No More Tomorrows (44 page)

If there is a betrayal, it’s impossible to do anything about it from in here. I’ve seen the pain of several women who’ve found out their husbands were cheating or had simply vanished, no doubt with another woman. One morning, such a betrayal almost ended in a suicide. A female prisoner called home, only to hear another woman answer the phone. She went crazy but could do nothing, so she lashed out at herself, overdosing on her medication. She had AIDS. She was in very bad shape, but she survived.

The most sickly, grotesque sexual scene I’ve witnessed was when I walked in on a female guard sitting on the cement floor of my cell, kissing – full tongue kissing – and fondling a new attractive female prisoner. The look on my face stopped them quickly. I was so disgusted and had to ask the girl why . . . why would she do such a thing? She wasn’t poor, she had food to eat, visitors coming to see her – including her boyfriend. Why would she possibly need to sell herself short like that? The answer was: ‘She lets me use her hand phone.’ And the guard herself is married with three daughters.

They kissed in our cell a few more times but, knowing I didn’t approve, soon moved their kissing and canoodling out the back. This guard was one of the more friendly ones, often helping me on occasions. When I didn’t have a hose to fill my pool, she took me for a walk to the kitchen to get one. Another day, I was standing at the door watching some of the Western guys play tennis. She could see the sadness and desperation on my face, so she took my hand, walked me to the tennis court and let me watch for five minutes. One of the guys gave me his racquet and I had a couple of shots. I’m not good at tennis, but it didn’t matter . . . I had fun. When the precious five minutes were up, she took me back to the block. I really hoped this guard would help me to play more tennis. She didn’t.

But despite being helpful, she always made me feel very uncomfortable – always way too touchy-feely. One day she actually pulled me down onto her knee while she sat at the guards’ table, and cupped my breasts. I leapt up quickly, but as it was early days I was pretty timid and didn’t get angry. She soon learnt I wasn’t bisexual, though it didn’t stop her trying to get close, sitting on my mattress and often asking me to sit beside her. I found it very unsettling.

Unsurprisingly, women regularly fall pregnant in here, often using the stomach-massage technique to abort. But when they choose to have the baby, women are allowed to live with it in Kerobokan for the first two years – at least that’s what the prison rulebook states. Only twice since I’ve been here have women brought their newborns back to Hotel K, both very briefly. One girl brought hers in for a single day before releasing it to her family to nurture. She did it for the baby’s sake, as this place isn’t exactly baby-friendly. But she’s had a haunted look in her eyes ever since. The other woman had her baby live here for just two weeks before she was freed. I was shocked to see her washing it under the putrid brown tap water.

One of the guards also had a baby girl she used to bring in with her each day, leaving her with us prisoners to baby sit. She was often left lying on a mattress in any old cell, usually full of girls playing cards and smoking. She’d be put on the bed, with a towel under her bum because the guard didn’t give her a nappy. The poor little thing was always being passed around. Unbelievably, most of the girls would let the baby suckle their breasts. She didn’t have a dummy, so they’d just get their breasts out to pacify her. The guard didn’t mind. I saw her pacified on almost every female’s breast. Some of the more educated people would cringe at how disgusting it was. But most didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.

Often those men and women prisoners who started sexual relationships in here would get engaged and married in the jail church or the mosque. I guess it lifted their spirits, but for me I think having a relationship in here would be more lonely and upsetting than being alone. Just knowing your husband or boyfriend was in a nearby cell but never being able to spend a night together and fall asleep on his chest would exacerbate the agonising loneliness. Male prisoners are sometimes allowed to have their girlfriends from outside come in for the night, if they pay the guards. There is no such luxury for the women. We are never allowed out for a night, or to have anyone in, no matter how much money we’ve got.

One woman, the informer prisoner Wiwin, who was serving four and a half years for possession of ten Ecstasy tablets, found herself a prisoner boyfriend after seven months. When she quickly fell pregnant, they were married in the prison mosque. The day after, she started wearing the traditional Muslim clothing and stopped kissing her husband in full view of people. I thought to myself,
Poor guy, his girl’s really changed on him.
When he was released about a month later, Wiwin started hiding away in her cell, only coming out for roll call and rice, and always wearing her Muslim clothes. People started forgetting what she looked like. Being pregnant, she got permission one day to go to the hospital outside. Her husband met her at the hospital. Then they were gone. Wiwin was the first woman in all of Kerobokan history to escape. The female guard who’d accompanied Wiwin copped a fair bit of flack and laughs from jail authorities and prisoners for about a week. Then all was forgotten. Wiwin was a smart woman after all.

Escape is something I often fantasise about, imagining a helicopter dropping a rope made into a swing with a seat. Or I see myself sailing off in a homemade boat, using my bedcover as a sail, dangling my legs over the side and fishing as the winds sweep me home to the closest Australian shores. They are silly daydreams. Escape would mean spending the rest of my life as a fugitive and not seeing my family. I would never do it. (Though, never say never.)

Men don’t just dream about it, they seem to do it quite often. One old man simply walked straight out Hotel K’s front door. It was ingenious. He’d only been here a couple of days and no one recognised him as he slipped out with all the visitors. He was well into the hills before the guards even realised he was gone.

Another guy went out to the dentist and on the way back got the guard to stop at the ATM. He sprinted straight past the machine and into freedom. The guard tried to run after him but didn’t have the speed, or maybe the heart, to catch him. But it wasn’t at all unusual to see men beaten within an inch of their lives after failed escape attempts.

