Escape (14 page)

‘Sorry, my teacher,’ said Jet laughing despite himself and becoming more frenzied with his ice picking.

‘All right, Jet. What is it? What do you want?’ I stood up, brushing flecks of ice from my shirt.

Jet explained that he was so busy supervising our laundrymen each day he would need help with the daily ice grind. He tapped the pick’s handle, toed the ice chest and shook his head at the shattered blocks as though to say, ‘Look what I have to work with!’

‘Got anyone in mind?’ I asked with a smile. Not surprisingly he did.

‘A good man. Nice boy—he has no family, nothing. Not money. He eats shit.’ Shit was one of Jet’s favourite English words.

‘We already have two laundrymen on the payroll, Jet. A food collector plus your own servant—whatever
he
does—and that idiot who’s supposed to be a carpenter. Plus an ironing man and those two twits you hired last week. Where are they and what do they do?’

Jet shrugged professionally.

‘All right, squirt.’ I gave up. ‘Bring him over this afternoon. We can always use another orphan.’

Sten returned from Building Two carrying an old video player barely disguised in a sack. Martyn had brought the antique VHS tape machine back to life.

‘Any movies?’ I asked.

‘Not yet.’ Sten slid the sack into a cupboard. ‘Only the one Martyn was using to get it working. Some Hong Kong chop-socky movie starring Fuck-me. He says he’ll be over Building Ten by eleven.’

Building Ten was the venue for church services, held each Sunday. There was no actual church and the service was conducted in the yard under the short-termers’ block, attracting mostly Africans. The hymn singing must have sounded wild and threatening to Thais, whose meditative chants were directed at a god not so hard of hearing.

Martyn and I moved away from the shoulder-rattling roar of the chorus, taking care not to stare directly at the wire-topped wall.

‘What do you think?’ I asked Martyn.

‘No real hazard.’ Martyn swept his eyes across the electric wire. ‘Connected to the 240 volt mains. No transformers that I can see so you’d have to be well earthed to get any arcing.’

‘So what’s all this stuff about people being fried on the wire?’

‘Only expectations.’ Martyn thought that those few who had climbed near the wire had felt a tickle through their sweat. Fear was enough to make them fall to the ground.

‘Staying in Six?’ he asked.

‘I have to. Six’s got four major walls just to get to where we are now but I cut off my options if I go anywhere else.’ I outlined the new plan.

Rather than deal with cell bars and scale five walls I would take advantage of a friendship formed with some of the Frenchmen I’d met in Klong Prem allowing me access to the car-repair yard. Although the prison’s autoshop in Building Six was more or less off limits to foreigners, a tiny patch of ground had been allocated to an old man whose poor health rendered him harmless.

Jean-Claude rarely moved from his chair beneath a tamarind tree where he spent his days reading books on mysticism. The old man’s career with the underground
médicaments sans frontières
had ended with his arrest for keeping a bucketful of amphetamine tablets under his bed. Night-time snacking had made him too talkative. His existence and needful condition would allow me to visit. The old man’s meals were brought by his compatriot, Raymond, who was the best cook in KP. Already I’d given Raymond books for Jean-Claude about psychiatric curiosities; much in vogue at the time and unaccountably sent in large numbers to us by the British Embassy.

The greatest difficulty with the new plan would be the high level of co-operation needed from people outside the prison. It would require that a VW Combivan be modified with internal panels to provide at least coffin space for one person. Raymond was supposed to be on good terms with a guard who arranged the private repair jobs in the Klong Prem area. The doctored Volkswagen would be delivered to the guard for a re-spray. This van then brought into Building Six by the guard, painted during the week, then returned for collection on the following Monday. This guard normally drove these vehicles out from the prison before noon. Once inside I would not be missed until early evening.

‘How many people would knowingly be involved?’ Martyn, I could tell, saw more ifs in this plan than I.

‘Certainly not the guard. He would believe only that it would be just another repair job. Probably old Jean-Claude. If the van is parked in a bad spot he might need to pull a heart attack as a distraction. I’ve got a friend outside who can make up the secret panel.’ I was thinking of my former Thai partner, Myca. Then I stopped talking, waiting for comment. None came.

