Smoking Poppy Read online

  ‘She said WHAT?’

  Sheila’s eyes were brimming with anger, and her anger infuriated me in turn. ‘She said she didn’t want to see either of us. She asked if we’d send some toiletries and some money but that she didn’t want to see us.’

  I dug my fingernails into my cheeks as I felt the evening’s alcohol burning off at speed. I could scarcely credit it. Here was Charlie facing a twenty-year sentence, possibly even a death sentence, in some filthy foreign dungeon. I thought right now she must be the loneliest person on the planet, and still she didn’t want to see either of the two people who loved her most and without reservation.

  I was trying to remember when it was that Charlie’s instinct to come to me had stopped. From the time a child begins to walk at around the first year they also start to fall. And that falling keeps happening for the first few years. They trip, they stumble, they fall, they bruise, cut, bleed; and some impulse drives them, some force, eyes full of starbursting tears and lip aquiver, back into your arms and you want it, you want to sweep ’em up and hold ’em tight and warm until it subsides: because you feel it twice, the bruise, the cut, it burns you, it sears you; they bleed you bleed; and hell, Charlie is lying there and it’s me who’s lying there in prison without a friend facing twenty years of my life rotting away.

  ‘She can say what the hell she wants. I’m going out there to see her.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ Sheila said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course I’ll bloody well come!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You just try and stop me.’

  ‘If you go, I don’t.’

  Her sigh was like a sheet of ice forming over a hundred unsaid things. ‘You can’t go alone! I’ll get time off work!’ Sheila was a part-time supervisor at the supermarket, where she’d met lover-boy.

  ‘Not necessary.’ I wasn’t having Sheila exposed to all that. I forbade it. ‘I’ll ask Mick Williams to come with me.’

  ‘Mick?’ Sheila said. ‘Would Mick go out with you? Do you think he would?’

  Her enthusiasm for this idea dismayed me. ‘He might. If I ask him.’

  ‘I’d feel much happier if Mick went with you. You know how angry you get. He could help you.’

  That made me suspicious. I suddenly wondered if I was having my strings pulled. ‘You didn’t tell Mick to come with me, did you?’

  ‘Now when do I see Mick?’

  ‘I don’t know who you see,’ I said nastily. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. All I knew was that I was going to have to go to some steamy Asian place to see my daughter in a squalid jail. Sheila was looking at me strangely. I needed her to squeeze me. I wanted to stay there, back in my own house, in my own bed, with Sheila holding me while I recovered the strength to know what to do. I stood up.

  ‘You can stay, you know,’ Sheila said, also standing.

  ‘No. I’ve got all my things at the flat.’ I hadn’t punished her enough yet.

  ‘How was the quiz tonight?’ she blurted in the hallway as I picked up my coat.

  ‘We won.’ Thanks to the fragrant hippy we’d beaten off a close challenge by the Fireside Tendency.

  ‘You keep winning, don’t you?’ Sheila said.

  6

  After work the following day I stopped off at the central library. I had a few new books to take out. I used books the way some people use alcohol, to obliterate the noise of the outside world. It was an old reflex, to stop me thinking too much about Charlie, but this time I wasn’t after the familiar escapism.

  ‘Not your usual cup of tea, Mr Innes,’ Lucy observed, efficiently stamping my loans. Lucy had been efficiently stamping my books for several years. I remembered her from when she started out with a white face and hair dyed as black as a crow. All that book-stamping had at least put some colour in her cheeks; and, over the years, in her hair, which had changed from soot-black to rocketburst silver and then, after a brief flirt as a carrot-top, to henna red. Then Lucy had a year off to have a child of her own, and when she returned I don’t suppose she had time to mess about with hair, so we discovered she was actually a blonde, and a very pretty one too. A single mum with no spare time on her hands, she still read every volume of fantasy and science fiction in the library. We had that in common.

  ‘Mugging up on poetry,’ I said defensively.

  ‘What’s this one? Looks very technical.’

