Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  By the time my mobile phone rang later that afternoon, the self-doubt was being overtaken by the fire ants again. A policeman introduced himself as Sean Thompson, and we organised a time for me to go into the station after work the following week. I would make a statement and we would discuss the next steps.

  When Judge left work that day I stood at the end of his chambers and looked over to the west side of Brisbane, the side where I grew up. The city fanned out under a bright pink sunset, that constellation of crimes, and I stood watching as mine joined the others. Its little warning light flickered on gently, taking its place on the map of human misery. The clouds streaked across the sky with highlights of yellow and orange at their tips and points as though the whole thing was on fire. Watching people go about their bustling lives was mesmerising. I counted the cars on the highway and calculated that if half the drivers were women and all drivers were over twenty-five then each of the red cars on the inner-city bypass that afternoon represented one victim of sexual violence.

  I stepped onto the balcony and tipped my head over the railing. The panic hyped up my pulse and reminded me that I mustn’t really have wanted to die, and so I just turned around and went home.

  The working week went by normally. I had let almost twenty sentencing revisions pile up, and I struggled through them when I could. There was another textbook trial on Monday. The complainant was a beautiful young woman with dark hair and strong features, and she wore a gold cross around her neck. Her mother hadn’t had any idea her partner was abusing her daughter. Prescription drugs were involved. I wondered when that girl had first called the police and what she would have done if she never heard back from them. During the graphic parts of her testimony I doodled on scrap papers. The defendant sat opposite me and I was grateful for being an unremarkable part of the system. I couldn’t help but look at his hands when I heard her tell the court what he’d done to her with them. Fat, strong fingers with calluses. Every detail was too much.

  The sentencing revisions panicked me, and it took me a long time to realise it was a pretty simple case of transferred trauma.

  Reading had always been a huge part of my life: I loved books that transported me and writers who made me feel as if I was there in among the adventure on the page. A love for reading makes you a determined reader. Even with an average book I would always do my best to feel a part of the plot and become close to the characters. But I didn’t know how to switch off that mechanism for other kinds of reading. Legal matters have settings and locations that need to be established, then you are introduced to the main characters, and there is dialogue and conflict. It’s all there on the page and it was all being transferred across to my body, into my mind. I could tell you what happens in every Harry Potter book, in each Amy Tan novel and all of Malcolm Gladwell’s essays. The court cases I read and edited collected in my mind like a sick library. All those women and girls were me. Every sentence referenced many other similar-fact comparable cases like an endless accumulation of completely unoriginal sins.

  As Dad drove me to the police station the next week, we chatted about normal stuff. I watched him to see if he was nervous or sad but I couldn’t read anything different from usual. It occurred to me that he no longer had the capacity to be unpleasantly surprised—that maybe he’d been a police officer for too long to think anything was sacred or untouchable. He pulled into the visitor’s parking bay, and a childhood memory came back to me: Dad had pulled the car up in front of the house and I was talking to him about Arron’s friends, saying something or other about them having girlfriends, and I went to open the car door but he didn’t move.

  ‘You tell me if any of them ever try anything like that with you, if they touch or kiss you,’ he said sternly.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, immediately feeling some shame but not knowing why.

  ‘Because that’s against the law.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re a child.’

  I felt my cheeks burning at the memory. I loved those boys. They were the epitome of cool. I wanted their clothes and their toys and their attention, and the age gap between us was painfully awkward. I pretended to like their music even though I couldn’t understand all those grungy haircuts and dissonant chord progressions.

  Now, with hindsight, so many things I’d struggled with as a child became clearer and simpler to me. Intense tomboy behaviour through childhood, a struggle and isolation in Grade Seven—when I was just about to turn thirteen—and the boys from my class I’d previously spent every summer with no longer invited me to their birthday parties.

  ‘Why didn’t you invite me to your party?’ I asked my friend Dylan that year, too confused to realise how pathetic I sounded.

  He shrugged. ‘It’s a boys-only.’

  The attention I craved from Arron’s friends was confusing all of a sudden. I was a girl and that meant if I wanted attention from them it had something to do with the fact that they were boys and I was a girl, but when I was twelve I had no way of understanding what that meant to an eighteen-year-old. We were all young enough to be hanging out in the backyard together but as Samuel proved, the boys were old enough to render us different creatures playing at different games.

  The shame I felt in the car with my father came from a fear of being branded girlish and attention-seeking, but all I truly ached for was to be cool like the boys. Their friendship seemed to have a depth and easiness to it that I envied and longed for. I didn’t have the tools or the language to understand or describe any of that.

  In Grade Six, when I had just begun to feel my male best friends slipping away from me, a teacher pulled me aside in class and told me that I was bad at maths because I was ‘boy-crazy’. My face burned. I nearly cried for fear she was right. I did want their attention and it did make me feel pathetic, but I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong. I didn’t know a thing about sex, or if I did I certainly couldn’t yet see how it related to me or my companions. My immature and short-sighted ‘not like other girls’ phase began shortly thereafter: a universally misplaced attempt to avoid the shame apparently inherent in girlhood.

