We had two bars to remove, meaning four cuts of two-and-a-half-centimetre steel. With the finest tungsten blades this could take between ninety minutes and three hours depending on how much noise we might be prepared to make. Using oil from the umbrella factory would dampen the sound but slow the cutting.
These estimates were not based on watching the family plumber make a mess of the lawn sprinklers but from the seasoned advice of Harvey Oldham, my bank-robbing friend. Harvey, by nature, took exception to imprisonment and had escaped five times. Following his earliest arrest he broke through the skylight at the police station. Later, left alone during his trial in a holding cell, he cut his way through the steel mesh to leave via the lawyers’ rooms. Once sentenced he ground his way out from the first prison he found with mortar between bricks. Harvey’s advice had been strongest on one point: the best blades are the most brittle; held without a saw handle, they will break as the hand wavers with fatigue. Two blades would be enough for two bars even allowing for a break in each. I would make sure we had four.
One thing stood before this plan. To buy the blades from anyone connected with the prison—foreigner or Thai—would almost certainly result in detection or betrayal. We would need to look outside the prison. We might need to look beyond Bangkok, beyond Thailand.
The New Year had opened with a modest social season for foreigners. A few post-Christmas contact visits and the embassy parties. Consular staff from the missions of Italy, Switzerland, Portugal and Poland each visited their imprisoned citizens, bringing seasonal food. The Nordic alliance of Denmark, Sweden and Norway sent an emissary with less time but more expensive gifts, which had underlined the high value of Christmas in those countries. In earlier years the richest foreign mission—that of the United States—had mounted full Thanksgiving lunches within the walled garden of Klong Prem. This had stopped when conflicting DEA arrangements for co-operation and testimony resulted in jagged rifts throughout the American bloc. When all gathered in one place there had been ugly scenes.
The British would never throw a party for their countrymen captured by foreigners and this entirely for reasons of history and class. England had invented prisons as we know them where bad food is an esteemed tradition. As well, diplomats had once been selected nobly and convicts were very much below the salt so the two could never share a table. Perhaps beneath all that lies the myth of empire’s conquest and glory: those who choose to fight on foreign soil under their own banners take their chances. If they allow themselves to be taken alive they should expect no aid from the Crown. By contrast former British colonies aimed to put on quite a spread—perhaps, in part, because the British did not.
‘Lay out my Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes,’ I commanded Jet on the Monday in mid-January of the Australian Embassy party. Jet sniffed a contemptuous do-it-yourself at my office cupboard and returned to his artwork. He was drawing a poster for Sharon’s jazz band, each member a face on a giant watch. I turned to Sten who had moved to our office after Theo’s death.
‘What about if I wore a safari suit?’ I asked. ‘Would that be amusing?’
Sten didn’t care. ‘You were French last week. Leastways, you were French enough to eat your way through their embassy food.’
‘I sit there and don’t say much. Eat a little. Nod from time to time and say, “Sure, fine” with an accent. Call me a tramp if you want.’
The French bash had been disappointing apart from the food and the smuggled wine. After six years in Klong Prem Raymond had been transferred to a Paris jail and the remaining French were broken men. None with any skills or resolve. This week I’d been told I’d meet three new faces at the Australian party, although Sten and I were slowly accepting that we might be on our own.
‘So where do you come from, really? Are you Australian?’ Sten had never asked before.
I tucked some plastic bags into my pockets. ‘I’ve bought or revised maybe two dozen Australian passports over the years. I think that entitles me to a free meal, wouldn’t you say?’
‘They might not see it that way.’
I’d spent many years in Australia and came to respect the land more and the cities less. The outback is an alien landscape of dry, ancient skins suggesting some lost primordial richness. Signposted with resolute trees gnarled and weathered as were the forearms of pioneering country folk, even in the east. Rocks and stones not immovably set in the earth—ready to move on hidden legs if no one was watching. The bush headily perfumed yet chaste; most life camouflaged against some extinct universal predator, its fresh morning sounds all avian bells and reptile whistles that spear warnings and defy location. Above the land it’s easier to apply character to people already several generations dead. The living are not so easy to define.
