windar
Teller of Tales
This story was commissioned by a member from Singapore, KelvinB. I thank him for helping with a number of details about the geography and culture of that interesting city.
Kelvin had previously commissioned a story in a similar vein from our late friend Praefectus Praetorio, to whose memory I dedicate this short, two-part piece.
Tuesday and Fridays were the days that court ordered canings were carried out at the Changi Women’s Prison in Singapore. Janet Tan knew that even after only a few days as an inmate. Everyone in the prison knew it, whether they were one of the unfortunate souls, like Janet, who had been sentenced to receive that most dreaded punishment or not.
She remembered her conversation with one of the veteran inmates, Sunita Das, as they had walked their circuit of the exercise yard yesterday. “I got my six on a Tuesday not long after coming in here,” she had confided to Janet. “They like to do it fairly soon, to get it over with,” she had continued. “But they don’t tell you ahead of time. They just show up some time after breakfast and take you for your medical exam. That’s when you’ll know.”
“Medical exam?” Janet had asked.
“Yeah, they want you to suffer, but they don’t want you dying. That would make trouble. But don’t worry; a healthy girl like you, slim, in good shape. You’ll pass with flying colors, lucky you!”
Janet had always prided herself on keeping in shape; even when things were terribly busy at work or she was travelling, she set time aside to run in the park or on a treadmill. At 33, she could easily pass for five or even ten years younger.
“So, did it, you know, hurt a lot?”
Sunita laughed. “Oh, my dear, you can’t even imagine. If hell is half that bad, I’m gonna be good, so I don’t go there. How many are you getting?”
“Eight,” Janet replied.
Sunita shook her head. “My sympathies. Six was bad enough, thank you very much. And how many years?”
“Ten,” Janet replied.
“What did you do? Don’t worry, the rules in here say you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, though somehow everyone finds out pretty quickly. There are inmates who work in the Admin offices and get to glance at paperwork. There aren’t a lot of secrets in here.”
“That’s OK,” Janet replied. “I don’t mind talking about it because I’m innocent.”
Sunita pointed at the other prisoners walking the circuit. “Ask ten of them and nine will tell you they’re innocent. Not me though; I did it. I was a bookkeeper and I embezzled from my employer; I set up a phony company and submitted fake invoices and wrote checks to pay them. It served them right for paying me so little. What about you?”
“They said I defrauded my investors by making false claims about a device we were working on that people could wear to monitor their vitals. But they weren’t really false; the device would have worked, we just needed more time to develop it. Now, of course, they put us out of business so it won’t happen. Someone in Silicon Valley will do it and too bad for Singapore. Like those guys there never exaggerate.”
“Well maybe the judges in America are more willing to forgive a little white lie,” Sunita replied. “And of course, no caning there. But you’ll get through it; everyone does. And you’ll get through your ten years, too. I’m halfway through my six and I can do the rest, no problem. Just keep your head down; some of these girls are mean.”
Janet looked around at her fellow inmates. She had no reason to doubt what Sunita had said; quite a few looked like she would be well advised not to piss them off. One of the guards banged her truncheon on the metal bars of the gate that led to the exercise yard. “Alright, ladies, time’s up! Back inside! Let’s go!”
The prisoners began heading for the gate. “Thanks for cluing me in, Sunita. I think I can face it if I know what to expect. I guess I’ll be seeing you around,” Janet said.
“Yeah, you will. Like where else am I gonna go, right?” Sunita replied.
Among the inmates who looked to Janet like someone she should avoid was a fellow recent arrival, Lucy Yee. Lucy was in her early twenties and about fifteen cm taller and at least ten kg heavier than Janet. Unfortunately, Janet wasn’t really able to avoid her because they had been assigned to the same two person cell.
Lucy had arrived a couple of days before Janet, convicted of assault on another girl, who, Lucy believed was sleeping with her boyfriend. Lucy had waylaid her in a club and broken the girl’s nose and a couple of ribs, earning her the same sentence as Janet-ten years and eight strokes of the cane. Well, now Lucy’s boyfriend would be free to screw whomever he wanted now that she was out of circulation.
