Inside the Tiger Read online

  About the Book

  A powerful first novel dealing with life, loss and the redemptive power of love.

  It’s not because Bel’s mother was murdered.

  It’s not because her father is a politician.

  Bel writes to a Death Row prisoner as an easy way out of an assignment.

  But now he’s written back.

  Drawn to Micah’s world inside a Thai prison, Bel finds herself falling for the boy with ragged hair, shackles and a terrible past. But is she setting herself up for more loss? And will loving him mean losing the people who mean the most to her at home?

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  IMPRINT

  READ MORE AT PENGUIN BOOKS AUSTRALIA

  TO MY PARENTS, KAREN AND IAN – MUM, FOR ALWAYS BELIEVING IN ME AS A WRITER. AND DAD, FOR TELLING ME I WAS GOOD ENOUGH. ALSO FOR CHAD, AND OUR FIVE LITTLE MASTERPIECES – MIA, ZARA, SOPHIE, HEIDI AND LACEY. YOU ALL MAKE LIFE BURN BRIGHTER. I’M SO LUCKY YOU ARE MINE.

  Nobody has ever sent me a letter in the post. Not the handwritten, snail-mail kind. And I’ve never written one, unless you count Year Seven English when we had to write to the person we most wanted to meet. All the other girls chose a celebrity. I wrote to my mother. It was a stupid idea and none of us ever heard back.

  This is probably even more stupid.

  Dear Micah,

  The pen’s been poised in my grip the last half hour. What do you say to a guy you’ve never met, whose life is the complete opposite of yours? I drop the pen on my desk, flex my fingers and peer through the second-storey window of my dorm. On the hockey field below, under a full moon, jacaranda trees cast shadows along the grass.

  In my mind, Micah’s huddled in a grimy corner of his cell, his face heavy with regret. But no one gives a shit when you’re shackled by your own mistakes. Not your family, not your friends. Micah has no right to sympathy.

  In the safety of my dorm, I turn back to the paper. It glares up, brilliantly white. Daring me.

  Dammit, Bel, write something.

  Picking up the abandoned pen, I shuffle taller in the wooden chair that’s been worn down by a century of girls’ backsides.

  You may think I know nothing of your life, but you’re wrong. I know what it’s like to live in a compound.

  I look at those pretentious words for all of two seconds before scrunching up the paper and launching it into the bin to join my growing pile. I’ll destroy the evidence before I go to bed. The evidence of pretending I know anything about Micah at all.

  ‘When’re you going to turn that bloody lamp off?’ Tash says in a croaky voice.

  ‘Sorry.’ My heart leaps. ‘Thought you were asleep.’

  ‘Like that ever matters.’ Tash rolls over to reach her phone. I don’t have to look to know that her sheets are made up so tightly across her body she can barely move. ‘One o’clock, Bel. Seriously.’

  ‘Won’t be much longer.’ I slide another sheet of paper out of the printer tray on our desk. ‘Just finishing that Legal assignment.’

  Tash groans and wriggles back beneath her sheets, her dark curls spilling over the edge of her pillow. ‘Honey, you need more structure.’

  I smirk. Tash has been raised on a solid diet of structure. She’s a control freak of the lovable variety. I don’t glance over at her till I hear the puff of air through her lips – the sound she makes before she drops into sleep.

  Not all the control freaks at St Margaret’s are so lovable. Miss Watkins, for example, aka Watchkins, the all-seeing eye. Tash says she’s just being motherly, but that’s no surprise since Tash’s mother is the CEO of Control Freaks Anonymous. Personally, I think it’s creepy how much Watchkins knows. She finds out every time Tash and I skip the cafeteria for Lady Macquarie’s Chair to get away from the gossip of the other girls. She somehow knew when I got my first period in Year Eight and Tash had to lend me her pads. I wanted to die when Watchkins sat me down and gave me ‘the talk’.

  And it was Watchkins who caught me when I skipped the walkathon last year. Admittedly, that wouldn’t have been hard. The school was raising money for victims of crime, which I guess made me the star of the show. They probably thought they were doing me a favour. Me, or my father.

  I press my fingers against my temples till they throb.

  I didn’t choose to do Legal Studies. That ranked about as high on my list as eating glass. The course lists filled up while I was finishing the final pages of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia for English.

  So instead of finding utopia, I copped Mr Robb because Legal Studies was the only subject left with vacancies. Then last month, while a lone fly buzzed through the lethargy of our classroom, Mr Robb waved his hands through the air like a magician. But just when I expected him to boom, ‘Pick a card, any card,’ he said, ‘Choose a cause, any cause.’ Okay, maybe not those exact words.

  ‘Align yourselves with a movement for the betterment of society, the world, yourselves or each other,’ he said.

