Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  As the days passed I became more anxious that he would deny it all and be offended at the heinousness of my accusations. I fell asleep with his voice in my mind telling me that it had been me imagining the events all along. Maybe he would yell, tell me he wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole, that I had been boy-crazy and was now ruining his life with a sick fabrication. A big stone of dread sat in the bottom of my belly, and it was there when I woke up, before I had even cleared my thoughts enough to remember why it was there. I couldn’t vomit it out, god knows I tried.

  Sometimes when I saw Vincent I would smile and be happy despite the dread. I went to his house. I asked him to come to mine. He muffled the scary voices, somehow; it was as if he extended a hand to me and, when I took it, I was carried to a peaceful place, and we sat on top of something, above things, and achieved a momentary clarity, and a respite. For a long time on either side of that week, but during that week especially, he felt like the only connection I had to an Earth where I wasn’t a fully loathsome thing. Left alone I would incessantly write, still drafting and redrafting the phone call, working myself into a nervous state, convinced I could somehow prepare enough for what was to come. Vincent was the only thing that could cut through all that.

  One afternoon I stubbed my toe on the corner of my bed. I gasped from the shock of the pain but then tears poured out of me and wouldn’t stop.

  ‘I’m so afraid,’ I said as Vincent pressed me into his shoulder, holding me, ‘I’m so, so afraid.’

  He said I was brave, and he said that he was proud of me, and he said that he loved me, and I believed him.

  ON THE WEEKEND BETWEEN STATEMENT and pretext call I went out for dinner with an old friend. We’d made the plan months earlier and I felt I couldn’t cancel, but I wasn’t optimistic about having a good time. As it turned out we shared a bottle of wine and stayed long after the meal was done. We were at a nice restaurant in the city on an alfresco patio, a warm and clear spring evening, and we had plenty of hilarious stories to catch up on. At about 10 p.m. we parted and I began the walk home to my place in Paddington. The wine had softened my nerves and I was actually looking up and around me as I walked. I even stopped to get a scoop of chocolate gelato. I remember thinking to myself, This is the first time you’ve been happy and relaxed in a while, make sure you don’t get a tension-release migraine.

  Walking past the courts building, I waited to cross at the lights. A single car slowed on the amber light, stopping across from me. Its windows were down and the kind of rock music I love bled into the empty, quiet street. The driver hung his arm out on the side closest to me, and the one riding shotgun flicked a cigarette butt, and when the green man flashed up I began to cross the road and the driver wolf-whistled at me. I ignored it, stared straight ahead and kept walking, but when I was directly in front of the bonnet he yelled something out at me. Without looking I gave him the finger and turned to the left to reach the footpath on the other side of the road, when my peripheral vision tweaked and I saw the man in the passenger side lifting his whole torso partially out of the window. We were less than two metres apart.

  ‘You fucking bitch!’ he screamed out, so loudly that spittle nearly hit me.

  I kept my head straight and tried to just walk leisurely, then I ducked behind a bus stop nearby and fumbled around in my bag for my phone. The car screeched as it took off in the opposite direction. I called Vincent and as the phone rang I looked up and out, my heart thumping, and spotted security cameras all around. Something tweaked in my mind about the angles of the cameras directed toward the Roma Street Parkland.

  ‘Hey,’ Vincent’s voice came through the line.

  ‘Hey, are you busy?’

  ‘Not particularly, no.’

  ‘I just…’ I paused—was it silly of me to have called him? ‘I just was walking home and these guys yelled at me from their car, but really angrily, like, they shouted at me, and I was so close to the car it scared the shit out of me. He called me a fucking bitch.’

  ‘Have they gone?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, they drove on, I just, I’m just,’ I sighed, ‘I’m right beside the part of the Roma Street Parkland where a woman got repeatedly raped.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘It was Megan’s trial earlier this year. Can you stay on the line for a bit? Chat to me until I get home?’

  ‘Yeah sure,’ he said. ‘What do you wanna talk about?’

  ‘Anything. Regular people stuff. Happy, boring stuff.’

  I walked past the parklands to get to work the next morning and found Megan in her office to tell her about the incident.

  ‘It was worse because I kept thinking about your trial.’

  ‘I know what you mean. That’s where the Korean woman was murdered a couple of years ago too, in a different part of the parklands, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, true. The murder trial for that French girl found dead near Kurilpa Bridge is starting soon as well.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Megan said.

  ‘She was raped too, the French girl. I didn’t realise.’

  ‘Hard to keep track of them all, hey.’

  That day Judge had to sentence a defendant with a complex personal history. We were up in chambers afterwards and Judge complained to me again about defence making submissions that their clients were of ‘below average intelligence’.

  I sympathised. ‘I also hate it when they say their clients have depression without going into it,’ I added. ‘Are they just unhappy? Have they been diagnosed? Is it related to trauma—is it a major depressive disorder?’

  ‘Mm.’ He nodded.

  ‘If they’re not specific then how do we know the defendants aren’t just kind of sad? I mean, nobody is 110 per cent happy every single day.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that, you seem to be!’ Judge said with a big, genuine smile.

  I just stood there with my mouth open.

