‘Absolutely.’ Rick then whispered in confidence, ‘You’re not like the others here. You know, losers.’
That was enough to make me give him the card that I usually kept for my factory boss, a card with a shallow draw.
At a quarter to midnight we losers bade Rick farewell as a front-office guard dragged a nearby key boy from his mat to unlock our door. Jet stood by the door like a bellhop to receive the tip for months of disloyal service; a tip that never came. Sten grunted goodbye from behind the shower curtain while taking a pee and Theo sprayed Rick with an unexpected sneeze.
‘Sorry, Lick.’ Theo made to wipe Rick’s shirt front. ‘Fuggin’ bad cold. All the bethst.’
Rick’s advice about his probation order was correct. Local police took him from the Klong Prem gate and held him for three hours until immigration cops called by to take him to the airport. Rick then flew to Singapore. At Changi Airport officials were impressed by the large red stamp in Rick’s passport declaring: DEPORTED FROM THAILAND FOR NARCOTICS. As there would be no narcotics in Singapore Rick was denied entry. He then flew to Hong Kong, a more welcoming territory. I came to know most of this from a records clerk at KP and from the record of my Visa card. Soon, as the card ceased automatically telling, the Rick trail went cold and I knew no more.
A visitor that week told me of a party I had missed, as visitors do. Klaus had been in London and had stopped at Bangkok on his way to see old friends in Macau.
‘Sharon was there. Your mother, too.’ Klaus was calling through the double bars of the standard visit zone. He’d arrived unannounced. ‘Everyone sort of came together by chance. It wasn’t planned. It was just funny that all these, well, friends of David happened to be in London. We were all going to get tickets for Sweeney Todd but there wasn’t time.’
‘So you held a wake instead.’ I wondered what the food had been like. ‘And I couldn’t even attend my own funeral.’
‘Not a wake exactly. More like a friends-of-David dinner. Though, to tell the truth, everyone was saying this time that we wouldn’t be seeing you again. Sorry, not like that.’ Klaus paused to make kinder words. ‘It’s just that some of us are getting old, you know. I brought you some crusty bread.’
‘From London?’
‘No, that’d be mad. From a Vietnamese–French bakery I found here.’ Klaus had owned a large restaurant in London before selling up and retiring to the Algarve. He knew which foods would be rare in a Thai prison. Klaus had more to give.
‘I’ve got some photos for you. Not the one’s you want—not passport photos—but all we could find. Copied from your radio operator’s certificate, I’m told. Colour, anyway.’
Klaus sealed the pictures of my younger self in an envelope and then told me that Chas would be visiting next month. Chas had also been at my wake.
‘And did Chas share the consensus that I’m finished?’ I sounded defensive.
‘I can never tell what Chas thinks but he certainly wasn’t nailing down the coffin lid.’
Before leaving I sent Eric the trusty around to take the photos. There was also a note from Michael. It read: Dean Reed never arrived for his appointment. No word since.
Chess by mail.
Sten was alone in his and Theo’s hut when I returned from my visit with Klaus. Sten had almost finished another oil painting. We had found a solution to the problem of making and storing a ladder for scaling the walls: Sten had built ten stout picture frames, each forty-five centimetres by sixty. While two lighter frames had been stretched with canvas, the others would form the rungs of our ladders when bound between bamboo poles from the paper factory.
I tapped the edge of Sten’s new painting. ‘Has anyone noticed that these new picture frames are less than half the weight of the eight stashed in the office cupboard?’
‘Who’d notice?’ Sten eyed a frown my way although I wasn’t being sarcastic about his use of heavy colours.
‘That one got a name?’ I asked. It could have been called Chocolate Bars on Mud Flats.
‘Nope. No names.’ Sten closed one eye to make a fine adjustment. ‘No names for paintings.’
I placed one of my photos on Sten’s easel.
‘That’s mine done. Theo’s, we have—where is he anyway?’
‘Upstairs in the room. Sick. Headache. The flu. Said he wanted to lie down.’ Sten lifted my passport photo then regarded it briefly before returning it to me. ‘I squared it with Pornvid. About Theo staying in the room for the day, I mean.’ Sten peered carefully into the background of his artwork and then with a broad-tipped brush scraped a knob of eternal brown from his palette. ‘You think Rick will come back with a key?’
‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘He’s got to get back to Thailand first. Anyway I’m filing our own copy, slowly. You know, Sten, it isn’t safe to run around Thailand without a passport. Not safe to stay, really.’
‘I know. I’ve got some friends up north. If it comes to that.’
‘Okay. But let me know if I can help. We can retouch old holiday snaps.’ I leaned with one knee resting on a chair. ‘Is there anything troubling you, Sten?’
‘This key business. I mean, fuck the UN thing. What about straight out the window, through the bars?’
I’d thought about that. ‘Well, we’re three floors up. And two floors below us there’s a tiled awning sticking out one-and-a-half metres. Remember when we had to fix the toilet pipes? The lightest touch on those crumbling tiles and they were falling to the ground. If you can think of a way around that?’
We had none so I went to my old vacant office and continued filing.
That night Theo didn’t eat Blow-Job’s spaghetti. He took a handful of aspirin and retired early to sleep off his flu.
I noticed a pack of sulphonamide tablets by Theo’s bed and, curious, asked Sten, ‘Was he taking these for his cold? I don’t think they’d work.’
‘It’s not that.’ Sten pointed to the pack of antibacterial pills. ‘They’re for his ear infection. He’s had them since he was a kid and regular antibiotics don’t work. Can’t get through to the ear or something. The only things that do the job when he gets blocked up. Theo’s been blowing his nose today like he’s doing it for the Olympics. Says he can’t stand the stuff in his ears.’
‘So he gets these headaches often?’
‘Not that he’s mentioned.’
Sten and I ate quietly on the far side of the room, trying to figure a way to avoid taking a roommate of the chief’s selection now that Rick had been released.
‘Know who he’s got in mind?’ Sten asked.
I nodded. ‘Another paying guest.’
I told Sten of Miraj, a new arrival in Building Six. Miraj was a Hindu Indian who’d been in the travel business supplying passports, visas and special routes to Indians and Pakistanis hoping to work in Western countries. He hadn’t bothered the Thais much but he had excited those in the US Embassy’s immigration-fraud task force. There had been little of substance in the case against Miraj—a single Thai visa wrongly identified as fraudulently obtained in Penang—but as a courtesy to the Americans, the Thai court had awarded Miraj twenty years imprisonment.
‘He’s made the chief a lot of promises to get a good room,’ I warned Sten. ‘We’ll have to let him in. There’s no one else, we can’t hold out, just the three of us plus Jet.’
‘So what’s so bad about this Miraj?’
‘Nothing really. Seems tame enough. Of course, if he sees us packing up one night to take our leave he’d scream his head off.’
Sten stroked his chin and offered a thoughtful look that suggested he might enjoy taking care of such a problem.
Around ten I offered Theo some tea. He declined. That is, he wouldn’t speak, although he was conscious in some way while not sleeping. In fact he couldn’t speak. That’s the way it is here, I saw then. A moment ago the room was quiet and now it is still quiet. A moment ago Theo was sleeping off a cold and now he’s in real trouble, needing immediate medical intervention. I saw
again: this is a prison, the room is sealed. Our Klong Prem island of 12,000 is one of decay and death. Our custodians—village bullies, tyrants, shamans—are not to help, only to watch us die.
When I returned to my side of the room I thought aloud to Sten.
‘What do you think is happening in our excellent Lardyao hospital tonight?’ I lowered my voice, realising that while Theo might not be able to move, he might easily hear. Sten frowned a new question and I nodded toward Theo before continuing.
‘Let’s assume we get him there—there would be no doctor, of course—and even if one called by nothing would be done. How do you suppose the Swiss Embassy would react if someone called the after-hours emergency number?’
Sten rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Whatever’s wrong no one will send for an ambulance.’
We ate some pancakes with maple syrup. Sten finally showed Jet where Sweden is on a map. It occurred to me that Jet could use some better company in our room. We listened to music on the radio.
Shortly before midnight Dinger the cat uncharacteristically began sniffing around Theo’s foam mattress. Theo had peed himself. Sten and I then rolled him from his side to find one of Theo’s eyes was turning milky, the lid no longer active. The other eye seemed frantic, although Theo made no sound. Even his breathing was creepily regular.
