Smoking Poppy Page 11

  18

  I doubt if Claire Marchant had been to university anywhere. On this occasion she had her hair scraped back and she was not unlike my Charlie. Same hair colour, similar in the shape of her face – I could see how she might travel about on Charlie’s passport. Several weeks in prison had given her a sallow look but the only real difference was in the hooded character of her brow, and in her habit of peeping at you from beneath. It was not a shy peeping. It was suspicion. There was an incipient curl to her lip too, as if a sneer was kept in permanent reserve for some comment or verbal assault directed her way. I didn’t like her much.

  She wore green cotton pyjamas – reminding me of the outfits worn by ancillary workers in the hospitals at home – and plastic sandals. We met her in a stuffy holding room with no window and no fan. It gave me an impression of the sweltering heat of the cells. She sat at a small table where I was given a plastic chair.

  For a moment we hunkered like chess players, and then I unpacked my bag with the soap and shampoo and all the guff. Sitting against the wall, also on plastic chairs, were Mick, Phil, Brazier-Armstrong and Mick’s prison officer wallet-friend. A female warder stood by the door looking bored. She stepped over to the table and checked the gear I had laid out.

  ‘They’ll only confiscate it and take what they want,’ the girl said.

  ‘Not if I encourage them to let you keep it.’

  The girl knew perfectly well what I meant. ‘Can I go back to my cell afterwards?’

  ‘We keep her ’lone last night,’ the prison officer put in, with a beautiful, beaming Thai smile, ‘for help her ’member few things. She ’member good now.’

  I understood the women were locked up six to a cell, but that was obviously preferable to a windowless solitary confinement. ‘You can have these things,’ I said as if I governed the slammer. ‘You can go to your old cell. But I need to know where and when you last saw my daughter.’

  ‘Why should I help you? I’ve been left to rot here. He,’ she said, jabbing a finger at Brazier-Armstrong, ‘is fucking useless. I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m on twenty years, possibly even a death sentence. What do I care?’

  We’d learned that drugs traffickers often travel on stolen passports, for obvious reasons. But Claire Marchant had maintained the pretence for a long time after she’d been jailed. I had a father’s hunch as to why.

  ‘Claire, don’t your parents know you’re in here?’

  She bit a fingernail.

  ‘You know, now we’ve found out your real name, we will contact them, and we’ll tell them what you’ve done and where you are. They deserve to know.’

  And this hard-bitten little girl started weeping.

  I saw it all there. She’d kept it from her folks. I don’t know how exactly, but so far she’d succeeded; they hadn’t got a clue that their daughter was banged up in Chiang Mai prison.

  I let her cry for a minute or two and then I found her a tissue. I asked the guard if I could give her a cigarette. The guard nodded, and Marchant accepted a snout. ‘They don’t know, do they?’ She shook her head, looked up with wet eyes and blew a long funnel of smoke at the ceiling. Now she couldn’t look me in the eye.

  ‘My dad’s very old,’ she said. ‘He’s sick, bed-bound. I didn’t even want to leave him to go travelling but he said I should go, said there was no point waiting around until he kicked it. I know he’s only got a year or two. I thought if I pretended to be – you know – someone else, that he’d never get to hear about it.’

  I thought about how long it had been since I’d heard from Charlie. ‘But doesn’t he expect to hear from you?’

  ‘I’ve got a friend who sends e-mails every fortnight. My sister at home prints them out and reads them to him. He thinks I’m in Australia right now. My lovely old dad,’ and here she started crying again, ‘I don’t want him to know about this. My lovely old dad.’

  After that she told us everything she could. If Thailand’s role in the Golden Triangle of opium cultivation had shrunk in recent years, it seemed it was still the Golden Gate. Much of the poppy growing had been pushed out of Thailand into Myanmar and Laos, where the opium was refined into heroin. Then it had to come back into Thailand again, because only Thailand had the wide-open communications and regular business and tourist access to the West.

