Smoking Poppy Read online

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Hand it over! Mick’s in the chair. And you, Phil.’

  I don’t know why but I felt very strange. The travel and the bombardment of strange and exotic smells had upset my stomach. I was tired from the journey and I almost had double vision. I couldn’t keep my mind off my encounter with Charlie tomorrow. I was afraid I might burst into tears the moment I saw her. I was living on the edge of an emotional volcano, and every time I thought about her this fluid started collecting at the back of my eyes. Home suddenly seemed to me a desperately long way away.

  I handed Mick my money. Wallet, cash, credit cards, everything. ‘Phil?’ he said.

  Phil’s fingers strayed to his pocket. Then he thought better of it. ‘I really don’t think that’s going to be necessary.’

  ‘Good,’ Mick said, stuffing them all in the bulging money pouch fastened around his considerable waist. ‘You pay your expenses, I’ll take care of ours.’ He’d got Phil’s measure, anyway. ‘Now let’s go and eat a pot-bellied pig. Follow me, boys, and keep close. Mick’s in the chair.’

  11

  I woke very early the next day, on account of the jet-lag. Phil had a room on his own, and the twin I shared with Mick had now cultivated a vegetable odour. I felt distinctly queasy. I wasn’t sure if it was the prospect of seeing Charlie later that morning; the food I’d eaten the night before; or the lunar aspect of Mick’s blubbery bottom peeping at me from the single sheet beneath which he slept. No jet-lag for this boy. I deliberately made a commotion in the shower, but Mick merely snorted and grunted in his sleep, so I dressed quickly and left him to it.

  It was five-thirty a.m. and none of the hotel staff were about. I slipped out into the garden to have a smoke. I expected it to be cool at that time of the morning, but it was already sultry and the temperature seemed to be cranking up at the rate of one degree per minute. There was a haze made golden by the diffuse sunlight. The Mae Nam Ping river at the bottom of the hotel garden ran swift and strong, the colour of green tea. It would be another six hours before I could see my lovely Charlie, and the cigarette wedged between my fingers trembled at the thought.

  A stone path wound between dribbling fountains, and the hotel garden was quite beautiful. There was a spirit house on a pole, white, as if made from wedding cake, carefully tended with flowers, figurines and offerings. A night-light flickered inside the spirit house. At the foot of the garden a sumptuous pagoda with a huge smiling Buddha overlooked the river. Burned out incense sticks clustered at the Buddha’s feet. The seats in the pagoda were carved from teak, upholstered in leather, and a sign invited me in but warned me to remove my shoes. This I did, and for good measure I put out my cigarette, but then I saw an ashtray placed on the low table, so I lit another one, sat down, and watched the river flow.

  I’d been torturing myself about Charlie, trying to identify what exactly had gone wrong between us. I’d explored the usual psychological angles, whether it was a power thing, in that I hadn’t wanted her to grow up; or whether it was a sexual thing in that fathers don’t want their daughters to mature. I’d been through all that stuff, and though I knew better than to dismiss any of it, it just didn’t ring true.

  From the earliest times, Charlie used to love to hug me. She would run to the door when I came home from work, leaping into my arms. She would cuddle up to me when she was poorly, or tired, or sad or plain happy. Sometimes several times a day. Spontaneous, fondling displays of innocent affection, and among the greatest pleasures to be found in this fleeting life.

  Then it suddenly foreclosed, when Charlie was about eleven. Funnily enough, Phil was happy to take a hug until much later, which, in a boy, surprised me. I thought he might shrink from it earlier. But he too in his time felt the need to retreat from these overt displays of affection. There was no particular incident prompting the withdrawal. It was just a sign that they were growing up, becoming independent, feeling the need to cut loose. Naturally I felt a pang at this. But you accept it. You wouldn’t want it any other way.

  I was startled by the presence of a figure at the entrance to the pagoda. She made me jump. It was a cleaning lady brandishing a sweeping brush. These Thai ladies move softly as a beam of light, sometimes seeming more spirit than flesh. She smiled and waid me deeply, before leaving me alone. I think she noticed that my eyes were damp.

  Oddly enough I never saw that same lady again.

