One of the guards also had a baby girl she used to bring in with her each day, leaving her with us prisoners to baby sit. She was often left lying on a mattress in any old cell, usually full of girls playing cards and smoking. She’d be put on the bed, with a towel under her bum because the guard didn’t give her a nappy. The poor little thing was always being passed around. Unbelievably, most of the girls would let the baby suckle their breasts. She didn’t have a dummy, so they’d just get their breasts out to pacify her. The guard didn’t mind. I saw her pacified on almost every female’s breast. Some of the more educated people would cringe at how disgusting it was. But most didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.
Often those men and women prisoners who started sexual relationships in here would get engaged and married in the jail church or the mosque. I guess it lifted their spirits, but for me I think having a relationship in here would be more lonely and upsetting than being alone. Just knowing your husband or boyfriend was in a nearby cell but never being able to spend a night together and fall asleep on his chest would exacerbate the agonising loneliness. Male prisoners are sometimes allowed to have their girlfriends from outside come in for the night, if they pay the guards. There is no such luxury for the women. We are never allowed out for a night, or to have anyone in, no matter how much money we’ve got.
One woman, the informer prisoner Wiwin, who was serving four and a half years for possession of ten Ecstasy tablets, found herself a prisoner boyfriend after seven months. When she quickly fell pregnant, they were married in the prison mosque. The day after, she started wearing the traditional Muslim clothing and stopped kissing her husband in full view of people. I thought to myself, Poor guy, his girl’s really changed on him. When he was released about a month later, Wiwin started hiding away in her cell, only coming out for roll call and rice, and always wearing her Muslim clothes. People started forgetting what she looked like. Being pregnant, she got permission one day to go to the hospital outside. Her husband met her at the hospital. Then they were gone. Wiwin was the first woman in all of Kerobokan history to escape. The female guard who’d accompanied Wiwin copped a fair bit of flack and laughs from jail authorities and prisoners for about a week. Then all was forgotten. Wiwin was a smart woman after all.
Escape is something I often fantasise about, imagining a helicopter dropping a rope made into a swing with a seat. Or I see myself sailing off in a homemade boat, using my bedcover as a sail, dangling my legs over the side and fishing as the winds sweep me home to the closest Australian shores. They are silly daydreams. Escape would mean spending the rest of my life as a fugitive and not seeing my family. I would never do it. (Though, never say never.)
Men don’t just dream about it, they seem to do it quite often. One old man simply walked straight out Hotel K’s front door. It was ingenious. He’d only been here a couple of days and no one recognised him as he slipped out with all the visitors. He was well into the hills before the guards even realised he was gone.
Another guy went out to the dentist and on the way back got the guard to stop at the ATM. He sprinted straight past the machine and into freedom. The guard tried to run after him but didn’t have the speed, or maybe the heart, to catch him. But it wasn’t at all unusual to see men beaten within an inch of their lives after failed escape attempts.
One of the most frightful sights I’ve seen was a guy who didn’t make it. He was caught, beaten, brought back into prison and beaten again. He’d cut down a tall thin tree, carved footholds into it, then climbed like a circus performer to the top of the wall before leaping to freedom. (What an amazing feeling that would be.) But other, jealous prisoners had seen him and alerted the guards. They were ready and waiting for him. Merc and I were sitting in the visiting hall when he staggered past in his blood-splattered underpants. He had huge welts across his back where he’d already been whipped. I couldn’t recognise his face: it was too distorted.
After they took him out to the isolation tower, the guards started pulling out axes from the little gardening room beside us. I was sure they were going to hit him with them. I started hyperventilating and getting really upset. Merc tried to settle me down but was shaking, too. It turned out they were just hacking down a tree to stop other prisoners getting ideas about climbing over the walls. We saw them dragging branches and bits of the tree past us.
