Smoking Poppy Read online

  The girls didn’t let him go easily. They had a good nose for a man in a storm, and in the third cavern he actually walked out with two petite prostitutes hanging from his neck. They made it twenty yards down the street, ultimately dropping off him like petals from a blown rose. It wasn’t until the sixth bar and his twelfth beer, somewhere along the Kotcasan, that he began to slow down.

  I was getting a bit worried about the state of his head. He was still the custodian of my money, and I suggested he give it back to me.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said, standing two more starry-eyed virgins a drink. ‘None of this is coming out of your stash.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m worried about.’

  ‘Mick’s in the chair. Enjoy yourself. Talk to one of these little ticklers.’

  I guess I was being cold with the girls, but I didn’t want to encourage them, or make them think I would pay to have them. I made some remark about AIDS.

  ‘Look!’ he snorted, nostrils flaring, nose-hair bristling at me. ‘We’re joking. We’re laughing. We’re singing. That’s all we’re doing. I’ve never been surrounded by so many pretty, smiling girls in my life. What I will do next, I don’t know. But I’m not fucking stupid. Now get that sour, kicked-dog expression off your face, loosen up, and get off my back.’ He turned his attentions to his pretty entourage.

  I wasn’t offended. I went to the bar and ordered myself another beer. A girl with hair like a bolt of shimmering black silk glided on to the next stool, sliding a draughtboard under my nose. ‘Wanna play?’ She showed me perfect teeth and a mythological Thai smile. ‘What your name?’

  ‘Daniel, evidently.’

  ‘Daniel Evidently, pleased to meet you. Me, Air.’ And she began counting out the draughts.

  Air was charming. More than that. I bought her a vodka and we played two games of draughts. I said I was hot; she fanned me with a magazine. I put a ciggie in my mouth; she lit it for me and fetched me an ashtray. She contrived to make these small things look like the most fun she’d had all year. I made it very plain I wasn’t looking for a girl. She said she didn’t mind. ‘Farang no like me,’ she said.

  I said I didn’t believe her, and she laughed prettily at my immense wit. There was a pool table at the back of the bar, so we played a couple of frames; but she was expert, and skinned me both times. Mick by now was happily ensconced with one dazzlingly beautiful Thai woman I hadn’t noticed earlier. The others had drifted away, beaten by this spectacular competition. I asked Mick if he was ready for another beer. So entranced was he by this beauty queen that he peered at me as if through opaque glass.

  ‘Sure. Haul in a vodka and tonic for Mae-Lin here.’

  He introduced us. Mae-Lin, fragrant and graceful with lovely, delicate cheekbones gently shook my hand. I felt a little kick inside me as her fingers brushed mine. I could see why Mick was spellbound. She was bewitching. I couldn’t imagine why a woman like that would have to resort to prostitution.

  ‘Mick told me ’bout you just now.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘Oh yes. He say you good man.’

  She was flirting with me. Her flashing eyes were completely unambiguous. I wondered if she was inviting me to compete with my friend for her. Shockingly beautiful as she was, I wasn’t prepared to do that. I made some throw-away remark, and turned to challenge Air to one last game of draughts.

  Halfway through the draughts Mick asked me if I wanted to take Air to a nightclub called Blue Valentine. Mae-Lin wanted to go there. Air shrugged when I said no, that I was ready for my bed.

  ‘She’s not on the game, you know,’ Mick whispered in my ear.

  ‘You don’t have to explain to me. Enjoy yourself.’

  ‘Seriously. She told me. She knows one or two of the girls here and was on her way to this club where she’s a DJ. Well, you know me. She made it clear she wasn’t a prostitute, like. Why don’t you come along?’

  It was true, he did have something seriously in common with Mae Lin. Mick had an old set of decks, a tangle of lights and a vast collection of seven-inch vinyl discs. He did weddings and funerals … no, not funerals, but family parties and the like. I guess this made him a DJ too, though I couldn’t see why he needed to justify it to me. Anyway, I wasn’t up for it. ‘Honestly Mick, I’m whacked.’

