Axiomatic

by Maria Tumarkin

  ‘Miss Popovic gets it,’ Vanda’s telling two young women who are up on shoplifting and loitering charges. Both women work the streets to support heroin habits. One was given heroin by her well-meaning mother when her ex, still living with her, moved his new girlfriend in. ‘Use it, it’d make you feel better’ said her mum and the young woman keeps saying ‘I am so embarrassed’ about the shoplifting: $144.20 worth of groceries. ‘We are not talking about razorblades, cosmetics and deodorant. We’re talking about food,’ Vanda informs the court. The second woman, Ruby, has a prior conviction from a time of heavy drug use and is completing an advanced cookery diploma, favourite food Italian.

  First Tuesday of the month is the Street Sex Worker List, held during afternoon hours to best fit with the women’s nocturnal working life and in a separate court to avoid the perv factor. The hope is more women turn up and magistrates resist going ape on the women with fines that push them back trawling the streets so they can afford to pay the fines. Ruby pleads guilty—$998 in iPods and audio equipment that she converted into drugs. ‘Despite the history, please consider a one-time no-conviction disposition,’ Vanda says. She reckons Ruby is looking good, taking care, has had a number of clear urines. I sit back and wait for the lecture, the legal shit sandwich. ‘I am amazed,’ Popovic announces, ‘at your perseverance, Ruby. On average it is ten withdrawals before a person succumbs to lifelong dependency or dies. You’ve had sixteen detoxes, two rehab stints, I don’t think I’ve met anyone like you who just persevered. It demonstrates how hard it is. Despite your intelligence and commitment you’re still relapsing.’

  Did I hear respect expressed in a court of law for a woman who has gone back to drugs more times than Marina Abramovic invited a snake to orbit her head? Did she just call Ruby a ‘remarkable young woman’? For every Popovic there may be a thousand morally squeamish sermon-makers, and for every Ruby there must be a metropolis of addicts who’ll give up on giving up. But god what a mighty thing it is to see respect, a non-generic respect, given not because we all deserve respect as a matter of principle but because a young woman who turns up to court with sixteen detoxes in her bag deserves it specifically. I ask Popovic about respect. She says, ‘Somebody said to me the other day, and I knew exactly what they meant, if you ask a seven-year-old what she wants to be no one is going to say they want to grow up and become a drug-addicted sex worker.’

  Something happens between seven and seventeen, seventeen and twenty-seven. People’s lives aren’t straightforward. Society is only getting more complex, nearly every woe on the rise. The week before, we agreed to meet for coffee early. Popovic forgot. Too much was going on. I sat watching the cafe’s open fire. Fantasised about being a lawyer. Better—a judge. I imagined a colossal sense of purpose. A tautness to my days. I imagined my words being like river embankments in the lives of people before me, preventing floods, redirecting the flow. Words of a writer are hardly worth a soggy biscuit most days. The week after, Popovic came on the dot, apologetic, not used to mucking anyone around. I asked her about dealing with people who feel trapped, about the tar, not saying ‘tar’ or wanting her to think me flowery. She has noticed among many young Aboriginal men a ‘feeling like there is nothing, like they are trapped in their circumstances’. Sense of hopelessness converges with family obligations: you are expected to drink and go in that car, towards that bottleshop, licence or no licence, under the limit, over. An elder may say to a young man that a staunch man, for his family, is the better man. ‘But because of stolen generations many people with a broad sense of family obligation do not have an intimate sense of family.’ I ask Popovic about family. ‘The effect of family can be devastating. I am now dealing with third-generation drug offenders.’

  I was talking to the deputy chief magistrate and remembering all those famous physicists who, with each of their discoveries, gave birth to another generation of happy atheists while themselves moving closer to some form of faith, or at least towards a place of big doubt. Possibly science looked like the cleanest antidote to faith only for those sufficiently removed from science. I wondered if similar could be said about the law and order system, that the deeper in it you are, the antsier you get with lofty claims about justice and rehabilitation. Not because you’re disenchanted, more because maybe—Rai Gaita’s words—you have found a ‘sorrowful sense of our vulnerability to affliction’ to be a better guiding principle than ‘let the punishment fit the crime’. Vulnerability to affliction, and also to chance, misfortune, genes, the family you are born into, postcode.

