Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  The second trial in Roma was the ugly, embarrassing part of our time there. Embarrassing for everyone—for what it said about regional Australia, White Australia, and all of us as a society. The defendant was a young Aboriginal man. He stood tall and fit while I arraigned him for the attempted rape of a younger girl.

  Three kids—the young complainant and two boys of the same age—had been playing by a riverbank when the older defendant and one of his friends joined them. It was agreed by all of them that the older boys’ arrival meant they moved from playing by the river to hanging out up around a bridge.

  The complainant’s evidence was a tape recording, and was almost useless. She said the defendant ‘hit her over the head’ with a big stick and dragged her off, and for a few hours everyone in the courtroom was extremely confused, because those weren’t the facts the prosecution was alleging. Then the second tape played, and we heard about how the girl watched R-rated films at home, and how she thought the defendant had taken her on a motorbike to rape her, or maybe not, and that she was passed out but not really. When the tapes ended, everyone sort of looked at each other for a little while, not knowing what to make of it all, and the prosecutor sighed audibly and made a submission that things would ‘become clearer’ once we’d heard the combination of the other witnesses’ testimonies.

  After the tea-break, the prosecutor’s words came good. The three others gave similar and more realistic accounts of the events. The defendant had pressured the group to leave the water and hang out by the bridge up near the bush, and there he’d taken the complainant away from the group, laid down a towel, and tried to initiate intercourse. It seemed that none of the others were willing to be the first to call bullshit on the defendant’s actions, and that it wasn’t until the girl started screaming and crying out that someone stepped in.

  The two young boys had guilt all over them, and reading between the lines it became clear that they had been acting sexually with the complainant before the older boys arrived. They had a language for deeds, quite casually calling oral sex ‘giving a gobbie’, and they carried an arrogance toward certain acts and genuine confusion toward others. This guilty feeling they shared seemed to affect their inability to just say ‘no’ to the defendant. The older one, the defendant’s friend, wasn’t much help in this either. He couldn’t give a straight answer to whether or not he understood or suspected why the defendant had left with the complainant.

  The trial lasted three days. There were so many tapes of the different witnesses, and they were frustrating in their evasive responses. Perhaps I was being impatient with them and it was just their youth that made the process tricky, but by that stage of the year I’d seen almost twenty trials, and that meant seeing plenty of children give evidence on tape. There seemed to me to be a difference between a child needing time to understand and try to answer a question, and what those boys were doing: giving the adults the answers they wanted without implicating themselves. Later that night, though, when I couldn’t sleep, I wondered if I was losing my mind. Was I so quick to see guilt, so quick to convict, that I was projecting a maniacal misandry onto innocent kids?

  The next morning Judge and I shared our thoughts on the question of the two young boys’ statements.

  ‘It seems that perhaps they were just doing some young experimentation by the water,’ Judge said.

  ‘They’re too old for “experimentation”!’ I objected quickly.

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ he replied. ‘Things clearly got out of hand when the older ones arrived.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ I nodded.

  The defendant didn’t give evidence and so the jury started deliberating on that third day. I looked out across the dry grass at the front of the courthouse, wondering what the area looked like before colonisation. It didn’t help the defendant that the complainant was white, and with hair so blonde as to almost be light gold. Would we be in an attempted rape trial if the complainant was a little Aboriginal girl? The rape case that Megan had dealt with from Roma Street suggested not. I saw the defendant kicking dust around outside the courthouse and watched his movements, but there was nothing to read.

  The jury took a few hours to do their job, and when court resumed some people were in the public seats on the defendant’s side of the room. The jury had chosen an older man for their speaker—a trend I’d placed in the ‘duh, men’ pile of things—and he stood up straight, spoke clearly, and nodded.

  ‘Guilty.’

  Judge dismissed them, and we moved straight to sentence. A few jurors re-entered the courtroom at the back to listen, but most left. Did they leave because they didn’t care, or because they were like me and cared too much?

