Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  I could hear myself ranting, but I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t speaking the words; the words were somehow speaking me. They ripped from my mouth with an ugly sound, like the tearing of cloth. Something was breaking up inside me. ‘But why is it I can’t even have that? Why is it my children talk in voices I don’t understand? Where are my children behind these strange languages? Who gave them these shrill, incomprehensible accents?’

  Something in me had hardened, crystallised, and not against Charlie, but against her position. As for the opium, I’d seen how good it was, how damnably selfishly good. I liked it. It was all about me and nobody else. It was about my insignificant little cry, my pathetic bleat against the uproar of life, and my little bleat, so it seemed to me, was as important as hers or anyone else’s. I could see how luxurious it was to sink into a magnificent selfishness like that, one which had no bottom, and through which you could go on falling and falling and falling. You could be asked to undertake the rewiring of hell and it would seem like nice work.

  ‘Yes, all along, it was me. I somehow terrorised my own son and daughter into putting on masks and affecting voices so that they wouldn’t have to talk to me. And you know something? I don’t even know how I did it.’

  ‘Stop it, Dad,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Why, Charlie? For two years you haven’t had the basic courtesy to phone us at home, if only to say you were all right!’

  ‘That’s not true. I spoke with Mum regularly before I came out here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes. You just didn’t know about it.’

  ‘What?’ I was stunned.

  ‘I told her I’d stop calling her if she told you. It seems hateful now. But I was so angry with you.’

  This piece of information tilted the world ninety degrees. I had absolutely nothing to say. It meant that Charlie and Sheila had made a pact to keep in contact but to exclude me. To keep me in darkness for nearly two years. I looked at Phil, and I heard my voice fracturing as I said, ‘Did you know about this?’

  I saw him swallow. He nodded. He tapped his fingertips together, trying to frame a response. It was Charlie who reached out a hand to my shoulder. ‘Don’t! Don’t touch me!’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to touch me!’

  Coconut’s machete protruded from under my sleeping bag. I picked it up. ‘You know what it feels like to hear this? I’ll tell you. It feels like this.’ I closed my left hand over the blade and dragged the razor-edged knife sharply downwards. The palm of my hand opened up in a grisly, bubbling incision. Then I ran from the hut before they could see my face, in which loss, in which perdition was complete.

  ‘Dad!’ Charlie shouted.

  I ignored her. She came after me.

  ‘Dad! Come back!’

  I turned. She stood on the porch, pointing at me.

  ‘Dad. Please.’

  The pain in my hand seared. I had to close my fist to stop the blood flowing on to the red earth. But as I stood there, bleeding, I realised something that instantly took away the pain. ‘Charlie. You’ve stepped over the threshold.’

  She hugged herself, and looked up at the sky in dread. Then she looked back at me. Her mouth formed an O. ‘Yes.’

  We just looked, giving each other galaxies of space, and when she finally stepped back inside, I followed her. There she instantly took my hand, putting the wound to her mouth. ‘Charlie,’ I said. ‘You broke through.’

  ‘I’ll do it, Dad.’ she said. ‘Tonight. I’ll do it for you.’

  ‘Charlie. Come here. My heart.’ I held her. ‘And you, Phil.’ He came to me, and I put my bloody hand on his shoulder. I was bleeding all over them. The three of us leaned together in an embrace of utter depletion, and my hand pumped with pain.

  I heard Mick suck his teeth.

  Later, with a bandaged hand, I walked up to the poppy fields. Some of the villagers stopped work to regard me strangely. I was trying to get things straight in my mind. I couldn’t determine whether I’d actually gone there in my drug-induced condition or whether I’d pipe dreamed the whole thing. I looked for a likely spot where I might have sat down with the Lord of the Poppy, casting about in the red dirt for scientific evidence of that absurd encounter. What’s more, the memory of it was like a mosaic with stones missing or crumbling even as I tried to piece it together.

  On my return I found Mick standing by the radio in the centre of the village, and in earnest conversation with Phoo. Mick beckoned me over. Jack’s henchman looked shifty, nervous. ‘Tonight,’ Mick said, ‘Charlie is going to make that walk.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ I doubted it, somehow.

