Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  Resting my head on the bathroom mirror I let cool water run over my wrists and tried to regulate my breathing. Each small hurdle took me right back to The Freeze. It was too soon for me to know if things would get any easier. I didn’t know if I would ever feel that relief George had spoken about in Warwick. In the meantime I had to be careful not to lose my job or my boyfriend. I looked in the mirror and tried to fix the mascara that had run, slapping my cheeks to bring a little colour back to my face. I could leave this job and find another, but I loved Vincent so much it made my chest ache. Does that make me a shit feminist?

  It was 3.30 p.m. I had an hour and a half to decide how much to tell him. What to divulge and what to withhold. Where could I draw the line between honesty and safety? What was the minimum he needed to know to understand? What was the maximum he could hear and still think me desirable?

  Back in the office I sat with a pen and paper and tried to draft how I might tell him. At which points I might pause and give him the opportunity to hold his hand up and say ‘enough’. How long I would wait before finishing my story before asking him if it changed anything between us, knowing he might not say anything then and there, and that this disease could slowly rot his lust for me, spoiling our relationship over gruelling months.

  If I was honest with myself, that was what I most feared.

  I was sure everyone would believe me, but I didn’t know if it would change things. I thought back to George, how he’d left the witness stand crying and fallen into his wife’s arms like a broken child. He hadn’t looked to see if she would catch him: he’d known she was there. They were strong. It would be harder for me to be strong if I was alone—if Vincent left me—but I already knew I had to take the risk. I could be alone for the rest of my life, but at least I’d be able to live with myself.

  Vincent and I sat on the front deck of my tiny share house in Paddington. When I’d first arrived I’d thought there was no way I’d ever let my bare legs touch the couch that sat out there, exposed to the rain and afternoon sun, ripping at the corners to reveal decomposed stuffing, but with the benefit of a little perspective I slouched into it absent-mindedly. My head lulled back as I inhaled deeply and tried to form a sentence.

  ‘I have to tell you something,’ I’d said to him when we got in the door and dropped our bags and hugged. He tried to mask a tiny panic in his eyes and it made me laugh. ‘I’m not pregnant!’ Then we both laughed. ‘But let’s have a cigarette, hey?’

  He waited quietly, knowing that sometimes it took me a while to put things right.

  ‘You remember that thing I told you about my brother’s friend?’ I asked. ‘Because we’d been talking about things we never told anyone else?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m going to the police about it.’

  ‘Okay.’ He nodded and waited for me to say more. I tried to hide how frantically I was searching for indications of disgust. If he had crossed his legs away from me or even crossed his arms in that moment, my heart might have broken. ‘I thought you said you didn’t know if you dreamed it?’

  ‘Nah,’ I exhaled, ‘that’s just what I said to kind of, I dunno, try not to have to deal with it. But what happened, I mean, kids don’t dream that shit.’

  Another moment of silence passed.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked calmly.

  ‘Not really. I mean, not right now. Things are probably gonna be a bit crappy for a while. I’ll just keep you posted.’

  ‘Well, I love you and I support you and I guess just let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

  I stubbed my cigarette out and leaned onto his chest, and he kissed my forehead and put his arm around me. The sun was setting over the houses and cyclists whizzed by.

  I pointed to the plant I’d potted when I first moved in. ‘I don’t know why this wattle won’t grow. The lime is fine and the rose is chill and the lavender is good. It can’t be me. I don’t know what it wants. It’s such a diva.’

  ‘Isn’t wattle a native?’

  ‘Yeah! So it should be super chill! That pot is like a luxurious European holiday for a wattle.’

  He kissed my forehead again and asked what I felt like for dinner. His kiss told me: I know you want to pretend everything is the same, that everything is going to be okay, so let’s just do that. While we discussed the merits of pizza versus curry it occurred to me that just two months ago I’d felt dread about how average and suburban Brisbane seemed. That the normalcy was stifling and that I yearned for bigger things, that I missed New York, that I wanted stimulation and adventure. How quickly everything turned around and all I wanted was to be hugged by my city. To take it for granted and let it house me and feed me while I dealt with things.

  The next morning Mr Chickpeas was sentenced to some high fines and a short amount of gaol time. His story appeared in the paper the following day, and the expensive crowds dispersed. Pullman would never be in the paper, though, and neither would Samuel.

  I was glad we weren’t dealing with anything too heavy, because I was on Struggle Street. I had a coffee in the morning but kept having to slap my face and crack my fingers to bring myself back to the present. All I could think about was getting to Headspace that afternoon. Keeping it together until a door clicked behind me and I sat down with a woman who might just let me speak for as long as I needed.

  When counsel finished making their sentencing submissions, Judge advised he would take an hour adjournment to consider his position. I accompanied him to his chambers and made sure I wasn’t needed for anything, then went to the bathroom, closed the toilet lid and sat down, leaning against the tiled wall. When I closed my eyes I saw myself in a horror movie, dragging myself along the ground because my legs didn’t work anymore. I tried to open my eyes but the lights were too bright and on automatic sensors so I scrunched them shut, but I just saw the trampoline again. The pool in the backyard reflecting the afternoon light. And The Freeze. Tears flowed out and I scrunched a ball of toilet paper to my eyes, then I heard high-heeled footsteps approaching the door. Did I lock it!? I cleared my throat and heard the steps stop and turn back.

