Smoking Poppy Read online

  Smoking poppy

  By Graham Joyce

  G&S Books

  Smoking Poppy.

  Copyright © Graham Joyce 2001. All rights reserved. This E-book edition first published 2013

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Foreword © Graham Joyce 2013

  Graham Joyce is a multiple award winning author. He grew up in the mining village of Keresley near Coventry. In 1988 he quit his job as a youth officer and decamped to the Greek island of Lesbos, there to live in a beach shack with a colony of scorpions and to concentrate on writing. He sold his first novel while still in Greece and travelled in the Middle East on the proceeds. He is a winner of The World Fantasy Award; is five-times winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel; is twice winner of the French Grand Prix De L'Imaginaire; and was the winner of the American O Henry short story award in 2009. His website is: www.grahamjoyce.net.

  Novels by Graham Joyce:

  The Year Of The Ladybird

  Dreamside

  Dark Sister

  House Of Lost Dreams

  Requiem

  The Stormwatcher

  Leningrad Nights

  Indigo

  Smoking Poppy

  The Facts Of Life

  The Limits Of Enchantment

  Memoirs Of A Master Forger by William Heaney/ How To Make Friends With Demons

  The Silent Land

  Some Kind Of Fairy Tale

  Partial Eclipse & Other Short Stories

  (Children & Young Adult novels):

  Spiderbite

  TWOC

  Do The Creepy thing

  Three ways To Snog An Alien

  The Devil’s Ladder

  (Non-fiction):

  Simple Goalkeeping Made Spectacular

  Author’s Foreword

  Does having children change the way you write? It’s a question often put to me. The answer is: yes, profoundly.

  I wouldn’t make any grand claims about it making you either a better or a worse writer, but it certainly makes you a different writer. The experience of having children is so clearly different for different people. For some people the entire process is obviously about as significant as having a glass of beer. For me, as someone who had originally decided that I never wanted children it is and remains an overwhelming and transformative psychic explosion.

  Anyway, Smoking Poppy was written while I was still adjusting to the magnificent emotional derailment called fatherhood. It was like all the coloured jewels had dropped out of the end of a kaleidoscope and there I was trying to assemble a new mosaic out of all these bits. One of the most unexpected jewels that Nature comes up with is the protect-and-nurture instinct to pick up your new-born child and hold it right there in your arms. This is astonishing considering that other people’s new-borns are or were pretty revolting alimentary canals squirting body fluids at either end: something to hand back quickly to the oafishly smiling father or the enraptured mother who thought it was “pleasantly bonding” to let you handle their bundle in the first place.

  Ah, but when it’s your own! Nature doesn’t just make you want to pick up and hug your child, it triggers complex hormones and pheromones that actually addict you to the practice of handling your child. A divine scent comes streaming from the soft fontanel of your baby’s crown. You get one whiff of that and you are a gonna. It’s more addictive than crack cocaine, and it never gives you a downer. It’s pure reward. Pick me up in your arms! Get a free hit!

  It stays with you all your life, that hit. This natural charge is so strong that next time someone gives you an alimentary canal to hold you don’t run from the room screaming anymore. You surreptitiously pass the baby’s fontanel under your searching nostril to see if you can still reclaim the scent of heaven. Just once again. Please.

  This novel, Smoking Poppy, sprang from that single idea. What happens when you are so addicted to the love you have for your children when you have to let them go? Or can you ever really let them go? In fact I open the novel with this idea. I wasn’t going to, initially. The passage that now opens the story was buried deep in the middle of the novel somewhere until my very smart editor Jason Kauffman suggested hauling it to the front. I still think it’s one of the best openings of all my books.

  Though the book is much more of an adventure novel than domestic drama. I have a habit (uncomfortable for publishers, though they let me get away with it) of splicing genres. Here was one I hadn’t tried, almost Victorian in character: the pale-faced Englishman plunged into exotic climes and inscrutable Orientals: but breathed upon all the time by the fumes of the supernatural.

