Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (22 page)

received deliveries of up to
150
kilos at a time.We were supposed to throw all the leftover juice into the sewer although we could drink as much as we wanted before getting rid of it.We were not supposed to give any of the juice or pineapples to our friends.

One week I made some kind of wine with the juice and quickly realised why pineapples were banned. By the time I had finished a mug full of pineapple wine I could hardly walk. Before I was locked in for the night the effect of it made me cry. I didn’t like being drunk in there so I never made any again. But I did manage to give gallons of the juice away to whoever came by. There were a few drunken prisoners that week.

Noontime signalled the dreadful mountains of grey, gritty rice with something threatening to be a vegetable perched on top. Often it was boiled cucumber or a tiny boiled fish, which had not been cleaned, and chillies. These delicacies were dished up three times a day. Somehow, the Thais managed to get fatter and fatter from the food, while I constantly lost weight. Every day, while massive ovens churned out stuffed breads, pineapple pastries and decorated cakes, one of us would head over to the area where the food was prepared for the rest of the prisoners, and bring back lunch or dinner.

The Thais I worked with were usually too busy or felt they were above the task of bringing the food to others, so the duty fell to me. I would take a four-gallon jam pan to collect whatever vile- smelling ‘delight’ happened to be on that day’s menu. It was always a relief to get a break from the cramped confines of the bakery, even if it was to smell dead fish or to be hounded by thousands of flies heading for the piles of carcasses waiting to be hacked into the pot.

The kitchen would hardly be recognisable, to most Westerners, as a kitchen at all. It was simply an area for chopping and boiling food.The girls there would sit on the concrete with meat cleavers, hacking toenails off chicken legs and chopping the mounds of dead pigs into pieces for boiling, surrounded by swarms of blue-

bottles and scuttling cockroaches. Hygiene was more of a greeting than a noun.

Over a relatively short period of time, I became quite friendly with Noi, a middle-aged Thai woman who controlled the jail kitchen and was in charge of all the cooking. A stolen bag of bis- cuits from the bakery would help me get enough vegetables to eat for a week. Noi had a desire for all things European, including soap, chewing gum and chocolate, many of the things I could get sent to me from home – and I would swap these for delicacies such as stuffed chillies and chicken fried rice, when I had the chance to trade something.

Noi had served over
15
years and had a hardened expression on

her face that I feared I was developing for myself. She was stockier than most Thais, with a sharp nose, and deep brown eyes. She had clout in the kitchen and was a good person to have as a friend. Gradually I sensed that the other women were somewhat suspi- cious of my relationship with her and they disapproved of me speaking to her.

One afternoon Pee Pom took me to one side and asked me if I knew about Noi.‘No,’ I replied.

Did I know why no one spent much time in her company? I didn’t, nor would I care.

‘Noi is a cannibal,’ said Pee Pom. ‘What?!’

‘She’s a cannibal.’

Pee Pom proceeded to tell me Noi’s story. She had set fire to a wooden house where a family slept, and when the fire had burned out she had gone in and taken out the hearts and livers of all five occupants. She ate them over the following days.

This was Lard Yao and nothing surprised me. I did think it was slightly ironic that a cannibal was head cook in the prisoners’kitchen. Someone in the prison administration obviously had a sense of humour.Noi was released under the general amnesty of June
1996
.

*

The prison grapevine was buzzing. One of our guards had been arrested on a murder charge and was expected to come into Lard Yao as a prisoner within a few days.The guard resembled a bent- up little crow and was as spiteful as a cobra. We were all very excited at the prospect of Crow coming in to join us. The story circulated that Crow’s husband had taken a second wife, as many Thai men do, and they had been found together by Crow in her bed at home.

She left the house and got a handgun, returned home and shot them both through the head as they rolled around in her bed together.Whether the story was accurate or not, I’m not sure, but a few days after hearing it Crow was bailed out of the police cells by the LardYao commander under the condition that she be held at the prison.Any guard coming in as a prisoner would have been a delight but the fact that it was to be Crow herself was marvellous.