Like Sunita, Lucy didn’t deny her guilt. “You’re fuckin’ right I smashed her up; the bitch deserved it!” she had boasted to Janet shortly after Janet was deposited in her cell following her intake. Janet had to hope that she wouldn’t inadvertently do something that would render her deserving of some broken bones in Lucy’s eyes.
‘This is what the next ten years of my life are going to be,’ Janet thought. Nothing in her previous experience had prepared her to share a prison cell with a tough girl from Yishun, a neighborhood where wanna-be gangsters (no doubt Lucy’s boyfriend was one) did their criminal deeds.
No, the last dozen or so years of her life had been spent first at Harvard on a full scholarship, where the idea for her biosensor had come to her during her lab rotation, then, following in the footsteps of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, dropping out to found a company to develop the product. She could have gone to Silicon Valley like many a budding entrepreneur, but family and cultural ties had brought her back to Singapore, a decision she now deeply regretted, in view of the caning she was facing.
There, her days were spent with scientists and engineers, when she wasn’t flying business class to New York, San Francisco, Shanghai or London raising money to pay for the HQ in Raffles Place, furnished in high-end techno-chic to impress prospective investors, and the development costs which always seemed higher and the time frames longer than even her most conservative estimates.
So, of course, she had sometimes fudged a few numbers and exaggerated a bit. What prospective tycoon doesn’t? It was all in the service of buying more time to develop a product that would help people stay healthy.
The foreigners expected you to do that. Unfortunately, her local investors, including some government big-wigs, didn’t.
And that was how she came to be lying on a cot late on a Monday night, in a cell with a snoring gangsterette like Lucy Yee, unable to sleep, wondering if tomorrow, Tuesday, was to be the day that they would come to take her to have her ass shredded into a pulp. Everything she had worked for was being sold at auction to compensate her investors-the big, beautiful house in Cairnhill, the vacation villa in France, the Mercedes, the Italian designer clothes and shoes- all gone, along with her bank accounts and shares in companies that were actually worth something, unlike the shares in her own company.
It took quite a while, but eventually, using some of the yoga techniques she had studied a few years before, she was able to drift off to a restless sleep, to be awakened around 6 AM by the guard coming down the hallway, banging her truncheon on the bars of each of the cells, shouting’ “Wake up you lazy sluts! Time to get your asses out of bed and down to the mess hall for breakfast!”
‘Breakfast?’ Janet thought. She didn’t feel hungry; all she felt was the gnawing fear in her stomach knowing that sometime after breakfast they might come to take her to her flogging. Putting her fear aside for the moment, she rolled out of bed and went to sit on the tiny seatless metal toilet to empty her bladder.
No sooner had she sat on the toilet then her cellmate jumped out of bed and came to loom over her. “Hurry up, bitch!” Lucy ordered. “I have to piss, too.” Janet quickly finished her business and got up, slipping her rubber sandals on and standing next to the barred door, waiting for the guard to open it as Lucy took her sweet time before finally joining her, scowling at Janet as though she begrudged her the air she was consuming.
They came after breakfast, the regular duty guard for their cell block, accompanied by two very stern looking comrades, the metal grate of the cell door clanging against the wall as they threw it open. Janet looked up from the book from the prison library that she had been reading. Her heart was pounding. Was this the moment she had been dreading ever since she’d heard the judge pronounce his sentence, “And eight strokes of the cane on your bare buttocks.”?
Lucy didn’t even bother looking up from her magazine, which delved into the romances and break-ups of K-Pop stars in exhaustive detail. The block guard looked from one inmate to the other and back again. Finally, she spoke, “Yee, on your feet, time to go see the doctor.”
“I’m not sick,” Lucy replied, her face still buried in the magazine.
One of the auxiliary guards grabbed the magazine out of Lucy’s hands and threw it across the cell. “You think this is a joke, Yee?” Then she grabbed Lucy’s arm and pulled her to her feet, twisting the arm behind her.
“Oww!” Lucy protested. “That hurts, bitch.
