Escape

by David McMillan

  ‘You made me love you,’ she’d said. ‘You can’t do that and just—just let it go.’

  I gave reassurances about my affections but as for my luck? The days had passed when I would present smooth excuses to vindicate my nose dive. Those implausible explanations I’d offer with beguiling worldliness as though lifting the lid of a burled humidor of Cuban cigars. Each had exploded before Sharon’s simple virtue. Even then she had an unassailable faith in my abilities. Every attempt to restrict hope and to issue warnings was met with bright, innocent protests and kisses. To smother Sharon’s buoyancy seemed as cruel as bagging a kitten.

  So I promised to be her keeper of the flame. She was wearing shorts.

  There’s some folklore—mostly credited by women—that men in prison are frequently driven to boy-chasing and madness by sexual deprivation. This is not so, for the boarding-school structure of the prison disentangles this little society to childishness. However, there is a deprivation, assuredly chemical, in banishment from the company and complex spells of women. Quite often remembered as a collection of flesh-captured but briefly held moments: cool nights—glass sharp—of a stiletto’s spark on pavement and quick eye contacts igniting a chance courtship. Or bright, blonde sunflower girls whose folded eyelids soften their smiles; olive-skinned beauties—fully rounded, almond-eyed—swirled in waved tresses, whispering with intoxicating breath and beckoning with a rising sweep of shoulder. Perhaps a grey-eyed, seamless and private fleche radiating pale fire from a hotel salon, a woman whose fingers caress a promise over her key’s label as might a cardsharp turn an ace. There were tom-boy-tough tree-house gamines cracking wise while puffing breakfast-cereal warmth from flannel clothes then a mocking smirk curtailed by a shy, twirling foot. And somewhere, shock-talking, heavy lashed, low-note women with taproom pasts fleetingly illuminated by doorlight who can be caught sniffing their fingers; a plum-cheeked vixen held alone in memory by deep-chocolate curls and her diamond-white eyes. In here, all these images endlessly reflected from windowed cities and wet streets—cloistered abstractions and all for nought.

  For above all rose my very own Sharon whose loss was felt the moment she left my sight. In the real world, ‘Do that swoon thing for me,’ I would ask of her while strolling in circles past glittering shops, hoping for a re-enactment of a spontaneous instant from our early days. Stepping back a few paces, Sharon would silently perform ‘Rapture’: crossing her arms, hands cupping her elbows, very slowly throwing her head to the sky, her left hand then sliding sensually along her arm to shoulder and squeezing while liquid eyes rise higher still to close upon a five-sense paradise as she sways against the earth’s spin. Heart filled I would always step forward and make Sharon disappear beneath the cape of my embrace.

  One quiet morning at the end of the week I was standing in the umbrella factory at the window that faced the coffee-shop tree. Sten was sitting beneath, upon its concrete surround, examining his toes. He was alone.

  I spent a few minutes talking with the top parasol man, detailing the size of the pop-up umbrella I wanted made. I then spent a few minutes more waiting for a runner to return with a can of black paint from the autoshop. When I left the factory I saw that Sten had not moved.

  An hour later in our office Jet stretched silently at his desk. His fingers were black with charcoal. From time to time he would pause at his artwork and watch me paint. I’d finished one cupboard and had moved on to blocks of wood. I wore thick rubber gloves.

  Jet stood and adjusted his shoulders. Purposefully he wiped his blackened hands on his shirt to enjoy the contrast. Jet was man enough not to mind a little dirt on his hands.

  ‘Pretty colour,’ he caustically observed. ‘Those blocks go nicely with the cupboard.’

  The paintbrush fell from my awkward grip. Jet theatrically picked it up from the floor.

  ‘Jet,’ I protested. ‘They’re the only gloves I could get. If you were any kind of thief, you’d steal me some doctor’s gloves from the hospital.’

  Sten arrived as I began work painting the laser-pointer pen I’d bought from beggar Fiorenzo (he’d tearfully embraced his consular rep last month).

  ‘Someone died I don’t know about?’ Sten rubbed his forearms as he looked around.

  ‘I’m in the mood for matt black this morning,’ I said. ‘I’ll get started on those picture frames of yours in a minute. Sit down. Take a load off.’

