Escape (24 page)

Rick sniffed, snorted and then gave up. It was not easy to make him indignant and doing so could often lead to further speechmaking.

The next day after my morning run, I tested one of the cell-door keys. It was a good fit and began to lift the internal springs. Unfortunately it also began to crack. A second key, again formed from Araldite and metal strips, was too rubbery for the torque required. The Goldilocks key would have to be steel. Sten was waiting in our office as I returned.

‘Everything okay?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I sat in the ice-chest sofa. ‘The keys are a perfect match for the original. Just not strong enough for the old lock. Maybe six or seven kilos lifting strength needed.’

‘So what next then? File one up from scratch?’ Jens did not seem as frustrated with this delay as I did.

‘Yeah, we’ll do that but a slow job. Meantime I’ll send out a plastic copy and try to get a steel one made. Not in Bangkok, of course,’ I was irritated so turned on Sten. ‘How’s the photo coming?’ I was asking of Sten’s passport photo, now late arriving.

‘It’s coming.’ Mild annoyance. ‘I’ve written to a girlfriend in Norway. She’s got my pictures. By the way, the chief wants us to take in another foreigner.’

‘Not if we can help it, Sten. It’s just as well Bruce’s gone.’ With Qing now under the care of the Chinese we were only five in #57. ‘Can you imagine what Bruce’s reaction would have been if we’d let ourselves out one dark night?’

Sten nodded, saying in joke-Italian:
‘Caccaria la pantelone!
Bruce would fill both trouser legs.’

‘Right. And anyone the chief would give us is bound to be worse.’

Sten was untroubled. ‘Nothing we can’t manage.’

In our own ways it had been just such assumed confidence that had brought Sten and me to the gates of Klong Prem.

Rick had returned from court not long after five in the evening, and had been bouncing off the walls of #57 since.

‘She did it! I knew she would. Good girl!’

Rick was applauding his Thai wife who had befriended the woman prosecuting his case for possessing fifteen kilos of grass. That day Rick had been sentenced to a year’s probation, a provision in Thai law I’d seen applied only once before to a foreigner in Klong Prem—a year earlier to a hippified Australian with one joint and a pocketful of Thai friends. Now Rick seemed ten years younger than thirty-five. Between outbursts of self-congratulating joy he struggled to show sympathy for those of us remaining with sentences amounting to hundreds of years if combined.

Rick was already shedding the everyman personality he had adopted upon landing at Klong Prem. Those convicts around him seemed more scruffy and amoral now. He would no longer have to hide his education with an egalitarian coat. Some rehydrated sentiment toward his upper middle-class family was now welling beneath his features. No more than sentiment for he’d had no contact with his parents in Southport for years and had abandoned those youthful pretensions for the personality formed with his expatriate chums in Pattaya. I couldn’t see the value in those class distinctions. In my early years under the cold rules of business, I’d tried to wring some useful work from such artificial differences but none paid. It’s a risky investment to divide humans from our animal nature and race has even less significance—no more than a passing fashion, often making traders blind to potential profits. As for class, it rarely earns the stamp of convincing illusion.

Rick could barely concentrate on cheating at Scrabble but managed a game to present me with a wrinkle in the fabric of his imminent freedom.

‘David, you know I’ve spent all my money on getting this far.’ Rick spoke softly. ‘Trouble is, the lawyer said they might kick me out tonight anyway.’

I read from the order of the court. ‘This says you have to report to some office in Damrong Rak at ten tomorrow morning?’

‘Yes, but it’s the immigration police, you see. They don’t know anything but deporting all foreigners released from jail. That would mean tonight. I’d have to fly somewhere and then come back.’

‘Okay, so you’ve got a passport?’ I wondered where this was leading.

‘Yes. But the thing is, although I’ve got enough cash for a flight to say, Singapore and back, I don’t know if my wife will be able to see me in time before I go to give me more. For expenses and so on, you know.’

Yes, I knew. I returned Rick’s release paper and then resumed quartering a human’s worming tablet with a nailfile. The cat Dinger’s worms were eating her from the inside out.

‘The thing is, David, I was hoping, maybe, you could lend me one of your credit cards for a day or two?’

Rick had one convincing argument to support his request. A week earlier he had promised to ask one of his oil rig diver friends to make a steel copy of my plastic cell-door key. Now Rick could do this himself. One part of this new proposal was without flaw: Rick, having worked in the chief’s office for so long, could send me the finished steel key, undetected in some kind of gift.

‘Okay, Rick. You’ll only be able to get US$ 1,000 from ATMs. Try not to run amok. And let me know what’s going on, whatever happens.’

‘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.