Axiomatic

by Maria Tumarkin

  That first time we talked it occurred to me that with Vanda being a community lawyer the two of us could even be in the same taxation bracket. Not until years later in a St Kilda legal branch foyer, me waiting for Vanda, she running late after a client appointment, did I seconds before she appeared (wearing black and white) write in my notebook, quickly, as if somehow I’d forget it

  DECREPIT

  SHODDY

  FALLING APART

  ALARM CODE ON A STICKER

  HEATERS EVERYWHERE

  COLD

  and then deeper inside that building, Vanda’s office was like a room from my childhood, windowless, boxy, held together as we’d say ‘by an honest word’. Closer to an anti-office. Not long after that in the Magistrate’s Court I overheard a young female lawyer say to Vanda, ‘I couldn’t do what you’re doing,’ and although it was mostly clear what she meant—couldn’t be so near other people’s shit and misery, couldn’t have the office you have—I tried hard, tried and failed, to figure out if she meant it as a compliment.

  The lawyer said what she said after Mike almost fell on her. I was there, saw it, Mike was up before a magistrate on charges of grabbing a fifty dollar note out of the hands of a woman about to pay for her lunch. As Mike, his balance shot, his eyes half closed, teetered in the young female lawyer’s vicinity an uncontrolled tiny revulsion burst pink on her cheeks, a similar facial phenomenon, I’m guessing, to the one on the lunching woman’s face in that South Melbourne cafe. First Mike had asked the woman for money. ‘No.’ I too frequently say no and I’d jump as well, as she did, at my bubble being burst even though it’s as far away as ever from bursting. While grabbing the note Mike said ‘I’ll have fifty dollars please’ to the woman. Like he was winking and inviting her to share in his pinch of good fortune. Vanda and the police prosecutor both smiled at this point in the prosecutor’s account—at Mike’s preference for a social intercourse. Bolting away from the woman he got run down by helpful witnesses.

  Vanda had represented Mike before and Mike, let’s be clear, had taken giant dosages of prescription medication on the mornings of his various other hearings too. On one occasion he was drifting away and no one stirred him so he slept right through. This time Vanda was keeping an eye on things. With clients hanging out, no methadone on them, I’ve seen her apply for adjournments: them sweating, getting fidgety, feeling sick, not worth it. Pills are a different kettle of fish and Mike did not seem too bad this morning other than, as time passed, he had less and less control over what his body was doing. These meds he’d taken, it turns out, were a bit strong. By the time he got inside the courtroom he was disoriented, talking noticeably overloudly then snapping into sleep. They’re precisely things you do not do in court. You whisper unless addressed by a magistrate, in which case you reply softly and with deference, and whatever you do you keep awake, especially when it’s your transgression about to be ruled on and this ruling, no matter the ridiculousness of the offence, could return you to jail.

  Vanda shushes Mike while arguing for exceptional circumstances—some months beforehand Mike found his girlfriend dead, from an overdose, in bed—and next breath nearly she’s imploring him:

  ‘Mike, don’t go to sleep.

  ‘Mike, you must…’

  Mike’s lips, framed by oozing sores, make the sweet lapping sounds of somebody small, in soft pyjamas, savouring their dreams. He tries waking, swigs from a cup of water Vanda got him but soon his head’s nodding, and dropping, while water from the plastic cup’s dripping on the court’s floor. You don’t spill water in court and, if you do, do it fast not in this gradual tipping and dripping way. Nor do you keep your mobile on, volume up, letting it ring out twice while the air in the courtroom stiffens until the whole thing feels like a scene from Duck Soup and it’s two minutes to lunchbreak, which was when Mike virtually fell on the young female lawyer, and the young female lawyer recoiled and looked at Vanda.

  Something else farcical: the obviousness of the distance in that room between officialdom and people’s lives.

  ‘Sentencing is a construct of the privileged classes,’ deputy chief magistrate Popovic says to me. ‘I have been doing this job for over twenty years and just worked it out.’

  Mike, asleep, noisy, moaning, water funnelling out of his hands, his phone ringing like the immortal shoe phone of Maxwell Smart in the middle of Washington’s Symphony Hall, for a moment made the courtroom unspool.

  How my head was aching by lunch. Vanda was unflustered. Many people she represents have or had addictions. Most self-medicate. ‘My clients,’ she says, ‘are better at self-medicating than the rest of us, they know which drugs work for them.’ Scientific studies are looking into possible positive effects of MDMA on people with PTSDs. Vanda’s clients worked that one out years ago. They know what drugs stop bad memories flooding their heads. True, theirs isn’t the covert, after-hours self-medication the general populace practises. Vanda’s clients don’t typically try hard to hide their methods of keeping sane or numb, which is the same thing some of the time, not all of the time. Then when they get picked up for possession, Vanda thinks ‘for fuck’s sake there are people in this courtroom, lawyers, clerks, who’ll go out and take their drug of choice tonight’. Birds do it, bees do it. It’s a question of who gets picked up—and you know who. Not that Vanda is all gooey on the subject, too many clients continue overdosing and dying. When one client, Rex, on a specialist assessment list for people with mental health issues and cognitive impairments, was pacing a small interview room before his years-old assault charges hearing, breathing in great gusts, screaming with vehemence—‘Police is fucking corrupt! This is not justice! And I am supposed to follow the law?’—Vanda preferred him that way, angry, more himself, not numbed out of his skull.

