We all walked outside together, and a dozen or so photographers went berserk. It was dark, but their flashes brightly lit our path. It was just a taste of what was to come, and it was truly frightening. Officers were standing on either side of me, holding my arms and dragging me through the media throng. They’d put my largeblue scarf over my head, causing the photographers to shove their cameras underneath it and blind me with their flashes. I was pushed down into the back seat of the police car, as a photographer leapt in next to me, taking more shots, before leaping back out. James was put in on the other side of the car.
I heard Merc wailing and screaming out, ‘Leave them alone’ as the car door slammed shut. It hurt to hear her pain. I shut my eyes for a second and tears streamed down my face. What a shit day.
I turned to look out the rear window and saw poor Merc sitting helplessly on her bike sobbing, just watching us pull away. I’d forgotten to wish her a happy birthday, though there was nothing happy about it.
The photographers were running alongside the car, still yelling and screaming and snapping wildly. As we sped up, they fell behind, eventually growing smaller and disappearing in the distance. Relentless, some of them were soon alongside us again, on motorbikes. My new life had just begun.
5
Waiting For Monday
IT FELT LIKE SOMEONE WAS PLAYING A MADLY DEPRAVED trick on me. Maybe I was being punked? How could this be happening? My head was spinning. I just couldn’t believe this was real.
The first night James and I spent at the police station, I optimistically thought that in forty-eight hours I’d be free. The Australian airport offices would open on Monday morning to provide proof of my innocence, surely: CCTV footage, baggage X-rays and/or recorded weight. Simple! Open and shut. I’d be off the hook. ‘Sorry, Schapelle, it’s all been a big mistake. Go and enjoy your holiday!’ I’d be off to surf and soak up the rays on a sun-kissed Bali beach like I’d planned. Yep, I could handle two days. No problem.
That’s what I kept telling myself as I lay scared and crying on a couch upstairs at the police headquarters, known locally as Polda, in Denpasar. James and I each had an old green couch. He didn’t sleep at all, as he wanted to protect me and make sure I was OK. I slept fitfully. Apart from the stress, it was freezing cold. An air conditioner blasted cold air all night and, with no blankets, I started to feel fluey and got up a few times to search for the ‘off’ button. I also badly needed to use the toilet but was too scared to wake one of the two sleeping policemen sprawled out in cane chairs next to us.
In the morning, I felt dazed and numb. This was unbelievable. I still couldn’t comprehend what was happening. Instead of getting up for an early surf at the beach, I was at the police station meeting my new lawyer and a guy from the Australian Consulate.
Merc arrived way before everyone else, of course – my beautiful protective big sister. She was looking drawn and upset and hadn’t slept a wink but raced straight over to check on us. I was quiet, still in shock and disbelief, as was James. Merc sprang into action, trying to convince the police to at least let James go: he was only sixteen years old and they knew the boogie-board bag wasn’t his.
Merc always seems the strong one. But the night before, she had ridden home on her bike, scared and crying helplessly the whole way, thinking, Oh, my God . . . what is going on? What am I going to do? Katrina and Ally were following her in a taxi. When they got home, Merc pulled herself together to look after the girls, then hit the phone to find me a lawyer. She first rang a good friend of hers who worked at the Australian Consulate. She gave her the vice-consul’s mobile number.
He arrived at about 8 a.m. on Saturday, shook my hand and introduced himself as Brian. He didn’t say much except that I’d soon be put in a little cell downstairs, where there was already an Australian guy being held on drugs charges.
‘How long has he been there?’
‘Oh, a month and a half.’
‘Whoa, what does he look like . . . scary?’ I asked, visualising an emaciated, hollow-eyed man with a filthy, unshaven face.
Then I met the lawyer, Lily Lubis. At about midnight the night before, Brian had given Merc a list of consulate-approved lawyers. ‘Sorry, please call back on Monday’ was the standard answering-machine response until Merc finally got through to a woman. She couldn’t take the case, or didn’t want to touch it, but said her sister Lily could and would phone straight back. She did. It hit us much later that Lily wasn’t on the approved list.
After first meeting Lily that Saturday morning, Merc and I had doubts, thinking she was a little too nice, too quiet, to be of real help.