  He unbuckled his moneybelt, fished out a few small denomination notes, and thrust the belt into my chest. ‘You’re on duty, Daniel.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ No, he wasn’t so stupid after all. ‘Off you go. Enjoy yourself. I’ll pay up here.’

  Mick wanted to splash his boots out the back before leaving, and Mae-Lin and I chatted while she waited. Red and blue neon light skidded off her lustrous jet-black hair. She was perfect. Her exquisitely manicured hands fluttered like white birds as she adjusted the high collar of her blouse. It was an entirely unconscious movement, as if she was trying to hide something. It drew my attention to her throat, and that’s when I saw a tiny scar, almost obscured by cosmetics. I looked at Mae-Lin again. She was rather taller than the average Thai woman. Then I looked at her hands.

  My God, I thought. That is good. That is very, very good.

  I was dumbfounded.

  Mick came out of the toilets, rubbing his hands together, chipper, larky, ready to leave, and I thought I’d better find a way to tell him. Then I thought, no, if you don’t know, after everything that’s been said and done, then that’s your look-out. As they left the bar and climbed into a tuk-tuk, I saw them squeezing up close together.

  It was something in the pearly air. It was in the hallucinatory vapours that comprise the atmosphere of Chiang Mai. When you see two people falling in love you don’t intervene. You don’t try to break a moment of grace, not for anything.

  I turned and saw Air looking at me. Oh yes, she’d seen me clock it. Mae-Lin was her friend. She clasped her hands together in a gesture of supplication which said, say nothing. It was unnecessary.

  ‘But I need one more beer before I go,’ I said.

  ‘I get it for you,’ Air said sweetly. ‘You good man.’

  At the hotel, I passed Phil’s room. Light was bleeding under the door, so I knew he was still up. I thought about tapping on the door to let him know I was back, but I didn’t bother. I thought of him sitting upright on his hard chair. I don’t know what it was about the bloke but I couldn’t even imagine him going to bed. I pictured him standing upright in a corner of the room all night, hands held stiffly at his sides.

  A few hours later I heard Mick’s key hit the lock from outside as he let himself into our room. He flicked on a side light, but I made out I was asleep. He blundered about, crashing into furniture, huffing and puffing in the bathroom, making such a commotion he was obviously trying to wake me. I pretended to sleep on.

  At last he threw himself into bed and switched off the light. I heard him sighing and moaning in the dark, and his bedsprings complaining as he tossed and turned. At last I heard him sit up. ‘Danny!’ he hissed. ‘Danny!’

  I twitched slightly in my feigned slumber, popping my lips at the air the way sleeping drunks do, pretending to snooze on.

  ‘Danny! I want to talk!’

  I was trying not to snort, so I buried my head deeper into my pillow, blissful in the deepest of deep sleeps.

  ‘Danny! I know you’re awake! I need to talk, you bastard! Danny! Hey, Danny!’

  17

  I was wakened the next morning by a sound like a herd of pigs being driven to market. It was only Mick, snoring into his pillow. I got up and slipped quietly out of the room.

  While he slept on I was enjoying a cigarette in the pagoda. Honey-coloured sunlight filtered through the haze, nestling in the folds and ripples of the swift-flowing green river, when Brazier-Armstrong showed up. Even though he wore dark glasses, I must say he looked terrible, like someone who hadn’t had a wink of sleep. ‘Good morning,’ he said, flashing me a very unconvincing grin. He made to step inside the pagoda.

  ‘Shoes,’ I pointed out.
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br />   ‘Of course,’ he said, slipping off his sandals. He looked around nervously, perhaps for signs of Mick.

  I love that. When you get someone who obviously thinks they are superior, and you are able to pull them up on some small matter of good manners or common courtesy. It’s terrific. I thought I’d lay it on a bit thicker for him. ‘You should always remove your shoes before entering a temple or a shrine. Always.’

  ‘I know.’ He was very short with me.

  ‘You can have a cigarette though.’ I offered him one. ‘They don’t seem to mind that.’

  ‘Not for me, thank you. Look here, Mr Innes, I really must object, in the strongest possible terms, to your colleague’s behaviour.’

