Escape (33 page)

At my desk I was lacquering a decorative tag attached to a key chain. The key was to an empty locker but the flat, wooden tag concealed the key Charlie had given me to the apartment in which he’d hidden my passport. Whatever happened, I did not want to have to explain that key if I was caught before the wall.

Nor could I explain away most of my other preparations should they be seen around the office or in our cell. Some things, such as the wooden block assembly (to hold the plank that would jut from our window), I’d made in sliding parts and would later conceal in #57 as a footstool. The old carpenter was much put out by my insistence on working by myself. I had been taking up to an hour after my morning runs modelling furniture and constructing panels. A new wall cabinet was now in place with pigeonholes for each of the cell’s residents.

The underside of that cabinet was false. Inside fifty metres of two-and-a-half-centimetre wide, flat nylon ribbon was held by pins making an arm’s-length skein. Building Six’s army-boot factory kept coils of the green canvas-like webbing to stitch across the heavy boots. Kept in a locked steel cabinet that took THB500 to open. I’d told Jet I planned to make a deckchair, crossweaving the ribbon into fabric, ‘Just as you’ll find on the best cruise ships, Jet.’ I’d shown him a sketch with which he seemed impressed. I was keeping secrets from everyone.

Almost every piece of good mischief that fails does so because of talk. Talk amongst the corps, talk from the best friend to his next-best friend, talk that’s called planning and drill; talk that’s called reassurance. We’re born to talk. We grin at our first words. Chattering and pointing. A single sighting of that rope in the wrong place would mean the end. Not just the end of the day and start again. The end. I wouldn’t talk in my sleep. I trusted Sten with my life but no talking meant just that.

Even now, years later, my temples throb a vestigial warning as I talk with this pen. There’s more, but I’m not talking until the night. I’m sure I haven’t even told you. Who knows what could happen before then?

A few metres behind my desk rose four metres of the inner wall for me an unintentional and enormous artwork, a mural rendered by nature’s casual hand. Sunlight had turned a twenty-year-old paint job to orange branflakes through which slanting rains had nourished green drools of mould, producing a gallery of long swords petrified in stone. At my side cooled an untouched bowl of ant soup, the steam from this dark broth commingling with a nearly invisible cloud of shell dust from the factory.

Chang, our first and best cook in the Cure, had once fried some ants for us. Swiss Eddie had been the only one brave enough to crunch into the bitter exoskeletons. Chang was sixty-three then and only now in Bangkwang had his sentence been reduced to ninety-nine years. Assuming he gets time off for good behaviour Chang would only have to cling on to life until his 140th birthday. Could happen. There’re those Russian peasants gumming blini on their sesquicentenaries. Happened in the olden days, too. Bible tells me so. Old Chang could make it home on a 797 to Taipei; just about tottering across the tarmac to meet his great-great grandchildren. Only to have his brittle bones and paper skin blown to dust by a taxiing Lear jet.

These days Eddie used his time industriously managing his intoxicants, I’d heard. However, the cost prevented him from eating at Chang’s table. Unquestionably a price too high, for Chang was still the best.

I’d had a report of English Martyn, too. Quite mad, they’d said: Martyn sitting blindfolded at his table wearing boxing gloves. Smashing half-cooked peas (chick and garden) with his insensible fists, wailing, ‘At last, a free lunch!’

I’m sure this madness-in-chains hypothesis is oversold. A week ago I’d passed the crazy Czech, Karel Stendak, as he was being escorted to his new accommodation in Building Two. The Czech government had allowed him to be a citizen again after establishing his Moravian birth. He’d paused at the gate and hefted his bedroll on one shoulder as he turned to me.

‘David, I can fool some of myself some of the time but I can’t fool all of myself all of the time.’

Perhaps I’d been enlisting the wrong people.

Dean Reed had returned to Bangkok and was helping a German businessman retrieve some assets tangled up in the Thai courts. Dean was having trouble keeping up appearances. He’d sold those bits of glitter that remained from the US$48,000 he’d finagled out of Myca. Probably now regretted stashing my getaway clothes at the luggage depot rather than selling those, too.