  I swear he looked pointedly at me.

  I wanted to ask if he’s ever lived with political activism? Has he ever been part of a picket line? Or even a measly little rally? I doubt it. I bet he plucked the idea from some teaching website and thought, this’ll keep the smartarses busy.

  It won’t keep this smartarse busy, though. I’ve had years of causes. Too many of my father’s causes to count.

  I seesaw the pen between my fingers as I examine the fresh sheet of paper on my desk. Writing to a prisoner is kind of a cause, isn’t it? An easy way out of this assignment. So why aren’t the words flowing like they should?<
br />
  Get it done.

  Dear Micah,

  Finally, when I stop thinking about them, the words come. Fast and flippant. I let my pen glide, dirtying the white paper with my scrawl.

  Your ad (if you can call it that) said you were looking for someone to write to, so here I am. All seventeen years and forty-eight kilos of me. I know nothing about you, so here are a few things about me. My name’s Annabelle, but everyone calls me Bel. Everyone except Dad. He says he wants to honour the name Mum chose, but really he uses Annabelle because he’s a traditionalist. And because it grates on me, I think.

  Anyway, I’ve been in boarding school the last seven years. Dad would have put me in earlier, but Year Five was the earliest I could start. At the beginning of every year, I hear the new girls crying at night in the dorms down the hall. I bet new prisoners go through something like that too. Sometimes it feels like prison here, though I doubt it compares to where you are.

  Do you ever get lonely? Or super bored? What’s it like there? Have you got any friends who have your back? I’ve got my roommate Tash. She’s more like a sister really. Even her mum gets all motherly with me. When I go to her house, she wraps me in her frangipani-perfumed arms and pumps me full of home-made baklava. Tells me I need to eat. I think she does it out of pity.

  Anyway, it’s late, so I better go. I hope this letter sails across the sea and into your hands. If it does, feel free to write back.

  Bel

  I take photos of the letter as evidence for Mr Robb before folding it into an envelope to drop into the red mail box at the front office in the morning. Tick. Assignment finished.

  Someone’s life made better without making mine any worse. No publicity, no fuss, no politics. I doubt it’ll even reach Micah, but that’s not my responsibility.

  My job is done.

  A few Mondays later, Tash slides in beside me on the mahogany bench in the cafeteria. The smell of her bacon and eggs is too much for my nervy stomach.

  ‘You ready to smash the English exam?’ She pushes her tray alongside mine.

  I grunt and sip my double espresso.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, eyeing the sad remains of my croissant. ‘What’s up?’

  I rub my eyes hard.

  ‘You should stress less,’ she says, looking at me sideways. ‘Either that, or sleep more.’

  ‘I’ve spent the last five nights with my head buried in Shakespeare.’ I shove a chunk of croissant into my mouth then talk through it. ‘Why do I still feel like I’m going to flunk?’

  ‘Because you always feel like that, honey. Then to rub it in, you one-up me. Seriously, how do you do that on zero sleep?’

  I sigh. Tash is brilliant at every single thing she does. Last year alone, she took out an eisteddfod, made it to nationals in volleyball and got vice-captain of the most prestigious girls’ school this side of the continent. But all she remembers is that I beat her in one Shakespeare essay.

  ‘Morning girls.’ Watchkins marches to the servery at the front of the cafeteria and clears her throat. ‘I take it from the noise level you’re all excited about the essay this morning.’

  Her face wobbles as she talks – she’s all round with middle age. ‘Now, if you can contain your excitement, I have the mail to distribute.’ There are groans as she plucks a rubber band off the small pile of letters in her hand.

  The mail list gets shorter every week. Mostly it’s just the Nannas who write. Potpourri sachets for underwear drawers, a birthday card. Money if you’re lucky. But at least once a month, a girl gets a phone bill her parents are pissed about.

  Watchkins adjusts her glasses and reads out the first envelope. ‘Airlie Smith.’

  Airlie slides off her bench seat and struts to the front. It’s her birthday this week and everyone knows it. Airlie’s dorm wall is covered floor to ceiling in selfies with everyone in our year. Even I made the cut. She pretends to be friends with the entire school because of the school captain gig. She doesn’t need to know I donkeyed my vote. It wasn’t necessarily personal. I just steer as far away as I can from school politics.

  ‘Jacinta Wotherspoon. Mandy Maree.’

  ‘Seriously, Tash,’ I say under my breath, ‘Othello is doing my head in. I mean, the guy drove himself to insanity and murdered his wife, but we’re supposed to feel sorry for him?’

  ‘Ah, that’s you.’ Tash nudges me with her elbow.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A letter.’ She raises one eyebrow. ‘For you.’

  I swivel my legs over the top of the bench as my heart does this weird flop inside my chest.