  We heard from the prosecutor that in various pre-trial interviews the defendant had completely denied he’d done anything wrong. It had implications for his sentence because his refusal to take responsibility for his actions was a strong indication that he didn’t feel remorse, and therefore didn’t have empathy for the victim. A psychologist asked him how he would feel if one of his mates did something like that, and he replied that he’d feel ‘sick, filthy, and dirty’—but this was around the same time that he denied the acts, so the court was told that at least some parts of his responses were performative.

  The prosecutor said the families of the complainant and defendant often saw each other around town, and that a feud had started when the defendant had denied the offending. It had escalated to the point where someone was nearly run over. The complainant refused to leave the house anymore because she saw him outside sometimes, and she was wetting the bed and not leaving her bedroom.

  The most heartbreaking part of the sentence, though, was the defence barrister’s submissions on mitigating circumstances. The court was told of the defendant’s ‘low intelligence’ and that he had no education, let alone a sex education. I took a chance to really look into his eyes, and I wasn’t sure if what was there was a dullness or just sadness, but there was a noticeable lag in his responses. When he was looking off into the distance and his name was called, it took him a moment to register the sound, glance up and find where the noise came from. His mother had been an alcoholic when he was in the womb. He wasn’t working and didn’t attend school, and an Aunty supported him.

  In the ‘careers’ section of his rehabilitation potential, Judge addressed him directly. ‘What do you want to do with your life?’

  ‘I wanna play football,’ he replied.

  ‘He’s looking for work but there’s not a great deal of work around,’ the defence barrister added.

  In the end, the defendant couldn’t be sentenced. Reports were required to inquire as to his mental capacity.

  I chatted with the registrar afterwards while I showed him the paperwork. He was a nice man. Round belly and soft face.

  ‘Got a ticket for the lotto?’ he asked me when we were just about done.

  ‘Huh?’ I thought I’d misheard him.

  ‘It’s a big one, the Powerball.’

  ‘Oh, haha.’ I started backing out of the room slowly without turning away from him. ‘Nah, not much of a gambler.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘But good luck!’ I smiled at him, remembering at the last moment to try to be nice.

  ‘You know,’ he added, as though it was just an afterthought, ‘I think this is only about the third guilty verdict we’ve had in over ten years.’

  I stopped in the doorway. ‘Third?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘In over ten years?’

  ‘Well, that’s how long I’ve been here, and I’m pretty sure this is only number three,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘They happen so rarely, I remember ’em.’

  I rushed across the building to tell Judge, but he didn’t seem to share my outrage.

  ‘What a coincidence, that the third guilty verdict in over a decade is for an Aboriginal man!’ I said.

  ‘Mm,’ he replied noncommittally.

  ‘And that man from last week, Strow—now I look back and fe
el like, what was even the point of taking it to trial!? They were never going to convict him!’

  ‘Well, it’s always worth taking things to trial,’ Judge replied, speaking reason.

  But I didn’t want reasonable: I wanted angry, I wanted affected, I wanted someone to reassure me that I wasn’t just being hypersensitive or imagining the patterns that were emerging.

  We cleared the list in Roma then flew home. I looked out over the town from the aeroplane window, the blazing sunset casting long shadows from car yards and cattle. Were the constellations truly more shocking out in such places, or did the bad deeds burn brighter simply because I couldn’t see anything else in between them? Travelling up north or out west felt more like travelling back in time, but if that were true then I would have looked forward to returning to the city.

  JEREMY PULLMAN WAS A TALL and slim man with pale grey eyes and a number three buzz cut along the sides of his skull. His dark hair was pulled into a ponytail and tied together at the base of his neck, and then plaited down until it reached his waist. The way it thinned on top made it look a little greasy, and I wondered if his solicitor had advised him to cut it off before getting in front of a jury. When he cocked his head to the right I caught a glimpse of a smudgy neck tattoo, but I couldn’t make it out because his skin was that permanent red-brown indicating years of accumulated sunburns. A literal redneck. He was on trial for violent, sexual acts against his twelve-year-old stepdaughter that I wish I hadn’t read so much detail about that morning. When he turned his head again and looked straight down the middle of the courtroom, right at me, I felt myself sweat. He didn’t blink his pale eyes and I couldn’t hold them for more than a moment; I flushed in panic and glanced away.