‘Can you speak, Theo?’ one of us asked.
Theo could not. Nor could he move one arm which had begun to curl into a rigid spiral, the fingers of his hand gnarled. Using what control remained of his good arm, Theo swung it over his head, slapping his hand against his ear in a desperate flutter. His one eye blinked furiously.
After fifteen minutes making a lot of noise we managed to wake a guard. He was not happy, even after we gave him two cartons of cigarettes. Reluctantly, though THB1,000 richer, this night guard woke a key boy to keep watch and then shuffled to the KP hospital.
‘Don’t worry, Theo, we’ll get a doctor,’ I lied.
Sten added, ‘We’ll get onto the embassy tomorrow if they don’t do anything.’
Jet made coffee. We ate biscuits and then Sten pretended to read his book while I read a mail-order catalogue from Alamogordo, New Mexico. Jet stared at the ceiling. A long hour passed. Sten wondered, ‘Can we give him anything?’ I shook my head.
The guard from Building Six returned with another from the hospital. Perhaps an orderly. They did not want to take Theo from the cell. Too much trouble. We said we could help. I provided the overtime payments but only one of us would be allowed to help the key boy carry Theo. The orderly guard called the front-gate staff on his radio; told them he had one for the hospital.
The door to #57 was then unlocked. Sten and the key boy kept Theo upon his mattress and carried him to the corridor. The guard assisted the key boy only by turning the key to secure Jet and me inside the cell. My last sight of Theo was of his bare feet as he was carried along the corridor and then his thin mattress being squeezed a little at each end by Sten and the key boy so he would not fall as he was angled down the stairway.
Jet cleaned Theo’s corner while we waited for Sten to return. When he did Sten waited for the key boy to leave before speaking.
‘You know, even if he lives, he’ll be a vegetable.’
Theo died from the unhurried internal bleeding of his brain in a KP hospital corridor seven hours later. Miraj, the Indian people smuggler, moved in the following day.
I found Martyn at a table littered with the skeletons of a dozen VHS video recorders. He had been scavenging for parts to create a living machine. I was visiting Building Two and Martyn to collect some gizmo he’d made for me. We spoke first of the changes to the KP social register.
‘I heard you had a suicide,’ I opened. ‘Someone from this hut?’
‘Yes. Well, Maurice was British but it wasn’t suicide.’ Martyn dropped a small screwdriver into a plastic cup. ‘Not unless he was some kind of Houdini. Tied head to toe.’
‘Business?’ I’d heard that there were many disputes over food, drugs and space in Building Two.
Martyn shrugged. ‘Everyone’s content to blame trusties working for guards. And drugs, of course. Makes me suspicious of my countrymen but I’d rather not think about that. And in your building, Theo? A fellow here says his mother came over.’
The Swiss Embassy had made a very small fuss for a few days after Theo’s death. A consul visited some of us at the prison. Theo’s mother flew from St Gallen to collect the body and took the trouble to thank those who had helped at the end, not that any of us had. She’d heard bad things of Thai prisons and had said, ‘At least they won’t be able to hurt him anymore.’
I’d finished my recollections and was boiling water for some tea I’d brought when Martyn asked, ‘You really thought they’d do something for Theo in that hospital, David?’
I lowered the purple tin and looked at Martyn. ‘You’re a hard man, you know that? Why is it that scientists are so charming when they strip away someone’s convenient delusions? Like holding a martini and smiling over some suburban fence as his neighbour pointlessly digs another foot of bomb shelter.’
Martyn pretended to be mystified so I got to the point.
‘Sure, I wanted Theo out of the cell that night. I knew he was a dead man and didn’t want to explain a stiff in my cell come morning. What would you have done? Started tapping a blood vessel?’
‘Sorry, David. I didn’t for one minute mean to imply—’ Martyn stood to attend the boiling kettle. Few foreigners in Building Two had servants. ‘Now take a look at this. I’ve a pen for you. You’ll see it has some LEDs.’
I picked up the black pen with three tiny lenses set in its shaft. ‘Do I have to turn it on?’
‘No, just touch it on the wire, holding the top insulated part. That wire around the wall—I’m betting the middle light there will glow yellow. That’s 250 volts so use caution—especially so high up—and the white one just means ten volts from some three-phase source.’
