Emily Barr - The Sleeper

She still didn’t come.

I couldn’t see Jake, but I knew he would be watching, from a distance. I watched and waited, but from the concourse it’s impossible to know anything. I thought Derek would come back, but he didn’t.

Jake was suddenly there. He walked straight over to me, took me by the arm and marched me towards the exit.

‘What’s happening?’ I said. ‘Where’s Rachel? Jake? Where’s Rachel?’

I pulled away from him. He shook his head.

‘Don’t, Lara. Don’t make a scene here, of all places.’

‘But she hasn’t done anything. Nothing can have happened.’

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you, but not here.’

He dragged me out of the air-conditioned building into the muggy outside world, towards a taxi.

I wasn’t getting into it. I couldn’t leave her behind. We argued furiously in low, polite voices, both of us desperate not to attract attention.

‘OK,’ he said in the end. ‘Get in this cab, or I’m leaving you here without any of your money and without any way of ever finding out what just happened, and you’ll never see your friend again.’

I hated him, but I went. He got the cab to take us to Chinatown, and we went to an outside table at a bar and he ordered beer. I wasn’t going to drink it, but then I did, quickly. I didn’t taste it or want it, but the alcohol immediately did something. It made me slightly braver.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Where is she?’

And then he told me. And when he’d told me, he got up and left, and I know I will never see him again.

April 25th

I have begged people to arrest me. They refused and said they’re going to deport me.

The khaki backpack contained nothing but heroin. It was by far the biggest consignment I’d ever taken, and by bringing it safely into Singapore, the world’s scariest place, I’d done something brilliant and exceptional. Said Jake.

He had (and I had worked this out by now) also hidden a kilo in Rachel’s bag. He wouldn’t say why. Either he couldn’t help himself, or he deliberately used her as a distraction, knowing that she would look uncomfortable and guilty no matter what. He set her up and now he doesn’t give a shit.

He told me that everything about this trip had been a huge gamble to start off with. He and Derek knew that the Thai authorities were looking at them and their movements. This, he said breezily, was the last time they’d been planning to use me anyway.

I screamed at him. ‘This was MY last time! I was dumping YOU!’

I’d strolled through Customs carrying so much heroin that a death sentence would have been inevitable. Rachel was carrying enough for that and didn’t even know it, and she was stopped and her life is over.

When he finished telling me, he grabbed me by the wrist. ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Lara,’ he said. I couldn’t pull away.

I started crying because I knew there was absolutely nothing I could do. I would try, and I did try, and I am trying and I will never stop trying, but it is pointless. I raged at him, told him I hated him, all of that. He didn’t give a shit. He never loved me, or even particularly liked me. He’s just a businessman, and he’s moving his business on somewhere else.

He told me that he too had been carrying. As if that would somehow make me like him again. He never usually actually carries it: a couple of times he’s had Derek tip the authorities off against him, so that he would walk through just before me and they’d pull him over, leaving me to stroll through an unguarded Customs area. But this time he did. This time we pulled off something massive, and all it took was the ruthless sacrifice of my best and only friend.

Before I left, he gave me a much smaller backpack and said I had to take it. ‘You’re checked into a private room at the YMCA, and all your stuff is there,’ he said.

I couldn’t look at him. I gave the small bag back, but he made me take it.

‘Seriously, Lara,’ he said. ‘You’ve earned it. Don’t be stupid.’

It was my clothes, a room key and a tiny amount of cash, plus a piece of paper with the hotel room number and a safe combination on it. We have done it that way before, but only once. Normally we just get in a taxi together.

So I took it, and left. I didn’t even look at Jake.

I got a taxi back to the airport and ran into the arrivals hall. When I tried to go backwards through Customs, hoping she’d be somewhere around there, unsmiling men in suits stepped out and stopped me. They were small and slight, but very uncompromising. There were no smiles, and the eye contact was stony.

I broke down completely. I just couldn’t hold it together. I wailed and screamed and cried. It destroyed any chance there had ever been of their taking me seriously.

‘My friend,’ I kept saying. ‘She’s here.’

First they ejected me from the Customs area, and then from the entire airport. I kept confessing, again and again. The first time I told them I’d carried drugs, they asked to look through my bag. They took it away for a bit, but there was nothing interesting about it.

After that, with no evidence and nothing but increasingly wild ranting to go on, they picked me up and threw me right out.

I sat on the concrete outside Changi airport (a tidy place where no one sits on the concrete), and I knew I was at the lowest point of my life.

A policewoman came and told me to move. She was quite nice, but when I started ranting, she changed. That gave me an idea, and I tried to act madder and madder in the hope of being arrested and finding my way into the judicial system.

In the end she took my bag, found that I had money and a YMCA key, and put me in a taxi there.

The money was in a portable safe, blocks and blocks of it. I tried to make a plan, but it was hard. I had to get Rachel out of wherever she was, all on my own. Last time I was properly on my own, I was walking down the Khao San Road in Bangkok, about to meet Jake. I would give anything to be able to go back and walk straight past.

I went to the police and told everything to a terrifying man who had an air of such authority that I quailed as I spoke. I almost wet myself when I told him all about our smuggling thing, but I was so relieved to be confessing that I managed to carry on.

The sole point I was trying to get across was that Rachel was a tiny player, unwittingly involved, and she should be released. I could feel, though, that my ‘why don’t you let her off this once’ line was not going to go down well.

He did write it all down, though. He was only interested in Jake and Derek, so I told him absolutely everything I knew about both of them. I know nothing will happen to them. I realised as I spoke that those aren’t even their real names.

And when I kept talking about Rachel, he wouldn’t even confirm that she’d been arrested. He wouldn’t tell me anything about her whatsoever. Then, since I hadn’t got any drugs or any proof of anything I was saying, he told me to go.

‘I believe your tale, Miss Wilberforce,’ he said. ‘Even without evidence. And for this reason I am instructing you to leave Singapore as soon as you can, and not come back.’

He took my passport and put something in there, and later I realised I had been politely deported, in my own time.

That was two days ago. I haven’t left. I need to go and visit Rachel before I do.

She’s been in the papers here a bit, but because she’s from NZ, I doubt there’ll be anything in the British papers. I moved out of the YMCA, and into this horrible hostel. Partly because this feels like a good place for keeping a low profile, and also because I like the squalor in a strange sort of way.

She was arrested with a kilo of heroin in her bag. That comes with an automatic death penalty.