Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  Crack! Jack’s elephant whip snapped at the red earth an inch from my fingers. Dust rose in the air like gunsmoke. ‘You! Get inside that hut! I’ve had enough trouble from you people!’ The whip cracked again, as Mick and I scrambled to our feet. The bearded Khao stood behind Jack with a loutish curl to his lip. He was enjoying this.

  ‘Steady on!’ Mick tried. A mistake. Jack cracked the whip and it whistled as it curled round Mick’s bare leg, somewhere between ankle and calf. Mick winced and swore, struggling to keep his balance. When the whip unravelled he took a step forward, but Jack had his pistol levelled at Mick’s head.

  ‘Where’s that boy? Tell me where he is, fat man! You know where he is!’

  Mick was incredibly calm. ‘What boy? The one I threw from the hut?’

  Then Khao spoke loudly in Thai. Something gloating. Jack turned to him, and I said, ‘Yes, he’s the one who sabotaged the generator.’

  Jack looked at Khao, and then at me, and then back at Khao. The heat of the afternoon and the air about me seemed to clot as I sensed events teetering on a mighty fulcrum. I had the thrilling sensation of almost hearing Jack’s brain turn in rapid motion, and as he regarded Khao steadily I saw something in his eyes, as if a piece of a puzzle quite outside my range of vision had suddenly snapped into place for him. He still had the pistol levelled at Mick’s head. He lowered it. ‘Get inside. Stay there.’

  ‘Do what he says, Mick. Get in the hut.’

  Mick was impulsive, but not stupid. He retreated inside, like a dog to kennel.

  ‘You too!’ Jack screamed. ‘And listen to this: if that fucking generator stops one more time you’re a dead man! You hear me? You’re dead meat.’ With that he stormed away, leaving Khao to sneer at me. Khao formed his fingers into a play pistol, aimed it at me, and pulled the trigger. He smirked again before walking away.

  Inside the hut Mick was nursing an angry red weal on his calf muscle. Charlie woke up. ‘What’s going on? Where’s Phil?’

  It was a long afternoon. I tried to keep my mind off the sound of the radio belting out from its lonely table in the centre of the village. There were long pauses between the high-pitched strains that made my heart quicken, but thankfully each pause was followed by another tinny, echoing piece. I was frantic about where Phil had got to.

  I feared more than ever that Phil might compromise us. Charlie, Phil and I were family: Mick was not. I was still terribly afraid that Phil, quite in desperation, might betray Mick in order to save our skins. The seriousness with which Phil took his own faith, and the gravity of Mick’s crime, made this a real possibility.

  Would that be how it would work out? That we had gone into the jungle and had to surrender Mick in order to bring Charlie home? Never more desperately had I wished to know the true measure of my son’s character.

  I returned to my copy of Thomas De Quincey, obstinately trying to stop my mind from turning on the complications of the last twenty-four hours and to distract myself from the hideous shadow that had fallen over the sunlit village. The words on the page seemed to skim past my eyes and I’d given up on the idea of learning a single thing from this book. But at least it helped me to fight against the doom-laden thoughts oppressing me.

  I’d finished reading the Confessions, and I’d got on to the unfinished sequel, which was published in the same volume. This part was called Suspiria de Profundis. I have no idea what that means, but there in black and white was the clearest bit of writing in the entire sorry mess of his book. At that moment, in the middle of all my troubles, a passage stood out as if illuminated. De Quincey was talking about something called ‘The Dark Interpreter’. He said that the Dark Interpreter was a part of every man and woman’s nature. It exists, to use his exact words, ‘in the dark places of the human spirit – in grief, in fear, in vindictive wrath’. More than that, it was a being, and this being comes to stand next to you at certain times in your life.

  De Quincey met the Dark Interpreter when he was helplessly watching his own child crying in pain over some childhood illness. The next day, he noted that his child had made a spurt in its powers of observation and behaviour. In other words, it had learned through suffering, and De Quincey himself had learned through his suffering. The dark had been interpreted.