Did I tell you that Sharon had visited just after Christmas? She’d spun down into the Klong Prem walled garden. Between shows, for her new band was doing well. There were only a few tables of foreigners at that time of year so we were undisturbed. Sharon sat and sang ‘Whatever Became of Me’ and looked tired.

‘You made me love you,’ she’d said. ‘You can’t do that and just—just let it go.’

I gave reassurances about my affections but as for my luck? The days had passed when I would present smooth excuses to vindicate my nose dive. Those implausible explanations I’d offer with beguiling worldliness as though lifting the lid of a burled humidor of Cuban cigars. Each had exploded before Sharon’s simple virtue. Even then she had an unassailable faith in my abilities. Every attempt to restrict hope and to issue warnings was met with bright, innocent protests and kisses. To smother Sharon’s buoyancy seemed as cruel as bagging a kitten.

So I promised to be her keeper of the flame. She was wearing shorts.

There’s some folklore—mostly credited by women—that men in prison are frequently driven to boy-chasing and madness by sexual deprivation. This is not so, for the boarding-school structure of the prison disentangles this little society to childishness. However, there is a deprivation, assuredly chemical, in banishment from the company and complex spells of women. Quite often remembered as a collection of flesh-captured but briefly held moments: cool nights—glass sharp—of a stiletto’s spark on pavement and quick eye contacts igniting a chance courtship. Or bright, blonde sunflower girls whose folded eyelids soften their smiles; olive-skinned beauties—fully rounded, almond-eyed—swirled in waved tresses, whispering with intoxicating breath and beckoning with a rising sweep of shoulder. Perhaps a grey-eyed, seamless and private fleche radiating pale fire from a hotel salon, a woman whose fingers caress a promise over her key’s label as might a cardsharp turn an ace. There were tom-boy-tough tree-house gamines cracking wise while puffing breakfast-cereal warmth from flannel clothes then a mocking smirk curtailed by a shy, twirling foot. And somewhere, shock-talking, heavy lashed, low-note women with taproom pasts fleetingly illuminated by doorlight who can be caught sniffing their fingers; a plum-cheeked vixen held alone in memory by deep-chocolate curls and her diamond-white eyes. In here, all these images endlessly reflected from windowed cities and wet streets—cloistered abstractions and all for nought.

For above all rose my very own Sharon whose loss was felt the moment she left my sight. In the real world, ‘Do that swoon thing for me,’ I would ask of her while strolling in circles past glittering shops, hoping for a re-enactment of a spontaneous instant from our early days. Stepping back a few paces, Sharon would silently perform ‘Rapture’: crossing her arms, hands cupping her elbows, very slowly throwing her head to the sky, her left hand then sliding sensually along her arm to shoulder and squeezing while liquid eyes rise higher still to close upon a five-sense paradise as she sways against the earth’s spin. Heart filled I would always step forward and make Sharon disappear beneath the cape of my embrace.

One quiet morning at the end of the week I was standing in the umbrella factory at the window that faced the coffee-shop tree. Sten was sitting beneath, upon its concrete surround, examining his toes. He was alone.

I spent a few minutes talking with the top parasol man, detailing the size of the pop-up umbrella I wanted made. I then spent a few minutes more waiting for a runner to return with a can of black paint from the autoshop. When I left the factory I saw that Sten had not moved.

An hour later in our office Jet stretched silently at his desk. His fingers were black with charcoal. From time to time he would pause at his artwork and watch me paint. I’d finished one cupboard and had moved on to blocks of wood. I wore thick rubber gloves.

Jet stood and adjusted his shoulders. Purposefully he wiped his blackened hands on his shirt to enjoy the contrast. Jet was man enough not to mind a little dirt on his hands.

‘Pretty colour,’ he caustically observed. ‘Those blocks go nicely with the cupboard.’

The paintbrush fell from my awkward grip. Jet theatrically picked it up from the floor.

‘Jet,’ I protested. ‘They’re the only gloves I could get. If you were any kind of thief, you’d steal me some doctor’s gloves from the hospital.’

Sten arrived as I began work painting the laser-pointer pen I’d bought from beggar Fiorenzo (he’d tearfully embraced his consular rep last month).

‘Someone died I don’t know about?’ Sten rubbed his forearms as he looked around.

‘I’m in the mood for matt black this morning,’ I said. ‘I’ll get started on those picture frames of yours in a minute. Sit down. Take a load off.’

