Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  But then the recording ended and Carter stood up, and the cross-examination began.

  In the year leading up to the trial, I’d been reassured by the thought that the only real question to be answered was about the date of the offending. I had told Anna and Vincent that Samuel’s admissions in the pretext meant he wasn’t denying the offending itself. The legal officer at the Magistrates Court pre-trial hearing even told me that age was the only question. Just that weekend I’d said to myself, At least the jury won’t think I’m making it all up.

  But then, in court, a few questions into Carter’s cross-examination, he said, ‘I put it to you that nothing else happened after Samuel touched you the first time.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I put it to you that Samuel only ever touched you with his finger, and only once, and that’s what he was referring to on the phone.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘And that the second allegation is a fabrication.’

  ‘No, I remember it.’

  Carter’s questions continued. Couldn’t Samuel have gone to a more secluded part of the yard if he wanted to do something so serious? Couldn’t he have waited until nightfall? Hadn’t my brother only just gone inside the house?

  Then the questions moved to my memory of the dates, and of the location of the trampoline, and went on and on and on.

  Finally the judge interrupted. ‘I don’t mean to rush you at all, Mr Carter, but we do need to break for lunch soon. How much longer will you be?’

  My chest was in a vice. I couldn’t go out and come back again. Not there.

  ‘Only five or ten minutes, your Honour,’ Carter replied.

  ‘Well then, I’m sure Ms Lee would prefer to finish?’ the judge said, looking to me.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  And with that nudge, that endpoint in sight, I made it through.

  I pushed out the courtroom doors and burst into tears.

  ‘Are you finished?’ Vincent asked me.

  ‘It’s done.’

  Raymond came out a couple of minutes later. I hadn’t finished crying. He gestured to a small private conference room and asked, ‘Can the two of us have a chat?’ I must have looked terrified.

  ‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ Vincent said, pushing me gently on the shoulder. I followed Raymond into the conference room and closed the door behind me.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘that went just about as well as it could have.’

  ‘But he’s denying the second count!’

  Raymond shrugged. ‘It just makes him look like a liar. The details of your account have never changed. I don’t see why the jury would think you lied about the second count. No, it’s fine. You should be very proud of yourself.’

  Mum, Dad, Vincent and I left the courts building together to go for lunch, and I caught sight of Samuel across the grass at The Coffee Club beside the Kusama mural. Vincent had his arm around me on one side, and my mother was holding my hand on the other side, and my dad was close behind us. Samuel was alone but for his solicitor—the man he was paying thousands of dollars.

  We went to a small restaurant nearby but I couldn’t eat anything. I just had a cold, sweet apple juice.

  After the lunchbreak my mum gave evidence, and then Dylan arrived and gave evidence, and then Sean went in. Hours ticked by and in my mind I was replaying, already, moments from the cross-examination.

  In the mid-afternoon the prosecution case closed and the court took another short break. When it resumed I waited, my eyes trained on the door; I was holding out hope Samuel wouldn’t give evidence. No such luck.

  ‘He literally can’t go any lower,’ I said to Vincent another hour later. ‘He’s denying the second count and he’s running a defence.’

  At half past four the judge called for an adjournment and sent everyone home. Raymond, Adeline and Sean came out of the courtroom and we all stood over to one side as Samuel and his team exited.

  ‘He’s a very combative witness,’ Sean said to me, ‘answering questions with questions. He doesn’t come across very well.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked, everyone listening now.

  ‘Raymond asked him something and his reply was, “That’s a personal question, I don’t have to answer that.”’

  We all murmured in anger and disgust.

  ‘And you’re allowed to listen,’ I said to Sean, ‘even though you’re a witness for the prosecution?’

  Raymond answered, ‘Yes, sorry, I presumed you knew—you’re allowed to listen now that the prosecution case is closed. I’m in the middle of cross-examining Samuel, so you can catch the end of it tomorrow morning.’

  I nodded. ‘Good.’

  Vincent and I got a beer on our way home. With my part done I was feeling a bit better, or at least like I’d done my best. We spoke about who Samuel could possibly call on to give evidence for him, and I talked about how I could have lied.

  ‘I could have said all kinds of things. I could have said that I remembered he did it after 9/11, and then he would have been on trial as a seventeen-year-old and sentenced as an adult. I could have said I remembered my second dog, Snoopy, playing with us, and Samuel would have been seventeen. I could have said I somehow definitely remembered being in Grade Seven, making me twelve and him eighteen. I could have lied in so many different ways to get him held accountable at an older age.’ I took a gulp of my beer. ‘But at least I know that I was honest and did my best, and that if he gets acquitted it won’t be me who failed, it will be the system failing me.’

  I woke up the next morning a lot angrier because I was a lot more scared.

  ‘You’ve done the hard part,’ Vincent kept saying, but it was a different kind of scared. The day before I’d been afraid of having to give evidence and be cross-examined. Now I was afraid that Samuel would be acquitted.

