’ Phil said.

  ‘Red with blue trousers,’ I offered. ‘Rupert Bear was.’

  ‘No! Yellow trousers with black check.’

  It didn’t matter what the subject – she was quick to contradict me on the smallest details. ‘Was he? It was so long ago.’

  I pretended to think about Rupert Bear so that the others wouldn’t know I was churning the earlier events of the day: my scuffle with Phil; the thought of Charlie’s rapists.

  About Phil: I lied when I said I’d never hit him. I did, once. When he was about twelve years old. He’d taken one of my books and chopped the pages out so as to make a hiding compartment. I’d confronted him; he’d lied; I’d hit him, too hard.

  Oh.

  I told him that day that I’d hit him for lying. But I in turn was lying about that. I’d hit him because I’d just had a furious row with Sheila. Too hard: I hit him too hard. I remember the shock of pain and betrayal on his face. I saw some shadow creep out of him and turn its back on me that day. He never looked at me the same way after that. Over the years which followed I felt so bad about it that I think I denied to myself that it ever happened. This day’s scuffle had brought the scene back to me.

  It also made me angry once more as I thought about Charlie’s rapists. It was a cold anger, one I’d never quite experienced before. Anger with ice at the heart of it. Anger that breathed out of you like ectoplasm, marshalling itself into a spirit or form external to your body. Phil was correct: I was determined to do something about them. I just didn’t know what. But my blood was knocking in my brain.

  And why did these two things seem connected, these two violations? The rape and my hitting Phil a long time ago. Apart from the fact that they’d been brought to mind by today’s events, I mean.

  It was a cold night again. Before settling, Mick made a silent gesture and lifted his pillow to show me his knife underneath. I lifted the corner of my sleeping bag to show him I’d had exactly the same thought. We were certain that Khao and his men, or just one of them, might be out to pay us a visit in the night.

  The thinness of the bamboo walls left me feeling very exposed. Every click or movement or stirring breeze outside had me on the alert, straining to identify every sound. Some animal was prowling out there for an hour. I heard it padding round, wheezing, sniffing at the hut. There was a strong moon, doing its work on the opium that had already seeped through the poppy heads; I hoped the brightness of the moon might keep intruders away. I was wide awake. Swords of moonlight sliced at me through the bamboo slats of the hut as I seethed about Charlie’s rapists. I lay in the dark with my fingers twitching on the handle of Coconut’s wide-bladed knife.

  31

  Sure enough, in the night, the attack came, and I was glad it did. I was in a volatile state, and something had to happen. I was boiling inside, but I’d had to shut down my feelings so hard I felt like I was moving around an ocean bed in a bathysphere. When the time came, when I heard the creak of a footstep on the porch, I was ready to break out, to come up for air, and then screaming.

  I’d seen a television programme about the partners of rape victims. All uselessly angry, living with a rage that had nowhere to go. The interviewer was giving them a hard time: after all, she was saying, you aren’t the ones who have been violated, think of your wives for a change instead of yourselves. True enough, I thought at the time, but what does she know about being a man? I know this: if someone violates a loved one, then the rage to strike back is terrifying and holy. I don’t understand religion. But I think that if there was a God, this is one thing He would forgive; more than that, He may not forgive the man who stood apart.

  I knew someone had come because I heard the animal foraging beneath the hut go skittering. I felt myself glide to my feet; almost as if my spirit left my recumbent, physical form dozing on the rattan pallet. I made no noise, though I saw Mick’s eyes flicker open. He too had been unable to sleep. I put my finger to my lips, to warn him, and he too produced his blade.

  I could have been a wraith, a figure of dream, banded by moonlight coming through the bamboo slats, moonlight that flashed on the blade I held loosely at my flank. I felt a peculiar calm. I peered through a gap in the bamboo and I saw him set foot on the step up to the porch, and he was drenched in moonlight. It was the man Mick had flung into the dust. He carried some object I couldn’t determine, either knife or gun.