  Question of priorities: how much spare energy is there to spend on worrying about accidentally body-slamming an easily spooked and crisp-shirted lady lawyer in Court 7? If you are used to being seen as a public nuisance, why bother tiptoeing in imaginary slippers through the hallowed halls of venerable institutions? Is it not the institutions’ problem that they often cannot handle people who don’t have the luxury of keeping private business private? Many of Vanda’s clients live their lives in public, like Lani who for years resided under trees—at a friend’s house, in a park—and who resembled in Vanda’s words a ‘malignant streetworker fairy on the other side of the faraway tree’ which was a change from the nice middle-class life she apparently led before her fairy days. Vanda tells me of a time Lani tried entering the Magistrate’s Court with whisky. When Vanda stopped her Lani downed the bottle in one go. Then went in. Another time a security device erupted and Lani was asked to remove her boots (long, long boots they were). ‘She takes off her boots and everything apart from the kitchen sink is there—cigarettes, money, phone.’

  The pleasure I get in Vanda’s Lani stories is the old-as-the-world pleasure of feeling, even secondhand, an anarchic force disrupt orderly proceedings. ‘This police officer is all right,’ Lani would say. ‘Isn’t he, Vanda? Do you think he would do me outside of court?’

  Vanda loved those times with Lani. ‘We had,’ she says, ‘a lot of fun.’ Hanging around Vanda I’d get starving for light relief, for harmless incongruities to show up the silly and the pompous about the way society does law and order—a young Vietnamese man Vanda was representing who bought coke for personal use only to discover the coke wasn’t coke, it was salt, so he tried re-flogging the stash at Crown Casino. Whoever bought it off him called police and dobbed in the fake drug seller. I laughed and wondered if selling fake drugs was less illegal. A few months after that he died. Bad heroin had got on the streets again. I was looking for reasons to laugh, and they were out there, don’t get me wrong, but death and grief were everywhere and like Vanda warned me no fairytales.

  We were talking about Lani on our way to the Mint for a drink. The Mint is where William and La Trobe streets meet and as we neared the lights Vanda said: ‘Last week, it
was a lovely day, and just there, on that corner, was a dead body. A young man jumped off a building. Must have jumped off this roof here. I never noticed how high this building is.’

  We looked up and, yes, somehow the building was much taller than you would register without looking up. ‘His body was covered but you could still see an arm sticking out.’ It passed unreported on the news. Media blackout. He was sixteen. ‘I went home,’ Vanda said, ‘and posted on Facebook that we must look after our men. More men die in Australia from suicide than car accidents. Go home, I said—to your men, hug them, often they cannot tell you. Don’t ask or expect them to tell. Just be there.’

  Mike got a suspended sentence. Twelve months. ‘We are grateful to the court,’ said Vanda to the magistrate. Mike was bending over completely by then, head between his legs, it was lucky all in all, the snatching bit was too serious for Mike to be let off but the magistrate could have been scandalised, could have made his verdict sting. Though Vanda believes: ‘A short, sharp sentence is no bad thing necessarily.’ No reports were done on Mike. No one checked the possible implications of his mother, during pregnancy, having rubella, a condition linked to cognitive impairments that produced in Mike a flat ear at least and most likely a bunch of other troubles that stayed undiagnosed—and no magistrate recommended court-integrated help services, chancing that they’d benefit Mike. Mike was slipping through the system. ‘We don’t have a system,’ Vanda says, ‘for people who don’t fit. Our best hope is they learn how to live on welfare and not get involved with the criminal justice system.’

  Except when you are poor and spend time on the streets, you’ll get involved. You can get picked up for anything. For begging or having weed or a Swiss knife on you. Mike breached his suspended sentence, went to jail, and Vanda dispatched a taxi to the caravan park where he’d been staying to collect his stuff and bring it to her St Kilda office. ‘You have seen my office.’ No service exists for people jailed abruptly and wishing for their belongings to not disappear down a ditch.

  One day, I think to myself, one day like this would be enough for me.

  Ten years, thinks Vanda.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder how much longer I can do it but then I think about everything I have gathered, relationships I have built, what a waste it would be. The thing about being embedded in the community, walking the streets, using the same public transport as my clients, not seeing people in my office, knowing people, knowing coppers, is I can connect people up and do something other lawyers cannot.’ Time—lets trust stick, and relationships take anchor. ‘So I think, surely I can do this for ten years.’