  She flicked through the pages of a book I’d found about drugs: I wanted to find out more about the stuff. I’d also picked up a couple of books by John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, because Izzy had said they were mad-for-it dope fiends. I was hoping they might have something to say, but unfortunately they were just books of poetry. I took them anyway.

  ‘He was a dope fiend, you know, Coleridge was,’ I said to Lucy, trying to sound like I knew all about the bloke.

  ‘The postman from Porlock.’

  ‘Pardon?’ I said.

  ‘He was whacked out of his head writing what was going to be his best poem, and then the postman came, and he never finished it.’

  ‘Really?’

  Lucy’s trained fingertips leafed through the pages to point out a title. I made a mental note to look at that one later.

  ‘I know someone who knows you.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said. I always felt slightly nervous in Lucy’s proximity, and I never knew why.

  She clasped her hands under her chin as if she was going to tease me about it, but when she saw me blinking stupidly, she said, ‘Decker Townsend. He’s in your quiz team.’

  I thought for a minute. ‘Hippy type?’

  She laughed. ‘Kind of. He’s a dope fiend, too.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Not really. Maybe a bit. He’s all right is Decker. Decent type. Says you’re good at general knowledge.’

  Then someone else wanted their book stamping, and I passed through the turnstile musing on the fact that I’d been cheerfully co-operating in a pub quiz with a drugs bimp.

  I’d made myself macaroni on toast for supper but I couldn’t face it. It’s awful stuff. I scraped the yellow gloop into the bin and had a beer supper instead, settling down with my library books. Farquar-Thompson had told me that an unusual feature of Charlie’s offence was that she was caught trafficking opium, not heroin. I didn’t understand the distinction at first, but from reading the library book I gathered that you needed the raw opium poppy juice as a base to make heroin. Since they had the laboratories for making heroin in Thailand, it didn’t make any sense to be transporting the opium. A small quantity of heroin was much more valuable on the street than the raw opium.

  I didn’t read anything in the book that hinted why Charlie might be trafficking opium. There was plenty of other information, however, and very little of it made me feel better. I read that in 1993 governments around the world were invited to celebrate International Drug Reduction Day. China joined in the celebrations. It rounded up a hundred traffickers, put them through a show trial and brought them to a packed sports stadium where a football match was about to be staged. Before the kick-off there were dancing girls with multi-coloured silk streamers, painted dragons, kite-flying displays and martial music. Then all hundred drug traffickers were lined up and shot by firing squad. Then the football match was played.

  International Drug Reduction Day celebrations, Chinese style.

  This sort of thing wasn’t funny. I’d brought Charlie up to be a football fan. After a few more chapters of this stuff I put the book aside, had another beer, and turned to Keats and Coleridge.

  I couldn’t get on with either of them.

  I’m not a great one for poetry, and my eyes wouldn’t stay on the words. The Keats was the worst. It was like being given a cake, which was all currants and no crust to leaven the thing. I couldn’t fathom it. I was looking for something that might let me know why Charlie, a happy young woman (at least on the face of things), might want to ruin her life with drugs. Or anyone else for that matter. Well, if Keats was a
dope fiend, there was nothing in his poetry that was going to help me.

  The Coleridge I liked a little better. At least I could understand it. I read the one Lucy had pointed out, the one he’d written while blasted out of his brain. It was called ‘Kubla Khan’. It did stop quite suddenly, so the story of the postman might be true for all I know or care. He mentioned the milk of Paradise and I wondered if he was talking about the drug, but there was nothing to say why you take the stuff in the first place.

  My mind turned to the fragrant hippy who had washed up on our quiz team. Decker, Lucy said his name was. I don’t know why but I wondered if this Decker was ever likely to have been Charlie’s supplier. We lived in a small city after all: perhaps he was the one who’d got her on to the stuff in the first place.

  I had another couple of beers before going to bed, though I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about travel arrangements and about getting out of my work commitments. I also lay there thinking up one or two raw questions I’d got for this Decker.

