Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  ‘Sorry to delay proceedings, your Honour,’ the prosecutor stood up as she spoke, adjusting her wig, ‘but there needs to be some further pre-trial discussion.’

  I wrote in my notes: I knew it.

  ‘How long will you need?’ Judge asked. I had heard him ask that question to counsel countless times before and thought I detected a hint of disappointment. Of course he knew they’d be splitting the charges; he was always a step ahead of everyone else in the courtroom. He had probably picked up on this a week ago at the preliminary callover back in Brisbane while I was scrambling around making other notes.

  ‘Well, that depends on Mr Crane,’ she replied with a hint of attitude, glancing toward the defence counsel.

  Crane got up. ‘Well, your Honour, it doesn’t depend on me, it depends on—’

  ‘What are we talking about here?’ Judge cut in.

  ‘Whether the complainants should be tried separately or if the current indictment is really suitable for a joinder application.’ The prosecutor pursed her lips. Her name was Marie Goode and she was lovely, but I yearned for someone quicker and meaner to fight for the sisters. All her sentences came out as questions, as those of so many perfectly intelligent women tend to do.

  ‘Very well, we’ll adjourn,’ Judge announced, ‘but please keep in mind that the people called for the jury are waiting on us.’

  Goode nodded. ‘Of course, your Honour.’

  I looked over at Reester, sitting up straight with a pressed grey shirt. His eyes were a very pale blue, almost white, and he was still and calm, like a crocodile, just waiting.

  We waited on counsel for an hour before Judge sent me out to get an update. It was all part of the strange system, that I could pop my head into the chambers of the prosecutors and defence counsel, asking for updates. Judge couldn’t be seen to do it himself, but everyone knew I was asking in order to report back to him. I would scuttle along the corridors of some of these shabby old regional courthouses, ferrying messages, imagining myself to be a little carrier rat. There’s no real job description for a judge’s associate but by then I had realised that if nobody notices you and everything runs smoothly, then you can rest assured you’re good at your job.

  I knocked on the prosecutor’s door and when the clerk opened it by just a crack, I caught a glimpse of a woman crying. Her shoulders were hunched over and long black hair fell in front of her face.

  ‘Hi,’ I said gently to the clerk, ‘I’m just wondering if you have an update for his Honour?’

  The crying woman pulled another tissue out of a box beside her, and I realised she must be one of the three sisters. The absurd little remaining hope I had for a joined trial was waning.

  ‘Yes, we’ll be about another ten minutes and then we’ll present a new indictment,’ the clerk replied in a vaguely apologetic tone.

  ‘Sure—the eldest sister?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, Clare,’ the clerk said. We nodded to each other and as the clerk stepped back from the door to shut it, I saw Clare’s face when she tucked her hair behind her ear. She was nodding but her eyes were swollen and her nose was a raw red.

  I stood for a moment, alone in the dark corridor, absorbing the information and all its implications. Reester wouldn’t plead now. No way.

  I considered the kind of women Clare and I were. Perhaps we’d both had the same night terrors or sinusoidal guilt trips. If the way we stayed silent was the same, would the way we fought be the same? Then I considered the kind of men Kevin Reester and Samuel were. I didn’t think Samuel would plead either. He had once tried to bully my brother into investing in a pyramid scheme. Samuel and Kevin were both top-notch dickheads. Would Clare go through with everything and give evidence alone? I was afraid for her.

  I waited for a sign in each complainant, a warning with every new defendant. Was this trial my omen?

  I pulled twelve names out of the barrel after lunch that afternoon, and once the jury took their seats the trial finally started. When I read out the indictment, count by count, and Kevin Donny Reester stood up straight and calm, and protested his innocence, count by count, I watched the faces of the people selected to decide his fate. The accusations were so horrific and so numerous I was angry at them for giving him the benefit of the doubt at all. As I read out each rape count I saw one of the women shift uncomfortably in her seat. You haven’t heard shit yet, lady, I wanted to snarl, buckle up, but when I sat down again and looked at her face, and saw her sadness, my anger turned to sadness too.

