Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  I was furious and bowed to the court before barging through the heavy double doors and storming out toward the elevators.

  Carter had also asked for Samuel’s presence to be excused at the next court date, meaning that not only had nothing happened just then, but that nothing was going to happen on the next court date either. There was no way he would enter a plea if he didn’t even plan to show up.

  ‘I thought I was done having to deal with that man’s complete incompetence,’ I fumed. ‘How is he still fucking things up?’

  ‘Who?’ Vincent asked, catching up to me.

  ‘Sean! He literally cannot do his job properly. Why isn’t the brief complete? I’m a human being, this is my life, this is another four weeks of my life.’

  ‘Yeah, he really sucks, doesn’t he.’

  ‘I can’t believe this. I want to punch Sean more than I want to punch Samuel.’ I was itchy with anger.

  ‘Want me to buy some cigarettes?’ Vincent asked. We’d been talking about quitting.

  ‘Yes please,’ I replied, exhaling. ‘I’m allowed to smoke today.’

  ‘Yes, yes you are.’

  We got coffees along with the cigarettes and sat on a cement retaining wall in the city smoking, talking about how funny Magistrates Court is.

  ‘Mags hears 90-something per cent of all criminal matters,’ I said. ‘I think Judge had something to do with that policy. Making sure they can deal with way more at that level. I guess it just makes things a little jumbled sometimes.’

  ‘I can’t believe I have to do property and commercial law in PLT but nobody has to do criminal law,’ Vincent said. ‘Most people, in a normal life, if they come into contact with the law or the courts it’ll be Mags Court and they need to know the basics of criminal offences.’

  ‘Chickpeas,’ I said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘They teach you the areas of law where the money is.’ I took a drag, watching the suits pass us to-and-fro. ‘You get a lot more money in one conveyancing gig than in repping a dozen shitty little DUIs. It’s chickpeas—the whole industry is chickpeas.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘That’s why I have Sean. And three weeks after three weeks after three weeks. I’m not the chickpeas, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  I called Sean when we got home. I wanted to ask about the source of the delay. I needed to know if the issue was just some small admin thing, or if there was more actual legwork to do. Had he just forgotten to photocopy some pages in defence’s copy of the folder, or made a few too many typos? Or had he overlooked a critical witness or bungled interviews? Perhaps all of the above. He didn’t pick up so I left a message and decided to just try to get on with my life.

  Vincent and I had some beers on the deck, chatting, and later, when I undid the buttons on his shirt we started kissing. When he told me I was beautiful I believed him. That was the first day I really felt as though I could keep living—properly living not placeholder living—while this chapter was still open and unfinished. When I lay in Vincent’s arms, naked in bed, and we joked about how sweaty we were, I was genuinely happy, not fake-it-until-you-make-it happy. The wound hadn’t healed but it didn’t inhibit happiness the way it had for the past year.

  Vincent coming to court with me forced me to acknowledge some level of continuity. The legal case wasn’t severable; I was the same person there and at home. It couldn’t be cauterised. The duality was the new reality, and I would never have seen that for myself alone. I was molested as a child and still grew into a sexual woman. In seeing myself through his eyes, through those rose-tinted glasses, even four years into our relationship, I found a sense of contentedness that wasn’t predicated on closure. Every single day, Vincent was the reason I didn’t put things on pause in that chapter of my life. How could I have put him, or my love for him, on pause? How different everything would have looked without him. How bleak.

  Weeks later I remarked that I was grateful he was still attracted to me even now I was ‘flabby’.

  ‘I think I like you even more when you’re flabby,’ he said, kissing me and putting his hands on me. I grumbled. ‘Not that you’re even close to actually being flabby,’ he clarified and paused, ‘I think maybe this is the size you’re supposed to be, and everything else is just you starving yourself.’ Then he kissed me and left the room.