  After Sten moved a chair I asked, ‘Had a busy morning?’

  ‘Busy enough. I’ve been working out with Big John, the Nigerian.’

  I nodded. ‘Seen Calvin?’

  ‘Yep. He’s been over behind the toilets. Nose to the grindstone.’

  ‘What is it about toilets and drugs?’ I wondered aloud. ‘They must be the least private places in KP.’

  Jet left the office to wash his hands and I set the newly blackened laser pen on a stand to dry. I turned to Sten.

  ‘From tomorrow, be a bit careful with the room shower screen. I’ll be taking the hacksaw blades from their stash. Hiding them behind the wall of the shower.’

  ‘Whoa there, Kemosabe.’ Sten kept it low and leaned back in his chair. ‘What’s the bustle?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean, soon—but no hurry,’ I assured him. ‘It’s just that getting those blades out will be a job in itself. Won’t have that much time on the night, whenever that is.’

  ‘Fine.’ Sten said no more than that.

  Sten had not lived in Sweden for more than seven years. In his travels he preferred the company of those who were strangers to his country. He was an outlander in Klong Prem, perhaps the man with the thinnest ties to country, tribe and commonwealth. An outlander yes but still earthling enough to keep both feet on the ground.

  That night as my cellmates covered waves of desolation with a foam of sleep I carefully padded the steps of furniture built for silence to take my position at the high window. An observation deck. For weeks I’d been watching the nocturnal activities of the guards. Or inactivities, really, for most would be in their beds: one in a factory garden, another on the floor of the chief’s office and, infuriatingly, the new guard camped below our window at one end of the dining hall.

  The new sentry, Ravvid, would fuss with his sheets and mosquito net and carefully arrange his water jug. Fool around opening and closing his bag of dried fruit like a squeamish bulimic at a horror movie. Go to bed; turn once, twice, thrice—get up, sip water, adjust the net, scratch ass, get back in bed, pick nose, get up, put three dates on a plate, go to bed. I passed my time inventing variations of a flying-fox wire from which I could scream down the eighteen metres to his bed while wearing mountain boots fitted with fifteen-centimetre, sharpened crampons. It seemed he worked seven days and nights straight before taking a two-day break.

  Resting my chin on my folded arms I looked beyond the wall to the red aircraft-warning beacons atop Bangkok’s tallest buildings. So deep into the night had the haze settled that even the traffic fell silent. Ravvid, the guard, was finally asleep. The stillness recalled nights at a hotel window seventeen years earlier. Sleepless, I would imagine the higher ground where friend Myca had gone to raise our fortunes. The Triangle and Myca’s perilous return journey south. From the slowly dissolving city it then seemed our lives could turn on such small things: an angry checkpoint; a broken axel; some enthusiastic nobody. And now, so little had changed.

  Suddenly, silently, Ravvid raised an arm to the net above his head. He flicked a finger at the net and set it in motion as a spider might test a web. No other parts of his body had moved.

  I no longer cared. Let Ravvid and all his kind sleep or lie in wait. I would do whatever was necessary.

  As a teenager I had kept upon my wall a most detailed map of the Soviet Union. Its faded colours still pronounced the fine, veinous network of connecting roads from shtetl to burg. The map remained on my bedroom wall until a wiser friend looked at the map one day. He lazily advised me that almost all of the positions of towns on Soviet maps were intentionally
misplaced. When he saw that I was upset, he added:

  ‘Of course, the KGB has special editions of these very maps. Only with theirs you need ultraviolet light to read them. Shine some UV on a secret map and the real road network comes out.’

  The next day I bought an ultraviolet tubelight from a stamp-collectors’ hobbyshop. No special tracery appeared on my wall map, only spots of bleach in the paper. I concluded that my friend’s KGB embellishment was probably a lie but I took down the map anyway, for it was true that some cities were missing and others joined by fictitious roads.

  In #57 I soon ended the long, night-time vigils. I’d seen all I could. And in daylight hours, too, I had learned as much as I would in KP. There seemed nothing more of value to discover about my arrest or the courts and should I continue to wonder at those around me, that unprofitable information would come at great cost. The time had arrived to yield control to those cognitive motorways formed in us all under a primeval light.