  We arrived at the courts building a few minutes early and went straight inside, up the elevators and into the courtroom, where we took seats in the corner at the back. I had a straight line of vision to the dock where Samuel would soon be sitting, and also to the witness box where he was due to finish being cross-examined. He entered a couple of minutes later, not looking at me, and when he sat down I stared at the back of his neck. I put you there. At least if he got off I’d have the satisfaction of seeing him relinquish control to the justice department during the trial.

  Mum and Dad arrived, then Sean, then all the counsel, and it started again.

  Carter kept glancing at me. Right before the judge was about to return, I saw him go over to Raymond. ‘I’ve never seen this before—shouldn’t she have to wait outside?’ he asked, frustrated, or perhaps nervous. I didn’t know I was allowed to watch because I had never seen a complainant do it before. Carter mustn’t have either. I didn’t hear Raymond’s reply, but he was still calm and Carter was not, and I did not flinch from his gaze.

  ‘Samuel got to sit there and listen while he called me a liar,’ I whispered to Vincent. ‘Now it’s my turn.’

  Samuel’s lawyers had probably advised him to be a bit calmer, but it was obvious that he was angry underneath. I sat up straight and put on a calm, unaffected face, and stared right at him. He didn’t look at me. Raymond was challenging him on his claims that he’d had no idea that his actions were ‘wrong’.

  ‘If you didn’t know what you were doing was wrong, why did you wait until Arron had left, until you were alone with the complainant?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And on the phone you said you’d been in trouble at school previously for touching girls’ underpants. Are you telling the court that even after those incidents and being called into the principal’s office for them, you still didn’t understand that touching a little girl in that area was wrong?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You didn’t know it was wrong?’

  ‘Well, inappropriate, maybe.’

  ‘Inappropriate, maybe?’

  I got the sense Raymond was keeping Samuel in the box for as long as he could, letting th
e jury see as much of him as they could. It was always a good sign to see a prosecutor feel comfortable with a defendant giving evidence.

  When they’d finished, Samuel’s sister called into court from where she lived in the UK. She stated her name for the record, then confirmed the address of where she’d always lived with Samuel and their parents in Yeronga.

  Carter asked her just one question. ‘Did Samuel ever act in an inappropriate, sexual way with you?’

  ‘No,’ she replied.

  ‘Thank you, Ms Levins,’ he said.

  Raymond stood up. ‘No questions, your Honour.’

  And the call was disconnected.

  ‘The final defence witness, your Honour, is Mr Joshua Forbes,’ Carter said, and I shifted in my seat. Josh had been Samuel’s friend, and he’d visited our house several times to hang out with Arron, but I thought that was when the boys were all much older. I was in high school by then, I thought.

  Josh’s evidence was about the trampoline. He said it was ‘always moving around’, and I started sweating. He was undermining the only thing we had to pinpoint a date—and therefore age—for Samuel.

  In cross-examination, Raymond only asked Josh a single question. ‘Could it be the case that the trampoline was moved in the years much later than 2000?’

  ‘That’s possible,’ Josh replied, and then it was time for the closing addresses.

  Because Samuel had given evidence, the prosecution got to address the jury last. Carter made a show of that being a big deal as it meant he had no right of reply.

  ‘It’s not a crime to be a bit of a big-noter,’ he said about the pretext call. ‘And I don’t know, but I suspect that my learned friend will tell you that Samuel is lying about he himself being abused.’

  I shook my head. We would never. Every time Samuel went lower, we went higher.

  What made me nervous was how much emphasis Carter put on the delay in the proceedings. The old ‘what took her so long?’ and ‘why is she only coming forward now?’ He kept repeating that ‘reasonable doubt’ was at an incredibly high standard as well, reminding the jurors that they had a witness who said that the trampoline was always moving around. Samuel had admitted to the first count occurring, but again Carter said it had happened when Samuel was just a child himself, and that it wasn’t too serious. The second count, which was serious, couldn’t have been the actions of a child, and therefore I was lying about it.

  In Raymond’s closing address, he told the jury there were three main reasons they should convict. ‘First and foremost, because Ms Lee is an honest, reliable and compelling witness. Her account of the incident has not changed once. Not at all in the past two years of proceedings. She has given you no reason to question her credibility or reliability.’

  I held back tears, feeling proud of myself. One of the jurors looked over to me, and I put on my associate’s face again. Calm, unreadable. Vincent squeezed my hand.

  The judge took a twenty-minute adjournment and then returned and summed up the case to the jury. It was relatively short, but in its even-handedness it struck me as unjust—like when homophobes are allowed to debate marriage equality on television. The judge’s presentation of Samuel’s arguments as alternatives to mine lent them a legitimacy they didn’t deserve. His testimony, so full of lies and evasion, was ‘his version’, as though mine was just ‘my version’ and not the truth.

  ‘Now I will ask you to consider your verdict,’ the judge concluded, and my whole body twitched.

  The twelve of them stood up and walked out, and I watched each one, longing more than I ever had before to hear what was being said in that small room.

  My family met outside the courtroom. The judge had said he wouldn’t take a verdict between 1 p.m. and 2.15 p.m. It was 12.45 p.m.

  ‘The only time I saw a guilty verdict in less than an hour,’ I whispered to Vincent, ‘was in Gladstone that time I called you, and Judge told me if a verdict comes back too quickly it’s because it’s an acquittal. So I suppose we should wait here until one o’clock, just in case.’

