No More Tomorrows (17 page)

Later that night, six male guards burst into the women’s section, storming directly into Sonia’s cell to search for the stolen phone. I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could hear the angry commotion: the banging, the shouting, the tearing apart of the cell. They soon found it, hidden under a blanket. What I heard next froze my heart. Spine-chilling sounds tore into the night. I felt so helpless. The guards whacked and thumped Sonia fiercely. She let out bloodcurdling screams. I stood at my cell door clutching the bars and sobbing. I hated this place. She might be a thief, but no one deserved that.

When Puspa eventually got the phone, it was a different model, different make and different SIM card. But she didn’t speak up. Sonia was bashed, humiliated and disgraced. Puspa was released from Kerobokan the next day.

Never could I forget who I was living with – the bad people in this little society. We were all thrown in together, killers and petty thieves. It would have made a compelling
Big Brother
house, guaranteed to keep the audience riveted. I quickly got to know my housemates and their crimes. And often, it was a shock. You really couldn’t judge a book by its cover. Killers came in all guises.

Puspa told me about a woman a couple of cells down who could make clothes for me for a small fee. I just had to supply her with the material and draw a pattern. And by the way, she was a murderer.

I first met her to ask about a hem. She was pretty, with long dark hair, in her mid-thirties and very nice. It was impossible for me to believe she was a killer. But she’d admitted it. She’d admitted to slicing up her maid. The maid had been having an affair with her husband for three years. When she found out, she killed her. She took the unsuspecting woman to the markets, as she did each week, and bought some carving knives. On the drive home, she stopped at a secluded beach and stabbed the maid over and over until she was dead. She then went home, cleaned herself up, drove to the police station, confessed and took them to the body. She got five years.

Another woman killed her one-month-old baby. She’d been having an affair with a married man who already had children. When she fell pregnant and had the baby, the man wanted nothing to do with her or the child. So she made a noose and hanged the poor little innocent baby. She got three years.

Then there was ‘the Black Monster’, Sonia. Local newspapers had dubbed her that for her crimes. Now even the guards used it. Her crime was poisoning men’s drinks at nightclubs, taking them outside and stealing their cash and credit cards. She was apparently a computer whiz and spent a fortune online with their cards. This was her thirteenth time in prison for these crimes, although she’d loudly boasted to Mum, Merc and me in our first visit that she’d murdered an Australian man. We had all gasped in shock. She was a thief and a liar.

Sonia was one person who did fit her profile. She was a nightmare. She annoyed everyone. At night, she’d yell for hours and violently beat the cell door. She’d sing at the top of her lungs all day. She stole from people. She hit people. She ran up and pinched girls hard on the breast, screaming for money or cigarettes. Nothing stopped her. I saw her kicked in the head, punched in the neck and attacked with scissors. But like an irrepressible monster, she’d just bounce back for more.

There were many people on drugs charges. Salma, a thirty-year-old woman from Mexico, was serving seven years for smuggling fifteen kilograms of cocaine to Bali in surfboards. She and her boyfriend both brought them in, though he was serving twenty-eight years. They’d had the boards specially made for the job, with cocaine hidden under a resin surface. They were caught after a tip-off.

Many of the girls were in for minor drugs offences, such as possession of one or two Ecstasy pills, or for other small crimes such as playing cards or petty theft. One woman had stolen 2,000 rupiah (about thirty cents) to buy some rice. She’d been starving. Another was busted for playing an illegal lottery game at home, a monthly event in her village. It was the eve of her daughter’s wedding, and she had had a few friends over to play. The police were tipped off by a jealous niece not invited to the wedding, and the house was raided. All the naughty players were arrested. She got three and a half years.

