Read Online The Angel of Bang Kwang Prison by Susan Aldous, Nicola Pierce - Free Book Online

may have looked the part but we were forever cleaning up after her; she frequently dropped trays of glasses—full and empty—on the floor or else she would accidentally tip someone’s drink into their lap. Anyone else would have been fired, but not a penthouse model!
    Staff from nearby nightclubs would come to ours on their nights off and would furnish us with free passes to their place of employment. I made a lot of new friends and danced in a lot of nightclubs aided by free drinks. I even dated the Scottish DJ for a while—I loved his accent. For six months I had a ball and lived day to day without plan or ambition. I felt relatively fulfilled and at peace with myself—relatively.

    I was alone at the beach one night watching the moonlight shimmer on the water. I don’t think I was especially thinking or pondering over anything in particular but suddenly I felt the hairs go up on the back of my neck and I was filled with a buzzing energy. You don’t have to believe me but I clearly heard a voice inside my head ask, ‘Why are you giving to those who have so much when there are so many who have nothing?’
    If I thought the universe was going to praise me for my good works to date—getting people interested in charity work, encouraging them to open up and discuss their problems and worries, and telling them about Christian spirituality—I was brought back down to earth with a bang. I sat there a little stunned, replaying the message in my head until it hit me like Newton’s apple; I should go where there are people who have nothing, and I decided:
    ‘Asia!, I’ll go to Asia.’
    I was quite cold by the time I dragged myself off the damp sand but I also had a date to work towards—11 September, which was a mere three months away. I had no idea how I was going to get to Asia and I certainly had no money, but I wasn’t going to worry about that for now. The first thing I did was head to the nightclub to inform my boss at Sheiks that I would be quitting in the near future. I found him downstairs with some of the management staff. He beamed at me when he saw me approach.
    ‘Hey you! We have been talking about you and have just decided we wanted to offer you the position of manager.’
    How many times does that happen? You make a big decision to change your life and someone promptly offers to improve the life you have.
    ‘We want to give you more responsibility because you have proved yourself an exemplary employee after six months,’ he continued, before I could reply.
    I found myself carried along in their excitement and smiled and nodded vacuously while my insides were squirming.
    ‘There is one problem Susan, which I’ve been meaning to tackle you about.’
    He had me curious now, as I fully concurred that I was an exemplary employee.
    ‘We’re getting a reputation of being a church, so I’m going to have to ask you to stop talking religion with the customers.’
    The cheek of him, I thought. I hadn’t preached in ages. Well, the decision was made for me, so I told him:
    ‘Thank you for your kind offer but I’m afraid that I was actually coming down to tell you that I would be leaving. I’m going away in September.’
    And that was that.
    The people in work were a bit funny about my decision. I think the managers were genuinely disappointed that I was leaving, because I would have made an excellent manager. No one congratulated me on my momentous decision to travel to Asia to help people. In fact it would be safe to describe the general reaction as slightly defensive, as if by saying, ‘I’m going abroad to help the less privileged,’ was my way of saying, ‘Look at you, you’re overly-privileged and you don’t help anyone,’ which I most definitely wasn’t saying. It was a strange time.

    Now that I had made my decision, how was I going to get myself to Asia? I lay in bed and went through a few scenarios for making the money for the air fare. One of my favourite customers at the nightclub