No More Tomorrows

by Corby, Schapelle

  Checking in was quick, but the process was shattering. Being made a prisoner in a third-world maximum-security jail was scary and degrading. And for what? What? I was doing time for someone else’s crime. It was so unfair. I was starting to feel gut-wrenching anger. I should’ve been checking in to a hotel for tourists, not terrorists. I wanted my old life back. But I had no control. None at all.

  I stood limp and compliant as a guard snapped my mug shot, took my fingerprints, height, weight, and for some strange reason measured my breasts. He then searched my bags. I watched keenly to make sure drugs weren’t planted. A second guard asked me a few questions, slipping in a few sleazy ones of his own. ‘You got boyfriend? You beautiful – you married?’

  I just said, ‘Thank you’, and politely answered his questions.

  It felt like a twisted version of being dropped off at a school camp when my beautiful mum, Merc and Wayan arrived to see me safely into jail. Mum held my hand. Her eyes were full of pain. Poor Merc looked sick. She was ghostly white and skinny. She’d now lost ten kilograms since my arrest. None of us could comprehend any of this. Didn’t this only happen in the movies?

  The good news was that, like at any hotel, we’d been able to buy a room upgrade. I’d get a spot in the best cell: clean, with no drug addicts, no lesbians and just four other prisoners. It was a relief, as the Polda guards had loved freaking me out with stories of lesbians attacking new girls. The cash price for the upgrade was $100. As we quickly learnt, Hotel Kerobokan is a thriving little business. Nothing is free. The prisoners even have to pay for the septic tank to be emptied.

  It was time for the others to go: time for me to get locked up. I was terrified. We were all upset and scared. In those moments, we didn’t speak, but we knew we were all thinking the same. What would happen to me in jail? What horror was around the next corner? What sick, twisted thing was next? I trembled as Mum hugged me goodbye. But I had to be brave. ‘I’ll be OK, I’ll be OK,’ I whispered.

  As I was led away, I heard Mum’s and Merc’s pained voices fading in the distance: ‘Love you, Schapelle! Love you! Love you!’ Tears streamed down my cheeks. This was hurting us all way too much.

  As I walked down a neatly trimmed pathway through grounds with grass, trees, a basketball hoop and a tennis court, I felt my heart brighten a little. Yeah, this is OK. I can cope with this until my trial . . .

  It was definitely better than staring at stinky concrete walls. People were playing tennis, freely walking about, and scattered on the grass eating lunch. They all stared as we walked past, many whistling, waving and yelling: ‘Hi, Corby! Welcome, Corby!’ So much for my plans of keeping a low profile. Hotel Kerobokan obviously had a local paper boy.

  The women’s section was just beyond the tennis court but isolated behind concrete walls. The only way in and out was through an old metal door. As I stepped through, I got a nasty shock. It was nothing like I’d pictured, nothing like the rest of the jail. It was stinky, muddy and gross. It looked like a section penned off for farm animals. A pen for pigs. I knew this was a third-world prison, but did they really expect human beings to live like this?

  I felt sick as I walked down a muddy path between the cells, clinging to my two little bags. All eyes were on me, and I felt like the loneliest girl in the world. How had my life come to this? I wanted to turn and run for it, but I knew it would be useless. I took a couple of breaths and steeled myself to step one foot in front of the other towards the guards’ table.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Schapelle Corby.’

  As the guards asked me a few more questions, I was quickly surrounded by a bunch of female prisoners zeroing in for a close-up. In no time, they were rifling through my bags. I just watched in dazed disbelief as they pulled out each item, held it up, looked at it, fingered it then passed it on in noisy, screechy excitement. It was like a scene at a flea market.

  I had a hazy, blurry feeling that I’d started getting a lot. I would just stare into space, vanish for a few seconds and then come back with my face flushed with hot tears. I was jolted back to reality by a loud-voiced girl shouting at me. ‘Hi, I’m Sonia from Timor!’ Sonia instantly appointed herself as my new best friend, though I quickly found out she was very bad news. She grabbed my bags and took me to my new cell.