I also got to know some of the male prisoners, who often came up and said hello during the visits. Within the first week, one guy, Agus, came to sit with Merc and me for a chat. His crime was murder. He’d come home to find his girlfriend in bed with another guy. He went to a cabinet, pulled out a gun, walked back to the bedroom and shot the guy in the head. (He admitted to having a bad temper!) He got nine years. His advice to me was to resist the temptation of drugs, no matter how low I got. He’d started taking heroin in jail to help numb the pain of this life. Now he was an addict and he bitterly regretted it.

Another guy was doing five years for murder. He’d broken someone’s neck during a fight.

Then there was a dentist and his assistant. They did about 2,000 illegal abortions at the back of his dental surgery, after hours. Two women actually died. The female assistant started coming into our cell to tell us horrific, disgusting stories of how the dentist aborted babies that were eight months old. The butchering dentist would go in with scissors and cut the baby out piece by piece by piece. He got two years. She was out in eight months. I refused to let her anywhere near me.

All prisoners, regardless of their crimes, were thrown together. There was no special pen for the killers. No more civilised lot for the card sharks and petty thieves. The only segregation was the isolation tower. It had four cells with tiny windows and was reserved for all death-row prisoners, including terrorists, and extra punishment. When I arrived, the Bali bombers Imam Samudra, Amrozi and his brother Mukhlas were in the tower.

I happened to see Amrozi on my second day, as I walked to a visit. A guard pointed to the tower and said, ‘Amrozi.’ My heart jumped up to my throat. There he was, right in front of me, squatting in the grass behind a steel fence. He stared at me as we walked past, the smile no longer on his evil face. I noted that his hair was a lot longer. After just spending weeks in his old Polda cell, it was especially creepy to be seeing him here so soon.

What is it with me and these monsters? Some people I’ve spoken to have been here seven years and have never seen him. This is my first full day and I have already seen him. Has some higher power turned my life into a nightmare for me to solve or find, unravel some information? What’s going on?

Diary entry, 13 November 2004

I took Merc to have a quick look at the tower on her way out from the visit that day, and we saw a guard walk one of the terrorists into isolation – Mukhlas or Samudra, we weren’t sure which one. When the guard came back out two minutes later, he looked really shaken up.

‘Fuck, I hate it in there,’ he said to a back-up guard waiting outside. Merc translated for me.

He was so disturbed by something that the other guard patted his back. Wow, those monsters could even freak out the guards! It was something for a guard to be rattled; they could usually smash someone’s face to a pulp without batting an eyelid.

Apart from the monster bombers and the butcher dentist, I tried not to judge people. I refused to think of their crimes; I couldn’t allow myself to. As much as I hated it, I had to live within this world, create a life behind these walls, adapt, until I went home – which would hopefully be soon.

10

Five’s a Crowd

Sitting outside my cell at 8 a.m., I smelt an awfully strong, pungent stench of sewage lingering in the air, so strong that I had to run to the toilet dry retching. How long will I have to stay here?

Diary entry, 20 November 2004

L
IFE DIDN
’
T EVER JUST CRUISE ALONG IN HOTEL
Kerobokan. Nothing was easy. Nothing was safe. Nothing was comfortable. Nothing was clean. Nothing could have prepared me for it.

We were living in a disgusting slum, in the most vile and unhygienic conditions imaginable. It was not fit for human beings. It was not fit for a dog. It was gross. It made me sick. I threw up often, had non-stop diarrhoea and persistent ear infections. I regularly got tine a, skin rashes and a type of Balinese conjunctivitis called red eye, so painful that my eyeballs felt like they were being scratched by razor blades. Often I felt weak and dizzy. Sickness was just a symptom of my new life.

The filth, the tropical heat and too many bodies made our cell the perfect breeding ground for germs and diseases. Rats and skinny runt cats wandered in and out freely through the bars. I often woke up with a rat sitting at the end of my bed. It wouldn’t move without lots of yelling, screaming and frantic shooing. But it really was the perfect home for rats.

