—
For the rest of my life I will remember how Johan looked when we finally came face-to-face in the visitor center. We were separated by a thick wire grille on my side, then an empty space and then areinforced glass screen on his side. I spoke to him through a telephone receiver that was still damp from the last visitor’s hand.
His body had changed completely in the space of a week. He was wearing a vest; his shoulders were sharp, his skin the dangerous shade of brown that follows sunburn but precedes peeling. Purple-red marks were beginning to scab on his left arm. He coughed like the man who lived next door to us when I was growing up. That man had died of lung cancer when I was nine.
The phone line was poor, and I only caught every few words. He didn’t know what his illness had been, only that he’d felt at the time like he was “going to die.” He had received “various things” intravenously and was taking what he believed to be antibiotics now. He told me his parents had managed to visit him twice, that they were staying near Siam Square—wherever that was.
In spite of his low energy, he straightened up when I told him my mother was here too.
“Seriously?”
“She was on a plane within twenty-four hours of your arrest.”
Johan was speechless for a moment.
“Most mothers would tell their daughter to get themselves on the first plane home and never talk to me again,” he said eventually. “I am touched. But I’m not sure what even your mum could achieve in this situation.”
“She’s throwing everything she’s got at this. But Johan, we need to know what’s happening.”
He rested his chin on both hands, eyes closed.
“Johan. Please. Mum has a friend here who can help—Prawat. He has contacts in the prison. But we need to know what we’re dealing with.” I paused. “And I need to know whatI’mdealing with, too. Please tell me. Everything.”
Johan’s eyes opened. “He has contacts here? Inside the prison?”
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
“I told you—he’s an ex of my mother’s. Look, Johan—that’s immaterial. I have to know what’s happening.” I leaned forward on the cheerful blue plastic counter my phone handset was attached to. I needed water.
His reply was lost a few times, first to the phone, then to a hacking cough. As I waited, the fan above my head stuttered to a halt and the heavy air closed in like a weighted blanket. We were sheltered by concrete, but the heat was deadly and the stench of drains overpowering.
Johan’s cough sounded dry. I asked him if he’d had any wheezing or rattling, if he’d coughed up any blood? He didn’t reply.
“I did do it, Carrie,” was what he was trying to say. I heard it the sixth, maybe seventh time. By then he was slumped forward on the phone counter. “I did do it. I’m…I’m sorry.”
I waited for him to take this back, but he didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
I wiped the sweat from my face with a piece of loo roll taken from the hotel.
“Did someone tell you to say this?” I asked after his next round of coughs. This was my one source of hope: the possibility that he might have been coerced or set up. I’d read it was common.
He stared at me for a long time. His eyes, from where I was, seemed bloodshot, but perhaps he’d been crying, too. His lips were stained white by painful-looking cracks. He looked severely dehydrated.
Sweat was beginning to gather behind my knees, in my elbows. To my left, a Thai woman with her sandals off was smiling, laughing, with the man opposite her, as if they were having a drink in a pub. This was no longer a world I knew.
Then: “I did it,” Johan said firmly. “And Carrie, you need to stop this Prawat, whoever he is. It could put me in real danger, having someone poking around.”
He cleared his throat, setting off another bout of coughing, then wiped his face with his bruised arm. He looked dreadful.
“Do you get it, Carrie? I’m answerable to people much more dangerous than the prison guards or the prosecutor. I’m glad your mum’s here to support you, but she mustn’t try to interfere with what’s happening to me.”
And then visiting time was over, and the guards were shouting at us, and someone was already taking his arm.
Twenty-two.