  It had taken years of conditioning to build the sense of insecurity required to make me freeze on that trampoline. Samuel knew it was there, he could sniff it—the desperate confusion part and parcel of a girl who doesn’t realise she’s on the cusp. How could I have ‘just called out’ to someone when the risk was being forever uncool? People were already looking at me and seeing a pathetic, boy-crazy creature; I couldn’t afford to make things worse.

  If I confront my memory fully, pulling it up and out of a deep, deep well, and if I hold it up to the light, wiping off the gunk, and if I’m honest, I remember walking away from Samuel that afternoon with a sense of happiness that he had paid some attention to me. Such were the depths of my self-doubt, already, and I hadn’t even got my first period.

  So there I was, walking with my ex-cop dad to the doors of the police station well over a decade after I’d been molested, having finally developed just enough disregard for potential social fallout. Finally feminist enough to realise I was all out of fucks to give. Still terrified of being called a liar or disregarded, but past the point of letting other people tell my story.

  All that reckless resolve then whooshed back out the door that had only just swung closed behind us when the policewoman at the counter recognised Dad and I saw confusion then realisation flash across her face. He might have felt ashamed or embarrassed to be there. How might a firefighter feel if their child caused a house fire? What if a teacher’s child needed an after-school tutor? My father had been a police officer and prosecutor for well over a decade and yet there we were, fronting at the desk with a historical sex abuse complaint. I looked up at his face, but again there was nothing. The nature of these things is that they are done by the people we trust, that offenders mostly fly under the radar as family or friends, and I knew that Dad knew that, but I also knew that shame and embarrassment weren’t always logical. If he
was suffering, though, he didn’t show it. He could be absolutely relied upon as a man of his generation for that.

  Sean came out of a side door and introduced himself to us. He was in office clothes and had a relaxed manner that verged on tired.

  ‘Did you bring a book or something to do while you wait?’ I asked Dad when Sean asked me to follow him upstairs to the interview rooms.

  ‘No, no, I’ll just wait,’ Dad replied, taking a seat.

  ‘But what will you do?’

  ‘Patience, my dear,’ he said and smiled in the same way as always, but I was full of regret as I turned from him. I should have just done this by myself, I thought as I climbed the stairs behind Sean.

  When I stepped into the tiny interview room, with its fluorescent lights and icy, rattling air-conditioning, a second police officer came in and closed the door so it was just me and the two men.

  ‘Ready to roll?’ the second officer asked, and dropped a cardboard box of tissues onto the desk in front of me then sat down opposite.

  I shouldn’t have done any of this at all.

  Considering the determination with which I’d tried to forget the incident for so many years, my recollection of it was ironically clear. Most of the time I put up an internal stop sign to the pathways that take me to the details of that afternoon, but closing my eyes and travelling down them is always as easy as it is miserable. The odd details about things Samuel said, and the way the offending progressed, was easily peculiar enough to defy the potential for fabrication by a child’s mind.

  ‘He said to me, “My sister likes it when I do this,”’ I told the officers and began crying.

  Sean raised his eyebrows and turned the corners of his mouth down, making notes. I was crying at how disgusting it all was, but also with relief. I’d spent so many years thinking I’d dreamed it up; for most of my youth I’d presumed the grotesque event was a fantasy I had created.

  The other officer interrupted me at an awful point in the story. ‘Do you remember if the fingers went inside your vagina or were they only on the outside?’

  ‘There wasn’t any penetration,’ I replied, matter-of-fact, having anticipated the question.

  ‘Oh, so not rape then, just sexual assault,’ he said, shifting his weight back in his chair and crossing his legs. ‘Well, not just, but you know what I mean,’ and he waved his hand indicating I could continue telling my story. I was crying too much to say anything back to him. At the end of my account he said, ‘Okay, so, based on what you said on the phone it sounded like a sexual assault case but this is actually more of an indecent treatment case if you were in primary school.’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, too exhausted and upset to argue that I had not misspoken on the phone either of the times I called.

  Sean explained that if I was ready, I could give my official statement that evening. Then the next step, if I wanted, was to make a pretext phone call. That would mean calling Samuel and trying to get him to admit to the offending while he didn’t realise the call was being recorded. I’d only ever heard pretext phone calls on the other end, at work—when lawyers were fighting to make them inadmissible and keep them out of court. I was terrified of having to speak to Samuel but I knew I’d have to try. I thought that if I could just get him on tape admitting it all, I could take a short cut past the normally years-long process of pre-trial preparations. I needed that optimism for strength, but now I look back on it as naive idiocy.

  I followed Sean up another flight of stairs and my thoughts returned to my dad sitting alone in the lobby. Over an hour had passed. I wanted to know what Dad was thinking but I couldn’t bear to go down and ask. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep. He fell asleep the one time we went to the ballet, and countless times at the movies. Our family photo albums are full of funny pictures of him napping on couches after big meals.

  Sean and I sat down at his desk, and he explained that we’d be preparing a written statement.

  ‘I have to tell you everything again from the start?’ I asked, confused.

