Help! Get me out of here! I’m so paranoid now and she’s still saying, ‘Shower, you shower.’ I think she’s trying to get me naked. If anything happened, I can’t help but feel that help wouldn’t come. So I read my book until late, with her watching me, and pretend to fall asleep reading so I don’t have a shower.
Diary entry, 11 October 2004
The hours in ‘the Agung cell’, as I called it, were sheer hell. I felt so trapped and helpless. I’d expected to get back control of my life that day, but instead it just kept spinning further out of control: it was stinking hot, Agung didn’t shut up or stop touching me, the guards kept leering, Merc had been refused a visit and my lawyer hadn’t come. When I asked for permission to call her, it was denied.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to rip that cage door down and go crazy. I wanted to shut that mouth that kept saying, ‘Shower, you shower.’ What the hell was I doing here? I wanted to lash out. I’d had enough, enough pain, enough indignity, enough disappointment and frustration, enough of these pathetic little guards trying to make my life even more of a misery. Now they were even denying me my basic right to phone my lawyer.
I was losing it. I was shaking with rage. I had so much anger in me at that point. But there was absolutely nothing I could do to release it. I had to try to calm down. It was all I could do. I tried putting my hands on my hips and pacing back and forth, five steps forward and five steps back. Breathe, breathe! I kept telling myself. I was blowing hard in and out. Be positive, be positive. I was feeling like a trapped tiger in a cage. It took so much energy to calm myself down. What had happened to my life?
A lighter moment in that black day was opening a plastic bag Merc had dropped off and finding she’d slipped in a slice of her thirtieth birthday cake. Tears sprang to my eyes. It was a slice of my real life. I missed it so much. I shut my eyes, pictured Merc and sang her ‘Happy Birthday’ in my head. I love you, Merc. I’ll be out soon and we can have another party.
A few hours later, I was lying down with a book flat across my face, pretending to sleep, when I heard Agung get up and walk over to the cage door, towards the guards. Then I heard an unmistakable sound. An unmistakable sucking noise. This couldn’t be happening, surely . . .
I didn’t dare breathe. I didn’t dare move. This was too sick, too disgusting. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t happening: You’re just being paranoid, Schapelle. She wouldn’t . . . No way. This doesn’t happen!
A loud groan broke my thoughts. Then I heard Agung run to the toilet and spit.
For what seemed like the millionth time in three days, I asked myself what the hell had happened to my life. She’d done it through the bars in the cell door!
I woke to the sound of my name being called by one of the big police. ‘Corby, Corby . . . your sister.’ I start to get up and, well, what do you know, Agung rolls over and says, ‘Shower.’ Does she ever give up? I had to laugh.
Quickly I poured buckets of water on me, dried myself and tried to dress with my towel wrapped round me. Careful not to show anything to those eyes that sit ever so close to where I’m dressing, staring with what I take as love and wonder.
Quick . . . let’s go. Get me out of here!
Diary entry, 12 October 2004
It wasn’t yet even 7 a.m., but the moment I stepped outside, I was hit by the bright daylight and a media scrum.
‘Schapelle, how are you feeling today?’
‘Schapelle, are you being treated all right?’
‘Schapelle, did you eat yesterday?’
I tried to politely answer a couple of questions as the police yanked me through.
The guards were moving me early to try to outsmart the media, but they hadn’t reckoned on quite how obsessive they were. Apparently, while I was in Agung’s cell, they’d spent the entire day in the Polda car park waiting to catch a glimpse of me.
It was four days since my arrest, and I was finally being taken to my interrogation. I was really nervous, as my life would depend on me recalling every moment of the trip. And that was hard. I had nothing to cover up, but who clocks every tiny detail of such a casually good time as the start of a holiday, when you’re with your mates, drinking beer, joking around and laughing? Now it was vital to my freedom . . . or so I thought.
I did my absolute best, although in the end it didn’t seem to matter what I said.