  Not that there are any hard-core ghosts in Smoking Poppy. If anything, my protagonist Danny is his own ghost. Although his quest is to find his daughter, he has over the years been losing his soul and though it takes him some time to realise it, he is also on a quest to get it back.

  One way he thinks he might find it is by sticking his nose in books. In order to get a clue to his daughter’s frame of mind he reads stuff like Thomas De Quincy’s Confessions Of An Opium Eater. Not that he can drag much sense out of the book, though he is impressed by the short section on the mysterious “Dark Interpreter”. Perhaps in that one regard he is a bit too much like me.

  I had a lot of fun in writing the characters of Danny, Mick and Phil. Danny is one of those intelligent blue-collar workers who through no fault of his own never got the chance of a university education, though he worked hard to ensure his own children had exactly that. He is disappointed in that sending his children off to university for three years only seemed to have the effect of alienating his children from him. He’s a clever man but he is exasperated with the world. He is also infuriating when he can’t see further than his nose. By which I mean I hope he is infuriating to the reader.

  For American readers “The Quiz night” in the early section of the novel is a common feature of British pub life. Teams for three or four players will assemble and pay a few quid into a “pot”. Then a quizmaster will pluck up a badly whistling microphone and hit them up with a series of General Knowledge questions. What was the name of Elvis Presley’s first wife? (“Mrs Presley” won’t cut it.) By what name is the former country of Burma now known? This kind of thing can be spread across an entire evening. The winning team takes the pot and – what do you know – it’s always the same team who wins.

  Danny, Mick and Phil travel from this cosy world of provincial British pubs to the opium-growing borderlands of Thailand and Myanmar (formerly Burma, but you knew that). There are very few places on the planet that can support the effective cultivation of the opium poppy, even though the raw plant is still the basis of the heroin trade. You need very high altitude, hot weather in the daytime and the sudden swoop of low temperatures at night. This combination makes the poppy sweat during the day and the sap then crystallises overnight for harvesting.

  The giant folded mountains of the region mentioned above and Afghanistan are the main production centres. I found Thailand/Myanmar much more the culturally interesting a place to send my three reluctant companions. The people living in these mountains are neither Thai nor Burmese. They are impoverished ethnic hill tribes with animistic belief systems. They worship the spirits. These people migrated from Tibet a few hundred years ago and brought the secrets of the poppy with them. The
spirit gates and fertility swings I describe in the novel are taken very seriously. They are meanwhile terrorised by the Myanmar government and by opium-gangs alike.

  I witnessed all of this when I spent some time living in the jungle with the ethnic hill tribes. I was definitely a tourist rather than an anthropologist but the time I spent there gave me some insight. Spirit gates are erected in the village and are carved with wonderful grotesque and vulgar figures. It is taboo to touch a spirit gate. They exist to signal to the spirits that they have free and unimpeded passage through the village. I was told in no uncertain terms that I should ask permission of the spirits before doing anything. For example before bathing in the river. I was warned that if I didn’t ask the spirits for permission before bathing that I would get a serious stomach upset. I must say I complied and I was fine.

  Opium was grown by the villagers. They have no medicine or pharmaceuticals and the drug was mainly considered as a relief for people in their old age. Problems started when young people copied western tourists in using the opium recreationally.

  Into this walk Danny, Mick and Phil. It’s all a long way from the cosy British pub on a rainy Tuesday night, which of course was my intention. It’s an adventure story as I say. But it also turns out to be a book about love and friendship.

  Graham Joyce

  June 2013

  1

  Oh that Charlie of mine, how I wanted her back.

  When a baby is born the fontanelle at the top of the head yawns open. You fill the hole with shimmering, molten, free-running love, where it sets and hardens over the hole with something like bone. But for the first few weeks of a baby’s life you are intoxicated by the extraordinary scent of its head. The chemical fix. A gift from the gardens of paradise. You want it all the time, and you only get it when you cradle that baby in your arms.

