Dragons & Butterflies: Sentenced to Die, Choosing to Live (102 page)

When I eventually came out of solitary, it was Wichan who gave me a place to stay and a locker for my stuff. During this time I personally witnessed his transformation and I truly believed he deserved a second chance. To me, he would always remain a brother.

After solitary, I moved into the general population and my new room was cell number 95. Frankly, this cell, which had belonged to some of the guys who had been evacuated, was in a hell of a state; it was full of dust and spider’s webs. The key-boy for the section helped me remove all of the previous inmates’ personal belongings. I was told by Santi that I could stay on my own in the meantime, but as soon as the evacuees returned I would have to find two inmates to stay in there with me. I was hoping that by then we would have received the amnesty and, if it was a one-fifth reduction, I would be home by January.

It took me about four hours to clean the cell and unpack my things. The euphoria of being out of solitary was kind of overwhelming. At first I couldn’t sleep and dozed off around midnight, only to wake up at 3am, tossing and turning. Then, as I was dozing off again, I was woken by a huge cockroach crawling over my face. I nearly had a heart attack. First on my list of things to do, I decided then and there, was to seal the netting, which had gaps all around it where insects could come and go freely in and out of the cell.

I found a spot that looked like a good place to hang out, in an area that had previously been assigned to death row inmates. There was generally quite a lot of space. The section was like a reasonably large dining hall with long concrete tables and benches placed at right angles to each other. Some guys kept all their belongings in cardboard boxes under or along a table. There were packs of bottled water stacked all around the place, and at the entrance there was a hot water machine. Further along the rear was an area where the guys showered, and just to the left of that was a shack where the toilets were – surprisingly, these were all Western-type toilets with seats. After all my years in prison, this really posed a problem for me. I had become so accustomed to squatting that, when using the seat, I had to stand on it to find my balance. One time I slipped off in the middle of having a crap!

Beside this area, closer to where the tables were, was a row of tiled concrete basins where you could wash your dishes. There were also a couple of taps, which was far more civilised than what you had at Bangkwang.

On my first full day outside of solitary, I noticed that there were a couple of guys around the building who played backgammon, and I looked forward to finding someone I could play with. Jesus, it was quite strange, being in the sunlight again. One guy gave me a deckchair and I sat in it for a long time, just revelling in the unusual sensation of the sun’s rays on my skin.

Every morning I would go for a jog, and then I would work out at the gym, which consisted of a couple of benches and one or two shoulder and chest machines. Then I would take a shower, collect my dirty laundry and give it to my new wash boy – a welcome change from having to do all my own laundry every day. In fact, the skin on my hands was raw and peeling from the harsh chemicals in the washing powder. In solitary, your food was delivered to your cell. Now I had to get used to lining up for it. Some days I would really get pissed off because some of the Thais would just come and push their way to the front. I didn’t say anything, though. I wanted to avoid any sort of confrontation.

I had taken to washing my food with hot water. Every day I ordered a salad, two corns on the cob, and some vegetable stirfry (which wasn’t too bad, but also had to be rinsed), but the bulk of my meal would be fruit. I would get a punnet of papino, grapes, pineapple and sometimes a mango. Most of the food was cold by the time we got it, so some of the guys would steam it up. After we had eaten, I would relax in my deckchair and even doze off for 30 minutes or so. There was really not much to do, and keeping my mind occupied was rather difficult, but, as the days went by, I got into something of a routine, and I would catch a game of backgammon here and there.

Between 2.30 and 3pm they would announce on the loudspeaker which floor, upstairs or downstairs, would have to enter their cells first. As we passed through the passage, the guards would do the usual checking – they’d frisk us and search through our things. Once we were locked in the cell I would take a short nap and then get up and shower. Then I would put on a clean pair of boxers and T-shirt and daven the afternoon prayer that is said before sunset. Afterwards I would eat my fruit, and then it was teeth-cleaning time, which was still something of an obsession for me. Sometimes I’d watch a little TV or read a book or write a letter, and then around 9.30 I would daven
Ma’ariv
(the evening prayer).

I would lie quietly on my bed thinking about my freedom and my hopefully imminent release, and I’d wonder when the other prisoners were going to return. I kept trying to imagine what life would be like on the outside, what my friends looked like, whether they were even alive. Some of them I hadn’t heard from during my entire incarceration. What was the new South Africa like, and how would I fit into it? From what I’d heard it was crime-ridden, but what exactly did that tell me – was it safe to walk in the streets?