The other auxiliary guard grabbed Lucy’s other arm. “You think you’re so tough, Yee, don’t you?” she spat. “Don’t worry, you’ll be crying like a baby soon when that rotan bites into your fat ass.” They marched her out quickly, barefoot, not even bothering to let her put on her rubber sandals. The block guard slammed the cell door shut behind them.
Janet was left feeling mixed emotions. On the one hand, she was relieved that it was Lucy they had come for Lucy, not her, though she knew her time would come. She was however, shocked by the violence of Lucy’s words and the actions of the guards. She resolved to behave in a more dignified way when they came for her.
About half an hour later, she got a bit of a scare when the block guard threw the door open and strode into the cell. ‘Had they decided they might as well cane the two cellmates in one session?’ she wondered.
The guard looked around the cell, then spoke in a not too harsh voice. “Tan, go get a mop and a bucket with some soapy water from the closet down the hall and clean the floor in here. And get a brush and some bleach for the toilet, too. ”
“Yes, ma’am,” Janet replied as she went out into the hall. Before her arrest, she had had a maid, a Bangladeshi named Yasmina, to take care of that sort of thing, but those days were in the past now.
Later, after the guard had pronounced the cell sufficiently clean, she was allowed to go to the exercise yard. There, she saw Sunita walking with another Indian inmate. Janet hurried to catch up with them. “Sunita,” she called.
Sunita turned to look at her, then turned back to her companion and said something in what Janet thought might be Hindi. The other woman nodded and continued on her circuit. “What is it, Janet?” Sunita asked.
“They took my cellmate, Lucy, today.”
“Well, that’s good for you. They take all the prisoners who are getting the cane at once, so you’re in the clear for today. Your ass gets to look nice and soft for a few more days at least.”
“Do you think they’ll do me on Friday?” Janet asked.
Sunita shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows? Look, my dear, you need to stop worrying about it. They’ll do it when they do it. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
Janet knew that was good advice. Still, she’d always been a worrier, obsessing over small details. “Will it leave scars?”
Sunita looked at Janet. “What did I just say?” she asked, looking a bit exasperated.
“I’m sorry,” Janet said. “It’s just the way I am. I need to know.”
“OK,” Sunita said. “Tell the guard you need to take a dump. Hold your stomach like you’re having cramps. Go into the bathroom right near the gate. I’ll meet you in there in a couple of minutes.”
Janet nodded and went to the gate that led out of the exercise yard. She approached the guard stationed there. “Ma’am I need to go to the bathroom, please,” she asked, trying to sound desperate.
“You’re supposed to go before exercise period,” the woman replied.
Janet clutched her belly, “Please, ma’am, it’s the food in here, I’m not used to it. I’m afraid I won’t be able to hold it.”
“Next time you decide to bilk your investors, Tan, maybe you should ask the judge to send you to The Raffles or The Hilton. Make it quick, OK?” she said, opening the gate. Janet hurried into the bathroom.
A minute or so later Sunita came in and beckoned Janet over to the far wall, under a barred window. “There’s more light here,” she said. She pulled down her prison shorts and underpants. “Here, have a look.”
Janet bent down to inspect. There were some faint lines across the middle of the brown skin. “It’s been a few years,” Sunita said. “They looked worse right after. Also on a light-skinned girl like you, they might show more. Maybe when I get out I’ll go see a cosmetic surgeon and see what he can do about them.”
Janet stood up. “I’m sorry, Sunita. I shouldn’t have asked. “
“No problem. It’s just a little souvenir of Changi. They want you to be able to look at it and remember not to break the law.”
Janet nodded. “I better get back out there,” she said, turning to leave.
It was later that afternoon, near dinner time, when they brought Lucy Yee back. She was naked, walking between the two guards, defeated, not putting up any resistance as they led her into the cell she shared with Janet. Her hair was disheveled, matted on her face and it was clear that she had been crying.
The guards maneuvered her onto her cot, face down. Janet stared open mouthed at Lucy’s ass, which was mess of gouges and wheals, the worst spots daubed with some sort of disinfectant that gave them a purplish tinge.