  After the first year this perfume thins out, but it never deserts the child entirely. So you keep hugging. Every time you pick up that infant you look for an opportunity to get her hair under your nostrils so you might get a hint, a hit, once more, of the perfume of heaven. It’s still there when she’s six years old. And even at eleven. And though between the ages of twelve and fifteen she pushes away your fatherly embrace, she still comes to you when she’s tired or hurt or unhappy. Then at seventeen it seems she’s more likely to come back to you, relaxed in your company again, not afraid to take a hug. And you’re still getting it. That scent. That charge. The love amalgam, fixed and hardening there from Day One. It’s still there.

  And it’s there on the October afternoon, with the golden leaves spinning all around you when you hug her and kiss her and wave her away to her life.

  Yes how I wanted her back. My Charlie. Just for two minutes. Just so I could hold her, and sniff her hair to check that she was all right. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because she was rotting in a prison cell in some Far Eastern jail. And it made me want to howl like a dog.

  I was struggling to assemble a flatpack chest of drawers when Sheila called to tell me that Charlie had turned up in some place called Chiang Mai. The flatpack contained one hundred and thirty-three individual parts, not counting the screws and the small tube of wood glue, and the suppliers had enclosed a Chinese diagram. There were no instructions on the diagram, just pictures, and arrows that made me think of the bowmen of Agincourt. I couldn’t make sense of any of it.

  ‘Are you there?’ Sheila said.

  ‘Of course I’m here.’ I was there all right. I was holding the diagram, the wood glue, sections P and Q, and I had the telephone squeezed under my neck. I was there.

  ‘Only you haven’t said anything.’

  ‘No, I haven’t said anything.’

  Then Sheila dropped silent on me and I felt so angry and confused and upset I clattered sections P and Q back in the box and threw the tube of wood glue against the wall.

  ‘What’s that?’ Sheila wanted to know.

  ‘I dropped the phone.’

  ‘Are you coming over?’

  I didn’t want to. Go over, I mean. I’d spent the last three months avoiding going over. ‘Yes.’ I thought I detected sniffle at the other end of the line. ‘Look at it this way,’ I said. ‘At least Charlie’s not dead.’

  I did go round and it was terrible. Just terrible. After we’d talked about Charlie and what might be done we had nothing to say to each other, and Sheila spent the whole time sighing heavily. I’m the wronged party and yet she’s the one who sighs all the time.

  I looked at my watch. I had to be at the Clipper for eight o’clock. They do a decent quiz at the Clipper, and besides I’m part of a team.

  ‘You don’t have to go,’ Sheila said, getting up.

  ‘I don’t want to be here when whasisname comes round.’ I know the swine’s name but I always make out I don’t, even though I don’t care whether he’s there or not.

  ‘He doesn’t come here, Danny. I’ve told you before I’ve never allowed him here.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got to go. I’ll give this bloke from the Foreign Office a ring tomorrow and I’ll tell you what we can work out.’ I brushed my lips against Sheila’s rosy cheeks and she sighed again.

  Chiang Mai? I was very glad when I got to the Clipper.

  Halfway through the quiz they stop for a breather. This is annoying because we then have to spend twenty minutes making conversation. I have to point out that the other members of my team, even though we’ve been playing together for some years, are not exactly choice company. You need a team of three or four, and we got shuffled together when the thing first got launched.

  Quite often we win, though we do have our rivals. Among others there’s an angry-looking mob of militant college teachers who huddle by the fireside; a team of pleasant lesbians; and a beery group of engineers. All of these come close, and every Tuesday the quiz provides a diversion. Though as I say, there are these twenty-minute pauses when we have to make conversation, and Mick Williams always kicks off by asking me what sort of a day I’ve had.

  ‘What sort of a day have you had then, Dan?’

