Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (19 page)

The advice they all seemed to give was to say that Robert was innocent, that he knew nothing about the drugs. ‘Plead guilty to possession,’ everyone said. ‘It’s a lesser charge than trafficking and you’ll have a quick trial and get the minimum sentence.’

I had no idea what to do or what to say at my court hearing, whenever that would take place. Everyone, including most of the prisoners, told me to tell the court that Robert knew nothing about the drugs. But why should I? It wasn’t true. He knew every- thing about the drugs.
They were his drugs.

It might be better to lie, though
, I thought, because being a grass, an informer, in prison is not the best way to do a sentence, and plead- ing guilty to possession could mean a lower sentence. I told myself I would think about it.

In August
1993
, a breezeless day, I was herded onto a bus with

some others and taken to court. I was served with the official

charge sheets. Remand was over; the trial had begun. However, the trial would last a further two and a half years and once a month I had to go out to court for a day. I met up again with Robert. He looked rough and had lost weight.

‘Look, Robert,’ I said to him,‘I’ll go halfway with you.We can both plead guilty to possession and we’ll get this trial over with quickly.’

‘Go fuck yourself.’ ‘What?’

‘Go fuck yourself.’

If that’s the way he wanted it to be, there was no way I was going to lie to protect him. From that conversation on I decided that I would tell the absolute truth about Robert and I would testify against him.That was the last time we ever spoke together.

The next time we were taken to court was the first day of our trial.An old, brittle-looking judge sat high on a bench flanked by two people who looked just like students, and a hush descended on the room.The prosecutor and lawyers were in attendance and my poor mother had made another trip to see me. Although I wasn’t really mentally prepared to see her, her appearance was wonderful to see and my spirits were lifted immediately. Unfortunately, she had arrived at court thinking that the trial would take a few days or maybe weeks. She intended to stay every day until it was over, which proved impossible considering it was to be such a long time before its conclusion.

Seeing my mum in court, my head went blank. I found myself just staring at her. It was such a horrendous, emotional time.The court was a sea of strangers apart from my mum, and both of us, red-eyed and bleary, just looked at each other thinking,
How? How did this happen?
The hardest part was when she walked away and I had no idea when, or if, I might see her again. My heart ripped at the corners.

One of the customs officers, speaking only a little English, sat down next to me and said simply ‘If you lie to protect him,’ point-

ing at Robert,‘and the court find you to be lying to protect him, they will uphold the maximum penalty. You know that, don’t you?’ His advice trailed away to a murmur.

We were sitting on old wooden benches and when I turned to look at my mother she had paled and I thought she was going to fall off the bench.

‘For God’s sake, Sandra,’ she pleaded,‘you’re already in enough trouble.Tell the truth, please. For God’s sake, whatever it is, just tell the truth.’

I told the truth, about how Robert had asked me to smuggle his drugs and how I had agreed and how we had been caught and how I had regretted every minute of what I had done.

Back in the prison, after the court appearance, I got hell from the other prisoners for saying this. Everyone had heard all about the trial because the British press were reporting on it at length. For telling the truth about Robert I developed a reputation as a prison grass.

Months later, a group of Robert’s friends showed up in court and told me that there were people who knew where my parents lived and, if I didn’t keep my mouth shut, they would nail-bomb my parents’ house.The protocol of prison life is so different from anywhere else. In most places outside prison there are rules, but when the rules are broken, the consequences are usually minimal. In prison you are constantly vigilant about transgressing rules, codes and beliefs. How does it work? What should you do? How do you behave? There were countless questions that could only be answered by experience.

One day I was called for a visit and was greeted by a recognisable face although I couldn’t quite place her. The woman had an Australian accent and she smiled as she spoke. Did I know her from the UK or Bangkok? She told me her name was Natalie and she chatted away for ages as I tried to figure out our relationship.