The block guard came in carrying a plastic bag that contained Lucy’s prison uniform, which she dropped on the floor and kicked under the bed. “You won’t need these for a while, Yee” she said, “But here they are.” Then the guards filed out leaving the two prisoners alone.
“I’m so sorry, Lucy,” Janet said, kneeling beside her cellmate’s cot and reaching out to stroke her sodden hair.
“It’s my fault, not yours,” Lucy replied.
Janet desperately wanted Lucy to describe the whole experience so she would know what to expect when her time came, but decided against it. “The worst part was that bitch was smiling through the whole thing,” Lucy volunteered.
“That guard?” Janet asked.
“No, her, the one who’s fucking my boyfriend.”
“They let her watch?” Janet asked, incredulous.
“Yes, the victims of your crimes are invited to attend,” Lucy replied, her voice shaking with emotion. “They say it’s so they can have closure, but I think it’s just so you suffer more.”
Janet was shaken by this news, something she hadn’t heard before. Did that mean that her investors might be present to watch her suffer, gleefully enjoying the spectacle as a payback for the money they had lost? She blushed just thinking about them staring at her naked body, smiling as she howled in pain.
Before Janet could say anything, the block guard came down the hall announcing dinner. Janet stood. “Would you like me to bring you back some food?” she asked.
“I’m not hungry,” Lucy replied.
“You should eat to keep your strength up so you can heal,” Janet said. She thought it would be a good think to try to be kind to her cellmate. After all, she was in pain. Also, Janet might need some help after her own ordeal which might be coming as soon as this coming Friday. “Maybe some noodle soup?”
“OK, sure, whatever. Thanks,” Lucy replied.
After she had eaten, Janet did bring back some noodle soup, helping her naked cellmate stand-sitting wasn’t going to be in the picture for a while-and she managed to get down most of the bowl, before she gingerly laid back down, groaning as the movements seemed to cause her distress, and quickly fell asleep.
Janet read for a while, then, finding herself tired from her previous sleepless night, fell asleep herself. She slept peacefully. After all, tomorrow was Wednesday and they wouldn’t be flogging anyone that day.
Kelvin had previously commissioned a story in a similar vein from our late friend Praefectus Praetorio, to whose memory I dedicate this short, two-part piece.
Tuesday and Fridays were the days that court ordered canings were carried out at the Changi Women’s Prison in Singapore. Janet Tan knew that even after only a few days as an inmate. Everyone in the prison knew it, whether they were one of the unfortunate souls, like Janet, who had been sentenced to receive that most dreaded punishment or not.
She remembered her conversation with one of the veteran inmates, Sunita Das, as they had walked their circuit of the exercise yard yesterday. “I got my six on a Tuesday not long after coming in here,” she had confided to Janet. “They like to do it fairly soon, to get it over with,” she had continued. “But they don’t tell you ahead of time. They just show up some time after breakfast and take you for your medical exam. That’s when you’ll know.”
“Medical exam?” Janet had asked.
“Yeah, they want you to suffer, but they don’t want you dying. That would make trouble. But don’t worry; a healthy girl like you, slim, in good shape. You’ll pass with flying colors, lucky you!”
Janet had always prided herself on keeping in shape; even when things were terribly busy at work or she was travelling, she set time aside to run in the park or on a treadmill. At 33, she could easily pass for five or even ten years younger.
“So, did it, you know, hurt a lot?”
Sunita laughed. “Oh, my dear, you can’t even imagine. If hell is half that bad, I’m gonna be good, so I don’t go there. How many are you getting?”
“Eight,” Janet replied.
Sunita shook her head. “My sympathies. Six was bad enough, thank you very much. And how many years?”
“Ten,” Janet replied.
“What did you do? Don’t worry, the rules in here say you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, though somehow everyone finds out pretty quickly. There are inmates who work in the Admin offices and get to glance at paperwork. There aren’t a lot of secrets in here.”
“That’s OK,” Janet replied. “I don’t mind talking about it because I’m innocent.”
