Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen.
I arrived back in Bangkok at one o’clock the day after Johan was bundled into a police van by an armed task force. I had not yet been married twenty-four hours.
We’d only left a week before, but in that time the city seemed to have swollen to triple intensity: the volume and heat dialed up, the scale dizzying.
Exhaustion and panic almost overwhelmed me as I loaded our bags into the back of a taxi at Suvarnabhumi.
The driver watched me curiously as I sat in the back seat, trying to give myself a Yanika-style pep talk through parched lips.
My eyes were grotesquely swollen. I looked amphibious.
I went straight to the British Embassy, because I had no idea what else to do. I was not a surgical registrar; I was a girl again, a girl longing for a parent to take charge of the situation.
My body calmed a little as the taxi drove up to the embassy entrance, its driveway flanked by pink flowers and tropical trees.
Around us in every direction the city shot up hungrily, noisily into the sky: office blocks, shopping centers, and the enormous stilted bulk of the Skytrain.
This quiet old colonial building tucked away next to a giant intersection, all white stucco and ornate shutters, was a small oasis of hope.
I will get help here, I thought, dragging our bags out of the taxi. The heat pressed in from all directions but I hauled the bags across the entrance veranda with renewed energy. Someone will tell me where Johan is and what I need to do to get him back.
—
Nobody was able to tell me where Johan was or what I needed to do to get him back. When I was finally seen, which took two hours, I was told that I needed to go to the Swedish Embassy instead.
I took another taxi to the Swedish Embassy. The journey took forty-five minutes and cost more than three hundred baht. When I was dropped off I realized I was about five blocks down the road from where I had begun. As I dragged our bags up to another entrance hall, I began to cry.
This time yesterday we had been dressing to get married.
“Can I help at all?” a man’s voice asked. I looked up sharply. He sounded just like Johan.
He was not Johan, of course, just a consular official, but he took me inside, sat me down in a small room, and went straight off to get help.
I don’t remember his name anymore. He was the first of dozens of people whose names I knew for a few minutes, a few hours—days, in some cases.
A wearying procession of people who wanted, but were unable, to help.
This man came back and told me that the embassy had already been informed of Johan’s arrest, which was a good start. Sometimes it took days or even weeks. A more senior consular official was due to visit him tomorrow.
“What? Where? Where is he?” I was high on sudden hope. “I have to go there! The diving permits were nothing to do with him—it’s his fixer they should be talking to! Johan didn’t even know about it until the other day!”
The man considered this. “Johan is at Chakkrawat Police Station,” he told me, “In Chinatown. May I ask…Can you tell me what you mean? About permits? And what did you call this person—a fixer?”
“There was some trouble with his permits in Myanmar,” I said, although something was feeling wrong now. “Someone was bribed or something, but Johan had no part in it. It was his fixer. Who’s since sorted it all out.”
The man went silent for a while. He had a kind, round face with a curious shamrock-shaped birthmark on the side of his neck, and a tendency to pause before talking that reminded me a little of Dad.
“I need to check my notes,” he said eventually. “Make sure everything we know matches with what you know.”
While he was away I googled the police station Johan had been taken to.
It looked clean and orderly, which I found comforting.
But it remained incomprehensible that this was where Johan was.
That they could have coordinated a major arrest all the way down on Koh Samui for a man who’d done nothing more than dive on a dodgy permit someone else had organized.
His very presence there was to help preserve Myanmar’s heritage.
The man came back. Johan had been taken to the police station in Chinatown because his alleged crime was committed in the vicinity, he said. It was meant to have happened just over a week ago.
I’d been pacing until that point, but at this news I sat down. Something behind my eyes felt fizzy. “I…In Chinatown? What crime?” I asked. “Do you mean…Do you mean unrelated to the permits?”
The man pursed his lips. “We do not have any information about an issue with permits,” he said. “The information that we have here is that he was arrested for drug trafficking.”
“I…What?”
He repeated himself, this time so quietly I could barely hear him. I couldn’t hear any of the sounds of this busy consular office now. Only the buzzing in my head, the placid gurgle of my empty stomach.
