Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  ‘So what’s going on, gentlemen?’ Judge asked once the session in court began. Both counsel were on their feet and I enjoyed how frank the atmosphere was when only the professionals were in the room. It was less guarded, less pedantic, more conversational, and made me want to belong to the profession—to a group of important people with important jobs who respected each other.

  Eric explained. ‘My instructor has just been on the phone to our key witness, your Honour, the sister of the complainant, and it appears that she has been extremely carsick on the drive here from Sandgate.’

  ‘Carsick?’ Judge queried. It wasn’t a strong excuse. To be called as a witness was a serious request: the woman could be in contempt of court if it was found she didn’t do everything within her power to testify.

  ‘It seems that the young woman has only, just this morning, discovered that she is pregnant,’ Eric paused, looking at some notes, ‘and that the carsickness is exacerbated by morning sickness. She is unable to travel more than ten minutes without needing to stop and, ah, be sick, and it’s over an hour and a half to drive from where she resides.’

  ‘And the Crown cannot proceed without this witness today?’ Judge asked. ‘We can’t just start today and get her in tomorrow? We have a group of sixty people waiting to know if they’re jurors or not.’

  ‘I understand, your Honour,’ Eric replied. ‘But there is a chance she won’t be able to make the drive even tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, what does “a chance” mean? And is this information coming from a doctor or is it self-reported? People need medical papers to be excused from court.’

  ‘Yes, sorry your Honour, perhaps if I could request a short adjournment and make some more calls, I might be in a better position to advise.’

  ‘Very well, we will wait outside,’ Judge said curtly and we all stood.

  In the antechamber—small, glass areas between the courtrooms and judges’ elevators—Judge took a seat and gazed out at the view of the city and river.

  ‘Gosh, that witness is only nineteen,’ I squeezed my hands together in front of me, ‘and she has just found out, by surprise, that she’s pregnant. I’m twenty-three, and I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be surprised with a pregnancy. And then to have people calling you trying to make you travel to sit in a rape trial.’

  I paused, but there was no reply. I could only hope he understood my subtext: that three men were trying to decide the validity of a very young, newly pregnant woman’s experience.

  When court resumed, the prosecutor brought his anxious irritation back in with him, but I thought I detected a shift in Judge. Perhaps a tiny softening. The trial was adjourned for several weeks, the jurors dismissed. The Crown was instructed to liaise with the witness, and to bring the matter back when she was feeling well enough.

  THE DRIVE FROM BRISBANE TO Warwick takes about two hours and can be quite beautiful if you don’t spend the entire journey panicking that you are going to crash an important man’s expensive car. As you leave Aratula and come over one particular rise, a huge valley of farmland opens up to make a beautiful landscape bordered by the mountains that form Cunninghams Gap. Some patches of land are grey and brown, scrubby and dry from cattle grazing. Others are rich green crops constantly being watered by huge paddock-spanning sprinklers, while other patches still are bright green and seem impossibly smooth. Fluffy white sheep make spots and streaks across the fields like a reflection of the clouds against the bright blue sky. I noticed a small sign nailed to a tree on the side of the road that said something about Jesus Christ saving us all because the end was near. I wanted to point it out to Judge and laugh about it together, but soon enough we got to the entrance to Warwick and saw a massive billboard with a Bible quote on it. Proverbs 13:10 Pride only breeds quarrels but wisdom is found in those who take advice.

  ‘Woah,’ I said, but Judge seemed unperturbed. He’d been to Warwick on circuit the year before; nothing that happened there would be new or shocking for him.

  When we finally reached our motel and stepped out of the car, a storm was brewing overhead. There was a mixture of moisture, electricity, cicadas and manure on the air, and it would have been exciting if I wasn’t so exhausted and cold. I had a piece of assessment for PLT scheduled for that night—it had to be done via video conference so I could pretend to take someone’s instructions for a will—and as I finally brushed my teeth before bed at midnight, the water was so cold it hurt my teeth and gums.

  ‘Aren’t some of your folks from Warwick?’ Judge asked me on the way to the courthouse the next morning as we joked about the rest of the town. I’d told him some time ago that an uncle of mine used to run a sheep station out that way.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, not bothering to indicate as I exited a roundabout, ‘but my mum and dad aren’t cousins, so it doesn’t feel like home, you know?’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh!’ he replied, but laughing.

  There was something really special about the courtroom in Warwick. It was the only room in the courthouse building with heating and as it hadn’t been open to fresh air for such a long time, its smell of leather and books was overwhelming. Stepping inside from a morning too cold for me to smell anything, a cold that stung the inside of my nose, into that quiet, reverent place, and setting up for the day’s work ahead, felt nice. Wigs sat on each end of the bar table like sleeping pets, waiting patiently for their masters’ return. Light refracted through the glass of the dock box, turning it into a thing of beauty rather than a cage for beasts. Some buildings and rooms feel empty without people inside them, but an old courtroom is different. Being there is like holding an ancient coin. Too many things have been absorbed over time—too much human contact for it to just disappear when the people leave.

