Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  There was one part of Sophie’s evidence in particular that I couldn’t shake from my mind. She said that when Pullman had driven her to an abandoned area and started doing the awful things, that a police car had come past. She must have felt such a flicker of hope that she was being saved, right before Pullman punched her again and forced her head and mouth down over his penis, saying he’d kill her if she made a sound. She said Pullman pretended to be on the phone and the cops drove on. Of all the disgusting things Sophie had endured, that flicker of hope being so violently extinguished saddened me the most.

  My dad must have dealt with so much of this stuff, but how much had he also, unknowingly, driven straight past?

  Later that afternoon, right on dusk, I was driving home from Vincent’s place, and the stretches of road between Indooroopilly and Yeronga were leafy and proudly suburban. When the Brisbane River appeared before me, it reflected a bright orange and pink sky. It was odd that everything seemed as though it should be beautiful but I couldn’t just say, ‘This is beautiful.’ As I passed an AFL oval on my right and glanced over at the children’s lively bodies as they trained, I wondered how many of them had terrible secrets that they were pushing to the backs of their minds.

  Then I looked back to the road and saw her, and slammed on my brakes.

  The woman was screaming at something further ahead. I followed her terrified gaze and saw a huge pit bull charging toward her from the other side of the road. The woman had two dogs of her own, small white poodles, and they were yelping and tangling their leashes around her ankles. She fumbled, trying to pick them up and move, but they were pulling against their collars, choking themselves with their necks at sharp angles, trying to escape. She was only metres from me, just on the footpath, but as the pit bull grew larger and closer to their tangled panic, I froze.

  The pit bull darted across the road in front of me and I saw its huge jaw open, heard a loud bark emerge through its giant teeth, and I thought I should hit it with my car. Put your foot down! I screamed at myself, but I was frozen.

  The pit bull passed in front of my car, leaping powerfully up onto the footpath. As it closed in on the fluffy poodles and their choking diamante collars, the pit bull screeched to a halt and bowed its head, and its stubby tail began wagging furiously. The woman was reeling, yanking the leashes away from this huge thing that was now nuzzling her pristine poodles. The pit bull was so excited it let out another bark and rolled onto its back and wiggled toward the poodles again.

  Another woman rushed onto the scene, apologising profusely, and in one motion she leaned down and swept the pit bull into her arms, cradling it like a baby with its belly up, and as its tail kept wagging it licked her face. ‘Sorry! He’s still—’ the pit bull’s owner was interrupted by a huge lick to her face ‘—a puppy!’

  I drove on for a few minutes before the adrenalin subsided, then I pulled over and started crying. My face burned with the shame. After all those years I had just frozen, again. And I cried out again, thinking that if I hadn’t frozen I would have hit and killed that puppy because of its breed. Because someone else was afraid of it and because I had heard stories about ‘those kinds of dogs’.

  I couldn’t see beautiful things anymore. I couldn’t do anything right. I wanted to call Vincent but I’d only just left his house and I didn’t want him to think I was too much hassle. I fell asleep in the car on the side of the road and drove home in the dark when I woke up.

  The twelve random adults who were responsible for deciding Pullman’s fate regrouped at 9 a.m. and there was a note at 10.30 a.m. The bailiff called me and read it out: We have reached a verdict. I hung up the receiver and decided to put in a little prayer. Couldn’t hurt. I’d gone to a Catholic high school but I couldn’t remember if I was supposed to address God or Jesus when I made requests. Were they kind of the same thing? Hey Jesus, if you’re there, make sure this guy goes to gaol. I pulled my robes on again, and thought back to Pullman’s neck tattoo, realising he was probably praying to Jesus as well. We’re all fools when we’re desperate.

  I stood in front of the silent, tense courtroom and read out the questions to take all the verdicts. Guilty, guilty, guilty, they said to each question, to all counts, and my hands shook as I sat back down and madly started preparing documents for the sentence.

