No More Tomorrows (10 page)

They brought my case inside so I could grab a few things to keep me going. I took my toothbrush, toothpaste, change of underwear and my make-up. I gave Merc my $1,000 spending money, still hoping that in a day or so I’d be spending it myself, and I handed my mobile phone and address book to the police.

We all walked outside together, and a dozen or so photographers went berserk. It was dark, but their flashes brightly lit our path. It was just a taste of what was to come, and it was truly frightening. Officers were standing on either side of me, holding my arms and dragging me through the media throng. They’d put my largeblue scarf over my head, causing the photographers to shove their cameras underneath it and blind me with their flashes. I was pushed down into the back seat of the police car, as a photographer leapt in next to me, taking more shots, before leaping back out. James was put in on the other side of the car.

I heard Merc wailing and screaming out, ‘Leave them alone’ as the car door slammed shut. It hurt to hear her pain. I shut my eyes for a second and tears streamed down my face. What a shit day.

I turned to look out the rear window and saw poor Merc sitting helplessly on her bike sobbing, just watching us pull away. I’d forgotten to wish her a happy birthday, though there was nothing happy about it.

The photographers were running alongside the car, still yelling and screaming and snapping wildly. As we sped up, they fell behind, eventually growing smaller and disappearing in the distance. Relentless, some of them were soon alongside us again, on motorbikes. My new life had just begun.

5

Waiting For Monday

I
T FELT LIKE SOMEONE WAS PLAYING A MADLY DEPRAVED
trick on me. Maybe I was being punked?
How
could this be happening? My head was spinning. I just couldn’t believe this was real.

The first night James and I spent at the police station, I optimistically thought that in forty-eight hours I’d be free. The Australian airport offices would open on Monday morning to provide proof of my innocence, surely: CCTV footage, baggage X-rays and/or recorded weight. Simple! Open and shut. I’d be off the hook. ‘Sorry, Schapelle, it’s all been a big mistake. Go and enjoy your holiday!’ I’d be off to surf and soak up the rays on a sun-kissed Bali beach like I’d planned. Yep, I could handle two days. No problem.

That’s what I kept telling myself as I lay scared and crying on a couch upstairs at the police headquarters, known locally as Polda, in Denpasar. James and I each had an old green couch. He didn’t sleep at all, as he wanted to protect me and make sure I was OK. I slept fitfully. Apart from the stress, it was freezing cold. An air conditioner blasted cold air all night and, with no blankets, I started to feel fluey and got up a few times to search for the ‘off’ button. I also badly needed to use the toilet but was too scared to wake one of the two sleeping policemen sprawled out in cane chairs next to us.

In the morning, I felt dazed and numb. This was unbelievable. I still couldn’t comprehend what was happening. Instead of getting up for an early surf at the beach, I was at the police station meeting my new lawyer and a guy from the Australian Consulate.

Merc arrived way before everyone else, of course – my beautiful protective big sister. She was looking drawn and upset and hadn’t slept a wink but raced straight over to check on us. I was quiet, still in shock and disbelief, as was James. Merc sprang into action, trying to convince the police to at least let James go: he was only sixteen years old and they knew the boogie-board bag wasn’t his.

Merc always seems the strong one. But the night before, she had ridden home on her bike, scared and crying helplessly the whole way, thinking,
Oh, my God . . . what is going on? What am I going to do?
Katrina and Ally were following her in a taxi. When they got home, Merc pulled herself together to look after the girls, then hit the phone to find me a lawyer. She first rang a good friend of hers who worked at the Australian Consulate. She gave her the vice-consul’s mobile number.

He arrived at about 8 a.m. on Saturday, shook my hand and introduced himself as Brian. He didn’t say much except that I’d soon be put in a little cell downstairs, where there was already an Australian guy being held on drugs charges.

‘How long has he been there?’

‘Oh, a month and a half.’