  I understood from what she said that there are two methods of transporting the drug, either by mules or by ants. The principle of dispatching mules involves large consignments, a high-risk policy with the possibility of confiscation incurring huge losses for the drugs bosses. The alternative policy was one of sending an army of ants bearing small amounts of the contraband concealed about the person, knowing that some of the ants would be caught but minimising the overall risk as dozens of other ants found their way through. Claire Marchant had been stepped on.

  Like a lot of tourists in Thailand, Claire had fallen in love with the country but without the means to stay there. The easy solution had presented itself, and she’d been picked up in the town of Fang having brought a packet of drugs, hidden in her vagina, across from Myanmar. It was, she said, the only time she’d done it. A boyfriend, she claimed, had talked her into it.

  But I didn’t entirely believe that, because she’d stolen the passport from Charlie a couple of months before being caught, so I figure she must have known why she wanted someone else’s passport. In any event, she was herself smoking the stuff long before her arrest, and so was Charlie.

  ‘I was on a trek in the jungle, in the north. It’s the safe way to get opium. The Thai authorities want you to believe they’ve got rid of the opium crops but up there the tribespeople still grow it. They offer it to you in every village.

  ‘In one village, up near the border with Myanmar, we came across another trek. There were some English and American tourists. They’d been on the pipe, and a couple of them were sick. Their guides were upset, because they’ve been told to keep tourists away from the opium. Anyway, this girl and her boyfriend were too ill to travel, so they had to spend a second night in the village. We were overnighting it so their guides decided to press on with the original group, and we were to bring the sick pair with us later.

  ‘I went to take a look at them. They were stretched out in a bamboo hut. I don’t know how many pipes they’d had, but they were out of it. It can get you like that. You think nothing’s happening so you smoke more and more and then you’re a puddle on the floor. I went through their bags. I was really after the guy’s passport, because my boyfriend wanted one. The guy had obviously had the sense to leave it somewhere safe before coming on the trek, ’cos his wasn’t there. But I found hers.’

  ‘That’s when you stole Charlie’s passport?’

  She nodded. ‘Next day our guides were up bright and early, but this couple were still sick. Maybe it wasn’t the opium; maybe something else. But our guides were in no mood to hang around waiting for these two farang to recover. The guides were jumpy, I don’t know why. A couple of strangers had walked into the village – not tribesmen – and I think they wanted us on our way. So we left. That’s it.’

  ‘You left them there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was a dirty piece of work you did that day, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re fuckin’ sorry,’ Mick said. ‘We’re all fuckin’ sorry.’

  The prison officer wanted to join in. ‘Yeh. Solly. Velly solly.’

  ‘You have a lot to answer for, young lady,’ said Phil.

  ‘If I get a map,’ Brazier-Armstrong said, ‘do you think you can tell me where the village is?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  He spoke with the prison officer who went off in search of a chart. Brazier-Armstrong read my thoughts. ‘It’s four or five months ago. Hardly likely she’s still there.’

  I said nothing. The officer came back and spread a good-sized army map across the table. Marchant placed her finger on the map, close to the border with Myanmar, halfway betw
een Pai and Fang, in the mountainous region to the north-west of Chiang Mai. ‘Here.’

  The prison officer looked grave. His brow wrinkled. He said some words in Thai to Brazier-Armstrong. They seemed to be discussing the implications. At length, Brazier-Armstrong said, ‘He wishes it were nearer the Golden Triangle area, where there are tourists making treks every day. But this place is lawless. Over the past six months there has been fighting between the opium gangs. Also the border is mined. Officially the Thai government wants the world to think it has the opium growing under control. In reality, they send in the army to burn a few fields, and the opium growers simply drift westwards.’

  ‘When can we go there?’ I asked him.

  ‘You don’t seem to understand, Daniel. There are no roads. It’s an area of steep-sided ravines—’

  ‘She went there,’ Mick interrupted, pointing at Claire Marchant. ‘So did Charlie.’

  ‘You can trek it,’ Marchant said. ‘You would need guides, but it can be done.’

  Claire Marchant had served her usefulness. She stood up. As the female guard was leading her out of the room, Phil got to his feet. He put a hand on Marchant’s shoulder. ‘Don’t despair. You have reason to be in good hope.’

