by Bri Lee
‘Do you think the reason you are calling is affecting your ability to do your job?’ she began.
‘What do you mean?’ I replied.
She paused as though she’d never had to clarify the meaning of the question.
‘This job is the thing that’s making me sad,’ I said.
‘I see,’ she said, but as though she didn’t.
‘But I’m still doing it.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s why I’m sad.’ I waited for her to say something but she didn’t. ‘So I’d say “no”?’ I said, still confused.
‘Okay,’ she replied.
It came time for her to schedule me in, and she asked what location I’d prefer. I told her I worked in the city so anywhere central would be good and she confirmed they had an office in the CBD.
‘And do you have a preference for a man or a woman?’ she asked.
‘A woman, definitely, please.’
‘Of course, and when would you like to speak to someone?’
‘As soon as possible?’
‘Well, I have one of our female counsellors free most of Friday next week.’
‘Oh.’ I was disappointed. More than another week alone seemed impossible. ‘If that’s the soonest, then sure, thank you.’
‘So what time would suit you?’
‘Any time after work, I suppose. If the office is in the city I can get there by five-thirty.’
‘The facility is only open during business hours.’
‘Sorry?’
‘There are no counsellors in the city available for out-of-hours consultations,’ she repeated.
‘But I work full-time. That’s why I have this number, because I’m an employee of the department.’
‘We can email you an appointment slip that you can take to your supervisor.’
‘But I thought this service was confidential if I wanted it to be?’ I asked her.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ she replied.
I fought the urge to hang up. I couldn’t imagine asking Judge to adjourn a trial so that I could go talk to someone about my feelings.
‘Does anyone go in early?’ I asked. ‘Is there a before-work time available?’
‘Ah, if you make a special request and really need it, I could ask someone to come in early for you.’
‘Is that possible? Yes please.’
‘Sure, so sometime next week at eight-thirty?’
‘Oh, well, I need to be at work at nine, like, by nine, actually, so that wouldn’t work.’ I scrunched my eyes shut, pressing the receiver hard into my face.
‘There’s someone who can do eight-fifteen starts, but he’s a man. The out-of-office-hours slots are booked weeks in advance and I don’t think we have any women who offer them in the city. Unless you’re happy to go out to Capalaba?’
‘Well okay, great, what time at Capalaba?’
‘The session would be from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. because they close at six.’
‘But I don’t finish work until at least five and I work in the city.’
It was like a shitty Monty Python sketch. All the absurdity but nobody laughing. In the end I booked an eight-fifteen session, over a week away, with a male counsellor. I hung up the phone and wept. I had thought that working up the courage to ask for help was supposed to be the hard bit. I began worrying that the office phone would register the number I had dialled and send a message to HR, flagging me. Had I given them my payroll ID? I couldn’t even remember what else the woman had asked. What if Judge found out somehow? It was only 8 a.m.—how would I last the day? What about the rest of the week?
I closed my eyes and imagined writing my worries on slips of paper and putting them in a box. I am fat. I folded the paper and put it in the box. I am not good enough for my boyfriend and he might leave me. In the box. I am not smart enough for this work. In the box. I don’t know how to start dealing with what happened to me. In the box. I imagined closing the lid of the box and putting it up on a shelf, and I took a deep breath in and a deep breath out. I would take the box down later, at home, in the shower, after dinner; and in the meantime, I would work.
By some administrative error-miracle we were listed for a single sentence that day. Normally a sentence only takes a couple of hours, and I thought I’d have the afternoon free to catch up with a lot of my Practical Legal Training (PLT) assessment. Like most of the associates, I was doing extra studies after work and on weekends to meet the requirements for admission to the legal profession. The law degree doesn’t make you a lawyer—there’s an extra six-to-twelve months (and $10k) or so of academic hoops, then another thousand bucks and a month’s worth of paperwork and filing to do. Both Judge and my dad regularly checked in on my PLT progress.
I got to Judge’s pigeonhole where our files normally sat waiting, but it was empty. I phoned the basement, and the young man who answered my call seemed excited. ‘Oh yeah! This indictment is from 1983, it’s all old, and it’s in special plastic, we didn’t wanna leave it out.’
‘Holy shit, 1983!?’ I replied.
‘Yeah!’
‘Be right there.’
I knew Judge had worked on the Fitzgerald Inquiry and even that didn’t start until 1987. I was so excited to show him. I made it down to the basement where the file-room clerk handed the indictment to me gingerly. It was three sheets of old brown paper, bigger than A4, and a rusty staple held it together. Looped handwriting crisscrossed all over it, impossible to read; the defendant’s name was in proper calligraphy, and the dates had been entered by a typewriter. Stamps and seals were plastered across different spots.
‘What’s it for?’ the clerk asked me, and I realised that in my excitement about the oddity I’d forgotten the paper represented a criminal matter.
I turned the sheet over. ‘One count of indecent treatment,’ I replied, and we both shrugged. ‘Some things don’t change, hey?’
Back up in chambers I showed Judge. ‘Look at this,’ I said, pointing, ‘just the one count, and he failed to appear on his court date, so there was a warrant out for his arrest, and now here we are! Twenty-five years later!’
