Smoking Poppy Graham Joyce (free ebook novel .txt) 📖

wickedly taunted by Mick, he allowed himself to take off his shoes and socks, neatly stowing them under his bed.

I lay on my own sunbed trying to ignore the pair of them by opening one of the books I’d brought with me. My fantasies had turned to England, and misty, damp autumnal mornings or to the sudden, short downpours of April. I thought of walks along the foggy canal towpaths and of mud-squelching football pitches. I was homesick already.

My book was A Season in Hell by Rimbaud. I was still determined to get to the bottom of what these dopers were up to. Of course, given recent developments, I had no evidence that Charlie had any connection with drugs whatsoever. But I suspected otherwise, especially if she’d allowed drugs traffickers like that creature in Chiang Mai prison to get near enough to steal her passport. I was raking through these books looking for references to opium and its effects.

As for Rimbaud, well. A complete prick. I won’t even waste your time telling you what this one was about. Half of it sounded like it was scribbled by a teenager giddy on his first bottle of cider. The book would still be lying on the bottom of the hotel swimming pool if Mick hadn’t fished it out. So I moved on to trying to make sense of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

I almost gave up on that, too. You plough through several pages of complete waffle before he even mentions opium. There is a lot of musing about De Quincey’s childhood, and then several miserable passages about a rotten time he was having in London where he got mixed up with a prostitute called Ann. I don’t see what that has to do with opium, but you keep reading it in the hope that soon he will get to the point.

Finally, after much whining about how difficult life is (this a young gentleman of the early nineteenth century – he ought to have thrown in his lot with the common people for a week), we get the thing named. One of his cronies from Oxford University suggested he use opium to treat a headache. (Oxford University – there’s that place mentioned again – someone ought to take it down brick by brick.) While studying at Oxford he started to use opium on a regular basis. If he hadn’t, I daresay he would have written a better book.

It was while we were sweating by the pool that we got a message from Brazier-Armstrong that made Mick apoplectic with rage. He’d been ‘called away’ for a few days and would report back to us the instant he returned.

‘The little shite!’ Mick roared. He pulled on his shirt and shorts and buckled on his moneybelt.

‘Oh dear,’ Phil said, ‘you’d better keep him on a tight leash.’

‘Where are you going?’ I shouted

‘You two stay here!’

I trotted after him, in wet swimming shorts and bare feet, to the front of the hotel. ‘I don’t want you causing trouble at the consulate. You’ll make things worse.’

‘I’m not going to the consulate.’ He flagged a tuk-tuk from across the street.

‘So where are you going?’

The tuk-tuk driver gave me a wide, toothless grin as Mick hoisted his bulk into the back of the three-wheeler. Mick barked at him to go and I was left standing in a cloud of filthy exhaust.

I went back to the poolside. Phil was also on his feet by now. ‘I’m not certain how wise it was of you,’ Phil opined, ‘to bring Mick along. We’ve got to take steps to contain him.’

‘Contain him? What do you suggest, Phil? Extra Bible classes?’

I flung myself into the pool. I was worried. On the one hand I was afraid Mick might do something stupid to spoil any possibility of assistance and co-operation we might have. Brazier-Armstrong was elusive and ineffectual, but his local knowledge and contacts were all we had. On the other hand, Mick’s blundering around was making things happen. If relations got too bad I could always blame everything on him and send him home. With Phil still glowering at me from under angry knitted brows I dried myself, ordered a whisky from the bar, and buried my head in Thomas De Quincey so I could stop thinking about these things.

It wasn’t easy. The De Quincey is written in a long-winded and old-fangled style, very different to today. Maybe it’s the pace of today’s life that makes writing so different. Perhaps in those days they had all day to say things in. Either that or we’ve got less things to say, but whatever the reason, old De Q was taking me round the houses before he was going to actually give anything away about this opium business.

One rainy Sunday afternoon he’d gone down from Oxford to London and, on the advice of a student friend of his, he bought a shilling’s worth of laudanum from a chemist in Oxford Street. (I don’t know why Oxford keeps cropping up – this sort of thing can make you paranoid.) I had to read on a bit before I found out that laudanum is opium dissolved in alcohol, so I suppose he was getting the double effect. I remember pausing at this point to look at the glass of whisky in my hand. I’d been feeling so strange and queasy since arriving in Chiang Mai I had the crazy idea that maybe these Thailanders lace their booze with opium.

Anyway, he drank this laudanum. I’ve no idea why he called his book Confessions of an English Opium Eater when he spent his time drinking the stuff rather than eating it. I felt slightly misled. When I thought of De Quincey I imagined him hiding in cupboards or dark rooms, chewing on some resinous black chunks of opium; this information changed the picture altogether. Now I pictured him sitting in front of a fireplace topping up his glass of laudanum from a decanter. So why not