“That’s impossible,” I told him. “We…got married yesterday. He doesn’t take drugs.”
The man pursed his lips sympathetically and tilted his head to one side. He handed me a bottle of water, and I wondered how often he’d had to have these sorts of conversations, how many sympathy bottles he’d handed out.
I tried again. “Are you sure? Drug trafficking is…well, it’s just a no. Impossible. I’ve been with him the whole time he’s been in this country.”
Only I hadn’t, I realized, as the ground underneath me began to tilt.
The man spoke up. His voice was gentle. I registered the beginning of cramping in my abdomen.
“If that is true, then you should go to the police station and make a statement. You could help him.” He watched me for a moment. “You have been with him for all of the time he has been here in Thailand? He has not been on his own at all?”
I am a doctor. The words slid into my consciousness as if on a screen. I couldn’t lie. Especially in a situation like this.
“Apart from when he was traveling in from the airport,” I said.
“That was the only time I wasn’t with him.
But he was not doing a drug deal. He was getting his kit through customs. He’s a diver, you see; he had to bring some of his diving kit with him.
There wasn’t anywhere he was willing to leave it in Myanmar, plus he was hoping to dive here…
” The man was watching me sympathetically.
“He was just getting his kit through customs and storing it in a lockup by the hotel. He told me,” I added, childishly.
The man made a few notes in the large notebook he’d been carrying since he’d found me dragging bags through the entranceway.
“I think you should just go to the police station and tell them everything you know,” he said.
“But why haven’t they taken me in for questioning, too? Why didn’t they get a statement from me on Koh Samui?”
The man held up his hands, as if to say, I’m afraid this is beyond my remit, but I could tell what he was thinking. They hadn’t bothered with me because I clearly had no knowledge of the crime, and somehow they already knew that.
“Is he OK?” I heard myself asking. “Is he safe?”
“He is not being tortured, if that is what you mean, although I cannot pretend that the conditions in police stations are good. I urge you to go there as soon as possible. If it turns out that you can help him, you must.”
Soon after that, he explained apologetically that he had a long queue of Swedish nationals waiting for him, and that he had to go. “You are welcome to stay in touch,” he said, handing me a card. His name was Niklas Sundberg.
And then I was outside again. Traffic roared in both directions as I dragged the bags up the Sukumvit Road toward Phloenchit. Above me the Skytrain rumbled, its pedestrian walkways hammered by the smart shoes of homeward bound workers.
At a loss, I sat down on a wall and got out my phone. Who to call? What could anyone do, anyway?
Someone, help me.
I became aware, suddenly, of a hot stickiness between my legs. I must be a day early. I’d been planning to buy tampons today; we were going to have a lazy first morning as husband and wife before going into town in the early evening for dinner and supplies. Our first full day married.
Blood began to seep through the thin fabric of my knickers.
Someone, help me.
I took the last sip of the Swedish Embassy water and found a sock near the top of my bag. I folded it, standing close to one of the giant concrete Skytrain girders, and stuffed it into my knickers.
Mum, I thought suddenly. What would Mum do? She would not be standing on the side of a main road, spiraling. She’d be in motion.
I stood up and walked to a break in the roadside barrier. Look for taxi. Raise arm.
It worked. A taxi pulled over, the driver gesturing for me to move fast.
Put bags in boot. Get in taxi.
The interior of the car was blessedly soft and cool.
I asked the driver to take me to Chakkrawat Police Station and then closed my eyes for a few moments, listening to the driver’s murmured conversation on his phone.
Even if he drove me around on a three-mile loop like the last one had, I didn’t care.
I thought about the soft cotton of Johan’s T-shirts, the earthy spruce smell of his skin, the laughter lines that transected his face even though he was only thirty. His fascination with me, his need for me, the way our bodies fitted together.
In desperation I returned my thoughts to my mother.
In the months Johan and I had been together, I’d seen more of her than in all the years I’d spent in London; they had formed a mutual fan club that had taken me entirely by surprise.
