Hotel Kerobokan by Kathryn Bonella Page B

gazing into the horizon. This was his old life. He ached to get it back. But now it was just an unattainable fantasy in a parallel universe that was devastatingly close, just the other side of the Hotel K walls. Ruggiero knew all too well that the beauty was intangibly near, but all he could see was blackness.
    His world was now the dark, claustrophobic concrete box of cell tikus ; hot and airless with a sickening stench of stale piss. The only amenities were at one end of the cell: a filthy hole-in-the-ground toilet caked with dried shit, and a concrete trough full of slimy, putrid water with a cloud of mosquitoes hovering above it.

    Cell tikus was disgusting, disgusting. The toilet was filled up with dry shit. I found out why it’s called cell tikus [rat cell] because the first time I went in I had to take a pee and I took it on the hole. The dry shit became soft and the rats came out of there, so in the dark I listened to them .
    – Ruggiero

    This was Ruggiero’s third time in cell tikus ; his hot temper had landed him there twice before. Experience made it easier only in that he knew what to expect. The first time he was incarcerated in cell tikus , he went ballistic, gripping the barred door and smashing it hard back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until he ripped it off its hinges. He was angry and hurting. He punched the concrete walls over and over, screaming abuse at the top of his lungs: ‘Motherfuckers, let me out! Fucking motherfuckers!’

    The first night they put me there I broke the door, it was rusted, you know when iron gets rusty – eaten by the moisture of the ocean. I bend it back and forth hard. I was so furious. I broke the whole door. They beat me a bit more, they beat me a lot. I was screaming anything … any bad word you know in your life was part of it. Fuck, motherfucker, shit people, Muslim fanatic. I don’t know how many times I punched the wall, but I hurt my hand, I was a madman, I was totally possessed. I was scary .
    The first 48 hours, I didn’t eat. I didn’t drink water. I refused to eat the stuff they gave me. And then, on the third day, I see Benoit … bad guy Benoit … a huge black guy from Cameroon. He was my best friend … I hear the voice of that gorilla, ‘I’m going to kill everyone; you have to give him food’. And then he managed to get there, he pushed the guards and then he opened the door and gave me some water, apples, a plastic bag because I refused to go to the toilet in the hole. I used the plastic bag. But the thing is: where am I going to get rid of it? I go like this with my foot against the wall for leverage and throw it out the small window up high. The funny thing was, the plastic bag I threw landed right on the edge of the mosque and the shit was flying into the mosque .
    – Ruggiero

    Hurling a bag of shit out the window each day gave him fleeting sense of rebellion, but mostly it saved him from the stench of his own waste as he languished in the cell. Days and nights passed in such a blur that Ruggiero lost track of the time he’d spent in there. There was virtually nothing to do, though some days he’d do a marathon burst of one thousand sit-ups. Finally, after being in there for a long stretch of time, a guard opened the door to release him back into the jail. He was like a man taking his first steps after being in a deep coma, walking out dazed and confused, squinting hard as the blinding rays of light pierced his eyes. It was Christmas Eve.
    The next morning started off cheerfully enough when he was called to his first visit in weeks, to enjoy a heavily spiked fruit salad with a couple of friends. But he was still edgy and angry; he desperately needed the whisky to numb his frayed nerves. He was still being punished; the only difference was that he was now in an ordinary cell twenty-four hours a day and was allowed out to visits again. Unfortunately, they hadn’t returned him to his former cell, where the cut bars remained