  Phil sat up, rubbing his eyes, and I silenced him with a gesture. The man on the porch hesitated, straining to listen. It was then I realised the object in his hand was a petrol can. He began sprinkling fuel on the hut. The bastard had come to burn us.

  I kicked away the bamboo door, stepped out on to the porch and brought the long knife down on his arm in a sweeping arc from high above my head. There was a brief communion of blade and moon, like fizzing sodium light, before a blow to my own head knocked me clean off the porch, and into a syrupy, all-encompassing blackness.

  I woke later in the night, back on my pallet bed, and with a raging headache. The other three were awake, and a single candle was burning. They were sitting up, whispering, but they shut up when they saw that I had come round. They all looked at me strangely.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Go back to sleep, Danny,’ Mick said in a hoarse whisper. ‘You’ve been having a bad dream.’

  Bad dream? I felt the side of my head. A bruise was already forming around my eye.

  ‘A nightmare,’ Charlie said. ‘We had to sit on you.’

  ‘And I had to slap you,’ Mick said. ‘Here, drink this.’ He tilted a bowl of whisky at my lips.

  Phil said nothing. His face was white like the moon.

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ said Charlotte.

  I groaned. I went back to sleep.

  When I woke again it was to the grey light of pre-dawn. The other three were still awake, and they were arguing. Charlie had a broom and was sweeping the floor in a vigorous, agitated fashion. Phil saw me open my eyes, and he quietened the others. My head still hurt.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  No one would say anything.

  I rose and went over to a bowl of water, splashing some of it on the back of my neck. Then I went to my pallet, and lifted up the corner of the sleeping bag. Coconut’s blade was there, as it was when we’d settled down the previous night. I took it out and inspected the blade. There was nothing to suggest it had been moved by me or anyone else. I felt nauseated by the pain in my head. I looked at Mick. ‘No dream, pal.’

  ‘Tell him!’ Charlie said.

  ‘Not necessary!’ Phil hissed.

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘If one of you two won’t tell him, then I will,’ Charlie said. She got to her feet, and in that moment it seemed that Charlie was the strongest one of all of us.

  ‘Tell me what!’ I shouted.

  There was a stand-off, then Mick also dragged himself to his feet. Phil made a noise, a release of air. Mick beckoned me outside, and I followed while the other two remained in the hut.

  Outside it was still chilly, but I felt the temperature rising, even though the sun hadn’t come up yet. It was as if the sun was a vast machine, and I could hear the faint and distant rumble of it before it appeared in the sky. The entire village was sleeping. As we stepped down from the porch, Mick turned to me and nervously placed his fingertips first on my shoulder then on my breastbone. ‘Don’t panic, Danny.’

  ‘I’m not about to.’

  Mick turned, staring somewhere above the neighbouring huts. ‘He’s under there.’


  At first I didn’t know what he meant by under there. His eyes were fixed on the distance. Then he made a minimal gesture which made me realise he was referring to the cavity under the stilts of the hut. I ducked down to look, but I couldn’t see anything in the shadows beneath the stilts, and I said so.

  ‘Covered over, Danny. We covered him over with crap.’

  I got down again. I had to crawl a little way inside. It didn’t smell too good under the hut. It reeked of garbage and pigshit. I could also smell petrol. I moved aside some debris, some pieces of bamboo and some torn strips of polythene and I saw a boot. I touched it. The boot was attached to a leg. I crawled back out.

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘Christ. I killed him.’

  Phil had joined us now. ‘Not you, Dad,’ he said. ‘Not you—’

  Mick spoke rapidly, hoarsely. ‘He was going to do for you, Danny. Really he was. He’d kicked you in the head. You were down. He was going to do for you, mate!’

  I looked back at the entrance to the hut. Charlie was watching from the shadows. She nodded at me. She was very clear about what had to be done. ‘You can’t leave him there. He’ll be found.’

  Mick and Phil were in such a fragile state they were relieved to be directed. I made Phil get the trellis I’d been planning to use as a stretcher for Charlie. I told Mick to crawl under the porch with me and together we dragged the body out by the feet. We also retrieved the petrol can. Mick mentioned a knife and I had to go back under to find it. While looking for the knife I found a discarded backpack.