But then we watched her take a call and almost yell down the phone, not hysterically but in a firm, ‘Do what I say’ tone. We signed her up.
Feeling a bit happier now that I at least had a lawyer, I asked her, ‘What happens if you can’t prove I didn’t do this?’
Blankly she stated, ‘It’s the death penalty, Schapelle.’
I just looked at her and bawled; I just cried and cried unstoppably. It was now an indisputable fact: those signs at the airport really did apply to me. It hit hard.
Calm, calm, calm, I chanted silently to myself. The evidence will be there. After all, aren’t Australian airports the best, the safest, the most secure in the world? Of course they are! And of course they’d have X-ray scans, recorded baggage weight and CCTV footage.
For the next couple of hours, Merc, James and I were left expectantly hanging around. There were no questions, no interrogation, nothing. This is ridiculous, I thought. It’s nothing like the movies. Isn’t someone supposed to take me into an interrogation room and sit me down in front of a little tape recorder to ask me lots of questions? Movies were my only reference to this situation I’d crashed into.
I wanted to be questioned. I had nothing to hide, and I wanted to tell these people that I didn’t do this and it was all a terrible mistake. I wanted them to see how damn ridiculous it was. But I had no control over my life any more, no free will. I couldn’t make things happen when I wanted them to. I wouldn’t be in charge of my day again for . . . well, I don’t know how long.
I wasn’t interrogated for three more days.
Later that day, they let James go, conceding the boogie-board bag was not his. I was taken down to my cell. I won’t ever forget first stepping into it. Initially I froze at the door, just sobbing and shaking. Everything was so unreal. Everything was so wrong. Why was this happening? The guard gently nudged me through, locking the scary-looking door behind me. With tears streaming down my face, I turned back to look at him through the thick steel bars of the door. I had a strange impulse to reach out and touch it but thought it might make me throw up.
I’d never before felt such fright and gut-wrenching loneliness. It cut through my soul. It was agonising. I collapsed to the floor and cried my eyes out. I cried and cried and cried, like a baby. My chest was heaving with sobs. I wanted my mum. I was venting twenty-four hours of primal fear and anguish.
Slowly it started to pass. Calm, calm, calm, the voice in my head started to again say. It will be OK on Monday . . . Just two days and it will be OK. I had to believe it.
I slowly turned to gaze around my little cell and take it all in. It was gross. I was surrounded by four faded, yellow cement walls, stained with thick layers of dirt, grime and graffiti. They were covered in drawings of naked girls and scrawled writing in many different languages, most notably Arabic. Later, I was to learn that some of it was done in pen and some, revoltingly, inhuman shit.
A paper-thin, old green and red carpet covered the cement floor. It was filthy with a musty stench and God-knows-what gross diseases living in it. For sure, no carpet shampoo or vacuum cleaner had ever touched it. In the far corner was my very own covered-in-shit squat toilet with complementary bucket and ladle, and a basin. That was it; there was nothing else.
I don’t know how many stars I’d give it but definitely not five! I wasn’t going to be slipping on a fresh towell
ing bathrobe and lathering myself in free bottles of sweet-smelling bath oils in this place. I’d sure taken the wrong hotel pick-up bus for that. There was no luxury here, no mattress, no blanket, no table or chair, nothing to sit on, nothing to sleep on, nothing to eat off. My pale-blue sarong became my furniture; I sat on it and slept on it. It didn’t create physical comfort, but it provided a psychological barrier between me and the infested carpet, me and my new life. I needed that.
That afternoon, I deeply felt the pain of my lost freedom. Merc and our brother Michael came to see me. Michael had arrived in Bali with his girlfriend on the Friday afternoon, too, flying in from Perth, where they’d spent a few days visiting her family. This was my first chance to see him.
But the bastard guards wouldn’t let them in or me out, though they easily could have if they’d felt like it. I stood at my cage door looking out. Merc and Michael stood outside looking in. They were both crying. From either viewpoint, looking at someone you love in that situation is brutally painful. ‘We’ll come back tomorrow, Schapelle. You’ll be OK – we’ll come back tomorrow.’