  A few weeks later we moved into our new home, a unit with just the two of us, and a few weeks after that I found him at his computer and said to him, ‘This is the first place I’ve ever lived in, or even stayed in for more than a few nights, in my whole life, where I haven’t vomited up a single dinner.’

  ‘Wow.’

  I nodded. ‘I’m happy here.’

  ‘This is a happy house.’

  ‘Our happy house.’

  It was an old square house split into two long, rectangular units, each about three metres wide, and the paint job was awful, and there were chooks out the back that belonged to our neighbours, and I was in love with it. I printed out a photo of Vincent and me at Officeworks—a picture of us kissing at my graduation—and put it in an Ikea frame and hung it on the wall over the old kitchen sink.

  One afternoon, shortly after we’d moved in, when Vincent was out with friends, I walked outside and into the backyard. Palm trees swayed in the February breeze and the chooks clucked, and in the space between the back of the house and the chook pen, the spot on the grass where I stood, I reached up and spun the wire arms of the Hills hoist. It was the biggest one I’d ever seen. The wire was strong against my fingertips, and it was heavy but it didn’t have the rusty squeak I was expecting. I thought back to that first case I had proofread for Judge two years earlier and wondered where that girl was now. I spun the iron arms again and sat on the grass, squinting up into the sun as the shadows passed over my limbs. Which girl was I wondering about? The girl who had been tied to the Hills hoist, or the other girls Samuel had interfered with, or my old self? What had we all done in two years? Were they all still alive? I longed to reach out to them, closing my eyes, and imagined extending my thoughts to hit theirs somehow. I thought: You can do it.

  At the next court date in the first week of March, I wore a plain black dress and when I approached the bench to ask about the matter of Levins they offered me the file, presuming I was Samuel’s counsel. I got bumped between courtrooms three times, panicking on each trip that in the brief time it took me to get from one courtroom to the other I would miss the mention. The third time I approached the bench and asked about Levins, a different young man tried to give me the file.

  ‘Oh, you’re the victim?’ he said, confused.

  ‘The complainant,’ I said, correcting him.

  Eventually, after several hours, the matter was heard last because Samuel’s representatives just hadn’t shown up. A man arrived and announced himself as the town agent: a cheap stand-in for the actual barrister. The prosecutor announced the matter and it was all over in under two minutes. Some of the holes in the brief had been filled, a couple of others hadn’t; they were waiting on the investigating officer to file the rest of the evidence. In my handwritten notes, FUCK YOU SEAN punctures the paper.

  ‘Adjourned for two weeks,’ the magistrate announced. What a win! Two weeks instead of four felt like a triumph. ‘Nine a.m. on Monday 20 March.’

  I flipped through to the date in my diary: Admission.

  I wouldn’t be able to attend the next Magistrates Court mention because I would be across the grassy lawn in the Supreme Court being admitted as a lawyer. The coincidence surpassed irony and landed in absurdity.

  On the bus home I thought about the paperwork I still had to file, and some deadlines, and about what I would have for dinner. I felt some small, pleasant surprise when my go card had more money than I’d expected, and so when the clock tower struck its long notes I marvelled at just how recently I had crumpled on the same streets. The thought of progress pleased me even more. I was disappointed, but my optimism for an outcome was sh
ifting and hardening into something else. Each adjournment came with less let-down, less stress. Life was less and less parcelled into four-week arcs of hope and disappointment and denial.

  One morning the following week when I needed to drop some paperwork into the Supreme Court registry for my application to be a lawyer, I saw a flurry of cameras and people milling around outside the building.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ I asked a man standing behind the news truck.

  ‘The bikie who killed his girlfriend just got sentenced,’ he replied.

  I kept my head down and passed the crowds. Women were speaking in front of cheap-looking banners, and the men had wiry beards and sunglasses. While I waited for my number to be called inside at the registry, I read about the bikie story on my phone.

