Smoking Poppy

by Graham Joyce

  But the soldier wasn’t entirely satisfied. He smelled a rat, but he couldn’t quite figure us out. We certainly had the look of a trekking group: four pink-faced Westerners and a Thai guide. The thing is, I too sensed something wrong, and I couldn’t work it out either. The soldier gave me back my Panda Travel docket and stepped over to the raft. He began to fiddle with the straps on our packs. He struggled first with the knots on the shoelaces, but couldn’t seem to unpick them. Phoo had made them doubly secure. Then he got bored and turned back to me. I was still smoking luxuriously.

  ‘Panda Travel?’

  ‘Yes, Panda Travel.’

  I was making heavy weather of trying to sound casual. As I stood at the river’s edge I happened to glance down at the water. The pink morning light made a mirror of the water, and in it I saw a desperate and haggard individual with psychotic, boiling eyes staring back at me. It was an image of a man at the end of his rope.

  With a minimal gesture the soldier waved us on. Phoo inched the raft back into the water and we climbed on board. We pushed off with an air of fanatical nonchalance, and the soldier stared after us until we’d drifted around a bend in the river and out of sight. ‘Will he contact Jack?’ I asked Phoo.

  ‘Maybe yes. Maybe no. Keep going.’

  We wouldn’t know until we met Phoo’s collaborator.

  About an hour further downstream and on reaching a small clearing, Phoo deftly guided the raft to the bank. A Thai man, completely expressionless and smoking a cigarette, waited under the trees. I could see a yellow Jeep parked higher up on a red-dirt track. As we put on our shoes the man helped Phoo untie the packs from the tripod and the two of them carried the packs to the Jeep. Then Phoo returned to the raft, gently pushing it into the flow of the river, where it sailed on minus its cargo.

  Phoo rode up front with the driver and the packs, while we four sat in the back of the vehicle, avoiding eye contact with each other, hardly daring to believe we’d made it. We sat in silence. I knew why: it would tempt fate to celebrate too early. The Jeep bounced and jolted slowly along the dusty track, and after another hour we came to a proper metalled road. After that the Jeep made good progress.

  There was a delay outside Chiang Mai as Phoo negotiated a songthaew driver who would take us into town. We were transferred to the back of the songthaew truck.

  ‘You pay me now,’ Phoo said seriously.

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Mick. He pulled the roll of notes from his belt and handed it over to Phoo. With that, Phoo fetched our packs and flung them in with us.

  ‘Ooooooh! Bye so long!’ grinned Phoo. He jumped into the yellow Jeep and it roared off the way we had come.

  The songthaew drove us through the outskirts of Chiang Mai. The great brass, ticking engine of the sun was well up by now, and already we were missing the cool of the jungle. Mick, sitting in the open back of the vehicle, handed cigarettes round and we lit up.

  ‘These packs,’ Phil said.

  ‘What about ’em?’

  ‘They’re not the same ones we’ve been carrying for the last six hours.’

  We looked at the packs. He was right. We opened them, and though they were stuffed with our clothes and belongings, Phil was correct. These were not the same backpacks we’d carried out of the village.

  ‘I thought mine was a little heavy,’ Charlie said.

  Mick took a deep drag on his cigarette. He blew a thick plume of blue smoke at a tuk-tuk roaring inches behind the songthaew. Then he looked at us.

  ‘We’ve been shafted,’ he said.

  38

  We had indeed been shafted. Later, we estimated that we’d each carried at least five kilos of jungle morphine into Chiang Mai under the noses of the Thai army. Of course, it might have been Phoo’s enterprise, but at the back of it I saw Jack’s puppeteering hand. He’d made sure Phoo let us know that he was going to be away, knowing we’d try to bribe someone to take us out as soon as Charlie was ready to go; and he knew that we had every chance of squeezing through the army checkpoint downriver. No doubt if that army soldier had been more persistent and we’d been caught, we would be locked up in Chiang Mai jail with only Brazier-Armstrong to help us, and the story would start all over again. No doubt, too, that Jack’s money would have sprung Phoo. The rest of us would have been hung out to dry.

