Smoking Poppy by Graham Joyce

Author:Graham Joyce [Joyce, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: G&S Publishing
Published: 2013-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

24

A long dark night lay ahead of me. On returning to the hut to find the old woman dribbling broth into Charlie’s mouth, I’d naturally attempted to speak to Charlie. But this time there was no recognition; no ‘Daddy’ as in the first moment of our arrival; no banter about the Postman of Porlock or whatever; nothing, not a flicker of interest. She gulped the soup and failed to respond to anything I put to her. Meanwhile the old woman watched me with critical eyes, and with her lips pursed in what I took to be the suppression of a smile.

‘Has she said anything to you?’ I asked Phil.

‘Nothing.’

But she’d been sitting upright, waiting for me when I entered the hut. Expecting me. Both Mick and Phil looked sceptical when I told them this. I began to doubt it myself. Almost as if our brief conversation had taken place in some imagined or telepathic universe. My sense of what was real and what wasn’t real in this place was already becoming unthreaded.

When I gave up trying to communicate with Charlie, the old woman nodded. She shuffled forward, once again producing opium from the folds of her gown. With it this time came a small ceramic pipe and a box of matches. She jabbed her finger at Charlie.

‘No,’ I said firmly.

The old woman shrugged, and put the things away.

I knew that if Charlie was addicted then she was going to have a craving. But I had no way of determining whether her current condition was attributable to the opium or to some other condition. All I could do at that moment was to withdraw the drug and see what happened.

‘The old woman’s intentions are benign,’ Phil said, reading my thoughts. ‘She’s obviously been the one looking after Charlie, feeding her, tending to her. Opium is probably the only medicine available to these people.’

I knew he was right. I had to accept that this feeble old matriarch was not the pusher at the school gates.

‘Pipe,’ Charlie said in a whisper.

The old woman looked hard at me, as if to say, what can I do? Her face was simian, very old, and yet her skin was oddly smooth. I couldn’t tell if she was prematurely old or immortally young. Except, perhaps, that her eyes gave it away. They were oddly translucent, like cellophane, as if burned out from staring at the sun. It made her seem other-worldly, shamanic.

She tried to tell me something about Charlie. She stroked her own shoulders and gestured outside the hut, maybe at the sky; she made utterly impenetrable signals. It was hopeless. She gave up, but with a cruel smile.

When we’d settled the matter of the opium, that Charlie wasn’t going to be given any while I was there, I tried to make the old woman understand that we would want something to eat. I pointed at Mick’s sleeping form; I pointed at my own yawning mouth. I made eating gestures. I then produced a few bhat from my pocket.

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