  My heart dropped. It was the same old concrete box as at Polda but slightly bigger. But this time five of us had to live in it – literally live in it. We would cook, eat, wash, use the toilet and sleep in this cell that was not much bigger than a Qantas cockpit. We would be cooped up like chickens for fifteen hours a day.

  It had no running water, no power and a barred door and window, which gave easy access to feral animals including rats, cats, snakes and toads. The floor was of broken and uneven concrete, and there was a very, very high tin ceiling, which I discovered was to prevent hangings. There were four of these primitive cells reserved for prisoners not yet sentenced, who were regarded as the highest suicide risk. I quickly learnt that suicides, or attempted suicides, weren’t so rare.

  There were six more cells that were slightly bigger and better concrete boxes, with electricity, running water and the greatest luxury of all: a switch to turn off the fluorescent lights at night. But the mod cons were offset by a not-so-modern open septic tank at the back. The foul stench in the cells was stomach-turning by lunchtime, when the hot sun had steamed up the raw sewage. These cells were reserved for the girls who had been sentenced.

  My first night in jail, we were locked up at what turned out to be the usual time of 4.30 p.m. I ate some pasta Mum had given me and got to know my four cellmates. They were all Indonesian, but one girl, Puspa, spoke perfect English as she’d grown up in Adelaide. She was a lawyer, jailed for stealing money from her clients. We mostly talked about home and laughed at an older woman, who kept trying to speak to me in English.

  I’m very lucky to have been put with these four women. Tomorrow’s another day.

  Diary entry, 12 November 2004

  That night I got my first full night’s sleep since smacking head-first into this nightmare. After five weeks of sleeping on my worn-out blue sarong, I was finally allowed the luxury of a thin mattress and pillow. And I knew that Lily was flying out to Australia to meet up with Vasu, who had made a date to see the Foreign Affairs Minister and his Labor counterpart.

  Please get something so I can live a normal life, please!

  Diary entry, 12 November 2004

  I started struggling through the days by clinging to the hope that I would soon be going home. I believed Qantas and the Australian airports would be doing their best to try to find evidence and that something would soon surface to prove my innocence. I just had to wait and be patient, but I really hoped that I’d be home by early January for Mum’s birthday.

  Adapting to the depressing daily drill was very hard for me. We had no freedom, despite the initial appearances, as the tennis court and grounds outside were almost exclusively for men. Women lived behind the walls within the walls, penned in like animals. The onlytimes we were permitted outside were for twice-daily visits between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m., and 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., and to collect mail or go to church.

  Our short days outside the cages were not our own. Three times a day, we had to line up for roll call to ensure no one had escaped. We were unlocked and had roll call at 7.30 a.m., then roll call again at 12 p.m. and 4.30 p.m., just before being put back into our little cages. We really were like chickens. These roll-call times were strict. Being late was punishable by some vile chore, like getting into and cleaning out the slimy, disease-infected pond. That’s one I’ve had to do. I was late due to being stuck on the toilet with diarrhoea. My punishment left me vomiting for the next twenty-four hours.

  Life was hard, and the guards seemed to enjoy making it harder. For instance, one day Mum came to visit me and was left waiting for nearly two hours.

  Mum should have been here at 1 p.m. It’s now 2.30 p.m. so am feeling even more low. I can’t even go out to th
e hall unless I have a visitor. I can’t hold back my tears any longer.

  . . . At 2.40 p.m. I pushed open the heavy steel door and walked straight over to the hall – what’s the guard going to do? Yell at me in another language I don’t understand? Five minutes after I went outside, a prison guy who sells drinks came and said my mum was here. She’d been trying to see me since 1 p.m.

  Diary entry, 21 November 2004

  We’d been sitting less than twenty metres apart on opposite sides of a wall, both waiting, both worried. I was called fifteen minutes before the end of visiting time. It happened a lot. Late calls were just sport to the guards.

  And they enjoyed another cruel sport. They’d dangle a carrot, then snatch it back, laughing. ‘Yes, you can play tennis, Corby,’ they told me once. I was so excited. I wasn’t a great player, but at least I could runaround and have a bit of fun. Mum raced off to buy me a racquet. Then nothing. Every day I begged: ‘Please can I play today?’ But the guards just kept saying, ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow!’