One of the most frightful sights I’ve seen was a guy who didn’t make it. He was caught, beaten, brought back into prison and beaten again. He’d cut down a tall thin tree, carved footholds into it, then climbed like a circus performer to the top of the wall before leaping to freedom. (What an amazing feeling
that
would be.) But other, jealous prisoners had seen him and alerted the guards. They were ready and waiting for him. Merc and I were sitting in the visiting hall when he staggered past in his blood-splattered underpants. He had huge welts across his back where he’d already been whipped. I couldn’t recognise his face: it was too distorted.

After they took him out to the isolation tower, the guards started pulling out axes from the little gardening room beside us. I was sure they were going to hit him with them. I started hyperventilating and getting really upset. Merc tried to settle me down but was shaking, too. It turned out they were just hacking down a tree to stop other prisoners getting ideas about climbing over the walls. We saw them dragging branches and bits of the tree past us.

As the months passed, I tried to keep my spirits up. Stanley was a big help. We put him on the list for roll call and would hold him up and say ‘woof’ when the guards called his name. He was as pampered as any Paris Hilton pooch. He slept next to me most nights, ate peanut butter and honey sandwiches and walked with me to visits, usually with pretty coloured ribbons in his hair. He was shampooed, brushed and cuddled regularly, and even got his own parcels in the post. He was far better company than most humans.

One day, I caught a girl unwittingly stealing a tin of Stanley’s gourmet dog food. She was just finishing it off when I walked into the cell. It was the first time someone thieving from me had actually brightened my day.

Reluctantly, I had to give Stanley back to Merc after a few months, as there were too many Muslims in my cell who couldn’t go near him for religious reasons. Jail life hadn’t always been the best for my little puppy anyway. I once found him playing with a syringe left lying on the floor by one of the two heroin addicts in my cell.

Continuing to create a bit of fun and soak up any moment of life that is uplifting is vital for my survival, to fight the pain and depression. It might be as subtle as a beautiful sentiment in a letter or a laugh in a visit, or as crude as watching a fight. One afternoon, I had ringside seats to a session of rock ’n’ roll wrestling between Renae and a Chinese lesbian who we nicknamed ‘Andrew Chan’ – because she looked like him.

The wrestling was in knee-high water, as the whole block was completely flooded from a heavy tropical downpour. I sat on my bed eating a hamburger to watch the fight through my window. It was show time. A crowd of girls quickly gathered around to watch. Renae and Andrew were really going for it, both looking like blokes, with their tough demean our, body language, stance and shouted words. They both had their fists up, slightly hunched like boxers, circling each other. Then they’d go in for the kill. Renae was winning. She’d dunked Andrew’s head under the water four times.

But then it turned ugly. On the fifth dunk, Renae’s right arm hooked Andrew’s head and took her down under the water again. This time, Renae reared up aggressively. She’d been bitten on her inner arm where she’d hooked Andrew. She was raging. She started yelling and showing the screaming crowd a huge bite mark, then angrily holding Andrew’s head under the water, gripping her around the neck. I sat watching, waiting with my heart in my throat to see what would happen next and thinking about my mum’s old mantra: ‘Don’t play-fight, you kids, it will always end up in a fight.’

Renae was still holding Andrew under the water, so a couple of girls broke it up, pulling Renae away. By then it was 4.30p.m., and the guards were locking us down for the night. Renae quickly ran over to my cell window, excitedly asking, ‘Did you see that, Schapelle?’, holding up her arm to show me the deep bite mark. ‘Yeah, I saw it, and it looked like an accident!’ It was the big topic of conversation that night in my cell. Everyone thought Andrew had accidentally bitten Renae’s arm when it came forcefully swinging into her face. The fight had at least been a bit of jailhouse entertainment, something to do, something different to look at.

These days, I spend a bit of time with the real Andrew Chan and Matthew Norman, as they’re both pretty funny guys, though we never talk about their crimes or their life and death sentences. Matthew’s sentence was increased to death on appeal but has just been returned to life imprisonment after a further appeal. Andrew is incredibly positive by anyone’s standards, let alone a prisoner on death row. One morning, he had almost the whole visitors’ area laughing with his antics. I was opening some of my parcels on the floor of the mail room and pulled out a pair of size 14 pastel-blue lace underpants. He grabbed them from me and pulled them on over his little short shorts, which showed off his skinny white legs perfectly. Then, with the lace underpants ballooning out from the puckering of his shorts, he pranced around the visitors’ area like a catwalk model.

My brother Michael also often gives me a good laugh whenever he comes over to visit me. He came in one day, after a gap of about three months since his last visit, and gave me a big hug and a smile. I was shocked when I saw that his perfectly straightwhite teeth were all brown and grossly decaying. My smile quickly faded and my heart broke as I looked at him. With all the stress I’d been under, my teeth were looking a bit worse for wear – but his stress was far more evident. I felt sorry for him, as he’d always taken good care of his teeth. I didn’t want to say anything or look too closely and hurt him. But he quickly realised my discomfortand started laughing at me. ‘What?’ I asked. He kept laughing and trying to talk normally, and I tried to also, though it was hard. Then he looked away for a second, before quickly turning back with perfectly normal pearly-white teeth. He laughed hysterically and held the fake plastic teeth in his hand. I burst out laughing, too. I thought they were so gross and funny that I washed thembefore putting them in and walking around to speak to a few people I knew. Everyone had a good laugh.

Michael was also the one to finally convince me to chop off my long hair. I told him I’d been contemplating it for a few months, maybe even shaving it off. It was so hot and washing it was such a hassle, with the dirty water constantly giving me ear infections. I was going as long as humanly – or womanly – possible between washes, sometimes three or four weeks. But I kept putting off the cut, thinking I’d be going home soon, and meanwhile living like a stinky matted piggy.