We knew she would receive immediate protection and special treatment, but hoped she would be forced to share at least some of our space and have to shower out in the open with us. We delighted in the idea of Crow standing knee-deep in foul water, with the rest of the prison population, as soldiers in helicopters hovered overhead, watching everyone bathe.

Crow spent the following weeks, though, living upstairs in he air-conditioned area of the prison, where the guards slept during night duty. Food was taken to the office three times a day by one of the guards. After a few days even the other guards couldn’t avoid gossiping and the murder story was confirmed. Some weeks after being arrested Crow disappeared and little was ever heard about her, except that she had changed her name and was working somewhere outside Bangkok.

Increasingly, the guards always took gratuitous and sadistic pleasure in dishing out punishments and tortures, even taking time to prepare their preferred methods. The longer I was in

prison the greater the variety of punishments I witnessed. Prisoners who violated jail regulations, even in relatively minor cases such as quarrels, were subject to punishment. Officers would dish out public beatings with either a rattan cane or short trun- cheon. I saw women beaten, battered, handcuffed, scorched, starved and brutalised, mostly by other women who could at best be described as perverts.

A girl had been caught stealing from the nursery early one morning while the mums were washing their clothes, and when the nursery guard came on duty at
9
o’clock the thief sat on the ground waiting for the guard to deal with her. A large crowd

lurked to see what fate awaited the girl.The waiting process was simply another part of the punishment.

The guard ordered the girl to put one hand face down on the table. She lifted her truncheon way up behind her head, then brought it crashing down across the girl’s fingers, with a crack that broke them all.

‘Other hand on the table,’ the guard ordered.

Again, you could hear the sound of the break. Kneeling on the ground, the girl raised her two broken hands up to her nose and thanked the guard for rectifying her bad ways. Slowly she got up and left. ‘Seeing is believing’, according to the aphorism.

Three guards in particular had the reputation for being the hardest of them all, and to receive a punishment from any of them was something to avoid. For a while many of us sensed that those three guards felt they had lost their reputations for brutality and the women got nervous.

One weekend they strutted around looking for someone to bolster their flagging reputations. One of them was very cute, the size of a small doll, and marched around like a robotic soldier. Her head constantly scoured the area in front of her for victims. I can’t remember why she chose the particular girl, but she was made to stand waist-deep in shit, digging out the bunker under the toilet

all day.When it was time for ‘lock-in’ the girl, almost on the verge of collapse, was put in a small empty room without having been allowed a shower, and was left there for the night and most of the next day.The guard just smiled. Lard Yao had fallen deeper into a dubious moral limbo.

Most of the prisoners dreaded the
soi
, the punishment room, where as many as
30
girls would be placed for a variety of crimes,

including fighting, stealing, disrespect towards an officer and being caught having sex. Offenders would be placed there for anything up to three months.

There was no bedding, no fan or mosquito nets over the bars, no change of clothes, no books or paper to write a letter on. Everyone was fed on slops twice a day. A bucket, sitting in the corner, in full view of everyone, was used as a toilet; they were allowed to wash once every three days. ‘Officer, officer, the bucket’s full,’ was the regular lamentation from inside the
soi
.A few weeks of this punishment and the girls would come out thin and pale, covered in bites with raging skin disorders.

Often the guards would ask the girls whether they wanted time in the
soi
or a beating and, more often than not, they took the beating.

‘It gets it over and done with,’ I was told by a girl named Nai.

One morning Nai had been caught fighting and was offered seven days in the
soi
, or seven hits with the truncheon. She took the hits, leaving her covered in purple and green bruises. But she would get over them quickly.

