Hotel Kerobokan

by Kathryn Bonella

  Tension filled every cell as the women listened to the sobbing and hysteria escalating in Room 9. No-one could do a thing. They were all trapped. They just had to wait as their fellow inmate’s life teetered on the brink. A bleak hour passed before a sound outside the steel door finally signalled the guards had arrived. Two men strode in and walked directly across to Nita’s cell and unlocked it. Nita burst out and ran like the wind down the path between the cells, ignoring the dozens of distraught faces pressing against the bars. As a tamping prisoner, Nita had dealt with several overdoses and was the most qualified to save Dani.

  Once inside Room 9, Nita knelt down on the concrete floor beside her, snatching a nearby T-shirt to wipe the vomit off her face. She was unconscious, but still retching and gurgling a stream of frothy vomit from the corners of her mouth. Nita knew it was vital to get coconut milk into the woman’s stomach. But it would be difficult as Dani’s mouth was almost shut. Nita stuck two fingers between Dani’s teeth and turned them sideways to prise her mouth open. But it was hopeless – her jaw was too stiff and Nita merely got a nasty bite as Dani involuntarily bit down hard. Her body was now shaking and convulsing uncontrollably. Several cellmates were crouching around, trying to pin the thrashing limbs to the floor. Nita tried to pour the coconut milk into the slit of her mouth. It was useless. The milk just spilled across her face. Dani needed a doctor fast.

  The guards stood around idly watching as a male tamping ran in with a stretcher. Nita and a few of the inmates lifted Dani onto it. With the help of the male prisoners who’d turned up, Nita carried the stretcher out of the cell, down the path past the locked cages of women now clinging to the bars, yelling, ‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’. Nita kept walking. The guards trailed alongside saying nothing. They hurried across the jail lawns to deliver the stretcher to an ambulance waiting out the front of the jail. It was the last time they’d see Dani. She was pronounced dead on arrival at Bali’s Sanglah Hospital.

  An affair of the heart had caused Dani to drink poison. She’d felt betrayed and abandoned by a cheating husband. His visits had ceased and he refused even to bring in their two young sons after confessing to being with another woman who he planned to marry. It had only been a few months since Dani was arrested for stealing forty-two million rupiah ($5600) from a bank where she worked. But her case was still being heard in court and she had no idea when she’d be free.

  She had started to spiral into a deep depression. Her life outside had vaporised. She’d lost her husband, and was facing years behind bars, and day and night there was nothing to do but dwell on her problems. Hurt, fury and frustration tore her apart. When Dani’s husband turned up the day after her death to collect her personal items, he asked Nita what she’d drunk and what time it happened. Nita told him and asked if he planned to re-marry. He admitted he did.

  The loss of Dani created a sombre mood in Block W. They were all shocked, but also knew it could easily have been any one of them – collapsing into a lonely, dark hole was something they all understood. In jail, hurt and loss were amplified. Snatched from life, friends, family and other support networks, the women were very fragile, their emotions more volatile than ever. Living among so many could be terrifyingly lonely. Suicide attempts were common.

  Drug runner Schapelle Corby is on suicide watch in hospital. The 30-year-old lost 12 kilograms in four weeks and suffered hallucinations and paranoia following the failure of her final appeal, doctors and her mother revealed yesterday. Corby had to be taken from Bali’s Kerobokan Jail on Friday to the international wing of Sanglah Hospital in Denpasar suffering depression.

  – Sun Herald, 22 June 2008

  ‘The patient Corby has suffered a total mental disturbance,’ Dr Leli Setyawati said. ‘Corby must be treated for one or two weeks. If there is no development, then the treatment can be extended further. But if it reaches a critical level, we must consider moving her to a mental institution.’

  – Sunday Herald Sun, 22 June 2008

  Australian inmate Schapelle had been fighting off depression since she’d entered Hotel K five years earlier. She’d desperately tried to stay positive, forcing herself to wear makeup, dress neatly and continually replace negative thoughts with positive ones. But it was exhausting and lonely. The long, dark stretch of twenty years in jail was terrifying. She’d been caught at Ngurah Rai Airport with over four kilograms of marijuana in her boogie board bag. She swore she did not put it in there. She swore she was innocent. But she lost her final appeal. In quick succession, she also lost her beloved father and stepfather to cancer. She didn’t get to say goodbye. It broke her heart. The loss of hope threatened her fragile grip on sanity.

