Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  I was selfish, though, of course. I was waiting for my sign. Waiting for a hope that justice might be done.

  On Friday afternoon Judge’s wife joined him for the weekend so I booked a restaurant for the four of us to have dinner together. Before we left to meet them, Mum started asking me a lot of questions. What kind of car did they drive? What kind of restaurant? How should she address Judge? I was having a hard time pretending I wasn’t nervous she’d say something wrong.

  ‘Are you worried I’ll say something wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, grinning. She laughed and I laughed too.

  We spent the weekend eating gelati and sitting by the ocean and lying on the couch watching television. We went to an op shop and a second-hand bookstore, and I felt as though an older, happier version of me was coming home into my skin again.

  A few times I thought to tell Mum about Samuel, but I realised while we were chatting to my dad on the phone that I would need to wait and tell them together. Not for any symbolic or meaningful reason, but just because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get it out twice.

  The staff at the courthouse were friendly and chatty. It would turn out to be the same at all of the regional centres I visited—cakes and slices always in the tearoom, and a deputy registrar who talked about the local buildings and sport teams, or bitched about the local solicitors whom they’d grown up with. It was lovely for a little while, but inevitably I became impatient.

  ‘I’ve decided to call it the “circuit shuffle”,’ I said to Judge while we waited in chambers for a note from the jury, ‘where they chat to me so much I have to start walking backwards out of the room to escape without being rude.’ He laughed.

  One of the associates in Brisbane whom I wasn’t even really friends with had gone out of her way to warn me about an older male staff member at the Bundaberg registry getting ‘a little too close’ to her. The story was corroborated by a third associate. ‘Nothing to report officially,’ she said to me subtly, ‘but something to be aware of.’

  I was trying to keep busy while waiting for Reester’s verdict and so carried some files downstairs to be processed, but I tripped on my heel and almost fell forward. The man I had been warned of was behind me, and as I fell he put his hand low on the small of my back just above my butt.

  I whipped around in shock and loudly rejected his help. ‘I’m fine, thank you!’ It came out aggressively and I saw surprise register on his face and immediately I felt stupid that I would presume his assistance was sinister. But when he laughed and shrugged it off, walking back to his desk, I felt even more stupid. If I was falling forwards why the fuck did you put your hand on me like that? I stared at the back of his head, furious, but still second-guessing myself. Am I losing it?

  All the dickheads swam into my mind, multiplying like in an Escher painting: Reester, Samuel, this handsy man, all in the foreground, no perspective.

  I dumped the files on a nearby desk and felt my phone vibrate—the bailiff was calling.

  ‘Yeah it’s just me,’ the bailiff said. ‘We’ve got a verdict.’

  My Fitbit buzzed at me with encouragement, reading my increased heart rate as a sign I was exercising.

  The fifteen minutes it took to bring everyone back into the courtroom were awful. I was practising the script I had to read out to take the verdicts. There were so many different counts I had to be extremely careful to follow procedure. I always felt as if I was trespassing somehow, when I stood and took the verdicts, like a baby in adult dress-ups.

  ‘Silence, all stand,’ the bailiff finally announced as Judge entered.

  Then the jury came in, standing in a row, shuffling anxiously.

  ‘Yes,’ Judge said, looking at me from up on his bench, nodding and sombre, ‘please take the verdict.’

  ‘Speaker, have the jury reached their verdicts?’

  ‘Yes, we have.’

  ‘And do you find the defendant, Kevin Donny Reester, guilty or not guilty of count one, rape?’

  ‘Guilty.’

  ‘So says your speaker, so say you all?’

  The chorus of twelve voices said ‘yes’ and they continued to say ‘yes’ for every count.