  I asked my mum to take me to the police station for the pretext call because I felt as if I needed to spread my inconvenience around as thinly on each person as possible. Mum would hold me if I cried, too, and I knew that I would cry the moment I was allowed to. The fear was illogical, like that of a dog in a thunderstorm trembling and whining under a bed. I had been snapping at people all week, inconsolable, unable to operate with the mental acuity required to think about the situation rationally and calm myself. I was terrified of something nobody else could see or understand. But I trusted Mum would love me the same no matter how that evening went. I didn’t feel guilty making her wait—not because she’d brought a book so that I wouldn’t feel bad, but because somewhere inside her I knew she understood I was trying to fight a great big powerlessness. If I was called a liar and a bitch that evening, she would still have my back. We rode together in her little white Daihatsu like we were driving a tank into battle.

  A tape recorder was ready on Sean’s desk. He said that for legal reasons the recorder couldn’t touch or be attached to my phone, but that he was allowed to turn it on and then leave the room, and that if the call was on speaker phone it would be recorded. I hadn’t realised I would be alone in the room, and that new information unbalanced me.

  ‘Do you have Samuel’s phone number?’ Sean asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, and he turned the recording device on, gave the date and who we were, and then abandoned me.

  I was sweating through my blouse from the nerves but shivering from the rattling aircon. I dialled the number Arron had given me, pushed the speaker-phone button, scrunched my eyes up tight, and waited for the grenade to go off.

  It rang and rang and I willed the device to go straight to voicemail so I could run away and hide somewhere.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Sam!’ I said brightly. ‘It’s Bri here, how you doing?’

  I was sitting on the edge of my chair, my legs crossed, my hands clasped on my lap under the table. I stared at a worn spot in the vinyl tabletop beside the phone and dipped into a certain mental state I’ve only ever
accessed when particularly drunk or after running too hard for too long. It’s a sense of being underwater, with audio goggles, shallow breaths and some dizziness.

  Samuel and I exchanged the pleasantries I had spent so many hours painstakingly perfecting, then we stepped through fifteen minutes of birthday-present conversation. The plan was working. His answers fell into one of my flowcharts of predicted response patterns. I asked him where he was, what he was up to. As expected, he was eager to talk about himself and spent some time explaining he was in America for an exciting new investment scheme. It was a get-rich-quick idea, he was proud, and I felt ready to pounce on his unsuspecting ego. I said his name a lot so that he felt positive, because everyone’s favourite word is their name. He was telling me how many millions of dollars he was about to make on a new deal, and with each stupid sentence that tumbled out of that pathetic dickhead’s mouth, I grew angrier.

  ‘So, um, the other thing I wanted to talk to you about quickly before we see each other again at the party with all the people around,’ I said casually, the way I’d done it a hundred times in my drills.

  ‘Yeah?’ he replied, but it was a bit too slow and a bit too quiet. He delayed a fraction of a second before he said it and without enough of a questioning tone. He didn’t wonder what I was going to ask next; he knew what I was calling about.

  My heart was pounding and I heard it beating in my underwater ears, and I knew in that instant, somehow, that the question now was whether or not he suspected I was sitting in a police station beside a recording device and with a detective outside the door.

  ‘It’s about that thing that happened when we were kids,’ I said.

  ‘Ahh,’ his voice had changed, ‘when we were kids?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ He was an awful liar.

  ‘The thing on the trampoline,’ I replied. This was it. His reply could change my entire life. The way I trusted my own memories.

  ‘Ah, yep, that thing,’ he said.

  Something split open inside me; my hands, flung to my mouth, were ice-cold. The same involuntary adrenalin responses from when he’d molested me set in. A clasp had popped open and a dark, ghoulish thing slipped out and into that tiny room. The gross creature responsible for the past decade of degenerate triggers was no longer within me; it didn’t belong there inside me, it never had, it belonged to the man I was speaking to on the phone.

  ‘I guess, I mean, I’ve just been thinking about it a bit lately and kind of wanted to clear the air, you know?’

  ‘Yeah, right, sure,’ he said. ‘I’m just in a room full of people at the moment.’

  He was suspicious, or perhaps nervous, and I could feel that he might hang up if I didn’t keep things calm and casual.

  I pushed it. ‘Can you pop outside, just for a minute?’ This was the most obvious time I had ever been responsible for making sure a situation with a man didn’t escalate despite how terrified I was. I’d had twenty-four years of practice with losers at parties and inappropriate colleagues, though. I knew how to calm him, the words to make sure no egos were bruised, how to slip into channels of his mind where I could be underestimated. I hadn’t even practised that part—I didn’t need to—it’s just a muscle women know how to flex. My voice lilted; I shrugged and put my chin in my hand even though he wasn’t in the room. ‘I’d like to just, you know, put it behind us or something.’

  I communicated to him: I’m sorry to bother you, please just indulge me this, and then this silly thing will be dealt with, and you will be fine.

  ‘Just give me a sec, let me just have a look and see if that’s possible.’

  ‘Cool, thanks, Sam.’

  I always do my homework.

