Smoking Poppy Read online

‘I thought the point of a nicotine patch was to stop you smoking?’

  Mick looked at the patch as if someone else had put it there. He was about to say something but the quiz had started.

  About a quarter of the way through I got a hot blast of patchouli oil or whatever it is. A small fist, red hairs bristling on putty-white skin, parked a pint of Muckster’s for me, and then another one for Mick, on the table. A gin and tonic came for Izzy, followed by another pint as a voice breathed in my ear, ‘Lucy sends her regards.’ I turned my head to see Decker weaving back to the bar with his tin tray.

  He pulled up a stool between Izzy and Mick, and the quizmaster wanted to know who wrote, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

  I should have left it. I knew there would be trouble. But I just barked out, ‘Keats.’

  Disgusted, Izzy threw her pen down on the table. ‘My department,’ she snapped nastily.

  Mick looked at me as if I’d gone out of my mind. ‘Literature. Izzy’s department. You know the rules.’

  I picked up the pen. ‘Rules? What rules? There are no rules.’

  Mick turned to Decker. Talking to me by pretending to explain to the new boy. ‘Izzy, literature and history. Me, sport, TV and pop music. Dan is general knowledge and odd bits of science. First run, that is. We have first run in our own department, then if we don’t shout, someone else can. Not rules, Dan is right. Technically. But the way we play it.’

  Decker nodded thoughtfully. ‘I see.’

  ‘Keats,’ Izzy spat. ‘My fucking department. Now give me back that pen.’

  I handed it over before the next question was put. For the rest of the round I sat on my stool, fuming. It seemed to me ridiculous that I couldn’t be allowed to answer whatever question I wanted, and as for Decker, well, I couldn’t exactly chin a bloke who had just brought me a pint of Old Muckster’s Jubilee Ale. At the break, I excused myself and went out the back.

  When I returned to the table Mick was sharing a joke with Decker. Mick’s laughter was like a traction engine turning over on a cold morning. He threw his head back and rubbed his considerable belly. Where was that pointless hostility when I needed it? Meanwhile Izzy was still eyeing me like a kestrel on a nest of chicks.

  ‘Danny,’ Mick said, ‘you ought to have a word with Decker about Charlie. He knows a thing or two about that stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Mick told me about the difficulty your daughter is in,’ Decker said soberly.

  ‘Tell the whole world, Mick.’

  ‘I thought he might know a bit about it, that’s all.’

  ‘You thought Izzy might know a bit about it. I’ve spent the whole week reading Ode to a Fucking Nightingale as a consequence.’

  They all looked blank at that, and then the next round of the quiz started up.

  We won again, and no little thanks to Decker, who could give the rest of us a run in all our specialist areas. We were getting some funny looks from the Fireside Tendency. By the time Decker had helped me get another round of double gins and double Old Muckster’s, I’d realised he wasn’t my man. Mick’s directness had given me the opportunity to ask him if he’d ever known Charlie, whom he hadn’t; and to ask him what he knew about opium, which he said was very little.

  ‘Hardly likely,’ Izzy said, blowing a head of smoke at the nicotine-coloured ceiling, ‘to come clean about it if he did.’

  ‘Whacky-baccy man, I’d say, looking at you.’

  Mick was brilliant like that. Here was a fellow with a cannabis leaf silver earring, and a cannabis leaf tattooed on his hand (of course I knew it wasn’t a damned tomato plant) and there was Mick tentatively suggesting that the man smoked cannabis.

  Whatever he was, he wasn’t the man who’d first given the filthy stuff to my daughter. The bell rang for time and the boy came round shouting at us to leave, and Mick told the boy to bollocks, as he always does.

  ‘By the way,’ Decker said as the boy hovered for the drained mugs, ‘Lucy says to tell you she would like you to baby-sit if you’re still willing.’

  It took me by surprise. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Tell her it’s fine.’

  ‘Baby-sitting?’ Mick spluttered. ‘You can’t baby-sit. We’re off to Chiang Mai Wednesday.’

  It was true. It had all been settled. Of course, I wanted to go the very next day, but this was the earliest we could manage. In any event, Charlie wasn’t going anywhere, was she?

  ‘Who’s going to Chiang Mai?’ Izzy wanted to know.