In the pause between psalms I asked Martyn, ‘What do you think are the odds?’

‘From that, not knowing who the people are—’

‘No,’ I interrupted. ‘I mean the odds against anyone getting out of here using any scheme.’

‘Well, since no one has ever done it there’s no percentage success rate from which to draw a table,’ Martyn began in his considered-opinion mode. ‘Imagine this. You’re sworn to secrecy and led to a ginormous warehouse. Big enough for a Saturn V rocket. Inside, this warehouse is filled with black marbles. Billions of them. But there’s just one red marble. You go inside where it’s pitch dark. You’ve been asked to select only one marble and you flop around in there being bruised before realising nothing you do is going to make any difference. So you grab one and ask to come out.

‘In the bright sunlight you find yourself holding the one red marble. You think you’re pretty special but your hosts tell you that everyone in the world comes to this warehouse at least once in his life. All six billion of us. You still think you’re special and damned lucky, too, till you ask what’s the prize for the red-marble picker and they say, “Oh, nothing. We don’t give a monkey’s who picks what. We just don’t give a toss. After all, sooner or later someone had to pick the red ball.”

‘Look at all those people singing to the heavens, praising a creator.’ Martyn gestured to the congregation who had now turned to the real business of the morning: trade. ‘They feel pretty special. Around all the stars with all their planets there had to come a creature who would one day think about the rarity of his existence. We’re probably the only creatures in this galaxy who try to build machines like ourselves but it had to happen sometime. We feel special and we just can’t help it. We can more easily tell our hearts to stop beating than prevent ourselves from instantly forming theories based on the feeblest throb from any one of our senses. Add sight and sound and the thing becomes a fact. Tell another of your experience and a universal truth is born. We’re programmed for this. Seeing something special in red marbles used to save our lives. Don’t worry about how people judge the odds, David. Let the plan evolve, one thoughtful jump at a time.’

That afternoon French Raymond was in our office cooking us lunch. A new set of coiled elements on our electric stove produced iron-foundry heat that forced him to keep both wooden spoon and spatula constantly scouring deep into the large wok.

‘Always I like to work fast,’ Raymond said. ‘Outside I am the same. Fast.’

Raymond was four years into a twenty-five-year sentence for a trifling eighty-five grams he’d been moving too fast to conceal at the airport. He would soon be repatriated to France to itch through a few years more at St Denis prison before release. Raymond was not a career criminal yet accepting enough to help those who were. Like many in Klong Prem he was simply careless with his drugs. His one earlier drug arrest had occurred in rare circumstances (bus stop, bomb threat) in Paris and after Thailand he would end his courtship with heroin.

The food was ready. While standing close to Raymond as he plated five servings I was advised, ‘The man you need to speak to is Luc. The friend of old Jean-Claude, not in the autoshop, he’s in the hospital. Sick, dying I’m sure. I told Jean-Claude you’ll go there next week. He visits his friend often.’

As a young man, the now-dying Luc had put himself about in Algeria with his friends until he was no longer welcome. Rejoining some of his group Luc went to Vietnam making soldierly trouble before moving on to Thailand. From stories he had heard Raymond thought that Luc’s old mercenary chums were just the team to weld and shape the VW van into the habitable steel vault I would need for the autoshop plan. I was less sure.

After we had done with Raymond’s duck Jet served slices of pannetone to go with some pineapple wine aged since August. While playing butler Jet was chewing the scenery with a tray. He wanted to secure the introduction of the latest stray for our family.

‘All right.’ Sten took the tray from Jet. ‘Let’s see your ice man.’

Jet led forward a short young man with Persian features who would have been stocky had there been more flesh on his bones. Jet shoved a chair behind his knees and he sat perspiring under perma-stubble over transparent skin that revealed blue veins.

‘So you’re looking for a career in frozen goods, young fellow?’ I tried to sound avuncular.

Jet took over the interview. ‘His Thai is shit, my teacher.’ Jet explained that Arib, as the Thais called him, spoke some Persian, incomprehensibly accented Arabic, gutter Thai and a few words of English. He had no first language to share with anyone else. An only child he recalled only the cooing of a Kurdish nurse from infancy and had never been to any school.

‘So how old are you, Arib?’ He looked thirty, I thought.