As the months passed, I tried to keep my spirits up. Stanley was a big help. We put him on the list for roll call and would hold him up and say ‘woof’ when the guards called his name. He was as pampered as any Paris Hilton pooch. He slept next to me most nights, ate peanut butter and honey sandwiches and walked with me to visits, usually with pretty coloured ribbons in his hair. He was shampooed, brushed and cuddled regularly, and even got his own parcels in the post. He was far better company than most humans.
One day, I caught a girl unwittingly stealing a tin of Stanley’s gourmet dog food. She was just finishing it off when I walked into the cell. It was the first time someone thieving from me had actually brightened my day.
Reluctantly, I had to give Stanley back to Merc after a few months, as there were too many Muslims in my cell who couldn’t go near him for religious reasons. Jail life hadn’t always been the best for my little puppy anyway. I once found him playing with a syringe left lying on the floor by one of the two heroin addicts in my cell.
Continuing to create a bit of fun and soak up any moment of life that is uplifting is vital for my survival, to fight the pain and depression. It might be as subtle as a beautiful sentiment in a letter or a laugh in a visit, or as crude as watching a fight. One afternoon, I had ringside seats to a session of rock ’n’ roll wrestling between Renae and a Chinese lesbian who we nicknamed ‘Andrew Chan’ – because she looked like him.
The wrestling was in knee-high water, as the whole block was completely flooded from a heavy tropical downpour. I sat on my bed eating a hamburger to watch the fight through my window. It was show time. A crowd of girls quickly gathered around to watch. Renae and Andrew were really going for it, both looking like blokes, with their tough demean our, body language, stance and shouted words. They both had their fists up, slightly hunched like boxers, circling each other. Then they’d go in for the kill. Renae was winning. She’d dunked Andrew’s head under the water four times.
But then it turned ugly. On the fifth dunk, Renae’s right arm hooked Andrew’s head and took her down under the water again. This time, Renae reared up aggressively. She’d been bitten on her inner arm where she’d hooked Andrew. She was raging. She started yelling and showing the screaming crowd a huge bite mark, then angrily holding Andrew’s head under the water, gripping her around the neck. I sat watching, waiting with my heart in my throat to see what would happen next and thinking about my mum’s old mantra: ‘Don’t play-fight, you kids, it will always end up in a fight.’
Renae was still holding Andrew under the water, so a couple of girls broke it up, pulling Renae away. By then it was 4.30p.m., and the guards were locking us down for the night. Renae quickly ran over to my cell window, excitedly asking, ‘Did you see that, Schapelle?’, holding up her arm to show me the deep bite mark. ‘Yeah, I saw it, and it looked like an accident!’ It was the big topic of conversation that night in my cell. Everyone thought Andrew had accidentally bitten Renae’s arm when it came forcefully swinging into her face. The fight had at least been a bit of jailhouse entertainment, something to do, something different to look at.
These days, I spend a bit of time with the real Andrew Chan and Matthew Norman, as they’re both pretty funny guys, though we never talk about their crimes or their life and death sentences. Matthew’s sentence was increased to death on appeal but has just been returned to life imprisonment after a further appeal. Andrew is incredibly positive by anyone’s standards, let alone a prisoner on death row. One morning, he had almost the whole visitors’ area laughing with his antics. I was opening some of my parcels on the floor of the mail room and pulled out a pair of size 14 pas
tel-blue lace underpants. He grabbed them from me and pulled them on over his little short shorts, which showed off his skinny white legs perfectly. Then, with the lace underpants ballooning out from the puckering of his shorts, he pranced around the visitors’ area like a catwalk model.