Often, the toilet in the corner of the cell blocked up, spewing faeces out onto the cement floor. It was disgusting. Some of the women kept using the blocked toilet, so their shit would float onto the floor. For days it would be awash with dirty water and chunks of floating shit. It stank like a pile of dead rats. When I showered, I held my breath, but I usually still threw up. My skin crawled to see some girls just walk on the squelchy mess in their bare feet. I never went without flip-flops. When the floor wasn’t covered in this mess, it was still always overflowing with puddles of stinking piss and lots of spit.

Now I understand the real reason our room has a disturbingly strong urine stench. This morning I saw with my own eyes one of the girls squatting on the ground.

Diary entry, 19 February 2005

It was shocking to find out that it was as much the vile habits of some of the women that fouled up our cell as the primitive third-world conditions. I’m sure it wasn’t a cultural clash of hygiene standards but just a lack of self-respect and respect for others. Not in twenty years or even a million years could I get used to some of the sick habits. They never failed to slam home where I was and who I was living with.

Some women bled out onto the floor wherever they sat when they got their periods, wiping it up later. I’d offer them pads, but they weren’t interested.

A putrid dark-green cesspool festered close to our cell. It had a sickening stench, bred all sorts of diseases and abnormal animals and was brimming with filthy rubbish thrown in by prisoners too lazy to walk to the bin. I hated even passing it to hang out my washing. So it was a disgusting shock to see women washing their clothes in it and washing their hands in it after going to the toilet, just too lazy to go to the tap. It was especially sick given the local custom of using the left hand instead of toilet paper to wipe. No doubt it worked OK in the real world, where people washed their hands well afterwards, but not in here.

Many of the women also scrubbed their clothes with old toilet brushes pulled out of the bin. At least they were trying, I guess. Others refused to shower, wash or even change their clothes.

The whole women’s section stank. Day and night, a foul stench smacked you hard in the face. It was the raw septic tank, the stinky bathroom, the menstrual blood; but perhaps worst of all was the body odour. It was a big problem, especially at night when we were sleeping shoulder to shoulder in the small sauna-like cell.

I usually woke up soaking wet with sweat. We all did. I woreloads of deodorant, but it didn’t do much. I also gave cans of it to the poorer girls, though most chose to keep it to give to their families. The stink was always bad, but sometimes it got worse when a new girl would arrive to blow us all away. One girl, Sitti, came about a month after me, refusing to shower, change her clothes or wear underpants. I had never smelt anything like her.

The new cellmate sleeps at the end of my bed and her pale-blue dress was tucked tightly under her knees, and her bottom was in my full view as she slept, foetus-style. I had such a disgusting shock. There was a pale yellow-brown wet patch. Gross. No wonder she stinks so much; and unbelievably she has not yet showered or changed her clothes. We gave her clothes and washing powder, and have over and over told her to shower, change and wash her clothes. Merc’s buying her a bucket tomorrow and a couple of clothes. But we girls have already given her some and she will not shower. Come on! Her smell is unbearable, she makes me feel so sick in the stomach and I don’t want to touch anything that she’s touched. I almost vomited when she sat on the end of my mattress this morning. I’m not being nasty; I’m merely explaining my cellmate.

Diary entry, 16 December 2004

This vile life often made me shudder, but for now this was my home. I had to live here. I had no choice. I just had to make the best of it, be the best person I could be and try to live in this squalor like a dignified human being.

If you can’t do it for yourself, you have to do it for your family and friends. You can’t go home to people who love you looking like the walking dead.

Diary entry, 2 November 2004

I did whatever I could to try to make life nicer. I tried keeping everything clean, regularly hand-washing my clothes, showering daily, sweeping the cell floor daily and scrubbing the toilet daily. I put bunches of pretty flowers on the barred windowsill, my favourite photos on the wall, and my clothes and books in neat piles. I gave the poorer girls soaps, detergents, deodorants, buckets for water, clothes and even underpants. Merc always raced out to buy the stuff for me.