  By nine-thirty we were elbows-deep in files and I was feeling significantly less philosophical. There was a double-header sentence for a mother and stepfather being cruel to their daughter. The girl had dermatitis so her hands were dry and split, and the two adults had rubbed chillies all over them. They’d also made her eat the chillies, shoved them up her nose, then made her eat even more, threatening that they’d ‘shove it down her throat’ if she didn’t. The mother and stepfather would stand in front of her taking turns to hit her hands with a wooden spoon, and sometimes they would make her brother hit her because they were too tired to do it themselves. Her mother had stabbed her once—a small wound that didn’t require stitches—and her stepdad had pinned her to the ground and hit her, whacked her with a wooden rod, and put pressure on her throat so she couldn’t breathe and covered her mouth. I looked over at his very large body and imagined his weight on top of me and those hands on my mouth.

  The worst thing about sentences was always when the prosecutor went through three or four cases of similar offences, in order to make recommendations for comparable terms. Not only did I have to sit through hearing about four other times people had done horrible things, but it was also a reminder that people did that shit all the time, and that the people in front of me weren’t unique. They didn’t exist in unfortunate isolation; they weren’t special, just results of our system and our society.

  The mother and stepfather’s acts were categorised as ‘excessive measures in discipline’, and this infuriated me. It was impossible for me to understand how the court didn’t treat their actions as serious assaults. The stepfather pinning her down and smothering her, in particular, was deeply troubling. Quentin Bryce’s report Not Now, Not Ever: Putting an end to domestic and family violence in Queensland had made 140 recommendations for how to address the ongoing crisis. One of those proposals was for strangulation to be a specific offence because research shows that as acts of intimate partner violence escalate, strangulation is often the penultimate violent act before homicide. As it is impossible to prove intent to kill by strangulation, defendants couldn’t be charged with attempted murder, and as there was often no lasting damage, the action couldn’t even be classified as grievous bodily harm; the result was t
hat a man could strangle a woman in her own home, release his grip after she lost consciousness, right before he killed her, and get charged with common assault, if anything. If this stepfather and I walked outside and he did the same thing to me, his sentence would be significantly more serious, but because the child was under their care—their ‘dominion’—the offending was categorised differently. It’s odd that our standards for a parent caring for a child are so much lower than our expectations for gentleness and respect from a stranger. One would think it should be the opposite, that to have and raise a child comes with obligations to care for that child.

  Was there anything sexual about this stepfather’s abuse? Perhaps the girl was too embarrassed or ashamed to talk about it, and hoped that by reporting the physical violence the sexual violence would stop as well.

  ‘The sentencing range seems to be very broad indeed,’ Judge said. There were court of appeal decisions where the primary judge only imposed community service. Surely such decisions were based on lingering attitudes from when society thought the law had no place interfering with how a man controlled his household?

  The Department of Communities wasn’t doing anything further about the family because the other six children were reportedly fine. Defence counsel said it was just that one daughter who was ‘in need of discipline’ and that the other siblings were supporting their mother and stepfather in court.

  The mother cried while Judge addressed her in his sentence, but they walked out of court with no real gaol time. Not even close to real gaol time. They’d all go back to the same house. Would anything change? It felt absurd.

  My dad arrived in Warwick to visit his mum, my nanna, with me on the Thursday of that first week. She had moved from her big old house into the local nursing home the year before. I organised for Judge, Dad and me to go to the Horse & Jockey for a steak together afterwards.

  Nanna seemed overly pleased to have ‘another lawyer in the family’ and asked me to explain each piece of jewellery I was wearing. The last time I had been at her house, she’d said to me as I went in to kiss her goodnight, ‘You know, dear, you are almost as pretty when you don’t wear any makeup.’ While I spoke to her that afternoon in the nursing home, she seemed to float in and out of herself. The dementia was gradual. She didn’t get alarmed or confused while we were chatting, but it was sometimes as if her eyes, as a lens to her mind, were struggling to maintain focus. Specific memories would be sharp, but then whole passages of time would be fuzzy.

  ‘She seems to be doing okay!’ I said to Dad as we drove from the nursing home over to dinner.

  ‘She has good days and bad days,’ he replied.

  ‘Does she like it there?’

  ‘Last week she phoned me and complained that the young nurse allocated to her was being extremely rude considering she owned the place.’

  ‘What!?’

  ‘I said to her, “Louise, you do not own that place and you are not the boss of those people, and you’d better start being nicer to them all,”’ I laughed and Dad continued, ‘and she said oh! as though she was so surprised.’

  ‘Classic Nanna.’

  That afternoon would be the last time I ever had a conversation with her. I thought about her for a while after that visit, in a mostly self-centred way, wondering what would constitute my life’s meaning and identity if I grew old and didn’t have children. Nanna had lost the ability to define her days by the capabilities of her mind, but she had four sons, each with multiple grandchildren, who had her to credit for their existence.

  I still longed to ask Judge about why he didn’t have children, but I knew I never could. He had spent his life devoted to his career and had a brilliant mind and temperament as a result. I wanted to hear what he thought about ageing without having had children. I needed a role model for it.