  When the jurors filed out and I’d prepared for what normally came next, I looked up and stifled a gasp, my hand flying to conceal my mouth. Pullman had changed. His whole face and his whole body looked different. Somehow his pale eyes were dead now. His fists were clenched on his thighs, the veins in his neck bulging. He had dropped his chin and he stared up at Judge from under his eyebrows, snarling. I tried not to look away from him but my body betrayed me, a surge of adrenalin making me sweat and panic again.

  Pullman had spent the past three days looking like a relatively normal man but suddenly it was blindingly obvious. Of course this was a man who drove his tiny stepdaughter around to abandoned industrial areas to beat and rape her. Perhaps he now thought he no longer had anything to gain from maintaining a semblance of decency. But how had he hidden it before? How had he hidden this thing under his skin? It must have been rippling along just underneath. I fought the urge to run from him and from that whole building that was full of people like him. I needed fresh air. The robes weighed my arms down and the jabot was so tight at my neck. Both counsel had come prepared to move straight to sentencing, though, and so we did.

  The first thing handed up was the defendant’s criminal history. First entry: the violent rape of a woman in a public bathroom, committed when Pullman was just seventeen. The facts of the offending were precisely the scenario that runs through every woman’s head when it’s late at night and she needs to use a public bathroom. I looked back up at Pullman and sighed, realising I would recall the face of this monster any time I needed to pee while out at night for the rest of my life.

  Some jurors had stayed for the sentence and sat just beside the dock, and I watched their faces as the prosecutor read out Pullman’s previous convictions. They exchanged glances and nods, and I saw one visibly relax. We got it right, they were thinking.

  I understand our legal system is based on the premise that you accept your punishment, serve your time, then move on with your life. I understand that the state doesn’t want to institutionalise people and that we simply can’t afford to lock up criminals for their whole lives. I also believe the primary function of sentencing should be deterrence, rather than punishment. But I have never believed that between Pullman’s first offence at seventeen and his offending against Sophie some thirty years later, he lived an innocent life. I do not believe that he didn’t commit a single other sex offence—either against the woman he was violent toward for years or another stranger. I do not believe that he won’t reoffend when he is released from prison at approximately fifty-five years of age.

  At the time of his trial, though, it wasn’t my job to think or feel. I recorded the time stamp of his sentence beginning, and put stickers on sheets of information for the file. What I believed didn’t have an effect on anyone but me; I could only absorb and react, never fix or solve or complete.

  When Judge finished the sentence and the prison officers approached Pullman, I flinched when they reached out to touch him. How many people had I ever shaken hands with who were actually awful sex offenders? Then, just as he was disappearing out the courtroom door to be taken to gaol, there was a loud shuffling of feet and a flurry of action. A young woman let out a loud wail.

  Pullman turned to look back at her. ‘I will appeal this!’ he yelled, being dragged out. ‘I will be back out with you again soon, baby!’

  She cried out, ‘I love you!’

  The door shut loudly behind him and the rest of the courtroom fell silent, all of us looking at the woman. The jurors sitting nearby stared at her with a mixture of pity and horror, their eyes wide. She hadn’t been in court for the trial—I would have noticed—but she must have sat through the w
hole sentence. She must have heard about Pullman’s previous convictions and been there when Judge summarised all the ways Pullman raped his stepdaughter, using different parts of his body in different places with varying levels of physical violence. But this woman believed he was wrongly convicted and I watched her weep in her seat, alone.

  ‘Did you see the new girlfriend?’ I asked Judge later in the elevator.

  ‘Yes I did.’

  ‘Yikes.’

  ‘It’s a comforting thought, isn’t it, that no matter what horrible things us men do, there will always be women out there willing to love us.’

  The elevator doors opened and we walked out. When he saw how low my jaw hung open, he grinned.

  ‘No comment,’ I replied. ‘But I will never forget that image, of that woman having just heard not only what he did this time, but also his criminal history, and then blowing him a kiss.’