  Goode stood up slowly, turning her body to face the jurors, and began the painful process of introducing them to the precise nature of the offending they’d be listening to for the next three days.

  As it turned out, Reester had a very specific modus operandi. He had encouraged Clare’s mother to move into his house with her daughters because he could provide for them, which was true. He would sit under the house at night once his partner and the girls had gone to bed and drink for hours while he listened to all his favourite country music. Then, on random evenings, when he decided it was time, he would put on a particular record—a Slim Dusty record—and as it played he would drag his heavy feet up the stairs, and Clare would start crying in her bed. She came to know the smell of Jack Daniel’s as a precursor to her tiny child’s body being violated.

  For years and years it was the same: the Slim Dusty and the Jack Daniel’s and the footsteps. The offending started tentatively, with touches as Reester glanced nervously at the door and she pretended to be asleep, but with time the violations developed until she was crying out loud, her body ripped and bleeding. The culmination of these bedroom visits was Clare being covered in his ejaculate, too young to have any idea what the sticky, smelly substance was.

  The jury heard this was the last time Reester came into her room at night. They did not hear that she was the eldest—by then around thirteen—of three sisters, and that one possibility for the cease in his offending was that he had moved on to her younger sisters’ tiny bodies. If the joinder application had been made and succeeded, the jury would have heard those allegations too.

  By the time the prosecutor finished her opening address, a feeling of filth had settled around the room. I imagined it emanating from Reester like a gas, slowly poisoning us all.

  As Crane took his turn to address the jury with opening remarks, I lamented the missed opportunity for the whole thing to have gone straight to sentence. Perhaps if Goode had pushed a little harder, Reester would have pleaded. I wanted to believe this so badly, but when I looked over to the dock at his face, only a few metres from where I sat, I realised that it never would have happened. Reester wasn’t even tense. He was less anxious than I was. I suppose the word ‘frustrated’ best describes the attitude of that short, square-chinned man. He shook his head when certain facts were alleged, and rolled his eyes as the complainant was quoted. Crane was already picking apart the inconsistencies in her story.

  I looked at Reester’s nose and wondered if he smelled things the same way I did. How could both of us be human and yet have so little understanding of each other’s brains? I fantasised about cracking his skull open, imagining that maggots and cockroaches would come pouring out. Aha! I would say. It’s alright, he’s just a rotten thing. An image of Samuel’s face sprang to mind, his head cracked open, and huge brown locusts swarmed out and toward my face. I felt myself flush and start sweating, and my eyes went soft around the edges. I picked up my pen and scribbled in my notebook just to keep my head down. On the weekend I will go and see some turtles. It wasn’t working, I couldn’t breathe, I could feel tears coming. I took a plastic ruler and dug the pointy corner of it deep into my thigh, under the desk, and focused on the feeling. I breathed in, and I breathed out.

  Court adjourned after defence’s opening address, then the jury were dismissed to their tearoom after being warned not to tell anyone about the proceedings. It was a small town, though, and while I didn’t think any of them would know if he was guilty, I thought it was likel
y some of them had already made up their minds one way or the other.

  In the week before Bundaberg I had bought a Fitbit, a food diary planner, and hired a personal trainer. I felt that amazing sense of skinny potential, daydreaming about how awesome the future Bri would be because the present-day one was so crap. On Tuesday morning the only personal trainer in Bargara met me by the beach, and I explained that I was the biggest I’d ever been and that I wanted to get ‘back in shape’. I was fishing for a compliment but she didn’t bite.

  In the middle of some particularly awkward lunge manoeuvre, where I lifted a heavy ball over my head while I took ridiculous big steps, a man further along the path came around a corner toward us. I saw his head turn to look at me. I kept my gaze straight ahead but I felt his eyes on me and it was uncomfortable. I kept lunging and lifting as he got closer, the unnatural movement making me feel silly, and when he was finally alongside me, his attention unbroken as I panted, he said brightly, ‘Keep it up!’