  ‘I told you about that,’ Mick snarled. ‘Last week.’

  ‘Aincha got ’omes to go to?’ the glass collector wanted to know.

  ‘I’m sure I can’t remember,’ Izzy grumbled, putting on her coat. No, she wasn’t talking to the glass collector.

  As usual we were the last to leave. There was that reassuring slam of the door behind us and the sound of three angry bolts shooting home. Still grumbling, Izzy peeled off in one direction and Mick departed, slightly unsteady after the strong Muckster’s, in another.

  I walked a short distance with Decker in the direction of town. Before he too peeled away, he stopped me. ‘What have you got against me, then?’

  I was a bit taken aback by this directness. He struck a match for his cigarette, and the orange flare lit up his face. For a second I saw lines and shadows etched around his eyes and at the downturn of his mouth; carelines I hadn’t really noticed before. He wasn’t much younger than me, maybe only a year or two. He had a light scar on the side of his jaw. Then the match went out, and I suddenly got the impression I’d underestimated him altogether. Our fragrant hippy had been around the corner.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All that glaring and glowering at me over my shoulder. I mean, if I’ve done something, I’d like to know what it is.’

  For a minute I felt a flash of anger. Then it passed, and I don’t know why, but I decided to come clean with him. After all, I had been pretty stupid about it. ‘I’m sorry, pal. Head’s in a state. Nothing against you. I keep looking for someone to blame.’

  ‘Normal,’ he said. ‘It’s normal.’

  A breeze picked up from the far end of the street. It stung my eyes.

  ‘I’ve been out there. Thailand. Laos. Burma.

  ‘Watch out,’ he told me. ‘Dreamland? Fuckin’ dreamland.’

  I stared at him, measuring his words.

  ‘It comes back at you,’ he told me. ‘Like your dreams. It’s whatever you want, or don’t want. Drugs? They’ve got everything. Religion? The ground exudes spirituality. Sex? You can have three young girls worshipping your prick if that’s what you want.’

  He took a quiet drag on his cigarette.

  ‘Danny, it’s a cracked mirror. No, that’s wrong, it’s the other side of a cracked mirror, the silver-metal amalgam-side of a cracked mirror, and you can’t always get back.’

  I couldn’t decide if he was a lunatic, or just drunk.

  ‘Decker,’ I said. ‘What about the stuff?’

  ‘Stuff?’

  ‘Opium.’

  He narrowed his eyes at me, leaning forward, creating a sense of conspiracy. ‘Two theories: one, the plant evolved quite naturally. Two, it changed and developed as cultivated by human beings. Look Danny, opium is an intelligent plant. I mean a sentient, parasitic life-form, psycho-chemically generating the need for its propagation in human brains to ensure its further cultivation.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Too right, what.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Imagine you are an alien colonising the planet. First disguise yourself as a non-aggressive plant. Secondly, make yourself useful; seductive and addictive to the planet’s dominant species, who will then do all the heavy spade-work, planting you, cultivating you, exporting you, taking risks for you, even fighting each other for you. Gradually you increase your control around the world. Get it? You’ve got time. You can wait. This is easy.’

  He drew back, removing his hand, allowing me to appreciate the full import of what he’d said.
I stared into his eyes. It was the most breathtaking load of cobblers I’d ever heard. ‘Cack,’ I said. ‘You’re talking cack.’

  He turned my words over in his mind, squinted in savour of the rich insight they afforded, weighed them carefully. ‘That reaction,’ he said, ‘is part of it.’

  We stared at each other for a moment, and without another word he shook my hand and turned. Then he was a silhouette, with the wind flapping at his hair and at the hem of his long hippy coat. I watched him go before spinning on my heels and setting off in the opposite direction. I turned up my collar and, weaving slightly, made my way home along a street of terraced houses.

  There was a breeze at my back. I heard light footsteps behind me, but when I turned there was nothing there. At some distance further on I heard what I took to be a dog trotting behind me, or maybe it was just some litter blown along the pavement. I turned again, but to an empty street. So certain was I that someone was behind me I spent a minute or two looking up and down the lamplit street, into the stiff breeze. The wind moaned softly in an unlit alley between the terraces. I spent a moment peering into the shadows there.

