Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  But it was easy to lose track, in a room like that one—with so many brilliant minds, beacons of success—that we were still the smallest fish. In the months that followed I saw our status sour people I’d previously called friends. I would watch how some judges mentored their associates with great generosity and care, and how others slowly crushed their optimism and trust. It was a different world, up there in that tower made of glass: blindingly ivory.

  After the training session I texted my judge. I was nervous to see him again because we hadn’t met in person since my afternoon of training with his previous associate, Rebecca, six months earlier. Good morning, Judge. Training has finished for the morning, if you are free I can come up to chambers otherwise I’ll lunch with the associates and see you at three.

  I started heading to the bathroom when one of the associates I’d just met called out to me. ‘Bri, come join us for coffee, we’re going to plan a dinner for next week,’ Alexandra said. She and I had done a summer clerkship at Corrs Chambers Westgarth the previous year. I didn’t know if she’d got a graduate offer with them, but I sure hadn’t and it had been a sting to see her that morning and be reminded of my rejection. Alexandra did marathons, spoke a bunch of languages and did volunteer legal work for something environmental.

  My phone buzzed with a response from Judge: Good morning, come up to chambers please.

  ‘Nah, I’m right, thanks,’ I replied. ‘Gonna pop up and see Judge. Besides, I’ll be in Gladstone next week!’

  ‘Circuit already!?’ Alexandra asked, as she jumped into the elevator with a group of Supremes and waved goodbye.

  ‘I know!’ I waved back.

  ‘Eew, Gladstone,’ came an unfamiliar voice from inside the elevator as the doors closed.

  I swiped my brand-new security pass and the elevator slowly took me up to level thirteen. I felt completely out of my depth. This space belonged to the Evelyns and Alexandras of the world. It belonged to people like my boyfriend, Vincent, more than me. The beautiful, bilingual people whose parents had gone to university.

  I took a deep breath and knocked on Judge’s door, and he looked and gave me a big smile. He invited me to take a seat and I remembered how nervous I’d been a year earlier, sitting in the same chair for the job interview, but as we chatted I also remembered how much we’d laughed together, how much I admired his lack of pretension.

  ‘Rebecca showed me some of your updates from America,’ he began. ‘It looks like you had a fantastic trip.’

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ I replied. ‘I can’t believe how different all the states are. New York was magic, though. I went to the Frick, like you suggested, and was blown away.’

  ‘Fantastic, isn’t it!’ Judge said. He collected art, I’d learned the last time I was there. ‘But I’m afraid we’ve got a bit of work to do before we can chat more. As you know, we’re heading off to Gladstone this Sunday.’

  ‘Yes, Rebecca has shown me all the preparations.’

  ‘But before that, I need to deliver a judgment I reserved from a pre-trial hearing last week.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, instantly nervous again.

  He got up and walked to his desk, collecting a wad of stapled paper. ‘I’d like you to proofread this and set up a time tomorrow for me to deliver it. You’ll have to contact all the parties and make sure we have a courtroom booked.’

  ‘Sure.’ I took the documents from his outstretched arm and stood up, noticing he hadn’t sat back down.

  ‘You’ll be alright to organise all that?’ he asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I lied.

  ‘Great,’ he said, turning to sit at his desk, ‘let me know how you go.’

  I left his room and took a seat in my new office, just outside his chambers. It was clean and simple, a small square with a large calendar on the wall, beside my computer, that Rebecca had prepared for me. The calendar colour-coded the eight towns that Judge and I would be travelling to on circuit. It noted that of all the weeks in the year we had for work, only two would consist of civil law: the rest were criminal. Gladstone came first—two weeks beginning Sunday, then only two weeks back home before Bundaberg. After that, three weeks in Brisbane, then off to Warwick, and it continued on.

  I grew anxious as I stared at the year in front of me, so I brought my attention to the present: to the proofreading. I scanned down the page and identified it as an s590AA application with catchwords listed: ADMISSIBILITY OF SIMILAR FACTS—indecent treatment of a child—rape—admissibility of previous similar sexual conduct. My stomach clenched, and I pushed back from the desk. I knew what it would be—I remembered it from law school. Prosecution had testimony from someone else, not the complainant, that the defendant liked certain things during sex, and this would go a long way in convincing a jury that the complainant was telling the truth. It was for Judge to decide if the probative value of this evidence outweighed its prejudicial value. The outcomes of pre-trial hearings like this were critical, often determining the outcome of a trial before it even began. I rummaged in the desk for a red pen and took a deep breath in, rolling my chair back around to face the document.

  The defendant was accused of sexually assaulting and raping his girlfriend’s young daughter. She’d been in primary school when the offending took place and was now a teenager. In her police statement she listed several occasions when the defendant had tied her up before assaulting her, the severity of the bondage and penetration increasing over time until she complained to her mother. The critical incident in question was when the defendant allegedly tied the girl to the Hills hoist in his backyard before raping her. Prosecution had found one of the defendant’s previous sexual partners who was willing to testify that while they were together he liked bondage, and that she had ended the relationship because his sexual desires grew in intensity until she no longer felt comfortable with them. I read on and on, forgetting to check for spelling or citations, gripped by morbid curiosity.