  ‘Ach, not bad,’ I always say, and then I try to eavesdrop on the Pleasant Lesbians or on the Fireside Tendency; not to cheat, but to avoid getting drawn in to idle chat. In any event I’m not likely to tell him that today the Foreign Office phoned my now ex-wife at our family home to say that our daughter had been arrested in Chiang Mai for smuggling drugs and was likely to face a death sentence. I wasn’t going to drop that little bombshell in the middle of the pub quiz. Apart from which, Mick Williams didn’t even know I had a daughter, or a son come to that, since I’d never mentioned either.

  At this point in the successfully derailed conversation, Mick Williams normally grunts, takes a sip of his Old Muckster’s Jubilee Ale and moves on to Izzy, to whom he puts the same question. Slightly more talkative than I am, Izzy can be relied upon to keep the pot boiling until the quiz is ready to resume. But Mick was in an unusual mood that evening, and instead of passing on to Izzy he sucked the buttery beer froth from his upper lip and stared me down. ‘Not bad? Know what Dan, you’ve been not bad for three years now. Time you were summit other.’

  Izzy snorted and downed her gin ’n’ tonic. I laughed off the remark, but Mick wasn’t smiling.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘For three years I’ve asked you what sort of a day you’ve had, and for three years you’ve given me the same answer. I tell you about my day. Izzy tells us about her day. But you – you never part with anything.’

  His bull-like neck was thrust forward at me across the table’s empty glasses. His face was pink, and blue veins twitched on his brow. The half-grin on my lips curdled. ‘You’re a skinflint,’ he said. ‘A tightwad. A miser with information.’

  I looked to Izzy for support, but she was on his side. ‘Splendid fellow,’ she said in that cut-glass accent of hers. ‘Winkle him out, that’s it.’

  I felt got at. Mostly I was irritated by Izzy’s last remark. A bespectacled elderly spinster with a gig
antic bosom and hair fixed in a bun, Izzy was a lecturer at the university across the road from the Clipper. Nylon anorak, tweed skirt, pilled woollen stockings. How she managed to keep her career together was a mystery to Mick and I. Always half-cut when she appeared for the quiz on a Tuesday night, after several large gins she was customarily plastered by the time she left the place. I could have said something nasty about her alcoholism, but I just smiled weakly. ‘Drinks anyone?’

  ‘No,’ Mick said, snatching the glasses out of my hands. ‘It’s Izzy’s round, and besides you don’t cop out of it that easily.’ Izzy took the hint, and after she’d gone to the bar Mick stuck his nose right up against mine and said, ‘Two lines.’

  ‘What?’ He was pressed in so close I could feel an airstream on my face, warm from his flaring nostrils.

  His pudgy forefinger pointed to a spot between his eyebrows, right above the bridge of his nose. ‘Two thick lines. Right here. You. Worried to death. Now let me ask you again: what sort of a day have you had?’

  It was a disconcerting moment. Mick’s face, crowned by wispy blond curls that should rightly grace a cherub and not someone resembling a bareknuckle boxer, was so close I could hardly focus. His lovely blue-curaçao eyes fixed on me without blinking. I could have blurted it out there and then, the whole thing, Charlie and Chiang Mai and the Foreign Office. But I wasn’t even sure I liked Mick Williams, let alone wanted to disclose the most intimate details of my life. Come to think of it, I knew as little about him as he did about me, even though he was as proficient at talking as I was the contrary.

  A market trader, peddling squashy, over-ripe fruit and veg on Leicester market, he was a big man, a bruiser; but his blond eyelashes, pimento face and piggy eyes belied an intelligent and lively mind. He was also my snooker partner on Thursday nights, but quite apart from that he was too blustering and noisy to be the sort of person I would want to count as a friend.

  He stared at me, waiting for an answer. I thrust my hands deep into my pockets and found there a ball of screwed-up paper. ‘Right,’ I said, smoothing out the flatpack furniture diagram on the table. ‘I’ve spent the whole day trying to work this one out, and if you can do it you’re a better man than I am.’