No More Tomorrows (13 page)

Diary entry, 26 October 2004

I knew I had to stay strong and adapt as best I could to living in a little cell – for a while at least. I had no choice, so I might as well try to make the best of it. I survived by refusing to let myself go, working hard to keep my spirits up, keeping the positive energies flowing, exercising, reading, writing and keeping my mind occupied as much as possible. I wanted to remain the healthiest I could, because I knew my life depended on it.

I am determined to keep mind, body and soul healthy. I don’t know how long I’ll be waiting for my day in court but I will not cause more anxiety, stress and pain to the people who love me and are doing everything they can to help me. I will never be able to repay or thank them enough, so I’ll start with respect. RESPECT.

Diary entry, 4 November 2004

I got down on my knees and scrubbed clean the filthy toilet. I did some exercises. I finally managed to eat, and I spent days reading positive affirmations and escaping into good books. I’d probably only ever finished a couple of books in my whole life; now I was getting through one a day. I also started teaching myself some Indonesian words from a dictionary that Lily had given to me.

Occasionally, there were light moments in the long dark hours, and I always tried to squeeze the most out of them. I began to see washing my hair as a treat, saving it up to spoil myself. It had taken a while to get used to washing in cold water with a bucket and scoop, but when I did I would feel 100 per cent after washing my hair.

The guys in the cell behind mine often helped to lift my spirits. When they heard me cry, they’d sing to me. We’d talk and sing to each other through the walls. I was even teaching one of them a bit of Japanese. If they heard me crying, they’d yell out: ‘Corby, you OK, Corby? You want a cup of tea, Corby?’

They were always looking after me, making sure I was all right. Most days when they were released into the communal area outside my cell for five minutes, they’d stand at my cell door talking to me and laughing. It was so good to have human contact, and we’d pretty much laugh for the whole five minutes. If a nasty guard was on duty, however, they were not allowed to talk to me, and I’d be told to sit out of sight in the far corner of my cell. The rare times when I was also allowed out made me feel so happy – almost like one step closer to freedom.

Many of the guys didn’t get outside help from family like I did, so I used to share the food and drinks that my family and friends brought in for me. The guys thought it was like Valentine’s Day when I returned from a visit one day with a gigantic melted Toblerone. Everyone grabbed a spoon and we ate the lot.

I saw a bit of Chris Currall because he used to get severe claustrophobia and was regularly allowed out to the communal area. He’d sit near my cell with a cup of tea and a cigarette, each time looking thinner and sicker. I felt bad, as I wasn’t allowed to give him anything. In the first few days, Merc brought him food and eye drops, but the lawyers told us to stop, as the police might try to implicate us in a drug syndicate.

Though we were never allowed outside for exercise, the police organised a little Polda PR one day to make it look like we were. After being told to put on our dark-blue Polda T-shirts and shorts, we were hauled out of our cells and made to stand in a line and strike three poses for photos: 1. hands together above our head to look like the end of a star jump; 2. hands straight out to the sides to look like the start of a star jump; and 3. down on the ground as if we were doing a push-up. As soon as the three pictures were taken, we were slammed back into our cells. The guys called them ‘the bullshit shots’. It was quite amazing.

I stole some moments of joy late one night when I was released with one of the guys to drain water from outside my cell during heavy rains. Our cells were inches away from being flooded. I grabbed my shower bucket and started scooping up water and throwing it through the cage bars where the guards usually sat.

Within seconds I was soaking wet. It was such a great feeling, as I love the rain and it had been so long since I’d felt it. All the guys in the back cell were watching me and laughing. They thought I was crazy, as I’m sure they’d never seen a girl standing in the rain before. They were going wild, like it was show time at a boys’ high school. We were all laughing hysterically, especially when a guard came around the corner at the exact moment I threw a bucket of water out. He was soaking wet. Whoops!

He looked at me, shocked for a second, and then started laughing, too.

Very early one morning, a guard came and unlocked my cell door. I warily jumped up and stood in the middle of my cell, confused, wondering what he wanted. I let out a wary ‘Hello’. Then he said, ‘Come, come look at the sky.’ He was pointing to the cage door that led to the outside world. I jumped at the chance and dashed over with a huge smile on my face.

It gave me such a calm feeling to look up at the vast blue sky. How nice of the guard to offer me this. It was beautiful.

As I walked back to my cell, tears were streaming down my face. I hadn’t seen the stars and moon for so long, but it was amazing to see the early-morning sky. Little things became so precious.

The pain of my situation never went away, though, no matter how hard I fought. Living with fear, hurt, anger and devastation, along with my physical aches and pains, became as natural as breathing.

How could this be happening? I don’t know what’s my real reality.

I have this painfully sick numbness in me, though I think I’m in a daze, I don’t really know.

Diary entry, 30 October 2004

Most of the guards weren’t nice, they were creeps who enjoyed making life harder: laughing at me, refusing me visits, mocking me and taunting me. They’d do little things to upset me: for instance, a guard once opened a bag of food Merc had brought me, knowing ants would quickly ruin it. After a few minutes, he gave me a cheesy smile, singing out, ‘Angry Corby!’