I stood there holding the bars of my cell door, desperately fighting back tears. I refused to hurt them more than they were already hurting. I loved them too much to let them know that I was so upset and traumatised.
‘Yeah, I’m OK, I’m OK . . . It’s all right,’ I told them.
It’s so hard not to cry. I’m trying so hard to keep a strong spirit in front of everyone when they visit. So they can leave and know that I’m handling this OK.
I feel so awful. Although this happened, I know all my friends and family know I didn’t do it. Still, it’s all me: everyone’s been so excited and saving so hard for this holiday, and now everyone’s sitting around crying, worried sick, not drinking, not eating, not surfing, not partying – just worrying.
Diary entry, 12 October 2004
When Merc and Michael left, I decided to try to brush my teeth, because I hadn’t cleaned them since Friday morning at Mum’s house and now it was Saturday afternoon. I knew I was fragile but thought I could handle it. I was fooling myself. Putting the toothbrush in my mouth just forced me to lean over the disgusting toilet and vomit.
In the cell behind mine were about eighteen guys, including the Aussie who Brian had mentioned, Chris Currall, who was arrested with 60,000 ephedrine tablets and 1.5 kilograms of ephedrine powder. I’d seen these guys when I was led down to my cell and could easily hear them through the cell wall. A Balinese guy called out, ‘You OK?’ after he heard me vomiting. He told the guards I needed a drink, and after I gave them some money that I still had in my pocket they brought me a clear plastic bag filled with Fanta.
Later in the afternoon, the guards let Chris out of his cell to talk to me for two minutes. He stood at my cage door – a very strange feeling.
That first night in the cells at Polda, I threw up for three and a half hours straight: 11 p.m. to 2.30 a.m. I know because I marked it in my diary:
I vomited pretty bad last night, I was actually in pain. The head policeman came to see me for a bit – he told me to let him know if I need to go to hospital. I don’t need a hospital; I need to get out of here.
Diary entry, 10 October 2004
I couldn’t sleep that night, like most of the nights that followed. Sleep suddenly became a luxury. Lying down on a soft mattress, with a fluffy pillow and fresh, clean sheets, had been a given only two nights before; now it was a fantasy that I longed for. And still do.
It was hell. Almost everything seemed to conspire against me sleeping. The ants and mosquitoes drove me crazy, and the guards sitting just outside my door didn’t stop talking all night. Despite trying, I’m now sure you can never adapt to sleeping on a thinly carpeted concrete floor. I did eventually sleep on the concrete, but only when the pain of sleep deprivation became worse than the pain of bruises and swelling and sharp pins-and-needles caused by the hard floor. It’s definitely not by chance that sleep deprivation is used as a method of torture.
I have to move my body every five minutes or so. I’ve not yet become accustomed to sleeping on the HARD floor; my body is in more pain now than the first week. The first week my bones – back bone, hip bones, shoulder, ankle bones – were bruised. Now they’ve become swollen, especially my tail bone – it’s the most painful.
Diary entry, 6 November 2004
Merc often tried to give me a mattress, but the police and guards point-blank refused to allow it. I have no idea why, as some of the guys were allowed mattresses.
On the Sunday, Lily came to see me, and I met Vasu Rasiah for the first time. I wasn’t told how Vasu fitted in, and I didn’t think to ask. I just assumed he was a lawyer at the same firm as Lily – and I think he was happy for me to assume that. He never corrected anyone when they called him a lawyer.
The Australian media called him a lawyer for months, until he became known as a ‘case coordinator’. It took Merc and me a few weeks to realise he was actually a developer/designer/contractor/construction manager and ‘case coordinator’. At least that’s what it said on the various business cards he handed out.
Two days of hell had passed, and I still had high hopes of getting out on Monday.
6
The ‘Celebrity’ Prisoner
‘YOU’RE FREE TO GO. HAVE A NICE HOLIDAY!’ AS THE cell door swings open, I happily step out into the brilliant sunshine with a matching brilliant smile. Tears of joy wash down my cheeks and the darkness clutching at my heart vanishes, along with the deep pain and fear. Thank God it’s over! Now my biggest problem is deciding between a relaxing poolside beer and the revitalising surf . . .