  Dad and I pulled into the carpark for the Horse & Jockey. It wasn’t a pub but it definitely wasn’t really a restaurant; it was something in between with tons of Keno forms and a drive-through bottle-o attached.

  I was nervous for the two men to get along and I was nervous for myself. My real dad was meeting my work dad, or something like that. My dad had only ever really dealt with magistrates, not judges, and I didn’t want him to feel as if somehow his and Judge’s careers were being compared. I felt protective of Dad, but I also didn’t want him to share some of his more far-reaching ideas for how he thought the justice system could improve.

  It all turned out fine, though, because I broke the ice by spilling an entire gravy boat of diane sauce on myself. Even as the event unfolded in slow motion and I saw my beautiful blue velvet dress being ruined, I was mostly just relieved it didn’t spill anywhere near Judge. I remembered in my training for the job my predecessor, Rebecca, telling me she’d ‘take a bullet’ for Judge. I laughed internally, thinking I’d tell my replacement quite sincerely that I’d ‘take a gravy boat’ for him.

  When dinner finished I was sad to see Dad get in his ute to go back to Brisbane, and I felt an ache of homesickness. I waved goodbye, watching his lights fade down the road and around the corner.

  We started the trial against Mr Delaware on the Monday. I hadn’t noted anything remarkable about it at the callovers we’d held in preparation: it was another historical child sex offence case and the defendant had been ‘Mum’s new boyfriend’. The most unusual thing about it seemed to be that it had a one- to two-day estimate, rather than the normal two- to three-day estimate.

  ‘There will be no witnesses called, other than the complainant,’ the prosecutor told Judge.

  I paused and looked back through the depositions, and realised that it was true. It was also then that I noticed the complainant’s name—George. How had I missed that? For the first time all year, I’d see a sex offence trial with a male complainant. I looked over to the defendant sitting in the dock. He was old, with a greyish beard and a walking stick.

  ‘Mr Delaware absolutely denies the offending,’ his barrister said.

  Of course he does.

  The prosecutor’s opening address was straightforward. Aside from George being a fifteen-year-old at the time of the offending, everything else was standard. George’s mother’s new boyfriend, Delaware, had started with small, inappropriate moves and touches toward George. Fleeting interactions that could be brushed off gradually developed into more bold and invasive acts over a series of months. George tried to tell his mother, but his complaint didn’t come out right, and it was dismissed. Delaware’s assaults grew more intense until one truly awful night, and then George ran away from home at sixteen.

  Delaware wasn’t the most composed defendant. He huffed and shook his head as the prosecutor stepped through each allegation. Once I even thought I saw him stamp his cane.

  George was in his forties. He wore a flannel shirt, thick blue farmer’s jeans, and polished brown boots. His hair was combed and held in place with just a touch of gel, and he was clean-shaven. The image he presented was one of a perfectly standard, white Australian middle-aged man being told to dress ‘smart-casual’. He seemed a touch nervous but was simple and clear when answering the prosecutor’s questions. The story felt real. George spoke about shrugging off the first few incidents, but then after some time Delaware would insist on watching him shower or showering with him. He wrung his hands a little when relaying the fight he’d had with his mother about Delaware being in the house.

  ‘And did you tell your mother about Delaware’s behaviour?’ the prosecutor asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And did Delaware leave the house?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the offending then continued?’

  George pinched his nose and rubbed his eyes hard. ‘Yes.’

  George had tried to ask his mother to kick out Delaware without explaining why, just like I’d tried to complain about Samuel to my mother so many times in different ways. It was easy to feel angry at George’s mum, but I suspected that employment prospects for a single mother in Warwick in the 19
80s were slim, and no mention was made of George’s biological father. Had Delaware, like Reester, offered financial stability? Had he been emotionally manipulative or physically abusive like Pullman? It didn’t matter. George’s mum didn’t act, didn’t listen to her son enough to read between the lines, wasn’t willing to open her eyes, to peel back the double-think.

  ‘Would you like to take a break before cross-examination?’ Judge asked George. He looked a bit ragged, his eyes a little red, his shoulders slumped.

  ‘No thank you, your Honour, I’d like to get it done.’

  ‘Very well,’ Judge said, and nodded at the defence barrister, who then stood up.

  The cross-examination was short but it also looked and felt completely different to the normal adversarial display. The barrister was, as usual, a man, but he had a more casual, respectful tone and approach to the questions than all the others I’d seen. My notes describe it as ‘gentlemanly’. I thought perhaps that cross-examination was what the court process looked like when counsel were actually all trying to get to the truth, rather than to get their client acquitted.

  ‘And why didn’t you tell anyone about Delaware’s alleged behaviour?’ the barrister asked.

  ‘Nobody talked about this stuff,’ George said, ‘especially not men. People didn’t even talk about being gay, and what he was doing was gay, and I was afraid people would think I was gay, or that he would make me gay. I don’t know. When you’re fifteen you’re not thinking straight. I just ran.’

  ‘No further questions, your Honour,’ the barrister announced shortly after, and then we heard that Delaware wouldn’t be taking the stand to give or call evidence, and so that same afternoon we sent the jury out to deliberate.