  ‘Even if you were a cat, you wouldn’t want to live there,’ said the leading senior constable at Moorabbin Justice Centre to Vanda one overcast morning. There was a boarding house. Cat was in the constable’s head because the grave of one, formerly the pet of a woman at the boarding house, was dug up by a fellow boarder. In the fight that followed, the alleged grave-digger was hit with a mug, suffering a gash on her forehead, the dead cat’s owner claiming self-defence since the victim, as she put it, had a spade. In the prosecutor’s file I saw close-ups: a spade, a gash, a mug. ‘I sometimes say to my clients,’ Vanda said to the constable, ‘if police arrived at a different time, the accused would be the victim and the victim the accused’ to which the constable agreed ‘oh, yes, often this is how our mind works. Whoever comes to us first we end up thinking of as victims.’ Vanda’s clients coming to police or to anyone—that’s rare. Fear of being charged over some forgotten or unforgotten breach is too strong.

  At Collingwood Neighbourhood Justice Centre, Vanda is there to see Georgie, who’s transgender, only Georgie fronted up the day before—got the date wrong. Wanting to sort out a victims of crime matter, Georgie was told instead they were expecting her the next day to deal with a breach of community corrections orders. Also hanging over Georgie are charges pertaining to possession, prescriptions forgery, forgery of cheques. Most of these she disputes, all of them she could have settled seven years ago, if only she’d come to court.

  Georgie is not here. Vanda calls her. Where are you, Georgie? If you are on Collins Street, what’s the problem with hopping on a tram and coming here? Get this sorted then you can get your victims of crime stuff happening too.

  (‘Pretty sage, Vanda,’ says Beth from Corrections, listening in, ‘I won’t say it’s particularly ethical but it’s pretty sage.’)

  No, Georgie, you won’t be put in jail. No. We have to deal with this stuff today. Just come. [quiet] No, Georgie, you can’t do it on your own timetable. You have to come when they tell you to come. You cannot indefinitely avoid dealing with this. You’ll be picked up and put on remand. [quiet] I can adjourn it for two weeks but what guarantee do I have you’ll show up? [quiet] No, I cannot hang around here all day.

  (‘She is not coming,’ Vanda mouths to Beth from Corrections.)

  People flunk court orders, miss court appearances, miss drug or alcohol counselling sessions, each missed step increasing the missteps for which they must be penalised. ‘They may say yes and may even believe they’ll do it, turn up, but there is no way,’ Vanda says. Better, she thinks, to get a suspended sentence and be done, no permanent headspin in the rehabilitation maze, less contact with the system. ‘Don’t forget, if cops want to get narky with trans people they can put them in cells or remand centres with men.’ Terror of that annihilates other impulses. It produces a blanket avoidance. Which in turn gets punished. Sooner or later the system must flare impenetrably hostile on Georgie.

  Must be naive—of course I’m naive because it still surprises me every time the justice system, even at its most banal and procedural, is a trap. The ground opens up and chomp, chomp, chomp goes the ground. Once she’s down in the system’s sublayers it is already too late for Georgie to get support. Others too, be they more obviously functional, or differently yet equally interestingly dysfunctional, if the justice system treats you with dignity the outside world still won’t. ‘Nobody should be punished beyond what court determines. But society,’ Vanda says, ‘pu
nishes people.’

  Mike, Lani, Steph, Ruby, Georgie—can’t imagine them ever being part of the festivities, seated at society’s table, eating buttered crumpets with fork and knife. And Astrid? She’s taken care of the answer to that question.

  Tracy is murdered in a broken-down white Econovan parked on Greeves Street opposite the Gatehouse, a safe space for St Kilda streetworkers. She lived in the van with Tony, her boyfriend, minder. They had been together a long time, loved each other. People talk about Tracy in something like unison, they say sunny, gorgeous, impeccably polite, interested in others, warm; she stood on her corner—she had her own corner—so dignified. Her back straight. The best posture. ‘When I saw her I’d stand straighter,’ someone says. She was classy. While knowing the dangers. Tony looking out for her was a plus.