  After spending two weeks at Sanglah Hospital, she was returned to Hotel K on heavy medication. But with only fifty cents a year spent on each prisoner’s healthcare, she got little medical help once back inside. Her family did what they could from the outside, but they could not ensure she took the medication. Other inmates, such as Australian Renae Lawrence, dispensed her pills, but they all had problems of their own and were unreliable. Schapelle quickly slipped back into the same poorly state she’d been in before she went to Sanglah. She grew disorientated and deeply paranoid, hearing voices and seeing things. Regularly at night she’d imagine someone spying on her through a hole in the ceiling, and would try to climb up to look. Subtitles on TV or writing on a magazine cover, she believed, were secret and cryptic messages sent especially for her to decode. She would spend hours manically trying to work them out. She swung from this hyper manic state to being almost catatonic, barely able to speak or look after herself.

  On her worst days, the jail boss let her sister, Mercedes, go into Block W to wash and feed her sibling. She’d spoon food into Schapelle’s mouth like she was a baby, even physically moving her jaw until Schapelle remembered she was meant to be eating and started to chew.

  On the brink again, Schapelle soon returned to Sanglah Hospital for her second stint within a year. She spent those days like a child, clutching a doll and resting her head on her mum’s lap. She was improving. But after twelve days, authorities unexpectedly arrived late at night to take her back. Schapelle and her mother, Ros, were asleep. Schapelle woke up and became hysterical. She flew into the toilet and locked it. Crying and desperate not to go back to her pitiful concrete cell, she slashed her wrists and arms with a compact mirror. Ros was distraught. There was nothing she could do to help her baby girl. When TV cameras started pushing into the room to film, Ros lashed out screaming, aware she was being filmed, but unable to control her frustration and anger over her total lack of power to care for her daughter. A short time later, Schapelle walked out to a car, wearing her pyjamas and clutching a pillow.

  Without proper monitoring, Schapelle slipped back to her psychotic state almost as soon as she returned to jail. It was a vicious cycle. She couldn’t get better in Hotel K. She was back to hearing voices and was found trying to climb the water tower. She spent her days dosed up on psychiatrist prescribed anti-psychotic pills, often walking around in a daze, confused about where she was, thinking she could walk out and go home. But freedom was still a long way off. Her first five years inside Hotel K had already changed her indescribably. The vibrant girl she once was had vanished and she was losing her will to live. She twice sliced up her arms in suicide attempts or cries for help. She didn’t care who had to clean up the blood. Her desperate family live in fear she will die in Hotel K. They will keep fighting to get her clemency, and to get her out of Hotel K before they lose her altogether.

  Life in Hotel K was very hard. It was not unusual for women inmates to become mentally unstable from the sheer hell of living in Block W; the ceaseless noise, the fighting, the lack of sleep and filthy conditions.

  Ketut Suparmini, 20, really felt the pain of living behind Kerobokan Prison bars. Not because she was badly treated by the guards but because she was fed up with her cellmates. ‘I’m fed up. There are good people and bad people in there. When I had a mea
l, my rice was snatched by another woman convict,’ she revealed yesterday.

  Ketut who has spent the past two months in prison for stealing gold jewellery now has to lie in a Sanglah hospital bed. Last week she took 16 paracetamol tablets at once before she became weak and vomited. The married woman was rushed to hospital and arrived at Sanglah at 6.27 pm.

  She was caught stealing a gold necklace belonging to her husband’s friend and was reported to the police. She was then arrested, and after an interrogation, Suparmini was put in the cell. She said that her husband had never visited since. Plus, she had to face other prisoners’ behaviour which often gave her headaches and stressed her. She was placed in a cell with 7 other women inside. Four of them were inside in connection with drugs cases, two were involved in a murder case and another was [inside] for killing a baby. ‘I couldn’t cope and it made me stressed,’ said the young, rather beautiful woman.

