Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  I wondered exactly how long it had been since I’d made my first complaint, and when I got home I dug through some paperwork. I found statement number one, taken when I was twenty-three, on 22 September 2015. The whole ugly mess was a month shy of its second birthday. A two-year-old human can speak a few words and dress themselves—Samuel still hadn’t even had to enter a plea.

  Kingscliff was beautiful. Vincent and I just slept in, had sex, watched Netflix, ate, had beers, watched more Netflix, ate more, and went to bed. It was a dream until I got the phone call from Dan on the fifth.

  ‘Yes, the indictment was presented this morning, and the trial against Mr Levins has been listed as Trial Number One on Monday December the eleventh in the District Court at Brisbane.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Oh, and Dan, do you have in your notes that I was previously a judge’s associate?’

  ‘Oh,’ he replied, and paused, probably scrolling through something on his screen, ‘I’ll let the legal officer know.’

  ‘Great, thanks, they’ll need to be careful about which judge the trial is allocated to.’

  ‘No worries. Got it.’

  I hung up, but still had worries. I’d mentioned that information to both my previous victim liaison officers. Didn’t I have a file? It was an upsetting phone call. I had really thought that after how well the pre-trial hearing had gone, Samuel might just plead guilty at the presentation of the charges against him. Was I being optimistic or just naive, holding out hope he would plead at every step?

  Weeks later, in October, I called to check up on Sean. I knew that he still had to do some tasks to make sure everything was ready to go to trial, and I needed him to know I was counting on him.

  ‘Everything at this stage is going ahead,’ he said. ‘The DPP were pretty surprised he didn’t plead, given his counsel indicated that if the matter was committed up to the District Court they would take “a certain course of action”, but yeah, he still might just plead on the Monday morning, you know, that happens, and hopefully this will all be over before Christmas. I suspect that’s a happy—well, not happy, but that’s a good thing for you.’

  ALL I HAD TO DO was not step in front of a bus for about four more weeks.

  Sean came to my house to serve me with my subpoena. ‘I suppose I don’t need to explain anything to you about being summoned to court,’ he said, standing wide-legged in my tiny kitchen. He handed me a pile of papers. I noticed they were held together with one of the little silver clips I used to find at home as a child when I rummaged through my father’s things, looking for loose change to buy lollies. I nodded and smiled as Sean spoke, and offered him a glass of water, while I tapped the clip with my fingernail.

  ‘So you know it’s the eleventh of December?’ he asked.

  ‘Couldn’t forget it if I tried, mate,’ I replied.

  ‘Yeah, of course, righto. And your birthday is the thirteenth, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yep. And nothing new has come up?’

  ‘No, no. It’s the same as before. No idea why this is a trial, but.’ He shrugged to finish the sentence.

  After he left I looked through the papers briefly then went to finish doing the dishes but turned the tap on too hard. Water hit the open side of a spoon and splashed up onto my face, and the shock of it set me off. I threw the plate I was holding into the sink and stormed into the bedroom, grabbing a clean bath towel and screaming into it. The yelling turned into crying, and then Vincent was holding me for a long time.

  Every time my mobile rang my stomach clenched up because I presumed it would be news about the trial. It rarely was—until the week before the trial, when it always was. Tuesday was a call from Judge, checking in with me, and helping me to make sure that none of the judges who I’d worked or interacted with would be allocated to the matter. On the Wednesday a call came through from a clerk at the DPP, asking if I was available the very next day to go into their office. I told them I was.

  It made me anxious to think of how late they’d left contacting me; maybe they had finally called because there was a problem.

  Going in the next day meant I had to write my victim impact statement that night. I should have drafted it weeks earlier, but the task was immensely frustrating and I’d abandoned it several times. In the document I needed to outline the ways I had suffered and how the offending had negatively affected my life, but in reality I was proud of how I’d spent most of my time trying to rise above it all. It felt exhausting to put into words how sad the whole thing had made me—right down to the vomiting and the self-harm—in order to try to make a judge understand. And in the end, if Samuel wasn’t convicted, the statement would just be thrown in the rubbish with no one reading it.

