‘Today was an absolute waste of money,’ sniffed Narelle as they sat down.
‘A waste of time, certainly, but let’s not call it a waste of money,’ Arabella smiled. When the solicitor frowned, Arabella assured her it was a barrister’s joke.
‘This judge wants to down the plaintiff,’ said Narelle, ‘that much is obvious.’
‘A bit early to say that, Narelle. He’s actually more antipathetic to everyone else. The test’s going to be how he responds to our cross-examination of her.’
‘I suppose.’ Narelle looked away.
‘In any event,’ said Arabella, ‘if you’re frightened that you stuck your neck out in your assessment of the case and want to protect yourself, you ought to ask your departmental client for instructions overnight to admit liability. Until you do, you have to understand that my duty is to do my best to win the case. You can’t ask me to roll over and play dead.’
‘It isn’t as easy as that. The State Crown and the Treasury Managed Fund we represent are like supertankers tied together. You can’t turn them round as easily as you think.’ The solicitor was in a very bad mood, and Arabella was getting sick of it. She quickly downed her tea and stood up.
‘See you on the thirteenth floor at ten to ten tomorrow, then?’ And she walked outside and found a taxi back downtown before the solicitor had got to her feet. Arabella was starting to see why Harry regarded solicitors as non-lawyers. If this one didn’t want to brief her any more, no real loss. Or so she thought.
Back at Burragate, Harry was happy. He toured the vegetable garden, satisfying himself that the broad beans and snow peas were doing well, and being left alone by the possums. He dreaded the depredations of the king parrots on his cherries, the lone apricot and the big pear tree that stood to one side of the vegetable garden, but decided to worry about that when the fruit started to appear in another month or so. Netting would be yet another expense.
He went inside and put on a jumper as the light thickened and took a tumbler, a bottle of Wirra Wirra and a bag of almonds down to the river near the platypus’s hole to see if he could spot it. Half the bottle and all the almonds later, near-darkness along the glinting river and still no sign of his quarry, he walked over to the dry creek where it entered the stream and sat on the bank to wait for the wombats to come out. The sun jabbed a last red spear through a gap in the bank of clouds, and dropped out of sight. Harry didn’t have long to wait. He talked to the animals as they lumbered out into the night air, in their awkward, muscular way, and noisily cropped the new grass on top of the bank opposite Harry’s position, but they ignored his overtures after one quick around-the-shoulder backward glance. There were two new babies, which made him even happier.
He walked back uphill towards the warm lights of his house, smiling. Blackberry thorns tugged at his trouser cuffs, and he made a mental note to slash them with the tractor over the weekend. Inside, he put a half rack of lamb in the oven and removed a big potato, onions, tomatoes and beans from the fridge, to boil later, all in the same pot. He peeled the potato and topped and tailed the beans while he listened to the ABC’s PM program on the kitchen radio, cursing the Prime Minister’s latest attempt to excuse the inhumanity of what she was pleased to call the government’s ‘asylum-seeker policy’.
‘They’re refugees, you hack. Will you ever tell the truth?’ He turned on the gas and switched the radio to FM, despite the poor reception, and listened to some lieder. He didn’t like lieder — who could? — but it was better than politics. Then he rang Arabella’s mobile and was surprised to find her at home. He’d expected to speak to her in chambers, her mind on the matter on trial, but there was nothing to work on overnight, as she explained to him, because her case hadn’t really started. She told him that she planned to go out later and eat something at the little café on the corner of Bayswater Road.
Harry took a breath. ‘I tried to ring you, you know. From the airport, on my way back down here.’ He didn’t mention not completing the call, nor the unanswered call to her chambers.
‘And I swore at you for not having the mobile with you.’
‘What would you have said if I had?’
‘You first.’
Harry took a long pause while he poured himself a fresh glass of red. ‘Apart from “I miss you”?’ Another pause at both ends. ‘I would have asked permission to come back to Elizabeth Bay for the night.’
‘For some particular purpose, Harry?’