  – Denpost, 11 November 2003

  When female inmates checked into Hotel K, they walked down the concrete paths, through the gardens and past the palm trees, the temple and the tower, to a large steel door twenty-five metres across from the tennis court. Behind it was their new world: Block W. It comprised ten small concrete cells, usually home to approximately one hundred women, despite being designed for only thirty-nine. Four of the cells were for inmates whose cases were still being heard in court. These had fluorescent lights that stayed on all night, and high ceilings to prevent suicides. They were always stinking hot, particularly as the ventilation was poor, with no windows at the back of the cells and so no air moving through. The other six cells each had a switch to turn off the lights, and a small window at the back. This created a bit of a breeze, but had a downside, as the open sewers directly at the back of the cells created a sickening stench, especially when they stewed in the hot afternoon sun.

  For westerners, the lack of hygiene was always a nasty shock. The hole-in-the-ground toilets regularly blocked and overflowed, spilling sewage onto the floor. Some locals would just squelch around in the faeces with bare feet. Several were peasants from tiny villages, serving a few months for crimes as trivial as stealing one sachet of coffee or one apple. They’d lived primitive lives and knew nothing about cleanliness or hygiene, often horrifying their cellmates with a gross lack of decorum: urinating and defecating on the bathroom floor; bleeding menstrual blood directly onto the cell floor, refusing to use pads or wear underpants. Some almost never washed their clothes or bodies, causing disturbing body odour in the cells.

  After developing calluses from weeks of sleeping on a concrete floor in the police cells, one improvement for new prisoners was having a thin mattress. Poor inmates unable to afford a mattress still slept on bare concrete or threw down a sarong. Hotel K provided nothing but the four walls of the cell. Everything, from essentials like soap, detergent and drinking water, to emptying out the septic tanks, was paid for out of prisoners’ pockets. The poor simply went without or depended on the charity of others, or earned cash by massaging wealthier prisoners or washing clothes for them.

  Those with money brightened their lives with contraband luxuries in their cells, like televisions, DVD players, mobile phones, and single gas burners to boil water, cook simple meals or heat heroin, although the guards often swept it all up in random cell searches. But aside from the drugs, which could potentially involve a new case in court, the guards would simply sell this all back to the prisoners within a couple of weeks.

  Primarily functioning as a men’s jail meant the women in Hotel K were treated as second-class citizens, rarely allowed out of their block and banned from the privileges of playing tennis and walking freely around the jail. Their sexuality was an issue. The authorities didn’t want the women inciting the men sexually. Doing a weekly aerobics class or yoga session in the hall, walking across the jail to a visit, collecting mail or walking to the little canteen or church were their only permitted outings.

  As in the men’s block, there was no segregation between cold-blooded killers, card sharks and callgirls; no lines were drawn between a woman who stole an apple to feed her hungry baby and a woman who pre-meditated the stabbing death of her husband’s mistress. The huge divide between petty crimes, like stealing a bag of prawn crackers or playing cards at the kitchen table, and dark crimes, such as assisting in illegal abortions on eight-month-old foetuses, was invisible. They all slept side by side, so tightly squeezed in that they often woke with their limbs entwined.

  In Block W there were many callgirls who’d been swept up in police stings at karaoke bars in Kuta and Denpasar. Many of the girls had deep resentment towards the police who’d used their services, asked them to procure a couple of ecstasy tablets, then turned around and snapped on handcuffs. Others were angry at being harassed by police for sex in exchange for a lighter sentence. While some refused, others acquiesced but were left bitterly disappointed when their sentences were read out in court.

  Police at Poldabes said, ‘Do you want to have sex with me, we can drop the charges?’ She agreed and was taken out of Poldabes and had sex with the policeman . . . But her sentence was not cut. She got the maximum of five years.

  – Elsa, inmate, talking about her friend

  One policeman asked me for sex in a flirty way. He asked in a very nice way. He wasn’t scary.

  Was he serious?

  Yes. He asked many, many times during the two months I was in police cells. He told me sex would reduce my sentence. I said no and finally he stopped asking me.