  ‘He wanted to tie me up to the Hills hoist outside and have sex with me there,’ the defendant’s ex-girlfriend testified.

  I flipped to the end of the document. Judge allowed the reference to the Hills hoist but excluded the general bondage content. The Hills hoist was a detail so unusual, so specific, that its probative weight could not be denied.

  I checked my watch and went for a walk down the length of the building to the ladies’ room. It was quiet here on the higher levels where the judges had their chambers, with frosted-glass walls and grey couches, wide and low. I had known on a theoretical level that this would be a Law & Order: SVU kind of job, but I hadn’t thought I would encounter this side of it on my first day. It seemed odd that the floor was quiet. Wasn’t anyone outraged? Judge was acting completely normal. Was this the new normal? Already?

  There was a Hills hoist in the backyard of my grandparents’ house. I conjured the image of it, remembering the smell of fresh laundry and my grandmother’s cigarette smoke. But now I saw a child tied to it, crying, being raped. I saw the reality in my mind, the manicured grass and the blue pool just beyond it. The warm Queensland afternoon and the sun-weathered plastic pegs. It was the only Hills hoist I knew of, so I couldn’t move the imagery of the offending elsewhere. It hit too close to home—literally, my grandparents’ home just down the road from where I grew up, where I still lived. The heinous snapshot had slid in through a crack between the layers of my life, like a slippery ghost, and something else tweaked inside me. A memory from my own backyard in grass green and sky blue. In the ladies’ room, my head flicked involuntarily, as though trying to shake the thought. I turned the taps on and watched the water flow over my hands, focusing on the sound it made and the coolness of my skin. I didn’t look at myself in the mirror before going back to work. I couldn’t have looked myself in the eye.

  That afternoon all of the new associates got taken on a short tour of the cells under the building. It was cold down there, and everything seemed large, but it wasn’t shiny like upstairs. Cement instead of marble, grey
bars instead of chrome arches. At the end of the tour, the security officer asked if we had any questions, and someone asked if all these temporary holding cells had filled up after the G20 protests; the government had panicked about it.

  ‘Not even close,’ the officer said with a laugh.

  I raised my hand next. ‘I read a newspaper article yesterday that said the prisons at Wacol are too full and we need more facilities. Is that true?’

  ‘It’s not a problem of not enough space at the correctional facilities,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘it’s that we’re sending too many people to gaol for too long. The longer they’re in, the less likely they are to ever truly get out, and it’s expensive to keep them incarcerated and pretty awful for them too.’

  We all nodded as though we, the children from the top of the tower, could even come close to understanding that dungeon.

  Back up on level thirteen I looked out over Brisbane bathed in hot yellow sunlight and thought about how all the people in the top levels were university-educated, white-collar overachievers. Far beneath us, fifteen stories down, under the ground, near where the cars were parked, we kept the criminals. We even kept the alleged criminals down there, away from the sun. My career in the clouds was built on the misfortune and misconduct of the people way below. The chrome impossible without the concrete. I made $50,000 my first year out of university, and I made it from a system that is funded by necessity because people keep doing awful things to each other.

  From the window where I stood, I saw a group of Indigenous Australians gathering in Roma Street Parkland, laughing and sharing food. Following years of invasion and genocide Australia’s First Nations people made up 3 per cent of our population—but almost a third of our prison population identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. According to the president of the Queensland Law Society, not a single District or Supreme Court judge identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

  When I turned from the window, I noticed that artworks hung on most of the walls, accompanied by plaques and explanations, and many pieces were by Indigenous Australian artists. The courts building struck me as a freakishly physical manifestation of Australia’s social dichotomy. Way up there, we liked looking as though we liked acknowledgement. We liked the words we could copy and paste to the beginnings of speeches, the box we could tick at the beginning of events, to show we cared, before we went ahead and didn’t. We made large corporate orders to absurdly expensive florists to match our acquisitions of acknowledgement, and those paintings sat silently beside the lilies, well behaved, where we could keep an eye on them.

  For the first few days of work, I thought that view from level thirteen was beautiful. On one side of the building, out through Judge’s windows, we saw the river and the hills, and on the other, near the elevators, a glinting expanse of modern infrastructure. It only took a couple of weeks for me to turn from the windows. After enough trials and sentences, I realised I was looking out over a constellation of crime scenes. Spots that seemed tiny from way up there were locations, chosen through significance or circumstance, for rapes and bashings. It quickly became hard for me to look at all the ant-sized people bustling to-and-fro and keep my mind from wandering between them, wondering which ones were the criminals, which ones were the victims, and which ones might be any day now. It seemed impossible that many people would go through that city, or along that river, or through those mountains, lucky enough to be neither. Perhaps this was because I knew that at the end of the day, when I was walking home among them, I wasn’t one of the lucky untouched.