  ‘Yeah, you too, buddy,’ I barked back. Fucking idiot. Lunge. Fucking. Lift. Male. Lunge. Gaze. If I hadn’t been so red in the face from the exercise, the PT would have seen me blush. She rolled her eyes and shrugged: universal baby boomer language for ‘boys will be boys’.

  Later that morning when I met Judge at the car, he inquired how my morning was and I replied that it was fine.

  ‘A good workout with that lady, then?’ he asked.

  Fuck. That man had been Judge, offering actual-happy-morning encouragement to a friend and colleague. I stood there by the car with my mouth open for a moment too long before bumbling out some apologies, and he laughed it off. As we drove to work he inquired about my exercise and asked if I enjoyed any particular sports. I remembered how the people in this world of success like understanding each other. I think Judge was comforted by the fact that I had a personal trainer. That I was that kind of person: someone who woke up early to look after her body. It’s a Type A personality thing. A presumption that a lifestyle work ethic translates to a broad intelligence; a recognition that all hard work is good; healthy body, healthy mind. Perhaps he felt reassured that he’d made the right choice in hiring me.

  Once when I did some work experience at an exceptionally boring commercial law firm in Brisbane I met their best employee, Elizabeth. She went to bed every night before nine so that she could wake up every morning before five because she and her husband did marathons…or maybe it was triathlons. Whatever it was, it was most weekends too. And I remember thinking, You’ll make partner. I also remember thinking, If I ever work here, I will gouge my eyes out. The memory of Elizabeth made me afraid that I’d turn into a boring person, so I replied to Judge that the only sport I ever truly took an interest in was dodgeball.

  ‘Just feels good to chuck stuff at people sometimes, you know?’ I said, and he laughed.

  Clare had pre-approved status as a ‘special witness’, which allowed her to give evidence via videolink. She was in some other random room in the old courthouse, and she could see counsel and Judge on a screen. In court her face appeared on old TV screens in front of us and the jurors. The rig was set up so that she didn’t have to see Reester, the prosecutors having convinced the court that she was too distressed to be in his physical presence. It was a good thing too, because even with Goode’s gentle questioning it took a full day to get through evidence-in-chief. Clare had almost fainted twice when pressed, again, to differentiate the specifics of the offending from one night to another. A bucket sat beside her chair and she reached over to dry-retch into it many times, the audiovisual link quickly shutting off, followed by a short adjournment. Judge had offered, twice, to finish for the day, but Clare insisted she wanted to get it over with.

  ‘I want it done,’ she’d said, and I felt myself nodding.

  She had to remember back and forth to which times she bled or didn’t, which times there was penetration or not, what the ejaculate smelled like, which Slim Dusty song. I have the word torturous in my notes.

  ‘Now I want to ask you about the very last time you remember Kevin coming into your room at night, Clare,’ Goode said to the screen. We had all just returned from yet another break to allow Clare a moment to gather herself. The jurors were solemn when they took their seats in court again. I saw a woman stuffing a wet tissue up the sleeve of her blouse and a man looking embarrassed as he brushed biscuit crumbs from his protruding belly.

  ‘Yes,’ Clare replied, taking a sharp breath, ‘okay.’

  ‘So can you please tell me everything you remember from that night?’

  Christ almighty. I could feel the room brace itself. I watched Clare on the screen take a deep breath now as though she were about to dive.

  ‘Well it was the same thing again,’ she started, and her hand made a rolling motion on the word again, ‘and I was in bed and he was under the house listening to his records, and then the Slim Dusty song came on, and ah—’ her voice rose, and she took another sharp breath in, ‘and I knew—’ her voice broke, ‘that he was coming for me—’ and tears poured down her face again and she cried out, trying to finish her sentence, ‘and so I remember I got all my teddies and all my toys and I put them all around the edge of my bed on top of my sheets and I tucked myself in as tight as I could!’ she screamed, continuing as though exorcising the memory, ‘but he didn’t care!’ She wailed so loudly the speakers on the screen hummed.

