Smoking Poppy Page 8

  Meanwhile Mick reclined in his chair. He made his lips pop on his beer bottle. ‘We’ve got to find that twat Brazier-Armstrong. He should have been there. He was supposed to be there.’

  Brazier-Armstrong, whoever he was, was attracting a lot of blame from Mick. I must say I was pretty angry with the consul for not being there to sort out the confusion. We’d gone by tuk-tuk, a kind of motorised lawnmower with a sun canopy, directly from the prison to the consulate office at the IBM building on Huay Kaew Road. The journey was not without its trials as the tuk-tuk driver was incredibly persistent in trying to fix us up.

  Tuk-tuk man: You wan girls?

  Mick: No

  Tuk-tuk man: You wan boy?

  Mick: Fuck off.

  Tuk-tuk man: Grass?

  Mick: Just drive your fuckin’ lawnmower.

  Tuk-tuk man: You wan fat lady? I got pleny fat lady.

  Mick: You want fat lip? No? Then shut it.

  Then when we arrived at the offices they were closed, and there was no sign of the lady with whom I’d spoken earlier in the day.

  We were simply left hanging out to dry.

  The confusion at the prison was bad enough. I’d simply walked out on all of them. Then of course I couldn’t get out of the compound without the guard unlocking the cage. When I returned everyone was talking at once, except the girl whom everyone had taken to be Charlie. When the Thai officials had established she wasn’t my daughter she was whisked to her cell by the female guard, and we were taken back to the office we’d come from.

  The prison officer couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. He summoned half a dozen colleagues, who in turn produced papers in triplicate with Charlie’s name, date of birth and our home address in England. He also produced Thai court papers, none of which were in English. At one point we were surrounded by half a dozen blue shirts all shouting at once. The paperwork was in order, so why was I being difficult?

  ‘She no your dotter, that girl?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’

  ‘So why you here?’

  Then it would start all over again.

  ‘She no your dotter?’

  ‘For the hundredth time, no!’

  ‘So who she, that girl?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her?’

  Mick had the bright idea of proposing that he and I interview the girl, but they weren’t having any of that. Finally Phil suggested they get the consul down there at the double, to see what he could make of it. They phoned. Brazier-Armstrong wasn’t available.

  We established that there was no possibility of Charlie being elsewhere in Chiang Mai prison. It had occurred to me that she might go to some lengths to avoid seeing me. There were only four other farang women there in total: one American girl, one Australian and two Germans, all for charges relating to drugs. All four of them were brought to the compound for us to see, to ensure no collusion or place-swapping. (Thais think all farang look similar.) Charlie wasn’t amongst them.

  We shook hands with the officer who’d dealt with us, we waid, and we left. We could still hear the officers shouting at each other as we quit the prison grounds. They were suffering badly from loss of face, and clearly hadn’t enjoyed being made to look incompetent before three Westerners in heavy, dark suits. As we made our way down the sweltering street, Mick had ripped off his tie and waved it angrily at an approaching tuk-tuk. ‘Bar,’ he growled. ‘Any bar.’

  Meanwhile my foot masseur pulled at each of my toes in turn, making the bone crack. I looked into her eyes and she smiled at me shyly before resuming her work. ‘Tomorrow morning,’ I said. ‘We’ll go to the consulate first thing tomorrow morning.’

  We’d spent the entire afternoon running the thing backwards and forwards, but were no closer to an explanation. I was crippled with agitation. If Charlie wasn’t in Chiang Mai prison, then where the hell was she? As far as I knew, she might be back home in England. I was also left with the impact of Mick’s revelation that he’d come along with me prepared to try and bribe the prison guards with his life savings. I kept stealing glances at the bulging moneybelt on which he permanently rested a fat pink hand. Naturally I was relieved that this desperate plan hadn’t needed to be put into action, but what was I to make of the man who was prepared to do this for me?

  Somewhere in there was another thought, one so dark that I kept trying to push it to the corner of my fevered imagination. It was the idea that Charlie might not be anywhere, that she might be dead. The thought was there, but prowling at a distance like a wild animal circling a camp fire, wanting to attack but held back by the light. I preferred to put my faith in the British Consul coming up with a sensible explanation, and, I admit, a bit of direction about what I might do next.