  ‘She blew him a kiss?’

  ‘Yeah, and then she held her hand to her heart.’

  ‘True love, I suppose.’ He smiled again, but in a sad way.

  Who was I to judge true love? Is that what we mean by ‘unconditional’?

  I turned into my office, dumped the files on my desk and shook the mouse to wake up the computer. While I waited in front of the buzzing screen I wondered if Vincent loved me unconditionally. Not yet, but I thought we were probably pretty close. It’s one of those concepts you never want to have to test. Would he love me if I had something swimming under my skin that was itchy and deadly and constantly wanting to be let out to do a horrific thing—if in a moment I could change my eyes to be dead and cold like Pullman’s? What if I found out Vincent had a something under his skin? Would I still love him? Women in relationships with men all like to think that we’d leave them if they struck us, but mainly we hope we never have to test our resolve.

  I DROPPED MY BAGS AND pressed the buzzer in front of the large steel gate through which I could see fancy landscaping and a lap pool. I was meeting Judge at his apartment before we headed off to Southport for circuit.

  ‘Hello, Brianna.’ Judge’s voice rang out from the speaker box.

  ‘Hi, Judge!’ I said back. ‘Ready for an adventure?’ I imagined him smiling on the other end of the line while he described how to get to his front door.

  The gate buzzed open and I grabbed my stuff and stepped over the threshold. It was an inner-city apartment complex but reminded me of a fancy hotel more than a permanent residence.

  The Brisbane River is a developer’s delight, twisting and turning a hundred times, offering up kilometres of riverfront homes. Until it floods. Judge’s apartment was on the ground floor. Would it be rude, I wondered, to ask him if his home flooded in 2011? Was that one of the things I could reasonably ask him or was it too close to home?

  ‘So did this place flood?’ I asked. I sipped a glass of water and gazed out over the river.

  ‘The carpark underneath the building almost did, but we’re up high enough,’ his wife replied.

  ‘Even though you’re the closest to the ground? Wow. I suppose the developers wouldn’t bother building an apartment without a river view.’

  We weren’t in a rush and so the three of us stood on the balcony chatting about delightful and inane things. I liked seeing Judge’s home. It was minimalist but comfortable and their love of art was clear—on display but not to be showy, only to do it justice. I asked Judge about one of the pieces and his answer turned into a small tour.

  I admired Judge so much. I had met him almost at the end of his career, and I wanted to know how he’d got there. I wanted him to narrate his life to me. The snippets I knew of him seemed incongruous sometimes, and I yearned to understand how he had slowly amassed so much wisdom and calm. This was a man whom most people only ever saw sitting at the tall end of the courtroom, wearing a wig and robes, making monumental decisions about people’s liberties. But I got to know the man underneath all that.

  Judge was an only child born in Yeppoon, which he called ‘pineapple country’. I knew he fell asleep on the train sometimes when he was young and that this was okay because he and his wife lived in a cheap, tiny house at the end of the rail line. I knew he’d worked in both prosecution and defence, and never tried any other career paths.

  The looming question that could never be asked, of course, was why he and his wife didn’t have children. Sometimes when he and I were exchanging life stories and getting to know each other, I felt perhaps it was an elephant in the room, but more likely I was emphasising something I was insecure about. His wife was friendly and easy to be around, and as we said goodbye to her that day and went to the car I entertained the idea of Vincent and I growing older together with just the two of us. Would he be fulfilled? One of those vases was probably the price of high school fees for one kid. I’d take the vase.

  Judge and I pulled into the hotel a couple of hours later and we joked about how it was named Xanadu. I pushed the door open to my room and grinned. There was a lounge area and a dining table, a full kitchen, and a verandah facing a spectacular shoreline vista. A hallway led to a master bedroom with attached ensuite and walk-in wardrobe, and a huge king-size bed sat heart-thumpingly close to the floor-to-ceiling windows. I flopped onto my back on the bed, scooted up so my head sank into the fluffy pillows, and took off my jeans, feeling the cool white sheets against my thighs.