‘Whoa, what does he look like . . . scary?’ I asked, visualising an emaciated, hollow-eyed man with a filthy, unshaven face.

Then I met the lawyer, Lily Lubis. At about midnight the night before, Brian had given Merc a list of consulate-approved lawyers. ‘Sorry, please call back on Monday’ was the standard answering-machine response until Merc finally got through to a woman. She couldn’t take the case, or didn’t want to touch it, but said her sister Lily could and would phone straight back. She did. It hit us much later that Lily wasn’t on the approved list.

After first meeting Lily that Saturday morning, Merc and I had doubts, thinking she was a little too
nice
, too quiet, to be of real help.

But then we watched her take a call and almost yell down the phone, not hysterically but in a firm, ‘Do what I say’ tone. We signed her up.

Feeling a bit happier now that I at least had a lawyer, I asked her, ‘What happens if you can’t prove I didn’t do this?’

Blankly she stated, ‘It’s the death penalty, Schapelle.’

I just looked at her and bawled; I just cried and cried unstoppably. It was now an indisputable fact: those signs at the airport really did apply to me. It hit hard.

Calm, calm, calm,
I chanted silently to myself.
The evidence will be there.
After all, aren’t Australian airports the best, the safest, the most secure in the world? Of course they are! And of course they’d have X-ray scans, recorded baggage weight and CCTV footage.

For the next couple of hours, Merc, James and I were left expectantly hanging around. There were no questions, no interrogation, nothing.
This is ridiculous
, I thought.
It’s nothing like the movies. Isn’t someone supposed to take me into an interrogation room and sit me down in front of a little tape recorder to ask me lots of questions?
Movies were my only reference to this situation I’d crashed into.

I
wanted
to be questioned. I had nothing to hide, and I wanted to tell these people that I didn’t do this and it was all a terrible mistake. I wanted them to see how damn ridiculous it was. But I had no control over my life any more, no free will. I couldn’t make things happen when I wanted them to. I wouldn’t be in charge of my day again for . . . well, I don’t know how long.

I wasn’t interrogated for three more days.

Later that day, they let James go, conceding the boogie-board bag was not his. I was taken down to my cell. I won’t ever forget first stepping into it. Initially I froze at the door, just sobbing and shaking. Everything was so unreal. Everything was so wrong.
Why was this happening?
The guard gently nudged me through, locking the scary-looking door behind me. With tears streaming down my face, I turned back to look at him through the thick steel bars of the door. I had a strange impulse to reach out and touch it but thought it might make me throw up.

I’d never before felt such fright and gut-wrenching loneliness. It cut through my soul. It was agonising. I collapsed to the floor and cried my eyes out. I cried and cried and cried, like a baby. My chest was heaving with sobs. I wanted my mum. I was venting twenty-four hours of primal fear and anguish.

Slowly it started to pass.
Calm, calm, calm,
the voice in my head started to again say.
It will be OK on Monday . . . Just two days and it will be OK.
I had to believe it.

I slowly turned to gaze around my little cell and take it all in. It was gross. I was surrounded by four faded, yellow cement walls, stained with thick layers of dirt, grime and graffiti. They were covered in drawings of naked girls and scrawled writing in many different languages, most notably Arabic. Later, I was to learn that some of it was done in pen and some, revoltingly, inhuman shit.

A paper-thin, old green and red carpet covered the cement floor. It was filthy with a musty stench and God-knows-what gross diseases living in it. For sure, no carpet shampoo or vacuum cleaner had ever touched it. In the far corner was my very own covered-in-shit squat toilet with complementary bucket and ladle, and a basin. That was it; there was nothing else.

I don’t know how many stars I’d give it but definitely not five! I wasn’t going to be slipping on a fresh towelling bathrobe and lathering myself in free bottles of sweet-smelling bath oils in this place. I’d sure taken the wrong hotel pick-up bus for that. There was no luxury here, no mattress, no blanket, no table or chair, nothing to sit on, nothing to sleep on, nothing to eat off. My pale-blue sarong became my furniture; I sat on it and slept on it. It didn’t create physical comfort, but it provided a psychological barrier between me and the infested carpet, me and my new life. I needed that.