  ‘Fuck,’ I whispered, getting up and seeing my red eyes in the mirror.

  ‘Do you mind if I head off a touch early today, Judge?’ I said, standing at the edge of his desk. ‘I have an appointment across town.’

  ‘What!?’ he said with mock outrage, smiling. ‘I don’t know about this.’ He looked across to the clock that showed the time as 4.50 p.m. ‘I suppose I’ll manage here, working hard into the night by myself.’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone if you want to go home early too,’ I said, faking slyness and turning on my heel. ‘In fact, there don’t seem to be many other people on our level still at work.’ I stretched the boundaries of the sass I directed at other judges sometimes, but he never took the bait.

  ‘No, no, that’s fine, you go on. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Thanks, Judge, see you tomorrow.’

  When I walked past all the other judges’ chambers, I wondered who would be allocated to my matter if it went to trial. I couldn’t imagine sitting in front of any of them, looking at their associate, being on the other side of proceedings. They’d probably list it for a judge from Southport or Ipswich—someone I’d definitely never worked with. Maybe Samuel’s lawyer would try to allege foul play?

  How many Department of Justice employees were also complainants in serious criminal trials, though? I would never know. We hid in bathrooms when we cried.

  Much to my disappointment, I was not cured after my first session with a psychologist. I was crying—wailing really—within fifteen minutes of arriving, and we spent most of the session cataloguing what was wrong with me so that she could figure out a plan for how to treat me and what approaches to take.

  ‘Well,’ she said at the end, ‘there’s a lot here for us to work with.’

  I responded by blowing my nose loudly and taking another tissue from the box in front of me.

&n
bsp; ‘And you’re sure you’re going to tell your mum and dad tonight?’ she asked. ‘There’s no rush. You’ve had a big day.’

  I decided against telling her that The Chickpeas Case was the furthest thing from a ‘big day’ I’d seen all year.

  ‘I need to get it done now that I’ve decided what I’m doing—I feel like a liar every minute I don’t tell them,’ I replied truthfully.

  ‘Alright.’ She handed me a pamphlet with the phone numbers of suicide helplines and emergency call centres, and I laughed. She didn’t laugh.

  I fixed my makeup and went straight from her office to Mum and Dad’s for dinner. I was surprised to see my grandparents there. Mum’s parents, Tuttu and Poppa, lived locally and we’d always been close; I didn’t want to tell them, though, and so I had to pretend to be fine through dinner, dessert and coffee. At the end of the evening when we all walked out to the cars I pretended I had to duck back inside to the bathroom, and waited until I heard Poppa’s old car engine disappear down the road.

  ‘Can I talk to you for a tick before I head off?’ I said to Mum and Dad, and their happy, full-bellied smiles dropped.

  I couldn’t look at their faces as I told them the story. Something like this was one of the worst things you could dump on a parent.

  ‘Do you want to do something?’ Dad asked me.

  ‘I want to report it. I called the police. I want to do the right thing.’ I started crying again. I sat on a chair and Mum came to hug me, then Dad came over and held us both for a long time.

  ‘Shhhh,’ my mother said, ‘it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s going to be alright,’ patting my hair, stroking my shoulder. I’d thought I had got most of the crying over with already, but in my parents’ arms I felt I could relinquish the sarcasm and stoicism.

  After some more questions and after I insisted I was fine to drive home, I left them. In the car as I pulled out of the driveway, I looked at my parents lit up in the headlights, waving and blowing kisses, and wondered what they’d say to each other when they went back inside.

  How could you do this to them?

  I felt as if I might vomit at any moment—the rich dinner and dessert churning around, being spoiled by an overwhelming sense of guilt. When I got back home I walked through the front door, straight into the bathroom, and brought it all up and out.

  ONE AFTERNOON THE FOLLOWING WEEK I ran into Ellen, an associate from Southport, in the photocopy room, and we had a good chat. I found her, like Megan, to be a tonic to the wankery of some of the other associates. She was on circuit to Brisbane but had just been to Kingaroy recently. Kingaroy had one of the worst reputations—if not the worst—of all the circuits. Ellen said they had three child sex trials and that all the men were acquitted.

  One of the trials was of a man and his stepdaughter in an incestuous relationship that the stepdaughter claimed began when she was eleven, but only had ‘evidence’ like texts and photos since turning seventeen. The jury acquitted because they weren’t convinced the incest was happening before she was old enough to consent—and for incest charges, a loophole says that both individuals being adults and not blood relations is allowed.

  ‘So they believed it for sure was happening when she was seventeen, and that he was basically her dad, but just absolutely couldn’t conceive that he did it even when she was sixteen or fifteen?’ I asked Ellen, knowing the answer.