  I met the prosecutor, Raymond, and the young clerk, Adeline, the next afternoon in the DPP’s building in the city. We made small talk about the weather in the noisy old elevators on our way to a meeting room. They both seemed like no-nonsense people, and I was reassured by the huge document folder tucked under Raymond’s arm, covered in Post-its and bulging with pages and dividers. That’s me in there. Raymond was relaxed but authoritative, and Adeline was quick and attentive.

  ‘Well,’ Raymond said to me after the door to the meeting room shut behind us, ‘thank you for coming in. I suppose there’s a lot about this process I don’t need to explain to you.’

  ‘Yes, I’m okay with most of the court stuff.’

  ‘I’m going to be honest with you,’ he said, and I held my breath, ‘I can’t make any guarantees, but this is one of the strongest cases I’ve seen all year. I’m not expecting any surprises.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you, good, thank you.’ I put my face in my hands with relief.

  ‘I’m not even sure why this is a trial.’

  ‘People keep saying that, yes.’ I made a flourishing sweep with my right arm and announced with a fake smile, ‘And yet here we are.’

  We spoke for a few minutes about the history of the matter, and then planned where and when to meet on the Monday morning—and how I should prepare. I lost the sassiness. It was all getting very close.

  ‘I do have one last question,’ I said. ‘Do you think he’ll give evidence?’

  ‘Yes,’ Raymond said.

  ‘Should we be worried about that?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But I don’t know why he’s fighting this, unless he has something up his sleeve?’

  ‘He just seems like that kind of man.’ He shrugged and shut his folder. ‘I’m seeing more and more men like him, who think they can stand up in court and bullshit their way out of things. But they can’t.’

  I sat still for a moment, dumbstruck at Raymond’s candour. Then my face broke into a grin. I thought back to Pullman making up the story about chasing a rat and trying to catch it with his bare hands. Pullman had gone down. It was nice to hear someone in the industry—especially a man—talk about the patterns in the defendants I’d seen.

  The next morning Sean called at eight just to make sure everything was okay. Then I got a call from Arron at lunchtime when I was at a small takeaway restaurant

  ‘I’ve just found out that Samuel has contacted a bunch of our old mutual friends and asked them to give evidence for him.’

  ‘Fuck,’ I said quietly, and started sweating. My mind pinballed through the people Samuel could have called, racing from face to face of their old friends, searching my memories for the ace Samuel had up his sleeve.

  ‘Sorry to tell you on the phone.’ Arron sounded sad. ‘I just thought you should know as soon as possible.’

  ‘And what did they say?’

  ‘At least one told him to go jump, but another one said yes.’

  ‘Fuck!’ I said again, louder, and left the restaurant, people staring. ‘Thank you, I’d better call some people.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  After I’d hung up, I dialled the DPP. I was pacing around on the street outside, holding the phone against my ear with my shoulder, cracking all
my fingers.

  ‘Yeah, that’s not surprising,’ Raymond said calmly. ‘Samuel doesn’t realise that giving evidence means being open to cross-examination, though, and I’m ready for him.’

  But I was still afraid of Samuel’s barrister. His lawyers knew the whole prosecution case against him, and we had no idea what they were going to get up and say. I wouldn’t know until I’d finished giving my evidence.

  It also made me upset to think of Samuel calling people up to say I was a liar. He was still going to such lengths to fight me, and I felt insulted. What might he say about me in the witness stand? What if he called me boy-crazy? What if he got one of his mates to agree that I was just some attention-seeking little bitch?

  The night before the trial was truly hell. I was reading and re-reading my police statements, which meant reliving the incident with a deliberate, slow, meticulous accuracy. Stop, rewind—that hand there, my dress there, he said this, I did that. Slow down, play. Again. Again! I searched for gaps or inconsistencies and reassured myself of my memories.