  Yes, I was Mr Innes now. One little chat about shoes and Brazier-Armstrong wanted to go all formal on me. Or perhaps it wasn’t the shoes. Perhaps it was about something Mick had told me in the night that had Brazier-Armstrong in such a state.

  Mick hadn’t given up trying to wake me. In fact he’d got out of bed and whisked the sheets off me, grabbing and twisting my big toe until I had to give up faking, and we grabbed a couple of beers from the room fridge and took them down to the pagoda, where we talked for two hours. Yes, it was mostly about Mae-Lin; but Mick also revealed what he’d been up to in the afternoon, when he’d raced off in a tuk-tuk.

  He was in a lather over Mae-Lin. The way he told it to me, he was smitten from the moment she’d entered the bar. I could understand that – as I told you, her appearance was nothing less than stunning. Speaking man to man as we sat in the pagoda, with night-lights burning at the foot of the Buddha, he disclosed that he’d nursed an erection from the moment she sat down next to him, and that it hadn’t subsided until her sudden revelation some hours later.

  ‘Hadn’t gone to do anything about it,’ he assured me. ‘To the Blue Valentine, I mean. Honestly wasn’t thinking about getting my leg over. Honestly. But I felt great, I mean really great in her company. His company. Her company. Oh, Jesus! Look, we necked a beer or two, and when the time came round for Mae-Lin to do her short DJ spot, I found out this gal was an R ’n’ B fan! The real thing! Knew the fuckin’ lot, a to z, side to side, top to bottom.’

  Up until that point, all Mick was having to deal with was an inflating lust, but this complication exploded his condition into the raptures of dewy-eyed love. As well as storing in his head an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of pop music, Mick’s lean-to garage outside his house was where he filed his huge collection of Stax and Motown originals. Here Mae-Lin might come dangerously close to unseating his notions of confirmed bachelorhood. And there are, as everyone knows, two turntables on a DJ’s deck.

  As he told it to me, Mae-Lin let him stand behind the deck at the Blue Valentine as they made their canoodling selections together for a half-empty dance floor. They came from behind the decks to dance together, smooching up close for Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, the works.

  Then Mae-Lin cut the spot short so that they could sit together in the shadows, and hold hands, and kiss. It was accelerating out of control. The beer. The music. The smell of Mae-Lin’s hair. The seductive, heady atmosphere of a Chiang Mai evening. In the Blue Valentine, Mick encountered more promise of celestial bliss than anything to be found in the corrosive bowl of an opium pipe.

  Why not? People fall in love. And if you walk away from that it’s like abandoning a new-born baby on the steps of a church.

  But Mick still suspected that Mae-Lin was a prostitute. She reassured him several times on that score, but Mick persisted in asking her why, if she wasn’t after his money, she wanted to spend her time with a fat fuck like him. He couldn’t accept her claim that she simply found him attractive, and so in exasperation – and bloody good for her too that she did – she’d spilled the beans.

  ‘At first I couldn’t grasp what she was saying,’ Mick said, rubbing his chin. ‘I just sat there with this shit-eating grin on my face, as if my jaw was paralysed. I wanted to stop smiling but I couldn’t. She asked me if I were going to say anything, but I was clenching my teeth, smiling back at her, looking across her shoulder. I tell you I couldn’t move, Danny.

  ‘Listen while I tell you about my balls. They’d gone. Shot back inside my body, like. And they didn’t drop again until a couple of hours later. Makes you walk with a gait. But here’s the strangest thing: I seemed to be able to rise up from my seat and leave this smiling, grinning body behind me still sitting there. And I quietly walked out without a word to Mae-Lin or anybody. Then I was outside and I jumped in a tuk-tuk. I didn’t even haggle over the fare.’

  After that, Mick had made his way back to one of the bars we’d drunk in earlier, huddled over a beer and eyeing the girls with deep suspicion. Whatever feelings he had about putting his tongue halfway down a man’s throat all evening, he was disgusted with himself over the way he’d treated Mae-Lin. He was haunted by an obscure expression on Mae-Lin’s face; and by the inexplicable vision of the figure of himself reclining in the chair, grinning inanely as his corporeal self had tiptoed away across the dance floor.

