Without needing to raise their voices, the police were lining up the Wild Palm staff against one of the walls. Nobody was being touched, apart from Jesse. One of the cops was gently lifting his elbow, and at first I thought he was fascinated by the unearthly pallor of my friend’s skin.
But what he was looking at were the three watches Jesse had on his arm, each of them set to a different time zone.
The cops all had a good laugh at that.
Through the barred windows of a police van I saw the name of Phuket Provincial Jail written in Thai script. They had not bothered to spell out the name in English, and looking at the mysterious letters I never felt more like a great big bungling farang. The sinking feeling came to rest in the pit of my stomach.
I was with Wild Palm staff I did not know. We sat opposite each other in the back of a small van with a teenage cop, so young that there was a smattering of acne on his smooth cheeks. None of us talking, all of us in handcuffs, all of us very scared. An Aussie guy. A couple of North Americans. A blonde Kiwi girl, quietly crying to herself.
The van passed through a set of gates, and then another and into a central courtyard. In the front pocket of my jeans, pressed hard against my thigh, I could feel my phone vibrate for a long time and then fall still. I could not reach it, and that made me feel a kind of shameful relief. Because I knew it was Tess calling me back, and I knew that I did not have the words to explain any of this. Tears stung my eyes and I blinked them away. The van came to a halt and they got us out.
There was a queue of women prisoners in the courtyard. All of them locals. Brown uniforms, barefoot, surprisingly cheerful. One of them smiled and laughed and gave me one of those looks that you saw in the bars. A professional look, full of longing and invitation, so well executed that the only way to tell it from the real thing was that you knew it could be switched off or directed elsewhere in a fraction of a moment. Some of them had their ankles shackled. Some of them were not women at all but men banged up between sex-change operations.
‘Kathoeys,’ said the Aussie. ‘The second kind of woman.’ Then he cursed when we saw that some of them were coughing. ‘Jesus Christ,’ said the Aussie. ‘Tuberculosis! They’re checking them for TB! There’s TB in this fucking place!’
I swallowed hard and tried to control my breathing. Breathe in slowly through the nose, let the lungs fill, then exhale slowly through the mouth. Again and again and again. Trying to find control in a world where I had no control.
We were formed into rough rows. There was Farren, his face set into hard lines. Pirin, looking defiant, by his side. Jesse, his face whiter than ever, visibly struggling in the heat. The sun was hot now, and it blinded me after the darkness of the van. Voices called out to us in English. Farang prisoners, gesturing us to come closer, desperate to convince us of their innocence.
But the cops murmured to us in Thai and we were ushered inside the main building, like a tour group in handcuffs, our eyes adjusting to the light, my skin feeling burned after just a few minutes in the courtyard.
Then Farren stepped out of line.
‘There’s been a mistake,’ he said, smiling coldly at one of the young policemen, and I thought it might have been the one with bad skin in our van, although a lot of them looked alike to me, very young, dangerously young; you had to be careful around cops that young. The cop looked at Farren without expression and held up his hand – Halt, his hand seemed to say. But his hand said far more than that, because the open palm struck Farren hard on the socket of his left eye, and I watched him reel back, his hand on his face, the shock and the pain of the blow robbing him of breath.
He got back into line.
Because there had been no mistake.
We were kept in a giant cell where most of the prisoners wore nothing but shorts and a bandana around their mouths, like the villains in an old western. It was crowded with bodies, a great mass of stinking frightened flesh, and there were other foreign faces in here, it was not just the people from Wild Palm. The foreigners all had the same look, as if they had woken up and found that the nightmare they were having was real.
When the smell of the open toilets reached me, the bandanas made sense, and as I felt the heat in here, I could understand why men wore only shorts or pants. But I kept my shirt on, and kept my jeans on, no matter how hot it got, as if removing them was some kind of admission that I belonged here, and that I would stay here forever.
Jesse came and sat next to me. ‘It’s going to be fine,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be all right.’
Then he covered his face with his hands and I put my arm around his shoulders and I did not look at him.
Farren sat apart from the rest of us, saying nothing, as if he did not know us. He kept his hand over his wounded eye.
With my free hand I looked at my phone and when I saw that there was no signal I got up and moved through the bodies to where Farren was sitting.
‘I should punch your lights out,’ I said.
He looked up at me.
‘You wanted a new life,’ he said, his voice flat and cold. ‘The good life. The soft life. I gave it to you. Stop whining.’
That wasn’t true.
All I wanted was a better life.
I flew at him, wanting to rip his face off for whatever Tess would have to suffer now, but Pirin was on me at once, far stronger than me, and knowing exactly what he was doing, wrestling me away and down, the space opening up around us to make room for the violence, his thick arms tied in a complicated knot around my arms and neck, pushing my face into the ground, and I felt my nose and mouth and upper teeth being smashed hard into the concrete, slamming into it, banged into it again and again, trying to stop me struggling.
But my wife filled my heart and she choked it tight shut and no matter how much he hurt me, I would not stop struggling.
9
‘Thomas Arthur Finn,’ said the young cop, and I didn’t get it at first, partly because my name sounded so strange in his mouth, and partly because of that middle name, hated and never used but there in my passport, and there on the computer printout the young policeman read from, the name of my father. About the only thing the bastard ever gave me, apart from eczema.
‘Here,’ I said.
Jesse’s sleeping head was resting on my shoulder. I edged away without waking him and got up, every limb stiff and aching. I suppose I must have slept at some point because the day had drifted by, the sun shifting across the small high windows at the top of the communal cell, and it was fading fast now as the island prepared for another spectacular sunset.
I picked my way through the bodies, most of them stuck somewhere between sleeping and waking, and I thought of the last time I had seen my dad. I was eleven, and he was leaving us for his new life with a woman a few doors down. She was leaving her home too. ‘You’ll understand one day,’ my father had told me, but by now I couldn’t even remember his face, and I still didn’t understand, and I knew I never would, and I knew I would never want to.
I followed the cop down a corridor to a small, clean room with a desk and a policeman sitting behind it. The cop behind the desk was the one who I had first seen standing alone on the balcony, staring at the infinity pool. I had thought he was just some young kid, but now I saw there were the three stripes of a sergeant on the grey sleeve of his uniform. He ran his pen down the list of names in front of him and yawned. There were other papers on the desk, many of them with the Wild Palm logo.
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