Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (20 page)

‘I’ve just come to see you,’ they would say, startled by my bemused and disappointed expression. I couldn’t help it.

Having to shout across a four-foot gap only increased my sense of frustration and alienation. ‘It borders on the surreal,’ said a reporter who came to visit one day. My life belonged to LardYao. One year had passed since I first entered LardYao and I was still no nearer to being sentenced. I was a curious sight, embarrassed by living in these squalid conditions and angry with people outside prison knowing how I was forced to live.The impulse for sympa-

thy is ancient and I hated their sympathy even more.

The paradox of LardYao was glaring; everyone wants prisoners to be punished and they expect rehabilitation. Fine. But the vul- nerability of prisoners, and the lack of self-esteem reduce all the good intentions to less than zero. I wanted to open my own mail or make a cup of tea when I fancied one. I wanted to eat when I was hungry, not when I was told. Even showing emotions was restricted. Everyone felt this, but no one said it.You couldn’t, it was impossible. Displaying emotion was a sign of weakness and in prison weakness was often preyed on. I was weak and I grew tired of having to put on a face and pretend I was hard and tough.

There were, of course, days when I realised how lucky I was and how much worse my situation could have been. By turns I grew resilient and found the occasional pleasure in small things.

Court mornings, of all occasions, were often a quiet, peaceful time. Rising early, before anyone else was up, and being let out in the dark was a precious change to the regular routine. It was one of my only chances to be more or less alone.

I would sit outside on my plastic mat for a few minutes with my cat, watching the fat bullfrogs jumping around the courtyard. I would watch them jealously, as they plopped and hopped around on the ground; they were as free as anything could possibly be in the prison.They were freer than the guards who worked there, ate there and, in some cases, lived there. I desperately wanted to be a frog or even one of the pigeons that flew in and out of prison all day.

One morning, on my way out to court, I looked around at the other people going that day and noticed a young girl. She looked too young, like an infant almost, and didn’t look at all well. In the damp holding corridor, the rest of us stood up and were counted, but the girl couldn’t lift herself from the floor.There were no signs of life in her eyes, and her body looked too thin to be alive.

‘Frogs. Frogs.’ The jumping of the tiny frogs had caught her attention.

Hers was a typical story. Her parents had been given a ‘loan’ for their daughter and told she would be given a job in a factory in Bangkok. Instead she was put to work in a brothel.At the time she was
12
years old. Not long after she began selling her body she contracted HIV and, at
15
, she developed a heroin habit. Shortly after that the HIV developed into full-blown Aids and, at
17
, the police arrested her for possession of heroin. She was going to court from LardYao, charged with possession of less than a fifth of a gram of heroin.

Two weeks after her court appearance her skeletal body stag- gered along the tiled floor of the hospital building. I watched as she dropped to her knees, her hands clasped together, asking the nurse for a paracetamol.

‘Go!’The guard flicked the girl away with her hand.

A few days later I saw her again.The bodysnatchers were taking her out of the prison in a body bag. By all accounts the youngster spent the last few nights of her life screaming in pain, but no one had bothered to give her any medication.The Thais would say it was her karma to die. How do you tell such a terrible story? It’s easy.You just remind yourself that it’s not you in that body bag.

Working in the laundry, scrubbing the clothes of the officers and their families had left my feet in a terrible condition.The officers brought their washing every morning and we had to wash it, dry it and have it ironed and bagged up by
4
.
00
pm that same day. I developed huge boils and infections across my feet and legs that looked like moon craters and the constant exposure to dirty water was having a terrible effect on the healing process. I left when I could no longer take the pain and began working in the bakery.At least it was dry.

No one working in the laundry was allowed to keep a cat because we worked with the officers’ clothes and to send out a bag of clothes with cat hair on it would have been to invite a punish- ment. No sooner had I started in the bakery than I adopted a

young tomcat by the name of Jow-Son. Before long my cat became the most important thing in my prison world.