After Sten moved a chair I asked, ‘Had a busy morning?’

‘Busy enough. I’ve been working out with Big John, the Nigerian.’

I nodded. ‘Seen Calvin?’

‘Yep. He’s been over behind the toilets. Nose to the grindstone.’

‘What is it about toilets and drugs?’ I wondered aloud. ‘They must be the least private places in KP.’

Jet left the office to wash his hands and I set the newly blackened laser pen on a stand to dry. I turned to Sten.

‘From tomorrow, be a bit careful with the room shower screen. I’ll be taking the hacksaw blades from their stash. Hiding them behind the wall of the shower.’

‘Whoa there, Kemosabe.’ Sten kept it low and leaned back in his chair. ‘What’s the bustle?’

‘Nothing. I mean, soon—but no hurry,’ I assured him. ‘It’s just that getting those blades out will be a job in itself. Won’t have that much time on the night, whenever that is.’

‘Fine.’ Sten said no more than that.

Sten had not lived in Sweden for more than seven years. In his travels he preferred the company of those who were strangers to his country. He was an outlander in Klong Prem, perhaps the man with the thinnest ties to country, tribe and commonwealth. An outlander yes but still earthling enough to keep both feet on the ground.

That night as my cellmates covered waves of desolation with a foam of sleep I carefully padded the steps of furniture built for silence to take my position at the high window. An observation deck. For weeks I’d been watching the nocturnal activities of the guards. Or inactivities, really, for most would be in their beds: one in a factory garden, another on the floor of the chief’s office and, infuriatingly, the new guard camped below our window at one end of the dining hall.

The new sentry, Ravvid, would fuss with his sheets and mosquito net and carefully arrange his water jug. Fool around opening and closing his bag of dried fruit like a squeamish bulimic at a horror movie. Go to bed; turn once, twice, thrice—get up, sip water, adjust the net, scratch ass, get back in bed, pick nose, get up, put three dates on a plate, go to bed. I passed my time inventing variations of a flying-fox wire from which I could scream down the eighteen metres to his bed while wearing mountain boots fitted with fifteen-centimetre, sharpened crampons. It seemed he worked seven days and nights straight before taking a two-day break.

Resting my chin on my folded arms I looked beyond the wall to the red aircraft-warning beacons atop Bangkok’s tallest buildings. So deep into the night had the haze settled that even the traffic fell silent. Ravvid, the guard, was finally asleep. The stillness recalled nights at a hotel window seventeen years earlier. Sleepless, I would imagine the higher ground where friend Myca had gone to raise our fortunes. The Triangle and Myca’s perilous return journey south. From the slowly dissolving city it then seemed our lives could turn on such small things: an angry checkpoint; a broken axel; some enthusiastic nobody. And now, so little had changed.

Suddenly, silently, Ravvid raised an arm to the net above his head. He flicked a finger at the net and set it in motion as a spider might test a web. No other parts of his body had moved.

I no longer cared. Let Ravvid and all his kind sleep or lie in wait. I would do whatever was necessary.

As a teenager I had kept upon my wall a most detailed map of the Soviet Union. Its faded colours still pronounced the fine, veinous network of connecting roads from shtetl to burg. The map remained on my bedroom wall until a wiser friend looked at the map one day. He lazily advised me that almost all of the positions of towns on Soviet maps were intentionally misplaced. When he saw that I was upset, he added:

‘Of course, the KGB has special editions of these very maps. Only with theirs you need ultraviolet light to read them. Shine some UV on a secret map and the real road network comes out.’

The next day I bought an ultraviolet tubelight from a stamp-collectors’ hobbyshop. No special tracery appeared on my wall map, only spots of bleach in the paper. I concluded that my friend’s KGB embellishment was probably a lie but I took down the map anyway, for it was true that some cities were missing and others joined by fictitious roads.

In #57 I soon ended the long, night-time vigils. I’d seen all I could. And in daylight hours, too, I had learned as much as I would in KP. There seemed nothing more of value to discover about my arrest or the courts and should I continue to wonder at those around me, that unprofitable information would come at great cost. The time had arrived to yield control to those cognitive motorways formed in us all under a primeval light.