Escape (8 page)

Greater Klong Prem was too big to take in at once. Even the reception building—a prison in itself—seemed massive compared to the cramped layers of the Cure. Our last kilometre of pathways leading to KP had kept us busy chasing runaway dinner plates and retying loose clothes to the shoulders of our helpers so we were all disorientated. Finally we dumped our bundles at the gate to Building Six like Bedouins at a dry oasis.

The trusty in charge of new foreigners greeted us. His name was Tanveer, a tall Pakistani with huge feet clinging to the edges of hard leather sandals.

‘You guys will be in Six until you go to other buildings. About a month or so. You’ll be assigned a factory for work and must do training in the mornings. This will teach you how to be prisoners.’ Tanveer half-heartedly poked through our possessions. He seemed disappointed but continued.

‘Radios are not permitted. Newspapers are also not. I must take away any long pants and contraband items. These will be put in the storeroom until you are released.’ A mystified pause followed as we looked among ourselves for any who might have a release date within our lifetime. No one spoke.

‘Cash is forbidden. You leave your money on account. Food can be ordered from the outside shop three times a week. You can get cash from the bank here in Building Six. But don’t be caught. Books you can keep.’

While everyone repacked his possessions I nodded sideways to Tanveer.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got a radio. What does it take to get it back?’

‘See me in a couple of days.’ Tanveer’s eyes darted about before he announced to everyone, ‘Don’t tell anybody.’

At that time in the afternoon almost the entire accommodation block was empty. We were led upstairs past garage-sized cells, many with plastic flooring, a screen around the toilet and mosquito mesh at the windows. Tanveer stopped in front of a cell. At the door rolls of bedding and clothes were stacked to head height. A key boy unlocked the door. It was empty, small and had no screens.

‘Stack your stuff on top of everyone else’s. You won’t have enough room inside.’

This was no exaggeration. After fifteen of us had moved inside, the cell was full. With twenty-one, it was packed.

‘Sorry, guys.’ Tanveer was already walking away. ‘You’ll have to stay in there until you find someone to take you in. Leave some room for the other newcomers. There’s only ten. They come in at two.’

Eddie and I staked some space by tearing blankets from our packs and haggling with the room boss. But he had nothing to boss. Within an hour every inch of space was taken with bodies. The rising heat was made worse by the lack of a fan. Only a hook and some bare wires hung from the ceiling.

By nightfall our best efforts had found us with no more than a forty-five-centimetre strip, one-and-a-half-metres long. Eddie made some weak coffee from a Thermos of tepid water.

‘This is the worst,’ Eddie said, snapping at mosquitoes. ‘And I’ve been in some bad places. You know what it is, don’t you? They throw us in this pit so tomorrow we’re willing to pay anything for a better room.’

‘I’m willing now.’ I gently kicked aside a fat Burmese who again lolled his sleeping head on my feet.

We spent the first half of the evening minutely searching the elastic tops of our shorts, the busiest feeding centre for the hundreds of bedbugs that swarmed from the rotten floor planking. Until midnight I kept my head from the flaking paint of the wall. Over the decades a wide black band had formed at head height. A thousand greasy heads had saturated the brickwork making an oily green valley for microscopic blood parasites. The acid from sweat-soaked, unwashed clothes bit at the nose. This excruciating induction night was unnecessary. We would have been house-hunting on arrival without this encouragement.

Eddie spoke of his first time in a Thai prison six years earlier. ‘It was all over a poxy hotel television set. I had to check out, you know, through the window. So I took the set. Eighteen months I got for that.’

Eddie had been eventually transferred to Bangkok to save the Swiss consuls travelling south to Phuket. Within days of his arrival at Klong Prem, pro-democracy riots led to several hundred students being arrested and taken to the prison.

‘They didn’t want ordinary criminals mixing with the students,’ Eddie explained. ‘Not because we might corrupt them. The jailers worried the students might turn us political. They put them in Building Eight. There were thousands of them.’ A sweeping hand gesture from Eddie caught his neighbour across the face. Eddie immediately apologised.

‘Oh, sorry.’

‘Asshole!’

‘Hey, watch it.’ Eddie had his limits.

