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and tells people that the worst moment in life was not his arrest on drug-smuggling charges, nor being thrown in jail, nor even fronting court in a strange country. Not even the spectre of the death sentence plays in Stephens’s head as the worst part of this whole ordeal. The single worst moment in Martin Stephens’s life was the instant he saw his mother’s face, and his father’s face, on their first trip to his Bali holding cell to see him. It was their thirty-second wedding anniversary and he thought he had broken their hearts. He never wants to relive that moment; playing it over in his mind is bad enough.
    He wishes like hell he wasn’t there, especially because of his parents, and he worries about how he has caused this unhappiness for them and whether they will cope. He worries about them getting older and spending their hard-earnt money visiting him in jail. He hates that, and he knows life will only get harder from here on. But at least he has God now. He always believed in Him, but, like so many others, in his own way. He didn’t regularly turn up as a churchgoer, but he considered himself a Christian and liked to think he pretty much lived life that way. Now, in the long hours between dawn and dusk, and the long nights when the sounds of Bali permeate his jail cell, he prays, reading the Bible and searching for a way ahead. He wants the burden to be lifted from his parents’ shoulders. Thewoman he loved and whom he was planning to spend his life with has now gone her own way, though they are still friends. She is young and it would be inconceivable to expect that she should wait so long for him. And he prays for his co-worker Renae Lawrence, who shares the same jail. He knows that Lawrence has come to rely on him, perhaps even to survive on him, some days, and he has a mission now. He must protect her. So he listens to her. Spends big chunks of his day with her. He likes her, thinks she’s funny, but he also watches out for her and everyone knows that. The pair hated each other during those early days in Bali, before they were nabbed, but now Lawrence is his ‘sister and best friend’.
    This doesn’t surprise people who have met Martin: his soft personality is obvious even to those who deal with him in jail. Bill and Michele Stephens are proud of that, the way he was brought up. That’s why they never thought that they had any reason to worry about where he was heading in life. Along the way he’d run off the rails a couple of times, which was fairly normal. But they had been happy with the big picture. So when he went off for a short spell in April 2005—on a trip to deliver furniture to Darwin, his parents thought—none of his family or friends thought any more about it. That is, until they turned on the television news and saw his face fill the screen.

IX
The Quakers Hill Boy
    M atthew Norman and his best mates at Quakers Hill High School in Sydney’s west would have the girls in stitches over their juvenile Jackass hijinks. The antics made famous by the MTV prankster series would be played out in the school playground, or on the weekend, or at any other time, as long as there was an audience. Of course, Matthew and his friends didn’t always have the props to deliver the same level of puerile pranks made famous by the real Jackass stars, but their show was just as funny. And it didn’t need department stores or golfing greens or international travel to make it funny. It was never cruel, either—just a few dumb stunts and a dose of good-natured fun to pass the time. They developed a bit of a following overit and, as long as there were witnesses, Matthew and his mates were happy to perform.
    Matthew’s friends came from two different years at the local high school, with a big casual group of girls and boys mixing easily. Everyone pretty much got on, and were open to new people joining in. A few of the girls thought Matthew was a pretty good catch. He was open and funny, easy to talk to, and