Judge wasn’t very excited. ‘I wonder what a single count of indecent treatment got in 1983?’ he asked, and I responded with a blank expression. ‘We have to sentence him according to what he would have received at the time he committed the offence,’ Judge clarified. My jaw hung open, and he started teasing. ‘You knew that, didn’t you!?’
‘So that’s why we don’t have any other sentences today.’ I groaned. ‘Time for some research.’
As it turned out, comparable sentences for a grown man molesting a girl under sixteen, in the Year of Our Lord 1983, were good behaviour bonds, fines, or a touch of probation. Whipping was an ‘optional’ additional penalty for the odd case. I raised it with Judge and was quickly informed that the point-in-time rule didn’t apply to any types of capital punishment.
‘Bummer,’ I said with a grin.
‘Well, he’s been in custody for the past three weeks awaiting sentence now, when he would never have received any actual imprisonment,’ Judge said, seeming to suggest I should temper my attitude.
‘I guess people shouldn’t skip town when they’re charged with sex offences,’ I said, my hands on my hips, and after a beat we smiled at each other.
In court things went smoothly. Both prosecution and defence came prepared to deal with the unusualness of the matter. Defence made submissions that in ’83 even lineal descendent and stepfather sexual-assaulters normally only had to sign a good behaviour bond. I was livid.
‘The defendant has led an otherwise blameless and unremarkable life,’ the defence barrister submitted. ‘He has five children and he’s been working for the state rail company for twenty-five years.’
What is an unremarkable life? I saw the corrective services officer and the solicitor, both women, being pleasant to him before court began, and he did just look like an average dude, but I was still mad. How many of these men looked lik
e average dudes? How many men walking around in any one Australian state had outstanding sexual assault complaints against them in other states? Did his wife know? Did she have a right to know, before she married him, that he was a sex offender?
Judge began his official sentencing remarks by saying, ‘I must put aside what the current attitudes toward sentencing this kind of offending are.’ And the man was, of course, released immediately. I processed the paperwork as ‘urgent’ and went back upstairs to chambers.
Judge came to my office with a small task but then lingered. ‘Should I check the orders you dictated? You didn’t put “whipping” down on his order sheet, did you?’ he asked, grinning.
‘I just can’t believe men could rape their daughters and stepdaughters and get good behaviour bonds?’ I spoke it as a question he might have the answer to. ‘It’s not that long ago! It’s not long enough ago for that to have happened.’ I slumped back in my chair.
‘The past is a different country,’ he said to me.
‘Yeah, well, it sounds like a shithole,’ I replied, and he gave me that sad smile.
I got up to walk to the elevator and noticed Megan was in my spot—not so much a physical location, but she was staring out the huge glass panes onto the city below, alone—and asked her what was up.
‘Yesterday we had to watch CCTV footage of an Aboriginal woman getting raped.’
‘Holy shit—’
‘—right there.’ She pointed down to the Roma Street Parkland.
‘Fuck.’
‘And it looks like today we’ll have to watch it again.’
‘What?’
‘There might be a plea deal. He’s been charged with two counts, and my judge reckons they might drop one of them if he pleads to the other, but counsel have to watch the footage again to see how valid it is that he’s been charged with two separate counts.’
‘And it’s all there? On tape?’
‘Yep.’
‘And he’s still fighting it?’
‘Yep. And this woman’s life is wrecked. Her community didn’t support her going to the police, because of course they don’t trust the police, which I get. They wanted to deal with it internally, with their elders. He’s some kind of community figure, and he’s huge. She passed out, completely unconscious, and he just climbed on top of her. You could see her body being shoved along the ground, like uh-uh-uh, as he did it.’
‘That poor woman.’ I shook my head.
‘I know. Can you imagine how hard it would be to have to turn against your whole family to take your rapist to court?’
We both fell silent.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, yeah, I mean, as good as you can be, right?’
‘Right.’
‘What about you?’
I told her about my morning. ‘How many other files have been sitting down there for decades?’ I wondered out loud.
‘Yeah, it’s way too easy to just drive across state lines and disappear,’ she said.
‘Can that still even happen? Does that really happen?’ I asked her, but I would get my own answer the following week.
The Friday of my counselling appointment rolled around, and I got to the office in the middle of the city at ten past eight. There were three other people in the waiting room and I had just sat down when a loud voice called out my full name. So much for anonymous. My counsellor’s name was David, and he wore a short-sleeved business shirt and synthetic trousers that made a schh sound when he moved. He stood smiling, his stance wide and strong, holding the door to his small office open for me.
‘Good morning,’ I said, shuffling sideways under his arm and into the room.
‘Have a seat,’ he said, gesturing to a low couch, and as I sank into the cushions he clicked the door closed and took a seat in his wheeled office chair opposite me. He placed each of his black leather shoes on separate prongs in the foot of the chair so that his crotch was wide open and closer to my eye level than his eyes were. I tugged at my pencil skirt, as it now sat up on my mid-thighs, and tried to cross my legs in a way that allowed me to sit up straight, but the couch had swallowed my arse. I had to bend my neck to look up at him.