  Christ, Mick! I thought when I saw the body gashed at the neck. I figured Mick had caught him with a blow of such might it had half severed his head from his body. The man’s army fatigues were caked in blood. ‘Strip down to your underpants,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to move quickly before the villagers awake.’

  Mick and Phil understood. After they’d stripped off we rolled the body on to the trellis. Phil and I took the front corners of the trellis and Mick took the back end. With the weight distributed that way the corpse wasn’t so heavy, and we hurried from the village along the very path by which we’d first arrived.

  The crimson sun, like a dragon’s eye, came peeping up over the jungle hillside as we shuffled along the path, sweating, shivering, slipping. Three English men in underpants and training shoes.

  I wanted to get us far enough away to avoid the body being found by villagers or dug up by scavenging dogs; on the other hand, we had to get back before the villagers were up and about their business. Half jogging, half shuffling, we hurried along the leaf-strewn path without speaking, our breath coming short. But the scrubby jungle was too open, and I couldn’t find the cover I was looking for.

  It occurred to me that Mick and Phil were in shock. They behaved like silent automatons, responding immediately to everything I said.

  About a third of a mile away from the village I stopped them. We were all panting heavily. I’d spotted a small cavity in the ground, beside a bush and broken red-clay boulders, about twenty yards off the path. We put down the trellis and I jogged over to check it out. It wasn’t the cover I wanted but it would have to do. We carried the corpse across the scrub and tipped it into the cavity, along with the fuel can and the knife. Then we rolled a few boulders over the body, but were unable to bury it completely.

  ‘Let’s get back,’ Mick panted.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. I insisted that we lay the trellis over the cavity, and cover it with leaves, sticks and broken stones, so that even if anyone were to walk across it they might not sense the trellis beneath their feet. This we did with trembling hands.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said, at last.

  We jogged back along the path, hopelessly out of breath. By now we were streaked with sweat and blood from the corpse. The sun was climbing higher in the sky and the day was heating up at an alarming rate. As we ran along the path all I could hear was our own heavy breathing, the three of us blowing and gasping, the sound of our panting rising like a mist above the vegetation, like stifled cries to God. As we approached the village I slowed the others down. I was afraid that everyone could hear our dreadful wheezing and hyperventilating.

  Villagers were moving about the village by the time we got back. Cocks were crowing, and a dog was barking. We hid behind a bush and dashed in one at a time, making for the outhouse. There we stripped off our underpants, and splashed and soaped each other in a hyperventilating and hysterical frenzy, teeth chattering, murmuring, moaning, scrubbing off every trace of blood.

  We went into the hut. Charlie sat cross-legged, eyeing our naked bodies like a baleful Buddha. She was calm. At that moment she was holding it together for all of us. ‘Lucky,’ she said. ‘Khao was here a few minutes ago. I lied and said you’d gone over to the poppy fields.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, trying to recover my breath. ‘Right. We get dressed. We go to the poppy fields. From now on everything is normal. Got that?’

  ‘Normal,’ said Mick.

  Phil looked sick, strange. ‘Got that, Phil?’

  ‘Normal,’ said Phil.

  Before going to the poppy fields, I made a small fire and burned the three bloodied pairs of underpants.

  32

  Nobody said a damned thing. Not to us anyway. We had no way of knowing if the boy was even missed.

  I say ‘boy’ as if I knew the age of the dead man. I guessed he was about Charlie’s age, though it is often difficult to tell with Thai men. What did it matter? Somewhere he’d had a mother and a father, and if we were going to get through this I knew I’d have to stop thinking about things like that. But the stress of going about and doing things ‘normally’ was excruciating. The four of us were the most dreadful bundle of exposed nerves, and if one sneezed, the others shivered.