  Thinking about Charlie, I understood this perfectly now. But I had the strangest notion that the Dark Interpreter had been stalking me here all the way from England, and at times I’d been dimly aware of his presence. In the gazebo in Chiang Mai. Or in the Buddhist temple where I’d had the odd sensation of someone beside me as I’d squatted with my eyes closed. In the night when I attacked our assailant and blacked out. Or here in this village, right now, while we were waiting to be found out for what we’d done.

  The Dark Interpreter was a guide – a terrifying one – to help us make sense of all this suffering and rage. It was the opium, De Quincey said, that in his case woke the being. I put the book face down at the page where I’d been reading these things. Charlie chose that moment to raise her eyes, and as our eyes met I once again felt at my side this extraordinary presence, and I was so flooded with ruined love for Charlie and Phil that I started to blub.

  Charlie cradled me like a mother. ‘There,’ she said. ‘There.’

  At some point late in the afternoon a very subdued Nabao brought us a pan of noodles. Her sprightly attitude was absent as she laid the dish on the table. I got the impression that she was still loyal and brave enough to do this, but that she wanted to be quick about it. Nothing in her attitude suggested to me that she knew anything.

  Phil returned in a highly agitated state. He’d been walking to and fro in the poppy fields. ‘Did anyone feel the jolt?’ he said.

  We all turned.

  He smiled thinly. ‘When we landed. I felt it. We’d been falling for some time, though of course it doesn’t feel like it. When you’ve been falling for a long time, I mean. It feels normal. Like every day is the same, perfectly ordinary. You stop feeling the air rushing past you. But then there’s the jolt. I felt it. That sudden jolt, and I knew we’d landed. We’re on the lowest platform, aren’t we? The one reserved for people like us. This is the lowest platform of hell.’

  ‘Phil,’ Charlie whispered.

  I’d had that falling feeling too, but not in the way he meant.

  ‘We’ve got to tell someone.’ Phil said this emphatically. ‘That would be the correct thing to do.’

  ‘No,’ Charlie said firmly. Then she went over to Phil and took his hand. ‘That is the worst of all possible scenarios.’

  ‘We’ve got to tough it out, Phil.’ I said. ‘The four of us. Tough it out.’

  ‘I’ve been up in the fields, talking with God. I’ve been asking Him if we should tell somebody about what happened.’

  ‘And what did He reply?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘He told me,’ Phil said, ‘to start by telling Rupert Bear.’

  With the dusk came Jack. It was a terrifying time. Phil was obviously disintegrating under the strain, and I was afraid his urge to confess might present itself at any moment. We’d had to endure the spectacle of watching Phil, hunkered in the corner of the hut, whispering a long confession into the ragged ears of Rupert Bear. I didn’t hear what he was saying, but when I saw Jack coming I hissed at Charlie that she should keep Phil back, talk to him, calm him.

  We watched from inside the hut as Jack approached and placed a half-bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label on the porch. This time he had Khiem, the old sorcerer, with him. ‘Be careful,’ Charlie breathed.

  Mick and I went out on to the porch. Jack didn’t have his whip, and his gun was holstered. Jack and Khiem squatted, then Jack picked up the bottle, unscrewed the cap and handed it to Mick. ‘How is your leg?’

  ‘Sore.’

  ‘Here, drink.’

  Mick and I exchanged a glance. Jack looked at me and said, ‘I posted a man in the generator hut, hiding behind the boxes of Calpol. Someone came in to tamper with the generator. We’ve got him.’
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  ‘Was it Khao?’ I blurted. I felt simultaneously sick and relieved.

  Jack squinted at me. ‘Not your business who it is, dear boy. My business. OK? I now know for certain it was the same person who put the pictures in your hut. Jack has solved at least one of your problems. My only problem now concerns my missing nephew. Can you help me on that?’

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  I gulped on the whisky. ‘No.’ I didn’t like this whisky-bearing, polite Jack any more than the whip-cracking version.

  He tilted his chin at Mick. ‘You?’

  ‘No.’ Mick wiped his mouth.

  Again he was looking at us for too long. At that moment I despised the itching pores of my skin for dribbling sweat. Quite suddenly he said, ‘Khiem here wants to help you.’

  Khiem nodded fractionally at the mention of his name.

  ‘Khiem says he doesn’t like this hut,’ Jack continued. ‘Full of bad spirits. He says Charlie invited them in. The only way is to burn the hut to the ground.’