  ‘What?’

  Phil narrowed his eyes at her. ‘The Lord is closer than you think.’

  ‘Thank you for that,’ Marchant said. ‘It’s comforting. I’ll take that and smoke it. I’ll put it in my chillum. I’ll powder it and put it in my beaker. I’ll snort it up my fucking nose.’ She turned to her guard. ‘Can you get me out of here, please?’

  Mick was grinning, but I looked at Phil and felt desperately sorry for him. He was trying to do his best.

  The prison officer spoke in rapid Thai. Brazier-Armstrong’s face dribbled with sweat as he turned to me, saying, ‘He says the situation is volatile in that region. There are Kareni refugees from across the border, KMT guerrilla forces, not to mention the opium gangs. The Thai government can’t even move their army around up there. I have to say to you, in an official capacity, that if you do go it is against my recommendation. If you go, and I will put this on record, the British Consulate can be of no help to you whatsoever.’

  Mick slapped his thigh. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that will be a big fucking loss to us, won’t it?’

  Securing the services of a guide was not as easy as we thought it would be. Several tour companies in Chiang Mai offered three-or four-day treks, but mostly to the controlled areas north of neighbouring Chiang Rai and up around the Golden Triangle. Our trek had to be open-ended. We had only a rough idea of the location of the village we were after, and we didn’t know where we would want to go after arriving there. The tour companies failed to understand what we wanted: they worked hard at trying to fix us up with packaged treks in the company of German and Australian tourists looking for adventure holidays.

  There was another problem. Whenever we pointed to the region we needed to get to, there was a marked reluctance to even try to find suitable guides. Eventually we were helped by a small company called Panda Travel. They knew of guides who had spent several years in the Thai army. When we offered to double the going rate, a telephone call was made. We would need two guides, we were told, should anything happen to one of them. We arranged to meet up.

  The two guides came to the offices of Panda Travel. On arrival they went directly to the rear of the offices where the Thais huddled in conversation. The prospective guides chain-smoked cigarettes, turning occasionally to look at the three of us, coolly and critically, I thought.

  Finally they were introduced to us as Bhun and Coconut. Both were wiry little guys who didn’t smile nearly as much as everyone else in Thailand. Coconut, the younger of the two with long, lank black hair, did the talking in strangled English, hard to follow. Bhun didn’t seem to speak at all, neither Thai nor English. For what was still a modest fee they agreed to cook for us and to negotiate with the hill tribes for places to stay en route. A commission settled the interests of the tour company, who provided small rucksacks and sleeping bags. We were told to leave our suitcases and most of our gear at our hotel in Chiang Mai.

  Bhun and Coconut would be ready to leave early the following morning. We were to rendezvous at the office, where a truck would drive us to Ban Mae Kon, which was as far as the road would take us.

  ‘That’s it then,’ said Phil. ‘We’ve set our hands to the plough.’

  ‘What plough?’ Mick said.

  I didn’t know what Phil meant either, but one thing was certain. We were going into the jungle.

  Since that evening was going to be our last in Chiang Mai for some time, Mick was hell-bent on enjoying himself. He showered and shaved and slapped on the cologne. ‘We’re going into the jungle,’ he said more than once, ‘we don’t know what we’re going to find, and we don’t know when we’re going to get our next beer.’ Which was his way of telling me not to try to talk him out of drinking himself senseless.

  Before we went out I tapped softly on Phil’s door. He opened the door very quietly. He seemed distracted, and I had the impression I’d interrupted him in the act of prayer. ‘Come with us,’ I said.

  ‘You know, a wild night on the town is not the solution to anything,’ Phil said. Mick had been needling him again. ‘We’d do better just to sit down and think hard, and I mean really hard, about what lies in front of us.’

  ‘We’ve no idea what lies in front of us.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He’d lost me again. ‘Phil, we’re going out to have a couple of beers and I’d like you to come with us. I don’t care to think of you here on your own.’

  He blinked at me. ‘But that’s what you don’t understand, Father. Unlike you two, I’m not on my own.’

