Authors: Schapelle Corby
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
1
Surviving Today
I
T
’
S AMAZING WHAT THE HUMAN SPIRIT CAN ENDURE AND
adapt to. If someone had told me four years ago that I would be sleeping alongside rats, feral cats and fifteen girls in a tiny, stinking-hot cell that partly floods with human waste whenever the Balinese hole-in-the-ground toilet blocks – which is fairly often – I would have said there was no way I could survive that.
If someone had told me that I’d be sentenced to this life for the next twenty years, I would have laughed at such a ridiculous notion.
Yet here I am, living in a filthy jail, sentenced to twenty years. Life is not easy – it’s very, very hard. It takes a hell of a lot of energy not to collapse into a big black hole of despair, and it’s happened a few times, where I struggle badly for days: I can’t get out of bed, I cry all day and think about starving myself to death to escape.
But I refuse to let this place break my spirit. I use all my energy and willpower to pull myself back together. I forcibly replace negative thoughts with positive ones. Staying sane really does take a lot of energy, but I have to, out of respect for those who love me.
When I flew to Bali on 8 October 2004 with my brother James and two friends, I imagined my biggest problem was going to be deciding which sarong to wear with which bikini. I was so happy and excited to be going on this holiday – two weeks of surfing, and celebrating my sister’s thirtieth birthday – especially as I’d been caring for my sick dad for a while and needed some fun. And I hadn’t seen my sister, Mercedes, and her two kids for almost three months and was really missing them.
So, as I happily stepped off the plane that Friday afternoon, looking forward to a poolside beer and some cuddles from my niece and nephew, I didn’t in my worst nightmares imagine the appalling turn my life was about to take.
Each day now I wake in jail with the same unbelievably intense burden of pain in my chest. It’s always the same, the reality of where I am. Sometimes I wake from a nice dream thinking I’m anywhere else. But too quickly the stench, the heat, the mosquitoes, the rats and the noise tell me where I am, tell me that this disgusting, stinking prison is my world . . . for now.
I know it could be years before I taste freedom again. This is the monstrously heavy weight I wear around my heart. How long will my life continue to pass in a jail full of killers, paedophiles and terrorists who all know my name – even the Bali bomber Amrozi, the Smiling Assassin, knew it. It sent shivers down my spine when he intentionally tried to brush my shoulder as he walked past me once while I was collecting my mail. I hadn’t recognised him until he’d looked into my eyes, smiled that smile at me and said, ‘Corrrrby . . .’
Every day I have to walk past the prison mosque, where the Muslims taunt me, laughing at me while saying in their creepy voices, ‘Ha, ha Corby, you got twenty years . . . you die in heeere.’ They say it over and over, laughing away like evil clowns. It takes all my self-control not to react, and sometimes I’m so tired that I give in and scream back. I hate doing that, because I know it’s exactly the reaction they’re after.
Long gone are the days when I’d kick off my shoes, lie on the couch and flick on the TV to watch my favourite soap opera. There are no chairs or tables in here and only very thin camping mattresses to sleep on, if you’re lucky. Some girls make do with a sarong on the concrete floor, as I did in the weeks after I was first arrested, when the guards refused to allow my sister to give me a mattress.
There is obvious sexual discrimination. If the men can afford to sling the guards some cash, they’re allowed to have pretty much anything in their cells. Some men have colour TV sets, blenders, vacuum cleaners and proper bed bases and mattresses. They can also play tennis, work out at a makeshift outdoor gym and come and go from their cells pretty freely.
We women live like caged animals, locked up in our little cells for fifteen hours a day. We don’t even have the simple luxury of darkness to sleep in, as the bright fluorescent cell lights are left on all night. It is so hot and cramped that I wake up every night with sweaty limbs on top of me; I get bitten by big red ants, which leave welts across my stomach and then scars. We usually have at least one rat in our cell, which skims across sleeping bodies and even around our faces. It is always stinking hot and humid, the moist tropical air perfect for breeding germs. It’s no wonder we are constantly sick.