  7

  Blame, you see. A sharpened knife has to blunt itself somewhere. I badly needed to blame.

  I’d already constructed several scenes inside my head. Decker the fragrant hippy, in the coffee bars and the pubs frequented by the young. Decker, laughing, witty, cool, effortlessly slagging off the establishment and work-a-day daddies like me, rolling up his doped cigarettes, casually passing them on in the middle of a conversation, as if it was nothing. Decker, speaking with authority about the meaningful lyrics of some rock and roll wankers from Manchester, counting out pills to his rapt audience. Christ, I even saw him waiting outside the school gates, dispensing little plastic sachets he called sherbet fountains. And always in the coffee bar, or in the audience, or at the front of the queue by the school gates, was Charlie with rapt, shining eyes. Charlie, smoking his stuff, popping his pills, drinking in his warmed-over hippie philosophies.

  I knew these images were all bollocks, but I couldn’t stop them playing out on the back of my retina. I’d be chasing the plaster wall on a rewiring job or installing a new junction box and I’d realise my hands were gripping the tools so tight they’d be trembling.

  I was finishing off a sub-contract job I’d been getting behind on, new house, crawling under the eaves in a sloping attic, trying to haul cable through to where I was working. My face was tracked with perspiration, and there was sawdust sticking to the sweat.

  I crawled out of the hole, wiping the sweat and sawdust on my sleeve. Flipping open a box of snouts I pulled one out with my teeth. I thought about Decker, and how I would knock his teeth so far down his throat he would need a surgeon with a torch to find them again. Then I would ask him what he knew about Charlie.

  I thumped the stud wall and it set up a wobble which travelled all the way round the corner. Shoddy work. Bad builders. They don’t think about us poor fuckers coming behind them, having to put in the fucking wires. I crawled back under the eaves.

  I spent a lot of time that week thinking about Charlie. Even though she wasn’t dead, I was like someone leafing through a box of old photographs after a funeral. When she was very small I used to go into her room while she slept in her cot. I could stand there for a long time just watching her sleep, the miracle of her, the sweet, holy marvel of her. Somehow when she slept her normally fine, straight hair would billow in curls as if she was flying in a place of soft, warm winds; her effortless aerial control demonstrated by her posture, one arm pointing at the top corner of the cot, the other drifting low and behind her. I had no doubt that this child was in flight, soaring through dreams bright with music, vivid with the colours and inebriated freshness exclusive to a mind only two years old.

  I could stand there for half an hour watching her trajectory, wondering where it was she might land.

  I suppose I wanted to be with her on those flights, inside her dreams.

  I wondered now whether I had spent my time watching her too closely. Maybe it’s not healthy. Children whose fathers don’t give a sod about them seem to emerge without too much damage. I knew I was setting myself up as a candidate for all this blame I was ready to discharge. I was putting myself in the frame, lined up in the police identity parade with the Deckers of the world. I wanted to know how that little flying girl came to be grounded on a filthy pallet bed in some place called Chiang Mai.

  ‘How did you get on with them?’ Lucy at the library wanted to know.

  It was a rainy Friday evening, and I was returning the Keats and the Coleridge and the other book. Basically they were a dead loss. There was the odd phrase which stuck in the mind, but I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. I couldn’t imagine spending three years at university reading this tosh. Maybe it made more sense around the time these old boilers were actually writing, and Oxford professor types keep them going because they are too lazy to read anything new.

  ‘Rubbish,’ I said. ‘I’m going to try something else.’

  ‘Are you growing a beard?’ Lucy’s electronic pen chirruped with satisfaction as it scanned my returns for the library computer. I felt my chin. Apathy had raised a crop of stubble, and my hair was creeping below my collar. ‘Suits you,’ she said. ‘Makes you look less buttoned-up.’

  I stalked among the shelves looking for something else to take home, wondering what she meant by ‘buttoned-up’. I was also trying to remember the names of some of those other deadbeat poets Izzy had mentioned. In the meantime I picked up another book, this time about the history of the opium trade. Then I remembered the name of Baudelaire, so I asked Lucy to help me.