  ‘Yes, and I’ll be writing it all down this time.’

  It seemed absurd that I would have to repeat myself twice, but over the following hour I had to repeat myself repeatedly. Sean typed with his index fingers. I thought again about Dad waiting downstairs and guilt surged through me afresh. My inclination was to get the story out as fast as possible because it was so awful to linger on anything, especially some details, but Sean would hold his hand up to stop or slow me down. He interrupted to repeat words and names back to me, and I could see by the way he’d hit Enter then tapped the left arrow and then hit Backspace that he didn’t understand the way the document was formatted and took unnecessary time to make each new paragraph look like the others. During a bad part of my story that made me cry, Sean looked up from the keyboard to the screen and realised he’d made a typo, then fumbled getting the cursor to return to the start of the line so that he could correct it.

  By the end of another hour I felt the hot ants in my skin and I wanted to rip the keyboard out from under his two fingers and smack him across the face with it. I asked for a glass of water, and received it, and the process went on and on, with my dad still waiting downstairs. When Sean finally printed out a draft copy I looked through it and pointed out errors on every page. We sat together as he went through it all again. Was this the great, strong arm of justice? Was this my champion?

  After I signed the statement, the other officer came into the room. I was freezing cold and exhausted, and he was frustrated that I couldn’t pinpoint the date of the offence. I’m not stupid! I wanted to say—I knew it was a problem.

  ‘I know that I was wearing my primary school uniform, but I’d be lying if I said I could be much more specific,’ I said.

  ‘DPP normally don’t even proceed with claims like this,’ the second officer said, not even looking at me. ‘You know, if you can’t narrow down that timeframe, we could do all the investigating but then they might just decide not to proceed with it.’

  I sat with my mouth open in horror.

  ‘Well, often we find that once people start this process they start remembering more things,’ Sean said. ‘Let’s give you a week or so, and you can give me a call at any time if you remember anything, then just pop in and make an addendum statement.’

  ‘Can I do the pretext phone call tonight?’ I asked Sean. I had been hoping to rip the bandaid off the whole ugly scab. I wanted it all done there and then.

  ‘No,’ Sean said, ‘we have to schedule that, and you’ll need some time to plan what approach you’ll take.’

  ‘What approach?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to tell you what to ask or say on the phone with Samuel, but I recommend you have a good think about it—about what kind of person he is, what information you want to know and what kinds of questions you’ll ask, how you’ll start the conversation, that type of thing.’

  The other officer was leaving the room and added, ‘In the meantime, see if you can remember some more details about the date.’

  ‘Also be prepared for the chance that he’ll deny everything,’ said Sean. ‘And avoid all contact with him. We won’t send any officers to knock on his door until after the call, otherwise he’ll be suspicious. Think about what you’ll say if he doesn’t want to talk or gets angry.’

  Sean stood up, and I followed. As we left, I saw the other officer at the end of a large room full of empty rows of desks. ‘Thank you,’ I called out to him with a wave, but he didn’t look up. He was swinging on the back legs of his chair, laughing, watching a video on his phone.

  ‘All done for tonight,’ I said to Dad with a nod and a small smile. ‘Gotta come back in a week to do the pretext call.’

  We shook hands, thanking Sean, and returned to the car.

  ‘Sorry it took so long. You didn’t get bored?’ I asked Dad, fastening my seatbelt.

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Did you have a nap?’ I asked. I thought I saw something on his face then, finally.
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  ‘No,’ he said firmly, disappointed.

  I didn’t recognise myself in the rear-vision mirror. Of course my father hadn’t fallen asleep. Not every man was a monster.

  I talked to him about the pretext call. ‘I have to plan what I’m going to say to Samuel on the phone—that’s my homework for the week.’

  It was a rainy night and the city sped past, shiny and blurry through the car window. As Dad drove us home, an announcement about sexual harassment being rife in the Victorian Police Service came on the radio. My dad told me a little about the bad eggs in the police service. He’d caught one officer who had gone from one domestic partner to another to another, committing violence against each, and had been using his access to the records system to cover his tracks so that each time a woman complained it looked like the first time. Dad was rightly making the point that this officer was abusing his authority, but I also felt confused. Why was any single woman’s complaint not taken seriously just because the defendant didn’t have a record? There always has to be a first time—how many repeats were we missing because every first complaint was dismissed?

  I thought about the impending pretext call almost non-stop, on each of the seven days that followed. Sometimes with ants in my skin, sometimes with my head on the pillow opposite Vincent’s, sometimes on my hands and knees vomiting in the shower. I was on autopilot at work, but we were starting another trial and I already knew how it would go. A small child had (allegedly) been abused by a friend of the family.

  When the jury asked to watch the video evidence of the child’s testimony again, like they always did, I had four hours to draft the first lines I would say when Samuel answered the phone. Arron’s thirtieth birthday was approaching. I would call to ask Samuel for tips for a present, and then I would say I just wanted to talk about one other random little thing before we saw each other again with people around. I went through a mental Rolodex of his possible responses. I didn’t know what I’d do if he got angry.