  ‘The thing is Danny, it’s like a bit of me is still there, do you see? I feel like a piece of me got torn off. I feel like I left my balls there.’

  I hadn’t actually got much in the way of wisdom on the subject to offer him. I mean, I could see why he was so distressed. You don’t normally get this sort of thing happening on the fruit and veg stalls of Leicester market.

  I did my best to reassure him that he hadn’t got to scrub himself down with battery acid or anything like that. It was when we were talked out about Mae-Lin that I got him to tell me where he’d gone that afternoon before any of this had happened. True to his promise, he hadn’t gone to the consulate, not at first at any rate. He’d returned, instead, to Chiang Mai prison.

  At the prison he’d sought out the official we’d met on our first visit. More folded notes changed hands, and, Mick told me, they’d had a long conversation about opium, farang prisoners, and our friend Mr Brazier-Armstrong. Mick had complained, in passing, that we never got to see much of the man, that he was never available and was of little help. That was, the prison official told him, because Brazier-Armstrong was always across the border in Laos or Cambodia, lying down with little boys.

  Mick wouldn’t lie to me about that. It is of course possible that the prison official was himself lying through his teeth or simply relaying malicious rumours; but Mick, taking it at face value, went ahead and acted on that information. He went back to the consulate, where he spoke to Mrs Duongsaa. Brazier-Armstrong, he told Mrs Duongsaa, had twenty-four hours to set up an interview with the girl who’d stolen Charlie’s passport, or he would telephone the News Of The World and the Sunday Mirror in London with information about what the consul was up to in Laos and Cambodia.

  And here, this morning, why, not even eighteen hours later, was the man himself, objecting ‘in the strongest possible terms’ to Mick’s behaviour. I wondered how many times in his career he had written those words in some piffling and effortless protest in the routine discharge of his office.

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘What has he done?’

  Brazier-Armstrong swept back his long fringe, and wiped his bespittled lips with an elegant thumb and forefinger. ‘I really don’t understand what he thinks there is to be gained by adopting this hectoring tone. My staff in particular feel very upset and provoked.’

  ‘Mrs Duongsaa?’

  ‘Duongsaa, yes. All this bullying is quite unnecessary. And, by the way, we are doing every single thing in our power to help you in your very difficult situation.’

  ‘I’m sure you are. Where have you been? Laos?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cambodia?’

  ‘No.’ He looked me in the eye. I actually thought he was telling the truth on that occasion, but some tiny oscillation in his iris made me suspect that what Mick had reported to me was true. The heavy dew of perspiration above his upper lip could have been formed by the morning heat, but he
was afraid of me. He looked at me and he knew that I knew.

  I sat in that pagoda calmly smoking a cigarette and gazing out on the green-tea river. The smiling Buddha at my right hand was telling me to keep calm but I wanted to break Brazier-Armstrong’s face. I was thinking not of the abused little boys, but of their parents. For all I know they might have sold their children into this vile bondage, and perhaps through rotten circumstances, but I couldn’t believe that none of them had been touched by shame.

  I too had been touched by shame, for my daughter. ‘You’ve come here to tell me something.’

  ‘I’ve arranged the interview you wanted. With the girl who took your daughter’s passport.’

  ‘You’ve arranged it. When?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘Good.’ I was determined to show no emotion.

  I finished my cigarette as he told me what time we should be there. He also suggested that Mick’s presence might be counterproductive.

  ‘And if I want him there?’

  Brazier-Armstrong stood up to leave. As a parting shot he warned, ‘You should tell your friend to stop bribing the prison guards. He might think it’s all very simple. But another guard will become jealous and your friend might find himself on serious corruption charges.’

  ‘Are you threatening us?’

  He stepped out of the pagoda and shuffled into his sandals. ‘I,’ he said emphatically, ‘don’t work like that.’ Then he hastened along the garden path, red in the face and plucking the spume from his lips with one of those manicured fingers.

  I called him back. ‘By the way. You went to Oxford, didn’t you?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘As a matter of fact, it was Cambridge.’

  Same fucking difference.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you at the prison.’