My brother Michael also often gives me a good laugh whenever he comes over to visit me. He came in one day, after a gap of about three months since his last visit, and gave me a big hug and a smile. I was shocked when I saw that his perfectly straightwhite teeth were all brown and grossly decaying. My smile quickly faded and my heart broke as I looked at him. With all the stress I’d been under, my teeth were looking a bit worse for wear – but his stress was far more evident. I felt sorry for him, as he’d always taken good care of his teeth. I didn’t want to say anything or look too closely and hurt him. But he quickly realised my discomfortand started laughing at me. ‘What?’ I asked. He kept laughing and trying to talk normally, and I tried to also, though it was hard. Then he looked away for a second, before quickly turning back with perfectly normal pearly-white teeth. He laughed hysterically and held the fake plastic teeth in his hand. I burst out laughing, too. I thought they were so gross and funny that I washed thembefore putting them in and walking around to speak to a few people I knew. Everyone had a good laugh.
Michael was also the one to finally convince me to chop off my long hair. I told him I’d been contemplating it for a few months, maybe even shaving it off. It was so hot and washing it was such a hassle, with the dirty water constantly giving me ear infections. I was going as long as humanly – or womanly – possible between washes, sometimes three or four weeks. But I kept putting off the cut, thinking I’d be going home soon, and meanwhile living like a stinky matted piggy.
‘Just do it! It’ll be so much easier and you’ll wonder why you hadn’t done it sooner,’ Michael said.
‘Do you think I’ll look ugly, though?’
‘Yes!’ was his blunt reply, and we both laughed.
After his visit, I walked back to the block, borrowed a pair of pink-handled kindergarten-type scissors from another cell and marched into my own cell, complete with thirteen-plus girls lying around in it. I then got a small mirror and placed it on top of a turned-over bucket. I put the rubbish bin beside me, and I was ready.
Sitting on the ground, I took a long look at myself in the mirror, then pulled up small clumps of hair, just enough so the blunt scissors could cut through without having to hack at it too much. I started at the front. I knew if I started chopping from the back, I’d get scared and stop. I couldn’t stop when starting at the front, otherwise I’d be left with an awful ’80s-style mullet and fit perfectly into this place . . . no, thanks.
I didn’t speak, as I didn’t want anyone talking me out of it. There was no turning back, this hair had to go. I was focused. To the other girls, I must have looked like a depressed, stressed, out-of-control wreck as I just kept hacking and hacking. I heard all the girls whispering among themselves, ‘What’s she doing?’ Women from other cells came in to sneak a peek. This was an event, anything to kill time – glad I could help them.
When Yohanna, the knitting lady, saw me, she pushed everyone out of the cell, knelt down beside me and asked what I was doing. I didn’t speak. She started crying, hugging me and saying, ‘Tell me what’s happened, Schapelle.’ I just kept looking in the mirror, chopping an inch away from my scalp. She tried taking the scissors off me. I stopped for a second, started crying and turned to her.
‘It’s OK, Yohanna. I’m OK, it’s just too hot!’ Cutting my hair was emotionally hard as I loved that hair and it also represented more of the life I’d lost.
I took a photograph of my beloved chopped-off hair and then threw the hair in the bin. A few days later, I found out that one of the girls had buried it in front of our cell. I thought that was a bit weird, but it was an Indonesian custom. I didn’t realise what a nightmare cutting my hair would cause. Suddenly, prisoners all over Hotel K, and visitors, were trying to take the first lucrative shots of my new short hairdo. It was worth a lot of cash. It was the beginning of my hat-and-scarf phase.
Each time I begin to feel something slightly resembling a comfort zone in here, something, a person, a problem, a change, whatever, will come along and throw me off course, out of whack, placing a hole in the road. Always something to disrupt, making it impossible for me to gain any illusion of a half-hearted sense of security.
My cell was the worst it had ever been. We were up to fifteen girls, including the two drug addicts who regularly shot up next to me. And though we now had running water, we were often worse off. Sonia regularly stuck her hand out of her cell to turn off the water pump. She liked doing it at 5 p.m. so we had no water until the guards came in at 7 a.m. It usually meant the bathroom floor would be covered with more floating shit, without any water to flush it away. Sometimes I found it hard to believe I was still actually a woman.