I couldn’t help exploding ‘YES!’ as I stared back at this pathetic little man.

He spent the rest of the day saying ‘Yes! Yes!’ in a voice mimicking mine. I just had to sit there and take it.

Another time, I stood at the cage door trying to catch a slight breeze when one of the guards started screaming out, ‘
Tidur, tidur!
’ (Sleep, sleep!), flinging his arms wildly to tell me to ‘move over to your corner’ like I was some kind of animal he had locked up. That sort of thing happened all the time. They were horrible, spiteful creeps who enjoyed abusing their little bit of power.

Sometimes they’d unlock my cell in the middle of the night, come in and just stand there looking at me. I always pretended to be asleep, but it terrified me, because if they tried something, the guys were locked up in the cell behind, so there was no one to help me.

The creepy guards also made me paranoid about using the toilet. Because the bottom of the cell door was quite high off the ground, I’d hold up a sarong just in case the sleazy guards bent down to watch.

I hit a low point when I was told the disturbing news that Amrozi, the Smiling Assassin, had lived in the same cell as me for five months. I felt sick knowing that I was using the exact same hand-held bucket to shower that he did and sleeping in the exact same spot. What had my life come to? One of Merc’s best friends had lost her husband to his bombs, which exploded in two busy nightclubs in Kuta. His bombs killed 202 innocent people. I scrubbed everything in the bathroom because I didn’t want to touch anything that monster had touched. And I changed my sleeping position.

It was such an eerie, horrible feeling to know the terrorist had been in the cell, and I felt like he still had a presence; I suppose he did: his DNA was on the wall. ‘Cobra’ was written on the wall in what looked like human shit – the guards told me that he’d written it. I was so haunted by his writing that it had a strange pull on my attention. I would just stare at it, and I started obsessing over what he’d really written it with. It could have been dried mud, but how did he get his hands on mud? I didn’t want to believe it was shit, but in the end I just had to find out, so got up close and smelt it. It still stank.

I took out my diary and wrote down every single thing that was written on the walls inside that cell, exactly how it was written, just in case there was a hidden code or secret message from the bombers. I also took photos of the writing.

Scrawled right next to where I put my head to sleep were the words ‘Sumudra, Freedom fighter’. I pulled up all the carpet, thinking maybe they’d hidden something, a little note, but I couldn’t find anything. If my obsession with the prison-wall graffiti seems a bit strange, I did have a lot of time on my hands!

After thirty-six days of living in that little Polda cell, I was moved to Kerobokan Prison. I knew by then that there were no ‘Get out of Jail Free’ cards coming my way, no quickly faxed evidence from Australia. But my lawyers were fighting to obtain it, and they had to win. They had to, so I could get back my normal happy life.

8

Evidence!

I
OFTEN WONDER WHAT
I
MUST HAVE DONE IN A PAST LIFE
to suddenly become so unlucky in this one. Since ‘Black Friday’, nothing – absolutely nothing – has gone my way.

None of it made any sense from the start. I spent endless hours lying on my hard cell floor, trying to get my head around it, trying to think of something I’d missed and firing impossible questions at the cell walls: who, when, where, why? Why was the stuff in my bag? Why had my bag handle been cut? Why were the zips done up differently?
Why?

My mind spun wildly with imaginative conspiracy theories, as I tried desperately to make sense of this insanity. But still nothing made sense and no answers bounced back from the dirty yellow walls. I just had to hope that, outside, my lawyers were having more luck.

I needed them to try to find evidence to back my story, to tell the truth, to counter the dynamite evidence against me, of the drugs being found in my bag. There had to be something, some piece of evidence to indisputably prove that I did not do this. Even if we didn’t find out the whole story – the who, when and where – that didn’t matter as long as we had the crucial bit: that I did
not
put them in.

But my luck was running the wrong way.

From day one, Lily and Vasu struggled to get direct answers to direct questions about possible evidence. ‘Is there a baggage X-ray scan?’ ‘Do you have a recorded weight?’ ‘Is there CCTV footage?’ They were simple questions. Yes or no? But my lawyers just smacked up against a matrix of confusion. Trying to figure out the lines of responsibility was like taking a non-stop ride on the Sea World Corkscrew.

‘Sorry, we can’t help. Please call this person – please call that person – call Qantas – call the Airport Authority – call Customs . . . Sorry, that’s carried out by “other agencies”.’

My lawyers were infuriated that they couldn’t get any answers, and it became obvious that security at Australian airports was definitely not a synchronised, smooth-running, well-oiled machine. We discovered there was not one but many ‘agencies’ involved in airport security, and clearly there was no streamlined approach to either security or the handling of a crisis.

It was a PR crisis for the airports and the airline because of the one undisputable fact that a whopping 4.2-kilogram bag of marijuana had sailed undetected through not one but two ‘high-security’ Australian airports. And it was already big news by the time these people were scrambling for their non-answers.