That afternoon, I deeply felt the pain of my lost freedom. Merc and our brother Michael came to see me. Michael had arrived in Bali with his girlfriend on the Friday afternoon, too, flying in from Perth, where they’d spent a few days visiting her family. This was my first chance to see him.

But the bastard guards wouldn’t let them in or me out, though they easily could have if they’d felt like it. I stood at my cage door looking out. Merc and Michael stood outside looking in. They were both crying. From either viewpoint, looking at someone you love in that situation is brutally painful. ‘We’ll come back tomorrow, Schapelle. You’ll be OK – we’ll come back tomorrow.’

I stood there holding the bars of my cell door, desperately fighting back tears. I refused to hurt them more than they were already hurting. I loved them too much to let them know that I was so upset and traumatised.

‘Yeah, I’m OK, I’m OK . . . It’s all right,’ I told them.

It’s so hard not to cry. I’m trying so hard to keep a strong spirit in front of everyone when they visit. So they can leave and know that I’m handling this OK.

I feel so awful. Although this happened, I know all my friends and family know I didn’t do it. Still, it’s all me: everyone’s been so excited and saving so hard for this holiday, and now everyone’s sitting around crying, worried sick, not drinking, not eating, not surfing, not partying – just worrying.

Diary entry, 12 October 2004

When Merc and Michael left, I decided to try to brush my teeth, because I hadn’t cleaned them since Friday morning at Mum’s house and now it was Saturday afternoon. I knew I was fragile but thought I could handle it. I was fooling myself. Putting the toothbrush in my mouth just forced me to lean over the disgusting toilet and vomit.

In the cell behind mine were about eighteen guys, including the Aussie who Brian had mentioned, Chris Currall, who was arrested with 60,000 ephedrine tablets and 1.5 kilograms of ephedrine powder. I’d seen these guys when I was led down to my cell and could easily hear them through the cell wall. A Balinese guy called out, ‘You OK?’ after he heard me vomiting. He told the guards I needed a drink, and after I gave them some money that I still had in my pocket they brought me a clear plastic bag filled with Fanta.

Later in the afternoon, the guards let Chris out of his cell to talk to me for two minutes. He stood at my cage door – a very strange feeling.

That first night in the cells at Polda, I threw up for three and a half hours straight: 11 p.m. to 2.30 a.m. I know because I marked it in my diary:

I vomited pretty bad last night, I was actually in pain. The head policeman came to see me for a bit – he told me to let him know if I need to go to hospital. I don’t need a hospital; I need to get out of here.

Diary entry, 10 October 2004

I couldn’t sleep that night, like most of the nights that followed. Sleep suddenly became a luxury. Lying down on a soft mattress, with a fluffy pillow and fresh, clean sheets, had been a given only two nights before; now it was a fantasy that I longed for. And still do.

It was hell. Almost everything seemed to conspire against me sleeping. The ants and mosquitoes drove me crazy, and the guards sitting just outside my door didn’t stop talking all night. Despite trying, I’m now sure you can never adapt to sleeping on a thinly carpeted concrete floor. I did eventually sleep on the concrete, but only when the pain of sleep deprivation became worse than the pain of bruises and swelling and sharp pins-and-needles caused by the hard floor. It’s definitely not by chance that sleep deprivation is used as a method of torture.

I have to move my body every five minutes or so. I’ve not yet become accustomed to sleeping on the HARD floor; my body is in more pain now than the first week. The first week my bones – back bone, hip bones, shoulder, ankle bones – were bruised. Now they’ve become swollen, especially my tail bone – it’s the most painful.

Diary entry, 6 November 2004

Merc often tried to give me a mattress, but the police and guards point-blank refused to allow it. I have no idea why, as some of the guys were allowed mattresses.