  But I didn’t practise responses to questions. My evidence would have to appear as natural as possible. I rehearsed saying the affirmation I’d have to swear when I arrived in the courtroom, although I’d heard it so many times during my year as an associate that I knew it by heart. I’d never thought it would be me saying it.

  You wake up on the morning of your trial and you’re trying to have a shower, and the hot water conks out like it always does in your cheap old unit, and you yell at the taps, ‘Don’t you know what’s happening today!?’ But the hot water system doesn’t know. The iron doesn’t know when it spits calcium and dirty water over your white blouse. And what do you wear to court anyway? How do you do your hair? Which shade of lipstick says ‘please believe me’?

  I emerged from the bathroom and Vincent smiled.

  ‘Pretty enough to look at, but not so pretty that I might be lying?’ I asked him.

  ‘Nailed it.’

  In the back of the taxi on the way into the city I had the overwhelming sense of being limbless, or carried. Detatched. With underwater ears.

  Outside Vincent held my hand and I could barely feel it. I let him lead me. We walked across the grass in front of the courts building, the Kusama mural staring at me, unblinking. It was hot and burningly bright outside—the way I would always remember that place—the way it was when I arrived on my first day of work. Had Samuel arrived yet? Had he wondered if the eyes were looking at him?

  We stepped past the glass doors and went through security. The click of my heels on the marble sounded familiar, and the smell of the building’s air-conditioning brought back memories, but it was an alien place. I had changed so much that it did not recognise me.

  ‘Courtroom 24, level seven,’ I said to Vincent from memory, in a monotone.

  Mum and Dad were waiting for us in the open space outside all the courtrooms, and Sean was there too. I hugged my parents and shook hands with Sean.

  Raymond and Adeline arrived, and I went over to them. ‘Like I said,’ Raymond told me, seeming relaxed, ‘no surprises.’ I nodded.

  There was nothing for me to do but wait. Wait without passing out or jumping off the balcony. Mum did a great job at encouraging general chatter, and Dad went to get coffees. About an hour later a door off the side of the room opened and strangers flowed in, about fifty of them, then walked into the back of Courtroom 24.

  ‘Those are the jurors,’ I said to Mum.

  ‘All of them!? I have to talk in front of all of those people?’

  ‘No, no—twelve people will be picked out randomly from that group, and the rest move on.’

  I thought of the associate on the other side, calling the names out of the barrel, and wondered who would be challenged and who would be empanelled. Which twelve people would be deciding my fate? I didn’t tell anyone—not even Vincent—that I had still been hoping Samuel would plead guilty on the morning of the trial. The empanelment of the jury signified that he was waving a red flag, not a white one. I felt silly for having been optimistic.

  ‘They challenged all the women,’ Sean said, after emerging from the courtroom about twenty minutes later. I just laughed and shook my head. A bitter laugh. ‘But there are still four,’ he added.

  ‘Still four?’ I asked quickly.

  ‘Yep, it was pretty funny, actually. It was so obvious what they were doing, but the associate just kept pulling out women’s names and they ran out of challenges.’

  ‘So long as there are more than two,’ I said to Vincent, and he squeezed my hand, ‘they might feel confident enough to speak their minds during deliberations.’

  There was another period of waiting.

  ‘What’s happening now?’ Mum asked me.

  ‘The judge is welcoming the jury and explaining their job to them, and telling them what they can and can’t do. Like, they’re not allowed to tell other people what they hear, or look me up on the internet or try to do any investigating themselves.’

  ‘Otherwise what?’

  ‘It’ll be declared a mistrial, and we’ll all have to go back to the beginning, with a new jury.’ I stared at her. ‘And I don’t know if I can do that.’

  Everyone went quiet for a bit, and then I heard my name called. Adeline was standing by the door to the courtroom. ‘We’re ready for you.’

  My hands started shaking and I felt the pressure of tears behind my eyes. Not yet, I told myself, just get through it. I pulled open the frosted glass doors and the courtroom appeared before me: light-filled, silent, attentive, poised to receive. I bowed to the judge at the threshold of the room, not recognising his face, and caught the eye of the associate. Her face was expressionless. All her thoughts imperceptible. The bailiff stood by the witness box and I walked towards her, trying to stand up straight, my hands clasped together to try to stop the shaking.

