No More Tomorrows (35 page)

‘When did it start going wrong between us, Mercedes?’

My sister couldn’t believe it. She was stressed out and exhausted. She didn’t need his shit. ‘Ron, it went wrong when you made us sign contracts and then lie about them.’

‘Do you still want me, Mercedes?’

The simple answer was no. He’d created more stress for us all. We’d wanted him to be quiet and go away since he’d first made the bribe comment. It had all got out of control. Merc knew how to get rid of him. She told him that all the family wanted to hire an expert to deal with the media.

He went ballistic, furiously yelling at her: ‘Why are you listening to your family? What has your family ever done for you, Mercedes? Do
they
give you money?’

Merc wasn’t actually planning to hire an expert. She’d ended up handling all the media herself, such as organising family interviews with
60 Minutes
and
Woman’s Day
after the verdict. The media kept calling Merc, preferring to deal with her. Ron’s angry reaction confirmed what we already knew: he’d been hoping to get rich. But his plan was backfiring.

Ron left Bali on Tuesday after coming in one last time to visit. It was a bad, bad day for me. It was black. I couldn’t stop crying, the stress and trauma of the verdict really starting to hit hard as the numbing shock was wearing off. Ron got straight down to business, holding up the contract I’d signed in March.

‘Schapelle, do you want me to rip it up?’ he asked. ‘I’ll just rip it up, Schapelle.’

It was a transparent attempt at reverse psychology. I didn’t bite. I was so tired, so sick of all the bullshit. I’d just got twenty years! ‘It’s up to you, Ron. Do whatever you think is best.’

He held the contract in front of my face and started slowly, dramatically, tearing it down the middle like a taunting schoolboy, no doubt hoping I’d stop him. I didn’t. Goodbye, Ron!

I needed to be alone, needed to get back to my cage. I was broken, sitting slumped over, with my head in my arms, sobbing, when Lily walked over to us and asked, ‘Why are you crying, Schapelle?’

I was incredulous. I glared up at her, thinking,
What the fuck do you think I’m crying about, you silly woman?
But I held back, instead snapping, ‘Lily, you have to
ask
why I’m crying?’

She walked off again, my eyes no doubt betraying my angry thoughts.

When Ron was leaving, he got almost to the door, stopped, turned and placed his hand on my shoulder, saying, ‘Schapelle, everything that I’ve spent, you can pay me back. You can pay me back $500,000.’

I shook my head, trying to make it sink in. My mind started spinning with thoughts.
That’s a bloody lot of money . . . Where did it go – on your luxury villa, your drunken nights?
It was ridiculous, but I was too tired to ask questions.

‘Yeah, OK, Ron. I might be here a while, though,’ I mumbled.

He patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘When you can, Schapelle.’

So now I had twenty years and a half-million-dollar debt. Great!

As the days in Hotel K passed, my numbness turned to hot anger. I was hurting deeply. It was so unfair. It had taken five months of self-discipline, helplessness, buckets of tears, disbelief, hope and hell to have my life snatched away; five months of being dragged to court each week, being the centre of attention, the topic on everyone’ slips, for the judge to take away my everything . . . Twenty years. I hated that judge. How had he suddenly become like God, in total control of my life, my future, my dreams, my freedom? He was able to stop me being a woman, being loved and giving love, and to withhold the most precious gift of having a baby. I wanted to tug him off his throne. He’d dismissed evidence, refused to authorise forensic tests, refused to give me the chance of gathering some real evidence to defend myself. I hoped his halo might slip down and choke him.

I spent endless hours sitting on my little mattress in my cage asking the same questions: how and why did this happen to me? I was getting so tired of trying to make sense of it. How did my life turn in such a way that I’d sat before the same judge who had sentenced the terrorist Amrozi to death? I’d never pretended to be perfect. But I didn’t do this, I didn’t deserve this. I’d told all I knew in court, I’d told the truth, there was nothing more I could have done or said.

I’m not just a girl; I am Schapelle. I am a human being, with a lot of love inside me and passion for life and living. But now I’m Schapelle the girl locked up for between fifteen and eighteen hours each day, helplessly relying on everyone and challenging my emotions each day, by the hour, a terrified child, without a voice, without a mouth. Help me if you can, help me to understand; I will not disconnect and I will not self-destruct. I am precious and the love for my family is precious.

Diary entry, 5 June 2005

I was surviving from day to day by telling myself it would only be another six months until I won an appeal. I just had to hang on for six more months. But occasionally I let myself think about the alternative: if they didn’t give me freedom, what then? What were my options then? Would I stay? And how would I do that? How would my family handle that? It was a possibility. Shit! How would we go about planning for that future? If the appeal didn’t turn out well, then it was possible my release would be in 2024. I’d be forty-seven years old – a daunting thought. I should never have done the maths.

But there were always plenty of prisoners in Hotel K who loved to remind me of my fate, constantly yelling, ‘Ha ha, Corby, you got twenty years! You
die
in here!’ It was like the chorus of a song, and everyone knew the words. Everywhere I went in the prison, people screamed it out. It tore at my heart. It always hurt. It was worst when I walked past the mosque, where at least three or four people would hurl it at me.

