No More Tomorrows (9 page)

Then I noticed some men who weren’t in uniform come in a side door, cameras in hand, and start snapping away.

‘Who are these people? Close the door! Close the door!’ I wailed at an officer, opening my mouth for the first time. One of the officers did actually close the door.

Ally had grown impatient waiting for us and now walked backin through the airport’s sliding glass doors and up to the little customs office to find out why we were taking so long. Instantly, she saw why and gasped, ‘Oh, my God . . .’

At least an hour or so passed before anyone said anything to me, although time had become meaningless. A man in a suit walked up to me and pointed to the plastic bag, saying, ‘This is yours?’

‘No!’

‘What is it?’ he asked me.

I didn’t want to be tricked into anything so I said, ‘I don’t know what it is.’

Again he asked, ‘Is it yours?’

Pointing to the bag of marijuana, I told him: ‘That’s not mine. The
boogie board
’s mine, the boogie-board
bag
is mine, but
that
is not mine.’ He walked off.

In court, this man claimed that I said the bag of marijuana was mine. It was my word against his. But why would anyone in my situation claim it as their own, whether it was or not?

He came back a while later to do a narcotics test on the marijuana. He put some liquid in a small plastic bag to mix with a tiny sample from the big plastic bag in the centre of the room. If it turned purple, it was a narcotic. It did, proving that it was marijuana.

He didn’t feel any need to prove that it actually belonged to me. No fingerprinting was done, because the bag had already been touched by so many hands. James had even been forced to pick it up to put it on the scales. ‘James, don’t touch the bag, don’t touch it,’ I told him. But they made him. It weighed 4.2 kilograms. Officially, it was listed as 4.1, after 100 grams was taken out for testing, although I’m sure more than a point left the room that afternoon. Later, when Merc arrived and demanded finger-printing of the bag, the police just laughed. ‘Too many people touch.’

‘Well, stop touching it now. Just stop touching it!’ Merc yelled.

The marijuana was mine because it was in my bag. Case closed. Looking back, I never stood a chance.

But I didn’t yet understand how bad things were. I’d seen all the ‘Death penalty to drug smugglers’ signs around the airport, but I wasn’t a drug smuggler and these weren’t my drugs, so I wasn’t too worried about long-term consequences. It was too ridiculous. I hadn’t even been interrogated, so how serious could it be?
Please . . . just let me go and start my holiday
, I thought. I knew things weren’t good, but I sure didn’t think this spelt the end of my freedom for twenty years.

Back when we’d first arrived, Merc was relaxing poolside with some friends and their kids at a villa she’d rented for her birthday. She was happily looking forward to seeing us. But as time ticked by, she started to get pissed off with me. She’d sent Wayan to pick the four of us up from our hotel and he was told, ‘No Corby here.’ She then rang the hotel and was told the same.

Merc guiltily recalls saying to her friends: ‘Bloody Schapelle, she’s given me the name of the wrong hotel! God, I can’t believe this, I’ll just have to wait for her to call me.’

Then she got a call. It was Katrina. ‘Merc, you’ve got to come quickly. They’re saying that Schapelle’s been found with drugs – marijuana.’

Merc thought she was joking. ‘Yeah, right! Where are you? Which hotel?’

Katrina broke down sobbing, and the shock and fright in her voice told Merc that this was for real. Katrina was in a police car being driven to a customs office outside the airport and had the sense to borrow the policeman’s mobile phone. Merc asked to speak to the policeman and was left in no doubt: this wasn’t a joke.

Merc, who rarely swears, apparently got off the phone and said, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck . . . ! What am I going to do?’ Wayan had gone with the kids to the beach for a swim and hadn’t taken his phone. Merc thought it must just be a mistake or that somebody had left half a joint or a tiny speck or something in my bag. She knew I loathed dope and didn’t smoke it, but also realised that everyone knew someone who did.

She changed out of her bikini into jeans and a shirt, and jumped on her motorbike. First she went to Wayan’s family home, hoping to find someone to take with her. But only a sick old uncle was there. So Merc zoomed off scared and alone.

I was slumped in a chair, leaning my elbow on a desk so I could prop up my heavy head in my hand, and James, Ally and Katrina were huddled together on the couch. Although I have no memory of it, we’d been driven from the airport to the main customs office just outside. I recall stumbling up five small steps in the dark. I think the shock had really hit me.

This room had become the new party zone and was alive with frenetic activity when Merc walked in. She looked at us and asked, ‘Are you guys OK?’

No one spoke. We just gave her shocked, useless looks.

She walked out of the room. She hadn’t yet seen the marijuana on the floor, as she’d been too worried and focused on us. In these moments, she still thought it was probably a tiny speck and that she could fix this.

Just outside the door were a couple of guys sitting relaxed at a table, and Merc asked them what the hell was going on. She noticed a bowl on the table, filled with finely chopped marijuana. The men didn’t say a word. They just smiled at her and pointed back into the room, towards the floor.

Poor Merc turned around and screamed. As I looked up I saw her legs collapse. Her hand flew up to her face as she fell stumbling through the doorway again and over to the couch. It was the last thing she’d ever imagined seeing.