‘Yeah, you watch it,’ replied the Thai, although he was too busy squashing bugs to make an issue of an accident.

‘So I got out of jail after a few months and went back to Zurich,’ Eddie continued. ‘They tried to put me in the army. Everyone has to go in Switzerland. But I got out of that. Failed the psychologic test. I convinced them I was crazy—Fucking bugs!’ Eddie leapt up and fell into a wall. While he had been talking, a fresh battalion of parasites had bivouacked in his trousers.

‘Eddie,’ I managed, drooping on an elbow. ‘Tomorrow, please. Bring me the head of Tanveer the trusty.’

Eddie was, by then, too dazed to respond. At some point we fell into unconsciousness and surrendered the dregs of our blood to the insect army.

The following day was taken up with arranging food and finding temporary lodgings. The prison had been hugely expanded during WWII after Thailand had declared war on the United States and Great Britain. Then it had been mainly filled with those considered troublesome by Thailand’s Japanese ally. The extensive grounds today do not reduce overcrowding, as most of the vacant land is kept for leasing to enterprising prisoners. The struggle for a foothold among us newcomers was matched by the daily struggle for survival by Building Six’s other inmates. This was the prison’s real control. No serious rebellion can occur when people are constantly uprooted, chasing food and using their remaining strength and resources simply to find an untroubled place to sleep. ‘You can see why most of the world don’t give the rich much trouble,’ Eddie remarked on his way to the bank.

Building Six’s accommodation blocks and factories were at the edges of a wide field of patchy grass where we newcomers were called to assemble.

‘This must be where we learn how to be model prisoners,’ I advised Eddie.

‘I’ll give him ten minutes.’ Eddie meant the foreign-prisoners’ instructor.

Our trainer was a middle-aged Chinese from Laos called Charlie Lao. He spoke half a dozen Oriental languages along with French and English coated with an Australian nasal rounding applied during his years in Sydney. Our training was a pitiful version of cadet-school marching and turning. We were also instructed to learn the Thai commands for turn left, turn right, hands in the air and some other expressions of surrender. As soon as we foreigners understood what Charlie was asking of us, we began to walk away.

‘Come on you guys.’ Charlie was too reasonable a man to make a fierce master sergeant. ‘Try to march in line. It’s only a few minutes. Good eccercise!’

His enthusiasm was met with two grunts and a fart.

‘Fellas, the chief is watching me. Maybe we be in trouble. You don’t want to end up like those guys!’

Charlie pointed to four young Thai prisoners who were being trained in a more down-to-earth manner. They had been found lazy at work and were now learning to roll from one side of the field to the other, arms and legs outstretched. An acne-faced trusty in uniform was yelling and slapping at them. The approach here was much more lenient that at Bumbudt (the Cure). As for the chief he was at his desk but absorbed in his account ledgers. His office was on the far side of the field, a small open house built in the style of a temple.

We then distracted Charlie with questions to allow him to make excuses for us all. Eddie had urgent business in the umbrella factory where he was determined to get to the truth of the allegations that hard drugs could be easily obtained in Klong Prem.

Charlie excused me from future training permanently, fraternally, ‘because we both come from Australia’. Charlie had applied for a royal pardon, having already served seven years. The pardon was supported by the Australian consulate based on a reasonable policy that official support would be given where the time served matched that of average sentences imposed by Australian courts for similar amounts. This policy was under threat for some mysterious reason but Charlie’s application was close to being granted. He was serving twenty-five years for possession of a few hundred grams of heroin.

From our first meeting Charlie immediately offered sound advice and help. Although we were close to the same age (I was thirty-seven) I’m sure it wasn’t simply the Australian connection that formed the bond. Charlie was born in Vientiane and I in London. Possibly we shared within our natures the characteristic of being servants without masters. I might have long abandoned that search but Charlie had not. He soon took me on a tour of Building Six.

On one side of the grass field stood an open-sided hall where poor prisoners would eat ‘government food’, as Charlie called it. The standard was fish-head soup with verminous brown rice and a quarter of a cucumber for dessert. Before permission to tuck in was given prisoners waited for some time while a long Buddhist form of grace was chanted.