  I instantly flashed on an image of our assailant in the moonlight, coming to burn us. Was Jack playing with me? Had he approved of his nephew’s actions?

  He seemed to study my response. ‘But we can’t do that,’ he continued, ‘because your daughter won’t come out. So he’s going to help her. Two days from now is a full moon. A good night to frighten the spirits away.’

  ‘Moon!’ said Khiem, floating a finger skyward.

  ‘Khiem says your daughter has to pass through the spirit gate on that night to make her peace with the Lord of the Moon.’

  I shook my head. ‘But as you say, the problem lies in getting Charlie to come out of the hut at all.’

  At this point Phil wandered out of the hut rubbing his hands, sweating, agitated. Jack spoke to Khiem. He addressed me directly while Jack translated; but as he did so Jack kept his eyes trained on Phil. ‘He says you are her father. Only you know the way to speak to her. Family thing.

  ‘He says the villagers will help, and he will do everything he can. He will summon good spirits to chase the bad spirits away. But the solution is in your hands. He has a lot of preparation to do before then and she must be ready in two nights to pass through the spirit gate or the moment will be lost. He says Charlie has gone into the belly of her own fear. Khiem says you must make her come out, the way she came out of her mother’s belly.’

  Throughout this speech Jack’s gaze hadn’t shifted from Phil.

  I looked at Khiem and he nodded at me again. Satisfied with that, the old man got to his feet and hobbled off. Jack too got up. ‘Now I have to send men out into the jungle to look for my nephew. What’s the matter with your son?’ he said.

  ‘Bad guts,’ I said with a half-smile. ‘Jungle belly.’

  Jack turned quickly and walked away. I looked beyond the perspiring Phil and into the hut. Charlie was standing in the doorway. She’d heard everything that was said.

  Khiem came back later to renew the candles and the incense. Still he refused to enter the hut. He performed unknowable rituals and fiddled about with the spirit house he’d constructed outside, blowing smoke through its door and hanging tiny bells under its roof.

  ‘But we’ve got to do something, Charlie,’ I said later, when we were all in our sleeping bags. The candlelight cast shadows along her face as she grimaced at me, and I realised how far she’d come from being a girl. In a certain light she looked old, care-worn, broken.

  ‘Looks like it’s going to be up to you my girl,’ Mick put in.

  Outside, somewhere in the village, another pig was being slaughtered. Its high-pitched squeal was almost human.

  ‘I want to do it, really I do,’ Charlie said. ‘I want to do it for all of us. But I can’t.’

  ‘You can if you pray for help,’ Phil insisted. ‘Each prayer is a step on the way to the open air.’

  Charlie shook her head, and I asked her what she thought about the photographs. I suggested it was not the mistake made on the night of the eclipse that was keeping her here, but Khao’s crude sorcery. I asked her if she thought Khiem might be able to answer the spirits for her. Hell, it was all mumbo-jumbo, but it was where she was at.

  ‘You seem pretty sure that Khao is out of the way now,’ Charlie said.

  ‘I have a feeling,’ I answered, ‘that he’s one bad spirit who won’t bother you any more.’ I was confident that rapist number two was about to get his payback.

  Phil was disgusted by this talk. ‘Only one spirit can help us, and that’s the Holy Spirit of the Lord. I don’t like this talk of trafficking in demons.’

  I discussed with Charlie everything Khiem had said through Jack; the stuff about making peace with the Lord of the Moon. Good spirits and bad spirits. We talked about what it might mean, and how, looked at a certain way, you could make sense of it. Behind this talk the squealing pig seemed to be taking an awful long time to die.

  ‘He’s giving you a chance to put things right,’ Mick said. ‘To make amends for that business during the eclipse.’

  ‘I know that!’ Charlie said testily. ‘Don’t you think I don’t understand?’

  ‘The only way to make amends is through the Lord,’ Phil added angrily.

  ‘But what he’s saying is … what he’s offering is …’ Mick was having trouble getting his point across. ‘The thing is … Christ! How long are they going to take to kill that pig?’

  We stopped talking, and the four of us lay back in our sleeping bags. The high-pitched squeals got more intermittent, but no less piercing. No one said it, but I think all of us realised it at the very same moment.