Lunch had been set upon several large tin tables under a bright plastic canopy on the grass plain between the main gate and an empty warehouse. At first sight it seemed that half the Australian mission had fled Bangkok to set up a field embassy in Klong Prem.
‘This is our Christmas-cum-Easter party for you all,’ announced consul Campbell Broun with subdued pride. ‘I though I might have trouble making up the numbers but it turned out just about everybody wanted to come.’
The diplomatic squadron numbered sixteen to our nine, without including four children from the South Sathorn Road embassy. Visitors included two clerks from the visa-assessment section, a man from Trade and Development and some officials who eschewed titles with their wives or partners.
‘We’ve tried to bring you a little slice of Australia today,’ beamed a woman of middle age still holding her cubist handbag as she stood behind the bowls and plastic cutlery on a red-checked tablecloth.
Square-cut ham, potato and corn salad with diced bell peppers in mayo; more potato salad but spiked with chives, chickens both dismembered and sliced from a fatty roll; bite-sized frankfurters with toothpicks and jars of black, salty yeast extract that needed rationing.
‘There’s not enough Vegemite for everyone to take a jar,’ warned a plump woman wearing a 1960s-style Japanese silk dress as she tore at wrinkled foil covering a collapsed sponge cake.
A third secretary held a jar weightily and winked some expertise. ‘We weren’t allowed to bring you guys any beer but can’t stop any of this getting into the fruit juice when you go back.’
The nervous fingers of a woman from accounts picked at clingfilm covering a large plastic bowl. ‘This trifle’s home-made with an extra splash of brandy.’
The uneasiness of some consular staff was not due to our position as prisoners but from the decay apparent in most of us. My earlier acquaintances—Garth Greengills, Ray Looseskin, Dale Hollowcheeks and Martin Sallowface—had been joined that day by Tubercular Ted in his wheelchair, Ving who’d been damaged boating from Vietnam to Perth as a child and damaged flying back as an adult, Brian who lived with his kathoey Thai wife in Building One and two AIDS invalids who were held upright only by the interlocking molecules of heroin working hard within their bodies.
Brian, almost the healthiest, stepped from the group and spoke.
‘Ah, it looks a treat, luv. I haven’t been to a party in eight years.’ Brian lowered the east-Sydney twang he normally used by a notch. ‘It’s not even my birthday.’ Another voice was there to come out.
Brian and I found enough chairs in the warehouse so that we could all sit and thus avoid a buffet. Some among us with enough energy took turns hammering the consul about our cases while some sat quietly pocketing the plasticware.
A discussion began about the kidnapping months earlier of three engineers in Cambodia. Remnants of the Khmer Rouge had taken an American, a German and an Australian citizen into the jungle and then made complicated demands for their return. Demands that carried the shriek of radical politics but an undertone of mercenary greed. The Australian man was highly regarded within his local community and his suburban football club had raised A$ 150,000 to have him freed. The plan stumbled at the door of the new Australian Embassy in Phnom P
enh.
‘There were all sorts of odd characters arriving for the negotiations,’ complained Campbell Broun. ‘It seems to me the poor family were being very optimistic. In fact the whole thing broke down.’
Brian had heard of the ordeal and wondered, ‘What ever happened to the bloke?’
‘Sorry to say all of the hostages were killed.’ Campbell finished constructing his sandwich from cold cuts. ‘Beheaded. A brutal lot, those Khmers.’
‘Did the Americans offer money, too?’ I asked. ‘Or the Germans—they usually pay up.’
Campbell replied that he wasn’t there, didn’t know.
I kept at it. ‘The story was that the payoff was actually blocked by the diplomats. Private money, private negotiators but somehow the embassies dropped the lid. Anything to that?’ I couldn’t make my position with the Australian officials any worse than it already was. When a government is funding its policemen to fly to a foreign land to testify for the prosecution, you’ve got nothing to lose.