  Being constantly told what I couldn’t do started to provoke a fury inside me. When it wasn’t the guards telling me what not to do, it was the other prisoners. ‘No, Skepel, no, no, no!’ No walking, no tennis, no talking to the boys, no wearing a sarong, no tight jeans. ‘No’ to even peeking outside the steel door to look longingly at those people lucky enough to be walking around: such a little privilege now seemed enormous.

  I was even hassled about sitting in the sun. ‘No, Skepel!’ On my first day, I grabbed my Walkman and went to sit on the concrete in the sunshine to get a bit of colour on my ghostly white body. I hadn’t been so white since living in the Japanese snow for three months. But the Indonesian girls all avoid the sun – it’s a status symbol to be light-skinned – and they thought I should avoid it, too. ‘No, no, Skepel!’ They screamed at me for the whole twenty minutes I sat there. I blasted my Walkman headphones with music to try to block them out and fought to control my temper.

  Sonia from Timor was one of the worst. She provoked me so hard on my second day that I lost it. She gripped my arm, pulling and pulling at it and yelling at me to stop talking to a Western guy playing tennis. I’d paused on my way to a visit. I don’t usually swear at people, but I screamed ‘Fuck off!’ in her face.

  I hated this place. Who were these people to tell me what to do? I did not belong in this hellhole. I was not a criminal. I was sick of being told what to do, sick of being locked up like a pathetic animal. Sick of the injustice of paying for someone else’s crime. When would this end?

  I was edgy and angry. Sometimes I screamed at guards and prisoners. Mostly I saved my temper for the walls, crying and screaming, ‘Fuuuck! Let me out of here!’ while smashing my bag furiously over and over and over against the concrete walls.

  I’d never before felt such pain, such fury, such injustice. I’m not a naturally angry person, but with no personal space, no privacy and nowhere to go, this was the only way I could find to release it. I wasn’t allowed to do anything else; I couldn’t even slam away at a tennis ball. In my old life, if I started to feel upset, I’d just walk across to the beach, sit down alone, stare at the horizon and listen to the beauty of crashing waves. In this soul-sucking dump, the sound was screaming and fighting, the horizon a concrete wall and personal space did not exist.

  I’m having a bad day. My body’s heavy. It’s 10.10 am and I haven’t spoken a word since the time I got up at 6 am. I want to sit in a dark corner and break down. I could do that any time I needed to at Polda. I’ll have to wait until everyone goes to sleep tonight till I can let go. Otherwise I would be the subject of talk of the day. It would be impossible for them to leave me be. Everyone needs to know everyone else’s business.

  Diary entry, 21 November 2004

  It was a seedy little world. A world full of criminals. A world full of society’s worst. I lived on edge. I could never let my guard down, never just kick back and relax without keeping one eye out for trouble – big trouble. Within the first few days I saw fights, a beating, girls taking drugs, a prisoner giving a blow job to another prisoner, and a suicide attempt.

  Today a female prisoner went down on a male prisoner outside the Aula. People were sitting around the corner and walking to and from the female cell section. They were not hidden, they were in full view of anyone who could see and did see. How romantic! . . .

  I seriously cannot understand these people. It’s now 8 p.m. and someone in my cell is smoking crystal meth. She’s leaving in two days. She’d never had any form of drugs on the outside, never smoked cigarettes either. Now she does both and she hasn’t even been here long.

  Diary entry, 20 November 2004

  Sonia came running up to me yelling: ‘She’s dead, dead – she did suicide. She drank poison, so stupid. Cell number 10!’ What? I noticed it was quieter than usual, not many girls sitting around. I went straight to my room in shock. Some time later I heard loud, painful vomiting. I realised at that point that she wasn’t dead. Once again, no doctor. Even the guards didn’t care. They didn’t even go in the cell to check. I gave my teddy to her.

