No More Tomorrows (36 page)

Church today, what a joke. I can’t relax there, so many cameras pointing at me, don’t think they got a shot: I kept ducking. And the people kept asking other prisoners questions about me. Today guests in the church were a bunch from Jakarta. When they left, the person in charge of the prison church – a prisoner himself – told me that the people today only came to take from me, to get money and to advertise their own church in Jakarta, that he’s sorry and next time a bunch like that come, he’ll let me know beforehand to warn me.

At the end of today’s second service, the priest came to me and said some female reporter had been in contact with him, and that the only reason he comes to services in the jail is because I’m here. I told him, ‘You’re a priest, and I do not want you to talk to any reporters about me. You are a priest and everything must be confidential – do you understand?’ But I think not. I can’t believe these people. It does say in the Bible to be wary of false prophets. I’m starting to realise there are many. Very sad.

Diary entry, 5 June 2005

I was still clinging to God but quickly growing even more disillusioned with His followers. I had an Australian priest tell me it was OK for me to kill myself. A husband-and-wife pastor team from Australia came in urging me to take Valium. The Christians who visited the prison often felt they had a God-given right to see me, even though I was turning down around a hundred visits a week, just too tired, stressed and down for polite chit-chat with strangers. I occasionally did come out to meet people, if I was feeling brighter.

One woman was insistent, sending letters through the guards, pleading for me to see her. I was feeling OK, so eventually went to meet her.

She was from a church in New Zealand and had come in to get my mum’s home phone number so she could write a book about me. I politely refused. She started rifling through a big white plastic bag. ‘Schapelle, I have all these things for you,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry, I still can’t give the phone number to you.’

This woman kept pushing. I kept saying no. She finally handed me the bag and left. I looked inside it once I was back in my cell. It was so insulting. The bag was full of empty shampoo and conditioner bottles, towels covered in stains, half-eaten packets of biscuits and half-empty bottles of drink. Who did she think I was? I flew into a rage, smashing the bag of junk against the concrete ledge again and again and again. Christians!

I just wanted to be left in peace. But it seemed everyone wanted something from me and didn’t give a damn how they got it. People would come in and just lie straight to my face about who they were. A woman sidled up to Merc and me one day, posing as a tourist. She looked, sounded and acted like one. I was in a pretty good mood, so had a bit of a chat, opening up more than usual. It was a mistake. This conniving freelance journo went straight to a women’s magazine. It was safer to distrust people, always be suspicious. I couldn’t afford to relax. I had to rely on my instincts. After months of honing, they were razor-sharp, but it was exhausting to live on high alert.

I picked up on one woman very quickly after a guard stopped me on the way back from collecting my mail. He’d obviously been slung a bit of cash, because he knew I didn’t accept visits with strangers but asked me to meet two Australian women. I was feeling a bit blue, but they were right there and I didn’t want to be rude. I said hi, instantly recognising the larger woman and asking, ‘Do I know you from somewhere? You look familiar.’ She quickly answered, ‘Well, I’m from the Gold Coast!’ She said her brother was a politician and he’d asked her to visit me to find out how he could help. My bullshit radar went off. It was absurd. Why would a politician send his sister? I couldn’t get away fast enough. I made an excuse and fled. But it left me with a nagging sense that I knew her. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

I soon found out she was a minor TV and radio personality. She milked our brief chat for her own publicity. She went on a popular TV chat show talking about how she’d met Schapelle Corby. My brother saw the interview. She even had the insensitivity to make a big deal about my pimples. A friend also heard her talking about me on the radio. It was insulting. Why couldn’t she have simply been honest with me and said, ‘Hi, I’m from
The Panel
, I’ve just come to see how you are’? Especially as I’d asked her. But she hid the truth. Her brother was a politician, but I’m damn sure he wasn’t behind her visit. Did she think I wouldn’t find out about her exploits, or did she just not care how I felt?

People clearly believed they had a right to lie to me and bullshit me. It hurt. I felt used. It was like I was no longer a person with a heart and feelings. I was Schapelle Corby: a story, a photograph, a way to make money or gain self-publicity. I was a prisoner, an inferior human being to be taken full advantage of, as I couldn’t defend myself in here.

Journalists would even pay the guards to let them come in during a visit, so they could sit and spy on me. My radar was alert to it and when it went off I’d often get so upset that I’d prematurely end a visit and flee back to my cell. The journalists also used their time in Hotel K to quiz other prisoners about me, greasing the palms of anyone who’d talk. It was a total invasion of my privacy. It was worst around the time of my verdict but has never stopped.

Sitting on the edge of an empty fish pond in Kerobokan Jail’s main visiting area, she chatted to other inmates . . . Dressed in three-quarter-length Billabong trousers, a crisp white top with her ponytail held in place by a beige peaked cap, she smiled and seemed relaxed, the Marlboro Light cigarettes she smoked the only visible sign of stress. She seemed almost happy the day was nearly upon her, an air of confidence in her walk as she moved around the yard . . . After a visit lasting close to an hour, Corby hugged her father and then her mother, with no sign of the emotion that has been part of her recent court appearances.

The Age
, 27 May 2005

It was the endless hounding by people taking sneaky shots of me that affected me the worst. I was on alert, sharply flinching whenever I saw any type of flash. If people openly and politely asked to take a photo with me, I usually agreed – until I was badly burned after being snapped smiling with a guy on drugs charges, who’d asked me politely. It had all caused me to develop an acute phobia of photographers and cameras. As with all phobias, it gave me an irrational terror of them.