‘Those people were terrorists—we can’t negotiate with terrorists.’ That was Dennis Effusius, the head of mission. In the first visit to a Thai prison by such a senior official Dennis had been pretending to listen to a hopeless petition from Garth Greengills. ‘When one starts paying, where does it stop?’
‘I guess if it’s a private arrangement it stops when you get your dad back in one piece.’ I looked at my fingers as though figuring it out for the first time. ‘I think everyone knew the kidnappers were ugly, not much point in asking them to prove it. Or was there?’
The head of mission looked to a chargé d’affaires for confirmation and got it: Yes, this was the troublesome shit who would soon be dealt with. Dennis then said to the table, ‘Indeed, a real tragedy.’
As the sun tilted in the sky the cream sponge cake was cut, the pavlova meringue dished and every inmate was given a business-class toilet bag from Qantas. Campbell’s two sons were nine and eleven and kept to themselves, even though most of us were now mingling, remembering an old ability to mingle. To the children we prisoners must have seemed a freakish bunch. The majority of those standing in that walled garden were diplomats with clear, glowing skin, wearing clean and new clothes; the women with brightly coloured dresses accompanied by an easy manner. They could have been airlifted from any Sunday barbecue in Sydney. We on the fringes, like a growth, must have seemed more repellent to the children than the bizarre sights they would have seen on Asia’s city streets. Most of us grey of skin, thin and diseased. Three with T-cell dropsy now bedecked with mottled, patched blemishes, wasted bones and lingering carrion odours. Also one, emaciated and green–blue from impending liver failure and another wheelchair-bound being eaten by consumption.
At the soft-drink table I turned to Dennis Effusius.
‘Been stationed in Bangkok long?’
‘Oh, two years now,’ replied the mission head. ‘But strictly speaking, my sentence is over. I’m staying on for a bit.’
‘Good accommodation?’ I showed an interest. ‘I think I’d live in a high-rise if I had to work in Bangkok, although I guess I’d always stay with friends if given a choice.’
‘Can’t do it. We’ll soon all be living in the compound. Just built thirty-five villa units.’
‘Security the issue?’
Dennis wrinkled his lips. ‘Not really. It’s the traffic. Just can’t spend three hours travelling to work each day …’
And so it went on. Even though I was sure I had some angry things to say about the certainty that all the Australian captives were slowly dying and about the policy of using these deaths as examples, we were talking here about the dangers of eating locally made pâté. I soon caught myself recommending the best place to buy thickened cream in the city. This professional talker had got the better of me. What’s more, he managed the last word.
‘Now you don’t look like you need fattening up with cream. Do quite well for yourself, I’d say.’ Then before I could respond he said, ‘Ah, there’s my daughter, Violet. She’s about to say something.’
‘May I have your attention everyone? My dad has asked me to distribute the gifts.’
Violet was a television actress, then just twenty-one, and had played a young policewoman in The Short Arm, an Australian soap. But this day she was every inch the daughter of a missionary. Brave and warm in ash nainsook, professionally in control of the natural revulsion that had scattered Campbell’s children.
Violet stood beside a large cardboard box under the canopy’s shade. She effortlessly plunged her hands into the box to capture a dozen green travel bags, freebies intended to promote the Sydney 2000 Olympics. ‘There seems to be some extras, I’m sure you’ll find friends for them.’ Violet let drop this polyurethane bounty on the table before returning to the box with a look of childlike wonder at what it might contain.
‘Ah, books!’
‘Ah, fuck!’ muttered Dale Hollowcheeks.
Violet took a book from the box as she passed her eyes over a small card on which our names were written. She leaned toward Tim and read the book’s title for the first time as she offered the much-read paperback.
‘Alive! The gripping story of survival following the Andes mountains plane crash. Now that’s interesting.’
Tim released the lock of his wheelchair and grabbed for the book just as Violet decided that this tale of cannibalism in the snow might not be suitable for emaciated Tim. Violet dropped Alive! back in the box announcing, ‘That one’s a little dog-eared, I think,’ and looked for another title.