‘I suppose the top one’s red. And if so?’
‘Uh, be careful. Or take some marshmallows. How’s it going anyway?’
‘Not good. Just Sten and me. No real plan. Are you sure there’s no one here in Two who’s up to no good? I mean—150 Westerners, I’d have thought this place a hotbed of intrigue.’
‘There’s talk of things but they’re no threat to the prison. A hotbed? Building Two is “fraught with no danger”.’ Martyn was quoting the broadcast from Radio Moscow’s English language service a year after the Chernobyl meltdown in which officials claimed the area safe. Improbably it was. For some reason almost a decade after the phrase was first transmitted, it had become popular just that month among the foreigner’s of Klong Prem.
Martyn and I then batted around and then finally dropped another plan in which I’d be called as a witness in someone’s case in Songkla. The idea was that I would get lost in transit. I had no faith in the friends of inmates and wanted no talk of escapes beyond the few. I returned to Building Six with my new toy, alarmed that I seemed to be running on ten volts.
Miraj, the Indian travel facilitator, might have been an admirer of the great Gandhi for he brought to #57 no more than two thin blankets and three shalwar khameez cotton suits, all of which he wore at once. Perhaps the chief had drained Miraj of all funds, although that seemed unlikely. More probable that Miraj had paid his rent with promises, for he was said to be very rich. Miraj operated what may have been a faultless profession, depending on the level of service. He guided freemen and slaves alike; he mocked our imposing crested and marbled passports, erasing our arrogant borderlines from our bogus charts. He rendered our visas blind. Public-spirited work indeed and at no more than market prices. Despite his worthy endeavours, every moment in Miraj’s company demanded the strength to resist strangling him for no clear cause. Unfair, really. Yet everyone felt the same.
When I advised him that our chief would not easily be put off without cost, old Miraj produced a borrowed smile that suggested he could
outwait the devil’s eternity without raising a sweat.
‘I’ve met many chiefs.’ Miraj set out his tins of food for his evening meal. ‘And they are all hungry.’
Sten peered down as Miraj opened his tins. One tin held a lettuce leaf. Inside the other seventeen beans, sliced lengthwise, it seemed. I sensed that Sten had taken an immediate shine to our new roommate.
‘Miraj, you old trooper! What have you got there?’ Sten suddenly dropped to his haunches, his knees centimetres from the polished nut of Miraj’s head. ‘No need to spend all day over a hot stove. We’ve got a top cook serving up for us. Our Blow-Job will fix you up with something to get your gums around. You can eat with us.’
‘Thank you, but I’m a vegetarian.’ Miraj half shielded his meal as though it might be vaporised into the pores of this massive Viking.
Sten stood upright just as suddenly as he’d dropped. ‘Won’t cost you much, Miraj.’
‘Most kind but I don’t eat more than I need.’
Sten turned and, to me, nodded assent. We had earlier agreed to accept Miraj into our room. Others could be worse; they might have friends, have ideas—and, for now, the chief would leave us alone as he tugged hopefully at Miraj’s steel purse strings.
Monsoonal rains had continued into October with no cleansing effect, just hastening the decay. Under the downpour thatched roofs disintegrated above our huts, vegetables soured quickly, and the filth surfed rather than flowed.
An old friend would soon visit and it was unlikely he’d be stopped by rain.
17
Charles Stanford had elected to put himself among the wounded. Not at the time of relative safety after each battle had moved on but while the dogs of war still tore at the bodies of the fallen. Following a brief civilised pause, Western law again encourages the arrest of its quarry’s family, supporters and even well-wishers. So when Chas arrives to help, he takes a risk.
With my vocation in mid-level druggery I’d brought enough trouble upon myself to scare away many friends, stun family into paralysis and cause once-firm lawyers to stumble and retreat. Through this immobility Chas would walk. The feature of his interest that most infuriated authorities was that he wasn’t a crook, received no financial rewards and could not be persuaded that he was aiding the wrong side. Few things more enrage those who believe themselves to be on the side of God and rightness than the sight of one who should be a knight in their chosen colours giving aid and comfort to an enemy. Even a small enemy, quite vanquished.
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