  The masseur hit a nerve in my foot and I twitched violently. ‘Heart,’ she said to me softly and apologetically. ‘Heart.’

  There was nothing for it but to wait until I was able to see Brazier-Armstrong, to make some sense out of this.

  ‘He should have been there!’ Mick jabbed a finger emphatically at the floor. ‘Brazier-fucking-Armstrong. At the fucking prison this morning. Pardon the French, my sweet darling,’ he said to his masseur, putting down his bottle and wai-ing her deeply by way of atonement.

  She tittered and shot a glance at her colleague.

  Mick tapped my arm conspiratorially. ‘See that? She fancies me.’

  13

  Mick was beginning to lose his temper, and the skull-cracking hangover we had in common wasn’t helping. Restored to his Hawaiian shirt and calf-length shorts, Mick leaned across the desk at the consulate in a manner that might be described as menacing. Me, I’d given up on the woman. I badly needed an intake of icy, clear water to sluice away the ravages of the previous night’s Singha beer.

  ‘So what you’re saying is,’ Mick, wagging a finger at her, ‘not only do you not know where Brazier-Armstrong is, but you have no idea of when he’s coming back.’

  Phil weighed in, too. He stood directly before the woman and, narrowing his eyes, placed his hands together as if in prayer, pointing his touching fingertips down at her. ‘The father has come for the daughter. He will speak with the consul.’ I don’t know what the woman made of this, but his technique gave me the shivers.

  The oriental concept of ‘loss of face’ is interesting. The woman at the consulate who had introduced herself as Mrs Duongsaa (and though she spoke impeccable English we never did find out whether she was an official, a secretary, or a general factotum) was losing hers fast. The traditional Thai smile with which she’d greeted us had slipped when we’d demanded she contact Brazier-Armstrong instantly. Before that she’d persuaded us to run through events, sympathised, expressed incredulity and promised she would ‘look into’ it and report back.

  ‘When would that be?’ I asked her.

  ‘As soon as I have some information,’ she replied.

  ‘No. I want some action now. I want you to speak to the prison authorities immediately.’

  Very sweetly she assured us that enquiries would be made, that something had obviously gone seriously wrong, and that there were a lot of formalities to be negotiated.

  ‘Stuff all that,’ Mick had said. ‘Where’s Brazier-Armstrong?’

  The maintenance of ‘face’ is conducted by smiles, sympathetic expressions, gentle indirection, and by body language signalling control and competence. When Mick asked for Brazier-Armstrong, Mrs Duongsaa looked as though he had slapped her. Now he was in her face, and her features had stiffened visibly.

  Mr Brazier-Armstrong was away on unavoidable business. Mr Brazier-Armstrong could not be contacted. Mr Brazier-Armstrong had not been specific about when exactly he would be back in the office. That’s when I’d asked where, exactly, the consular official was at that moment. Mrs Duongsaa was unable to be specific at that moment. Now her face was paralysed, though her eyes were moist with hatred.

  I’d slumped in a chair. The more I tried to think about how we were go
ing to make progress in this impossible situation, the more grinding was my hangover. After the foot massage of the previous evening I’d allowed Mick to talk me into getting smashed out of my head. We’d ended up in the Corner Bar on Loi Kroa, a neon-lit shed full of pretty young prostitutes. They made me laugh, and even with Mick trying to wind me up, I didn’t implicate myself beyond buying a few beers. Sweet girls, all of them, and all about Charlie’s age.

  Mick made me snort when he suggested, ‘There is no Brazier-Armstrong, is there? He doesn’t exist. There’s just you and this desk.’

  ‘Ha!’ went Phil.