  No pig.

  34

  I winced when the first puncture was made in my arm, and Khiem smiled broadly. He was starting to smile at me a lot, and this made me slightly nervous. The incisor made three holes in my biceps skin, and the three holes bubbled with tiny beads of blood mixed with blue jungle-plant dye. He moved the instrument down carefully, measuring the distance with an accurate eye, and plunged the incisor into my arm again. Khiem had arrived outside our hut shortly after sun-up, clapping his hands, whistling and calling us out.

  Mick, no stranger to the tattoo parlours of the English Midlands, said, ‘Even I felt that one.’

  ‘Wizards that peep and that mutter,’ Phil said. ‘Sorcerers that—’

  ‘Don’t you ever give it a rest?’ I was smarting, and Phil’s increasingly obscure remarks only set my teeth on edge.

  ‘Leave him,’ Mick said. ‘Leave him alone.’

  Phil, regarding the whole thing as barbaric, slipped away. I was still panicky that he would do something stupid, but this tattooing had given me something else to think about. And we all needed something else to think about.

  I was second up. Charlie had been first. Her arm was swollen with the new tattoo, her fingers twitching over it, though Khiem had slapped her hand, told her not to touch it. Nabao stoked a pipe for her, to which I turned a blind eye. The idea, and this was directed by Khiem, was for me to take an identical tattoo. I’d been made to understand that this would draw some of the bad spirits out of Charlie and on to me.

  Right.

  Jack seemed to have appointed a new lieutenant, one who went by the name of Phoo. One of the new poppy-spangled bandits, he wore an impressive bullet belt round his waist. Phoo spoke English, after an extraordinary fashion. I don’t know why he was there at the tattooing exactly, other than that he seemed fascinated both by us and Khiem’s enterprise.

  ‘He fuck-good medicine, Khiem, yep,’ said Phoo enthusiastically. He had a beautiful, toothless, wide-mouthed smile and spectacular wrinkles around his eyes. Aged somewhere between twenty-five and sixty-five, Phoo was a chatterbox, very different from his predecessor in Jack’s private army. It occurred to me that killers come in many different shapes and sizes. ‘Khiem cure me snake-bite onetime. Fuck-good. Me dead. Oooooo! Him cure me jungle-medicine, fuck-good, tee-hee-hee! He cure Charlie fuck-good.’

 
; Phoo had ‘explained’ Khiem’s desire for Charlie and I to take this tattoo. ‘Him say you father carry spirit for she. You carry spirit for she? Oooooo! Take mark. Tee-hee-hee! Him say you take tattoo hep you find way to she world.’ Phoo was an enthusiastic translator, nodding vigorously, smiling radiantly.

  I’d never had a tattoo. Most of the blokes I knew, like Mick, had taken them on while teenagers and now felt pretty sheepish about it. I know it’s in vogue: Charlie already had one on her shoulder. These university-educated middle-class kids sporting Celtic knots and fortune-cookie Chinese mottoes. Soppy Oxford brats frantic to look like they’ve been round the corner, taken a scratch. I thought it was a brainless thing when I was a youth, and now I just find it depressing. But Khiem’s intentions were serious, and I had to go along with it.

  ‘At least,’ I said to Charlie when she was preparing to take hers, ‘you’ll have earned this one.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said sharply.

  ‘You kids. You’re desperate. You wear tattoos as a badge of experience. Only you don’t have any experience.’

  Charlie looked hard at me with those chromium and blue eyes. ‘You don’t give an inch, do you, Dad? Why is it so important for you to keep us knee-high? Huh? Why?’

  I failed to answer, and I must say I was a little shocked when Khiem produced from his tool-kit his poppy-head incisor as his tattooing implement. He laid it out before us and mushed up some jungle plant to make an indigo-coloured dye. A lot of ritual went with it. Still more pots of incense were lighted: the stuff was beginning to give me a headache. Khiem held his poppy incisor up to the sun and with half-closed eyes muttered an incantation.

  I looked at Mick and was about to say something when Phoo stopped me with a gesture. The smile had gone from his face. ‘Don’t say him fuck. Don’t say him joke. No for any part you. Onetime chance you say free to him go.’