Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (16 page)

Her look left me in no doubt whose fault it was that the media were interested in them. She left to deal with the reporters.

Later that day I was called to the office. Inmates are allowed food to be sent in from a relative, and it is collected at the end of the day after a guard has checked it through. My mum had brought boxes of protein supplements and her home-made fruit- cake to Thailand for me. I looked at the parcel and felt as though my dear mother had entered the prison with the bag of food. I could see the shops where she would have bought those things, saw where she would have kept them at home before leaving for the airport. She had bought things that she had given to me years

before when I was a child and here she was again, nursing me with a bag full of groceries. My eyes filled with tears.

That afternoon a guard watched me struggling with the pain in my stomach and sent for the prisoner from the hospital that had carried out the intimate checks on the new prisoners. ‘You no well, you stay hospital.’

With the embassy staff having visited me that day, the prison officials tended to worry about all the paperwork they would have to fill in if anything serious happened to a foreigner so they put me in the hospital wing that night. In the hospital block the horror of everyday prison life paled into insignificance.The place was tiny, with only five small rooms each holding about ten women. For many of the prisoners, the hospital offered little hope of recovery or treatment. In its wards, women of all ages – in prison for a multitude of crimes and serving sentences from a few years to life – wasted away and often died gruesome deaths.

One room was for heavily pregnant women and those who had recently had a baby. Another was for women over the age of
60
and a third appeared to be for those who had access to large

amounts of money; it was slightly more comfortable and the women who spent time there tended to be treated with a great deal more care. I was in the room for ‘others’, people who fell into none of those categories.

In this room there was one young girl aged around
20
. She had

a brown tube protruding through the middle of her stomach, attached to a bottle underneath the bed. Naked as the day she was born, something was being drained out of her. She smelled and looked dreadful.Another had what looked like a football explod- ing from her throat. I wanted to leave immediately.

At the end of the corridor there was one further room, where the Aids and the TB patients were placed. Putting them in together usually finished them off in weeks and most of these critically ill women were not even given a paracetamol to relieve their pain.

My mum and dad had promised to return but there were no visits at the weekends. Lying in my hospital bed I was determined to get better. I also wanted to look OK for them when they came again to see me. I decided a suntan would do the trick. For hours I sat on a step directly in the sun. People are amazed when I tell them we were not locked up all day in cells. There was no real need for this: a high wall with barbed wire and a guard brandish- ing a machine gun was sufficient enough to keep prisoners under control. I baked.

I was fascinated by the idea of escape. Sitting in the sun, hoping to get well, I thought I heard helicopters.Then one flew directly overhead and I knew I wasn’t dreaming. It returned and hovered over the prison for what seemed like an age. Then it went away again.Then it returned. Disappeared, then returned.That was my dad, it just had to be. Of course, it was. He’s coming to get me.And he’s coming in a helicopter!

This was wonderful.The sun was beating down and, for the first time in ages, I was happy. My dad was going to free me. I felt like a little girl all over again, only this time he wasn’t leaving me in the way I had presumed he was, all those years ago, when I had fallen in the water. Now he was coming to save me. He was coming to get me out.

There was a large sandy area in the centre of the prison and I hadn’t yet figured out what it was or what it could be used for.It was either a massive cat-litter tray for all the prison cats or a helicopter- landing pad.That was it.That was where he would land.That was the only explanation as to why he was flying overhead. He was trying to set down in the landing area. But why was he coming today? We hadn’t discussed anything. OK. He would tell me his plans on Monday. He would tell me what time I should expect him. And I could tell him about the perfect landing pad. I couldn’t wait.

When Monday arrived my face was burned brown from the sun. I didn’t hear my name being called for my visit until late in the morning. I thought they had forgotten to come.

‘Your parents are in the embassy room waiting for you,’ said a guard.