  She was already in the act of switching off the lights, closing up for the evening. I was the last borrower. ‘You are going at it, aren’t you?’ she said, in the way you might remark to someone who’s drunk half a bottle of vodka before breakfast. Anyway she found and stamped me something by Baudelaire. I might have guessed he was French by his name.

  ‘If you don’t mind waiting a moment, I’ll walk out with you,’ she said. ‘Only I hate walking across that dark car park.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, quite flattered to be asked to escort a young woman anywhere, even if it was only to the safety of the well-lit street. I waited while she armed the burglar alarm, flicked off the porch lights and secured the door.

  ‘This Decker,’ I said as we carefully stepped over rainwater puddles to cut across the gloomy car park. Our boots crunched the wet gravel underfoot. ‘Is he a drinking pal of yours?’

  ‘Drinking? When do I get out drinking?’ She laughed. ‘I’ve got a two-year-old daughter to think about. I should get out drinking!’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘My mum looks after her while I work.’

  ‘I’ll baby-sit for you,’ I blurted.

  She stopped in her tracks and looked at me strangely. ‘Why?’

  ‘To give you a break, I mean. A night off. I’ve had kids of my own. Two. A pair. Boy and a girl. I know the ropes.’

  ‘Why?’

  What could I tell her? That the reason I wanted to baby-sit was because my own daughter was rotting in an Asian jail and I wanted to watch her two-year-old baby, in flight, sleeping. It wouldn’t come out right. ‘Just a thought.’

  We started walking again. ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ Lucy said, and I felt foolish beyond measure. ‘I’ll be all right now,’ she said when we reached the parade of shops. ‘Thanks, Mr Innes. See you!’

  I was actually walking the same way as her, but I felt compelled to mumble a goodbye, turn on my heels and step out in the opposite direction. After a few yards I drew abreast of the Shoulder of Mutton, a roustabout’s pub I never use, but I had to dive inside just to get something to put the colour back in my face.

  8

  Izzy was completing the Daily Telegraph crossword while waiting for the quiz to get underway. She could crack a crossword puzzle before the tonic had stopped fizzing in her gin. She wasn’t the greatest conversationalist in the world, Izzy. But then neither was I according to Mick Williams, and t
hat night I was too busy looking round to see if Decker was going to arrive.

  Decker had proved to be a useful addition to the team on the previous occasion, coming up with one or two answers that had stumped the rest of us. He also had the tact not to volunteer answers before we did; he’d wait, and if none were forthcoming, he’d offer one. I suspected him of general knowledge. Though that didn’t stop my unreasonable interest in breaking his face.

  The difficulty with these occasional team members was what to do with the pot. The prize money of twenty-five pounds to the winning team always went into a pot, since we didn’t know what else to do with it. The pot was kept by Izzy, and she sat on it like a dragon in a cave. Mick and I had guessed that the pot kept her in juice, but we never said anything. Then when these casual players came along you had to split the winnings for tiny returns.

  But Decker, hearing Izzy mention the pot, insisted that we keep his share. Whereupon Izzy had insisted that he join on a regular basis. I should add that Izzy goes skittish and stupid when any presentable young man appears. She simpers; she smiles broadly; she flutters her eyelids and she shows off her intellect, which is considerable. Really, you wouldn’t think she’d bother what with the state she’s in. But whenever Decker rang the bell with a correct answer she’d lean across me to grip his knee between a powerful thumb and forefinger.

  Slightly nonplussed by this romantic attention, Decker had muttered something about not liking routines, but eventually conceded to turn up the following week. That is, this week. But with the quiz about to start there was no sign of him.

  Izzy dispatched the crossword in record time, laid down her pen, glared over the top of her spectacles and said, ‘Where’s our sweet hippy then?’

  ‘Cow fell on him while he were drinkin’ milk,’ Mick said, dragging on a snout. I didn’t get this joke. Then I noticed Mick had a nicotine patch on the back of his wrist.