When Lily and I were going through the interrogation transcript a couple of days later, she spotted a fatal, sneaky line just before I signed it: ‘Yes, the board cover, body board, fins and the plastic bag do all belong to me.’ There was zero chance it was just a typing error. It was the second time the police had tried to fool me into signing a confession. They’d clearly thought that among so many papers, it would slip our eyes. Despite popular belief, the marijuana just being in my bag wasn’t enough to convict me. They needed two bits of evidence. A signed confession would have made things perfectly simple.
I quickly learnt not to trust the police but to trust my instincts. During the interrogation, I suspected a policewoman was secretly taking photos of me with her mobile phone. I told Lily, but she said I was being silly. So I tested the woman by walking across the room. Her phone followed. I moved around a bit more to be sure. Now I was sure.
I told Lily again, and the policewoman angrily denied it when Lily asked her to stop. But sure enough, her photos were splashed on the front page of the local papers the next day. This was the start of an ugly and distressing invasion of my privacy by sneaky, snapping fortune-hunters wanting to fill their pockets.
There was nothing hidden about the media pack downstairs that day. We could hear their loud banter from the upstairs office. I peeked out the window and saw at least twenty photographers and reporters milling around. I braced myself to face them as the police got ready at the top of the stairs to take me back to the cell. Which one? Please, please, not the Agung cell!
I’d been begging Lily to have me moved back to the first cell. Please, I can’t bear another night in there with that woman.
I don’t know what to expect when I hit outside. The media crowd see me coming down the stairs, and I have police on either side on me, holding my arms and directing me. I get to the bottom step and there’s so many people, TV cameras and tape recorders in this huge semi-circle in front of me, everyone asking questions. It’s taking a long time to get where we are going.
I see a Western guy with his hat on backwards. He asks me softly, ‘Are you OK?’ I nod and ask if he’s Australian; and ‘yes’ he is. I also notice a camera guy to the left of me and he has a really nice light-brown eye. He has a camera covering the other one. Thinking that he’s a bit of a cutie distracts me for a moment and I just continue walking. Must have gone to fairyland.
I’m brought back to earth by a reporter asking, ‘Is there anything you want to say to the Australian public?’
I turn and say: ‘Help me! Help me!’
What? How dumb! Why do I say that – why can’t I say something positive like: ‘I’m innocent, my lawyer’s doing everything she can, be patient and I love my family’? That would be better. I could kick myself!
I can’t see where we are going, with so much happening around me. I’m in the middle, being pushed and pulled. We come to some stairs and they get me inside. Suddenly the noise stops.
‘Where am I, where am I?’ Yes, I’m back in the ‘nice’ cell – thankfully.
Soon after, Merc comes over and a Channel 9 crew is following her. Guess who their camera guy is? He comes up to the cage and is reassuring me to stay strong. Cool, now I have a cute face in my memory.
As I’m writing this I’m feeling, like . . . gross! Here, cute guy; there, girl behind cage. Makes me feel sick. How could I think someone’s cute from where I’m standing – the state of my life? What! Who am I?
Diary entry, 12 October 2004
Being suddenly thrown into a hot media spotlight added to the surreal nature of my new life. It’s very bizarre to have cameramen waiting a
n entire day just to catch a glimpse of you. In fleeting moments, it seemed exciting, but mostly I didn’t like it. I hated my name being known for this, I hated looking bad, being filmed with red teary eyes and in sweaty clothes that I’d slept in. I’d never liked being on camera and always used to dodge Mum’s home video because I thought my voice sounded weird and I looked like I weighed triple my actual weight.
This is a nightmare, not just mine but everyone who knows and loves me. Friends from home are calling Merc and saying that everyone, everywhere is talking about ‘that girl in the Bali prison’, and out in the surf here in Bali my brother and friends hear people talking about it. Everywhere, everyone knows my name. Might be different if my name was something like Lisa or Suzy. In a couple of years, everyone would forget about this. But no . . . my name is Schapelle.
Diary entry, 15 October 2004
It was hard to believe how big my story had become. People assured me it was a lot bigger than the image I had in my head. Any time I was taken out of my cell, the media clamoured. Police on either side of me would practically drag me across the car park, fighting through a scrum of media people walking backwards, tripping over things, stumbling in potholes, jostling each other, anything to get their shots.