  Decker’s ramblings had me spooked.

  I was not looking forward to the trip to Thailand. I don’t take to the heat. In the past I’ve spent a few grudging holidays in Spain with Sheila and the children, always retreating like a dog to the shade. Neither am I very keen on foreign food. I have an adverse reaction to spicy concoctions. A mild curry at the local Taj Mahal restaurant brings sweat blisters the size of commemorative coins to my brow: and I happen to know that a balti chicken jalfrezi is no more an example of Indian cuisine than is a plate of jellied eels.

  Even trying to read the Frenchman Baudelaire was making me feel slightly queasy. For some reason, even though the poems were in English, the translators were always too lazy to translate the titles. Ridiculous, since the titles are always easy to translate. Les Fleurs du Mal for example means ‘Evil Flowers’. Un Voyage à Cythere means ‘A Voyage to Cythere’. I know that much and I don’t even speak French. So why do they make a big deal of not translating the title? It’s because it’s poetry, isn’t it? Anything else and you would get your title thrown in with the price of the other translations.

  Baudelaire took lots of opium as far as I could gather, and hashish too, and what I read was much more useful than the Keats or the Coleridge. Baudelaire talked about the similarities and differences between opium and hashish. This was more the sort of thing I’d been looking for. Both of them, he says, make you weak-willed, and both make you focus your attention on trivial and tiny details in such a way that you get fixed. But he also said that hashish is much more disturbing and intense than opium. This surprised me, because I thought that hashish was the drug of choice for these hippy types. Hashish, Baudelaire said, is a confusing fury, whereas opium is a gentle seducer.

  I could see that. I could see Charlie going for the gentle seducer. I thought of Charlie being seduced along with other young girls fresh out of university, the dew still on ’em. When I felt that watery prickling again behind the eyes, I had to put down the book and uncap a bottle of whisky, evaporate the excess fluid with the heat of the grain.

  I ran myself a bath, and while it was filling I warmed some milk on the stove for a hot chocolate drink, to try to sober up. I thought I’d give that deadbeat Baudelaire one last chance; and though the words wouldn’t keep still on the page it was while soaking in the tub that I read:

  What sad, black isle is that? It’s Cythera, so they say, a land celebrated in song, the banal Eldorado of all the old fools. Look, after all, it’s a land of poverty.

  Dozing slightly, I let the book slip into the water and had to retrieve it from under the soap suds. I fanned it out and spread it over the taps to dry, and fell to thinking about Charlie again, and what sad, black Cythera she’d got mixed up in.

  9

  I was expecting Lucy to return at around midnight. In the event she didn’t get back until nearer one a.m., though I didn’t mind in the slightest. Even so, the baby-sitting session had been something of a disappointment.

  When I’d arrived at eight o’clock in the evening, Jonquil – it’s not for me to make remarks on the names parents inflict on their children – was already tucked up in bed and fast asleep. I spent most of the evening flicking between the numerous channels on Lucy’s TV set and not finding anything to entertain. It depressed me to think of the millions of people glued to this poor fare night after night. I started to have ridiculous thoughts about how the bright lights from the screen might be triggering signals in their brains, like opium does, to get them to tune in again and again, pointlessly and destructively.

  I made four or five visits upstairs ostensibly to check on Jonquil, but really to look at her sleeping in her cot. I’m ashamed to say I thumped about a bit and let the door bang a couple of times, in the hope that she might wake, and cry, so that I might have an excuse to pick her up, comfort her, change her nappy, carry her downstairs with me. Ironic really. When Charlie and Phil were babies we used to tiptoe round them, praying that they sleep on for another half an hour so that you might get something done. Then of course the softest muffled footfall on a deep-pile carpet would resound like a pistol shot to bump them out of sleep.

  ‘Jonquil’s got a bit of a cold,’ Lucy had told me. ‘If she wakes up you can give her some Calpol. I’ve left it on the cupboard in the hall.’