Already this place has taken a toll on my body. I don’t know what diseases I might have picked up, but this place is riddled with AIDS and hepatitis, though I haven’t done anything to be exposed to those. I had diarrhoea for the first two years, and I still vomit often; I suffer regularly from severe eye and ear infections, and my hair has gone prematurely grey. It’s also shorter now, after I chopped my beloved waist-length hair to an inch all over a while ago – a drastic move as I’d always had long hair. But washing it in putrid jail water contributed to my constant, painful ear infections.
I don’t have a full-length mirror, so I haven’t seen whether I have hail damage, or cellulite, on the back of my legs, but I’ve noticed that most young girls in here do. I assume it’s due to lack of circulation, given that we’re not permitted to walk around, and we sit all day, barely moving.
Despite living in this dump, I still take pride in my appearance. Looking my best, or at least passable, has always been important to me, and I don’t enjoy looking like crap even if I feel like it most of the time. I still pluck my eyebrows, I put conditioning treatments in my hair and dye it as soon as the grey roots come through. Most mornings I apply Natural Glow bronzing powder and waterproof mascara – for all the tears – and am constantly applying cherry lip gloss. I always make sure my clothes are clean and still enjoy wearing new outfits, though I’m a bit worried about losing my fashion sense. When I first cut my hair, I accessorised with hats and scarves to stop sneaky photographers taking shots of my short hair. I occasionally wear jewellery or spray on a little Gucci perfume to lift my spirits.
Making an effort with my appearance also gives me a bit of dignity in a place where that is something you really have to fight for. Just when you think you’ve endured every humiliation possible, something else happens, something so gross you will never forget it. There’s one girl in my cell who really lives up to the expression ‘appearances can be deceptive’. She’s very pretty and takes great pride in doing her hair and make-up, but she is the biggest, most disgusting pig. One morning, I used the bathroom just after she’d spent her usual two hours showering and came across one of the most revolting sights I’ve ever seen. Her bloody sanitary pad was draped across my toothbrush, which was sitting in a cup up on a ledge.
I dry retched for a few seconds, thinking about the number of times I’d brushed my teeth without ever knowing this had been happening, and then went out to confront her.
‘Ah, OK, you! Can you go and get that off my toothbrush, please?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot,’ she whined.
‘Yeah, thank you for forgetting today, because now at least I know to change my toothbrush. Did you do it yesterday, too, and the day before? You’re a disgusting person. Get rid of it.’ My mum has since bought me a toothbrush with a cover.
I’ve seen horrors in here that are sickening beyond belief: prisoners beaten to a pulp, kicked in the face until it’s just blood and bone, girls attacking each other with broken glass bottles, a woman miscarrying in my cell and people trying to kill themselves. I’ve seen prisoners having sex and female guards passionately kissing female prisoners.
I shared a cell with two heroin addicts who were regularly shooting up next to me. One girl would often kneel beside me, injecting herself as I chopped up vegetables to cook on my little gas cooker. She’d spend five minutes pumping the blood in and out of the syringe to intensify the hit, while I concentrated on making my vegetable curry. It got worse. One of the girls later told me this girl often used my spoon to mix the heroin, no doubt also spilling blood onto it, then would give it a quick wipe and put it back with my things. I used it many times without knowing. Merc quickly organised a doctor to come in and give me hepatitis shots when we found out.
I’ve seen several suicide attempts, usually women drinking a bottle of bleach, then foaming at the mouth and twitching for the next twenty-four hours. Someone always forces coconut milk down their throats, and no female has actually died while I’ve been here. But men have. I found a guy hanging from the rafters in the hall with a noose around his neck early one morning. He was a guy I used to speak to often. He looked in peace, like he was sleeping, as he hung there. I felt strangely calm.