  ‘Bel Anderson.’ Watchkins draws down her lips in surprise as I approach. ‘There’s a first time for everything.’

  I stand mute before her, snatching the standard-sized white envelope from her outstretched fingers. It’s plastered with about a dozen green stamps declaring it’s from the Kingdom of Thailand. The croissant shifts inside my stomach.

  I cross the room and quickly sit down, jamming the letter into my folder on the table.

  ‘Well?’ Tash whispers. ‘Who’s it from?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I mumble. Not entirely a lie. I don’t know a damn thing about Micah. And now, in the bright light of a school morning, I’m wondering why I ever thought it was a good idea to write to a convicted criminal.

  She studies my face. ‘Bel, what is it? You’ve gone all white.’

  ‘Tell you later.’

  I tap my fingers on my folder, but no amount of fidgeting prevents my stomach from tumbling.

  As soon as Watchkins finishes rollcall, I grab Tash by the wrist. We have fifteen minutes before our Shakespeare essay. That’s fifteen minutes too short for anything except walking to class. But I drag her out of the cafeteria in the opposite direction.

  ‘Bel, we don’t have time,’ Tash says as I close the door to our dorm. ‘What is it?’

  I slide the letter from my folder. The foreign postage stamps and green ink are glaringly bright.

  ‘Okay, so don’t go making a big deal of this …’

  Tash eyes the envelope. ‘This?’ Checks her watch. ‘We have like, twelve minutes.’

  I bite my bottom lip and lower my voice. ‘You know how Mr Robb made us choose a cause for Legal Studies –’

  ‘You said you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Exactly. So I chose something like a cause.’

  ‘Well, it either is or it isn’t.’

  ‘If Dad can’t use me as his little campaigner anymore, I’m sure as hell not going to let Mr Robb do it. I found a plan B.’

  ‘How unlike you.’ She hasn’t lost her sarcasm. Yet. ‘But what’s this got to do with that?’ She points a trigger finger at the letter.

  ‘See, there’s this website where you can write to a prisoner …’

  ‘A what?’ She swallows like she’s just downed a shot of straight vodka.

  ‘A prisoner. Sort of like … a pen pal? There are lists and lists of prisoners, Tash, all looking for someone who might write to them, someone who might care, just a little bit, you know?’

  ‘Wow.’ Her eyes have gone wide.

  ‘In the end I picked Bang Kwang Prison in Thailand. And I figured, if I’m going to write, I may as well pick someone who really needs some cheering up, right? So I found the Death Row prisoners, and there was this Aussie guy. Seemed like the sensible choice.’

  ‘Sensible? Death Row? Bel, honey …’

  ‘What?’ I set my jaw.

  ‘Well, couldn’t you have gone for something like … I don’t know, someone serving five years? I mean, this guy’s going to die. What do you have to do to end up on Death Row?’

  I flick the envelope against my palm. ‘I didn’t actually think he’d write back.’

  She’s quiet for a moment. ‘I take it Daddy dearest doesn’t know.’

  I laugh nervously. ‘Ah … no. Not a good look if his daughter’s writing to a crim while he’s all let’s-get-tough-on-the-bastards.’

  She cocks her head to one side. ‘D
id you do this to piss him off?’

  ‘Oh, please, give me some credit.’

  She nods firmly. ‘Okay, let’s open it. We have eight minutes.’

  And that’s when I know she’s with me.

  I inhale deeply and tear open the envelope.

  15/10

  Hey Bel,

  Thanks for the letter. First one I ever got. A few months back, these guys come through asking who wants to put their name down on this writing list? Figured I got nothing to lose so I wrote my name on it. Never heard back but.

  Then today, the screws are calling names and handing out mail. I’m paying no notice. Playing poker. We play for cash. You can buy food, clothes, that kinda thing if you’ve got cash. Anyway, today I’m holding this royal flush close to my chest. I’ve got this game wrapped, but my poker face is a rock. I don’t even hear them call me. Then there’s this prod in my back, and I turn round. One of the screws is holding a paper in his hand, jabbing it at me. Next time, you listen your name, no? he says.

  I drop my cards on the table and the boys swear when they see them. So you ruined me a good game. But I forgive you, cause I’m good at that. You gotta be when you’re in here.

  You want to know what it’s like here? Well, it’s not boarding school, that’s for sure. I’ve got a good set of boys but. Bunch of foreigners, all of us. Dutchy’s from Holland. Boxer’s Aussie, like me. He trains us hard cause he was a kickboxer in Sydney. And there’s another guy called Leo. He’s old, like forty. Italian. Been doing time a dozen years or so. He knows the screws and they give him special favours, cause he can draw, hey, and when he draws their girlfriends, they get him stuff. Here in building five, we’re good as brothers. We look out for each other, divvy up anything we get.