  And no one would have believed us.

  If I understood Jack correctly, the morphine base we’d brought downriver would be worth more than twenty thousand dollars in Chiang Mai, and would make business worth twenty-five million dollars on the streets of London, Paris and New York. It made us complicit in the smuggling of drugs, but there was a far more serious crime that one of us had to carry.

  We had to spend a night in Chiang Mai before we could get on a flight to Bangkok. We returned to the River View Lodge to reclaim our stored suitcases and there we took two double rooms. I was never going to be happy until we were on our way to London. I wanted medical attention for Charlie, but it had to wait. Significantly, I chose to room with Phil while Mick agreed to share with and keep a close eye on Charlie, though we spent most of the time together, not wanting to venture out.

  I could only guess at what Jack might do if the body surfaced while we were still in Chiang Mai. If Jack had wanted to kill us, he would have done it at the riverside before we’d exchanged the backpacks. But would his attitude change if he knew we’d murdered his nephew? My best hope would be that Jack’s guerrilla farming would take him on to another place long before some scavenging animal or hapless villager turned up something nasty.

  We had a difficult time organising a flight out. I spent agonising hours on the telephone trying to make reservations. Finally we discarded our original tickets and bought four new one-way flights from Chiang Mai to London Heathrow via Bangkok.

  ‘Are you going to tell me about it?’ I said to Phil in a moment when we were alone.

  He looked pale. He lowered himself gently on to the edge of his bed, put his hands on his knees, and stared at the wall.

  I tried again. ‘This notion of release, Phil. Giving it up.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Hearing you talk like that. It seems odd.’

  I knew it wasn’t gratitude he wanted from me, but I had to say, ‘I suspect I owe you more than I’ll ever be able to tell you.’

  ‘It was over in a couple of minutes,’ he said. His voice was flat. ‘When you went out there that night, we followed, of course. He knocked the knife out of your hand and he kicked you unconscious. You were out. Belly down in the dust. He lifted your head by the hair and took a knife to your throat. I scooped up your machete and I hacked it into his neck before he could cut your throat.

  ‘It was like when you lodge an axe in a tree. I was gripping the handle of the machete and I couldn’t pull it out of his neck. I was still trying to dislodge the damned machete when he spun away from me, and he convulsed and smashed his head on the edge of the porch.

  ‘I wish I could say he died quickly. He didn’t. He couldn’t cry out. The machete was half buried in his neck.

  ‘I was useless. Shivering, still shivering. Mick rolled the body under the hut. He got under there himself and pulled the machete out, and the man bled to death, there, under the hut. Then Mick got me and you inside. He cleaned up before you came round. That’s the whole story.’

  Although Phil said that was the whole story, it wasn’t the case. Now I understood what he’d meant when he’d said he was in hell. He had violated the holy injunction not to kill. He’d broken the sixth commandment to uphold the fifth, to honour his father: not in any intellectual ranking or ordering of these injunctions, but in the imperative of the blood and the moment.

  Now I had to stand in awe of him.

  But for Phil the entire saga had not after all proved to be a Pilgrim’s Progress, not the treading of a difficult but steady path to grace or redemption, but a sudden tilting plunge into hell. Back home he was an Elder of his church. Here he was a m
urderer. How was he going to find a way out of hell? I didn’t even know if there was a way out. If I could have exchanged my soul for his, and accepted his penalties in an afterlife, I would have done so without a moment’s hesitation.

  But I couldn’t.

  ‘Is there anything, anything at all, I can do?’

  ‘No, Dad. Nothing.’

  I wanted to cry for him. My dumpy little boy, whom I’d also lost. There was no fixing this. I was learning that there are so many things a father cannot fix. I even made a silent appeal to the God in whom I have no belief: you saw what happened, surely you cannot blame this boy? Come the moment, Phil had placed the affiliations of blood even above his deepest religious convictions.

  Would not any God, of any stripe, forgive that?