  Diary entry, 2 December 2004

  The girl in cell number 10 finished vomiting this morning and was in roll call this afternoon. The guards were mocking her for drinking poison. She laughed it off as ‘stress’. How nasty some of these people are.

  Diary entry, 5 December 2004

  One of the most common problems in Hotel K was theft. If in the outside world I had to watch my handbag because a thief might be lurking, in here I could be sure of it. Thieves were everywhere. For most it was a profession. Almost everyone stole. Within the first week my make-up, money and some clothes were all pinched. Puspa’s mobile phone, not permitted in jail but discreetly kept, was stolen from our cell in my second week, a day before her release. It incited the first of many beatings I’ve witnessed, and it haunted my soul.

  When Puspa realised in the afternoon that her mobile was gone, a huge fight broke out in our cell. Girls were screaming and hitting each other. I escaped to a visit but could still hear the yelling. The finger had been pointed at Sonia, the busiest thief. Puspa was furious. She wanted it back.

  Later that night, six male guards burst into the women’s section, storming directly into Sonia’s cell to search for the stolen phone. I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could hear the angry commotion: the banging, the shouting, the tearing apart of the cell. They soon found it, hidden under a blanket. What I heard next froze my heart. Spine-chilling sounds tore into the night. I felt so helpless. The guards whacked and thumped Sonia fiercely. She let out bloodcurdling screams. I stood at my cell door clutching the bars and sobbing. I hated this place. She might be a thief, but no one deserved that.

  When Puspa eventually got the phone, it was a different model, different make and different SIM card. But she didn’t speak up. Sonia was bashed, humiliated and disgraced. Puspa was released from Kerobokan the next day.

  Never could I forget who I was living with – the bad people in this little society. We were all thrown in together, killers and petty thieves. It would have made a compelling Big Brother house, guaranteed to keep the audience riveted. I quickly got to know my housemates and their crimes. And often, it was a shock. You really couldn’t judge a book by its cover. Killers came in all guises.

  Puspa told me about a woman a couple of cells down who could make clothes for me for a small fee. I just had to supply her with the material and draw a pattern. And by the way, she was a murderer.

  I first met her to ask about a hem. She was pretty, with long dark hair, in her mid-thirties and very nice. It was impossible for me to believe she was a killer. But she’d admitted it. She’d admitted to slicing up her maid. The maid had been having an affair with her husband for three years. When she found out, she killed her. She took the unsuspecting woman to the markets, as she did each week, and bought some carving knives. On the drive home, she stopped at a secluded beach and stabbed the maid over and over until sh
e was dead. She then went home, cleaned herself up, drove to the police station, confessed and took them to the body. She got five years.

  Another woman killed her one-month-old baby. She’d been having an affair with a married man who already had children. When she fell pregnant and had the baby, the man wanted nothing to do with her or the child. So she made a noose and hanged the poor little innocent baby. She got three years.

  Then there was ‘the Black Monster’, Sonia. Local newspapers had dubbed her that for her crimes. Now even the guards used it. Her crime was poisoning men’s drinks at nightclubs, taking them outside and stealing their cash and credit cards. She was apparently a computer whiz and spent a fortune online with their cards. This was her thirteenth time in prison for these crimes, although she’d loudly boasted to Mum, Merc and me in our first visit that she’d murdered an Australian man. We had all gasped in shock. She was a thief and a liar.

  Sonia was one person who did fit her profile. She was a nightmare. She annoyed everyone. At night, she’d yell for hours and violently beat the cell door. She’d sing at the top of her lungs all day. She stole from people. She hit people. She ran up and pinched girls hard on the breast, screaming for money or cigarettes. Nothing stopped her. I saw her kicked in the head, punched in the neck and attacked with scissors. But like an irrepressible monster, she’d just bounce back for more.

  There were many people on drugs charges. Salma, a thirty-year-old woman from Mexico, was serving seven years for smuggling fifteen kilograms of cocaine to Bali in surfboards. She and her boyfriend both brought them in, though he was serving twenty-eight years. They’d had the boards specially made for the job, with cocaine hidden under a resin surface. They were caught after a tip-off.