  I found my phone and called Vincent. ‘Hey, handsome boyfriend.’

  ‘Hey, pretty lady.’

  ‘I’m looking straight out to the ocean at sunset, lying on a big white bed, with no pants on. When do you get here?’

  ‘Wow, yeah? The apartment is nice?’

  I had only just left him back in Brisbane but I missed him already. I told him so and he told me the same back, and when we hung up I tried to be grateful for the love I’d found instead of terrified by how much power it had over me. It would be our three-year anniversary in September. I remembered how nervous I’d been to impress him when I dropped him home on our one-year anniversary. How much I’d cared. How I’d ached for constant confirmation that he loved me, but refused to ask.

  ‘I had such a great day,’ I’d said to him.

  ‘The only thing that could top this will be our second anniversary,’ he said as he kissed me goodbye, and my heart exploded.

  I fell for him at first because he was more handsome than me, and I fell in love with him after about six months because he was much smarter than me. I considered him my better in every way, and every day he stayed with me was an incredible reaffirming of my worth. But any moment of doubt between us would cripple me. He could be cruelly unresponsive to text messages, often accidentally, and I would withdraw. He would cancel our plans if he was too hungover and I tried as hard as I could to give him the cold shoulder, but I found it very difficult to determine my worth independent of him. Since puberty I had accepted, as a fact of my existence, that I wasn’t worth anything; that the ugly thing was ever-present inside me. That it was the dark truth, a rotten core, and that the smiling daytime Bri was the facade. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that so many of the feelings I struggled with are perfectly normal for abuse and trauma survivors.

  Lots of people like to go around saying that ‘nobody else will love you until you love yourself’, but I didn’t love myself when I met Vincent, and through his love I became stronger within myself. To share your life with someone is to see the world through their eyes, and when someone loves you wholly it is almost impossible to keep hating yourself as much as I did back then.

  In my office at Southport that week, I wondered if I should try to contact the magistrate I’d done some work experience with in Magistrates Court during my law degree. He’d always been approachable and generous with his time. ‘Work experience’ was a great look on my CV, but really I was just sitting quietly in court and then I’d get to ask him a few questions at the end of the day. I remember a thirteen-year-old defendant, appearing via videolink from a correctional facility, who k
new more legal terminology than I did.

  The magistrate had once had to put someone in gaol for a little while, which isn’t that common in Magistrates Court, and he adjourned to consider his sentence.

  ‘I always take a break before handing down a sentence where someone is locked away,’ he said to me in his chambers later. ‘It’s a serious thing to remove someone’s liberty, and nothing is lost by taking a tea-break for fresh air and consideration.’ It’s good advice—nobody ever regrets cooling their jets before making a call.

  Now he was running the brand-new trial of the specialist domestic and family violence courts. This trial was one of the recommendations of Quentin Bryce’s Not Now, Not Ever: Putting an end to domestic and family violence in Queensland report, released early in the year, and the system was supposed to have a lot of extra-specially trained support staff and service infrastructure. In urgent cases the magistrate could make same-day protection orders, and legal aid people were there for both men and women all the time. I read more about it while I was working up the courage to pick up the phone. It wasn’t coincidence that the trial was taking place in Southport. Judge had told me the area was experiencing real trouble, and when I looked it up the stats showed this. The Gold Coast Bulletin said that drugs, alcohol, and porn were ‘driving’ the domestic violence crisis, and this claim angered me. Papers always point to external factors, to things that exacerbate the pre-existing problems rooted in culture and society.

  ‘It’s always seemed to me to be about control,’ Judge said to me once, when we were dealing with a nasty rape case between ex-partners. ‘He wants to control her and if there are children, he thinks they are his too.’