  Oddly, there was no recrimination from any quarter. There was not even discussion between us. It was too important to pretend to be preoccupied with other things, in an act of wilful denial. Charlie, who had been very clear that the dead man was one of her rapists, merely retreated to her pipe. Mick was sullen, jumpy. Phil suffered the worst: he spent a lot of time in the corner of the hut, on his knees in silent prayer.

  We sensed we couldn’t possibly get away with it. We’d reached the lowest point.

  Can I tell you that I felt in any way satisfied that we’d killed my daughter’s rapist? I can’t say that it changed a single thing. The rage in me hadn’t gone away. The event was always going be a wound in Charlie’s life, and it still smouldered in my brain. I had not an ounce of sympathy for the heap of meat we’d buried under the trellis, but our actions had done nothing to restore equilibrium to my mind. Revenge had not delivered the promised sweets, and all that had altered was that our predicament had become even more perilous.

  We took turns in sleeping, submitting to the exhaustion of a night without rest and the strain of the last few hours. Though we agreed we should only do so in turn, and for a short period, lest anyone should speculate on the cause of our collective fatigue. I dozed so fitfully that my fears and anxieties got mixed up with my dreams.

  Mick woke me. He was worried about Phil, whom he said had gone to walk in the poppy fields. Mick looked grave. ‘I hope he can handle it,’ he said.

  ‘He’s got to,’ I replied. ‘He’s got to.’

  Charlie was deep in one of her slumbers. I let Mick take a nap, and I sat outside the hut, waiting for Phil to come back. I dug out of my pack the copy of Thomas De Quincey. Not that I had the head for books in that state, of course, but I wanted anyone watching to think that I was relaxed enough to be able to read. I sat outside the hut in a kind of trance, remembering to occasionally turn the page for the benefit of any observers.

  By the time Phil returned, he looked utterly wretched; tortured and tormented. I saw straight through him to the small boy within. I followed him inside the hut. ‘Can I hug you?’ I asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I need to.’

  He looked at me with evident distaste. ‘It’s a bit l
ate for that, isn’t it? Yesterday you wanted to smash my face.’

  ‘Please.’

  I stepped forward and put my arms around him. He allowed me near him, but it was deeply unsatisfactory. He turned his shoulder to my chest and stood sideways to me. I was making him squirm so I let him go. ‘You get some sleep now,’ I said. ‘Sleep is good. It knits the soul.’ It was probably something I’d read in Thomas De Quincey.

  ‘The soul!’ he spat, as if I had no right to talk about these things. ‘The soul!’ Then he started laughing. Cackling. He threw back his head and laughed manically, but then stopped abruptly, and the fact that he stopped cackling so suddenly was more disturbing than his laughter. But he was so profoundly tired he lay down on the pallet and he let me cover him with a thin blanket.

  In the quiet moments which followed, and with the other three sleeping, I took a good hard squint at the hut, trying to see what it was that might stop Charlie from going outside. What forces might bar her way, even if only in her fevered imagination. Was there a giant serpent coiled around the hut? Or prison bars of smoky green light obstructing the door? I tried to visualise these things, superimposing images where I couldn’t see them.

  I laid my head next to Charlie’s, trying to feel my way into her dreams, her nightmares, trying to get on that flight with her all over again. I wanted to fight it for her from the inside. But there was nothing. I thought about the moment I first entered the hut and found her sitting upright. I wondered now if it had only been a spirit I had seen. It seemed possible to me that a mind in an extreme state of distress could see anything.

  I imagined her spirit sitting upright again, legs crossed under her, leaving her sleeping body. I imagined her trying to tell me what she saw. At that moment, Charlie opened her eyes – her real eyes, in her real body – and appeared to stare aghast at the open door. I swung round and in that moment I had a notion of the hut tilting ninety degrees, so that we might all fall out of the doorway, and go on falling, falling into the throat of the world, parallel to the surface of the earth, hitting trees and other objects but never stopping in our descent as we plummeted further and further into twilight. I grabbed at the floor to steady myself and the hut righted. When I looked back at Charlie her eyes were shut, after all, and she slept on.