  Raymond came out of the courtroom and paused, so Vincent and I went over to him.

  ‘That was a great summing-up,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he replied. ‘It’s in the jury’s hands now, but I do feel positive.’

  ‘Yeah, Samuel didn’t come across particularly well in the box,’ Vincent said.

  ‘Yesterday I asked him about his business, or tried to find out what it was he actually did for a living. He talked about having an interest in some investment company, but it turned out he didn’t really have any ownership in that company. And when I asked him what skills and experience he brought to the company, he said, “My energy.”’

  Vincent and I burst out laughing.

  ‘Lunch then?’ Dad called over to us.

  ‘Sure,’ I replied.

  Then I saw Samuel walk past confidently, and I looked down. My heart was beating so hard that my shirt was moving.

  I picked the only vegetarian dish on the menu, something with rice, thinking of what might be easiest to bring back up if necessary and not wanting to waste any meat. I put the food in my mouth and moved it around in there. Even though my mobile was on loud, I kept it on the table beside me and checked it every few minutes. The knot in my stomach didn’t leave a lot of space for food, so Dad finished my meal when I pushed my plate away. I rested my forehead on the table, groaning, and took Vincent’s hand.

  ‘I can’t handle this,’ I said.

  ‘The hard part is over.’

  But my body was twitching, shaking. I jiggled my foot incessantly and wrung my hands. The small travel can of deodorant I’d brought was nearly finished. As we left the restaurant a bus rushed past me, loud and stinky.

  ‘Just a few more hours, right?’ I asked Vincent.

  ‘Right.’

  We were back up near the courtroom at 2 p.m.

  ‘The worst thing about waiting for a verdict,’ Sean said, ‘is that you don’t even know how long you’ll be waiting for.’

  I paced around, then sat down, then went to the bathroom, then had a glass of water. The minutes ticked by, my mind devouring itself, descending into desperate hypothesising.

  Sean and Dad were sharing cop stories. Sean was saying that he had applied to be moved to the fraud squad because in the past two years he’d had to work several murder investigations, and he had two small children at home. I saw him then, for a brief, clear moment, as someone who had been trying his best, and I was newly awash with guilt for my derision of him.

  I walked over to where Vincent was sitting. ‘How are people supposed to do this? I’d prefer for him to be found not guilty than for the jury to be hung. Or if they convict on count one but not count two, he’d be able to appeal the first conviction, and then we’d be back again. I couldn’t do this again. I can’t do this.’

  Vincent held me and kissed my forehead.

  ‘What are you thinking about the deliberation time?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a good sign that it’s been over an hour, but I’ll be worried if we get to 4 p.m. That would mean one or more of them can’t agree with each other.’

  More pacing. More staring angrily, then sadly, then in fear out the window at Roma Street Parkland. More cop stories from Sean and Dad. More chatter about Christmas plans from Mum. All the while feeling as though someone was shaving slices off my stomach lining.

  It had been just under three hours when I got the phone call from Adeline. I was worried she would say they had a note, which would mean a question or a problem, but mercifully she told me, ‘There’s a verdict.’

  ALMOST EVERYONE WAS READY WITHIN five minutes, but Carter asked for an extra ‘three minutes’ for the solicitor to arrive. My body was out of my control. I sat down beside Vincent, and he put his whole right arm around my waist, pulling me in, holding my left hand with his, and I could feel how sweaty he was and how fast his heart was beating. The minutes ticked by—three passed, five passed—and just as
the solicitor entered the courtroom, the bailiff stood up.

  ‘Silence, all stand,’ she announced.

  The judge came in and took his seat, and the associate followed him, still nothing on her face.

  ‘We have a verdict,’ the judge said. ‘Please, Madam Bailiff, get the jury in.’

  In the silence of the room I heard my blood pounding in my ears.

  ‘I’m so scared,’ I whispered to Vincent, and then his body shuddered, a ragged breath in, and I tried not to cry.

  Hot anger rushed over me as the jurors filed in. Who are you to say if I’m a liar!? I dug my fingernails into my right palm, clenching my fist. They stood in a line facing outward so I couldn’t see their faces from where I sat.

  The associate got to her feet. ‘Members of the jury,’ she said, and the rest of her question was already in my mind, memorised, ‘have you reached your verdict?’

  ‘Yes,’ the speaker said.

  I started crying, couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop it.

  ‘Do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty of count one, indecent treatment of a child?’

  ‘Guilty.’

  ‘So says your speaker, so say you all?’

  ‘Yes,’ they all chorused.

  ‘And do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty of count two, indecent treatment of a child?’

  I looked up to the ceiling, holding my breath, tears splashing onto my forearms.

  ‘Guilty.’

  ‘So says your speaker, so say you all?’

  ‘Yes,’ they chorused again, and I began the second chapter of my life.

  I let the feelings come in waves while the business of the court continued around me. The sadness, the anger and the pride: it all rushed in like a flash flood, washing out the lingering worries and fears, taking the ants and the bindi-eyes with it, the sheer force of my relief catching me off guard.