  The twelve jurors were excitable when they came in and took their seats, but once the prosecutor finally finished his opening address a sombre reverence replaced everything else. They stopped looking around the room at the funny wigs. They stopped flipping through their complimentary notebooks and sipping their chilled glasses of water. They were still and silent.

  Sophie, Pullman’s stepdaughter, was young enough to be automatically allowed to give evidence via videolink. The screens around the courtroom flickered on and we saw her in a bare room, her head and shoulders just visible over the top of the adult-sized desk in front of her. I noticed Pullman’s barrister becoming uncomfortable as her chair and the angle of the camera were adjusted, and she was asked to ‘sit up as tall as she could!’ I knew why he didn’t like the fuss. We were all looking at this little girl with her blue T-shirt and her messy pigtails, a girl too small for regular furniture, wondering what kind of monster could violate her. It felt wrong that she had to defend herself in our adult world of arguments and loopholes. Pullman was looking down in his lap, seemingly calm and respectful.

  The prosecutor probably appreciated the opportunity to run a trial with such a perfect complainant. I knew by then that if Sophie had been fifteen instead of twelve, they would have taken a different approach. They would have had to. It was a relief to see a jury not immediately suspicious of a complainant’s testimony. Defence couldn’t ask this little girl about what contraception she was on, then draw inferences to her promiscuity by reminding her that she also didn’t have a boyfriend. They asked her what she was wearing to actually test her memory, not to suggest a shorter skirt had been selected to indicate willingness. She could, in no way whatsoever, have ‘known what she was getting into’ or ‘asked for it’ or ‘made a drunken mistake that she regretted the next morning’.

  I doodled cracking skulls in my notebook while the prosecutor stepped Sophie through several separate, heinous occasions. The term ‘eggshell skull’ refers to the legal principle that a victim must be accepted for who they are individually, regardless of where their strengths and weaknesses place them on a spectrum of human normality. If you strike a person whose skull happens to be as thin as an eggshell, and they break their head open and die, you can’t claim that they were not a ‘regular’ person. Full criminal liability—and responsibility—cannot be avoided because a victim is ‘weak’. I had slowly grown obsessed with the concept.

  In Pullman’s case, he was at a disadvantage because his stepdaughter was young enough to be judged as a child instead of a woman. She had been an easy target for Pullman, but in a sick way her weakness had now become her strength. The Crown would make the most of what they had by highlighting Sophie’s innocence, and she was bloody adorable so it wasn’t that hard. When she began crying during the third hour of the video, I looked across to the jury and saw their brows were furrowed. They were feeling sympathy, perhaps even sorrow. Women like Jessica get ‘emotional’ but children are allowed to cry.

  When Sophie had finally finished giving evidence and Judge adjourned for the day, the jury looked exhausted.

  Back in court the next morning we heard Sophie’s mother—Pullman’s former partner—give evidence. She was the first witness to be physically in court in front of us, and if you had just walked in you’d have been forgiven for thinking she was on trial. I saw the questions practically burning behind the eyes of the jurors. How could she let this man anywhere near her child? It emerged that she and Pullman were on ice during the relationship and that he’d supplied it to her. He was frequently physically violent to her, but she loved him and stayed.

  At lunch I met up with Dad at a cafe between our two buildings.

  ‘They just choose not to notice things if it means they’re getting their drugs,’ he said to me calmly with a shrug.

  ‘What about him, though?’ I struggled not to raise my voice. ‘Isn’t it possible that he has cultivated an abusive, drug-dependent relationship with the mother so that he can enjoy unrestricted and unquestioned access to the child?’