Sunita pointed at the other prisoners walking the circuit. “Ask ten of them and nine will tell you they’re innocent. Not me though; I did it. I was a bookkeeper and I embezzled from my employer; I set up a phony company and submitted fake invoices and wrote checks to pay them. It served them right for paying me so little. What about you?”
“They said I defrauded my investors by making false claims about a device we were working on that people could wear to monitor their vitals. But they weren’t really false; the device would have worked, we just needed more time to develop it. Now, of course, they put us out of business so it won’t happen. Someone in Silicon Valley will do it and too bad for Singapore. Like those guys there never exaggerate.”
“Well maybe the judges in America are more willing to forgive a little white lie,” Sunita replied. “And of course, no caning there. But you’ll get through it; everyone does. And you’ll get through your ten years, too. I’m halfway through my six and I can do the rest, no problem. Just keep your head down; some of these girls are mean.”
Janet looked around at her fellow inmates. She had no reason to doubt what Sunita had said; quite a few looked like she would be well advised not to piss them off. One of the guards banged her truncheon on the metal bars of the gate that led to the exercise yard. “Alright, ladies, time’s up! Back inside! Let’s go!”
The prisoners began heading for the gate. “Thanks for cluing me in, Sunita. I think I can face it if I know what to expect. I guess I’ll be seeing you around,” Janet said.
“Yeah, you will. Like where else am I gonna go, right?” Sunita replied.
***
Among the inmates who looked to Janet like someone she should avoid was a fellow recent arrival, Lucy Yee. Lucy was in her early twenties and about fifteen cm taller and at least ten kg heavier than Janet. Unfortunately, Janet wasn’t really able to avoid her because they had been assigned to the same two person cell.
Lucy had arrived a couple of days before Janet, convicted of assault on another girl, who, Lucy believed was sleeping with her boyfriend. Lucy had waylaid her in a club and broken the girl’s nose and a couple of ribs, earning her the same sentence as Janet-ten years and eight strokes of the cane. Well, now Lucy’s boyfriend would be free to screw whomever he wanted now that she was out of circulation.
Like Sunita, Lucy didn’t deny her guilt. “You’re fuckin’ right I smashed her up; the bitch deserved it!” she had boasted to Janet shortly after Janet was deposited in her cell following her intake. Janet had to hope that she wouldn’t inadvertently do something that would render her deserving of some broken bones in Lucy’s eyes.
‘This is what the next ten years of my life are going to be,’ Janet thought. Nothing in her previous experience had prepared her to share a prison cell with a tough girl from Yishun, a neighborhood where wanna-be gangsters (no doubt Lucy’s boyfriend was one) did their criminal deeds.
No, the last dozen or so years of her life had been spent first at Harvard on a full scholarship, where the idea for her biosensor had come to her during her lab rotation, then, following in the footsteps of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, dropping out to found a company to develop the product. She could have gone to Silicon Valley like many a budding entrepreneur, but family and cultural ties had brought her back to Singapore, a decision she now deeply regretted, in view of the caning she was facing.
There, her days were spent with scientists and engineers, when she wasn’t flying business class to New York, San Francisco, Shanghai or London raising money to pay for the HQ in Raffles Place, furnished in high-end techno-chic to impress prospective investors, and the development costs which always seemed higher and the time frames longer than even her most conservative estimates.
So, of course, she had sometimes fudged a few numbers and exaggerated a bit. What prospective tycoon doesn’t? It was all in the service of buying more time to develop a product that would help people stay healthy.
The foreigners expected you to do that. Unfortunately, her local investors, including some government big-wigs, didn’t.
And that was how she came to be lying on a cot late on a Monday night, in a cell with a snoring gangsterette like Lucy Yee, unable to sleep, wondering if tomorrow, Tuesday, was to be the day that they would come to take her to have her ass shredded into a pulp. Everything she had worked for was being sold at auction to compensate her investors-the big, beautiful house in Cairnhill, the vacation villa in France, the Mercedes, the Italian designer clothes and shoes- all gone, along with her bank accounts and shares in companies that were actually worth something, unlike the shares in her own company.