Inside the hall an old blind man had set up a cigarette and candy counter. Operating by touch he kept his change tin at close range where its weight and sound provided an accurate accounting. ‘He makes more money than you think! He doesn’t just pass his time.’ If Charlie knew a blind man’s profit margins then he would be someone to keep close.

Charlie steered wide of the chief’s hut, tacitly indicating that the sight of us together might excite the boss. Should the crafty Chinese be seen guiding the new white man, we could readily be called to the chief’s office to negotiate a donation to the building-repair fund.

Beyond, the roadway led to a gated automobile-repair shop. There officers’ cars were tuned and serviced or those of officers’ friends. Some of these cars were in such poor condition that the plates and engine numbers had to be replaced. Factories in Building Six produced army boots, more ceremonial votive paper boxes, plastic fittings for bigger plastic fittings and, of course, inlaid portraits. I was assigned to a large umbrella factory producing pop-up brollies of many colours.

Behind the factories Charlie took me to the thatched-roof ‘coffee shop’. It sold everything but cups of coffee yet kept stock adequate for a small-town general store. As Charlie was called away to speak with his Chinese friends who owned this concession, I bought a fried-egg sandwich and sat under a tree watching the queue at the bank. One window at the coffee shop had been remodelled as a teller’s cage behind which a round-faced man served a line of fifty customers. With a firm, clean script he would deduct up to THB1,000 from prisoners’ accounts in return for THB800 cash. The guards were blind to these transactions during banking hours but it would be no defence to point to the coffee shop if caught with currency.

‘David! Over here.’ Eddie was calling through the window of the umbrella factory. ‘You want to meet the guy who’ll do your work?’

I walked around the water tanks to the factory entrance to meet the Thai boys Eddie had agreed to pay THB200 each to do our work. ‘For another two hundred we can get beach recliners.’ Eddie pointed to a small group of Europeans in a corner under a ceiling fan, reading books or playing chess.

‘I don’t want to sit around here all day,’ I said but would later buy a chair to establish additional territory. ‘Want some lunch, Eddie?’ I asked, waving my floppy egg sandwich at the coffee shop.

‘No thanks,’ winked Eddie with assumed cross-eyes. ‘I’ve had mine.’

That night Eddie and I found temporary lodgings before opening negotiations with the chief for better accommodation. The chief was a short, chubby man who looked like Panama’s former master, Manuel Noriega, and smiled at least as often. In his office he began with the usual discussion of the limited funds available from the Thai prisons department. A deal was struck with the help of Rick, an Englishman who was renting a desk in the chief’s office. A dubious, tactical location I thought too close to the front line. Fortunately Rick also wanted to share a private cell.

‘It’ll come to about THB10,000,’ explained Rick. ‘Five for the boss here. And about the same to renovate a cell. We can’t get away with less than five or six of us to the cell but that’s better than the ten-to-twelve average for the regular Thais. See if you can scare up some other tenants. We’ll split the costs for the chief and share for the room fixings, okay?’

Rick had lived in Pattaya for almost five years. He had fled his well-to-do parents and siblings from Southport, western England before finishing college to find new friends among the British deep-sea divers of southern Thailand. Now, more than nine years later, he had a Thai wife and daughter and earned a fair living selling grass to expatriates in his area. He had been arrested with fifteen kilos of weed a few months earlier while driving to the capital. His guess was that a man in his employ, another Englishman, had dropped him to the local police. Relatively this was all good for Rick. A minor case, no foreign entanglements and a Thai wife who would connive to have him released. Rick had money, friends and no serious enemies so his confidence was justified. Of the over one hundred Westerners I came to know in Klong Prem, he was the only one in this position, especially the having-friends part. By contrast most Western inmates relied on a monthly grant from their embassies of around US$120. Only the British consulate provided no funds, citizens relying on a little money from Prisoners Abroad, a UK charity. Nigerians, Burmese, Vietnamese and Pakistanis all had to live by their wits and few lived well.

The three-winged accommodation block stood crumbling in the sun, tiles falling from its roof and external pipes leaking enough water to grow stray ferns and lichen around each barred window. It held almost 180 cells, each no more than rooms with a toilet hole in one corner. The chief allocated us a room which we then concreted and plastered before hiring a carpenter to build a screened shower above the toilet.