‘Does there have to be a purpose? Other than being together? Your turn, anyway.’
‘Same thing. I would have asked you to stay. For the purpose of going to sleep against your big, hard, lovely body. To listen to your breathing. To look at your hands and think of you holding the baby.’
‘Just that?’
‘No. I wanted to look wantonly, if not lasciviously, at you in the shower as well. Also to ask you how you’re going to deal with my mother.’ She laughed gently. ‘A woman you have never met, and cannot possibly imagine. I’m thinking of selling tickets.’
Day two of Papadopoulos v the Department of Education started promisingly. The interpreter arrived, and she was duly sworn in. The plaintiff presented herself again in her black suit, this time with a white blouse. Now guardedly cooperative, she was led more or less successfully by Mr Buchanan through her evidence in chief. The gist of it, as translated, was this.
I worked at that school for eleven years. I used to start at 6 a.m. and clean the classrooms and the staff room. The headmistress won’t let me clean her office. Then I clean the boys’ toilets, then the girls’. They are always very dirty. Disgusting. Little pigs, they are. On this particular day, I had finished the boys’ toilets. I emptied my bucket down the drain inside, and was taking my broom, mop, bucket and Pine O Cleen back to the storeroom. I went about five metres from the toilets and something hit me in the face. Up here [indicating her forehead on the left side]. I fell down and couldn’t move. They took me to the big hospital at Camperdown in an ambulance. RPA, it’s called. They gave me many tests and sent me home. I went to bed and couldn’t get up in the morning. For the last year, I have been going to doctors, to specialists. Tests, blood, X-rays. My husband takes me. I cannot work any more, and I can do very little at home. My daughters come and do my washing and hang it on the line. My husband cooks. Sometimes I make the bed and use the vacuum, but not much. I get help from the family. I was going to keep working until I was sixty-five, but that’s impossible now. I get this stabbing pain in my face and it usually lasts a few minutes, but sometimes it doesn’t stop all day. Just on one side. If I touch it, it hurts more. If I brush my teeth, it hurts. When I eat my food, it hurts.
Gosling DCJ had his laptop open in front of him and, having gone to Wikipedia (as had Arabella when she was preparing the case), was taking particular note that Mrs Papadopoulos was reeling off her symptoms in precisely the same order as they appeared on that website. Buchanan, not noticing the judge’s mildly amused expression, next took his client through the litany of unpleasant blood tests, neurological examinations and MRIs she’d been subjected to, and the medication she was taking. The plaintiff’s barrister struggled unsuccessfully to pronounce carbamazepine, clonazepam and amitriptyline when he came to them, but who could blame him for that?
Eventually, Arabella’s opponent informed the judge that he’d completed his evidence in chief, and Gosling nodded at Arabella. Always ready to judge new talent.
‘Thank you, your Honour.’ Moving to stand at the lectern, Arabella turned to the notes she’d been making while the interpreter related the plaintiff’s evidence. Her practice was to rule a vertical line down the middle of a page of her spiral-bound lecture pad, and summarise the witness’s evidence on the left-hand side. Points she wanted to make in cross-examination were then added to the right of the relevant entry. She had already prepared some questions in chambers, making assumptions about how the evidence would emerge, based on statements the witness had made to her doctors. The trick, Harry had
told Arabella, was to listen to the answers and adjust your plan of attack to counter them. Be prepared to jettison everything you’d intended to ask. Most barristers couldn’t do it, he said. They were so in love with the plan they’d committed themselves to at midnight, alone in chambers, that they usually missed the hints that were dropped when the evidence was actually given.
‘Might I have access to the plaintiff’s file from the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, if your Honour pleases?’