They had been in there for hours but the guards had only called me, in Thai, for a visit once and had not bothered again. I could hardly wait for my dad to tell me about his helicopter plan. It would be great. Imagine, flying out of Lard Yao with my dad, waving at the rest of the prisoners and the guards, with their shiny boots and gold-rimmed glasses.They would hate me and I would just shrug and say something like,‘You see, I wasn’t really supposed to be here, anyway.’

OK, Dad, tell me about your helicopter plan.
I didn’t actually ask him, I wanted him to surprise me with it.
OK, Dad, I’m ready.
Did my mum know? Probably not. It was a secret, just in case, in her excitement, she let it slip and the plan would be foiled.
OK, Dad, I’m ready.

We had only half an hour to speak but that was plenty of time. If we had paid the guard we could have had all day, but none of us knew at that time.

OK, so he hasn’t mentioned the helicopter. He still doesn’t want to involve my mum, but he’ll be back tomorrow. He’ll tell her to go to the toilet or something and then talk me through it.
The following day it was the same; there was no mention of him coming to get me in a helicopter.

The fourth day I saw them was Wednesday, but this time every- thing had changed.They were both cold towards me and looked traumatised.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘We are leaving today, Sandra.’ ‘Why?’

‘Our local newspaper said that we are visiting you in Thailand, published where we live and printed a picture of the house along with a massive valuation. Someone’s broken in and we’ve been burgled. We are going home to deal with this mess that we wouldn’t have had if it hadn’t been for you.

‘So you deal with your problems and we’ll deal with ours.’

They left. My parents had always loved their home.When I was growing up, I often asked them why they didn’t go out at night like other parents. I couldn’t understand why they were always at home.They laughed and told me they loved their home as much as they loved each other.They had things at home that they had collected and treasured for years.

I felt sick when I heard they had been burgled. Later, in letters my mum told me that ‘nothing special, just some booze, a televi- sion and a bag of jewellery’ had been taken. It was only part of the truth. Eight years later when I asked my mum why she never wore her engagement ring, she told me it had been one of the things stolen. It was a beautiful white gold ring that my dad had saved

hard for over
40
years earlier, and it was gone.

After their visit I didn’t see my dad again for nearly five years.

There had been no helicopter plan at all.

Over the next few months I would return to the hospital, mainly with the same complaint. Most of the time the pain was emotional rather than physical and being there helped me over- come any feelings of self-pity.Talking to a young woman who had just had a baby in the prison, or to a teenage prostitute dying of Aids, put my own situation in perspective.At least I had some kind of hope.

LardYao ran on money and not rehabilitation.The notion of reha- bilitation was an anathema. It was a miniature city and a world unto itself where money talked and the prison officials listened. Prisoners, of course, were not allowed real money; instead coupons were handed out every day and used as an acceptable currency. They were only valid for the morning on which they were issued.At
1
.
00
pm the coupons became void.

Hardly anything in Lard Yao was free. Everyone had to pay for everything they used except the sandbag pillows, a large towel that was used as a blanket, tap water and the plates of gritty brown rice

with something sloppy and boiled placed on the top of it. Toiletries, sanitary items, thin uniforms, washing powder, coffee or any food items from the prison shop, stamps and stationery all had to be paid for.The black market was rife. It was possible to buy just about everything from hot water for tea and blocks of grey ice, twice a day, to illegal substances and items such as small knives, radios, snuff, cigarettes, pills and powders.

Those who ran the black market would lend large amounts of money at an interest rate of
50
per cent. Prisoners washed clothes for
30
baht a week and other traders had portable ‘shops’ in carrier bags, where you could get something to eat in the middle of the day. These items were also charged at a mark-up price of
50
per cent and you had to pay up the following Tuesday.

You could get most things done and could buy almost every- thing from the black market girls, at a price. Failure to pay a debt on the agreed day increased the debt by
50
per cent per day and, if it was still not paid, violence regularly followed. Normally, the black market girls would simply find the debtor, surround her and take whatever money she had until it was paid off, or they would take everything the girl owned and sell it. Or they would beat her. On one occasion a Nigerian woman had her bottom lip bitten off and fed to a cat, for not keeping up the repayments. In another incident a Thai woman was battered senseless, with prison-made truncheons, for not forking out what she owed. Even the guards

took their share of any black market profit.