That’s the way I pictured Monday. I’d seen it, dreamt it and convinced myself of it during the past forty-eight hours. This surreal, crazy madness would stop. My spinning world would beset back on its axis. They weren’t my drugs, I didn’t put them in my bag, I didn’t do this. Just a quickly faxed X-ray or boogie-board weight would prove it beyond all doubt. The police would say, ‘Yeah, look, it’s crazy, let her go. Let her go to her sister’s birthday.’
So that first Monday I sat anxiously waiting for the guards to come and unlock the cell to release me back to my normal, happy life. The moment I heard the guard’s keys jingling I leapt up, almost smiling with excitement. My pulse was pumping as I stood expectantly at the cell door. Please let it be over – please!
But Monday reality was harsh. As the guard unlocked the cell, he murmured that he was just moving me to another cell. My gut twisted as it took the kick.
This was the start of my white-knuckle, roller coaster ride of hope and despair. I’m still on it. I get so hopeful that I might get out, then bang, bad news arrives, plunging me into despair. It hurts. The ride’s a bit flatter these days: no high expectations, no devastation.
That first Monday, my spirits took quite a plunge. No evidence had been faxed by anyone from the Australian airports. My panic and fear flew back with the terrifying thoughts: What if they don’t actually have the evidence? What if we can’t prove the drugs aren’t mine?
What happens if they can’t prove I didn’t do this, then what . . . I stay here? That would kill my mum. It would be all my fault, even though I didn’t do it. This is all way too much, and it’s because of me! How can I say I’m sorry, how do I start to say I’m sorry? I’m here. Why? Why am I here? It’s not me. I shouldn’t be here. And I’m sorry. Sorry for what? I didn’t do anything.
This is so surreal. A nightmare, not just for me, but for everyone who knows and loves me.
Diary entry, 15 October 2004
I felt sick as the guard hustled me out of the cell. I kept biting my quivering bottom lip to stop the sobs, and my heart felt even more tightly screwed with pain and a heavy blackness.
I started to take deep breaths, soothing myself by forcing new thoughts: Just a bit longer . . . Maybe tomorrow, maybe a day or two more. But I’d lost confidence in getting the evidence quickly, as shouldn’t it have come today? I was scared as the
police marched me across the courtyard, past some pushy reporters and photographers and into a long cement passage to another cell.
Things were about to get worse.
The cell was a dungeon unfit for human life, with no windows, no daylight and no chance of a breeze. It was like a red-hot sauna and my clothes were quickly soaking wet. In the corner was a filthy squat toilet, so vile that it made the covered-in-shit toilet in the other cell seem not so bad.
Even worse than the cell itself were the people who came with it: two sicko, weirdo guards and a fat Balinese prostitute. The guards sat just outside the cage door, creepily staring at me and occasionally saying a slimy ‘Wow, sexy body.’ I was on display for these creeps, with nowhere to hide. I was very scared. And those sleazy guards were definitely interested in playing more than just mind games.
Sitting on a sarong inside was my first ever cellmate, Agung. At first, when she greeted me with a wide toothy grin, she seemed friendly enough. But after a bit of small talk, she was scarily friendly and just as creepy as those guards.
‘My name Agung, what your name?’
‘I’m Schapelle.’
For a second she looked at me, shocked; then she jumped up, laughing, as she ran to a pile of stuff. She pulled out a newspaper, pointing to a front-page headline that screamed ‘SCHAPELLE’ above my photo.
‘Ha, ha, Saphel, Saphel!’ she kept repeating, and pointing.
It was day three, and already I was a ‘celebrity’ prisoner – not an asset in a place full of criminals and petty guards. To Agung, it elevated me to a status worthy of adoration.
She’s making me feel super self-conscious. Keeps looking at me, lovingly. I try to read my book as much as possible. Keeps asking if ‘You like boy? You like big banana? Not banana. Not good.’ A couple of times she’s touched my breast and stroked my upper arm while she’s looking at me and not speaking. She made our beds up together. I was reading and she was lying on her side playing with my arm – staring. Yes, I’m scared!
No More Tomorrows Page 6