  The couple had been driving when the man grabbed the steering wheel from the passenger’s seat and crashed the car into the side of the road, then left the vehicle, went around to her side of the wreckage, and punched her until she died.

  I found it difficult to imagine how someone could ever be that angry. I had good reason to be angry: I had been wronged, and the man who wronged me continued to prolong my pain, and apart from smacking my own legs during the family trip to the Barossa, the only time I had ever so much as raised my voice was alone in the car out in the sticks once, banging my fists on the steering wheel with nobody around.

  Comments on the article questioned why he’d done it. People always want to know why. Defence barristers tiptoe around the question: ‘Why on earth would he do this?’ and the tough thing for the prosecutors is that it’s rarely an easy story like stolen money or a love triangle. People of sound mind do horrible things because they want to, because they’re not worried about the consequences, and because they place their wants and needs above those of others. There is no great conspiracy.

  Samuel didn’t molest me because someone touched him when he was young. He didn’t molest me because of anything external to himself. He did it because in that moment on that trampoline he wanted to, and because he completely disregarded my thoughts and feelings on the matter. The first part is easy. I know why he wanted to: sexual exploration and gratification. The cycle of abuse may have been a contributing factor to his desire to interfere with me but it didn’t force his hand. What was far more troubling and mysterious was his reckoning with the latter part of the equation: me. Why didn’t he think about how it would affect me? To molest a child is to completely disregard their humanity. Their personal and physical autonomy. To commit irreparable damage to a still-soft, still-forming mind.

  I also read the sentencing submissions of the bikie murder case on my phone. The man was ‘sorry’. Samuel was ‘sorry’ too. Neither would be sorry if they hadn’t been caught, for the same justification they’d used, perhaps subconsciously, to act in a wholly selfish manner in the first place—it is rare that we behave truly abhorrently to people we consider our equals. The law allows us to hit our dogs and our children because they fall under our dominion. We are in control of them. The language of ‘necessary discipline’ applied to women until very recently too.

  I looked out the window to the right of me, to Roma Street Parkland. Race was an extra layer difficult for me to fathom. Where was she now, that Aboriginal woman whose community resented her speaking to the police after she’d been brutally raped? What monumental strength she must have shown.

  The paperwork went through and—much to Judge’s relief—my admission date rolled around. I was putting lipstick on in the mirror and stepping through the process that would take place at court, calming my nerves. It was such a different kind of nervousness, but it was still in my belly—excited nerves instead of dread. Butterflies. Part of me was tempted to duck across to the Magistrates Court first in case my matter was mentioned before I needed to run to the Supreme Court at 10 a.m., but I was almost certain my matter wouldn’t be heard within the first hour of the day. My presence wouldn’t make a difference anyway: Vincent was the only one who knew about the scheduling overlap, and he’d offered to sit at the mention in my place.

  ‘No way,’ I’d said, kissing him. ‘One of these things is much more important than the other. I want you in my life at the good bits.’

  I looked good and I felt good. When Judge arrived to where my family and I waited outside the Banco Court, we hugged and I introduced him to my brother and grandfather, as he already knew my mother, father and partner. They were all there for me.

  It was an achievement to be going for admission in the first session of the day because they’re arranged in order of graduating grade point averages, and I felt like a big deal. My name was read aloud and I was referenced as Judge’s previous associate, and we nodded at each other across the room in front of the crowd, and I felt proud of myself. After the swearing-in ceremony my family and I went to morning tea together with Judge and the woman who had moved my admission. It was custom that the newly minted lawyer take everyone out as a sign of gratitude for their support over the years.

  ‘So how will you write about today?’ Judge asked me as we all walked past the Magistrates Court to a cab rank, and I laughed louder than I should have.