‘So, why are you here today?’ he asked cheerfully, before glancing at some notes and answering his own question. ‘You’re a bit stressed about work?’
In that instant I knew I couldn’t tell him the real reason for my visit. It would be an exposure; it felt too risky somehow, as if I was a hypochondriac for even making the appointment. I wouldn’t be able to articulate my complaints clearly enough to convince David of something. Samuel’s name wouldn’t come out of my mouth. I didn’t want to be dramatic. I knew I wouldn’t have time to fix my makeup before work if I cried, and there was no way I could even start talking about my problem—the real problem—without crying. The whole thing was a waste of time. I’d been holding myself together for so long, waiting for the appointment, and the horizon of deliverance had been a mirage.
Instead, I told David a partial truth: that I was worried the job was making me hate men. That I couldn’t walk around Brisbane without seeing places where crimes had been committed. That what I saw in court was bleeding out around the edges, seeping into the rest of my life and spoiling everything. He listened for a few minutes until I trailed off and shrugged, then he started telling me a story about one of the jobs he had before becoming a counsellor. He was a support worker at a halfway house for men who had domestic violence orders against them.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’d sit in that room with them, and we’d try to get to the heart of the problems. Some of them were able to acknowledge what they’d done and they would try to work through that part of their history and work through that guilt, but some,’ he paused as though trying for maximum impact, exhaling and shaking his head, ‘just never admitted they’d made a mistake. And these were really bad men. I mean, really bad.’
I stared up at David’s face, trying to hide my disbelief. It had taken me so long to feel as though I wanted to open up and tell someone what I was going through, and there I was listening to a dude’s crotch as he competed with me for who had the job with the most fucked-up men in it.
I watched him push his weight around on his wheelie chair, his face friendly and animated as he recalled how hard he’d found it to truly see into one particular man’s soul. This one guy had beaten his wife to a pulp and insisted it was her fault, but David kept working with him and didn’t give up because David believed everyone had some good in them and a chance for redemption.
I told David I didn’t know who to talk to because I didn’t want to unload on Vincent, and he commended me for being such a good girlfriend.
Next he drew diagrams on the whiteboard. I left his office with a triangle-shaped exercise to do when I felt ‘emotional and overwhelmed’. I was to try to separate the thoughts from the feelings from the actions. The triangle was supposed to keep ‘think’, ‘feel’ and ‘do’ separate from each other. I found one recently that I had scribbled on while in court. On ‘think’ I have: It’s not fair that this man gets to go around ruining women’s lives for his own gratification. Taking what he wants and leaving abused children behind. I am so powerless to stop them or protect myself. What if he’s not found guilty and he goes out and does it again? I don’t know who to trust. On ‘feel’ I have: Angry. Scared. On ‘do’ I have: Not allowed to cry in court. I don’t know which trial those notes are from—they fit too many.
Walking back to work after the appointment finished a merciful five minutes early, I stopped for a cigarette and felt a bit bad that I hadn’t been clearer with David.
‘Do you feel like we’re off to a good start—that we achieved something today?’ he’d asked me earnestly.
‘Absolutely!’ I replied, smiling, picking up my handbag and moving to the door.
One of my best friends, Anna, lived in Melbourne, and the last time we’d spoken on the phone she’d told me that sometimes when she slept
with a guy who was a dud in the sack she would try to teach him lessons in foreplay and intimacy, as a favour to all women who might see him in the future. I thought about David’s crotch in my face and how maybe no woman had ever told him that he was a shit counsellor.
The only thing he’d said to me of any value was, ‘When you are lumping all men together, try to remember the good men in your life. Think of their faces and what you admire about them.’ As I walked to work I thought about my dad, and what he would think if I told him I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I walked to work and thought about Vincent and felt anxious that his love was retractable because I couldn’t be a clean, beautiful thing for him. I walked to work and thought about Judge, and that I couldn’t get through a single year without crumbling. I was surrounded by good men: three of them, giving me all the good things a young woman could need from the men around her. Giving me a strong father figure and a generous lover and an admirable mentor. It seemed like I was the problem.
I arrived at the courts building and saw Evelyn walking in, holding a coffee, her head of shiny hair tipped back in laughter as she spoke with some Supremes. All those men who gave me all those things, and all I wanted to give them was Evelyn. I fantasised about stepping back and her stepping forward, taking my place, relieving me of the pressure to be daughter, girlfriend, associate. She could do it all, be them all, better than I could manage even one role. It was comforting to imagine my parents taking Evelyn as their changeling. She and Vincent would make a finer pair of lovers than he and I. And I would just disappear. Float up, fly away to nowhere and sleep forever.
The bells of the Brisbane clock tower chimed, pulling me back to the beginning of the day, telling me I was late. I stubbed my cigarette out, crunched down on some mints, slapped my cheeks a little, and went to work.
That weekend I went out to a cafe with my mum on Sunday morning before she and Dad went away for a few days. I’d barely seen her or Dad on the weekends since I’d started working—they spent them out on a block of land they’d bought to retire on.
‘We had a lovely time at Maleny yesterday,’ she told me as our coffees arrived.