  When I eventually sat down again the pressure of tears was building behind my eyes and I shut them tightly. I couldn’t show any emotion lest the defence team think the impartial arbitration of justice had been compromised. The prosecutor’s clerk ducked out of the courtroom, probably to go find Clare, to tell her the ‘good news’. I pictured her face, crying, and I imagined her sisters crying with her, terrified of their own trials ahead, but emboldened by the strength of the eldest. I wondered if their mother embraced them, and how many times she might have said she was sorry. I pretended to drop a pen under my desk, frantically wiping my eyes and slapping my cheeks as I hid for a moment. We adjourned for a short break before sentence, and Reester was taken away in handcuffs.

  When I went back into court to prepare for the sentence I saw a woman and child sitting at the back of the room in the public seats next to the dock. I don’t know much about kids and how big they are at what ages, but this one looked to be at the stage of life where his school backpack would still comically swamp him. A child in a courtroom is always a curious sight, like a live lamb in a butcher’s. He had little jeans on and his long blond hair was clean and shiny. It looked beautiful brushing his shoulders next to a crisp blue T-shirt. I stared at him squirming in his seat, envying his clear skin and the confusion on his face. I wanted to rip my jabot from my throat and run to him, scooping him up and taking him out for ice-cream. I don’t belong here either! I’d shout, bursting through the double doors and out to the beach. The woman with him couldn’t have been much older than forty and was extremely overweight, with beautiful dark features and perfectly ironed clothes. She held her hands in her lap, the tip of a hanky poking out from where her fingers tightly clasped together. The room was quiet enough for me to hear her sniffle.

  ‘Is his Honour ready?’ the prosecutor asked me quietly, breaking my curious trance.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’ I looked down, back to my work, quickly preparing the papers on my desk in order to accept documents and dictate Judge’s sentence. Reester would be going to gaol, and it was already past 4 p.m.—that meant urgent processing and a cranky registrar. Everything had to be perfect or we’d miss the transfer bus.

  ‘Daddy!’ The shout rang through the room like a bullet. I looked up in time to see the boy run toward Reester, intercepted at the last minute by the woman who was surely his mother. No… My face contorted but I couldn’t look away. I glanced to both counsel, noticing their shoulders sag as they turned to their papers with tired faces. As Reester got back in the dock the boy climbed onto his chair and reached his arm up as high as he could and placed his palm flat on the glass that separated him from his father. Reester looked down, smiling lovingly, and mirrored the boy’s act, Reester’s large wrinkled hand pressed against his son’s tiny one. It was overwhelming. There were too many heartbreaking things happening at once. I didn’t know how to process the new information. It was all so much easier to deal with when you couldn’t see that bit. The love part.

  I could not bring myself to end that moment. I would not separate their hands or interrupt that boy telling his smiling father what he’d learned at school that day. His mother was crying and trying to pull the child back into his seat, but his little body wriggled away, escaping her. I pretended I needed more time to prepare my own work and waited until the boy finished talking and his mother sat him down. Then I rose and went to get Judge from his chambers.

  I stood in his doorway. ‘It seems that Reester’s new partner is here,’ I said, ‘with their young son.’

  ‘In the courtroom?’ Judge asked, one eyebrow slightly raised.

  ‘Yes.’ We paused and I sensed he was waiting for my comment, but I just shrugged. Most of the time I didn’t know what Judge expected I’d say, or what he wanted me to say. If he’d asked me what I was
thinking I would have told him: I was just wondering if Reester only rapes female children.

  ‘Everyone is ready for you,’ I said instead.

  When people are sentenced, the language around them changes. In the eyes of the law, since Reester had been convicted, the allegations against him became truths. Allegations crystallised to facts. Judge didn’t tell Reester he was being sentenced because someone said he was a rapist; Judge told Reester he was going to gaol because he was a rapist. Judge began a brief summary of the facts that the prosecution had proved, that Reester would be sentenced on, then paused halfway, realising the child was still sitting next to his mother, listening.

  ‘This is quite serious content,’ Judge said, looking at counsel. ‘I wonder if it might be wise to take the child out of the courtroom?’

  The boy left but the mother stayed. What had Reester told her? Did she know about the joinder application and that all three sisters had similar complaints? Did she think Clare and both of Clare’s sisters were insane liars making false accusations? Had Reester ever touched the boy?