Family and friends in Britain would write asking if there was anything I would like sending from home. It was never as simple as that.Anything I might have liked would never have been allowed into Lard Yao, and anything that was allowed I didn’t really want anyway.While I thanked people for their kind offers, I told them I needed nothing.That changed when I realised that feeding Jow- Son was going to be a problem. (The rats in Lard-Yao were far too big for the cats to catch.)

While other prisoners received bottles of perfume, make-up and underwear – most of it to give to the guards as bribes or for dealing with the black market – I requested boxes of cat food from home.

One morning, out of nowhere, a beautiful, reddish-brown cat appeared and was immediately adopted by the Thai sweet factory girls.This cat was the biggest domestic feline I have ever seen.
He must have escaped from Bangkok Zoo
, I thought, because he just didn’t look normal. I nicknamed him Brutus.

After a few weeks Brutus started terrorising all the other tomcats, and often we would come out in the morning to find a fearful tom clinging to the top of a fence with smelly, brown liquid pouring down the wall beneath it. The bakery cats developed infections all over their hind legs from where Brutus had brutally and systematically attacked them all night.

Soon Jow-Son was howling when I picked him up, his infec- tions bursting out over my shirt, leaving me covered in green slime from his wounded legs. Over and over Brutus attacked the male cats. It seemed almost unnatural. Brutus refused to allow the other toms peace. Even the kittens born following his arrival all bore an uncanny resemblance to Brutus. Working late one night in the bakery, I saw him strutting inside.‘That’s it,’ I thought,‘I’ve had it.’ I could no longer sit back and watch this creature terrorise all our babies.

I picked him up and shoved him in a rice sack.To be honest I didn’t know what I was going to do with him but I was raging. I was also trembling. I walked away from the bakery carrying the sack over my shoulder and looked at the wall. I could hear Brutus clawing his way out of his little cloth prison.

If I throw him over
, I thought to myself,
he’ll get hurt and might lie injured for days
. My palms began to sweat.All I could hear was my heartbeat and the sound of a low humming coming from the bakery. Everything swirled. Looking across the yard I saw the pond where Karyn and I had sat together in the boathouse. I walked over and threw Brutus and the sack straight into the water. A few bubbles rose to the surface of the water. Brutus was gone.

My God, what have I just done?
I was trembling terribly as I returned to the bakery, and when the girls asked me where Brutus was I could hardly speak.

‘Gone where?’ they wanted to know. ‘Over the wall.’

It was the first time I had ever killed anything.A few days later the bag with the dead cat floated to the surface of the pond. Surrounded by furious women from the sweet factory, I denied their accusations telling them I had no idea where their precious cat was.

Jow-Son disappeared very soon after that but despite losing him I still didn’t regret what I had done. It was a long, long time before I was allowed to forget my murderous incident and a long time before anybody would speak to me. I never went near the Thai sweet factory again.

It’s a curious story to tell, and I am always struck by people’s reaction.Animal stories. It makes them sad.All the craziness and all the suffering and the moral chaos and the young women dying and all the terrible things that went on in LardYao and people say, ‘You killed a cat?’ I’ll never figure that one out.

*

One of the hardest things to adjust to was the way time passed, or didn’t, as the case might be. Days sometimes felt like hours, hours sometimes felt like weeks, and weeks often felt like years.Yet it always seemed to be Sunday again. I had received a little pocket calendar shortly after I had arrived in Lard Yao and tried to keep track of time. The months passed rapidly but the calendar was a hindrance. How many more calendars would I receive?

Each year I would be sent a pile of calendars from different people, each sender presuming that it would prove useful. I hated the sight of them; I hated the sight of any calendar, but didn’t tell anyone how I felt. I didn’t want to sound ungrateful.

