Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  Mick scratched his head. ‘Yes, he is a bit of a pain like that.’

  ‘I’m surprised he has any friends,’ Charlie said. ‘He’s so mean-spirited. The moment anyone wants to do anything outside his control, he stops giving. He doesn’t even give you an argument. He shuts down. That’s what he did with me when I got old enough to want to do things my own way. Stopped hugging. Stopped being kind. Stopped being interested. It was like I was overdrawn at the bank one day.’

  I sniggered, because I didn’t take seriously these emotional attacks. It was as if they were talking about a cartoon version of me.

  ‘I have noticed,’ Mick put in, ‘that he’s a bit tight with information.’

  ‘He’s an emotional miser,’ said Charlie. ‘A skinflint with his affections.’

  ‘Probably why Mum left him,’ Phil added.

  ‘What?’ Charlie said. This was news to her.

  ‘Oh yes. Or put another way, he drove her to another man.’

  I snorted derisively at this, too. Well it was all hurtful sure enough, but it didn’t seem to upset me, because once again it didn’t exactly seem to be about me. I would have said the opium was making me apathetic, except that I couldn’t feel any effects. Every time Nabao gave me a pipe she tore another banana leaf. I was on to my fifth pipe when I began to suspect that she wasn’t actually putting any opium in the bowl, or that I was smoking some placebo, or that she was setting me up with tiny doses. I thought this because nothing seemed to be happening.

  I’d smoked all five pipes of opium and I felt absolutely nothing. Except that my tattoo wasn’t stinging anymore.

  Charlie listened in dismay as Phil got her up to speed on me and Sheila, and I was enormously amused by the expression on each of their faces. Charlie, arms folded stiffly, gazed down at me with her features moulded into those of a mother who, intensely annoyed by the antics of her child, is powerless to act. I’d seen that facial cast on Sheila many times when Charlie was a child herself. I’d probably worn the same expression myself once or twice over the years. Phil meanwhile had taken out his pocket Bible to wave under my nose as he spoke, sermonising like a street-corner preacher but about my life. It made me snort again. Finally I looked over to Mick, perhaps to see if he too thought it funny, but he only regarded me lugubriously. With his perspiring face darkened by shadows and with his poached-egg eyes, he too looked faintly ridiculous and I laughed. The fact that none of them seemed to find the situation amusing made me cackle with laughter.

  ‘It’s not this dope that’s making me laugh,’ I tried to explain to Mick. ‘Really it’s not. It’s the expression on everyone’s face.’

  His dumb response only made me laugh more.

  ‘You’re going to overdose if you keep smoking it at this pace,’ Charlie said.

  ‘That’s the idea,’ I said, and this banal phrase seemed so witty that I found myself giggling again. Charlie shook her head.

  What happened over the next couple of hours is not easy to recall. I lost track of how many pipes I had. I got fixated on the swish of Nabao’s banana leaves, so much that I found I could replay it in my mind – the turn of the leaf as it was placed upon the pile, swish, leaf, swish, leaf, until I wasn’t certain whether I had merely replayed the image in my mind or whether Nabao’s sinewy hand had actually turned a new banana leaf. The thing which surprised me most was not that I went into any kind of trance – which was what I’d expected – but that the procession of my thoughts actually came to seem like real events in front of me. That is, the interior world became exterior, and vice-versa.

  And the world was not transported into a beautiful place, as I’d expected. The phrase ‘the milk of paradise’ which was buzzing around my head like a fat bee seemed inappropriate. A swattable phrase. Rather the world had muddied its colour palette, so that I was in a tea-brown or dirty orange universe, almost identical to this one, but seeming to intersect this world at a very slight tangent. A double vision.

  ‘Perhaps it’s the light,’ I said aloud, commenting on this, meaning that the orange glow of candlelight was playing with my senses. Mick answered, but frankly I didn’t care to pay any attention to what he was saying. I kept thinking what an old world was this one that I was seeing, unspeakably old, and spent, and over-evolved. That sounds as if I became unnerved by it, but that was not the case. I felt totally neutral, and not at all anxious.

