Free Escape by David McMillan Page A

resources simply to find an untroubled place to sleep. ‘You can see why most of the world don’t give the rich much trouble,’ Eddie remarked on his way to the bank.
    Building Six’s accommodation blocks and factories were at the edges of a wide field of patchy grass where we newcomers were called to assemble.
    ‘This must be where we learn how to be model prisoners,’ I advised Eddie.
    ‘I’ll give him ten minutes.’ Eddie meant the foreign-prisoners’ instructor.
    Our trainer was a middle-aged Chinese from Laos called Charlie Lao. He spoke half a dozen Oriental languages along with French and English coated with an Australian nasal rounding applied during his years in Sydney. Our training was a pitiful version of cadet-school marching and turning. We were also instructed to learn the Thai commands for turn left, turn right, hands in the air and some other expressions of surrender. As soon as we foreigners understood what Charlie was asking of us, we began to walk away.
    ‘Come on you guys.’ Charlie was too reasonable a man to make a fierce master sergeant. ‘Try to march in line. It’s only a few minutes. Good eccercise!’
    His enthusiasm was met with two grunts and a fart.
    ‘Fellas, the chief is watching me. Maybe we be in trouble. You don’t want to end up like those guys!’
    Charlie pointed to four young Thai prisoners who were being trained in a more down-to-earth manner. They had been found lazy at work and were now learning to roll from one side of the field to the other, arms and legs outstretched. An acne-faced trusty in uniform was yelling and slapping at them. The approach here was much more lenient that at Bumbudt (the Cure). As for the chief he was at his desk but absorbed in his account ledgers. His office was on the far side of the field, a small open house built in the style of a temple.
    We then distracted Charlie with questions to allow him to make excuses for us all. Eddie had urgent business in the umbrella factory where he was determined to get to the truth of the allegations that hard drugs could be easily obtained in Klong Prem.
    Charlie excused me from future training permanently, fraternally, ‘because we both come from Australia’. Charlie had applied for a royal pardon, having already served seven years. The pardon was supported by the Australian consulate based on a reasonable policy that official support would be given where the time served matched that of average sentences imposed by Australian courts for similar amounts. This policy was under threat for some mysterious reason but Charlie’s application was close to being granted. He was serving twenty-five years for possession of a few hundred grams of heroin.
    From our first meeting Charlie immediately offered sound advice and help. Although we were close to the same age (I was thirty-seven) I’m sure it wasn’t simply the Australian connection that formed the bond. Charlie was born in Vientiane and I in London. Possibly we shared within our natures the characteristic of being servants without masters. I might have long abandoned that search but Charlie had not. He soon took me on a tour of Building Six.
    On one side of the grass field stood an open-sided hall where poor prisoners would eat ‘government food’, as Charlie called it. The standard was fish-head soup with verminous brown rice and a quarter of a cucumber for dessert. Before permission to tuck in was given prisoners waited for some time while a long Buddhist form of grace was chanted.
    Inside the hall an old blind man had set up a cigarette and candy counter. Operating by touch he kept his change tin at close range where its weight and sound provided an accurate accounting. ‘He makes more money than you think! He doesn’t just pass his time.’ If Charlie knew a blind man’s profit margins then he would be someone to keep close.
    Charlie steered wide of the chief’s hut, tacitly indicating that the sight of us together might excite the boss. Should