People also wrote to me about the seasons at home and year after year I would hear about the spring daffodils and the autumn leaves turning brown. So many times I prayed that I wouldn’t miss another British springtime. I wrote and received letters from a man in Scotland and one spring he came over to Bangkok to see me. He brought a small bunch of daffodils with him. They were one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen as I looked at them through two sets of bars and across the visiting room.The guards, of course, wouldn’t allow me to have them but I shall never forget how their graceful yellow faces bobbed in that dark, grey corridor. There are very few markers of time in prison. One day is pretty much like the last. It goes by slowly and then, suddenly, a year or two has passed and you wonder what’s happening to your life and

where it is going. It’s almost seductive, the way time disappears.

My first anniversary passed and I had barely noticed it.The real way to measure time was by the events going on beyond the prison walls. Life was going on outside without me, without any of us.There were the occasional blips of good fortune – like the daffodils – but mostly we held onto things in our minds as they had been outside before our imprisonment.

I would go over the events of the last few years, wondering who fitted in and who were against me. Did they mean anything or

were they simply part of my slow breakdown? For a while I strug- gled with the absurdity of my prison identity.

Meanwhile, Shanty, my friend from West Yorkshire, had her third child and he was growing up quickly with his two elder brothers. Holroyde had lost his boyish looks and the sagas of his life unfolded in his letters. My dog, Kara, was getting old and reg- ularly attended the vet. My two cats had ‘gone’. While my grandparents grew precariously older, my parents tried to live a normal life, but they struggled with the shame of everyone knowing where their daughter was and what she had done to get there.

One afternoon, Jackie, a woman from West Yorkshire, was in Bangkok and she visited me in prison, promising to come regu- larly until she had to go back to the UK. She lived roughly a mile from my house and her visits brought me so close to home I could

almost touch it. For the
20
-minute duration of her visit I could

almost smell Yorkshire; I could feel the bumps in the pavement as she described the walk between our two houses and I could taste the tea we spoke about drinking from china cups.

Six months later and she had to return to England. I was devas- tated. It felt like she had just started visiting; it felt like she had been coming forever.When she was gone I felt completely lost. I resolved to forget about her visits and concentrate on doing my time.All that mattered was getting sentenced and surviving what- ever sentence they handed out to me.

The questions that mattered now were these: How many years have you done? How many do you have to go? Will there be an amnesty this year? Would you go home if there were one?

My brother sent me a bundle of unfinished letters and also one that he had managed to complete. When I read them through I suddenly realised just how much I had upset my whole family. So many times he had started writing but was too upset to finish them. Hearing from him was marvellous, but terribly emotional.

Dear Sandra

I have tried to write to you so often over the past months but always only get so far and have to give up.What should I say to you? It all seems like a dream to me. I can’t bear to think about it… my God, may we never ever have to go through such a period as this again… my God have we cried… please come back when you can.

I still can’t believe it has happened to you (I love you) please come back… I can’t bear to think about the situation you are in. When I think about it I get too upset.You really are a stupid, idiotic girl, but we want you back… one day we will see each other again.

I have changed a great deal as I am sure you have… this is all rubbish, why am I writing this? I have been trying to write so often and this is going to be sent to you no matter what, even if it is a load of old rubbish…

Sometime during my second year – I can’t recall exactly when – my brother came to see me. It had been several years since we had set eyes on each other and he had changed greatly. Gone was the long hair and smelly Afghan coat and in its place were a sensible haircut, a smart suit and a pair of leather brogues. He had turned into our father. Having a family of his own had obviously changed him greatly and I was slightly unsettled by his appearance.Yet in some ways I was glad. He was getting on with his life while my life stoodstill.

For a few seconds we said nothing; then we talked. It upset both of us that we couldn’t touch or be closer to each other. His vitality had never waned but he was more reserved, probably from seeing his sister in such a state, and his face retained a peculiar expression of sadness.

What did we talk about? Everything, I suppose, and all the things that reminded me how much I had let everyone down. Like my brother, I should have grown up by now, I should have had a