The lights were never switched off at night in the LardYao dor- mitories to ensure that everyone could be seen at all times of the night. Couples slept together in full view of anyone remotely interested in watching their lesbian relationships: prisoner/pris- oner, guard/prisoner, guard/guard. A myriad of combinations. Girls eager to embark upon relationships often approached me but I refused. Not because I wasn’t interested – I just smiled and told people I was a ‘try-sexual’, I would try anything once – it’s just that I never fancied anyone.

Most nights I just put a small towel over my face to help me sleep. I was like an ostrich, burying my head away from what was going on around me.

In those first few months I slept alongside some of the strangest women I could ever have possibly imagined. One of my neigh- bours had killed her husband because he had been showing his second wife more attention than her; she chopped him up into eight pieces, took the meat off his upper legs, put the pieces in large biscuit tins and poured his remains into the river as fish food. With images like this in my mind, it was no wonder I baulked at the food placed before us every day: gritty, dirty rice, full of maggots and bugs, whole fish soup, boiled cucumbers with egg or hairy pork.The kitchen girls simply sliced through the dead pig, bones and all.They would slice off most of the meat and sell it on the black market, so what was left was a chunk of fat, topped with

thick skin, sprouting coarse hair.

I was in desperate need of some peace and quiet. So I was sitting with Karyn, in what we called the Boathouse – a little wooden building standing on stilts over a green, slimy pond full of enor- mous fish.We used to go there whenever we could, enjoying the relative peace and quiet, sitting chatting.

Suddenly the most awful stench wafted over from the hospital building nearby, and Thai prisoners were running around with their heads down, shouting and screaming. They wore scarves, fashioned from shirts, over their faces, to block out the putrid smell. I thought a sewerage pipe had burst in one of the upstairs rooms.

Some kind of gooey, brown liquid was pouring through the ceiling and a large puddle had formed on the tiled floor below. The liquid fell in a constant flow; the smell was overwhelming. It turned sickly and we could barely catch our breath.

Three days earlier a woman had died of Aids and tuberculosis, and the undertakers had not been round to pick up the remains of

her body. Left untreated, in temperatures over
100
degrees for three days, her body had swelled and eventually burst in the heat. The woman exploded.

Not surprisingly, the prison officers stayed well away from the burst body, while two prisoners placed a bucket under the drip- ping mass in an effort to catch what was flowing from the dead woman’s insides. Most of the mess missed the buckets and was swept aside from the floor onto the grass, by the edge of the build- ing.

Buddhist Thais don’t like touching dead bodies themselves, believing that everyone has a spirit inside them that does not die when the person themself dies. Apparently this spirit can, very easily, jump into another body if interfered with. So the body- snatchers were summoned. Usually of another faith, the bodysnatchers took most of the people who died in LardYao away to be dissected by medical researchers.They made quite a decent living from the prison, given the number of dead bodies that were carted out of there.

By the time the bodysnatchers arrived to pick up the body of the woman, she had stopped pouring through the ceiling. Upstairs, they could barely stand what was lying in front of them and almost as soon as they entered the room they ran back out again. Dressed in what looked like astronaut suits, and carrying a heavy-duty body bag, they eventually carried the body down the stairs.The body was dropped on the floor and her photograph was taken. One of the men snapped her fingers broken, to make it easier for him to take her fingerprints, before she was removed from the prison grounds.

Lying there, drained of life, and most of her fluids, the stiff body of the woman resembled a grotesque piece of modern art. Most of the prisoners who witnessed this scene simply turned away, knowing that they might well end up in the same condition. It was a horrible, ugly death, and no one seemed to care about her; just the smell she had created.This was just another day in LardYao.