They were desperate with their questions. They’d fire anything at me: ‘How do you feel, Schapelle?’, ‘How are you holding up?’, ‘Are you getting anything to eat?’, ‘Are you a drug smuggler?’, ‘Are you innocent?’ Sometimes I’d answer them and sometimes the questions were so stupid that I didn’t bother.
One guy stuck a microphone right in my face, yelling, ‘So how does it feel to be a drug smuggler, Schapelle?’ That question hurt. It stabbed me hard in the chest. I just cast my eyes down, trying to hide new tears and thinking that only an extremely cold, heartless being would ask such a question. Did he really expect me to reply, or was he just there to hurt me and get a reaction?
They were relentless. They’d run into the upstairs office while I was having a visit, snap a shot and run out before the police even realised what was going on. When friends and family came to visit, we’d usually have to talk through the bars and the cameramen would stand close, catching every single word.
All the guards were running around shooing the reporters away from the cages, telling me to stand in the corner of my cell so no reporters could see me. I know some reporters are trying to help, but the majority of them will do anything for a story. They don’t realise that when I get a visitor, that’s the only time I’m allowed out of my cell. Yesterday I got out for three minutes. I won’t get out today either, even if Lily does come they won’t walk me to the police room. I wouldn’t want to anyway, as it’s so awful with the press running around you, knowing they’ll soon be writing about you. Makes my time so much harder. It would be very easy to go insane.
Diary entry, 31 October 2004
I quickly discovered that if the reporters didn’t get a new story, it didn’t stop them writing one. The Bali press were the worst, making up pungent and ridiculous lies. Three big ones in the first week were: I had a drug factory in Bali that converted marijuana to heroin; I’d claimed in my interrogation that we fed marijuana to cattle in Australia; and I was known as ‘the Ganja Queen’ and used the codeword ‘lemon juice’.
Merc didn’t tell me at the time, but she was being hassled twenty-four hours a day. She was followed, chased and telephoned incessantly. Day and night she got calls. At 4 a.m. or 11 p.m. radio stations called for live interviews; endlessly throughout the day, the press called. But she didn’t turn her phone off in case it was Mum ringing or some important news about my case. When she came to Polda, the media were literally on top of her from the moment they spotted her. She lost five kilograms in the first week, and I’m sure half of it was media strain. It was suffocating and often annoyed the hell out of us.
The media also started squabbling over me. I agreed to do a telephone interview with A Current Affair, to let my family and friends know I was holding up OK, and was told not to talk to the other media guys. I felt rude, walking through the scrum, refusing to answer anyone’s questions. So when a cameraman later came to my cell asking if I had anything to say to Australia, I simply said, ‘I love my mum.’ Someone from ACA later came to my cell and told me off through the bars. I couldn’t believe it.
I was especially distressed to hear that Dad was being hassled at home by media camping outside his front and back yards. He was changing his cancer medications, so it was the worst possible time for him to be stressed at all.
The guards didn’t like the media either, so I was refused many visits while they camped outside my cell, to stop them getting their shots. One guard tried to outwit the pack by sneaking me down a long back corridor to a side door. Great plan – shame he forgot the key! I had to laugh. The guard at first looked angry but then turned and laughed with me, and he still somehow managed to get me back to safety before the media realised what had happened.
Merc, my lawyers – that is, Lily and Vasu – and I thought it would be a good idea to talk to the media, to protest my innocence, to get the true facts out there and put pressure on the airports and Qantas (the airline I’d flown with) to deliver the evidence. That is why I decided to do an interview with 60 Minutes. Although I had concerns about attracting too much attention, and maybe too much influence, from Australia and pissing off the Indonesians, I was desperate for help from the authorities.
The day that the interview was filmed had been one of my worst. I’d only been out of my cell once, briefly, in three days; the particularly nasty guards were on duty and had refused to let me see a friend who tried to visit. I’d spent the whole miserable day crying.