  Some time later Mick came down, looking for his breakfast. He was red-eyed and his hair stuck up like the comb on a good rooster. His ghastly army-surplus khaki shorts reached midway down his meaty calves, and he’d decided to give the hotel staff the benefit of viewing his gorgeous pink and bristly chest. ‘Coffee,’ he croaked.

  ‘Put a shirt on, will you?’

  He glanced around. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just put a shirt on. You’re a disgrace.’

  He shook his head as if I’d asked him to go native and wear a sarong, but he nipped back to the room, returning at length sporting a migraine-intensity Hawaii-style top. We had breakfast in the garden: English style bacon and eggs but with two tiny strips of bacon frazzled the way a spent matchstick is burnt. Mick growled, got up and lumbered to the kitchen. I don’t know what he said, but shortly after another two dishes arrived, this time lightly cooked. Mick demolished both his and my second plate, and then set about the fruit placed before us.

  I tried a piece of strange orange fruit, but it wasn’t to my taste. Mick noticed and snorted.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re fucking ignorant so you are,’ he said, mopping up the last of my egg with a roll of bread. ‘It’s papaya. Tried to sell it on my stall but no one went for it.’ He held a piece right under my beak. ‘Don’t you think it smells like a woman’s hole?’

  I waved the papaya away and removed myself from the table, ostensibly to light another cigarette. Mick sniffed the piece of fruit himself, evidently with satisfaction, and popped it in his mouth. Then he set about the pineapple. ‘Have you tasted this? Marvellous! Beautiful! Su-bloody-perb! Have you? Have you tasted this?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Very good.’ I was trying to think how to break it to him that I didn’t want him to come to Chiang Mai prison with me. I was going to have to tell him that I didn’t want him there when I came face to face with Charlie. I kept rephrasing it tactfully in my head, when really what I wanted to say was: leave us alone for a minute you big fat fuck.

  ‘“Very good”? Is that all you’ve got to say? Very good? Well I’ve got to get some more of this “very good” pineapple.’ With that he made lumbering purposeful strides in the direction of the kitchen once more.

  When he returned bearing a plate of freshly sliced pineapple, I stamped out my cigarette and said, ‘Look Mick—’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, rivulets of pineapple juice coursing over his unshaven chin, ‘about when we go to the prison. I’ll go so far in, but when it comes to you seeing Charlie I’ll hang back, like.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So’s you can see her on your own, type of thing.’

  ‘Oh. Fine.’

  ‘Father and daughter isn’t it? Brought together again. You don’t need me there. You might think you do, but you don’t.’

  Phil, blinking and sleepy, joined us for breakfast.

  ‘Here he is,’ Mick said, apropos of absolutely nothing, ‘Cardinal Cunt.’

  Deng, the hotel manageress, brought a message that we should call the British Consulate in Chiang Mai. Our previous arrangement had been to meet the consular official, a gentleman called Brazier-Armstrong, at the prison. I telephoned and spoke to a Thai lady, who told me that Brazier-Armstrong had been called away on an emergency. She confirmed that the prison was expecting us and that all we had to do was to present ourselves at the reception.

  In the hour before our appointment at the prison I had a bad attack of the shakes. My stomach was in a dreadful state. I cursed Mick for the things he’d forced me to eat
the night before and I swallowed half a packet of Diocalm, which helped my condition not a jot. My fingers shook so badly Mick had to do up my shirt buttons.

  ‘We’re going to roast in these,’ he complained.

  ‘It’s what we agreed. Stop whining.’ We’d all three brought our best suits with us, wanting to make the best impression possible. I wasn’t having Mick up there in his army-surplus shorts. So we wore collars and ties and heavy, dark English suits. ‘Just remember,’ I said, ‘if it moves, wai it.’

  Mick placed the palms of his hands together under his nose. ‘I’ll wai like a bastard.’

  I had the flight bag full of supplies for Charlie. ‘Cigarettes!’ I shouted. ‘I forgot the cigarettes!’

  Mick produced two cartons. ‘Here. I got these while you were making a prat of yourself at the airport.’

  I was touched by Mick’s consideration. ‘Did you think of bringing anything for Charlie?’ I asked Phil.