I could barely understand this exterminatory impulse of the guards. The guards sought perfection, a world without enemies; at least none who could strike back.I tried my best to avoid punishment while the guards tried their best to avoid punishing me.The embassies, particularly the British,American, European and Australian, frowned upon physical brutality and beatings.It was impossible,though,to be in LardYao and not know who was in control.

*

Angela was a very large American woman who was arrested and then charged with attempting to smuggle a kilo of heroin out of Thailand. Her family provided her with one of the most expensive lawyers in Bangkok, but six months after her arrest she arrived back from court with a life sentence. Her family paid the lawyer thousands more dollars, but a year after her initial sentencing the appeal court upheld the original sentence.

Angela cried about how unfair she thought it was, because other people had been caught with far more heroin than she had yet they had been given sentences far shorter than hers. Again her family paid out several thousand dollars to the lawyer and she hoped for a reduction of sentence at the Supreme Court, but they too upheld the life sentence.

When she returned from court the Thais whispered stories to me about Angela. A visitor had told one of the prisoners about a story in the newspaper that day. It reported that a woman had been caught trying to smuggle a kilo of heroin out of Thailand in the body of a dead baby.Thais generally do not export drugs.They usually get a foreigner to do that for them so the Thai women in the prison suspected that the story was about Angela.

Smuggling drugs was bad enough but to smuggle them in the body of a dead baby was unthinkable, and when other prisoners asked me about her case I told them what the Thais were saying. It sounded logical and explained why the court had not reduced her sentence, although I didn’t actually believe the dead baby story and said so when I spoke about it.The story quickly spread around the prison.The following day Angela heard about it but with the added titbit that ‘Sandra told me you killed aThai baby to smuggle your drugs in.’

Understandably Angela went a bit crazy but, knowing that a six-foot-two woman weighing roughly
22
stone was after me, I was in no great hurry to put her straight. I hoped someone else might.Angela, sweating with fury, charged around the prison and

for days I hung out in the shadows. I couldn’t fight Angela, and wasn’t angry enough even if I’d wanted to; I was so exhausted from work I could barely fight sleep. When she finally cornered me I was in the bakery where only those who work there are allowed.As she entered all the Thais immediately left us alone and only the metal workbench came between us.

She was furious.
Here it comes
, I thought,
the fat lump is going to kill me. If I hit her, punches will just bounce off all that lard and she’s too tall to

punch in the face
. I was tempted to grab one of the
10
-inch knives

on a nearby counter but I really didn’t want things to get out of hand.

She ranted and raved for a bit, letting more and more anger out while I agreed with her that it was a horrible story. I told Angela she’d be justified in beating me because I had been wrong to repeat the tale. The situation was defused. Even though we had never spoken much before, we chatted for a while and soon after became quite good friends. When I finally left Lard Yao she was the only person I kept in contact with.

In late August
1994
, a British man and a Swedish woman were arrested on drug-trafficking charges in separate incidents. The Swedish woman was arrested at Bangkok Airport after she was found with
7
.
8
kg of heroin in her luggage. The woman was Karolina Johnnson. I couldn’t believe it when a reporter who visited me told me about the case. It had to be the same Karolina I had known.

One Friday evening a girl with a frizzy head staggered through the gate. Her stuttering walk gave her away. Karolina had arrived, the same Karolina who had tried to get me into smuggling gold and girls; the same Karolina I had thought about when Robert had made me his offer.
If she could smuggle successfully surely I would be OK just this once
, I had thought.

Had she ever thought about me when she heard I’d been arrested at the airport? Had she ever wondered whether her activ-

ities had influenced my decision? The following morning some girls told me that the new woman wanted to see me.‘She says she knows you,’ they said.

‘Yeah,’ I replied,‘she does.’

She had known I’d been in Lard Yao all that time but not once had considered visiting me. I went to find her.

‘So you’ve finally arrived,’ I said, standing over her.‘I wondered how long it would take you.’ She ignored my caustic remarks.

‘How do you live with so many women? I can’t survive without men.’