The septic tank also blocked up a few times, and our cell was the first to overflow. I went with Renae and a girl from my cell, Sumila, behind the block to try to fix it. Sumila didn’t mind getting her hands dirty. She lifted the cement lid of the septic tank and, as she did, all its gross contents came alive, spurting thirty centimetres into the air. I felt Renae grab my shoulders and shove me out of the way and then run for it. She couldn’t get away fast enough. I heard her screams over the top of my own. All the slop was gushing out all over Sumila’s bare feet. Then, with her bare hands, she replaced the lid. That would without doubt be the most grotesque image I have ever been witness to – an overflowing septic tank.
Back in the block, Sumila rinsed her feet and hands using water from the fish pond. She then gave Renae and me one of her biggest smiles. We stood in shock as we watched the simplicity of her hygiene.
Finally, after a year and a half in the pre-sentencing cell, I was allowed to move into Salma’s elite cell. It was a relief, but I had to be careful of a prisoner called Michelle. She was an expatriate Dutch woman living in Bali and in jail for drugs. She was nasty, always making snide remarks and always walking around with a camera, taking shots of everything . . . especially me.
She was odd and no one really liked her except Renae, and as they started becoming buddies, it caused a rift in our friendship. I spent one night in the same cell as this woman before she moved into Renae’s cell, lying at night with a sheet over my head so she didn’t take photos of me asleep. I’d already caught her taking sneaky shots of me a few times. I had done nothing to this girl but try to be nice.
My concerns about this woman were confirmed after she was released and sold a story about me to New Idea. Incredibly, the magazine just took her lies, publishing a story full of errors without bothering to check its facts. They even stated that Stanley was dead. It was unbelievable. Not only do I not have any privacy but complete lies are made up.
Journalists keep coming in trying to get stories about me by paying other prisoners to talk. I don’t understand why people won’t just leave me alone. It’s never-ending, and I know it will continue until the day someone comes to say, ‘Pack your bags, you’re checking out.’
21
Stealing My Soul
THIS IS LIKE THE DEATH OF MY LIFE BEFORE. IT’S BEEN A mourning process, a grieving, all the emotions of shock, disbelief, denial, then anger, then trying to deal with it, then numbness and acceptance.
I have to accept that I’m here: accept that this is my life, at least for now.
But I will not accept my sentence – I don’t know why I call it ‘my sentence’. It’s not mine. I will never accept twenty years. I’m just waiting. I’m not putting a number on my years in this shit hole. No way can I think about twenty years. I live in hope that something will happen, something has to. I will fight, my family will fight. Even if we fight for twenty years, we will keep fighting.
I am strong enough, capable enough of surviving in prison for twenty years. If I have no choice; if I have to, if there is no alternative. I am n
ot capable of hurting myself, not capable of suicide or hurting my family in that way. I will come through without damaging myself; I will not allow anger or bitterness to eat away at me.
I feel paralysed inside these walls, my heart is still beating full of love – well, half full of love. I am still alive, but I’m stuck, I can’t move, no one can hear me. People care for me, people work for me, but as yet, with all their efforts, no one can save me. The people who have died within these walls have died of loneliness, helplessness, of a broken heart, broken spirit.
Like a small child, I’ve had to learn to walk again. I can’t do anything for myself, everything is relied on from the outside world – my friends, family – everything I need has to be brought in, from my food, toilet paper and medicines to emotional support. Without constant contact through my visits, it is very possible that I might go insane, a depressed, angry, crazy, psychopathic Aussie chick.
I think I am back to my normal mental state . . . not so religious. I keep all my relationships personal, as with my relationship with God. It’s personal, between Him and me. No one else. I still pray, in my cell.
As part of accepting that this is for now my fate, I’ve also realised there’s nothing to be gained in this place by letting anger overcome you, rebelling against discipline, screaming at the guards. It’s not going to help me walk out those doors; it just causes more problems. I work every day at staying calm, on an even keel, replacing negative thoughts with positive ones.
No More Tomorrows Page 30