heidihaiku

My Romance

Stretching it out
Gently goes the summer leaf
Crumbs in my fingers

That Knight

Lemon dressed bed
a summer scene, serene
Fitful tossing dream

The Game

Too much to bear
or else I bare my heart
Stand up and stay cool

Watching

Under the sea foam
twirling shadows find their feet
Aqua blasts them deep

Writing Exercises - Senses

Smell
You could almost see the stink lingering in puddles outside the main dorm in RAK.
The khaki bubbles popped and spread like craters on cooking pancakes as they released their eye watering fumes of pee. "I guess they didn't unlock for the toilet again last night..."

Taste
The taste of your tattoo against my tongue on that long summer morning, not so long ago

Sound
Metal against metal; the sound of the iron skeleton key rapping against the aluminium table with speed and force. Thwak thwak thwak thwak thwak!

Touch
The feel of the prison issue blanket against my skin. It was heavy with the grease of hundreds of bodies that had used it before me. I itched. After a week I could feel the irritation growing under the skin of my back. After two weeks my back had exploded in a mess of angry red pus filled spots. A Sri Lankan girl squeezed and bathed it for me.

Sight
The vision of Derek standing calm, almost nonchalant in the visiting courtyard, while to each side of him it was chaos. His stance almost an inversion of all those around him. They shouted, waved, gesticulated, jostled to be seen and heard by their visitors on the other side of the bars, many of whom were wilting and crying in the afternoon heat. He just stood still and stared into my eyes, searching out my heart, as I wilted and cried too.

Taste
The tiny salty black bubbles popped between my teeth and I looked over at mum with eyes that didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. The caviar was first class. I sipped from my glass of Dom and started to notice long forgotten senses waking up. The Champagne bubbles tickled my mouth and nose and washed the salty eggs down in one exquisite swallow. I had eaten prison food for two years. The only alcohol I'd drunk was a couple of capfuls of baby cologne. This was my very first taste of freedom.

Writing Exercises - Emotions

Love
There’s a lightness that comes with love. People talk about butterflies tickling their skin from the inside out, but doesn’t it all start in the head? It’s the brain that suddenly bursts with these long dormant hormones. It’s the neurones firing off with pleasure that create space where once there was longing. For me, the lightness means I can relax when he meets me at Schiphol Airport. Relaxing means a feverish afternoon of lovemaking in the tiny White House hotel in Amsterdam. The feverish afternoon becomes an affair born in security, surety and complete physical surrender. I had melted into my man and he into me. He said I love you Hyde. And I finally said I love you back.

Fear
It’s like a game of tetris. The ball of fire is suspended around my heart and drops down into my flaming belly pit. The moment it drops another forms, and drops, then another and another... There’s a tightness that runs from deep inside my brain and fingers its way through my body. It hurts. It’s like my soul is trying to tear through - to get away. But I need it here. I need to be alert, I’m straining to pick up a hint in their fast flowing Arabic, a hint that I’ll be ok, that it will all be over soon. But deeper down in the pit of fire is an emptiness that tells me it’s useless. A knowing that tells me the only place I'm going is back to jail.

Self loathing
You can tell the girls who actually have some legitimate reason for being in prison. The ‘what ifs’ and ‘what have I dones’ hang unspoken, like a weight slung across their shoulders as they move through the hours of each and every day. This ghostly appendage to the soul balances two buckets - one on either side - overflowing with regret and sadness. When you’re carrying the buckets, it usually means you’re going to be here a while. You’ll watch girls come, some with buckets, some just in transit; and you’ll watch girls go. That’s when your own buckets get heavier. How can you go? How can you even just make it ok? Sorry, I screwed up is not a currency accepted here. You are powerless to change events. In the end, you can only change yourself.

Joy
I look at the new text message and can’t help but smile. It felt like the roof opened up to the sun right there in Sexy Nails salon. A burst of pink spread across my cheeks then leaked all the way to my fingers and toes. I looked up, not looking anywhere because my eyes were glazed, just recalling his hands gently laying me back onto the bed. I see the sun tattooed on his solar plexis. Maybe that’s where the warmth is coming from. I want to reply but know now it’s ok. I don’t have to rush. He’s still there. And I’m still smiling.

So I craft my response while the Vietnamese lady paints hot pink wax between my legs.

Chained to my dreams

Dear Catherine,

I keep having this dream. The dream is always different, but the outcome is freakishly the same. I’m back there and I’m clean. Squeaky. No way I’m going to screw up this time. Derek is close by, but still out of reach. We’re in the same country at least. I’m going to a party. I’m not going to take drugs. But other people are. It’s absolutely not ok for me to have anything in my system. We all know that. One more strike and I’m out...

I never remember the detail of exactly how it happens, just the earth shattering moment when I’m stopped by the police and realise that they’ve got me again. As they’re taking me back to the station for a urine test I’m ready to tear my own heart out. My free life disappears before my eyes. How could I have slipped? I can’t tell my family. Better they think I’m dead. There are no more get out of jail cards left. The worse part is, I don’t even know whether I’m guilty or not. I feel guilty. I know they’re going to get a positive test out of me. But I don’t think I actually took anything. Or was it just one teeny tiny taste? That’s enough of course.

The next part of the dream could be anywhere. But I’m inside. Locked up. Sometimes some of the faces are the same. Sometimes I’m in a completely foreign prison, drawing only, I can imagine, on pictures in my mind from Sasha’s stories of Delhi prison, or the numerous books written by people like us. The despair is indescribable. Yet I never, ever see my parents in these dreams. Maybe it’s my mind’s way of protecting itself? Do you think my sub-conscious knows that’s territory too painful for even a dream?