  Actually it’s not true to say that I felt neutral. There was something else going on, beneath my perceptions about the ancient character of this opium world. Whatever it was, I liked it. It took me a time to appreciate that what it was was a scent in my nostrils. When the certainty clicked in me, I remember going ha! It was that new-born baby smell. The fontanelle. The original, pungent love amalgam, but to the power of nine.

  Of course there was no baby anywhere near, and I knew the earth had opened up its fontanelle to me.

  Physically I felt so comfortable that I didn’t want to move. The blood in my veins had been replaced by silk. But intellectually I felt very stimulated, and fascinated by this strange world. I got up and walked out of the hut.

  That is, I believe I got up and walked out of the hut. I clearly remember taking a walk out to the poppy fields, but Mick afterwards told me I’d only been gone a few minutes before coming back and smoking another pipe; but that would not have been enough time for all the things to have gone through my mind.

  Swish, the hand turned the leaf.

  Perhaps I only thought it, and my thoughts deceived me, but I remember walking to the opium fields and standing amidst the poppies. The villagers had gone, having completed the day’s harvesting. My legs felt like rubber and my muscles had turned to a kind of slush. Progress was difficult, and when I got there I sat on the red earth looking up at the incised pods. I was struck by the number of poppy heads weeping. Not just seeping opium, but suffering with it, and yielding.

  Then back in the hut. Charlie, crying now. And Phil, kneeling by my side, hands clasped around his pocket Bible, whispering unwanted prayers in my ears, a whisper like a dry banana leaf turning.

  I saw very clearly how we are all of us incised by the experiences of life. We are pricked, we weep, we yield. And the substances we weep and we bleed harden in the cold of the night, under the moon. I had very fanciful notions about where this stuff went; about the varying quality of this stuff; about who was collecting it and why. It seemed to me that our first breath as a newborn baby comes to us sharp as a blade, as an incision. We take it in. We give it out in our first howl, a hymn to life.

  Let it in. Give it out.

  Swish. The leathery hand turned the leaf.

  Who was harvesting this human stuff? Was there a place where they could sell the love amalgam, a city where the rats run free? I had a smuggling plan. Get everyone hooked on this. Weeping. Bleeding. Hardening overnight on the bed pillows. Fairy bandits decked in poppy hoods scraping it from the sheets. Get the Western world on this stuff. Give it a name.

  Love. I loved Sheila. Charlie. Phil. Let it in. You experience it. You cry. You laugh. Give it out. You take it in, you give it out. Drugs. Alcohol. Religion. Sex. When you get older you don’t cry quite so much. All music, all singing is a kind of weeping. Orgasm too, a kind of crying. Spilling, splitting, seeping, oozing seed, giving. Love lies weeping.

  ‘Don’t cry Dad, don’t cry!’ It was Charlie. She was unlocking my fingers from around a pipe. A leaf turned somewhere. Swish. ‘Please don’t cry! I can’t stand to see you cry!’

  ‘Am I crying?’ I didn’t think I was. I certainly didn’t feel sad. Not at all. The fact is, I didn’t care about any of this. I saw it all, flowing like a pearl-green river under an indifferent diffuse yellow sun, and I didn’t care. If I had to cry it was only like the poppy, because I was incised, and I was yielding. It was my time.

  I remembered when Charlie was a little girl, and when she used to cry about small things, as children do, and sometimes I would respond by teasing her with a terrible affected boo-h
ooing of my own. Perhaps not a very effective way of responding, but this would often bring her round. The spectacle of her father pretending to blub was usually worse than whatever had prompted her own bout of sobbing. I suspected that what I was doing now was something of the same pattern. And yet somehow I’d moved beyond being troubled by either Charlie’s or my own distress.

  The truth is I’d even allowed to get myself side-tracked. I didn’t care any more about why I was smoking these hilarious opium pipes. I mean, I knew it had to do with Charlie and what I was after, but that all got pushed aside. What’s more there were other people in the hut, lots of people, and I didn’t like the look of all of them. Some of these people were half centipede. One was feeding from Charlie’s foot. I smote it with a thought. I was able to chop the centipede in half simply by the power of thought. It shrieked and it bled and it withered, and I giggled, and the giggle made me cough.