  ‘Tracy’s murder,’ Vanda emails me, ‘scared the women. That hasn’t lasted long though. Desperate people are out there, need for drugs outweighs fear.’

  Tony and Tracy had broke away from St Kilda, clean at last, they were living with Tony’s mother, taking care of her when she got sick. Her death pushed them back. They restarted on heroin, money ran out, eventually, reluctantly, they returned. Tracy by all accounts hated being out on the street again. Tony was in hospital when Tracy got killed. He found her. The murder was brutal. I won’t supply you with details. Police think it could have been a client and are working on a robbery-gone-wrong scenario but the killer is on the tear and it’s been years. Interpol’s involved. Tony has collected the car numberplate numbers of more than three thousand of Tracy’s clients in her last eighteen months. If he’d been with her in St Kilda and not having a major infection treated (Tracy made him go) none if it would have happened (got to live the rest of his life with that).

  Tracy’s death is linked in the media to that of Jill Meagher, not a sex worker, an ABC radio employee from Ireland, who didn’t work the streets but was walking home along one after drinks with colleagues. Adrian Bayley, who raped and killed Jill five hundred metres from her Brunswick home and sleeping husband Tom, had to his name, among other convictions, sixteen rapes in under a year against St Kilda sex workers. That’s how many on record. So the real number could be anything. In an interview I saw, a woman at a strip club Bayley frequented said he was violent and a total freak but hardly the only one. When Jill was killed, thirty thousand marchers protested street violence, enough flowers piling up near the bridal boutique where CCTV cameras last filmed Jill that council workers were called in and removed them. Sea of flowers equals traffic hazard. Ten months later, it was Tracy, to the corner where she’d stood—it’s Tracy’s Corner now—people brought with them flowers, candles, letters and banners, and a clear sense that seeing as Jill’s death provoked an outcry Tracy’s couldn’t be ignored. On Greeves Street a candlelight vigil was planned, the publicity posters saying

  She is Someone

  A peaceful gathering to remember Tracy

  which annoyed me. Someone? Was her humanity ever really in question? At a separate big memorial service a banner said WOMEN OF ST KILDA SUPPORT THEIR SEX WORKERS. ‘Fucking thank you,’ said Vanda who skipped the service and went instead to an all-nighter at the Gatehouse, where everyone who was gathered knew Tracy and Tony.

  We don’t need to say it. Both of us think about Astrid’s service.

  We don’t need to say it but actually we say it after a few drinks (white = me, Vanda’s = red)—say something in the rhetoric around Tracy’s death didn’t sit well. I have no right to a position, not that it ever stops me. I mutter something about things feeling wrong. ‘Felt forced,’ Vanda says, ‘contrived.’ Didn’t feel like it was about Tracy. It was about a principle. About an idea. Which is fine. Important. Good that it happened and, who knows, perhaps in all of this someone’s life was saved but it was not about Tracy. Or Tony. When Jill died people said could have been me, my daughter, my sister, my girlfriend. After Tracy’s murder some were trying to say the same about her. Others, especially online, countered that heroin-injecting hookers with even the most lovable foibles are not us. It was not quite she had it coming but not that far off.

  Curious thing: empathy via identification. If we say it could have been me, shouldn’t we first ask who was she? And wouldn’t the answer to that usually take aeons of decoding? And what if Tracy couldn’t have been me and I couldn’t have been Tracy (I never for instance had an addiction of the kind that would make me again and again, for years, do things I hated doing)? There’s much that’s not known about others and much of it is unknowable. What can be grasped of another person’s suffering has limits. Ignore the limits and people become symbols, vessels in which we carry liquids of our choosing. Things—whereas to recognise another person as fully human is also to notice what in that person is different, and to not twist the difference into near-saintliness. On the street as anywhere, people are good and bad, both at once. Poverty, neglect, abuse or disadvantage—people’s pasts do not coat them in fairy dust or make their actions always already morally defensible. If we feel roused only when picturing people as morally elevated by their misfortune then … well. Beyond sad.