  ‘Too right she is. And during the commotion this boy is going to get us back on the road to Chiang Mai. Isn’t that right, Phoo? Chiang Mai?’ Mick flashed his wallet.

  Phoo didn’t seem persuaded. ‘I no so sure.’

  ‘Let’s step in the hut,’ I suggested.

  The three of us went inside the generator hut, where the useless Calpol was still piled high in cartons. We squatted. Mick took a huge wad of dollars from his moneybelt and unrolled it. ‘This now,’ he said, peeling off a few banknotes. ‘And all this later.’

  ‘Oooooooh. Ooooooooooh.’ Phoo shook his head. ‘No so sure. Jack find out, he kill me for sure.’

  Mick fanned the rest of the banknotes for him so he could see how much was there.

  ‘Ooooooooh!’

  Mick turned to me. ‘Phoo says after Charlie walks there will be dancing, bonfires, festivities. Full-moon party. It’s absolutely the moment for us to slip away. We won’t get a better time. No one will notice us. And Jack is away. Phoo here will take us to the river, and on a raft.’

  I suspected a trap. I had a feeling Jack had a good idea what had happened to his nephew. It would suit his purposes to get us out into the jungle, away from the villagers who themselves bore us no ill-will.

  ‘What the hell is the matter with you?’ Mick hissed. ‘This is it, Danny! This is fucking well it! We’ve got to go while Jack and his men are away! You want to stay here until they turn something up? We go by raft, and Phoo will have a man waiting by the road with a truck.’

  ‘How the hell is he going to arrange that?’ I protested.

  Phoo unbuttoned his breast pocket and took out a slim black object. ‘Cellphone!’ he said eagerly.

  ‘What’s more while you were away, something good happened,’ Mick said brightly. He held out his amulet for me to see. ‘I found it outside the hut.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that improves our position enormously.’

  I didn’t like it, but Mick was right. I smelled Jack’s rancid finger in all of it. But it was a chance we had to take. ‘So you’ll do it then?’ I said to Phoo. ‘Yes or no?’

  Phoo rubbed his chin in agitation and looked at the wad of notes in Mick’s fist. ‘Oooooooh!’

  We spent a hideous afternoon. Charlie was in a dreadful state, sleeping in fits, crying through her nightmares, thrashing her arms, soaking her bed with sweat. I cradled her as much as I could; I found myself holding her foot again. I had no idea what she would do, come the hour. We briefed Phil on the plan, and he spent the time wrestling with his own demons.

  It had to work. We couldn’t wait around any longer for that body to be turned up. I tried talking to Charlie even though she was sleeping. I tried telling her that this had to be the moment.

  Khiem appeared late in the day, relighting the incense, performing his inscrutable rituals around the hut, singing songs of a repetitive rhythm. ‘Moon!’ he said to me. ‘Moon!’ He wanted me to be ready. He also asked, by means of gestures and pointing, for some personal things of Charlie’s, which I gave him.

  Just before twilight Nabao brought us one of her noodle soups, but I had no stomach for it, and neither did Charlie. Her guts were rioting as the hour approached and we had to keep leaving the hut for the sake of her modesty. Even Mick, though he ate, had gone quiet. In fact he was in a decidedly strange mood. He kept fingering his amulet.

  ‘What is it, pal
?’

  He let out a big sigh. ‘Remember that Buddhist monk in Chiang Mai? The one having a ciggie under the bo tree?’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘I keep thinking about something he said. He told me that the pot had to break and become the clay and that broken things are made whole again. Odd, isn’t it? Charlie here thinks she’s been punished for stealing a piece of the moon. And I show up with a quarter-moon amulet. And if that’s not enough, then I lose it and find it today, on the evening of the full moon. It’s all got to snap together, hasn’t it?’

  ‘What are you driving at?’

  I noticed Phil listening intently to this. ‘Mick’s saying it’s a sign. It’s like we were meant to be here, at this very moment.’

  I looked hard at him. ‘Mick, you’ve got to keep your head together.’

  He stared meaningfully at my bandaged hand. Then he turned to Phil and arched a single eyebrow.