‘Ah, I not know exactly—’

Jet flew in. ‘Twenty-four, we think, but no one—’

‘Shut the fuck up, Jet,’ Sten said kindly. ‘Let him speak! He’s got the bullshit ice-picker-upper’s job, okay. We’re just asking.’

After some time pooling languages we found that Arib was probably born in Jordan but had been moved to an aunt and uncle in Isfahan when aged about five. The couple told Arib that his parents were dead, blaming some warring factions and they did not burden Arib with any schooling in their large, cold-floored house. Arib did not learn to read so his memory of place names and even dates had been garbled with new accents. At some point the Isfahan house was sold and Arib was given a little money, a ticket and a passport of some kind (‘Red!’ claimed Arib responding to our subsequent question, pointing to a cucumber) as he was taken to the airport. From there the sixteen-year-old Arib landed in one of the Gulf states (don’t ask) where his new uncle’s driver collected him and took him to this uncle’s house where Arib was promptly forgotten. Neglected in the social sense; there is no starvation, corporal pain or sexual misuse in this story.

Within eighteen months Arib and his new uncle moved to Thailand. This new uncle was a Jordanian diplomat, Arib thought, although he was unable to recall His Excellency’s name and was too shy to ask the servants and even less inclined to ask his uncle’s frequently changing Thai girlfriends who left the big house in taxis.

‘Is this poor cunt simple or what?’ Sten exasperated, now conceding Jet’s authority in such matters of the street. Jet assured us that Arib was simply without communication skills.

After a few months in the new house the new uncle was called away on affairs of state more and more often; sometimes absent for weeks at a time. Arib, tiring of the maid’s food and her Udon Thani nattering, began sorties into Bangkok. Having no money Arib mostly walked. He apparently made some friends and would spend nights away from home. Following a week away from his uncle’s house he returned home to find the maid gone. A caretaker, previously unknown to Arib, told him that the master had returned to Jordan. Arib returned to the streets, his new friends and was soon arrested for what we would call vagrancy.

Arib’s one-year sentence for being poor had been completed and he now found himself in the unfortunate position of being a stateless foreigner.

‘How long ago did he finish his sentence?’ I asked Jet who then turned not to Arib but to the circle of bent old men outside our office who hungrily scooped rice at the carpenter’s table.
‘Meua-rai
?’ yelled Jet.

‘Five years!’, ‘It’d be five, easily’, ‘A good five,’ agreed the wrinkled KP pundits without pausing in their gumming or looking up.

A considerate five, according to the prison authorities, for Arib would normally have been sent to the notorious Immigration Detention Center to starve or to the insane asylum where, by now, he would be mad. In losing Arib’s file the prison authorities had performed an act of kindness.

‘So can he stay, my teacher?’ asked Jet after sending Arib to the taps with our dishes.

‘Of course, Jet,’ I replied. ‘Let’s not give him the ice pick for a day or two, eh? Start him off with the basics of carrying the blocks, just so he doesn’t get lost.’

Old Jean-Claude was not yet at the hospital when I arrived so I spent a few minutes with the doctor complaining of kidney stones. The doctor had no particular experience with renal calculi but gave me what I wanted: an appointment for an X-ray in Building Nine. That was the AIDS hospice, adjacent to Building Six and on my list for study as it was one block closer to the wall.

The hospital honoured an architectural tradition of impressive façades (typical of Thai prisons) with its reception and administration area appearing newly glassed and brightly gloss-painted. The doctor made a practiced speech about the need for constant donations in order to provide the latest equipment. He did not seem a total incompetent, just supremely uninterested in his patients.

Near these consulting rooms was a newly built, air-conditioned suite with an engraved sign in English: INTENSIVE CARE UNIT. Looking through its glass porthole I saw what could have been a guest room from any one of Bangkok’s four-star hotels. Except that there were heart monitors, respirator pumps and machines with many dials, their connecting tubes neatly looped and their casings covered by colourless matt plastic. In one corner stood a dialysis machine. None of these devices surrounding the large bed was in use. The gently breathing lump under the silk bedspread had a face I recognised—that of Police Major General Prompon Phoont’ang, admired for his investigation into the case of the Saudi royal gems robbery.