  Mick was patting my back, until the coughing fit subsided. ‘Enough,’ he whispered. ‘That’s enough.’

  I wasn’t having that. I reached for another pipe. Nabao’s eyes were sugary black reservoirs.

  Her hand turned another leaf.

  Charlie was speaking to me but instead of hearing her I could actually see the words pouring out of her mouth, densely scripted, spiralling in the air. I tried to read these airborne, winging words but I couldn’t get them to add up: ‘Porlock’s poorlot postmen pertaining principally prior to poppy poppa pappa pipped piqued punishing paternally pisstaking and puppeteering podsqueezing papaver …’

  Phil too was at it. His words came thrumming out in gothic script, like a cloud of insects swarming the hut, and making no more sense than Charlie’s. ‘Thou shalt therefore being of the Father that thou shalt with His only son and thou shalt get thee into the land of Moriah and God will Himself provide a lamb and behold thou hast not withheld thine only son …’

  The sultry, sticky, smoky air became a dense, burning thicket of words, consuming itself.

  The hand turned the leaf.

  I asked if anyone was counting. I was back in the poppy field, and the Lord of the Poppy said to me, ‘Oh, we never stop counting.’

  He looked only a little like Khiem, although he was sensationally tall and thin, maybe eight feet tall, and he was dressed in a tunic and a cape stitched with massive red, mauve and white poppy flowers tough as canvas. His treacle-brown pod of a face was a mass of warts. The reek of opium overwhelmed me. He seemed to have dozens of toes on each foot, all of which were half buried in the cracked, dry earth.

  I was distracted by a movement at the top of the hill. It was Phil. He was running, running through the poppies, roaring, tearing off his shirt as he ran. I seemed to see this in slow motion as he went by. Then he disappeared over the other side of the hill.

  I felt embarrassed by my son’s behaviour. The Lord of the Poppy looked at me as if I should say something. I didn’t know what to say so I asked, ‘Have you had a good year?’ It felt a bit stupid, but it was all I could think of.

  This made him laugh. ‘The idea!’ he said. It made me laugh too. We chuckled long and loud at that, the Lord of the Poppy and I.

  My new tattoo seemed to pulse and glow. I felt quite proud of it.

  ‘Can I have her back?’ I asked him. ‘You know, I love her very much.’

  ‘Sometimes that helps and sometimes it doesn’t. But I will ask my sister.’

  ‘Your sister?’

  He floated a warty, pod-like finger at the sky. ‘The moon.’

  ‘Of course. Take me in return for Charlie,’ I suggested cordially.

  ‘Sorry.’ He turned to me and I noticed that his eyes were mirror-bright milky cascades. ‘You’re not quite up to the mark.’ It was then that I noticed he was weeping. Tears of milky but resinous sap tracked his leathery face. It was a shocking sight, this weeping of the guilty poppy. I sensed he was embarrassed by my seeing him this way. I was about to ask what he meant by saying that I wasn’t up to the mark: perhaps he was suggesting that somehow I was responsible for keeping Charlie here.

  Not giving enough, in the way Charlie and Phil said I was not giving enough? Is that what he meant? I thought I’d been giving all my life. Fatherhood was like being the incised poppy. I took the incision every day like a man, and at first I was the dark loving juice to which they all returned. And then I was so afraid they might not return that I stopped the flow.

  It’s hard, I wanted to explain to the Lord of the Poppy. So hard. They tumble into your hands, pink, wrinkled and vulnerable; like tiny shellfish from out of the roaring and infinite black sea, minute in your leathery grasp. And then before you can even smoke a pipe-length of life’s experiences they’ve outgrown you and climbed over your head; before you’ve even had time to explain to them the half of it.

  And I wanted to explain the half of it, because I need to be needed.

  But I never had the chance to put this important point to the Lord of the Poppy, for I was back in the hut. Phil in the corner on his knees, bare-chested now, praying. Mick surveying me with a baleful eye. And then Charlie was screaming and raining blows on my chest, blows to which I was almost oblivious. It seemed to happen at a distance, almost to someone else. Mick and Nabao pulled her away from me, yet all through this attack I remember talking, brightly and perceptively.