  Stung, Duongsaa was about to reply when the telephone rang, but it was Mick who snatched it up. Duongsaa got to her hind legs in protest, but Mick danced a couple of steps backwards, informing the caller, ‘The British Consulate in Chiang Mai is closed while we sort out this fiasco with Chiang Mai prison. Goodbye. Who am I? I’m the British Ambassador in a purple vest, so fuck off.’ He placed the receiver back on its cradle with exquisite gentility. Duongsaa was still remonstrating when Mick added, ‘We’re going to stay here by this phone until you get Brazier-Armstrong.’

  Snatching up a cellphone Duongsaa tapped out a number. When she got a response she spoke in rapid Thai, staring at us icily throughout the conversation. Something that was said on the other end made her voice go up an octave. When she’d finished she said, ‘Mr Brazier-Armstrong will come to see you at your hotel.’

  ‘Breakthrough!’ said Phil.

  ‘When?’ I demanded.

  ‘Today if possible. Maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘So why did you lie to us about not being able to contact him?’ Mick wanted to know.

  ‘Never mind that,’ I said. ‘You tell him he’d better be there.’

  ‘You got what you want!’ she said, her voice shrill. ‘Now you go!’

  ‘And if he doesn’t come,’ Mick said, ‘we’ll be back here tomorrow.’

  ‘And I get the police.’

  ‘You do that,’ Mick said, puce in the face. ‘And I’ll give ’em five hundred dollars and they’ll kick your fat arse all the way to Bangkok. I know how this country works.’

  I steered him towards the door. ‘That’s enough. Let’s go. I really do need a glass of water.’

  ‘Water,’ said Phil. ‘Water is good.’

  But there are more things in life to lose than just ‘face’. I knew a man who had lost a daughter when she was only seven. She’d contracted a rare form of leukaemia and he had to watch her perish.

  You have two incontrovertible wishes when you are a parent. One is that you will die before they do, because it is terrible ill luck to have to bury one of your own children. The second is that you in turn will live long enough to see them grow to a ripe age. In the years when Charlie became ‘lost’ to me, even though I knew she was still alive and just not speaking to me, my mind often turned to this poor man whose little girl had died.

  You see, he never got over it. There is no getting over it. The world for him after that was a changed place. He once said to me it was as if somehow overnight two or three of the colours of the visible spectrum had been withdrawn. The sense of loss shot through everything. Before this happened to him, he was a rather arrogant man, always treating everyone to his views on this or that subject; but, and beyond all his deserts, he was so humbled by nature through this event that he even seemed to discard his opinions.

  Back at the hotel the afternoon following our shouting match in the British Consulate, Phil intuited what was in the back of my mind. ‘I think it’s time we asked God to help us, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Come into my room, where it’s quiet.’

  I remember shaking my head at him, minimally, the way you shake your head when someone offers you a cigarette of inferior brand. I don’t believe in God, you see, so I had to stop this tiny voice inside myself from doing what Phil wanted, which was praying that Charlie was still alive.

  I retreated to the shaded side of the swimming pool. There I found an English-language daily newspaper called the Bangkok Post, and in it I read a story which left a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the day. It was a case of drug smuggling. A mother with a baby in her arms had been arrested trying to leave Thailand. Her baby was dead. It had been dried, eviscerated and stuffed with high-grade heroin.

  When some of the heat had burned off the day, I decided to visit a very old Buddhist temple we’d passed that morning. To be honest I thought it was a way of finding a few moments of quiet reflection on my own. I made all kinds of tactful remarks to Mick and Phil, that they needn’t baby-sit me, that maybe they had things of their own to see, but they stuck to me like shit on a baby’s blanket.

  The temple was an oasis in the madness. The pagoda roof sweated and glittered like spun gold in the haze of the evening sun. Mick got his camera out to photograph the carved dragons at the entrance. He and I were about to take off our shoes to go into the shady interior – not Phil, he wasn’t going to smudge himself in the proximity of heathen idols – when we were distracted by a small movement a little way off. It was an elderly Buddhist monk in saffron robes, squatting under a bo tree. No, he wasn’t meditating: he was enjoying a cigarette.

  Mick snorted. ‘A monk having a fag!’ he said. ‘That says it all!’

  ‘Not very spiritual,’ Phil agreed sniffily.