She was in great form and I couldn’t tell her I found it hard to

place her so I carried on the charade for the duration of the visit, which lasted
15
minutes. Some weeks later she returned and by then, thankfully, I had remembered I had known her reasonably well in Bangkok. It had got to the stage where I could barely recall people’s faces, never mind their names and, in truth, part of me just wanted them to leave me alone. Initially, visits were welcome, but as the months wore on, they reminded me that people had lives outside my own, where they could walk, talk, eat, sleep and drink freely. I was just a memory.

Nothing in Lard Yao made sense, and nothing seemed real. No games of any description were allowed: no ball games, no cards, dice or board games.Yet the large sandy area I had thought was either a giant cat-litter tray or helicopter-landing pad was in fact a pitch area for French boules or volleyball for the officers.

We could watch but we were not allowed to play. Every evening for a month the officers would practise volleyball, and the closest an inmate would get to playing was to fetch a stray ball for the guards. Every volleyball practice was yet another quantification of the passage of time. Anyone caught with a home-made game, or found kicking a ball of rolled-up paper, risked confinement in the
soi
, or the dark room, for minor misdemeanours.They would be kept there for several weeks.

If you had money, you could get your hair cut and fingernails polished by the inmates who worked in the ‘beauty salon’. If you had no money to pay for the service you would ask one of the girls in one of the factories to cut your hair. If a prisoner was caught cutting hair, or even if someone was recognised as having just had a haircut that wasn’t from the salon, the guards would enforce a punishment. Most of the time my hair was cut illegally.

The laundry I worked in was only for the guards. Every day they would bring in their dirty clothing and every day we would wash, dry and iron it for them to collect that evening. If anyone working in the guards’ laundry was caught washing a prisoner’s clothing, those clothes would be confiscated and a punishment or

fine would be enforced. I never understood, and I still can’t, the idea of physical punishment as rehabilitation. However, the pun- ishments handed out to prisoners, that had so horrified me initially, gradually become almost unnoticeable.

The guards would make women bang their knuckles on the concrete anything up to
100
or
200
times, but the guard had to be able to hear the sound of her knuckles knocking on the ground

five paces away. If the girl missed one knock she had to do the whole lot over again. By the time the punishment was over, the offender’s fingers were usually bare of skin to the bone.

Another version of this saw women crawling on all fours, up and down the length of the prison over the cement path, for hour after hour in the blazing sun.

Then there was the punishment where groups of officers gath- ered around and called out that there was to be a beating. Once a crowd had gathered, the victim had to sit and receive a thrashing with a rattan cane or a solid truncheon. When it was over, the wrongdoer had to raise her hands in thanks and say out loud, ‘Thank you for rectifying my bad ways.’ Punishment and this curious need to cleanse offenders usually began with orders from above, and the malignity of it increased.

Other officers preferred humiliation as their form of chastise- ment. They would hang a large sign around a girl’s neck advertising her crime, and she would have to walk around the prison for the rest of the day.The sign might say ‘I am a thief ’, or ‘I have the mouth of a dog’.

Couples caught by guards in intimate liaisons were usually tied up together with ropes and made to sit in the middle of the grass, under the blazing heat of the sun all day.The heat was bad enough but the grass presented an altogether different problem.

First, despite appearing lovely and lush, the grass was full of vicious ants that not only bit, but also managed to hang on to human skin until they were individually plucked off. Second, the grass was watered daily with sewerage water.

Every morning a woman lowered a basket into the sewer. A pump had been placed inside the basket and a pipe was attached to the pump. The basket filtered out the shit from the sewer and ensured the hosepipe didn’t get blocked.While the sewerage cer- tainly kept the grass a fertile green, exposed wounds on the wet grass infected terribly. Most of the women had plenty of open sores.

Those girls forced to sit on the grass, tied up as punishment, ended up with terrible infections, and that was also the idea of the punishment. What I couldn’t understand, though, was why women were being punished for having sex when the officers used to do the same, many of them with the prisoners.An inmate gets to know herself well in prison and through punishment the knowing is much more profound. Prisoners construct their mem- ories from brutality.