  Calpol, the paediatric all-purpose medicine. Baby-dope. When Charlie and Phil were babies themselves we got through gallons of the stuff whenever they were poorly and couldn’t sleep. Now as I looked at Jonquil, deliberately working a squeaky floorboard with my right foot, she slept on like the dead. Jonquil had a tiny green candle of dried snot under her nose. It reminded me of Charlie’s perpetually streaming nose. It also brought back the time when Charlie returned from her first term at Oxford.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ Sheila had whispered to me when I came back from work that day, dumping my gear under the coats in the hall. ‘She’s got a stud in her nose.’

  ‘A what?’

  Sheila tapped the side of her own nose. ‘A little emerald stud just here. I think it looks quite pretty. Don’t say anything.’

  I moved through to the sitting room, where Charlie lounged on the sofa, watching TV. ‘Hi, Dad.’

  I didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the tiny green stud in her left nostril. It had me mesmerised. After a while Charlie seemed to become aware of my staring. She flashed a smile at me before turning back to the TV set. ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’m OK,’ I said.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have allowed myself to stare like that. But that nose stud, to me it looked for all the world like a tiny ball of snot. There it is. You spend the first five years of your child’s life wiping gunk from their noses, until they develop the competence to deal with their own streaming hooters. During that five years it becomes a reflex. Then the next decade or so passes in the blink of an eye, and your snot-nosed little girl comes home from the celebrated Oxford with an emerald stud. Well, you want to scrape it off. I know how unreasonable that sounds, but for a moment that’s how I felt.

  ‘What are you staring at, Dad?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How’s work?’

  ‘Fine. How’s yours?’

  I knew she’d been studying a course called ‘Post-colonial Literature’. She gave a dismissive shake of her head, the sort that suggests there’s no point going into it with an electrician. ‘I brought a stack of work home with me.’

  ‘How’s post-colonial literature?’

  ‘Cool.’

  Cool? We used to laugh at people who said things like cool. It belonged to an outmoded and faintly ridiculous generation of people who said groovy and dad-io and far-out man! I hadn’t heard it said in a while.

  Maybe it wasn’t a very cool thing to do but I reached out and tried to flick the stud in her nose. Did I think it would fall off into my hand?
It didn’t.

  ‘Ow! OW! What the HELL are you doing, Dad? Just what the hell?’

  Sheila came rushing in from the kitchen.

  ‘He tried to rip the stud out of my nose!’ Charlie exaggerated, nursing her admittedly now inflamed nostril.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Sheila demanded of me.

  ‘Yeah,’ Charlie joined in. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’

  I didn’t say anything. I went and ran a bath, locking the bathroom door against the pair of them.

  The sight of Jonquil, red-cheeked, cherubic and superbly snot-nosed, summoned this back to me. To my delight she eventually did wake up and I was very happy to reassure her and to give her a small dose of the trusty Calpol. A sound, sticky, red, gooey, medicated, measured dose. I felt useful and wanted. It was what I was after, and Jonquil went straight back to sleep. Oh, that Calpol.

  I was still thinking about the business of Charlie’s nose stud when Lucy returned, date in tow. When she introduced us, it made my thoughts about Charlie’s stud shrink to insignificance. This joker had several gold rings through his ears, a couple of hoops in his nostril and one more ring weighting his lower lip. In addition to that the sides of his head were shaved and the hair on his crown was dressed like a topiary fowl in a hedge of yew.

  ‘This is Mark,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ll make some coffee.’

  The greater-crested Mark shook my hand limply. I had to suppress a smile what with all these fireworks going off in his face. ‘Nice to meet you, Mark.’ Then I followed Lucy through to the kitchen and told her not to bother on my account, and that I’d be on my way. I didn’t want to be a gooseberry.

  ‘Stay for coffee,’ she answered, but through gritted teeth, thrusting an empty mug into my hand. I stood there while the kettle boiled. Lucy put a spoonful of instant coffee granules into my mug, topped it with boiling water. ‘Milk?’

  We returned to the sitting room together. Mark, feet up, had made himself comfortable on the sofa, but, seeing me returning with a mug of coffee for myself after all, put his feet back on the floor and chewed his bottom lip. The TV was still running, and a late-night political debate droned softly in the background. Lucy launched into an account of their evening. Mark grunted every now and again in agreement but kept an eye on the TV. Every time I looked at him I had that Christmas song going round in my head: five gold rings and a partridge in a pear tree. He stole a glance at his wristwatch.