Bangkok, September 2010
We were on our third attempt to visit Johan at Klong Prem prison. Once again, impotent and frayed, we waited in the visitor center—a large, open-sided structure with a roof for shade and rows of chairs adrift in the shiny blue straits of an overpolished floor. At one end, a cheerless café kiosk with a pot of plastic flowers on the counter served bottles and cans; at the other, armed guards watched.
A large part of me was still unable to believe anything I’d been told about Johan’s supposed crime, but a darkness was beginning to underpin me now, a subterranean river made visible only by the fissuring earth beneath my feet.It could be true, it whispered.You could be wrong.
I was due to start my new job in eight days. My thoughts hurtled in every direction, and Johan was not there to stem the tide. He was not there to put a hand on my chest and say,Are you actually breathing, Carrie?
—
I was drinking red lime soda, on which I had become somewhat dependent, and Mum was at the front, at the duty guard’s table. He was sitting, smart in his biscuit-colored khakis; she was standing, talking rapidly. To her left, a large group of people was disappearing off through the gate toward the visitor compound, flanked by guards. Once again, we were not part of it.
I hovered, unsure if I should intervene. Mum thought nothing of getting herself arrested when the cause was worthy, but surely even she wouldn’t risk detention in Thailand?
When her voice began to rise, I walked over. “Stop,” I said quietly. “Mum, please stop.”
“They’re playing with us,” she hissed. “This man has just admitted that we are not even here on the right day. Even though they told us to come on a Tuesday or a Thursday. Forfarangsthe visitor days are Mondays and Fridays. They knew this, but they have let us sit here all these hours, spending our money at their café.”
I led her away before she started swearing directly at the guard.
“I knew something was wrong,” she said. “There are plenty of foreigners in this prison; there should have been plenty of overseas visitors. Not least Johan’s parents.”
I had wracked my brains trying to work out how to contact his parents. They must have been at the Swedish Embassy daily since they flew in; they must know everything by now. And yet I had no means of contacting them—no mutual connection, nobody willing to help. Johan didn’t use Facebook, so I couldn’t even start there.
Mum’s hair moved half-heartedly in the hot breeze falling from metal fans on the ceiling. “Right,” she said. “Let’s go.”
We walked to the main entrance, Mum deep in thought, and I braced myself for the scorching march past barbed-wired scrub and watchtowers to Bang Ken station. But to my surprise, Mum flagged down a taxi.
“I have a new plan,” she said as we sped up the ramp onto the Sirat Expressway. I closed my eyes for a moment, enjoying the inestimable comfort of air conditioning. “There’s one more person I can try. And if you’re wondering why I didn’t try him before, it’s because I really did not want to. I honestly believed I’d be able to sort this out without him. He’s an ex,” she added. She sounded uncomfortable, as if I had opinions on her love life. “We were together when I lived here, before I met your father.”
She looked out of the window of the car. We were speeding high above the city, next to the Skytrain. “He broke my heart in a very serious way,” she added, surprising me again. Mum didn’t have a soft underbelly, yet her voice was thick, bogged down with an old pain I knew nothing of.
“Nonetheless, he is very well-connected and he will know people who can help us. And, God knows, he owes me.”
“OK. Thanks, Mum.”
We sped on. My mother said no more.
—
“Johan’s sick,” she said when I woke the following morning.
She was pacing the room, calling someone, but I could hear the phone ringing out. “He’s been really sick. Maybe they were telling us the correct visiting days, I don’t know, but he wouldn’t have been able to come to the visitor center anyway.”
My world slid sideways. “With what? Is it serious? Who told you? What do you know?”
Mum didn’t have much information for me. She’d contacted her ex, Prawat, via email the previous evening and he had replied while we slept. Prawat had spoken to a contact at the Central Correction Hospital in Klong Prem overnight. The doctor already knew where Johan was: emergency care. He had been “very ill,” but he was due to be discharged back to the remand prison today or tomorrow. And that, for now, was it. No medical data for me to interpret.
“He adds only that Johan seems to be receiving generous financial support,” Mum said. “Otherwise he could not have received full hospital treatment. He said he has plenty of food and has just received new clothes.”
My head swam. Johan was never ill. He hadn’t had so much as a cold in the time I’d known him.
Images crowded my thoughts, images I’d seen online in words and pictures. Twenty men crammed into a tiny cell, lying almost on top of each other to sleep. Rats, cockroaches, festering buckets of excrement in corners.
“I can’t stand this,” I said weakly. “Mum, I don’t know how to…I can’t…”
Mum came over and put her hand on my wrist. Another mother would have folded her arms around me and held me until the panic subsided, but I didn’t have another mother. What I did have was a mother who knew someone who knew someone, and that was even better.
“Let’s go and see him,” she said. “Today’s the day. Get into the shower and then get yourself dressed.”
