“Can you describe the man and woman in the shop?”
“The man who was welding at the front of the shop had slightly longer hair. Like, ear level? I can’t remember his face but I’d say he was maybe your age or thereabouts. I just don’t know, though.”
Mum went silent while she wrote this down in her notebook. She always had multiple notebooks within reach. “And the others?” she prompted.
I did my best to remember the others in the shop but I had nothing to offer, not even the color of their T-shirts.
“The only details I remember are of the woman who talked to Johan—she was much more smartly dressed. She was wearing a skirt suit. Navy, I think.”
Mum didn’t say anything. Her eyes were narrowed as she scanned the screen on the Skytrain; we were coming into a station.
“The next stop is ours,” she said, turning back to me. I couldn’t remember the last time her presence had been such a comfort.
“Could that woman have been something to do with this?” she asked me. “Do you think Johan was doing a handover with her?”
“I mean…I suppose he could have. But I saw him put the jaggery balls in his bag. There could have been other things in there, I guess, but there certainly wasn’t space for some massive drug delivery.”
Mum frowned. “I believe it wasn’t a big one. But they take illegal drugs very seriously here. You must know that.”
I didn’t know anything anymore.
“I think that woman is key,” Mum said. She wrote more notes in Malay. When we were young, Mum only ever used Malay in her notebooks. Maya was quite certain this was to stop any of us finding out what she was up to.
“Sayang,” she said, putting her notebook away, “if I achieve nothing else in life, I will get to the bottom of what has happened. I’ll do everything in my power to help Johan. OK?”
—
Mum came good on that first day, just like she promised. With purpose and confidence she marched us right past the front of the Bangkok South Municipal courthouse, a clean white building by a stinking canal of blue-black scum. She marched us straight up to an area of broken concrete bordering the river, in the middle of which sat a squat building with barred windows. Inside it there were people. Not Johan—I ran to the windows when I saw silhouettes—but people, prisoners, awaiting hearings. People who might later leave and be replaced by him.
“This is where we will stay,” she said. “All day. He will come eventually.”
There was a round concrete table with curved benches next to the cells. It was littered with cigarette butts and grass grew in the large cracks. Near us, a long-abandoned ice-cream cart held filthy water above which a cloud of flies hovered, but the cell block itself was surrounded by well-tended pot plants, and there were shiny new plastic chairs under a blue parasol, presumably for guards.
The sun beat down; the court’s aircon units roared. Prisoners came and went. Some guards handled them more roughly than others. I kept myself busy counting the fiber-optic cables that ran from concrete post to concrete post by the canal.
Mum got us food and flimsy plastic bottles of cold water. She talked from time to time to the guards, but they were unable to tell her when, or even if, Johan would come. On one of her trips, she brought back a mobile phone. “We need a local number,” she said, opening up a sim card from a plastic package. “If we can somehow get Johan an English-speaking lawyer, they’ll need to be able to call us.”
I sat up. “You mean he won’t have a lawyer already?”
“Not an English-speaking one,” she said. “He’ll get the equivalent of a duty defense lawyer. And the chances of them speaking English are slim. In fact, the chances of them being interested in helping him are slim, to be honest.”
“Why? Why wouldn’t they want to help him?”
Mum watched me for a moment. “Oh, Carrie,” she said.
“What?”
She paused, considering her words. “This country is developing at breakneck speed,” she said. “But resources are still overstretched, and there are a great number of people who need help. Some wealthyfarangwho’s been caught dealing drugs isn’t a priority for a duty lawyer who has two hundred cases on the go.”
She cajoled open the sim tray at the side of the phone and loaded it up. A grinning, pink catlike cartoon filled the screen as the phone came to life.
“The justice system here does its best but it may be a year, two years before Johan even goes to trial. And if they really do believe he’s been supplying drugs, the chances of him being found not guilty are nonexistent, Carrie. That’s why I came straight over. If we are to have any hope of getting him out of there, it will need to happen quickly. But before we can do anything, we must speak to him. We must better understand what happened.”
The cartoon cat meowed and then played a plinky-plonk tune. The screen filled with gold stars and then a series of Thai words in sparkly purple. I felt dizzy. A year? Two years? Before a show trial? And then what?
Mum quickly opened another bottle of water. “Drink,” she said. “You need to stay well.”
I drank gratefully.