The associate, a woman of a certain age and a close friend of the judge’s wife (‘You forced Beryl on me, didn’t you, so you’d know everything I get up to at work, and after work, for that matter?’ — it had been a long and unhappy marriage and Mrs Judge Gosling had every reason to be distrustful) shuffled through a stack of brown envelopes, extracted a thick one and handed it to the sheriff’s officer, who brought it over to the Bar table where Arabella stood waiting with her hand out. She then passed it to Narelle, and asked her to check through it. The Crown Solicitor’s office had left it extremely late to serve the subpoena on the hospital’s records department, and Arabella resented being kept in the dark until the very last moment. Let spiky Narelle do the work now, she thought. Better late than never. She can let me know anything important at the morning tea adjournment.
‘Mrs Papadopoulos, when you answered my learned friend’s questions, you didn’t say anything about what hit you.’
‘I don’t know what it was.’ In perfectly serviceable English, without waiting for the question to be translated.
‘Didn’t you tell your lawyers it was a superball? The Statement of Claim alleges that that’s what it was.’
‘I don’t know what it was.’ Intractable, but still in English. The interpreter stood quietly by.
‘And you don’t know where it came from, either, do you? That’s something you just can’t say.’
Gosling interrupted. ‘That’s binary — two questions, Ms Engineer. Which one do you want answered?’
Arabella coloured. ‘My fault, your Honour. Plaintiff, you don’t claim to be able to identify the source of the article that you say hit you, do you?’
Mrs Papadopoulos needed that translated. She answered quickly, and in Greek. ‘I don’t know. It hit me and I fell down.’
‘You’ve just assumed it was something thrown by a child playing in the school grounds, haven’t you?’ The question took some time to translate, and it appeared that the plaintiff needed further explanation even of the Greek word for ‘assume’: Aναλαβoυν. She asked a couple of questions that only her solicitor and the interpreter understood, and then answered in Greek.
‘Nobody else threw it,’ was the translation. ‘It had to be.’
‘But you don’t know from whence?’
No answer. A blank look.
The judge took over. ‘Plaintiff, what you’re being asked to admit is that the ball, or whatever it was, could have come from outside the school.’
‘How could that be? The children were playing on the playground.’ A hint of truculence, and back in English.
The judge was enjoying a return to his former role as a combatant. ‘But there were also children outside in the street, on the footpath?’
The plaintiff paused for the interpreter, and reverted to Greek for her answer. ‘Yes. Some going up the road to the Catholic school.’
‘So you can’t say whether the thing was thrown from inside or outside the school grounds, if it was thrown at all?’
A long pause after the question was translated. The answer came in English. ‘No. I don’t know that. How could I say that?’
‘Equally, you can’t say that it was thrown, if at all, by a child from your school?’
Again in English, ‘I don’t know that. How can I know that?’
The judge muttered ‘You might need to’, but handed the witness back to the cross-examiner. ‘Ms Engineer?’
‘Thank you. Mrs Papadopoulos, have you always worked? Since you came to Australia, I mean?’ From this point on, a highly suspicious Mrs Papadopoulos used the interpreter constantly. She didn’t trust this tall woman in the black robe, like an Orthodox priest, but glamorous.
‘Apart from when the children were little.’
‘Hard work? Physical work, manual work?’
Mrs Papadopoulos nodded emphatically. ‘First, in the factory making lights. Then at the fish markets, very hard work. Then the children, then cleaning. First offices, then at the school.’
‘Have you ever suffered any injury at work before?’
‘Not really.’
‘Sick leave?’
‘Sure, for the influenza. Not much else.’
‘And you told his Honour that you can’t do much work at home any more. You don’t clean, or do the washing, and you say you can’t carry the shopping. Is that right?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Or more accurately, you don’t?’
‘I can’t. My husband will tell you.’
Arabella looked at the clock on the side wall, which was at 11.20 a.m. ‘It’s a trifle early, your Honour, but might we take the short adjournment at this time? I need to confer with my instructing solicitor about the hospital notes, and I don’t anticipate taking long after that to complete my questions.’
‘Very well.’ Gosling seemed happy to get out from behind the bench and have Beryl make him a cup of tea. There were chocolate biscuits in a tin in his desk drawer that neither his wife nor Beryl would have permitted. Neither did Beryl report to Mrs Judge Gosling, because she didn’t know, that his Honour watched internet porn on his laptop during the adjournments. ‘Twenty minutes.’ And the court rose.
