Escape (36 page)
At that moment a familiar sound stroked my spine. The unmistakeable scrape of a sandaled foot across gravel. Sinking behind a factory pillar, I looked left and froze. Sixty metres away, standing at a massive water trough, the pot-bellied guard, Bonpan, stood leaning over the slowly filling tank. Wearing only shorts and a vest, he appeared to have shuffled from sleep, seeking water.
In the darkness I crouched to my bag and groped for the one device I’d hoped might save me from such an event: a bulky, black automatic pistol, its fat round-tipped silencer now attached to the front. A distinguishable silhouette at any distance. Easing the final tube into clips at its bridge, I activated the laser that formed its sight.
As I waited the red dot quivered with speckled iridescence low on the factory wall describing the inclination of my grip. Bonpan, known to me and a man of mostly even temper, sagged heavily at the trough’s edge and splashed water on his forehead. I took a handful of cable ties and planted them at my back under my belt line.
Only I knew what the drowsy guard should not: that the macabre-looking automatic was a fake. Nothing but the laser sight was true. The body and grip of the gun I’d sculpted from model-airplane balsa wood before gluing and painting it black in the utmost secrecy. The matching silencer had been a bottle of skin cream, its domed cap severed to form the exit port. The laser was also a pen.
This charade was not ill considered. The value of having a real gun seemed small in almost every scene I could imagine. To begin with, smuggling a silenced weapon and sub-sonic ammunition into Klong Prem would have carried deplorable risks. Even speaking to the type of locals who could find such a weapon would invite gossip. What’s more, to fire even a well-made gun on a still night would be far from silent, much less the dodgy tool I might get. More importantly, a real gun would be almost useless. Any night, distant guards would be no threat for I could simply avoid them. Those behind me whom I failed to spot would either sneak away for help or shout to me at a distance. Shooting one on the turn at sixty metres was no job for a pistol. Even a hit would most likely result in the wailing wounded groping for his radio as I emptied my gun at a now more difficult target. Any real shooting would probably generate the sounds I hoped to avoid.
Conclusively the only value in a gun would be its appearance. Should I turn from my ladder to find an advancing guard, the first impression must carry the moment. The sight of a red dot upon his heart combined with the lethal intent implied by a fulsome silencer would take his breath away. Before he could speak I would issue calming instructions to hold him until I closed the gap between us. Gaffer tape and cable ties would then form the best silencer. Alternatively I could round a corner to come face-to-face with some barefoot wanderer and a gun would be unnecessary. Without the sensitivities of my roommates to consider, a guard could more easily be made still by hand.
At the tank Bonpan raised himself from the water with some effort. He looked at the clouding sky then turned and lumbered away. I moved to the factory corner to watch him return to his garden. It was not yet five o’clock so there was a good chance he would re-enter the semi-conscious drift that formed guards’ sleep.
After collecting my ladders I carried them balanced underarm beyond the water tanks to the first wall. The wind had settled and I heard the dribbling chortle of water pipes as they filled the wash tanks. A sound that belonged to Klong Prem only at night, for in daylight hundreds of voices smothered all small things. Similarly, night changed the odours of even the worst places. During the day clay stoves fuelled by rags, rotted furniture and empty plastic bottles soured the ground and issued microstring soot over the washhouse. Now, during the smokeless night hours, the smells of the cooking hearths blended and the earth breathed. On the lines, the laundry of the moneyed classes left oversoaped by their washermen perfumed the air and brushed my face as I made a hunched transit between sheets and sarongs.
The wall leading to Building Seven was topped by wide, flopping coils of barbed wire. These were held between steel posts and anchored by U-bolts. One ladder allowed me to the top to wrench out the U-bolts with pincers. Then, although I knew better, I tried to cut the wire with those beaver-tooth pliers. Not enough leverage.
From the ground I taped a small coat hook to the spare bamboo pole. The barbed-wire coils were now conveniently sagging between their supports and I hooked the low point with the pole. I drew the wire well below the wall’s rim but it sprang up as soon as I released the pole. I could have sacrificed some of my rope to stretch the coils and tie them to the nearest laundry pole. Yet with time burning at my neck, I simply grabbed a table from the cookhouse, taped it roughly to the pole hook I’d no longer need and so produced an ugly anchor.