By December of my first year the prison was getting the better of me; my feet were covered in huge sores and I was depressed. I cried at the slightest thing and felt hopeless. I barely knew what was happening with my family, nor how they felt about me and, half the time, I didn’t really care. My case? God only knew.

On some mornings as I hung out my washing, a wood pigeon would call out and I would close my eyes and stand listening to him cooing. I had heard them years earlier as a young child in Kent and, just for a few seconds, I would close my eyes and travel back to those happy times.Then the bird would fly off as I opened my eyes again to face the piles of dirty clothes and squabblingThai women working beside me. Did I dream those wood pigeons? I have no idea. But for those few seconds it was bliss.

Increasingly, the nights were the hardest to endure. From lock- down in late afternoon to release early the next morning meant hours and hours of close confinement. It was an awfully long time to be left alone with your thoughts. Nothing made sense apart from pain, both physical and emotional, which existed on the

same level.The pain of the cell wasn’t actually physical, but some- times, most times, I wished it were.

Previous to Lard Yao I had always thought of myself as a sur- vivor, but prison life tested me to the limit. Day after day, month after month, I grew so tired of it. It was impossible. The bald, disease-ridden rats that grew to the size of cats and two-inch flying cockroaches never ceased to horrify me. I could stand my own ground with the other prisoners but could never cope with the disturbed chatter of rats or flying cockroaches.

There were times when the gap between what prison and reha- bilitation claimed for itself and the reality of the daily performance was so huge it was hard to know which was worse – the reeling motion of your mind or the crawling on your stomach like a snake.

What do you do? Nothing really, except think about why you are here, how you got here and how you have almost crucified your family by your stupidity.All the while the single fan above us chopped away at the relentless heat.

If it hadn’t been for my family back home then I am sure I would have killed myself, and taken the easy way out. But I owed them more than this; they were the ones who had got me through to this point, they were the ones who kept telling me that I should hang in there.The first faces I would see when I woke up every morning and the last ones I would see before bedding down for the night were my family and friends. In my cell of women, they visited me every night, just to say ‘Goodnight, Sandra’, just to remind me they were there.Their faces swam before me. It was a kind of schizophrenia. I wanted them near me, but I didn’t want them in there. I was scared for my family, much more than I was for myself.

Towards the end of that first year my feet were still erupting in massive holes.The pain seemed to come from inside the bone and an infection had developed from the inside before exploding. No one cared, though.Why should they? There were some days when

I was so low that I couldn’t imagine spending more than another hour in that place. Lard Yao was a madhouse, a rest home for the about-to-be-criminally-insane. I prayed for miracles. I prayed for a sign. I prayed that all this praying might be worthwhile.

Happy Christmas! But
25
December was just another day for most of the other women and me. Part of me still wanted to celebrate something, especially all the letters and little kindnesses from family and strangers, at home, and from around the world. On Christmas Day I wrapped up all the toiletries and new knickers I had been sent and gave them away to some Thai women I worked with. I don’t think many of the women knew what to make of a sock full of gifts, but it gave me a little pleasure giving my stuff away.

NewYear passed and there was nothing to celebrate. I replaced celebration with surviving and existing and that way I could deal with the enormous weight of the unbearable. I realised that prison confirmed nothing and proved nothing. It was just there.

nine

Domestic Violence

Dear Sandra

You have no idea how often I have tried to write to you and the number of pages that have gone on the fire and I still can’t write what I want to say to you.We love you so much (you stupid cow). Please, please come back…

Letter from my brother, June
1993

Many people passing through Bangkok, often total strangers, would come by to see me, as if I was an object of curiosity in an exhibition tank. In the visiting room I would ask them why they had come, hoping they might have brought a message from someone I knew at home, or a snippet of news, from beyond the prison walls.