  Dusk fell and the temperature began to plummet. I knew something was about to happen because the radio was suddenly silenced, and this time I knew it wasn’t a fault with the generator. Then, as darkness descended on the village, I heard movement outside the hut. I went to the porch. Villagers were gathering from all directions, men, women, children, even some very old people I hadn’t seen before came hobbling to join the assembly. Two or three of the men held burning flares aloft, but the others, including even the smallest child, carried metal pans, mostly aluminium saucepans or stainless steel dishes. The villagers lined up on two sides, forming a path. At the far end of the path stood Khiem.

  Khiem gave a cry, half shout, half ululation. When he stopped, the villagers began banging their pots and pans very quickly with sticks or spoons. I looked up at the moon. It was full, like a plump silver gourd hanging incredibly low in the sky, waxy and benign.

  I went into the hut. ‘This is it,’ I said. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. It was down to Charlie. Then there was a rustling sound by the door.

  It was the sound of a single bamboo strip torn away from the hut, next to the door. On the other side of the door another strip whistled as it was plucked away from outside. I saw what was happening. The villagers were widening the door for us to come out. They were going to dismantle the hut stick by stick.

  ‘Oh no,’ Charlie said. ‘Oh no.’

  Nabao was inside, stroking Charlie’s hand. The old woman looked up at me with infinite pity. She knew this had to be the moment. She’d prepared a pipe of opium, and gestured towards Charlie.

  ‘Yes, give it her. She’s going to need it.’

  While Charlie smoked her pipe more strips of bamboo were plucked out of the wall. I unpacked something from my bag. I’d been saving it for this moment. It was my own bit of dark magic. ‘Something was taken away from you Charlie while you lay in this hut. I got it back.’

  It was the passport Brazier-Armstrong had returned to me in Chiang Mai. I held it open at her photograph. It occurred to me that if the villagers believed in photographic magic, then perhaps Charlie could have her soul returned in the same way. She took the passport from me with a trembling hand.

  In the passport photograph a sweet young girl smiled at the camera. The photographer had caught her about to burst into a laugh. It had been taken two weeks before her eighteenth birthday. ‘Look at that,’ I said. ‘It’s my girl. When she was little.’

  I guess I’d meant that it was my girl when I was still in control of her life, in a way that I had never been after that photograph was taken. Charlie looked at me and said, ‘Is it going to be all right, Dad? Is it?’

  ‘Of course it is. That’s why I came for you.’ I had a leather wallet with a neck strap. I took the passport from her, slipped it in the wallet and hung it around her neck. ‘But it’s not just a photograph, is it? It’s love all the way, Charlie. Me and Phil and Mick. Our love is going to carry you out of this place. Isn’t that right, Phil?’

  ‘That’s right, Charlie,’ said Phil.

  ‘That’s the one, Charlie,’ said Mick. ‘That’s the one.’

  Outside the din of battering metal grew louder and more impatient. More strips of bamboo were torn out of the walls, now on all four sides. Mick stepped forward. ‘Here,’ he said, hanging his amulet around Charlie’s neck.

  ‘Oh God!’ Charlie was trembling and crying now. ‘Oh God!’

  ‘Will you take this?’ Phil said. He wanted her to have his pocket Bible. Charlie closed her fingers around it, grateful for magic of any colour. Phil seemed mightily relieved.

  ‘This is it, Charlie,’ I said. ‘I’m so proud of you but I need you to do this one thing.’ Her eyes were closed but she was nodding at me. I actually started to think she might come through. ‘I also think I could do with a tug on that pipe,’ I added.

  I took a draught of the opium. Charlie giggled, but it was an hysterical giggle, almost a shudder. ‘I might need you to carry me,’ she said faintly.

  ‘We can do that,’ Mick said. ‘Easily. This time with your permission, eh?’

  She shivered uncontrollably. One of her hands clasped the passport wallet and the amulet, the other Phil’s Bible. Mick and I linked arms and made a chair for her to ride and we carried her to the threshold. Phil fell in line behind us, breathing steady encouragement down the back of our necks as we stepped towards the door. When the villagers saw us appear at the threshold the racket and their excitement soared. In the din I could barely hear myself think. Charlie flung her arms around my neck, burying her head in my breast. ‘It’s all right,’ I said to Mick. ‘I can take her. She’s my baby.’ The pain in my hand seared as I carried her. But I wanted it. Wanted the pain of carrying her.

