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

said. ‘Khao was here a few minutes ago. I lied and said you’d gone over to the poppy fields.’

‘Right,’ I said, trying to recover my breath. ‘Right. We get dressed. We go to the poppy fields. From now on everything is normal. Got that?’

‘Normal,’ said Mick.

Phil looked sick, strange. ‘Got that, Phil?’

‘Normal,’ said Phil.

Before going to the poppy fields, I made a small fire and burned the three bloodied pairs of underpants.

32

Nobody said a damned thing. Not to us anyway. We had no way of knowing if the boy was even missed.

I say ‘boy’ as if I knew the age of the dead man. I guessed he was about Charlie’s age, though it is often difficult to tell with Thai men. What did it matter? Somewhere he’d had a mother and a father, and if we were going to get through this I knew I’d have to stop thinking about things like that. But the stress of going about and doing things ‘normally’ was excruciating. The four of us were the most dreadful bundle of exposed nerves, and if one sneezed, the others shivered.

Oddly, there was no recrimination from any quarter. There was not even discussion between us. It was too important to pretend to be preoccupied with other things, in an act of wilful denial. Charlie, who had been very clear that the dead man was one of her rapists, merely retreated to her pipe. Mick was sullen, jumpy. Phil suffered the worst: he spent a lot of time in the corner of the hut, on his knees in silent prayer.

We sensed we couldn’t possibly get away with it. We’d reached the lowest point.

Can I tell you that I felt in any way satisfied that we’d killed my daughter’s rapist? I can’t say that it changed a single thing. The rage in me hadn’t gone away. The event was always going be a wound in Charlie’s life, and it still smouldered in my brain. I had not an ounce of sympathy for the heap of meat we’d buried under the trellis, but our actions had done nothing to restore equilibrium to my mind. Revenge had not delivered the promised sweets, and all that had altered was that our predicament had become even more perilous.

We took turns in sleeping, submitting to the exhaustion of a night without rest and the strain of the last few hours. Though we agreed we should only do so in turn, and for a short period, lest anyone should speculate on the cause of our collective fatigue. I dozed so fitfully that my fears and anxieties got mixed up with my dreams.

Mick woke me. He was worried about Phil, whom he said had gone to walk in the poppy fields. Mick looked grave. ‘I hope he can handle it,’ he said.

‘He’s got to,’ I replied. ‘He’s got to.’

Charlie was deep in one of her slumbers. I let Mick take a nap, and I sat outside the hut, waiting for Phil to come back. I dug out of my pack the copy of Thomas De Quincey. Not that I had the head for books in that state, of course, but I wanted anyone watching to think that I was relaxed enough to be able to read. I sat outside the hut in a kind of trance, remembering to occasionally turn the page for the benefit of any observers.

By the time Phil returned, he looked utterly wretched; tortured and tormented. I saw straight through him to the small boy within. I followed him inside the hut. ‘Can I hug you?’ I asked.

‘Why?’

‘Because I need to.’

He looked at me with evident distaste. ‘It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it? Yesterday you wanted to smash my face.’

‘Please.’

I stepped forward and put my arms around him. He allowed me near him, but it was deeply unsatisfactory. He turned his shoulder to my chest and stood sideways to me. I was making him squirm so I let him go. ‘You get some sleep now,’ I said. ‘Sleep is good. It knits the soul.’ It was probably something I’d read in Thomas De Quincey.

‘The soul!’ he spat, as if I had no right to talk about these things. ‘The soul!’ Then he started laughing. Cackling. He threw back his head and laughed manically, but then stopped abruptly, and the fact that he stopped cackling so suddenly was more disturbing than his laughter. But he was so profoundly tired he lay down on the pallet and he let me cover him with a thin blanket.

In the quiet moments which followed, and with the other three sleeping, I took a good hard squint at the hut, trying to see what it was that might stop Charlie from going outside. What forces might bar her way, even if only in her fevered imagination. Was there a giant serpent coiled around the hut? Or prison bars of smoky green light obstructing the door? I tried to visualise these things, superimposing images where I couldn’t see them.

I laid my head next to Charlie’s, trying to feel my way into her dreams, her nightmares, trying to get on that flight with her all over again. I wanted to fight it for her from the inside. But there was nothing. I thought about the moment I first entered the hut and found her sitting upright. I wondered now if it had only been a spirit I had seen. It seemed possible to me that a mind in an extreme state of distress could see anything.

I imagined her spirit sitting upright again, legs crossed under her, leaving her sleeping body. I imagined her trying to tell me what she saw. At that moment, Charlie opened her eyes – her real eyes, in her real body – and appeared to stare aghast at the open door. I swung round and in that moment I had a notion of the hut tilting ninety degrees, so that we might all fall out of the doorway, and go on falling,