  On Saturday night the four of us went to Mon Repos to see turtles hatching. The moon was so full and bright I got a shock every time I looked up at it. Thin strips of clouds with strong silver linings streaked across the sky as we waited our turn to be led out to the ocean.

  ‘Are you enjoying being on circuit?’ Judge’s wife asked me. She was a lovely woman, kind and intelligent.

  ‘Um,’ I paused, thinking of Reester, ‘the food is good?’ I said, unconvincingly.

  Shortly afterwards my mother pinched my arm. ‘Try to be a little more positive about it,’ she hissed. ‘A lot of people wanted your job.’

  It was true, I was being ungrateful, but later I wept as the turtles hatched. They broke through their shells and struggled up out of the buried nests, fumbling through the sand toward the ocean, toward the big white moon, to begin a journey that only one of a thousand of them would survive. People around me were gasping and cooing, but a child made a quiet squeal, ‘Daddy!’ and I broke again.

  I was grateful we were in the dark where I could cry freely despite being surrounded by strangers and my mother and Judge. The ugly parts of my life kept crashing into the beautiful ones. Under one of the most spectacular night skies I’d ever seen, in a tropical paradise, I was witnessing a miracle of new life, and all I could think about was how many children were being brutalised at that very moment.

  The park ranger came up to me, holding one of the hatchlings out for me to touch. It was smaller than the palm of my hand. Its tiny flippers swung madly in the air, programmed to push through sand and water for the next several days until it reached deeper oceans. I looked into its shiny little eyes and saw the moon glinting back.

  ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ the ranger whispered. I murmured assent. And statistically speaking, she will be dead within twenty-four hours.

  I looked down toward the water at all the hatchlings racing to the shoreline, then back up the hill to all the children in the sand, and opened my palms to the moon, helpless.

  BRISBANE WAS TURNING NIPPY SO I got my thick stockings out of storage for the early morning walks to work. They cut into my stomach—a painful reminder of my size—and so despite the cold I lost a couple of kilos. Two people complimented me on my slimmer figure.

  The problem was that the nylon and mesh stockings rubbed against the small cuts on my upper thigh so the neat red lines couldn’t dry or heal properly. Bandaids didn’t fit over the crisscrossing lengths either. One afternoon I made it home from work, dropped my bag, kicked my heels off and tugged at my stockings to pull them down from under my skirt, and an itchy pain exploded where my cuts were. I fell back onto the bed and hiked my skirt up to find a mess. The stockings were patterned, a lace-like effect, and as the tiny fibres had picked up on the edges of my scabs throughout the day, the slices had re-opened and then the blood had dried into the stockings, and I had just ripped the whole mess open. Stains covered the inside of my woollen skirt and the stockings were crispy, flecking dried blood onto my white sheets as I rolled them off. I checked my phone and swore; Vincent would arrive within the hour.

  I’d seen him twice since my Jameson-fuelled self-harm, but we’d been out and about so there had been no risk of awkward questions. There was no getting around it this time. I also had no intention of actively trying to hide the scabs. I wanted him to see how much I was struggling so that I didn’t have to find the words to start the conversation. If I was honest, it was a challenge. Leave me! they said, red and rippling like a cape to a bull.

  In high school there was a girl, Katie, who put neat cuts onto her wrist, and we all saw but didn’t say anything because they ran horizontally instead of vertically, so we knew she was ‘posing’. The phrase ‘cry for help’ was tossed around.

  My mother heard me say something about it one afternoon and admonished me. ‘It’s still very sad and she obviously doesn’t feel like she has the right people to talk to about it,’ Mum said while I downed a Milo.

  It was in Grade Eleven and I’d started cutting my thighs sporadically the year before. The following week I heard an announcement over the school speakers: ‘Would Mr and Mrs McIntyre please report to the school reception’, and I was flooded with a strong mix of envy and pride that I immediately hid, and then I saw them—Katie’s mother and father—walk straight past me. We’d met several times in the past few years, but their eyes weren’t taking in any faces or details. They took long, fast strides. I wanted my parents to rush to the school and ask me why I was sad every day.