  ‘We’re right behind you,’ Mick said. ‘All the way. Right, Phil?’

  ‘All the way, Dad,’ said Phil.

  Charlie convulsed hideously as we passed outside. I feared she’d gone into a fit. The tumult in our ears augmented, and the huge moon seemed to crash on our heads like a cymbal. Khiem stood before us, fantastically attired, a terrifying apparition in the silver moonlight. He wore a felt cap sewn with poppy petals, and a long tunic. The belt round his waist jingled with silver discs sewn together like the scales of a fish. Draped from his neck were a great number of larger, circular, silver amulets, and in his hands he carried a wooden staff and a silver disc. He approached Charlie and touched her chin gently, so that she might look him in the eye. As she opened her eyes she was caught by his gaze, and for two or three seconds it was like watching someone draw a sting. Something passed between them in that moment, and I felt her relax marginally, surrendering a little in my arms. She gasped at his wild appearance, not least because also hanging from his neck was a familiar looking animal.

  ‘He’s got Rupert Bear,’ Charlie breathed.

  ‘That’s right, Charlie.’

  I’m not sure if she fainted or merely gave herself over to us, but Khiem beckoned us on, turned, and led us slowly through the clanging, banging, clattering tumult of villagers. I saw Phoo in the small crowd. He looked anxious.

  Behind us our hut was being emptied of our backpacks and other belongings. Khiem proceeded at a painfully slow pace, and as we passed the villagers peeled away and ran on up ahead, rebuilding the path in front of us, still thrashing their pots. I felt lost and bewildered in the cacophony of sound, though in a strange way protected by it. It was an island of noise in the sea of the night. ‘Are you there, Mick?’ I heard a slight panic in my voice.

  ‘Right behind you, brother!’

  We shuffled on, this bizarre procession illumined by the massive, pendulous moon. Perhaps it was the blast of opium I’d taken before coming out of the hut, but I saw the event as if from above, singular and inexplicable, Khiem leading us with an outlandish gait that was almost a dance, me following with Charlie in my arms, Mick keeping step behind and Phil bringing up the rear, intoning psalms. And at the periphery of the crowd I saw other figures assembling, behind the villagers as it were, as we approached the spirit gate. Hordes of figur
es in shadow, or in silhouette, pressing in behind the villagers. I blinked them away.

  On either side of the spirit gate lighted torches were burning, throwing off a waxy, syrupy smoke, and as we approached, I saw that the moon had settled exactly behind the arch of the gate. We inched towards it as if towards a prize. It seemed to occupy the entire sky. I wanted Charlie to see it. ‘Look at it, Charlie! Look at the moon!’

  She opened her eyes, encouraged by the spectacular formation. Moonlight drenched everything. It flooded over us, milky light. I could even smell it. The villagers spurred us on with renewed urgency, clanging pots and pans dangerously close to our ears.

  Charlie started to feel even heavier as we approached the spirit gate. My lacerated hand burned. Sweat was streaming into my eyes, but I dared not put her down. The smoke from the flares thickened near the gate, and in the haze and in the din I again began to have the strange sensation of crowds of figures congregating behind the villagers, pressing in on us. Moreover I saw complex structures assembled behind them, platforms and piers and landings, and ladders of bamboo and stairways, all with people coming and going and climbing or descending. Some of these figures were paying us no attention; others were interested in the proceedings; one of the grey shapes formed his mouth into a trumpet and leaned through the villagers to blast it in my ear; others again reached their arms through the villagers and tried to press down on Charlie, making her weight unbearable. Still others appeared to want to help, and were making noises of encouragement, blowing cool air on my burning hand, assembling in greater number as we approached the spirit gate.

  These tortured visions lasted for only fleeting seconds, and would have stopped me in my tracks were it not for Khiem and the villagers who came back to urge me on. The din from the thrashing of the metal pots kept the spirit multitude at bay, allowing us to make progress. The visions cleared from my mind as at last we staggered through the gate, to the cheers and ecstasy of the villagers, who threw down their pots and applauded wildly, whistling and shrieking. Then they began singing.