Moore - A Prayer Before Dawn

A PRAYER BEFORE DAWN

A Nightmare in Thailand

Billy Moore

Published in 2014 by maverick house publishers.

Maverick House, Office 19, Dunboyne Business Park, Dunboyne, Co. Meath, Ireland.

info@maverickhouse.com
http://www.maverickhouse.com

Copyright Billy Moore

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a newspaper, magazine or broadcast.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is dedicated to my mother,
a small woman with a big heart.

PROLOGUE

A YOUNG THAI, no older than twenty-five, ran past me, his face showing pure terror. He slowed and turned to look at his assailant, who then passed me swinging his metal chair, striking the victims head. He lost balance, slipped, and hit the concrete with a loud thud. Another man appeared with a nine-inch knife, and stood over the young mans body.

A crowd gathered; even trusties stood and watched as the older man repeatedly plunged the knife into the young Thais flesh. It wasnt done in frenzy; it was slow, cold, and calculated. Still no one helped or attempted to intervene. They all just stared, while a few shouted teng kao and kaa man .

I knew enough Thai to understand that the crowd was shouting stab him and kill it. The knifeman kept thrusting the blade into the young mans body, each time sinking it in up to the handle. The knife went into his neck, lower back, chest, legs, and stomach; so many times I lost count.

I stood only a few feet away, watching in fascination and feeling guilty. Finally the victim lay still and quiet, in a pool of his own blood. It was horrible. I felt bad for not helping. But what could I do? This was a Thai problem. And I was a foreigner, one of many in Klong Prem prison.

More than a week passed before I could sleep without replaying the murder of the young man, over and over again in my head, in slow motion. This was the reality of life in Klong Prem, a place described by the prime minister of Thailand as a zoo to house the nations most dangerous criminals. And little did I know that this was just the beginning of what was to be, for me, three years of a waking nightmare.

Chapters

Rocky Roads

STANDING ON A prison roof is a great way to get noticed. And thats what I wanted to get noticed; to be acknowledged; for someone to look at me and see me for who I was, a small frightened child who was never allowed to grow up. I was desperate and full of fear. I couldnt live life on lifes terms; this was my only escape. I needed help; I just didnt know how to ask for it. To me, being on the roof was the answer.

Sadly, for the time being no one was about to ask me to tell them my life story; all they wanted was to get me and my fourteen fellow inmates off the roof. HMP Liverpool was on lockdown and seventy feet below us a full complement of guards in riot gear were spread out and craning their necks to look up at us.

Discontent had been bubbling all day. It was one of the hottest days of the year. The whispers went around: Were staying out, they cant make us go back into those sweatboxes. There was a buzz of excitement which mounted and spread from man to man like electricity. It was forbidden; it was a mutiny; we were going to defy the system.

At first they closed the gates, left us in the yard and watched us from behind barbed wire and seven-foot-high locked gates. They watched us the way people observe dangerous animals in the zoo. They said nothing.

There were about a hundred and fifty of us the guards knew better than to try and take us on and aggravate an already explosive situation. They had all the time in the world. We took our shirts off and let the sun beat down on our pale prison skins. Big mistake! We wanted to get up on the roof that was our objective and to get there we needed makeshift ropes. The word had spread quickly that something was going down in the exercise yard. Dinner time had come and gone without the usual queue of hungry inmates shuffling along, metal trays in hand.

Whats going on? an inmate asked.

What the hells going on? another shouted.

A sit-in, in the yard, came the reply from another group of inmates.

Where?

In the yard, man.

The screws were flapping around, yelling, trying to get the others back into their cells and away from the situation.

Back in their cells the guys wanted to be in on the action. If they couldnt get up onto the roof, at least they could help the men in the yard get there. Men started to pass sheets out of the cell windows. Brown sheets floated down into the yard and were tied together into ropes. All we needed was a climber. Actually what we needed was Spider-Man, and we had him!

His name was Austie, a cat burglar with a stutter. He was a local lad who was game to try anything. He tied the sheets around his waist and got up onto the shoulders of the tallest man available. From there he grabbed onto a drainpipe and, by getting his tiny feet into the smallest of crevices, he shimmied up the pipe. We watched breathless as Austie inched higher and higher. As we looked on, dirt and debris fell in our eyes and all around. He was getting there. Even the screws must have been impressed because, when Austie made it to the roof and stood with his hands in the air like Rocky Balboa, the whole prison erupted with shouts and whistles and yells of approval. That was Austies finest hour, no doubt!

Three guys successfully made it up onto the roof, and then it was my turn. The last bit of climbing I remembered doing was when I was a ten-year-old and thieved eggs from birds nests. I could hear one of the landing staff shout no chance, fat arse! and a chorus of sniggers from the other screws.

Fat arse? Id show them. I scrambled up the sheets, helped by the men above who pulled me up as best they could.

At the top, hearing the jubilation, I felt like a superstar. But the thrill was short-lived. I was getting what I wanted for sure. I was being noticed. But not in the way I wanted. Suddenly, I felt alone and scared. I knew Id have to come down sooner or later and for a split second I contemplated taking the quickest route. For that moment I envisaged myself splattered all over the yard, my blood drying fast in the scorching heat, the detested screws having to scrub away at the bits of me which would be plastered all over the walls and tarmac.

But thats not the kind of person I am.

In fact, I was brought down sixteen hours later in a cherry-picker, suffering from sunstroke. I spent a night in the hospital wing and then the next seven months in solitary confinement. I got a few kicks and a few punches from the guards nothing I wasnt already used to. It was a bit of an anti-climax, really.

So much for my big cry for help.

It was much later on in my life that I learned the kind of really bad things that can happen to you in prison.

I was thirty years old when this happened but Id been in and out of jail since I was seventeen: dangerous driving, burglary, robbery, violence, drugs.

Drugs, of course. Thats where it all started. I was smoking weed with my mates from the age of sixteen. I graduated to smoking smack a year later and my world changed.

Smack made me vomit at first but that feeling of being wrapped in cotton wool, protected and secure, was worth the discomfort. I couldnt get enough of it. As you may have guessed, security, protection and love were things sadly missing from my life. Youve probably heard it all before, the alcoholic, violent dad, the valiant mother brutalised and broken down by caring for six children and having to deal with a violent husband. The endless poverty, the 70s council estates rigidly divided into ganglands, the Toxteth riots in the 80s.