  ‘Do you solemnly and sincerely affirm and declare that the evidence you give here today will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?’ she asked.

  ‘I do.’ I sat down and glanced over to Samuel. Do you?

  The jurors were seated against the far wall opposite me, two rows of six: a wall of everyday Australians bestowed with the divine power of truth-seeing.

  Raymond stood up. ‘Can you please state your full name for the record?’ he asked me, and it began.

  His questions led me perfectly. We stepped through the dates of my childhood, photos of the family home, Samuel’s presence in our lives. The easy parts.

  ‘And, you know why we’re here today,’ he said, his tone changing. ‘Can you please tell the court about the incident with Samuel?’

  I spoke firmly and clearly, but my body was revolting against my mind. My shoulders clenched up. I couldn’t make eye contact with anyone. I felt short of breath, and when I tried to gesture, to demonstrate Samuel’s actions to the jury, I struggled to speak and move simultaneously. The underwater ears were extreme. My stomach, by that point, was full of razors.

  I got to the end of the retelling, and Raymond had to ask a couple of follow-up questions about placement, about fingers, about whether the sun was up or down.

  ‘Your Honour, I’d now like to play the pretext phone call,’ he said to the judge.

  ‘How long does it go for?’

  ‘About forty-five minutes, your Honour.’

  ‘Well, we’ll take a morning tea-break and then come back to it,’ the judge said and stood up.

  ‘Silence, all stand,’ the bailiff quickly declared, and I stood, panicking, and looked to Raymond for guidance, but he was shuffling papers, and so I looked across to Samuel in the dock, and he was talking to his solicitor.

  The bailiff appeared beside me. ‘You can wait outside if you’d prefer,’ she said softly with a sad smile, gesturing to the door. I smoothed my skirt and walked right past Samuel and out of the room. Everyone was standing there, waiting for me.

  ‘Haven’t finished yet,’ I said to them. ‘Morning tea-break.
Then pretext, then cross-examination.’

  Vincent hugged me. I couldn’t stomach a coffee. Couldn’t make small talk anymore. I sat and watched the palm trees of Roma Street Parkland sway under the stark sunlight for twenty minutes.

  ‘The waiting is always the worst bit,’ Vincent said, and I just nodded.

  When court resumed, finally, I went back in and we were about to get started when they found they couldn’t get the CD with the recording on it to play through the courtroom speakers. We adjourned for another five minutes and I imagined what would happen if it didn’t work. We’d adjourn for the rest of the day, and I’d have to come back for cross-examination the next morning. I gripped the handles on the chair and watched the seconds tick by on the courtroom clock.

  ‘We’ve sorted it out,’ the bailiff whispered to the associate after a couple more minutes, and I felt a rush of relief. Just get it done.

  The judge came back in, the jury came back in, and we all listened to the CD. I winced at the sound of my voice—it was much louder than Samuel’s, because of the way the audio was recorded, and it was shrill and fake. I’d made myself come across so casual and chirpy, and now my nerves and wet eyes in court seemed fake.

  ‘Yeah, that’s awesome, dude!’ my voice replied to something he’d said. ‘Yeah, cool, I’m doing great!’ I tried not to squirm in my seat too much.

  In the final third of the recording, when Samuel was giving me waves of unsolicited business advice and gloating about his latest investment scheme—after he’d admitted the offending and said I wasn’t the only one—and his responses were lengthy and mine had shrunk to single words here and there, I heard some sniffling in the tiny gaps between his sentences, and it made me furious. The fire returned to my belly, pushing the nervous churning aside, and in my mind I reached back in time to myself in that room, to that terrified young woman who had run straight into the fire, and I thought, You can do it. And I saw her sitting there, silently crying between her chipper responses, and I imagined her saying it back to me, You can do it too.