Though I haven’t lived a totally sheltered life, nothing could ever have prepared me for this new one. I never know what I’ll see next, but I do know that in my future there’ll be many more grim, disgusting sights I can’t yet even imagine. That’s my reality, that’s just the world I live in now.
It’s impossible not to get involved in this little society, because unbelievably I’m part of it. I don’t want to be here, but I don’t have a choice, so I have to adapt. Though I’m spending more and more time vanishing into a daze, alone and lonely, I do still need human contact, to talk to people and interact, because I can’t just shut myself down and turn off completely. I would go insane. Life goes on wherever you are.
I help other prisoners when I can and talk to them about their crimes and their sentences, which is unsurprisingly a big part of prison conversation. There’s nothing else to talk about; we don’t exactly have lives. I’ve become friends with a few people, but it’s very different to my old life where friends stayed friends. In here, you’re friends for a while until people show their true colours, reminding you exactly where you are and who you’re living with. It’s happened many times, where I’ve been hurt, let down, lied to. I don’t trust anyone totally, and I can’t completely relax and let my guard down. I live constantly on edge. I’ve had a couple of nasty fights, but I’ve never been badly physically hurt.
My heart hurts almost non-stop. A black heaviness lives inside me, but I snatch moments of joy whenever I can to keep my spirits up. Fleetingly, I can get swept away having a good laugh or conversation with a family member or friend when they visit and can almost forget where I am. I’ve always had a pretty wicked sense of humour and enjoyed a naughty laugh. I still do.
I was friends for a while with another Australian girl, Renae Lawrence, who’d been caught at Denpasar airport with heroin strapped to her thighs. Stuck in this hellhole together, we sometimes created a bit of fun. In her first few months in here, she regularly made me laugh with her dramatic reactions to new horrific sights that I’d already become numb to. We share that black humour where we find someone slipping on a banana peel pretty funny. We used to joke about going to the jail canteen in our wheelchairs when we’re really old – not that funny really.
One morning, I woke to find that a rat had given birth in a pair of my shoes, the pretty ones Mum had bought for me to wear to court. There were five tiny pink rats with their eyes still closed. Disgusting. But I ran to Renae’s cell excitedly calling out, ‘Hey, Renae, come and take a look at this. I’ve got something for you to see, come on.’ We raced off to my cell, and Renae spun on her heel as soon as she saw them, dry retching all the way back down the path.
I also get a laugh from all the ‘Schapelle’ jokes that circulated after my arrest and then trial. I think I’ve heard most of them, as Mercedes would download the latest and bring it in for me to read. My favourites were ‘the schapadlock – guaranteed for twenty years’, the perfume advertisement ‘Conviction . . . for the girl who’s lost her appeal’, and the sign on my beauty salon door: ‘Back in 20!’
It might seem strange that these jokes made me laugh, but I have to make light of all this sometimes or I’d go crazy. I still can’t comprehend twenty years. I won’t believe it; I can’t believe it. The idea of spending the next twenty years locked in a little cell is unfathomable – never to get married, never to have a baby. How can I imagine twenty years? It’s nearly as long as I’ve been living!
Perhaps the very, very worst thing about all this is that I’m innocent. I didn’t do it. I have to live this life knowing that I don’t deserve to be here for one night, one hour or minute – let alone twenty years. I’m being punished for someone else’s crime.
But I’ve been turned into a drug smuggler. I’ve heard all the rumours and theories. I know many people believe that I packed a transparent, pillow-sized plastic bag of marijuana into my boogie-board bag. Well . . . I didn’t hide it. I didn’t lock the bag, but I did put my name, address and phone number clearly on it. Then I checked it in and brazenly boarded a flight that went via two major Australian airports . . . I wasn’t content to risk one airport, with a direct flight from Brisbane to Denpasar, but chose two – Brisbane and Sydney, with all their security checks. Then I willingly claimed the bag as my own when an Indonesian customs officer asked to inspect it. I don’t know anything about international drug smuggling, but I guess if criminals went about it like that, they’d be pretty bloody stupid.