  IN THAT FIRST WEEK BACK in Brisbane, my first week at work, I spent most evenings with Vincent. We had skyped during my two months away, but something vulnerable inside me had calcified over again. He was the one person to have ever reached me, and the one man I’d somehow opened up to, but I’d only been gone a fortnight when I realised that how much I missed him was inhibiting my happiness, and I resented it. I didn’t know how to be in love with him and not be with him, so I tried to push him from my mind by reaching back to behaviours and feelings I’d once had when travelling alone. By the end of the trip I had finally shaken the impulse to reach for him when I saw something wonderful.

  Being back was full-on. I had somehow forgotten how handsome he was in real life: strong features, thick dark hair, slim and tall. Inhaling the smell of his neck as he held me at Brisbane Airport gave me a head rush. I’d never voiced my wondering if he would even really wait for me, or still want me when I returned. We had been together for three years since meeting at law school, and I panicked that my life was moulding to his. Connection to someone seemed to necessitate a loss of independence. Being in a relationship meant compromising on things I’d barely finished fighting for. But my hard-won comfort in solitude had turned into missing his company. Despite how relaxed he was, I second-guessed ordering at restaurants and didn’t know when to wear high heels anymore. There were so many moments of bartering my autonomy for his affection. I oscillated between convincing myself he didn’t really love me and feeling terror at the prospect that he did. I didn’t know how to just be in love.

  Lying in his arms after dinner on the Thursday night of my first week back, a few nights before I’d have to leave for Gladstone, I did an appalling job of articulating my thoughts. ‘Sometimes I feel like when I don’t see you for a while I can’t keep this love open, like it’s too hard, and now I’m home it’s like I’m trying to crack my ribs open to let you at my heart again.’ I started crying at my failure to explain myself. ‘And now I have to go away again.’

  Vincent kissed my cheeks, my forehead and my lips, his quiet blessing, ‘I’ll be right here when you get back.’

  He wasn’t listening to what I was trying to say. Perhaps it made even less sense to him than it did to me. Maybe he thought I was just stressed, and maybe he was right.

  The next morning at work, Judge and I held a callover ahead of going to Gladstone. At callovers the judge goes through the list of every outstanding matter—every active file—at a courthouse. The prosecutor needs to know the details of these matters and which ones the Department of Public Prosecutions (DPP) wants to prioritise. Defence lawyers need to be ready to advise the court how their client intends to plead when their matter is mentioned. Among what felt like a million other tasks, it was my job to take note of every piece of information that might be relevant later. The following week Judge might ask me why a certain matter couldn’t be listed for trial and I would need to be able to remind him the defendant was in hospital, or that a witness was unavailable.

  I began seeing how human the system was. Matters that had been waiting on the list at Gladstone for years might have to wait six more months if a certain lawyer was on long service leave. Expert witnesses needed to be able to take time off work to testify. Sometimes, I would learn, we just couldn’t make it to the end of the list in two short weeks. The towns and cities we travelled to on circuit weren’t big enough to justify having a judge sit there permanently, but they needed to have their matters dealt with locally, and so judges would travel out west and up north for two weeks at a time. My judge had the most circuits scheduled out of all the District Court judges.

  ‘Did you see that barrister’s cufflinks?’ I asked Judge later in the private elevator after court adjourned.

  ‘No.’

  ‘They were big shiny dollar signs,’ I said, grinning, ‘the size of fifty cent pieces, glinting in the light.’

  ‘Really!?’ Judge gave a light laugh and shook his head. We were off to a good start.

  Back in my office I prepared us for the coming trials. The bulk of the court list was child sex offences, and when I remarked upon this to Judge he agreed and we commiserated.

  ‘Unfortunately it’s the bread and butter of the District Court,’ he said, ‘but sometimes you get a good bit of old-fashioned violence, like that second trial.’

  I laughed.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘two adults going at each other,
fisticuffs, the occasional chainsaw—it becomes a welcome reprieve from the child sex stuff.’ He was smiling now, but it was a knowing, tainted smile I would come to recognise.

  That evening at home over dinner, my mum asked me about circuit. ‘And it’s always for two weeks at a time?’

  ‘Yep,’ I replied. ‘Sometimes we come back in the middle weekend and sometimes we don’t.’

  ‘Depends on the location,’ my dad added between mouthfuls.

  ‘Nope,’ I said, pointing my fork at him, ‘it depends on the judge.’

  He nodded. ‘Mm.’

  ‘Everything depends on the judge,’ I said.

  ‘And where do you live while on circuit?’ Mum asked.

  I shrugged. ‘A hotel or motel or apartment thingo. I do all the bookings but I’ve never heard of any of the places before. I have to research and print out maps so I know how to drive us from the airport to the accommodation. I’m really nervous about it all.’

  ‘You’ll be fine, sweetie,’ she said, smiling, ‘you’re good at all that stuff.’

  ‘Now that you’ve got a job,’ Dad said, changing the subject, ‘you should think about saving up for a deposit.’

  My older brother, Arron, was almost thirty, an electrical engineer, and had just bought a place out in Donnybrook—a two-hour drive from Brisbane—because even on his great wage the worst house on the worst street was all he could afford. Dad was over the moon: both kids had finished university, and one out of two had real estate. He’d get the Baby Boomer Gold Star once I was also up to my eyeballs in a mortgage, and then he’d be able to wipe his hands on his pants and crack a light beer.