Tim’s lunge forward on unfamiliar slopes had set his wheelchair rolling back, a retreat he attempted to correct by clutching for the table. His grip fastened on four slices of inconveniently placed Port Salut and it was only the practiced reflexes of an accountant from chancery nearby that halted Tim’s backward slide.
Violet closed a serviette around Dr Ernesto’s Golden Cummerbund and set it beside Tim’s plate.
‘I know you’ll like that, Tim.’ Violet had become more selective. ‘Love and magic under Ceauesescu’s Rumania,’ she read.
The other civilian and professional guests returned to talking among themselves as Violet read blurbs in the book box before offering them as gifts.
‘You could have them all but we have to call at the women’s prison next door before we go.’ Violet set aside a diet book, a guide to Provençale cooking and several self-help books before giving Martin Sallowface a sports autobiography, If Memory Serves.
‘I don’t get a chance to play tennis often these days,’ Violet chirped. ‘Martin, you look like a sportsman, I’ll bet.’
Martin took the paperback and tried reading it with each eye from under an airline eyepatch mask. ‘Yeah, thanks,’ was all he could manage. That afternoon dealing with outsiders and the heavy food had combined to drain the effervescence of the Australian prisoners.
‘Now, what have we here?’ Violet held up an oversized grey paperback. ‘The new one from Laura Dragoman Smith, The Seven Portals Of Pavlodar. A mystical journey through Kazakhstan. It’s the best one, I think and it’s yours David for being so patient.’
Violet’s bubbling performance ended neatly with, ‘Well, I’m sure you all have little messages to give and to take before we pack everything up and don’t forget to take all of this food.’
As I’d been to three of these events that month I was prepared with a wad of zip-lok plastic bags. Campbell, the vice consul, gave me a sharp look until he saw me dividing the plastic carriers between Brian and Dale Hollowcheeks. Letters were surreptitiously passed for posting and cash given in envelopes. Most of this was against prison rules and although it was easy to be cynical about the limits and stated premise of the embassy staffers’ rule-breaking, it was impossible not to be a little charmed.
As I had no cash to collect, messages to entrust or requests of any kind, I stood aside with Dennis Effusius. I blathered idly about the mysteries of diplomatic immunity—this mostly to avoid speaking about my case and the help t
he embassy was giving the Thai prosecution.
Dennis, trained against questioning, had determined that I’d been trying to get some inside information and so changed the subject.
‘Not taking any of this food back?’
‘Eh? Oh, I’m full. Still, I’ll be taking something. Thanks.’
‘I must say, you don’t look in bad shape.’ Dennis looked at the others before turning sideways in accusation. ‘Considering the circumstances for everyone. I suppose it’s not all the same in there.’
‘You know everyone here will be dead before any make it home.’ I was already cursing myself for rising to the bait. ‘I’m just new here. Give me some time and I’ll look the same.’
Dennis didn’t answer and was immune enough to stand next to me with serene tolerance before moving away.
As anvil clouds moved across the sky, the table and picnic canopy took on the appearance of a cavernous cellar where some madman has tied his victims to chairs while rats and cockroaches scurry over cake crumbs. The villain raises his glass to his long-dead and decomposing guests then exclaims, ‘You didn’t listen to me, did you? Now we have all the time we need and we’ll be such good friends.’
The office was empty when I returned. Bo-Jai’s helpers brought the usual steel canisters of food for the night, which was good as I found I was hungry after all. Stateless Arib saw me at my desk and began to sweep around my feet. I waved a hand at the floor, telling Arib that he could finish for the day.
Sten arrived, soaked with sweat from weightlifting, something he’d been doing twice each day in recent weeks.
‘Enjoy your lunch?’ Sten removed his leather mittens. ‘Make any new friends?’ He raised a doubtful eyebrow.
‘One on medical transfer from Bangkwang. As if the hospital here is better. I give him four months, six if he gets on the hammer. The other, some Vietnamese kid—in for the long haul.’ I was tired.
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