  The ‘all’ that this scene spoke to Mick eluded me, but he approached the monk waving his camera. The monk was quite happy to be snapped. Then Mick sat down beside the monk and produced his own pack of ciggies. I took the opportunity to slip off my shoes and dart inside the temple. ‘Coming inside?’ I asked Phil.

  He hung back. ‘No, I think I’ll take a stroll.’

  I’d given him my permission to change out of his heavy serge trousers and his starched white shirt, but he was committed to sweating it out. ‘But it will be cool inside.’

  ‘No, I’ll not come in.’

  Something about the expression on Phil’s face took me by surprise. His thumb stroked the leather cover of his scriptures, a nervous, smoothing tic I’d noticed before. I suddenly realised how he filtered all of this: the drugs, the prison, the prostitution, the heathen temples. We were in a trough, a hollow of deep sinfulness, treading a path of spiritual danger where even the beautiful old pagoda temple was an emblem of menace. Where I saw only a lacquered dragon, he saw a house of graven images; where I could smell only incense, he sniffed the breath of the serpent. The dragon within the temple rolled its lascivious tongue, waiting to lick him with all the poison impiety of a heathenish faith.

  He waved his Bible at me in a parting gesture and hurried out of the temple grounds, as if afraid I might try to persuade him further. Letting him go, I stepped inside the temple.

  It was indeed cooler within, but bright, not dark like a Western place of worship. The interior was painted red, like a lacquered box. A few tiny candle flames flickered at the foot of an immense brass Buddha, reflecting mildly on his polished breast, cheek and forehead. I sat down on the creaking, varnished teak floor.

  The Buddha’s huge painted eyes gazed down at me, neither sympathetic nor hostile, but yet involved. Suddenly I vented a deep, distressed sigh. The sigh was so noisy and overstated that I felt embarrassed for myself; I even looked round, but the temple was otherwise empty. It was as if I’d been holding my breath since stepping off the plane. Then it happened again, involuntary as a sneeze with my body shaking slightly, and my profound sigh was absorbed into the nooks and crannies of the temple.

  I’d spent the last forty-eight hours steeling myself against the gaudy carnival of life outside; the Ferris-wheel of exotica; the sensual onslaught; the terror at what I’d find in Chiang Mai prison; the disappointment and speculation that had followed. Now the simple act of walking into the temple had punctured my distress. I closed my eyes and held my head in my hands, waiting for another discharge to rip through me.

  After a good while, I don’t know how long, I felt a quiet presence come up from behind and settle down
next to me. I didn’t look up. If it was Mick I wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. His sleeve brushed mine. Perhaps he saw my distress, but I was glad that for once he had the sensitivity not to say anything. It was so quiet in there that I heard his level breathing, at least until it fell into rhythm with mine, or perhaps mine with his. He sat there with me for ten minutes, and his silent presence had a calming effect. When I opened my eyes he’d gone again. I got up and walked outside.

  Mick was sitting under the bo tree, bathed by the hazy light. The monk had gone. I sat down beside him, taking one of his proffered cigarettes. He was chuckling to himself. It turned out that the monk had spent several years in Birmingham, and his English had a heavy Midlands inflection. Mick had been treated to a short lecture on Buddhism, and decided I too should have some of the benefit. He started telling me about the Eightfold Path: right words, right action and the rest of it.

  ‘That’s great, Mick. You’ve shared a snout with a monk and now you’re a Zen master.’

  He was stung. ‘Don’t take the piss!’

  ‘Shall we go?’

  Mick scrambled to his feet and kicked off his shoes. ‘Let me have a look inside the temple first.’

  ‘But you’ve already been in.’

  ‘No I haven’t. I’ll only be a minute.’

  ‘Well who came in while I was in there? Was it the monk?’

  Mick looked at me oddly. ‘No one went in.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Not while I’ve been here. Why?’

  ‘Nothing. You go inside.’

  Mick had to be mistaken. A very distinct someone had squatted down next to me. I’d clearly felt them brush against my clothes. I’d heard them breathing. My skin flushed at the thought. I shivered, and concluded that the heat was getting to me. I felt dizzy again.