  I wanted to tell him about the absurdity of it all. That my matter might be being heard at that exact moment, in a building I could reach out and touch. I wanted to tell him that I felt proud of myself for being able to enjoy the day despite the thought that Samuel might have more reason than usual to be in that area of the city. And I hadn’t told anyone my secret nervousness that Samuel would somehow find my application for admission and oppose it, as any member of the public is entitled to do. I’d played out in my mind, in the days prior, what would happen if he showed up at court to make a scene, ‘objecting’ like you can do at a wedding.

  ‘With much champagne,’ I said to Judge, and we all laughed.

  Sometimes it’s easiest to let them underestimate you.

  The next day I called Sean to find out what I’d missed. I didn’t really expect much from him, and those expectations were met.

  ‘I don’t understand why Samuel’s dragging this out so much,’ I said to Sean, after he gave me the short update.

  ‘Yeah, look, I think he would have just been expecting it all to have gone away by now.’

  ‘And he’s deliberately found a barrister who used to be a cop. It’s so fucking, I don’t know, it’s—’

  ‘He’s a bit of a prick, actually,’ Sean said.

  ‘Carter?’

  ‘Yeah, well, I mean, I should say, he’s not the friendliest gentleman barrister I’ve had to deal with.’

  I laughed loudly, and Sean and I exchanged pleasantries before saying goodbye. At least he was honest.

  I put the phone down and picked up my certificate of admission. It had been spitting rain on the way home, and a blotch sat at the bottom right-hand side of the big red seal on the page. The night before I’d felt disappointed by the imperfection, but with time to reflect I’d decided it was fitting. I didn’t fit in that scene—something was a little amiss—but I’d still get the paper framed. I could have been a hotshot lawyer if I’d wanted to, and that thought alone was enough permission for me to leave it behind.

  One day the next month I got a letter in the mail with a government seal. It was an information pack about being the ‘victim of a crime’ in Queensland. It had the phone number of my victim liaison officer, Rhys, and so I called it thinking he might have more information than Sean. He said that after all the Magistrates Court stuff, if the DPP decided to continue with the matter, it would take several months for things to reach the District Court.

  ‘How long is a long time?’ I asked.

  ‘Our guidelines are to aim for four months from committal, but it can take up to six months for us to create the indictment to then be presented.’

  I thanked him for his time, hung up, and screamed into a cushion for a while.

  The next mention was listed for 10 April, and I didn’t ask Vincent to come with me unti
l the night before. We were in the kitchen doing dinner dishes.

  ‘Do you think he’s going to plead?’ he asked me with a tone that suggested he didn’t understand why I wanted his company all of a sudden.

  ‘No, I’ve given up on thinking about that anytime soon. He’s not even going to be arraigned until it gets up to the District Court. But I think he might be there. Some stuff Sean told me on the phone made me think that tomorrow they’re going to list it for a committal hearing.’

  ‘Right.’ He put a wet dish down on the drying rack slowly but wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘Which makes me think he might be there. Or that at least his actual barrister will be there.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Which is why I’m a bit nervous about it, I guess.’ I was wringing the tea towel in my hands.

  ‘Okay, well, I have an oral presentation for my thesis at 2 p.m. that I need to prepare for in the morning,’ he said, trailing off slightly.

  ‘Of course, yeah, it’s my fault for asking you so late.’

  He held me for a long time, kissing my face, and when he left the room I stood in the same position until my feet hurt, and then I poured myself a large, warm glass of the Jameson my brother had given me as an admission present, and sat with it in the bottom of the shower. I thought a lot about vomiting, touching my fingers to my lips, but I didn’t. When the hot water ran out I turned the taps off and lay in the tub until the Jameson ran out. When I was finally shivering from the cold I got up, swaying, dried myself, lay in bed, and thought a lot about cutting, but didn’t. I could have—I had closed the bedroom door and taken sewing scissors with me, and I’d poured myself more Jameson. Vincent was at the other end of the unit gaming online with friends. I wrote awful things about myself in my journal and cried. How can you be so disgusting and fat? You are taking up time and resources from people who really need the system. This is all one big ego exercise.