I’m too ashamed to even call my lawyers.

The dreamscape chaos is mixed with a sense of déjà vu. It’s like that scene from Midnight Express when they’re walking circles chained to the wheel, sinking deeper into the maddening rut walked by their own feet. I know I’ve been here before. It’s all the same but different. I know it’s hopeless. I keep dreaming. I go to court. I stand clutching the bars watching bus loads of women released to carry on with their lives, knowing that will never be me, on that bus. I can actually feel the despondency gnawing away at my soul. It’s a sad, sad place I’m in and I’m slipping off the edge. Giving up...

Then there’s a sharp turn. It’s like a knife slices through the middle of the dream and changes its course from a point back in some premonitory corner of my mind. It’s as sudden and shocking as finding out I didn’t actually do it. Of course I didn’t do it. Who could be so crazy? And I’m walking out of the jail, heart beating faster as it settles back into my conscious body.

I know I’m awake and I cry.

Ramble

I know I want to end the book with the journey home - the beginning of a new, young life - but I have no idea what it's supposed to mean. There was something in Fiona's idea - telling the story from multiple perspectives...

There are the Emirates staff at the first class check in watching me approach in handcuffs. There were the fellow prisoners saying goodbye. It would be amazing if you cold focus up close on their faces and hear their internal monologues as each encountered this shell of a girl. Woman. Was I a girl or a woman at twenty six? Wow, there's a question all of its own.

I can see the shotias - Fowzia in particular watching me leave, and Major Sabah 'Will she be back? Third time's a charm.' That's where the nightmares come from, always that third time lurking, waiting to happen.

So this shell of a girl, she's empty, dry of tears, a grey, vaporous shadow of her former self, while all around, every pinpoint along the way, there are faces looming close, watching and passing judgement. What's it like to enter the world with this flag hanging over your head? Forever. There's a passport with an international drug peddling charge attached to it. A profile on interpol, a world wide web where a search of your name returns a digest of your personal history, etched into the screens of the future.

And there are the friends who've been let down. The family who will never look at you the same way, the secrets that exist to protect grandparents, the fear that prospective employers, clients, boyfriends and colleagues will one day ask the question...

What's it like to go back into the world? Where do you start?

Three beginnings - a writing exercise

Beginning One:

The key jerked us out of sleep. Rap rap rap rap rap. Then deeper. Thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack. “Yalla. Goomee. Eat.” Quickly. Get up. Breakfast. The beginning was no different to any other day. But we all knew the end would be.

Peeling my eyes open, my body started to register what day it was. The dread bubbled in my belly and quickly rose, pushing a little "Oh" from my lips as it fizzed and burned around my heart like poison. If it wasn't for the poison I'd be empty inside.

I looked over at Sasha, she was sitting, knees up, arms draped over the front of them with her head hanging between her legs. It’s the position you sit in when you think you’re going to be sick. I know how she feels.

Kate is right next to me, close enough to touch. I glance over my shoulder and she is laying straight as a plank, eyes focused on the fluorescent light above our heads. It looks like a black light – one of those dark UV tubes that make your teeth glow at a trance club in Amsterdam – but it’s actually a standard old white tube. Covered in flies. They’re still, settled, but before long, as we start to move and a little air circulates in the room, they’ll become active. There must be hundreds of them. Enough to completely cover a metre long tube. When they start buzzing around the room for the day, you can see that the tube is covered in fly shit.

Kate isn’t a morning person; she’s still laying here next to me, staring straight up. I’d go beyond saying Anna isn’t a morning person. She’s actually frightening in the morning. I’ve seen her bare her teeth, wolf like, and that’s just because Sasha told her she missed a patch when she was cleaning the floor.



Beginning Two:

The black fabric was the softest thing about today. I just held it for a while. It was cool too. A little sea of cool in the thick humidity of a middle eastern summer morning.

Standing with the abaya held to my body and feeling the slippery waves of rayon move and settle around me has a calming effect. My eyes are open, but by all appearances, nobody is home. On court day, the further you can get away from the truth, the safer you are. It’s like your own personal defence team steps in to fight the system. Suppress the nervous synapses that threaten to derail an already shaky defence built by a very expensive lawyer. We all deal with another day in the Shariah court differently, but there’s one emotion that’s as strong as the handcuffs that link us like a chain gang for the journey – it’s the sheer terror at what new evidence will unfold.



Beginning Three:

The girls at the Emirates first class check in counter had been on duty since midnight. It was 6am and they had two hours left in their shift and would soon start seeing passengers for EK 005 departing at 7:30am. Checking in the east bound Singapore flights was usually a breeze – mostly Western expats going home to Australia, and often, Emirates pilots and their families. They reapplied layers of pink lipstick within the sharp confines of red lipliner, they gossiped in Arabic about a colleague they suspected of moonlighting as a prostitute, they readjusted their shaylas, wrapping the black veils loosely around rich black hair, and they dismissed a lecherous Bahraini wanting to check in. His ticket was for Riyadh and it was economy. All in all, it was just another winter’s day in Dubai and the temperature was a gorgeous 21 degrees Celsius at 6am. The sky was wearing its perennial shade of smoky blue. And the palm trees lining the forecourt just outside the automatic doors were heavy with bunches of ripening caramel coloured dates.

Then two police women escorted a blonde girl in handcuffs through the automatic doors.