  Though exhausted from the flight from the village, we were wired, and a long way from sleep. Charlie, Mick and I drank heavily with no apparent effects. We sat in the hotel room, chain-smoking and sighing. We talked continuously, though not about anything with gravity. Every so often one of the group would look at the locked door of our hotel room.

  Until I couldn’t stand it any longer, and it was to Phil I turned. ‘But why in God’s name couldn’t you tell me what had happened? Why couldn’t you say? Then at least I might have understood what you were going through.’

  Mick answered for Phil. ‘He was protecting you.’

  ‘Protecting me? It wasn’t me who needed protecting! You were going out of your mind up there, Phil! Out of your mind.’

  ‘Danny,’ Mick said quietly. ‘It’s true that Phil had some wobbly moments. But it was you who was going out of your mind.’

  All three looked at me intently. I thought of the spirits I’d begun to see massing in the village. I thought of the opium, and of the paranoia. ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. There was never any danger of Phil letting us down.’

  ‘What was driving Phil crazy,’ Charlie added, ‘was the prospect of not keeping you together.’

  It was later, at Bangkok airport, that Charlie took off Mick’s lucky amulet and handed it back to him. ‘I really value this,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to let you keep it.’ He offered it to her for a second time.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want you to make a promise,’ he said, taking a swig from a bottle of Singha beer. ‘You’ll give it back to me only when you have your next dope.’

  Charlie clamped her lips. The crease in her brow writhed momentarily.

  ‘Nothing need be said,’ Mick suggested. ‘No harsh words. No criticism. We’re beyond that now. Only after all that’s happened I think you owe it me, to tell me if and when that day comes. Don’t take the amulet off me if you can’t at least do that.’

  ‘How much of an addict are you?’ I said. I had no idea of the implications of her addiction, nor of sudden withdrawal.

  Charlie looked at me. She took the amulet and put it round her neck. I could have kissed Mick.

  There were other deals going on. Phil turned to me and said, ‘You made a promise, there in the jungle.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. You said you’d go to church with me every Sunday. For a year!’

  I thought about it. For one disgraceful moment I was about to bring up the fact that Mick had had to put him across his shoulder. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. Phil pushed out his bottom lip, and then he sniffed with apparent satisfaction. He even took a sip of my airport beer to seal the contract.

  He’d been entirely correct about this jealousy thing. I could see that now. And I’d driven them all away with it, Sheila, Phil, Charlie. Phil and Charlie, I now realised, both had to go to places where I wouldn’t follow them. Or at least, if I did follow them, then it was to places where they’d each got me on their own terms. And if I could follow my daughter into the jungle, then I could follow my son into his evangelical church. Not to bring him back – that wasn’t the point any more. It was just to say: I’m here. With Mick’s arm-twisting help, I managed to wring out of Phil a reciprocal promise that he would come over to see us once a week.

  From Bangkok airport we telephoned Sheila. Charlie and Phil took turns talking to her, though Sheila appeared to spend most of the time crying. Then I had a few words. We made it sound as though we’d come to the end of a fabulous holiday.

  ‘Are you coming back too?’ Sheila said evenly.

  ‘Well, I’m not staying here.’

  ‘Stop it. You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean. We’ve got a lot to talk about, Sheila. All of us.’

  In the air somewhere between Bangkok and London, with Charlie sleeping next to me, I fell into a doze. I dreamed I was on the jade-green river on a raft made out of aeroplane parts.

  39

  It seems only moments ago. A lotus flower unfolding in a single hour of the morning sun. And a lifetime in another incarnation.

  Charlie meanwhile, leaning against my shoulder, continues to slumber, hugging her Rupert Bear. Her hair blows minutely in the soft airstream from the overhead vent of the pressurised aircraft cabin. One arm is held down on her lap and the other points up oddly above her head. She has resumed her flying position, the one I would spend hours watching when she was in her infant cot. Mick’s amulet hangs from her throat. I think Phil’s particular sacrifice will always weigh in her karma, not his.