  When going to sleep Vanda sometimes imagines an avalanche of snow dropping on Melbourne. She imagines bringing people in to where she is, giving them food, turning cold away. She doesn’t think about what happens later. Just the sheltering. Then she falls asleep. ‘All we can do is smooth a bit a very hard road,’ she said to me after a morning in court of applying for adjournments, community service orders, no-conviction dispositions. Most of the people would be back within months for the same sorts of thing and she would represent them again and it wouldn’t feel Sisyphean, not to her. She was rolling rocks out of their way, didn’t matter that the rocks roll back. ‘People have hard, hard lives and you just make a little bit easier their life that is damn hard. Mind you,’ she says, ‘I have clients say it was never meant to be like this. I went to Brighton Grammar.’ Cushy lives fall apart too. (Watch out.)

  Kierkegaard wrote hope is ‘a new garment, stiff and starched and lustrous’ and recollection ‘a discarded garment that doesn’t fit’ though it was beautiful once, exquisite, while repetition is ‘an indestructible garment… neither binds nor sags’. Repetition, like recollection, may suggest a tilt back in time (replay, reload, rewire, revoke, repent) but for Kierkegaard repetition’s movement is always towards the future, into ‘the new’, it is the state of being inside time. He thought while Greeks taught us all knowledge is recollection, ‘modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition’.

  Some years ago one of Vanda’s clients was utterly determined Vanda should sleep with her. The woman sent cards to Vanda c/o the St Kilda legal branch, toys too, which began to stack up at reception. ‘Is it your birthday, Vanda?’ She was refusing to open the cards but couldn’t send them back as the woman’s current address was unknown. An experienced caseworker had once advised Vanda, if a client propositions you don’t say ‘oh no, how unprofessional, I mustn’t because of my job’ or ‘no I can’t, I have a partner’ because the client may take it the job or partner is the obstacle and, were this obstacle removed, you’d sleep with them. You have to say a firm no at the outset. Vanda had another client walk with her to the office from a clinic at St Kilda Junction. This woman was talking rather insistently about the two of them getting a room in a motel, no one need find out, and Vanda was saying ‘look, this is a bit unprofessional’ and doing her best to be firm but still respectful. They said their goodbyes. Vanda got inside. Pulled out her phone. Almost instantly a message beeped. ‘And who said you were professional anyway?’

  Vanda couldn’t stop laughing. She tells me the story and we are laughing together. What a good feeling to laugh like this. Such freedom in it. We’re like a pair of balloons out in the sky (not helium, not us) pushed further into the atmosphere by wind and cold air. When it is time we will return to earth as little bits of balloon spaghetti. Learned articles tell me we will freeze up there first. That’s OK with m
e. With you, Vanda? ‘While we do know that animals occasionally eat these soft slivers of rubber,’ I read, ‘the evidence indicates the pieces ultimately pass through the digestive system without harming the animal.’

  PART TWO

  I’ve heard Lorrie Moore say in a lecture she delivered at New York Public Library that parenting’s mostly useless: in the making of personhood the culprits are biochemistry and residential zipcode. Her lecture was entitled Watching Television, something Moore and her three siblings were more or less banned by their parents from doing on moral and religious grounds. Prohibition produced in them neither a great uniform hunger for TV’s pleasures nor uniform contempt for TV’s distractions. Instead came four zigzag reactions, four lives in which TV was not important or unimportant, which for Moore was more proof of parenting’s small role and the big role of other things, chiefly postcode, easily obscured in the 1.8-meets-2.2-kid families world. All that’s needed, Moore said, is a large enough sample and we will see most people become who they need to whatever their parents get up to.

  I was thinking the opposite. Somehow something claims us. Certain prototypes assert themselves, usually later in life. And for those who took an oath a long time back to (I do not count myself in this group) under no circumstances become our parents this may feel like a form of possession, or like being possessed. You open your mouth and your mother’s voice comes out complete with your mother’s words. Stuck in a mirror’s that old inbuilt irony: your father’s eyes. It’s like Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that every utterance in this world contains in some way all the utterances that preceded it. We contain our parents, doesn’t mean we are them, it means we go from being inside of them to them being inside us.