In the women’s block, it was only Sonia who taunted me. A few nights after my verdict, she started screeching from her cage, ‘Corby, you got twenty years! I hope you die in this place!’ She kept blurting it out. I was too sad and down to retaliate. I just lay crying in a heap on my mattress.

After about ten minutes, my cellmate, Giant, leapt up and started furiously banging on our cage door, screaming at Sonia: ‘Stop it, Black Monster, stop it!’ She didn’t stop. Giant’s temper flared. ‘I’ll fight you in the morning, Black Monster!’

‘OK, Giant!’

They screamed between the cells to arrange the fight and then spent the next two hours shouting abuse at each other.

Giant woke up early, eager to fight. She started to prepare. She was a big girl but as flexible as a Russian gymnast. She threw one leg high up on the wall and did the vertical splits. She threw punches into the air, did crunches and pranced around performing
Rocky
-style exercises. We were all laughing and excited. We plaited her long hair and tied it up to keep it out of the way during the fight.

Then it was time. The cells were unlocked. Giant and Sonia charged like bulls, stopping just short of each other. Giant crouched into the boxing position, her fists clenched and ready, karate-kicking the air with gusto. It was pretty funny but very quickly turned nasty. All of a sudden they were body-hugging each other, falling to the ground, rolling around, tangled up, kicking, punching, scratching and biting. It was a big catfight. It was vicious. The rest of us stood around watching, letting them go for it. No one wanted to get anywhere near them.

Sonia grabbed hold of Giant’s plaited hair – it was a killer move. It stopped Giant like kryptonite stops Superman. Giant was stuck on top of Sonia, unable to move without her hair being torn out of her skull.

We were all yelling abuse at Sonia when about eight guards walked over to try to stop the fight. They viciously punched and kicked Sonia to make her let go of Giant’s hair. It didn’t work. Five minutes later, all these guards still couldn’t unlock her monster grip.

Giant was screaming out in pain. I had to do something. This was my fault. Sonia wasn’t very big, just very loud and very scary to look at, and she used this to her advantage. I wasn’t scared of her. I just went with my instincts. I went up, grabbed her by the hair and started smashing her head hard against the ground. She was glaring into my eyes as I chanted, in a low demonic voice: ‘Let her go . . . Let her go . . . Let her go!’

Suddenly she let go. The fight was over. Poor Giant was left sore, with a huge black-and-blue bite mark on her inner thigh. Sonia was all right: she had a hard head. I didn’t feel guilty. It was something that had to be done.

But it didn’t stop the irrepressible Black Monster. She started screaming abuse at the top of her lungs again a few days later during morning roll call. She was locked in her cage as punishment for her latest sin. We were all in line. She screamed, ‘You die in here, Corby! You die, you die!’ All the girls turned to look at me. I tensed up.

‘You die, Corby!’ Sonia kept taunting.

I couldn’t believe this girl. Merc brought groceries for her, because she had no one else. This was the thanks she gave. She was sick.

My pulse was racing. I was fuming. I asked the guard, ‘Please, please open the cell so I can give her one punch.’ I just wanted one shot, to break her nose.

The guard refused – instead doing it herself. She walked into Sonia’s cell and hit her hard in the face. It definitely made me feel better. When I calmed down, I was very glad the guard hadn’t let me in.

Life got even worse for me when a package possibly containing anthrax was sent to the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra, in retaliation for my verdict. Suddenly, I was being treated with suspicion. I got death stares, all my mail was opened and thoroughly inspected, with the guards often joking, ‘Corby anthrax! Corbybomb! Ha ha!’ How the hell did I get stuck in the middle of all this?

People are not thinking about their actions. It’s not going to help me in any way, but only makes this situation worse for me. Although I have nothing to do with what’s happened, it may have devastating effects on my appeal at the High Court. Meanwhile I still have to live in this boxed society. There are so many fanatics. In this small area, over the past week I’ve had people staring (well, that’s usual), but pointing and grinning at me, with knowledge of my sentence. Now, with the anthrax scare, people are ‘death-staring’ me. I’ve become completely paranoid, with eyes in the back of my head. My security around the prison has been boosted; I can’t do anything without a guard accompanying me. The Oz consulate is on standby in case anything harmful happens to me. Prisoners keep commenting to me about how the Australian public wants to get the money back, their aid to the tsunami appeal. I’m embarrassed. What can I say? We can’t take back what we’ve given and it’s not the people of Indonesia’s fault, they need our help. It’s the government’s fault.

Diary entry, 1 June 2005

Being sentenced to twenty years turned me into even more of a freak show. People in church, in visits and around the prison grounds would point, stare, laugh, whisper, try to take sneaky photos. I was the girl locked in for twenty years. I had no escape from it. Church was the worst. Christians would come in from the outside and stare at me. I’d get angry and lose it, often running out in tears. I’d go back to my cell and cry unstoppably. Sometimes the guards got Eddie to come and settle me down. Most of the time, I didn’t want to leave my cage. There were eyes and cameras everywhere. It felt even worse than before. Everyone was trying to snap the first shots of me after my verdict. The stalking of me was relentless.