You pick a young jailer who you have seen reading an English-language magazine. His hair is slicked to one side, his eyes are hopeful, and his tan uniform is clean. You almost think he might be too ‘good’ to accept a bribe – but then you see him lingering dreamily on the magazine page that advertises a car. He’s poor. He wants better things.
You wait until he comes close to the bars and then, catching his eye, you lean forward and whisper your offer to him.
He’s tempted. You can almost see, in his faraway gaze, a reflection of a tiny car, his hand on the wheel, his arm round a girl, a sunset over the ocean as the engine purrs. But then he turns away and pretends he hasn’t heard you. Your heart sinks.
Later that day, a different jailer takes you out of your cell for a ‘check-up’. The other prisoners watch you suspiciously. You’re frightened that you’re about to be punished for having dared to offer a bribe.
But the jailer takes you to a tiny office room, and Jamilah is there, sitting on a plastic chair. She bursts into tears at the sight of you. Her skin and hair are filthy. Her stick-thin shoulders shake as she gives an awful hacking cough, flecks of blood staining her hand and lips. You help her to stand; you can see she’s almost too weak to walk.
The officer who brought you to the room slams the door and strides away. You stand in the middle of the room, holding Jamilah, not knowing what to do next.
The door opens again, and the same officer you offered the bribe to walks in. The first thing he does is check the door is locked behind him.
‘All right, where’s the money?’ he asks.
You slip off your shoe and take out three hundred dollars, leaving you a hundred and fifty still hidden under the sole. But the jailer shakes his head.
‘Not enough,’ he says.
So you add the final hundred and fifty. ‘That’s all I have,’ you insist. ‘Really.’
‘Not enough,’ insists the young jailer again. ‘Five hundred is minimum.’
Since Piggy took fifty dollars of your money to get Jamilah a crappy box of used headache tablets, you’re fifty short of fulfilling the bribe. There’s only one last thing you have to offer: the pen.
You look at Jamilah and know that it would spell her death to send her back inside the jail, even for a few more days. You take the pen from your pocket.
‘It’s real gold,’ you tell him. ‘Worth more than fifty dollars.’
After that, the jailer moves so quickly and smoothly to get you out of jail that it’s clear he’s done this before.
You and Jamilah are ejected onto the streets of Jakarta, Indonesia. You are homeless, penniless, starving, and Jamilah is horribly sick. Your pen is gone, you have no access to a phone, and anyone who knows you and might help is thousands of kilometres away. You don’t speak the language, and any police officer who finds you here without papers could throw you back into jail, from where, next time, there would be no escape.
Looking around, you can see at a glance that there are lots of other people like you in Jakarta, living on a thread of hope day to day, getting by on their wits alone.
It’s the same in every city in the world, you realise now. Maybe it’s even like this in Australia. If you take the shiny lid off, turn a city upside down and shake it, all the poor people will tumble out like pebbles.
You look down at Jamilah. At least we’re two pebbles together, you think. You hope you’ll be able to survive.
To return to your last choice and try again, go to scene 30.
You breathe as slowly and quietly as you can and shake your head at Jamilah. You’re not moving until you can be sure it’s safe to come out – no matter how long it takes.
‘Come on, kids,’ says the voice. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
You’ve heard enough Somali folktales by now, like the one about the persuasive cat and the innocent mouse, to know that the only people who call out ‘I’m not going to hurt you’ are usually the ones who want to.
Eventually, the torch swings around and the footsteps crunch away.
You stay in the bush all night. Mosquitoes whine and bite your arms and legs. Jamilah coughs so much she gags. You wipe the sweaty hair and gritty bits of bark and dirt from her forehead.
Just before dawn, when monkeys are hooting and crashing through the branches above, and cracks of pink light are slipping through the leaves, you hear another person approach. They are stomping, and muttering what can only be Indonesian curses. Then they give a shout in English.
‘Okay, kids! If you hear me, then come out, you bloody …’ He lapses into Indonesian swearing again. Then he shouts, in a voice wilder than the monkeys: ‘Big punch on my face! Can’t see from one eye! My car taken, and I spend the night in jail, and now I pay bloody big fine! All to come back and look for you! If you’re still here, you did very good, but come out now or I bloody leave and not come back!’
The voice is so indignant, and the stomping so heated, you’re sure it’s your man. The police couldn’t be that good at acting. You can see glimpses of his clothes now, and he’s not in uniform, although in the dim pre-dawn light you can’t get a clear look at his face.
Then you smell clove cigarettes.
‘That’s him,’ you say to Jamilah. You climb out of the bush and call,