  A sigh escaped my lips, and it sounded very much like the word fuck.

  ‘All right,’ Phil said, relenting. ‘I’ll come. But I’ve no intention of making a fool of myself.’

  ‘That’s good of you,’ I said. ‘And Mick will be relieved, too.’

  As it happened Phil was rather more buoyant than I expected, and Mick was much more subdued. Like me, Mick was deeply apprehensive about what lay ahead. In the days we’d been in Chiang Mai, I’d started to get a little bit accustomed to the sweltering heat, the spicy food, the endless bartering over small exchanges. Mick, though, had never looked like he was away from home, but the jungle, without its bars and pool tables and hotels and ice-cold beers and Pepsi-colas was a different proposition.

  Outside the Wat Pan Tong temple we passed an ancient Thai man squatting on the pavement. He had a sheet spread on the ground bearing odd merchandise. Mick stopped, turned, and went back. The old man was an amulet-seller. He had hundreds of amulets for sale, fashioned from metal, wood and terra-cotta. Mick fingered one of the amulets. The old man named a phenomenal price. Mick put it back again, and the old man picked out a more expensive looking thing which was actually dirt cheap.

  ‘You’re going to buy one?’ Phil said.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Mick, and after a little consideration he chose one with a hole so that it could be hung round his neck, and paid for it. The old man surprised us by holding the amulet in the air, swaying dangerously and wailing loudly as he blessed the object. Mick was mesmerised, and deeply impressed.

  ‘See that?’ he said after we’d moved on a few paces. ‘Made my skin flush, did that.’

  ‘He buys a heathen fetish,’ Phil said, ‘in the vain hope of good fortune beyond the wicket gate.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Mick said.

  I examined the amulet for myself. It was a flat lozenge of terra-cotta stamped with a crescent moon, horns up, as it were. The moon radiated lines to the edge of the amulet. ‘Very good,’ I said. ‘You’ve just bought the Thai equivalent of a lucky rabbit’s foot.’

  ‘I don’t know who’s worse, Danny,’ Mick said, quickening his step, ‘you taking the piss in one ear, or him bleating in the other.’ We made our way to our favourite bar with Phil walking a few pace
s behind, like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, muttering darkly about Mick’s amulet.

  I made a brief call to Sheila. I let Phil gloss the details for her. After that we had a few beers and even Phil consented to play a couple of rounds of pool with the bar girls, but none of us had much in the way of heart or conversation. Something was eating Mick. Looping his new amulet on to his neck chain, he was mumbling about ‘right speech’ and ‘right action’, but it was still a surprise when he told me, ‘Look Dan, I’ve got a small account to settle, type of thing. Got to put something in order.’

  He asked me if, later in the evening, I would go with him to the Blue Valentine nightclub. He wanted to apologise for his behaviour to Mae-Lin.

  ‘Of course we can go.’

  After that he cheered up. He wasn’t ready to go just yet, he said. He wanted to cruise the bars, drink some beer, tease the bar girls, break a few hearts. Pretty soon he was his old self. I looked at him, with one bar girl fanning his face and another feeding him slices of fresh pineapple, and for all the trouble he was I was glad he was coming into the jungle with me.

  Phil didn’t think so. After a young Magdalene had humiliated him at a frame of pool he laid down his cue, and suggested an early night for us all.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Mick said through a mouthful of pineapple.

  ‘Really,’ Phil said, his face reddening. ‘Tomorrow is going to be tough. We need to be focused and rested.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you go back to the hotel and we’ll be along later.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Phil said, ‘that I’m going to have to insist.’

  I was astounded. I looked at Mick and Mick looked at me. Then Mick got to his feet, brushing off the tiny bar girls in the process. ‘Well, that’s it then, if the man insists. Sorry girls, but I have to go. We’ve been called. Good night, sweetheart, and you my darling. Kiss kiss. One last embrace.’

  I thought Mick was joking.

  He was. He slumped back into his seat. ‘On second thoughts I’ll have another beer.’

  Phil wasn’t amused. Sweat boiling on his brow he looked at me severely and said, ‘Dad?’