On 30 November 2011 I experienced quite a fast vibration in my heart. This lasted approximately a minute, but it kept recurring, so I decided to report sick. At the hospital they did an ECG, which was performed by a prisoner who worked there. Once I had the results I had to wait to see a doctor. I explained that I had been diagnosed with a heart condition, atrial fibrillation, back in 2008, and I told the doctor that if he could prescribe some blood-thinning aspirin, that was what was needed for my heart to beat regularly again. The doctor examined my ECG scan and confidently pronounced my heart rate as too slow. I asked him what his area of expertise was and he told me he was an ear specialist! I just laughed and told him I needed to see another doctor. One thing I was sure of was that my heart wasn’t beating slowly; it was beating too fast. I waited for another three hours before I was finally seen by another doctor, who said that all I had experienced was heart palpitations and that in fact the ECG scan showed my heart to be normal. But he gave me aspirin and prescribed propranolol as well, which I should take only if the palpitations recurred.

With the date for the King’s amnesty now so very close, no wonder my heart was over-excited.

For some time now I had been rather troubled by something my sister had planted in my mind: for some reason, Joan believed that I would never get out of prison alive. I never discussed this with her, as that would have been like inviting a bad omen to materialise, but now I couldn’t help wondering to myself whether I
would
actually ever make it out of Klong Prem. Freedom seemed tantalisingly close, but too much hoping always seemed to have a way of turning on me. Then I would pull myself together and decide that there was
no way
I was fucking going to die, and it didn’t matter what anyone thought. I would make it out of prison alive!

After months of counting down to the crucial news that would affect my life so profoundly, Sunday 4 December arrived – one day before the official announcement of the amnesty. Well, at least I had made it to the amnesty, I thought. So far, so good. The atmosphere in the building was exhilarating, and the news we wanted to hear had already begun filtering through. The documents had apparently arrived at the prison, but the official announcement was only to be made the next day, on the King’s birthday. However, everybody seemed to know that drug cases were going to be given a one-sixth reduction. If this was true, it meant that I would have approximately five months of my sentence left to serve. Although I had been hoping for a one-fifth reduction, I was over the moon with one sixth.

From being sentenced to life imprisonment, and then having to endure years of not knowing, finally I could start counting the months and weeks to my freedom. Let the final countdown begin! This countdown was
real
.

It’s hard to find the words to describe what I was feeling. It was like a dream. My head felt light and my heart raced (in a good way). I don’t think I had ever before experienced such an emotion. Happiness normally comes in waves, but this feeling had a permanence about it that lifted me so high I could almost fly. I wanted to scream and shout so that all the world would hear me.

I was going home!

When the news filtered through, I managed to call Joan to share it with my family. There were shouts and tears of joy at the other end of the line. I’d never heard my sister so excited. I imagined my mother’s joy, too, when she was told that she would see her only son in just a few months. Our nightmare was finally coming to an end. Suddenly that light at the end of the tunnel was brighter than it had ever been.

My time on the phone was very restricted, but I did manage to phone some of my friends and share the news with them. Joan would put it up on my Facebook page, though, and soon all my friends around the world would know that it wouldn’t be long now before I was a free man. That night, alone in my cell, I recited the Master of the Universe prayer, the one I had been reciting ten times a day. It slowly dawned on me that it had nothing to do with being physically released from prison; it was all about being spiritually free. Of course it was. During my prayers that night, I was far more attentive and aware somehow, and I felt the closest I had ever felt to G-d. I thought about my mother who, for the past 17 and a half years, had gone down on her hands and knees every single night and prayed to G-d that the day would come when she would see her only son again. I always believed that I would be released in G-d’s time, and, over all the years I’d been locked up, I had kept telling Joan that
Hashem
had the perfect time for each and every one of us. And now here was mine: this was
my
time. I was going to make it, I knew I was. I couldn’t stop thanking Him.

My excitement was tangible. I could feel it and taste it. I tried to force myself to read, but it was so difficult to concentrate that eventually I gave up and lay staring at the ceiling, thinking about life on the outside. One of the first things I wanted to do was sit at a pavement coffee shop and just watch people walking by. I was going to experience everything as if I was experiencing it for the first time.

Amnesty or not, it was business as usual in Klong Prem. After all, only a handful of us would be going home; the rest, although with reduced sentences, still had to face the harsh reality of doing a long stretch of time. As a distraction, besides having my head in the clouds, I would spend between two to four hours a day playing backgammon.

The next weekend, something happened that dampened our spirits. On the Sunday, one of the Thai inmates in solitary confinement committed suicide. There were six Thais in the same cell; at around 1am one of them went to the toilet and found this guy strung up with the nylon drawstring from his shorts. They shouted for the guards and there was a huge commotion. The guards came in, looked through the door, and told the guys that under no circumstances should they remove the body. They would come and take care of it in the morning.