  – Wanda, Indonesian inmate

  Block W was a highly charged environment, tempers fraying and snapping at the smallest things. Within a split second, a slow afternoon could turn; two girls suddenly slashing each other with broken glass bottles or attacking with a pair of scissors over the theft of 10,000 rupiah ($1.30), a bowl of rice or a bucket of water. Or even just over one of them coughing.

  Often in the centre of the storm was fiery Timorese prisoner Sonia Gonzales Miranda, nicknamed Black Monster. She was notorious in Hotel K for her fighting, her psychotic behaviour and for regularly being locked up for months in cell tikus. She tore around the jail, pulsing with energy, instigating spats and catfights wherever she went. If someone refused to give her a cigarette, she’d pinch their breasts. But usually she didn’t need a motive. Her fuse just blew anyway. She always managed to break the daily monotony.

  When one afternoon a new prisoner gingerly walked into her cell for the first time, Sonia sprang like a cat off the floor and started strangling her. Other girls jumped up to unclasp Black Monster’s fingers from the woman’s neck. As they pulled her off she went nuts, flailing her fists around and yelling like a lunatic. A male guard walked in and started slapping her around the head, before dragging her out by the hair and down to the guard’s table. It was like a game to Sonia. The second he let go, she sprinted off, laughing maniacally. He angrily tore after her, snatching her by the shoulders within a couple of strides. He whacked her a few times and led her back. She enjoyed creating a show like this. All the women stopped to watch. The guards sat discussing what to do with Black Monster. The punishment cells were all booked up. They decided to isolate her in her own cell for a few weeks, expelling her cellmates and dispersing them into the eight other cramped cells, excluding Mexican model Clara’s paid-for ninth cell.

  Sonia craved attention and didn’t mind disrupting everyone’s life to get it. During the night she’d suddenly let out a long, piercing scream and thrash the cell door back and forth, just to wake up as many women as possible. Angry screams telling her to shut up would tear back until the entire block was awake, and abusive yelling was coming from every cell along the path, often accompanied by the loud din of saucepans being banged against the bars. It could last all night, until the fury exploded into a fight in the morning.

  One such fight broke out on the eve of a court hearing. Sonia started screaming abuse at a girl, Dewi, a few cells down. The pair fought often and had a joint date in court the next day. Dew
i stood at her barred door, yelling, ‘I’ll get you in the morning, Black Monster!’ Black Monster yelled back, ‘I’ll get you, Dewi!’ Their inane slanging match continued for hours.

  In the morning, when a guard opened Black Monster’s cell, the fight blew up. The guard grabbed Sonia by the arm to take her straight out of the block before a fight started. But Dewi was already crouched near the door. As Sonia walked past, they both spat abuse. Sonia snapped. She broke the guard’s grip, snatched a broken glass bottle from the ground nearby and threw it at Dewi. She missed, but the fight was on. They were both dancing around each other with jagged shards of broken glass. A crowd gathered to watch the action – it was better than breakfast television. Black Monster didn’t let her audience down. She dumped the glass and charged at Dewi, knocking her to the ground. They rolled around, tearing out clumps of each other’s hair. The guards pulled them apart. Sonia broke their grip again, and hurled Dewi to the ground for the grand finale. Dewi crashed hard, twisting her wrist and crying out in agony. As the guards yanked Sonia away, she turned back to smirk at the crowd. She didn’t go to court that day. She was locked back into her isolation cell.

  If Hotel K issued membership cards, Sonia’s would be platinum. For years she’d been checking in and out. When she wasn’t a guest, she’d return as a visitor to see a friend, usually dressed up in her latest clubbing outfit. She couldn’t stay away. One afternoon she was even arrested during a visit. She sat talking to a friend on the floor of the busy visiting room. She was working as a dancer at a nightclub, and was casually flicking through photos of herself dancing and of her new Spanish boyfriend. The relaxed scene turned when three uniformed police officers briskly walked across and snapped handcuffs on Sonia. She went psychotic. Everyone in the visiting area turned to watch. She was thrashing her body about as the police dragged her out with her high heels scraping along the ground. The police had been looking for the Black Monster since the day before, when a New Zealand tourist had reported she’d stolen his money and mobile phone from his hotel room.