Escape (35 page)

By two o’clock, after very little cutting by me, we were still on the same bar. And that no more than two-thirds cut. I would not take any more time or energy here.

Some suggestions were voiced but I was listening only for sounds outside the cell. At ten past two I called an end to the cutting.

‘What about we leave it for tonight?’ Sten recommended. ‘We can start again tomorrow night.’

Pausing for a moment to give an impression of thoughtful consideration, I shook my head slowly. ‘Let’s try this. Grab the bottom of the bar. Here, let me wrap it in a towel. Bend it up, it might snap.’

As Sten climbed up and took a double-handed grip, I again looked at my watch, the only impartial advisor. I avoided looking at Miraj. If work were suspended I had no doubt that, after daylight, as soon as the cell door would open, Miraj would scamper down to the chief’s office and spill. Once free of this cell no threat or inducement would halt his instinct for self-preservation and any promise he might make now would be meaningless. While Sten would remain stoic, Calvin would walk through the day zombified and seeking anaesthesia. Jet, however, might give the game away with some gleeful and nervous sharing. All these were needless speculations; Miraj would see me chained to the floor of a pit before I could finish breakfast. Even should he die during the night there would be meddlesome enquiries. Considering the others, this was unthinkable.

Sten tested the two-foot bar with one hand on the window’s ledge and the other gripping the bar. He pulled as though separating wild beasts. The bar moved only a few centimetres and sprang back.

Undeterred, Sten made two small notches at the sides of the cut with a blade and then stood down. ‘I’m gonna have to get up on this thing.’ He meant the ledge. ‘My feet on both sides. You stand behind me if it snaps and I fall.’

I arranged mattresses on the floor below the window and stood with Calvin. We waited to catch Sten if he fell.

Sten breathed in and gripped. He steadied himself and levered with a controlled tension as if pulling for Sweden. The bar groaned and the room seemed to shake. So did Miraj. His courage was failing him.

I crouched in front of Miraj and took his ear in my fist, drawing it to my lips. I said, ‘Miraj. The only reason I don’t end your life here and now is because it would upset the others. That’s the only reason. Don’t you give me any cause to look at you again.’

Sten was through toying with the bar. ‘Right, you bastard,’ he muttered.

With sweat dripping from his brow he knotted his fingers around the bar, locked his shoulders and lifted his thighs. Things shook. Sten had fifty prison guards between his hands on a descent into hell. The bar strained upward, it curved, it bent—but it did not snap. Sten stood down, breathing heavily.

The now curved bar had partially returned, leaving a gap of fifteen centimetres. More if Sten could hold it in place.

‘That’s good,’ I said, patting Sten on his shoulder. ‘That’ll be enough.’

Sten was exhausted. My cellmates’ adrenaline would be drained. They would soon rest and reflect on what tomorrow might bring.

‘I won’t get through there with my shirt on,’ I said to Sten. ‘And that oil might be needed.’

I took my shirt off and stuffed it into my bag before oiling my chest. I turned to clear the bookshelf and saw Jet standing in his corner.

‘My teacher?’

Standing before me with a tremulous soldier’s stance, Jet was wearing his best shirt and kids’ commando shorts. A pair of stiff leather sandals (a recent family gift) and a white handkerchief folded in his card-sized breast pocket. Some photographs in one hand for luck.

‘I go with you, my teacher. Everywhere.’

In the Barents Sea, a few drops of the ocean seeped through an icebreaker’s hull. They evaporated immediately.

‘Jet, you can’t come. It’s very good of you to volunteer. You’ve got three years. Maybe four. Sten is going to look after you. Won’t you, Sten?’

‘Sure will.’

‘Here, put this in your pocket.’ I took THB5,000 I’d prepared and slid it into Jet’s top pocket. ‘I’ll write to you. Send you things.’

I’d given Sten most of my cash. The guards wouldn’t mess with him the way they might the others and he’d buy Jet out of serious trouble. He’d need to—the money I’d given Jet would be taken by lunchtime. Jet sat on his bed. I turned to Sten.

‘Try to stop them doing their worst,’ I said quietly. ‘Calvin will be okay. They won’t slap an American around in a hurry. You—well, you’re fucked. But you know that.’

I lifted my bag from its hook and pushed in a towel. ‘But you also know that they don’t hold grudges on principal if there’s money to be had. And you’ll have some of that.’