  Dad took a sip of his flat white and smiled at me. ‘That too, my dear, is very possible.’

  I couldn’t understand how he could seem so detached. Even if I worked in that shithole for fifty years I hoped that I would still be affected by the horror. I wanted to feel—more than that, I knew it was important to keep feeling. It would be infinitely easier to sacrifice empathy for the ability to sleep at night, but I didn’t like those kinds of humans. Did that mean I didn’t like my father? I was angry at how calm he seemed. I wanted to yell at him, pushing his flat white into his face, ‘What if this girl was your child!?’ But a question like that would be the beginning of a conversation I wasn’t ready to have.

  As I walked back into the huge chrome building and my eyes adjusted from the bright Queensland midday sunshine to the shady interior, I felt a tension headache forming. I had been frowning the whole day, probably also grinding my teeth. How many years had it taken my dad, or Judge, or any of the people in this building to leave work at work? What did that make them, and what did that make me?

  Back in court Pullman’s counsel announced that he was going to give evidence. I thought I’d misheard. It would be the first time I’d heard a defendant speak in his own defence since that first trial in Gladstone.

  Pullman swore on the Bible to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Then he told his version of events, which included a story about there being a rat under Sophie’s bed, and that he’d been trying to chase and catch it in the dark with his bare hands. This was so preposterous, I found it offensive that he could think we would believe him. He offered this rat as an explanation as to why he was found in Sophie’s room one night after everyone else had gone to bed. None of the other witnesses said they’d seen a rat in the house, let alone upstairs near the bedrooms, and certainly not that night.

  When discussing another occasion—a car trip ostensibly to get food for the family—witnesses disagreed with Pullman about the food being cold by the time he and Sophie finally returned. He said they’d been gone only as long as it took to get dinner. ‘She was always pestering me, wanting to be with me all the time and go with me everywhere, you know?’ he said, shaking his head with an expression that communicated a tsk-tsk. He’
d been asked why he had chosen to take only Sophie with him for the drive, and not any of the other children or his partner.

  His relaxed demeanour infuriated me. He denied everything, he was saddened by the accusations, he thought it had something to do with Sophie’s mother being jealous and resentful of his new relationship with a younger, more beautiful woman. He felt sorry for Sophie’s mother and said he thought this trial had something to do with her, said she was ‘unwell’. The subtext was clear: Chicks, huh?

  When Pullman finished testifying the defence case was over, and we sent the jury out to their little room with tea and biscuits. I sat in my office, mindlessly pushing papers around my desk, thinking about Sophie’s mother. Did Sophie resent her mother? Could any of us ever come to understand the complexity of an emotionally and physically abusive relationship? Did the drugs make things less or more understandable?

  It’s easy to question how a mother could ignore or not notice this type of offending, but human coping mechanisms are amazing. We find ways to keep going, our minds coursing around things we might not have the ability to fully comprehend or acknowledge, so that life can keep propelling us forward through time. I was able to keep my memories in a walled-up space in my brain. Sometimes they would leak out, sure, but I understood the need to shove something into the corner of the mind and board it up in order to just survive. I existed in a perpetual state of double-think, behaving as though one set of facts was true when I knew it to be false. I acted as though I couldn’t feel my past rushing up behind me. I pretended I didn’t have my foot on the accelerator and that the brick-wall breakdown was still far away in the distance.

  The jury deliberated overnight and I liked the idea that Pullman might be sleeping badly, waking into a nightmare. I pictured his greasy head resting on a state-issued pillow, his legs tucked up against the cold and his filthy ponytail dangling off the edge of the bed. Was he one of the men who had managed to convince himself he hadn’t done it, or was he reflecting on his actions? Did he realise he belonged down there? When I got in the elevator and went all the way up to the thirteenth floor, into the sky, he got in and went way, way down, underground.