  After the usual morning run I nodded at Pornvid on the steps and ascended the stairs to our cell.

  Approaching the cell door I saw Ding the cat waiting for me, sitting with her paws tucked under her chest. With the cell keys in one hand I scooped up the cat with the other.

  ‘Dinger, young lady,’ I scolded. ‘Don’t sit in the corridor. Some nasty man will come along and boot your head in.’ One of our Building Six guards had a liking for kicking at cats with his heavy shoes. Dinger’s mother had been brained that way and had delivered early.

  In #57 I set the cat on a pillow and returned the keys. Once back, Ding watched me remove a cloth-wrapped roll of small tools that I’d had tucked in my waistband. Her eyes wide, as a child watches television. Taking the scroll poster from its hook on the wall I tore the Desiderata from two supporting rods. Using pincer pliers I split the rods enough to tear them apart with my hands. From the splinters I removed the four hacksaw blades that Michael had hidden inside. I saw he’d wrapped each blade in the foil travellers use to safeguard their photographic films and had then sealed the blades with wood filler. He must have used a radial-arm saw to cut channels in the dowelling. A delicate job, for sure. Removing the blades had taken twenty minutes and generated some noise. Noise that would be reckless at night.

  After I’d hidden the blades behind the shower screen, I placed the fragments of wood and torn pieces of the poster into a cloth sack that usually held my damp exercise clothes. Turning to the cat I knelt at her side by my bed. With one hand, I encircled her tiny neck. She was so small that, with the same hand, I easily and gently pinched the scruff of her neck with two fingers. She began to purr as she always did at any touch. I could feel the throb on the palm of my hand. With my other I took a small syringe from my kit and flicked bare an ultra fine twenty-nine-gauge needle. Ding’s purring was unaltered as I slid the needle into the furry arch of skin behind her neck nor for the next thirty seconds as I pressed the plunger home—injecting her with 200 milligrams of heroin. Then the purring stopped, her head flopped and she went limp. I held her body to my ear to listen for her heart while I capped the needle. At seven months she weighed no more than a lady’s kidskin glove. I put her body in the sack with the broken spars.

  In Klong Prem it is difficult to throw anything away for there are always people poorer than the ones you see. I had to wrap the cloth sack in paint-splashed newspapers before throwing it into the deepest pocket of the rubbish dump.

  Young Steve from Hampstead joined Sten, Calvin and me for lunch. In that last week Sten and I raised occasional conspiratorial eyebrows but never the subject of the escape. This nodding acquiescence to each other’s position was enough. During lunch I let my guests do the talking. More than ever their faces held the awkward camaraderie of deserting husbands.

  In a perfect scheme I should have helped with some good humour. Made jokes. But on that day I couldn’t join in the laughter of captive men at all.

  22

  On Sunday afternoon I finished my job as censor of the foreigners’ mail by sending the outgoing letters to the Klong Prem mail office. I then turned to the fat ledger at my desk and removed every record of my limited use of official post.

  The factory was almost empty. The sun, low in the sky, began to slip into the office as it usually did for twenty minutes when no one was there. Sten, Jet and Calvin had already begun the afternoon amble to #57. Miraj would already be in our room. In his corner.

  As I had for the past five days I set the padlocks of our cupboards to appear locked, although they were not. This so I could unfasten the doors in silence at any time. All set, I went upstairs to dinner.

  As Jet folded our picnic blanket I stepped up to the shower to wash my hands. Pausing at the window I saw that the new guard’s trusty had not prepared his master’s bedroom below our cell in the dining hall. That meant he would not be on duty this night.

  Turning from the window I briefly forgot where I was. I saw a cell with four men sitting on the floor. Dropping down from that lost moment, I joined them, helping Calvin with a birthday card for his boy in Hawaii.

  A few minutes before midnight I switched off the light to encourage sleep. The new ceiling fan whirred smoothly, allowing the sounds within Building Six to state their business. The disputes of dice players, some distant applause rewarding late-night storytellers. Then laughter and retorts. Someone in a private cell took a shower to take the heat from his skin. Outside a guard responded to a trusty, sharing a joke through the bars.