It took quite a while, but eventually, using some of the yoga techniques she had studied a few years before, she was able to drift off to a restless sleep, to be awakened around 6 AM by the guard coming down the hallway, banging her truncheon on the bars of each of the cells, shouting’ “Wake up you lazy sluts! Time to get your asses out of bed and down to the mess hall for breakfast!”
‘Breakfast?’ Janet thought. She didn’t feel hungry; all she felt was the gnawing fear in her stomach knowing that sometime after breakfast they might come to take her to her flogging. Putting her fear aside for the moment, she rolled out of bed and went to sit on the tiny seatless metal toilet to empty her bladder.
No sooner had she sat on the toilet then her cellmate jumped out of bed and came to loom over her. “Hurry up, bitch!” Lucy ordered. “I have to piss, too.” Janet quickly finished her business and got up, slipping her rubber sandals on and standing next to the barred door, waiting for the guard to open it as Lucy took her sweet time before finally joining her, scowling at Janet as though she begrudged her the air she was consuming.
***
They came after breakfast, the regular duty guard for their cell block, accompanied by two very stern looking comrades, the metal grate of the cell door clanging against the wall as they threw it open. Janet looked up from the book from the prison library that she had been reading. Her heart was pounding. Was this the moment she had been dreading ever since she’d heard the judge pronounce his sentence, “And eight strokes of the cane on your bare buttocks.”?
Lucy didn’t even bother looking up from her magazine, which delved into the romances and break-ups of K-Pop stars in exhaustive detail. The block guard looked from one inmate to the other and back again. Finally, she spoke, “Yee, on your feet, time to go see the doctor.”
“I’m not sick,” Lucy replied, her face still buried in the magazine.
One of the auxiliary guards grabbed the magazine out of Lucy’s hands and threw it across the cell. “You think this is a joke, Yee?” Then she grabbed Lucy’s arm and pulled her to her feet, twisting the arm behind her.
“Oww!” Lucy protested. “That hurts, bitch.
The other auxiliary guard grabbed Lucy’s other arm. “You think you’re so tough, Yee, don’t you?” she spat. “Don’t worry, you’ll be crying like a baby soon when that rotan bites into your fat ass.” They marched her out quickly, barefoot, not even bothering to let her put on her rubber sandals. The block guard slammed the cell door shut behind them.
Janet was left feeling mixed emotions. On the one hand, she was relieved that it was Lucy they had come for Lucy, not her, though she knew her time would come. She was however, shocked by the violence of Lucy’s words and the actions of the guards. She resolved to behave in a more dignified way when they came for her.
About half an hour later, she got a bit of a scare when the block guard threw the door open and strode into the cell. ‘Had they decided they might as well cane the two cellmates in one session?’ she wondered.
The guard looked around the cell, then spoke in a not too harsh voice. “Tan, go get a mop and a bucket with some soapy water from the closet down the hall and clean the floor in here. And get a brush and some bleach for the toilet, too. ”
“Yes, ma’am,” Janet replied as she went out into the hall. Before her arrest, she had had a maid, a Bangladeshi named Yasmina, to take care of that sort of thing, but those days were in the past now.
Later, after the guard had pronounced the cell sufficiently clean, she was allowed to go to the exercise yard. There, she saw Sunita walking with another Indian inmate. Janet hurried to catch up with them. “Sunita,” she called.
Sunita turned to look at her, then turned back to her companion and said something in what Janet thought might be Hindi. The other woman nodded and continued on her circuit. “What is it, Janet?” Sunita asked.
“They took my cellmate, Lucy, today.”
“Well, that’s good for you. They take all the prisoners who are getting the cane at once, so you’re in the clear for today. Your ass gets to look nice and soft for a few more days at least.”
“Do you think they’ll do me on Friday?” Janet asked.
Sunita shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows? Look, my dear, you need to stop worrying about it. They’ll do it when they do it. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
Janet knew that was good advice. Still, she’d always been a worrier, obsessing over small details. “Will it leave scars?”
Sunita looked at Janet. “What did I just say?” she asked, looking a bit exasperated.
“I’m sorry,” Janet said. “It’s just the way I am. I need to know.”