The huge bag was open, with bits of marijuana on the floor and sticking out everywhere, where it had been pulled apart earlier by grasping hands. No one needed to tell her what it was. She just thought,
Shit, what is going on?

It wasn’t blind faith, but not for a second did she think the drugs were mine. Not once has she asked me. She knows me well enough to know I wouldn’t be so bloody stupid.

There were now five of us sitting silently, dazed and shocked in that horrible room. But things were about to get worse. The many windows surrounding us were starting to fill with local photographers and reporters. News had travelled fast: ‘white girl with marijuana’. They were poking their cameras right through the open glass louvres and into the room, clicking frantically. More and more appeared until the windows were completely filled with people and cameras. Their flashes were going off like crazed lightning. I’d never seen anything like it. I felt like a caged animal on display at the zoo. I didn’t have a chance of keeping my story out of the headlines.

I made futile attempts to hide, trying to find places around the room where the cameras couldn’t get a clear view of me. But every corner I crouched in, they seemed to find an angle to snap me. I kept my hands over my face, or my hair, blankets, anything, to hide from them. The others were desperately trying to help me too, standing in front of me and shutting the curtains.

But the photographers just became more frantic to get their pictures and started aggressively tearing aside the curtains and reaching their cameras well into the room. Suddenly, they were touching me, too. I became hysterical as hands came snaking in, grabbing my shoulder, touching my face. I leapt up screaming, ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone!’, desperately fighting off their clawing hands.

Not one of the officials in the room did anything to help. In fact, a policewoman was taking photos with her mobile phone and had been all day. Merc angrily asked her what she was up to. Paperwork, she said. But she was clearly taking shots of me and the marijuana, and we saw her send them. No doubt she was being paid, as the next day her shots were in the local newspaper and ended up in the Australian papers. We knew they were hers because no one else had that angle.

I was sobbing and gasping for breath when even more humiliation was dumped on me. With the cameras still clicking away and the hands still clawing, about ten men walked in and started circling me, saying, ‘Strip. Take your clothes off now and strip.’

I shot a panicked look at Merc and we both just lost it. ‘What?
What?
’

‘Take your clothes off . . . strip . . . strip search.’

I just thought,
Strip – in front of my brother? In front of all these cameras, and these men? No way.

Merc was crying and asking them, ‘Please, please, can’t she have a woman with her? You can’t do this. Please!’

God only knows how, but miraculously she got them to leave. They sent in a woman ten minutes later.

She took me to a disgusting, dirty, covered-in-shit toilet and told me to strip. So, in that stinky place, I stripped naked in front of her.

How humans could actually breathe in that sickening stench, let alone strip off completely naked, was beyond me. I had never been so humiliated. I felt so small, so vulnerable. Everything was totally out of my control. I could do nothing to help myself. Nothing! I put my clothes back on and, feeling ashamed and dirty, walked back into the room to more flashbulbs. I was exhausted. What the hell
was
going on?

By now, I’d been frightened, upset, shocked and horrified for nearly eight hours, but it wasn’t until the next moment that I became truly scared for my life. A big important-looking man walked in holding a couple of papers, which he shoved at me, saying, ‘Sign.’ A bunch of policemen and plain-clothed men also gathered around, saying, ‘Sign, sign.’

I looked down at the papers in my hands and my whole body began to shake. Everything was in Indonesian, and I didn’t have a clue what it said. Merc came over to sit beside me and began trying to translate, as she speaks Indonesian. But this was all tricky legal jargon.

It was right around this time the reality hit me that those signs at the airport declaring ‘Death penalty to drug smugglers’ could actually apply to me, to my life. I knew I was in big, big trouble. I needed a lawyer.

Merc worked out pretty quickly that it was a confession. A couple of the men were trying to translate it for me in their broken English, but Merc told me they weren’t being truthful. I had to get a lawyer.

We both started saying, ‘We should have a lawyer – we would like a lawyer.’ But they kept responding: ‘No, no, tomorrow. Just sign. It will be harder for you if you don’t sign.’ They pushed hard. I didn’t have a clue what my rights were but had seen enough movies to know that you don’t sign anything without your lawyer present. That just kept going through my head:
Don’t sign anything, don’t sign anything, don’t sign anything . . .

They finally gave up when they realised I wasn’t dumb enough to just sign it. I would love to know what those papers actually said, but I haven’t seen them since, and they were never shown to my lawyers.

The fireworks were nearly finished but not quite. It was around 11 p.m., and they were planning to take the four of us to the police station for the night, though Merc convinced them to release Allyand Katrina.

All of our suitcases were still sitting in the back of a police car and, despite the fact that they were ticketed in my name, Ally’s and Katrina’s were never searched and mine still hadn’t even been opened; I don’t know if it ever was. The suitcases weren’t kept as evidence, as Ally and Katrina took theirs with them that night. If they’d been kept, everything in my name could have been weighed, which would have instantly proved that I didn’t do it. It was a devastating blow when we later learned that Qantas only kept total baggage weights. But we didn’t know things like that at this point.