  Climbing to our window in four barefoot steps I saw the guard turn away. Above his trousers he wore only a thin undervest stretched over a heavy paunch which he rubbed in contentment as he moved away. His bed was under a canopy in a distant garden.

  As I returned to my place I saw that Sten was awake, although his eyes were closed. I spoke quietly.

  ‘Sten. You awake?’

  ‘What’s up?’ Sten opened his eyes to the half-light, asking again. ‘What’s doing?’

  ‘It’s a nice day for a white wedding,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah?’ Sten pulled himself upright.

  I nodded to the window. ‘It won’t get any better.’

  ‘You got everything set?’

  ‘As set as I know how,’ I said to keep it short.

  Sten hunched forward, his arms loosely folded around his knees. ‘Okay.’

  Not long after midnight Building Six became quiet. I sat in #57 beside the weak light from the corridor unrolling fifty metres of army-boot webbing, a ribbon of green nylon. Sten was next to me, awake but silent—lying back, arms folded behind his head. A legionnaire at rest. Before me Jet, a sleeping servant. At his side, Calvin, an ally by heritage. Then there lay Miraj, whose heart was a pea in a whistle, a squealer by uncontrollable nature.

  Of the 700 in Building Six five-sixths were beyond easy hearing and sight but many had rooms that faced the path I would take beyond the bars. Of these 120 fellow prisoners, 119 would shriek in explosive alarm should I be seen passing. (In cell #71, the 120th man was a crippled mute so might do no more than rake the bars with his crutch.) Inside the accommodation block the guard on our floor slept on his elaborate but temporary bed sixty metres from #57. Outside another guard slept in the factory gardens and a third on the floor of the chief’s office. Beyond Building Six five guards were at the central command post and set for a drinking session while half a dozen more were spread among some of the eighteen guard towers, happy to be above the mosquitoes. Seven officers manned the front gate, playing cards. Next to this Klong Prem prison of Lardyao sat the Bangkok Special Prison, Bumbudt Remand Prison (the Cure) and Bangkok Women’s prison—each with its own complement of staff.

  Over and around the Klong Prem moat sat guards’ residences, a live-in training college and the homes of the multitudes whose incomes relied upon the prison complex. In the nearby streets predatory police cars trawled the night. In addition to those officials there idled a society of institutional parasites ready to claim just reward for any service. Within this sub-c
ity there slumped a monastery stocked with monks. Among them those who had briefly comforted two inmates who had been jolted from the electric cables atop the north-east tower before falling to the ground. The monks had held them until the prison guards arrived.

  Inside the cell I set the rope aside and began freeing the hacksaw blades from their groove in the shower screen. There was no point in waking Calvin and Jet. They would wake soon enough.

  Returning to my bed for the last time, I turned to Sten, sitting alert in the darkness.

  ‘S’go.’

  Handing Sten one of the saw blades, I packed a soft but tough bag with the backup passport, a penlight, two sets of keys and padlocks wrapped in cloth and a set of clothes including long trousers. Only civilians and guards were permitted to wear long trousers.

  Sten stood from his bed as I lifted my mattress to the wide table below the window. I set the mattress to muffle the sound of standing feet.

  ‘I’ll begin on the first bar,’ I whispered to Sten before checking at the cell door for any movement.

  I could just see the outline of the guard sleeping under his net on our third-floor landing. He was still. I then eased out a nest of tables near the shower, creating steps to the high table beneath the window. Stepping up, I removed the window’s flywire screen and set it at the cell door where it could not be knocked over accidentally.

  The plan was to remove two of the two-and-a-half-centimetre diameter bars from the window in four cuts to allow an easy exit.

  Pressing the saw blade lightly above the base weld of the first bar, I drew its teeth back in a long stroke. The blade’s tiny teeth flaked away a dozen layers of paint covering the bar and shaved enough minute curls of steel to leave a half-millimetre notch in the shaft. The sound of the rasping vibration, amplified in the bars, had thrummed into the concrete surround. An alien call in the still night.

  ‘Use the oil.’ Sten was standing behind my legs.