The plaintiff and her lawyer left the courtroom. Arabella rebuked herself for not asking the judge to issue a warning to Mrs Papadopoulos not to discuss her evidence with her husband during the break, but suspected that there would be collusion, judicial admonition or not.
The sheriff’s officer wanted to shepherd the defendant’s lawyers out too and lock the court, but Arabella persuaded him that she and Narelle needed to confer about the subpoenaed documents from the hospital, which the judge hadn’t given her permission to uplift. He left them to it.
Arabella took off her wig and gown, throwing them lightly onto an empty chair. ‘Mrs P’s in some difficulty if she can’t adduce evidence that an unsupervised child within the school grounds was the villain.’
Narelle agreed. ‘We had no duty of care in relation to the Catholic schoolkids, and Buchanan can’t prove it wasn’t one of them.’ She picked up the RPA bundle. ‘But that might be the least of her problems.’ Overcoming her self-interest, Narelle handed Arabella the file, folded open at a form headed Admission. ‘She’s been in three times for a bulging disc, and she was operated on six months before the incident at the school. She’d only been back at work for ten days.’
Arabella read through a dozen pages. When she finished, she looked sad. ‘Poor Mrs P.’ She took a little pad of post-it stickers from her jacket pocket and marked a number of pages in the bundle, turning to make notes on her spiral-bound pad as she reached each page that interested her. She numbered her notes and the corresponding post-its for easy reference.
The trial resumed, and Judge Gosling invited Arabella to continue her questions.
‘May I just be quite clear about what you say, Mrs Papadopoulos? You say, don’t you, that the only thing preventing you from working is the pain you get in your face from time to time, and that it was caused by whatever happened outside the school toilets that day?’ Arabella waited for the translation of her question, the answer, and the translation of the answer into English.
‘It’s very bad pain, and I have it most of the time. That stops me working, yes.’
‘And it’s the only thing?’
‘No, it stopped the sex.’ Somewhat embarrassed.
‘No, I’m very sorry, Mrs Papadopoulos, what I meant to ask was whether the pain in your face is the only thing that prevents you from working.’
‘Oh. Yes, the only thing.’ Mrs Papadopoulos looked at her solicitor and raised her eyebrows. He looked down at his notes.
‘No other physical problems at all?’ Arabella didn’t need to read from her notes.
‘No other problems, no.’
‘Not with your legs, or your feet?’
The plaintiff looked puzzled. ‘No, not at all. Never for a day.’
‘Not your hands or your arms?’
‘Not at all. Why do you ask that?’
‘And not with your back? No previous back problems at all?’ Arabella had kept her eyes on the plaintiff, who was now looking everywhere but at her tormentor.
‘You mean from work?’ Mrs Papadopoulos was becoming guarded.
‘No, I don’t mean only from work. From anything. Any accident, any injury, even degeneration.’
‘Never any back problem.’ Defiant again.
‘Are you sure of that? You don’t want to reconsider that answer?’ No response. ‘Have you, for instance, ever been told that you had a disc problem in your lumbar spine?’
‘Nobody ever told me that.’
‘Not even Dr Cousins?’
‘Who’s he?’
Arabella permitted herself a quick aside to her solicitor. ‘Harry Curry says that when they answer your question with a question, it’s because they don’t actually want to lie, but they’re going to have to. They’re delaying the evil moment.’ She turned back to her task, noting that the judge had closed his laptop and was giving the interrogation his undivided attention. Arabella knew that Gosling knew she wasn’t asking these questions without knowing what the truthful answers should have been. There are rules, after all. Counsel can’t make it up as they go along.
‘Have you ever had any sort of treatment — an operation being one example of treatment — for a protruding disc?’
‘No.’
‘Were you ever an inpatient at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital?’
Harry Curry: Rats and Mice Page 4