  The friends I was with discussed the matter.

  ‘She just wants attention,’ someone said.

  ‘You’d only cut on the wrist if you wanted someone to see it,’ I added, and everyone nodded. It would be another five years before I had something even resembling a boyfriend, and I always wore board shorts to the beach. Easy secret.

  But then there I sat, on the edge of my bed after work, at twenty-three, a woman with a job, ‘pulling a McIntyre’.

  I went to the bathroom and washed myself, dabbing iodine onto the lines with a cotton bud, and shaping a custom bandaid with nail scissors to cover the worst bits. It felt a bit nice to be caring for myself like that, playing nurse to the determined version of me. I hunched over myself, dressing the little wound, and whispered to the soldier, nodding, do better, be better, and felt proud.

  Two years earlier Vincent and I had been in bed, cuddling and watching movies, when he’d noticed the scars—at that stage dormant and fading—on my thigh for the first time.

  ‘What are these from?’ he asked, running a finger over the pale ridges, and I froze.

  He held me for about twenty minutes of silence, and then he said ‘fine’ and got up to go, and I blurted it out. I told him, trying to joke about it, that I was ‘just an angsty teen’, and he came back to bed and hugged me for a long time, kissing me.

  He didn’t know I still did it, and in truth neither did I. It had been years. I couldn’t remember the last time, but when I’d done it again the rush was the same and I realised immediately that it was also the same feeling I had when I purged. I would talk to myself angrily, making lists of faults and wrongs, then begin the act, the small ritual masochism, making promises to do better, to be better. I only ever cut at night-time right before bed, the same with purging. A desperate attempt to demarcate a ‘before’ and ‘after’ Bri, so that I could leave the ‘before’ Bri in the dirt, and commit to a new self in the morning. I neatly traced new cuts over old scars. My panicked need for self-improvement could only ever come from self-loathing. Diary pages from those nights are full of the most horrible things, all written to myself in third person. Looking at them in calm daylight is like seeing myself in an upside-down spoon. That girl is nearly, but not quite, me.

  When Vincent and I went to bed and he saw the bandaids, he became sad and confused. I told him I was struggling with work, and I sort of thought that I was, but I genuinely didn’t ha
ve the words to explain the other half of it. He was good to me, of course, and held me again, but in the wee hours he had to shake me awake from screaming nightmares. I wondered how much more ‘crazy’ he could take. I was unravelling as I tried to reckon with my past, but I felt as if I had to get my shit together and be a good, chill girlfriend before I told him everything in case he thought it was all too much. I imagined things he could say: ‘I didn’t sign up for this shit.’ ‘We’re so young, I don’t want to get stuck dealing with you and all this.’ ‘This isn’t fun anymore.’ ‘I don’t feel the same way about you now.’

  At times it felt so strong, the problem with me, the wrongness, that it was corporeal. If I was thinner, more beautiful, then maybe he’d be less likely to leave when I told him about being molested. If I fixed up the other parts of my life, fixed my body, then perhaps I wouldn’t be such a crap package. I thought if I was hot enough he’d be attracted to me regardless of the damage.

  The next morning I woke up, put my stockings on, left Vincent sleeping soundly, and went to work a little early. I figured it was time to talk to someone. Although I’d been miserable for months, it was a high-functioning miserable. But while the vomiting was an easy secret, Vincent would now be watching for new scars. In our associate’s training session, one of the HR managers had mentioned that free counselling had been made available to all Department of Justice and Attorney-General (DJAG) employees, so when I got to work I found the phone number. I glanced at the clock—making sure there was still a good half-hour before Judge would arrive—shut my office door, and dialled.

  A woman answered. I told her I was a DJAG employee looking to access the ‘complimentary and confidential’ counselling, and she said she would ask a few preliminary questions.