  He was quite stung. ‘Of course I did!’ He fished a couple of items from his flight bag. One was a pocket Bible not unlike the one he carried about with him, the other was probably the very same toothbrush he had left over from Christmas.

  Mick gave me an old-fashioned look.

  We left the hotel in plenty of time. Mick spotted a bicycle rickshaw and hailed it. The cyclist, whom Mick insisted on referring to as a ‘coolie’, spoke no English. He seemed a little unhappy at the idea of squeezing the three of us into his rickshaw until Mick waved a banknote under his nose. We had to show him the prison on a map we’d picked up at the hotel.

  Within minutes we were caked in sweat, making laboured progress across town. Chiang Mai was as extraordinary by daylight as it was by night. The old town was enclosed by a high eighteenth-century red-brick wall and a rippling moat populated here and there with turtles and frogs. Within its ramparts we were whisked through blossom-lined streets, alongside shining gold- and red-lacquered temples, and past crumbling, ancient chedis. The rickshaw dodged a line of monks in saffron robes and women bearing yoke-panniers. It was all fabulously exotic, but I wasn’t seeing any of it, because I had a deep, doomy feeling in the pit of my bowels. Mick shifted his weight uncomfortably in the rickshaw seat, and mopped his brow with a large white handkerchief. Phil, nursing his own well-thumbed pocket Bible, looked pale and unwell.

  The rickshaw man peddled up the Ratwithi and delivered us into the yard of the women’s prison. I was surprised to find a modern building of white concrete; maybe I’d expected to see a rat-infested hole in the ground. Before the steps leading into the building was a statue of a Thai soldier bearing a dead infant in his arms. As Mick and Phil climbed out of the rickshaw I looked around. There was a compound of crashed vehicles. I could hear music coming from behind the small opaque windows of the cells. Towels and sheets were squeezed between the narrow openings of the windows, to air.

  ‘Ready, Father?’ I heard Phil say.

  Mick touched my arm. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘This is it.’

  He paid the rickshaw man and we went up the steps and into the prison building, three men in dark suits. A few dismal-looking Thais sat around on hard plastic chairs. A row of glass-panelled offices ran off to the right. The reception desk was empty. I was relieved to have some of my preconceptions defeated by the modern, sterile, municipal appearance of the place. Apart from the heat, it looked less foreboding than any British jug.

  At last a Thai officer in a blue police shirt appeared. I waid him and told him who I was. He motioned us to sit down with the other waiting Thais. Phil kept sticking his finger inside his collar to air his neck. After some minutes another officer came and took us into a small office with metal filing cabinets and a giant rotating fan. He seemed in a bad mood. All three of us waid him, and when Mick offered a Western handshake I was appalled to see that he had, in the palm of his hand and folded the size of a postage stamp, a Thai banknote. The banknote was trousered in one deft move as the officer simultaneously motioned us to sit down.

  The officer went outside.

  ‘You fucking idiot!’

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ Mick said.

  ‘What?’ said Phil, who’d missed the sleight of hand.

  ‘We’ll all be doing ten years in this fucking steam bath if you keep trying stunts like that.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Phil.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Took it, didn’t he? Now listen to this. I’ve brought my life savings out here.’ Mick tapped his bulging moneybelt. ‘I’ve got it in big American dollar bills. If that’s what it takes, it’s yours.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Phil wanted to know.

  I stared at Mick with my mouth open. Life savings? I had no idea what that might mean. But he was offering it as a bribe to these prison guards. I felt dizzy. The officer returned, clutching a sheaf of papers. Now he was all smiles. ‘You wan see dotter, yeh?’

  I nodded. ‘Please.’

  ‘Yeh, we got dotter yeh. But she no wan see you!’

  ‘I understand that,’ I said. ‘The consulate told us she didn’t want to see me. But I have some things for her.’ I patted my flight bag with the shampoos and the soaps and the cigarettes.

  Mick was already folding another note into the palm of his hand, before the officer said brightly, ‘No problem. You her fadder. You good for her see. We make her see you.’

  ‘We’re very grateful,’ Mick said, offering a cigarette, careful to leave the open packet on the officer’s side of his desk. ‘Very grateful.’