  The courtroom sat absolutely still and silent, all eyes transfixed on Clare’s body rocking back and forth, all ears listening to her cries. It seemed as though she was battling to stay conscious.

  She gripped the edge of the table again. ‘But he didn’t care! He ripped the sheets off the bed and grabbed me by my ankles and dragged me on my belly to the edge of the bed.’

  To Crane’s credit, he was gentle in cross-examination. I didn’t think it came from a place of kindness—he would have skewered himself in front of the jury if he’d made Clare shed a single extra tear—but it was still a relief. It seemed almost merciful, the way he stepped through small inaccuracies, putting the case forward only as far as he was legally bound to do.

  The defence approach was one of complete denial, and without the corroborating testimony of her sisters, Clare’s racked recollections wouldn’t necessarily be enough to remove the ‘reasonable doubt’ we were all supposed to carry. Reester’s silence and refusal to give evidence seemed stark, if only for how loud and pained the complainant’s testimony was. The scales of justice felt difficult to weigh with such a palpable imbalance.

  At the end of it all, when Judge thanked her and told her she could go, I watched the monitor showing her standing up and exiting the room. She moved slowly, retreating from battle, exhausted but alive, and she would wait another two days and nights to hear the outcome of the war.

  The only other Crown witness was Clare’s mother, and this would not be the last time I was disappointed in a mother’s testimony. Every time, it seemed, it was the same story of domestic violence and emotional manipulation. It would be far too easy—a gross oversimplification—to ask those mothers why they didn’t know or why they didn’t do more to protect their children.

  Clare’s mother told the court that Reester was the first man in years who had provided a stable home for them. She described him as occasionally ‘unpleasant’, but added that she hadn’t felt she could uproot her children again.

  ‘What other man would take me and three girls under ten?’ she asked. ‘We’d already shifted three times since my youngest was born.’

  ‘Did your daughter ever tell you about what Reester was doing?’ Goode asked the witness.

  ‘No, never.’

  My own mum was arriving in Bargara that night for a couple of days before the weekend. She was the light at the end of the Reester tunnel. I was exhausted and wanted to spend time with someone I didn’t have to put on a show for, but I was also nervous because I wouldn’t be able to throw up after dinner anymore.

  For weeks if I’d eaten dinner and the
n tried to go straight to sleep, I would just lie in bed thinking about all the fat inside me, until I would cry and tell myself awful things, and finally get up and purge. I slept so soundly after I’d emptied my stomach. It was meaningful. At once an assurance that I couldn’t get bigger, and a difficult act of strength and determination, and a good dose of punishment. I liked the way the heaving made my abs work. I will do better, I said to myself. Just one more time, then you can go to bed. I would brush my teeth again. Good girl.

  ‘Isn’t this lovely!’ Mum remarked about my room when she arrived on Thursday afternoon.

  I didn’t know how to tell her I’d rather be in a crappy motel than hearing any more about Kevin Donny Reester. She was right, though: it was the kind of apartment we’d stay in for a special family holiday. The ocean crashed loudly just outside the big windows and you could sit in the bath with a cold beer watching the waves roll in at sunset. We walked to the shops to get fish and chips for lunch, and my hair whipped around my face when we took a selfie to send to Dad. I tried not to talk about work, but I felt as if I didn’t have anything else to say. No hobbies anymore, no books I’d read in a long while.

  The inconsistencies in dates and complaints that Crane had pointed out made me anxious overnight, but—to my surprise and relief—Goode’s closing address the next morning was amazing. It would be the only time in the whole year that I saw the sorrow and anguish expressed by a complainant accurately and respectfully used to convince the jury of her testimony. My hope for a conviction fluttered back to life in the prosecutor’s oration.

  Defence had the right of final reply, though, because they hadn’t given any evidence, and there is something to be said for having your voice be the last in the minds of the jury before they retire to consider a verdict. I watched the twelve people rise and shuffle out, and I took note of the time for the meticulous minutes I was required to keep. The next four hours felt like hell to me, and I could only imagine what the wait was like for Clare, or for Reester himself.