‘I know.’ Sten lifted the bookcase plank from its mounts.

I disassembled our shoe rack, refitting its wooden parts to make a block that just fitted between two of the uncut bars of the window. As Sten came to look I added a warning.

‘Shithead will be spilling his guts in the chief’s office before you can pull on your drawers.’

Sten wasn’t troubled. ‘I’ll keep him quiet till morning. And then as late as I can.’

‘Are you sure about this, Sten? Last chance Texaco?’

‘I’ll be okay.’

Sten and I lifted the plank to the window but it was too long to manoeuvre without hitting the fan. We had to move the large table to the centre of the cell and switch off the ceiling fan. The plank was almost the length of the room.

Sten slid the upended plank to the window ledge. I fitted the wooden block between the uncut bars, leaving a gap the size of a vertical letter slot: just big enough to allow the plank to slide out of the window. One-and-three-quarter metres of plank jutted into the night air, less than a quarter remaining in the cell. It held.

After a last check with a mirror of the corridor and the ground below, I climbed to the window and turned to face the room. I made no farewells. Sten stood on the bench and levered the bar while I twisted my head under the gap. With my hands now outside the window, I set my shoulders in position. I lifted my weight. The sawn stump of the bar dug into my back despite the cloth I’d draped over its jagged edges.

‘More,’ I called upon Sten.

As he strained I writhed through. The stump scraped along the flesh ridge next to my spine but did not catch and I twisted out from under the bar to air that was different. Still facing the cell, I found myself clinging to the bars, my feet perched on the ledge—a flying wyvern that had been drawn from the night by some odour.

My soft green bag appeared at the bars and behind it, Sten’s face.

‘Break
both
legs.’ He winked.

‘Thanks.’

I lifted the bag’s sash over a shoulder and looked down on the grounds of Building Six. No movement. The paths and gardens lit in small pools from some scattered bulbs. A greater light spilled from the cells’ windows. Quiet. No masking wind, only the sound of a hundred ceiling fans whispering low.

Turning back to the bars, cell #57 was alone in darkness. I saw shapes moving inside—people lost to me now. I let go of the bars, gripping the upturned plank that jutted into the gloom. Its surface was rough despite some earlier work with sandpaper. Hand over hand, I eased away from the building until my feet left the window ledge. Dangling from the plank, I worked my way to the tip, collecting splinters. I looked down.

Beneath my toes, four-and-a-half metres below, a crumbling tile awning sloped between floors. And another below that. From pebble-drop tests I knew that any touch of foot or scrape of knee on my way down would produce a cascading shower of broken tiles and concrete. The cell at ground level held a nest of unhinged trusties whose whistles would shred the night air with peals should I be detected.

Abseiling would require swinging into the wall so only a controlled drop would do. Dangling from one arm, I thumbed a loop of army-boot webbing from my bag. The fifty metres of thick nylon ribbon had earlier been unrolled and folded in half. I hooked the loop over the top of the plank and then lifted the remainder from the bag. In three drops I released the rubber bands holding the bunched rope. At the last of these it softly folded to the ground, its last dozen metres piling as green fettuccine.

I gripped a twist of rope in each hand. Although I’d earlier taken some leather gloves from the autoshop, I’d found them loose and this next move needed full control, no matter the cost. I eased my grip. The ribbon rushed from my hands and I plunged toward the ground. Tightening my grip steered me into the wall. The ribbon burned across my fingers and palms and I braked enough to kick one foot into one of the safety loops I’d tied. My descent halted just above the first awning and I swung in to a wide figure-of-eight spin, the trailing rope brushing against the lip of the fragile overhang. As spin combined with my pendular swing, I was granted an unwelcome close-up of crumbling wall plaster alternating with a panorama of the far horizon.

I had no safe option other than to wait until I stopped swinging. I passed the time by watching the loop attached to the plank overhead slowly writhe to its tip. I’d got the measure of this rope by then and lifted a strip under my shoes before easing down the remaining twenty feet. The ground was soft so I allowed myself a gentle sideways fall. I looked at my hands. The nylon cord had cleared my palms of splinters.

Stepping back from the building I took up the rope’s slack and gently fly cast the loop from the tip of the plank. Sten had been dutifully at the rudder and I watched the heavy plank slide back into #57 as the coiling rope fell into my arms.