Now with a clear approach, I put both ladders against the wall, my bag over my shoulder then climbed, straddled the wall and hauled the smaller ladder over, followed by its big sister.
From my perch I had a view of walls unseen from any window in Building Six. The thick, angled walls of Building Seven, the wire hedges between sections and a high ferroconcrete wall that obscured those beyond the AIDS compound. I climbed down to the marshes of Building Seven, hearing my breathing: exhausted, drained of ambition and even curiosity. Feeling contempt for something (I don’t know what) for I now had to make decisions as well as climb these cheap mountains.
So then, quite empty, I called upon unreasoning hostility. Alas this usually reliable resource was puddled in torpor. I stood unmoved by images of flesh-grinding chains and dungeon rot that shadowed upon the stones from every angle.
Fortunately the night air told me that I was alone and alone among the 12,000 free to move.
Abruptly I found myself sitting high again, now on top of the second wall of Building Seven with my needless speculations left on the ground. I had taped the two ladders together and was moving between walls with my skinny castle-storming ladder balanced over my shoulders. Atop each inner wall, the ladder rose well above its rim, allowing me to climb quickly down as it seesawed over.
From an unfamiliar courtyard of dangerously open ground, I speared into an unexpectedly dense garden, squashing through its wet soil seeking any path that would take the long ladder. Here, plenty of newness and freshness for someone confined to Building Six for almost two years but I was a slave to time and the ladder, a runaway cross-country bus.
The climb to the AIDS-sufferers’ building brought a surprise: no tree cover. So quickly down and over to the building’s wall. Keeping low beneath the windows, pausing to check for sounds of others and continually adjusting my load to avoid strikes. No sound from the wards, only a cloying odour that seeped and held.
The next wall was comparatively low. An easy hurdle using the ladder to flatten three rows of barbed wire on top as I tilted from one side to the other. The gaffer tape was holding well and the picture-frame rungs made climbing swift while the bamboo settled quietly each time it touched ground. Perhaps some vestige of the grass of its ancestors. Before me opened a wide-pathed quadrangle with weedy lawns just under half the size of a football field. High and bright lights illuminated two intermediate towers. This must have been an old prison left as an island when Klong Prem was enlarged. The towers were unmanned but between them sat a darkened guards’ hut.
Setting my ladder flat to the ground, I crept to the hut to hear faint evidence of a sleeping guard. An intake of breath; body weight shifting against hemp cords from a charpoy bed. I would like to have known more but the hut was edged with a gravel path. I retreated to my ladder.
Beyond this field rose the outer wall. Given the position of buildings, lights, towers and guards, going sideways was as dangerous as going ahead. And there was the hour. I could smell dawn.
As I loped across the quadrangle like a pole-vaulter’s caddy, I wondered what function had a row of three-metre concrete poles I could see ahead. Almost as I was upon them, I saw they held a near-invisible wall of barbed wire. Twenty or more taut strands from base to top. I turned my ladder in time to collapse in the mud beneath this unforeseen barrier.
It was simple but effective. Too muddy to dig under, too noisy and exposed to ladder over. Triple-stranded and too tough to cut.
I cursed heaven and earth in whispered Arabic—a language whose rich and satisfying obscenities I’d learned from some friendly Lebanese. Reluctantly I cut loose one of the picture frames and wedged it upright between the barbed strands. After dragging my ladder and myself through the gap, I left the frame in the mud as my hands and the frame were too wet and slimy to grip fresh tape. The missing two rungs now made the ladder clatter more but would not be missed.
Ahead stood the wall, the last wall. Yet before me still oozed the two-and-a-half-metre width of Mars Bar Creek, the internal sewer-moat that flowed below the outer wall. Although I was covered in mud, I would be damned if I’d wade through shit. People would smell me in the streets.
I slid the ladder across the turdal canal and then adjusted the angle to make an oblique crossing. I tied rope to the end I was leaving and scrabbled across holding the rope tight. This was because at the wall side, there was less than one metre of path—not enough to drag the ladder across without tilting it into the fetid magma of Klong Prem. This ladder and I were pals by then. I would treat it with courtesy. After pinning my side of the ladder with a stick (snapped off a finger of bamboo, less concerned with noise by then), I raised the rope to pivot the ladder across the moat.