  Phrases Samuel used on that phone call have been seared into my brain, and they’ll sit there forever, his voice like a branding iron. He had always kept his sister at a distance because he was ‘subconsciously’ afraid he’d ‘do something’ to her. He had been abused when he was a boy, by an older male relative, and never told anyone.

  ‘I’m not someone that becomes a victim,’ he said quite firmly. ‘I’m assertive.’

  He had a few other reasons that he was glad he’d never told anyone about his abuse, and they touched my own insecurities in an uncanny way.

  ‘If I bring this up my mum and dad are gonna get really fucking upset. So why would I do that? It’s over. It doesn’t affect my life anymore, but it would really harm my parents if it came out at all,’ he said.

  Also, he was sorry. He’d been caught doing inappropriate but not-really-serious things to girls in primary school—looking up their skirts and such—but nothing came of it. He said all the things he’d done were just opportunistic, that he was just experimenting somehow, or going around trying to prove he wasn’t gay. He promised me he’d never ‘pushed’ anything non-consensual with a grown woman. He said that since reaching adulthood and having ‘normal’ relationships with women, he’d always treated them well.

  The worst part came when he said, ‘Yeah, I did it like two or three other times,’ and I tapped out. I should have prodded him for specifics, tried to get more incriminating details out of him, dates in particular, but I couldn’t. The words just didn’t come; I’d used up all my bravery.

  After that I wasn’t even fuelling the conversation with questions—he just didn’t stop talking. He asked me what I was doing with my life. I said that I was working as a judge’s associate but also doing some writing. The final fifteen minutes of the police tape are just him giving me advice about entrepreneurialism and the publishing industry. He told me how he’d been thinking, lately, of how he’d be a good literary agent. He was already representing another girl he knew who wrote sci-fi books and they weren’t that good but he’d get someone to buy at least one. He said I should write some kind of fantasy, nerd stuff, because that sells easily. I mumbled some single-word responses, wanting the ordeal to end, but he didn’t stop. I was exhausted and still afraid that if I didn’t play it cool he would jump through the phone and get me somehow.

  His latest business scheme was apparently about to come good.

  ‘Like, you know, I’m not really supposed to talk about what I’m doing because we’re actually making a lot of money, but oh well, can I tell you a secret you can’t tell anyone?’ he asked me with a cheeky tone in his voice.

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  ‘You’ve been pretty good at keeping a secret so far.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Um, that was a bit below the belt, but oh look that’s a pun too, ah, what I was going to say is that on Friday, by Friday, I should be about two million dollars richer.’

  When he finally finished a sentence about how the publishing industry was changing and I should self-publish to save money, I could barely sit up straight, and I told him I had to go and that I’d see him at Arron’s thirtieth. I said something about no hard feelings and he was pleasant saying goodbye, and I fumbled trying to hang up the phone.

  Perhaps he felt a certain weight had been lifted off him since he’d had the opportunity to apologise. Perhaps he felt a bit good about himself.

  I opened the door and Sean looked up at me expectantly. ‘Finished?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘How’d you go?’

  ‘He admitted it,’ I said, and burst into tears. My knees went from under me and I fell backward into my chair.

  Sean tried to ask about details but quickly realised I was in a state. ‘Do you want to go back downstairs to your mum?’

  ‘Yes!’ I cried out to him, and he helped me down the hall, and I took the steps one at a time, and he held the door open for me as I fell through it and straight into my mother’s arms. She rocked me like she’d done when I was a child, stroking my hair, pushing the side of her face against my forehead while I wailed until I tired myself out. I wet her blouse with tears and snot for a long time, and she kissed me until I quietened.

  ‘How did it go?’ she asked me gently. Sean had been waiting
quietly in the doorway.

  ‘The operation was a complete success,’ I said, with a dead-eyed smile, wiping snot from my nose. ‘He said he did it.’

  Later that evening when Mum dropped me home, she said to me, ‘I know this thing is horrible, but promise me you won’t let it ruin your life. You have such a wonderful, incredible life. You’re such a fantastic girl. I know it’s sad and you’re allowed to be sad, but promise me you won’t let him win. If you let this get to you too much, he wins.’

  I look back to that version of myself with some pity and admiration. I collapsed that night and stayed down—on some kind of emotional level—for weeks after, thinking that the worst was over, but I didn’t realise it was only the beginning. Now I wonder if Samuel realised that on the phone, having just admitted to abusing me, he went on to mansplain my own career choice to me. Not for the first time I felt grateful for him being such a shit human—the longer you spent with Samuel the easier it was to hate him. Aside from everything else, all of it, the thing that got me through the next two years was his voice in my head:

  ‘You weren’t the only one.’

  I replayed his words and the sound of his voice in my mind whenever I considered dropping my complaint. I inspected each phrase like a puzzle piece, pulling it out of my memory and turning it over, and when I put the picture together as best I could the truth was clear to me: I might have been the first woman to make that call, but there were other girls, multiple other girls, and he had been waiting for one of us to call. Either I got there first and he was ready, or he’d received a similar call previously and had time to polish his response.

  Days later, once I’d relayed the contents of the conversation to Vincent, he questioned Samuel’s honesty with a single word: ‘Bullshit.’