  Karma. Do I sound like a hippy now, or a Buddhist? I’m not even sure what a Buddhist is, but I don’t think I’m one. I don’t really care for any kind of creed. Religion is like the dope, which is like the whisky, which is like the stupid television. Same fuck of a different colour.

  But I do believe in spirits. In ghosts. Only now I know what they are. They are not the dead. They do not come from an afterlife. They move about us. They live on our shoulders, or at our right or left hand, and they are created by our actions. I was followed all the way by one small spirit. It practically had to tug me by the sleeve that day in the poppy field before I would acknowledge it. It was the crying spirit of an absence of core in my life.

  Phil is seated in front of me, along with Mick. I intend to keep my promise to Phil and I will attend church every Sunday for a year, no matter how unspeakably awful it is. And it will be unspeakably awful. But every week I will approach this awfulness with a glad heart, because it’s a means for me to get back to Phil, and if in some way it begins to unburden him, then I’ll do it. I’ll even take along my own teabags. Then there’s Mick. What can I say about him? A man who would go into the jungle with you; a man who would put his entire wherewithal at your disposal in a time of need. I’m in awe of him, too. Every step of the way his behaviour was impeccable and ultimately beyond reproach. A giant at my side. But he’s changed. I’ve noticed no fake-waiing and farting on the way home. A superficial difference, which I suspect is only temporary.

  I think of what Charlie taught me, and I see how Mick’s desire to be needed by me is no different to my own desire to be needed by my children. Only he’s better at it than I am. More than anything I know that through his actions he gave me that grace and generosity – so deplorable in its absence up until now – to finally be able to call him my friend.

  Next time I have some trouble, I’ll tell him about it first.

  Because I have come a long way. As far, if not further, than any of them. All this time I have spent thinking of Charlie as a child and never as a woman. And all this time I spent pretending to be the great protector, when it was ultimately Phil who forfeited everything to protect me. It’s a shocking and humbling thing to realise how much your children have to teach you.

  I’ve been a selfish child pretending to be a man. I allowed fatherhood to become a creeping cataract, preventing me from seeing the changing needs of those around me. But I didn’t know then what I know now. That you have to let them pluck from your heart with bruising fingers great, sparkling, golden, resinous chunks of love, and never ask under what moon they smoke it or where they spill it.

  I remember when Phil was born. In th
ose first days when I displayed him proudly and everywhere, and with the oafish grin of the neophyte father indelibly painted on my stupid jaw, a mean-spirited and mealy-mouthed old woman approached me and said, ‘Yes, and he’ll break your heart one day.’

  Break your heart one day? I wish I’d known then what I know now, and I could have gainsaid the old harridan. Your children break your heart every day. You only have to look at them and your heart shreds. They lacerate it. Pulverise it. And then they mend it for you, each and every day, with a gesture or a smile or a sly glance, just so that it can be shredded and wrecked all over again. And all over nothing.

  That’s what it means to be a father. That’s my definition: a father is a person with a mashed heart and a wounded hand. And that’s perfectly normal.

  But you have to be so careful while your heart is being mashed over nothing, that your heart doesn’t harden when you can’t take any more. Because if that happens you’ve lost the possibility of salvation that becoming a parent gave you in the first place. Did I let that happen? I won’t again. I’ve stopped despising my children for what they are. My daughter is a drug addict. I’ll try to help. My son is a religious fanatic. So what? I’ve stopped hating them for the things that make them different from me.

  The pressure changes in the cabin and I know we will soon be coming in to land. I make my way to the toilet at the front of the cabin, and in there I bolt the door behind me and I let myself cry.

  I’ve got my family back. Not in the way I might have idealised, but they are there. Phil has a long way to go to work out his redemption, but at least now he will allow me to be with him in the enterprise. Charlie too has a lot of work of a different kind, and I have the feeling that she will or will not work out her salvation regardless of what I do. But – and it’s an important but – she’s still wearing Mick’s amulet. Seeing that amulet gives me the optimism I need.