Done. Now, the last wall.
From my narrow belt of land, I could only raise the ladder by lifting one end and walking underneath while keeping my arms above my head, moving sideways. Finally raised, the ragged bamboo tips reached the wire atop the wall. I climbed.
The sky overhead was a glowing shroud of deep blue yet I didn’t look at my watch. As its figures would become visible so would I. Here at the western wall, the nearest tower was unmanned. The corner tower probably manned by a guard ready to wake. The ladder held strength but wanted to bounce away from the wall as I ascended. I reached the top and opened my eyes to a view I had imagined for so long it was already a living memory shaped from stars above a purple–black horizon and infinite focus.
Yet my eyes were flashed by a flattened rainbow of colour on the horizon where a deep orange was pressing against a forgiving blue. It was a quarter to six with dawn just minutes away.
Sliding and bumping to the ground back inside the prison, I threw off my muddy clothes and used the last of the bottled water to clean myself. I changed into my street clothes kept in a plastic bag. Before climbing again I put on the heavy rubber gloves to deal with the electric wire.
Once more at the wall’s apex, I looked close at the strands of wire I would need to climb. Without self-discussion I’d decided two things: to abandon Martyn’s voltmeter (for no figure would alter my course) and to avoid swimming the moat. At the other side of the wide klong was a muddy field of reeds leading nowhere. I dropped the rope over the free side and attached the midpoint fold to the steel post that held the electrical cables. Touching the wire with the back of my gloved hand, I felt nothing.
As I lifted myself up to the post, leaving my faithful ladder forever, I looked up once more. I was alone, floating above a free earth. A small unbelieving human in this sudden and most-private world, I was inescapably touched by the red ball of the sun as if by the immortal hand of faith.
Lifting myself to the tip of the steel post, I had to risk a rubber-soled foothold on the exposed wire. I felt a tingle of conductivity along my shin, not more. Easing myself over and turning I repeated the foothold. A last surge of current and then I was clear, taking the acrylic rope in both hands and sliding nine metres to the ground.
I had landed on the narrow earthen footpath that surrounded the prison walls. Pulling the rope through, I bunched it and threw it over the reeds. I felt like a civilian in my street clothes but clouds had greyed the sun as its light rolled toward me and I knew I was far from being one among the morning crowds of prison staff who would be arriving for a day’s rest.
I drew the black umbrella from my bag and popped it open. Only a few drops of rain fell over Klong Prem. The clouds were unconvincing and the skittish mists lifting but I needed that umbrella’s protection as I had a long way to walk.
Keeping an even pace I kept close to the wall, walked to the first corner, and turned. Another great wall before me and I kept the umbrella low—just high enough to see the path ahead. As I passed the last corner I could not resist looking up to the guard. He held his rifle in the crook of his arm and looked down at the people arriving with early deliveries and others opening their stalls at the front of the prison, some boiling water for a first coffee. As I passed below he took an interest so I lowered my black canopy upon my pale face. I held to that day’s maxim: ‘escaping prisoners do not carry umbrellas’. I hoped the guard would conclude from my khaki trousers and brown shoes that I was one of his colleagues, taking the side path, perhaps to avoid a boss.
‘Lucky, lucky, lucky,’ I whispered to myself, for I could see nothing.
The footbridge crossing the moat was just to the side of the main gate, by then alive with voices and feet. From my webbed shield I heard greetings and chatter, the sound of cars, too. Crossing the bridge I had to lift the brolly’s rim to avoid collision. I walked beyond the visitors’ shops but kept to the driveways, despite the foolish temptation to head for open ground. Drivers have less time to focus. At the unmanned and open boom gate I moved against the tide of arriving civilian Klongsters and cars hopped over the speed humps. A new Mazda belonging to a ruthless Building Six guard bumped high and he gave a most curious look.
A farang?
But his car drove on and within two minutes, I was at the main road. Another long minute before a break in the traffic allowed me to cross this main artery and its dividing barrier without looking panicky. Finally I could lower the umbrella that had been my staff and comfort.