  You see, I wanted to comfort her and tell her that just as we take the incision, so must we give out, and that she’d been right and I’d been stupid. There had been a day, oh, long before her departure for university, when I’d realised my children were beyond me, and I had indeed foreclosed on them. It was self-protection. I thought I couldn’t go on bleeding like that for my children. I wanted to explain to her that I thought I’d found a way to hover serenely above the uproar of life. I’d thought to control my love by withholding it and rationing it.

  But now everything’s in order, I wanted to explain to her. Now I understand. We take it in, we give it out. I’d had to come all the way out here to be incised all over again. But I couldn’t get through to her; my lips mashed on the words and I couldn’t communicate the richness of this thought. I watched her hysterical sobbing as if she were a child crying over something quite unimportant, and I accepted another pipe.

  Swish.

  The leathery hand turned the leaf.

  36

  I slept after my opium marathon; or to be more accurate my opium session concluded with a sleep. I woke up the following morning with Charlie exercising a damp cloth around my face and neck. I was sticky with perspiration. I blinked at her. Though my head was something like straight again, my field of vision was still rich with residual opium disturbance. Soft contours were bleeding colour; sharp edges cast shadows. Charlie clamped her lips hard and refused to meet my eyes. That crease above the ridge of her nose was getting deeper.

  ‘The bastard’s awake,’ she called.

  Mick was just outside the hut. He came in. ‘Back in the land of the living,’ he said. It was the sort of remark I’d expect him to make if we’d had eight or nine pints of Jubilee Ale down at the Clipper.

  Other than the visual strangeness I had no hangover to speak of, at least not as with alcohol; though I did feel as though my insides had been pulled about a bit and, as I say, my eyes were still trailing something of the opium in me. My throat was very sore. ‘Water, please.’

  Charlie folded her arms as if to say get it yourself, but Mick brought me some water. I sipped it and then I had to get up because my bladder was bursting. Before I went out Charlie said, ‘Well, did that change a single damned thing for anyone?’

  I stopped. ‘Yes. It changed quite a lot, actually.’

  Charlie and Phil glowered, waiting for more. I gestured to Mick that he should come outside.

  He followed me into the out-house. ‘I don’t know what you were trying to prove, Danny,’ he said as I relieved myself. ‘But we’re no further on.’

  ‘No, we’re a lot further on.’ I could recall most of what transpired with absolute c
larity, except that I was confused about what was actually event and what was opium-induced imagination which only felt like event. ‘Mick, tell me what you saw.’

  He scratched his head. ‘You were babbling. Charlie couldn’t stand to see you getting further and further out of your head. I watched her. At first she made out she didn’t care, but it was eating her up. Phil, too; he was off his head just watching you. He followed you outside. I went to the poppy fields to get you but I ended up bringing him back instead. Then Nabao started to get agitated, thought you’d had enough. Looking at me, like. You wanted another pipe but I told Nabao to take it away. You were vomiting. You were hell-bent, Danny. Hell-bent.’

  Vomiting? I didn’t remember that. I had a sudden flash of Phil running through the poppy field, dragging off his shirt.

  ‘How many pipes did I have?’

  ‘Look for yourself.’

  Back inside, Nabao’s banana leaf strips were lying on the mat. I counted them. Fifteen pipes of opium.

  ‘You could have killed yourself,’ Charlie said.

  ‘I quite liked it. Might do it again, tonight.’

  ‘Ha!’ went Phil.

  ‘No, Phil,’ Charlie said. ‘It doesn’t happen that quickly. He’s learned nothing from this.’

  Her superiority riled me. ‘Oh I’ve learned plenty,’ I raged. ‘Plenty. Shall I tell you – you and Phil – shall I tell you what it is a father wants? To love his children without conditions and to be loved in return without conditions. But it seems that’s too much. So what he hopes for is that his children will grow up to do the things he likes doing and to like the things he likes. But why should they? So he can’t have that either. Also too much to ask for. So what he then hopes is that his children will at least grow up to speak in the same voice as his, so that they might talk together and not be divided in his own hearth.’