“OK,” Sunita said. “Tell the guard you need to take a dump. Hold your stomach like you’re having cramps. Go into the bathroom right near the gate. I’ll meet you in there in a couple of minutes.”
Janet nodded and went to the gate that led out of the exercise yard. She approached the guard stationed there. “Ma’am I need to go to the bathroom, please,” she asked, trying to sound desperate.
“You’re supposed to go before exercise period,” the woman replied.
Janet clutched her belly, “Please, ma’am, it’s the food in here, I’m not used to it. I’m afraid I won’t be able to hold it.”
“Next time you decide to bilk your investors, Tan, maybe you should ask the judge to send you to The Raffles or The Hilton. Make it quick, OK?” she said, opening the gate. Janet hurried into the bathroom.
A minute or so later Sunita came in and beckoned Janet over to the far wall, under a barred window. “There’s more light here,” she said. She pulled down her prison shorts and underpants. “Here, have a look.”
Janet bent down to inspect. There were some faint lines across the middle of the brown skin. “It’s been a few years,” Sunita said. “They looked worse right after. Also on a light-skinned girl like you, they might show more. Maybe when I get out I’ll go see a cosmetic surgeon and see what he can do about them.”
Janet stood up. “I’m sorry, Sunita. I shouldn’t have asked. “
“No problem. It’s just a little souvenir of Changi. They want you to be able to look at it and remember not to break the law.”
Janet nodded. “I better get back out there,” she said, turning to leave.
***
It was later that afternoon, near dinner time, when they brought Lucy Yee back. She was naked, walking between the two guards, defeated, not putting up any resistance as they led her into the cell she shared with Janet. Her hair was disheveled, matted on her face and it was clear that she had been crying.
The guards maneuvered her onto her cot, face down. Janet stared open mouthed at Lucy’s ass, which was mess of gouges and wheals, the worst spots daubed with some sort of disinfectant that gave them a purplish tinge.
The block guard came in carrying a plastic bag that contained Lucy’s prison uniform, which she dropped on the floor and kicked under the bed. “You won’t need these for a while, Yee” she said, “But here they are.” Then the guards filed out leaving the two prisoners alone.
“I’m so sorry, Lucy,” Janet said, kneeling beside her cellmate’s cot and reaching out to stroke her sodden hair.
“It’s my fault, not yours,” Lucy replied.
Janet desperately wanted Lucy to describe the whole experience so she would know what to expect when her time came, but decided against it. “The worst part was that bitch was smiling through the whole thing,” Lucy volunteered.
“That guard?” Janet asked.
“No, her, the one who’s fucking my boyfriend.”
“They let her watch?” Janet asked, incredulous.
“Yes, the victims of your crimes are invited to attend,” Lucy replied, her voice shaking with emotion. “They say it’s so they can have closure, but I think it’s just so you suffer more.”
Janet was shaken by this news, something she hadn’t heard before. Did that mean that her investors might be present to watch her suffer, gleefully enjoying the spectacle as a payback for the money they had lost? She blushed just thinking about them staring at her naked body, smiling as she howled in pain.
Before Janet could say anything, the block guard came down the hall announcing dinner. Janet stood. “Would you like me to bring you back some food?” she asked.
“I’m not hungry,” Lucy replied.
“You should eat to keep your strength up so you can heal,” Janet said. She thought it would be a good think to try to be kind to her cellmate. After all, she was in pain. Also, Janet might need some help after her own ordeal which might be coming as soon as this coming Friday. “Maybe some noodle soup?”
“OK, sure, whatever. Thanks,” Lucy replied.
After she had eaten, Janet did bring back some noodle soup, helping her naked cellmate stand-sitting wasn’t going to be in the picture for a while-and she managed to get down most of the bowl, before she gingerly laid back down, groaning as the movements seemed to cause her distress, and quickly fell asleep.
Janet read for a while, then, finding herself tired from her previous sleepless night, fell asleep herself. She slept peacefully. After all, tomorrow was Wednesday and they wouldn’t be flogging anyone that day.
TBC