On the ground I socked on a T-shirt and folded the rope into my bag. I had just this one length which had to see me over many walls yet. Padding along the matted weeds, I kept close to the building’s wall until the corner. Then ducking through a prepared gap in a picket fence, I threaded through the darkened factory to my office. It was five to three. Not much after six, Klong Prem would sniffle and shuffle to life.

Through the mesh screens around the office, I could see the top of the mosquito net under which a guard slept. Although he was no more than twenty-five metres away, he was a sound sleeper of regular habits.

Now, when it was not needed, a drunken wind fitfully poured from the city, rustling palm trees and cloaking remote footsteps—should there be any.

I removed the padlocks from the office cupboard and opened the doors wide. After guzzling some water I pulled on some dark tracksuit trousers before setting a small flashlight on a chair aimed at the cupboard’s interior. Removing a false shelf, I took out my street clothes, four rolls of black gaffer tape and a bunch of thick cable ties. All of that into my bag along with the collapsible umbrella that had been delivered from its factory just a week earlier.

More carefully, I stacked eight heavy picture frames upon an open towel and then secured them to each other to muffle any rattling. Together they weighed an awkward thirty kilos. I left the cupboards open.

Although there remained three major and two minor walls beyond Six, my first stop was the paper-box factory where I should construct the ladders. Carrying the towelled block of frames on one shoulder, I wound along the paths to the wide street alongside the main factories. The box-factory door was chained and locked as expected but for months the factory boys had been climbing through the twisted window mesh on Sundays to keep out of the rain. Unfortunately a week earlier some plywood had been nailed to the window frame to halt the intruders. Setting down my load, I saturated the nail points with machine oil from a small squirt bottle and waited thirty seconds before working out the nails with a bottle opener from the pocketknife. Despite the oil, two nails complained. This main street was a bad place to work. A corner each end—far enough away not to hear an approaching guard and too distant to do much about those who might see me.

Inching my sack of frames, swollen bag and myself through the torn eye of the factory in silence chewed up valuable minutes. Doing everything without making much noise was taking a lot longer than the test moves I’d timed during the noisy daylight hours. I would remember that.

The gritty factory floor was smeared with oil and dye and littered with bunched paper and plastic bottles. The two long walls held rickety scaffolding upon whose beams rested thousands of five-meter bamboo poles—each ten centimetres at the base tapering to thumb width. Many were draped with sheets of yellow and red paper, drying in preparation for folding as offertory gift boxes for Chinese funerals. The twelve tiers of poles looked set to collapse.

Clearing some floorspace with one of the poles, I laid the picture frames in two rows before selecting poles to match. Holding the torch in my teeth I found eight poles to make two ladders, taping the frames at intervals as rungs. Taking an extra pole for luck I lugged everything to the end of the factory. The back wall of the paper-box factory abutted the autoshop. The autoshop was gated and never visited at night. Better than dragging my litter along this main street.

My mouth had dehydrated from holding the torch so I paused for a few seconds to drink and look at the next obstacle. The rear wall of the factory was corrugated iron and topped with mesh. I didn’t like the slog but I’d have to peel the holding nails from the mesh and go over the top. I would not look at my watch until I was in the autoshop.

Balancing on cross beams, I peeled back the ventilation mesh and had trouble evicting the long and heavy ladders. I used the short one to climb down to the autoshop. The driveway was pooled with oil and staked with steel battens to hold car parts.

Standing on the driveway I saw that the autoshop gate in my path had been chained. The gate easily scaleable but too jangling to touch. I’d have to slide the ladders underneath the narrow gap and climb carefully over the hinges. It was then ten past four. Sliding the ladders quietly and climbing silently took another fifteen minutes. I stopped looking at my watch. That wonder drug, adrenaline, would soon be demanding payment with dizziness and unsteady movements—but not for now.

After I reassembled my rigging I looked to the next objectives. Beyond the rows of toilet stalls, clotheslines and cooking hearths was the first of the inner walls. This led to Building Seven and from there to the AIDS hospice. This route meant an additional wall but avoided the certainty of sighting a few inmates mooning at windows. The five hundred prisoners of the AIDS building were already at the porridge-fleshed, carrot-boned stage of their way to death so the strength for window-gazing would be no more than an anguished memory. From their untrodden gardens, the surrounding wall led to the final high barrier. Or so I thought.