Slowly, I’d come to welcome it. Johan’s open and uncomplicated admiration of Mum’s work, her energy, her spirit, had helped me see her once again as the woman I’d worshipped as a child, before Dad and Maya’s endless maligning—and, ultimately, Mum’s own repeated failures as a parent—had hardened that tender part of my heart.
Years I’d spent, listening to talk of successful sit-ins and public letters, speeches and rallies and forced meetings with government officials. If anyone could advise me on my next move, it was Mum.
I got my phone out and called her, but of course she didn’t answer. I left a voicemail.
—
The one English-speaking man at Chinatown police station said Johan was not there. He did not know where he might be.
After ten minutes of me standing at the desk, begging him to find out where Johan was, he asked me to leave. “We very busy,” he said, indicating the two other people in the waiting room.
Eventually I went off to a stairwell, which might or might not have been another waiting room, to try Mum again.
As the call connected I stared at a bunch of framed pictures of former police chiefs, waiting for inspiration.
All around me were Thai voices. Blood was beginning to seep through the sock in my knickers and my abdomen was knotted and angry.
I found the other sock in my bag and cautiously pushed open the one door that wasn’t locked, hoping it might be a toilet.
It wasn’t a toilet. It was a small room of holding cells. I stopped in the doorway, unnerved. Why was this accessible to the public?
I stared at the cells. Chipped paint, no fans or windows, little more than five square feet of dirty floor space.
Compared to the lobby outside, with its framed photos and air conditioning, the room was hellish, but I imagined the real cells, probably below ground level, would be a lot worse.
This couldn’t be anymore than a processing space for new arrivals.
I turned to the whiteboard next to me. It was covered in writing I couldn’t read, but there was one word I knew: farang.
Johan. That was Johan. Foreigner.
I stuffed the clean sock into my knickers and went back to the front desk, grateful for new faces: the shift had changed. The English-speaking woman at the desk knew who Johan was straight away. He was being interviewed, she said. Her facial expression was surprisingly sympathetic.
About what? What the hell is happening here? I wanted to shout. Instead I asked, as politely as I could, when I would be able to talk to him.
She turned around and said something to a colleague who was sitting in a giant swivel chair. After a brief consultation, she told me, “We don’t think you will be able to talk to him.”
I took a deep breath and asked if I could talk privately to her.
Surprisingly, she agreed, and we stepped back into the stairwell.
Through an emergency exit, I could see the sky had turned pink.
Night would soon fall and yet Johan was being held in this building, charged with drug trafficking.
Across the road a shop turned on neon Coca-Cola lights.
Tuk-tuks and mopeds buzzed past; the evening burned brazenly on.
“I have about six thousand dollars in my bank account,” I said bluntly. “Can I help him get bail?”
“Bail?”
“I pay money so Johan can come home. Before he goes to court.”
She smiled, although whether out of sympathy or derision I couldn’t tell. “He will be going to court every week for long time,” she said. “It is never possible to go home for his crime. He will go to court tomorrow, then Klong Prem after that.”
Everything started to move slowly, even the fly hammering itself against the window between us and the front waiting area.
“Klong Prem? Are you sure?”
“Yes. Klong Prem.”
It is in Klong Prem remand prison, crammed shoulder to shoulder with thirty other men in a four-man cell, a bucket for excrement, and little more than offal for food, that arrested Thais and foreigners will spend often two or three years while their court hearings and eventual trials rumble on, I’d read earlier.
Sprawling, filthy, a “high-security nightmare,” it was—according to the ex-inmate whose memoir I’d read snippets of during my flight back to Bangkok—one of the darkest places on earth.
I crouched down, suddenly, on the floor, hugging Johan’s bag.
What had he done?
The woman watched me, saying nothing.
“I have money,” I whispered again, but she shook her head.
“He is at court tomorrow. You cannot visit him at the police station or courthouse…But soon he will go to Klong Prem remand prison, and they have a visitor center there. Good luck.”
I called after her to ask which courthouse, but my phone started ringing.
“Carrie. I’m on my way to Heathrow,” was the first thing my mother said.