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SNOWING IN BALI

kind of drug dealer feeling . . . But at the same time I was proud, I am not a drug dealer, I can show my face, come, take a picture. Then when I go down, two guys come, ‘Hey, Rafael, remember me?’ I look. ‘Sorry, no.’ ‘I bought something from you.’ I say, ‘Shush, I have my son.’ My son says, ‘Papa, what did the guy buy from you?’

– Rafael

No longer using coke also opened his eyes to the fact that it had been the glue that kept him and Anna together in a fraught relationship. Being free of it also meant he was content to have sex with one woman – his new girlfriend, Emily.

Even when she’d found him that night at his lowest ebb there’d been sexual chemistry – ‘I remember I touch her hand. We started to have feeling with each other. But we say “Cannot, no, cannot.”’ Their feelings were conflicted by the fact that Emily was Anna’s friend and her estranged husband, Julio, was Rafael’s friend and customer. The two couples had socialised together, but for the past six months Julio had been in a clinic in Brazil for coke addiction. It was complicated, so breaking the news of his new relationship to Anna in jail wasn’t easy for Rafael. It went as badly as he’d expected – ‘Fuck, she wanted to kill me.’

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Late one night about a year later, Rafael got a surprise phone call. It was Andre, who’d just flown back to Bali after his third jailbreak, asking to stay at the beach house. Rafael told him he’d sold it but he’d be waiting outside the Canggu Club. Andre arrived looking like an unlikely escapee, dapper in a buttoned shirt, long pants and leather shoes, with his gap-toothed smile. When they got into the car, Andre ripped from behind his ears

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