  She just nodded, the photocopier churning out papers behind us. The light travelled along under the glass of the machine and reflected in Ellen’s glasses like an eerie indication of a passage of time as I stood there, silently considering how lucky we were by comparison. At least I presumed Ellen had never been through something like that. She probably presumed I’d never been molested either. I looked in her eyes, searching for a signal, but I only saw the machine’s lights passing over, left to right. I thought across the cohort of associates whom I’d just considered wankery and wondered how many I had incorrectly presumed were the ‘lucky ones’. Statistically speaking there could be at least a dozen of us.

  ‘The stepdad was gross, though, wasn’t he?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Ellen said, ‘absolutely disgusting.’

  Megan came into the copy room, dropping folders loudly on the desk in front of us.

  ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe this,’ she started, ‘we’re in a trial, right? It’s a rape case where this guy is at, like, a Christmas party and then takes his best mate’s daughter upstairs and forces himself onto her, rapes her, then just comes downstairs and enjoys the rest of the party.’

  ‘Yuck,’ Ellen said, and I groaned.

  ‘But get this!’ Megan continued. ‘Just now a juror handed us a note saying that while they were on lunchbreak they saw a security guard approaching the complainant’s father to take him away somewhere, and asked if maybe the jury shouldn’t have seen it and asking the judge if the event had any significance. So we called in the security guard, and they said that one of the girls from a visiting school—they were sitting in, listening to the trial—had been walking out during an adjournment and felt someone feel her up, and that she turned around and saw the dad right behind her.’

  ‘What the fuck!?’ Ellie and I called out in chorus.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ I said, ‘the father of the rape complainant touched a schoolgirl on the arse as he was walking out of court?’

  ‘Yep.’

  The photocopier whirred on as the three of us fell silent.

  ‘Well,’ Megan clarified, ‘allegedly.’

  Later that week I arrived at level thirteen early enough for it to feel empty, so I found the right number online again and punched it into my office phone. While it rang I wedged the receiver between my shoulder and face, and started breaking all the nibs off my freshly sharpened pencils, pushing them into a slab of printouts I needed to edit, forcing the lead at a diagonal, feeling the wood give a little, focusing on the anticipation of the break. I was so full of anxious, angry energy. Ants were crawling into my skin through my pores and running along my vein lines. Why did I have to pick this phone up again? I pictured my brother when we were children as my hand smacked my face involuntarily: Why do you keep hitting yourself?

  ‘Hello, Dutton Park Police Station, Constable Ian Grey speaking,’ an unmistakably young man’s voice came through the line, and I sat up straight and grabbed the phone again, dropping the impotent pencil.

  ‘Good morning, Ian. I’m just calling to follow up with a complaint I made a little over a week ago. I left all my details and they said that someone would get right back to me, like, in a day or two, but nobody has.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, let’s look it up. Your name and date of birth, please?’

  I gave him my name and date of birth.

  ‘I can’t see anything here in the records,’ he said with the slight distraction of someone scrolling down a screen.

  ‘It is a complaint about a historical child sex offence,’ I replied and told him the time and date of my phone call. He asked me if I had called Dutton Park, and I said it had been the same phone number I’d just dialled, and he asked the name of the person I’d spoken to, and I said I couldn’t remember. We went back and forth for several minutes, then he put me on hold and went to see who’d been working the morning of my call, and I sat quietly in my office looking at the pencils and pockmarked paper.

  The constable finally came back on the line and exhaled. ‘I’m so sorry, there’s no record of your complaint in the system.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what happened and I can’t explain it. Are you in a position to go through it a little with me now? I just need the basics so I can pass it on to CIB, and someone will get in touch with you later today.’

  ‘But that’s what they said last time?’ I must have sounded like a lost child.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Wow,’ I paused, ‘okay, yeah, so, the basics,’ and I started from the beginning, a
gain.

  The constable listened, asking the same questions as last time, taking my date of birth and contact details again. He told me someone would phone me within forty-eight hours.

  I hung up and pushed my wheelie chair back from my desk and leaned forward to put my head between my knees. It stung somehow, a feeling like a rejection mixed in with the shame and embarrassment, but I also felt bewildered. It was crushing to think of how long it had taken me to build up the courage to pick up the phone and make that first call, to tell my story to a stranger and ask for help. The single worst moment of my life, the darkest point in my past that I’d nearly died reckoning with, was officially insignificant enough to slip through the cracks. This beast that so often made it difficult for me to breathe had fallen behind someone’s desk unnoticed. I was shattered that something so important to me was of no importance to them—to the people who should care, who were paid to care.

  Doubt tugged at my sleeve all day. What if my complaint was small and silly compared to all the more serious stuff the police had to deal with? After all, I should know better than most that I could very well be taking up too much police time with a one-off, historical matter. Was I wanting too much? Too greedy for attention and sympathy?

  They’d asked if I was in ongoing danger and I’d said ‘no’, then they’d told me someone would call me as soon as they had time. How many women less selfish than me wouldn’t have followed up? Those women’s complaints wouldn’t even be in the system and so wouldn’t be statistics, couldn’t be listed as attrition if they didn’t proceed with the matter.