A couple of weeks after my retrial was shut down, I was feeling depressed and went to church to try to lift my spirits. It was futile, I just had to put up with more staring. So I walked out but didn’t make it back to the block before hell hit.

‘Corby, Corby, Corby!!’

I turned and saw a pack of at least thirty photographers and reporters charging towards me. I froze. I felt chilling terror like I’d just seen dark fins circling me in the water. I couldn’t breathe. My entire body tensed up tight. Then my flight instincts kicked in. I ran for my life, sprinting along the jail pathway. They were chasing me, snapping at my heels. I flew into a little office, slamming the door shut, locking it quickly and flinging myself under an old wooden desk.

It was like a horror movie. I was curled up and cowering in fright as they started thumping on the door. From under the desk, I could just see the bottom of it vibrating each time they hurled themselves at it. I closed my eyes and started praying:
Please, God, make them go away.
But they weren’t giving up. I was terrified. I was shaking like a leaf. They might well have been psychos with axes instead of journos with cameras. I glimpsed their faces pressing into the glass, peering in through the windows, and their hands holding cameras at all angles, desperately trying to fluke a shot of me.

I started to get cramp in my legs. An hour had passed and they were still trying. I felt hopeful I might escape unscathed when I heard a female guard’s voice that I recognised. She’d always told me she’d help me. The time to do it was now. But she didn’t. Her familiar voice faded and then vanished. Another half an hour passed and they were all still there, staking me out, trying to smoke me out.

My mind was spinning. I had to escape. I knew they’d eventually get a key or smash it open, and I certainly didn’t want them to get shots of me hiding under a desk. There was a second door behind me, which no one was banging on. I calculated I could leap up, fling it open and sprint through the courtyard to the boss’s office before they’d catch me.

It was at least a plan, so I gulped a few breaths and went for it. But it failed dismally. As I flew across the courtyard, a male prisoner saw me coming and slammed the metal gate shut. He was on duty to make sure no prisoner went past that point. I leapt onto the gate, clinging to the bars and screaming to the prison boss, ‘Help me, Pak Bromo, help me!’ But it was too late. I was trapped. The photographers came crushing in around me, clicking their cameras like crazy. The guards were suddenly there, too. I went ballistic. ‘Fuck off, don’t touch me! Fucking don’t touch me!’ I was hysterically thrashing my arms about, lashing out at their cameras, shoving them out of my face. It was all so unreal. I felt dizzy, but I couldn’t stop. I was yelling, unleashing all my pent-up fear and anger. My whole body was shaking.

The guards were trying to pull me off the gate. I knew the cameras were catching it all, but in those moments, I didn’t care. I just wanted all these bastards to leave me alone. I had been slammed away for twenty years – why couldn’t everyone just leave me alone? I was hyperventilating, sobbing, still fighting and screaming as the guards finally peeled me off the gate and dragged me through the scrum into a room. It wasn’t over. The windows were instantly swarming with lenses, as the insatiable media kept trying to get more. It was their lucky day. I was howling loudly, crouching behind a partition in another attempt to hide. I was upset, angry and pissed off. I was in their care, but the guards did nothing to protect me from this. Suddenly two men were standing just two feet away and staring at me. Choking on my sobs, I screamed out, ‘What are you looking at? Who are you?’

It was a sick, twisted irony, but the two men were from the Indonesian Human Rights department and had brought the pack of photographers with them. When I got back to my cell, I collapsed onto my mattress in exhaustion. My body was bruised and sore. These people had treated me like a feral animal for so long that they’d turned me into one. The girls in my cell told me that while I’d been at church, the media pack had come in and rifled through all my belongings, taking photographs and asking questions about ‘living with Corby’. I hated my life.

It didn’t take much to trigger my dark fury these days. I had anger in my heart. I exploded sometimes. I hurt so much because there was nothing more I could do to make people believe me, and I was stuck in here for twenty years. I would often cry with frustration at not being able to get out, not being able to make people believeI was innocent.

Everything irritated me far more than before. I had lost all tolerance. I was angry, aggressive, constantly screaming at people or bursting into tears and collapsing in a broken heap. I’d never sweated the small stuff before, but now I did. Like each afternoon the girls would sing out ‘Thanks, Mrs!’ when the guards locked us into our stinking monkey cages; they’d done it since day one. But now it enraged me. ‘Don’t say thank you! Don’t
thank
her!’ I’d yell at them.

Sometimes I’d completely explode simply because a person looked at me. I’d turn around, screaming, ‘Stooop bloody staring at me!’ I didn’t understand myself and later felt so ashamed and sorry for the poor person who had been looking at me.

Sometimes it was simply running out of drinking water. They didn’t keep any spare containers in the women’s block, so Eddie always told us to step outside the block, hold up the empty container and he’d bring a new one across. One time we ran out and I went to give Eddie the signal, but I wasn’t allowed to take a single step outside the door. The guard grabbed my arm, yanking me away from it. I screamed into her face, ‘We have no bloody water to drink!!’ I went crazy. It was a little thing. In that moment, it represented all the basic liberties I’d lost.

It was the minor things like that that really tortured me. All my dark anger at the world would ignite from something so small. The little things brought on the big emotions, and then I’d start to punch the walls and chuck things at them. But I couldn’t even do that freely. Everyone would come running, staring at me, and soon I’d have sixty girls in a circle around me. I’d scream, ‘Piss off, don’t look at me!’ And then even more girls would come to see what I was yelling about. There was just no escape. It was all the little things coming together that made me angry at the whole situation. And there was nothing I could do. I felt so angry and frustrated.