  ‘We look after her good,’ the prison officer said. ‘Me fadder, too. We no throw your dotter to the sharks!’ He smiled and nodded and blew smoke. Mick and I smiled and nodded and blew smoke. Phil fingered his collar again, forcing a grimace. It was agonising. I was terrified that at any moment this was going to go wrong.

  We smoked and smiled some more. Then the officer said he was going to see if she was ready for us.

  ‘I’m not sure about this, Mick. How are you going to try to float it?’

  He was dribbling sweat from every pore, and it wasn’t just the heat. ‘I don’t fucking know! I’m winging it, Danny, I’m winging it. I’ll try to get a moment to speak to this guy.’

  The smiling officer returned and beckoned us to follow him along the corridor. He unlocked a cage door and we stepped into a compound where a few female Thai prisoners were lounging in cotton pyjamas. They looked away, bored by us. The odour of stagnant hormones and dead energy was suffocating. Then we were taken into a holding room.

  ‘I’ll stay out,’ Mick said.

  ‘No! Stay! And you, Phil.’ It’s true: suddenly I wanted them both there with me.

  ‘She come now,’ our officer said. ‘Lady guard bring her.’

  Charlie. I was going to see Charlie. We heard voices and the slopping sound of plastic sandals as they approached the holding room. The female officer came in first, bringing her reluctant prisoner behind her.

  I didn’t recognise her. Our eyes met, and we searched each other. Nothing was said. She, Mick, Phil and I and the two Thai prison officers stood in silence in the sweltering room. Phil was shaking his head.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Mick said at last.

  I turned to the male officer. ‘You can throw this one to the sharks,’ I said. ‘This isn’t my daughter.’

  12

  She prodded my foot and I twitched again. ‘Heart,’ she said. ‘You got problem wiv heart.’

  Mick, feet up next to me, let out a little cry and his foot masseur giggled. ‘This one got problem with—’ And she didn’t know the word, so turned to indicate an area at the side of her lower back.

  ‘Liver,’ I added helpfully. ‘He’s got a problem with his liver.’

  ‘Gercha!’ Mick shouted as his foot masseur gouged under his toes with the ball of her thumb. Mick was sceptical but I was impressed. I’d had a minor heart murmur for some time, and my foot masseur had gone straight to the diagnosis. As for Mick, who’d insisted on bringing a c
ouple of bottles of beer in for the duration of the two-hour foot massage, it would have been surprising to find any liver there at all.

  The massage had been Mick’s idea. After the fiasco of the prison we’d spent a dreadful afternoon wringing our hands, failing to get any sense from the British Consulate and finally drinking too much beer in a tiny bar opposite the Tha Phae Gate. Phil had adjourned to the hotel early in the session, complaining of fatigue but clearly disapproving of what was obviously going to turn into ten rounds of wrestling with the demon alcohol.

  ‘I’m not being funny,’ Mick said after he’d gone, ‘but Phil is a dead weight.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I could hardly disagree.

  ‘It’s like having a vulture on your shoulder.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How do you suppose he turned out like that, then? He doesn’t even look like you. Are you sure he’s yours?’

  ‘Give it a rest, Mick.’

  In my ignorance I thought ‘Thai massage’ was a euphemism for knocking shop. Knowing nothing of the deep skills of a traditional Thai massage, I would only concede to the notion of foot massage in a place resembling more clinic than brothel.

  We were invited to change into sports shorts and to relax into comfortable armchairs, feet resting on stools as two ladies of about our own age set about us with coconut oil. I heard myself venting deep sighs as my masseur dug into hitherto unknown joints and muscles in my feet. A giant ceiling fan rotated slowly, chopping at the air.

  So in the massage shop I lay back, thinking about Mick’s remark. It must cross every man’s mind at some time. Whether a child is actually his, I mean, especially when they wind up as junkies or religious crackpots. Me, I haven’t got a religious nerve in my body, but Phil is the full hair-shirt. He’s even got a haircut like a monk’s tonsure except for the bald spot in the middle. I expect he’s looking forward to baldness with some relish. But no, though he’s a little shorter than me, he’s got my build exactly, and my eyes, and my habit of screwing up my eyebrows when I’m trying to figure something out. Much as some days I’d like to explain it away by thinking that Sheila did a wrong ’un, I can see he’s mine right through to the marrow.