Emily Barr - The Sleeper

April 29th

On the plane

They didn’t like me at passport control. I didn’t care. I hoped they’d arrest me, but of course if they want you to leave a country and they only find out you haven’t when you’re on the way out anyway, they’re hardly going to detain you.

I screamed as they put me on the plane. I hated them. I swore at them. It was perverse: I wanted to be arrested and they wouldn’t take me. They just sent me home. Once the plane doors were locked and we were in the air, I stopped. I couldn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks. I can’t do anything. I will never do anything but try to get Rachel out.

Jake is such a fucking bastard. I hate him beyond anything, and if I can ever get even with him, I will.

May 15th

Mum and Dad’s house

I’m going to choke on the horrible stale air if I stay here a moment longer. I cannot bear it. They are so preoccupied with trivialities. Who cares? Who cares when the bins go out or what the neighbours are doing?

I managed to find news about Rachel on a New Zealand website. I am never going to see her again, because there’s every chance she’s going to be executed.

My friend is going to die, because of me. She’s likely to be hanged, as far as I can discover. My very best friend, the only real friend I’ve ever had, is going to be suspended by a noose around her neck until she is dead.

It’s my fault. If she hadn’t met me, she would be going back to New Zealand and carrying on with her life. I have killed her by being a drug smuggler. Whichever way you look at it, I’m evil.

And I know I’m powerless to stop it. I’m writing letters every day. I’m keeping copies of them all because I do so many of them I’d forget otherwise.

I can’t give up on her. Mum and Dad are worried about me. Because I’m not being the good girl any more.

They have no idea.

September 21st

I saw something in the paper.

I’d kept this book hidden so tightly away, wrapped in a cloth, at the very top of the back shelf of my wardrobe. This is the only place I can write it down. I don’t want this in my home any more.

I was reading the Saturday paper today, sitting in my flat on my own, fighting off the urge to revisit all this stuff. My place is just a studio in north London, and not in one of the parts that people consider ‘nice’. In an area, in fact, that is best known for its women’s prison, which sometimes feels like the universe taunting me and making sure I never forget.

The flat itself is nice enough. All mine (rented), though I’ve just made an offer on a little terraced house in Battersea. But I’m not very good at being on my own yet. I actually need a boyfriend or something, I think, to stop my mind attempting to swerve into bad places.

I was reading the paper, trying not to think about R. Every moment of every day I try not to think about her. And there it was, suddenly: a blurry photograph of him. Jake. ‘Mastermind of drug ring arrested in Thailand’, it said. His name wasn’t Jake; it was actually Donald, and it seems that his ‘tiny little operation working below the official radar’ was nothing of the sort. He was arrested in Bangkok: not at the airport, not for smuggling, but after police trapped him. It didn’t say much, but I think he recruited a young woman, an undercover officer.

I should be happy. I should not be hysterical, crying and shaking and throwing things around the flat. I know this stops him doing it to anyone else, and I know that he, unlike R, deserves it. But it brought everything back. I can’t control myself.

So Jake is in prison. So is Rachel, caught in the crossfire. I’m sure they’ve got Derek by now too, or that they’re about to. Jake would hardly protect him.

I sat in a tiny room in Singapore and told the police everything about Jake. I took them to him, I am certain of it. Rachel and I did it. They listened to me a little after all.

Out of everyone I knew who was involved in this business, I’m the only one who got away.

I’m the one who ruined everyone else’s lives.

I looked Rachel up. She’s still alive. I wrote to her again, but I know the best I’m going to get is another stiff, furious letter from her brother telling me to leave her alone.

January 24th

One more entry. Then I’m going to hide this book somewhere. I can’t throw it away, and I can’t ever open it again.

Today I met a man. After turning down people asking me out for drinks, ignoring people approaching me in the street, everything, I finally met one. I knew I would know him when I met him, and I have.

He’s not Jake, and that is why I have chosen him. He doesn’t make me feel wild and impulsive. I didn’t want to fling my clothes off when he looked at me. But he feels safe. He would never ask me to risk my life to make him rich.

Saturday afternoon, and I was in Soho on my own. I have friends from work but I can’t really be bothered with them. R was the only friend I had, and look what I ended up doing to her. I killed her.

She wrote me one letter, months ago. I burned it in the sink because I couldn’t bear it, and now I wish I had it. She said she had known what she was doing.

It’s not actually your fault as much as you think , she wrote. I asked Jake if I could do what you were doing. He told me not to tell you because he didn’t want you worrying about me. So it’s not quite what you thought.

It explained why she had been so terrified on the plane. But I was not thinking about it, and that was taking all my energy.

The plan was to stroll around and enjoy London, and perhaps end up at the cinema or an art gallery. In my head I was in Changi jail, the exact place where I should have been. I was with Rachel, Rachel who hated me so much she would not let me visit her, would not speak to me, just got her brother to tell me to go away. I pictured her crammed into a cell with other prisoners, unable to understand them, stripped of all dignity.

I pictured her dead. I tried to shut it out, but I knew that today was the day she was scheduled to be hanged.

And I suddenly couldn’t take it. I went into a bar and bought a bottle of beer and sat by the window on my own. All I was going to do was get drunk. It was raining.

There was condensation on the inside of the window. I drew a prison on it. Just a square building, but one with bars on the window. I drew a stick Rachel outside it.

Just before I could put the noose around her neck, someone interrupted me. An ‘Is this seat taken?’ interruption.

I said no. I thought he wanted to take the chair away to join his friends, but he sat on it, at my tiny table, instead.

And then I looked at him. He was nice-looking. I need someone. He felt safe. He, I thought, would do. He could save me.

I ordered a coffee, to pretend I hadn’t been drinking on my own in the afternoon. If he’d asked about the empty beer bottle, I would have told him. He didn’t, and so I won’t.

We talked a bit. He was fine. Then, somehow, we went to the cinema. It was gloriously ordinary. He was normal. He was not going to recruit me for anything. He was smitten with me, and I knew I was safe.

His name is Sam.

part four

Thailand

chapter twenty-five

Iris

Everything almost made sense.

The sun was hot and high, but it was a hazy, choking warmth, not the blazing heat I had imagined. This city was too much for me to take in, and all I could do was cling on to the edge of my seat and squeeze my eyes tightly closed whenever it got too much.

That did not, of course, block out the smell, which was a mixture of dust and dirt, food cooking, rubbish rotting, dizzying heat and toxic waste. I had never thought of air as anything other than a pure and negligible thing, but now it was assaulting me. It was hot in my nose, in my throat, in my lungs, and it made me cough.