I tried putting on make-up to cover my tear-stained face, but I knew I still looked really bad when the guard came at about 6 p.m. to take me up to the office. As far as he and the rest of the police knew, I was going to have a visit with my lawyers.
It was a cloak-and-dagger affair. Being a Saturday evening, there weren’t too many people around, and Lily had lured the sole policeman watching me into another office. I was introduced to the reporter and the cameraman, and after we sat down, he nervously pulled out a little camera hidden in his backpack. The interview abruptly stopped and started many times, as he quickly stashed his camera back in the bag whenever Merc gave a warning cough that a policeman was wandering by. We all knew that getting caught wouldn’t be good.
We did a quick interview, but I couldn’t get my words together because I was having such a bad day and was also still very teary. Everyone was very easy to talk to. I was not nervous at all. Just a bad day for me. I’m a bit worried for my family and friends to see the interview because of the mental state I was in, fumbling to find words, in tears and the stressed state of me. I know that would surely make them worry more than they already are.
Diary entry, 6 November 2004
7
Dark Days at Polda
It really sux being in here. I’ve been here for eighteen days. I thought I had no more tears left. I was wrong. I haven’t yet made it to twenty days. I want to know HOW I’m supposed to make it through ten or twenty years. Twenty years I wouldn’t even contemplate surviving. Ten years . . . oh, I can’t think about it. I wonder if someone out there is feeling even a little guilt. I may never know.
Diary entry, 26 October 2004
I SPENT THE FIRST FIVE WEEKS LOCKED UP ALONE IN A tiny, windowless, airless, soulless concrete cell, with a barred door that looked into another cell. Some natural light came through the bars but was outshone by bright fluorescent lights burning around the clock. The air was musty and stinking hot, making it sometimes hard to breathe.
My cell door often went unopened for three or four daysstraight. I could pace out the room, and occasionally did, for exercise, three steps wide and five steps long. I also spent a lot of time uselessly crying, as there wasn’t much else to do. Most animals are treated better; animal protection groups would riot if they weren’t. Some days I di
d have the anger of a captive tiger. It nearly sent me crazy.
Those weeks stressed me way beyond my limits. I didn’t eat; I just vomited endlessly. When there was nothing in my stomach, I vomited water or dry retched until my body shook violently. I spent weeks constipated and badly bloated, until I got a severe case of the opposite problem, which has lasted to this day.
As the days passed and still no evidence came through, I became very scared for my future. My whole body trembled when I thought about worst-case scenarios. I tried to block out thoughts of the death penalty and couldn’t imagine being locked up for twenty years, never having a baby or getting married. But I had to accept that there was fat chance of my going anywhere pleasant soon. Chris Currall had just found out that his time in the police cells had been extended by sixty days. I would have to wait to go to court and prove my innocence to the judge.
Lily came to see me this afternoon, so I got to go up to the police room for a couple of hours. The case isn’t looking too strong. Not surprising. They don’t have much to work with. I trust Lily and Vasu. There is still a lot of evidence to be rounded up; that all takes time. Be strong, be strong, be strong.
Lily talks to Mercedes mostly and I like it that way. Less stress, I can keep my energy – put it to better use. Sit-ups, squats, dreaming of boys. No, I figure the less I know the better for me, to keep level-headed.
Usually I’m a very positive person, that’s ‘usually’ as in Schapelle pre-8 October days. I rarely if ever got angry, upset. When I felt my blood beginning to boil, I’d breathe deeply, smile, tell myself it’s OK. It’s so not worth sweating the small stuff; all you’ll ever gain from that is deep frown lines on the forehead and above your nose between your eyes, and wrinkles on the upper lip. But you know I was positive as in encouraging myself, my friends, encouraging others, people I don’t know; being honest; walking around with a smile, a true smile that can make someone’s shitty day completely turn around. That kind of positive doesn’t take any energy at all. But I am finding positive thinking in these post-8 October days very draining. I am innocent, I will keep positive, I will get through this, I will be going home.
No More Tomorrows Page 7
