Free Escape by David McMillan

guys.’ Tanveer was already walking away. ‘You’ll have to stay in there until you find someone to take you in. Leave some room for the other newcomers. There’s only ten. They come in at two.’
    Eddie and I staked some space by tearing blankets from our packs and haggling with the room boss. But he had nothing to boss. Within an hour every inch of space was taken with bodies. The rising heat was made worse by the lack of a fan. Only a hook and some bare wires hung from the ceiling.
    By nightfall our best efforts had found us with no more than a forty-five-centimetre strip, one-and-a-half-metres long. Eddie made some weak coffee from a Thermos of tepid water.
    ‘This is the worst,’ Eddie said, snapping at mosquitoes. ‘And I’ve been in some bad places. You know what it is, don’t you? They throw us in this pit so tomorrow we’re willing to pay anything for a better room.’
    ‘I’m willing now.’ I gently kicked aside a fat Burmese who again lolled his sleeping head on my feet.
    We spent the first half of the evening minutely searching the elastic tops of our shorts, the busiest feeding centre for the hundreds of bedbugs that swarmed from the rotten floor planking. Until midnight I kept my head from the flaking paint of the wall. Over the decades a wide black band had formed at head height. A thousand greasy heads had saturated the brickwork making an oily green valley for microscopic blood parasites. The acid from sweat-soaked, unwashed clothes bit at the nose. This excruciating induction night was unnecessary. We would have been house-hunting on arrival without this encouragement.
    Eddie spoke of his first time in a Thai prison six years earlier. ‘It was all over a poxy hotel television set. I had to check out, you know, through the window. So I took the set. Eighteen months I got for that.’
    Eddie had been eventually transferred to Bangkok to save the Swiss consuls travelling south to Phuket. Within days of his arrival at Klong Prem, pro-democracy riots led to several hundred students being arrested and taken to the prison.
    ‘They didn’t want ordinary criminals mixing with the students,’ Eddie explained. ‘Not because we might corrupt them. The jailers worried the students might turn us political. They put them in Building Eight. There were thousands of them.’ A sweeping hand gesture from Eddie caught his neighbour across the face. Eddie immediately apologised.
    ‘Oh, sorry.’
    ‘Asshole!’
    ‘Hey, watch it.’ Eddie had his limits.
    ‘Yeah, you watch it,’ replied the Thai, although he was too busy squashing bugs to make an issue of an accident.
    ‘So I got out of jail after a few months and went back to Zurich,’ Eddie continued. ‘They tried to put me in the army. Everyone has to go in Switzerland. But I got out of that. Failed the psychologic test. I convinced them I was crazy—Fucking bugs!’ Eddie leapt up and fell into a wall. While he had been talking, a fresh battalion of parasites had bivouacked in his trousers.
    ‘Eddie,’ I managed, drooping on an elbow. ‘Tomorrow, please. Bring me the head of Tanveer the trusty.’
    Eddie was, by then, too dazed to respond. At some point we fell into unconsciousness and surrendered the dregs of our blood to the insect army.
    The following day was taken up with arranging food and finding temporary lodgings. The prison had been hugely expanded during WWII after Thailand had declared war on the United States and Great Britain. Then it had been mainly filled with those considered troublesome by Thailand’s Japanese ally. The extensive grounds today do not reduce overcrowding, as most of the vacant land is kept for leasing to enterprising prisoners. The struggle for a foothold among us newcomers was matched by the daily struggle for survival by Building Six’s other inmates. This was the prison’s real control. No serious rebellion can occur when people are constantly uprooted, chasing food and using their remaining strength and