Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen.
Mum arrived at lunchtime the next day, immaculate and raging, and stormed the embassies with the force of a siege. She couldn’t hear the word no. She wouldn’t leave, and she knew who to ask for next if the poor soul in front of her couldn’t help.
My mother had arrived at precisely the right moment, for I no longer had capacity.
After an hour at the embassy I went out to the tropical garden, where I sat by a dusty tree.
To this day I don’t know who she spoke to or what she said, but within a few hours we were on the Skytrain, heading toward a district called Silom.
“The courthouse is there,” Mum said. “I am told there are some holding cells outdoors that he’ll pass through before his hearing.
If we need food or water, I can go. There will be no chance of you missing him that way.
” She glanced at me. “But of course I am going to find a better solution. This is just for today, Carrie.”
This was Mum in her truest self. The fire was within her; there was no burden of jet lag or fatigue.
She had lived in Thailand for a few years before she met Dad, working with the rape victim charity, and her Thai was still more than adequate.
I had never in my life been more grateful to have this woman for a mother.
“Sayang,” Mum said softly as we hurtled above the chaotic streets. Outside our air-conditioned carriage, hot rain was emptying from a brown sky. “How are you feeling? Have you slept?”
Sayang means love in Malay. Dear, precious, endless love. She hadn’t used this word with me in years. My eyes filled with tears.
“Terrible, and no,” I said, wiping my eyes on a tissue she had been ready with all along. “Mum, what’s happening?”
“Oh, Carrie,” she sighed. She put the tissue packet back in her bag and then turned back to look at me.
I blew my nose. “Johan doesn’t use drugs. I’ve never even seen him smoking marijuana. He doesn’t use drugs and he certainly doesn’t sell them. But…”
“But?”
I had to tell her. I had to tell someone.
“The thing is, he took far too long to get to me from the airport the night he arrived. I keep going over it in my head. And I’ve checked on a map; he would definitely have had time to make a detour to Chinatown to do whatever it was they think he’s done.
But Mum, the thing is, he just wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. I know him.”
Mum put a hand on my bare leg, then took it away.
“Carrie,” she said softly. “My contact at the embassy went through back channels to find out for me. Possession of class A drugs. Not a huge quantity, but sufficient for it to be considered trafficking. And as far as the police are concerned, there’s no mistake.
He’s who they were looking for. They just hadn’t found him yet.
But then he used his bank card on Koh Samui to make a withdrawal. That’s how they found him.”
I stared at her. “He made that withdrawal to buy my wedding ring,” I said. “He was just a guy at a night market, Mum, he wasn’t…he’s not…”
The train whizzed on. Two young women in short skirts and chunky trainers were giggling at a magazine opposite us, not a care in the world. Beyond them, the sky was filthy brown for miles, rain hammering down.
“I’m sorry,” Mum said.
Tears began to fall down my cheeks again, but this time I didn’t stop them. I didn’t know how to use my hands anymore. My surgeon’s hands.
I made myself think once again about our trip to Chinatown.
About the strange furrow of Johan’s mood, that shop full of catering equipment.
The well-dressed, very attractive woman who’d started talking to him when he went in to drop off sweets for that kid.
She’d been oddly familiar with him, touching his arm, smiling, but he’d seemed anxious—unhappy, even—to see her.
I relayed all of this to Mum, who listened keenly, asking me to repeat various details.
“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 wealthy farang who’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.
Mum was still tapping away at the phone. “Do you think he’ll tell you the truth when you see him?”
“I have no idea,” I said, after a pause. “For the most part, I still don’t believe any of this. I think they’ve made a mistake. But…”
“…But it’s hard to understand how this could be happening if there’s no truth in it.”
I nodded.
And then, suddenly, there he was.
“Johan…” I shot up from the concrete bench, but Mum pulled me down.
“Take it easy,” she whispered. “If they think you’re going to make trouble, they’ll hold him somewhere else.”
My body froze as he was walked toward the cells. Handcuffed, an armed man on either side of him.
Johan, I called silently. Turn around.
He heard me, of course, even though I hadn’t made a sound. He stopped, turned in my direction, and there he stood. He was still wearing the clothes he’d been wearing three days ago, in that other life, when we’d stood opposite each other on a beach and said I do.
I love you, I mouthed desperately, as the guards told him to move.
He continued to stare at me as they chivvied him on toward the cells.
His face was blank. My stomach folded as I spotted some blood on his T-shirt, but there were no obvious cuts on him—or at least the parts of him I could see.
His soft striped T-shirt. His wedding outfit.
Are you OK? I mouthed.
They paused for a second, the guards, talking and fiddling with keys. I’m sorry, he mouthed. I love you.
Then he was gone.
—
For the first few days I had complete faith in my mother.
She was the one person who made impossible things possible, who defied odds.
She was the invincible Adelina Ghali, who chained herself to railings, glued herself to buses, marched into embassies and even government offices when she could pull it off.
She got help for those who needed it most and she was never defeated.
But as the days passed—as doors remained closed, as our visits to Klong Prem remand prison passed without any sighting of Johan or any further explanation of why he had been arrested on a drug-trafficking charge—my confidence in her powers began to wane.
And when she suggested, five days in, that we try waiting outside the courthouse cells until we saw him again, it began to dawn on me that she really might be out of ideas. That we really might not be able to get him out of this.