  Vanda does not own a car. So, no Popemobile to cushion and escort her from one strife to the next. Most of Vanda’s work is outreach. She walks a lot. I’ve also seen her stand without leaning on anything, back straight, two heavy bags hanging off a shoulder, for long stretches. It is not insignificant that she puts her body out there.

  Not hiding is how Vanda does it.

  It’s a real issue, how to keep people real. And not make them into catchphrases for banners, appendixes to principles. Colleagues say Vanda understands her clients’ lives and this is worth more than most things. Many who advocate on behalf of others don’t want a connection with those they’re advocating for. Aren’t interested in talking politics. Twists and turns of human fate are not up for discussion. Whereas a smart lawyer who gets you, fights well for you, is like a doctor, the provider of an essential service.

  For psychological stuff she sends people to Helen Barnacle, who was once jailed for heroin possession while pregnant and fought for her daughter to be with her until the age of four. One was the normal maximum allowable age. Helen got a BA inside prison. ‘She is well known on the street, doesn’t have a middle-class past,’ Vanda says, ‘doesn’t go oh, poor you!’

  Isn’t easily shockable. NO FISHING. What does it take to not be shocked?

  I hear one of Vanda’s clients, homeless for now, sharply articulate, sum up the psychologists she saw before Helen. ‘I don’t mean to sound horrible but they were like textbooks. I would see the look of horror in their eyes.’ Their eyes.

  Perhaps one way of putting it is that many of Vanda’s clients live their lives on a highway where they are repeatedly hit by passing trucks. As they are bandaging their wounds, cleaning them out with rainwater, putting bones back into sockets, another truck’s oncoming. A backlog of injuries functions not unlike a backlog of grief, an expression I first heard near the desert in the Kimberleys where backlog describes the unrelenting holding of funerals on Aboriginal land, leaving the living no time to mourn the dead, creating an imploding paralysis. That is what’s in the tar as well. Most people have a truck going over them at some period in their life. But on a highway you don’t get one or two. You get a convoy. They don’t stop. That’s the point. The recurrence is the point. The point’s the repetition.

  ‘These middle-class people keep their cushy middle-class lives and my clients constantly have to be re-traumatised,’ said Vanda after police charged (not her first charge-sheet appearance) Steph.

  About the trucks: Steph was fifteen when she left home where her mother sexually abused her. Then in a foster home her carer, a married woman with kids, behaved in a way that to Vanda’s ears sounded like studious grooming of Steph. No doubt it’s hard with teenagers in care since being sexual is often the only way many can express affection or gratitude but not crossing lines is the carer’s business. Once Steph came of age it turned into a full-fledged sexual relationship. Two maternal figures, one after another, betraying Steph, she lost her footing. That was the telling, typical thing: it was Steph who wasn’t fine. After Steph left, the carer continued working with children, her family and employers none the wiser. ‘The woman,’ Vanda says, ‘didn’t behave illegally but she did behave amorally and gets to keep her family and money and nice life. What does Steph get to keep?’

  When Steph was charged she was in hospital—distressed, smashed on valium, talking about wanting to kill her ex-carer. It was 2 a.m. with no prospect of Steph acting on her threats against the woman, who lived far away. Still hospital people called police. Later in court to explain Steph’s behaviour Vanda had to bring up the sexual abuse. ‘Where’s the proof?’ replied the magistrate. And added ‘Anybody could say that.’ Vanda was gutted. When Steph jumped up and screamed ‘mate, she is a fucking pedodog’ and the magistrate raised his voice in ordering Steph to sit down Vanda was gutted some more. The guy was silencing Steph in front of everyone as if no one ever learned the nature of kids getting abused is predicated on secrecy. On perpetrators feeling convinced nobody will believe victims and on their victims finding no space in which to speak of what happened. ‘Sometimes I don’t mind my clients getting a foot up their arses, this was not one of those times,’ Vanda says. The suspended sentence Steph got was not the point. Once the magistrate opened his mouth it stopped being about sentencing.

  That night—Friday—Vanda could not sleep. Kept going over everything. Could she have protected Steph, not mentioned the past? Not really. This magistrate’s reaction was beyond anticipating. That weekend Steph tried, not her first attempt, to kill herself. Few things are worse than being disbelieved when the darkest stuff that ever happened to you creeps out to the open. New shame on top of the old shame, rage too, so urgent it wants to suck the bone marrow out of you. Trucks, yeah, so. Sometime later Vanda noticed a newspaper make mention of a carer being investigated for inappropriate sexual relations. No name was given; Vanda was sure who. She popped the article in an envelope and posted it to Steph, a way of saying your experience is being taken seriously, you’re not a liar or piece of shit. She’s not aware if it gave Steph any relief.

  I know Vanda’s love is theatre but I prefer TV and this is how my mind works. If Vanda, the Scandinavian lawyers & cops psycho-thriller, went into development she’d be one of those in-demand street-literate females unscared of locking onto people’s eyeballs once they’ve taken a hit, or even if no hit, not a
gram, is to be had, shuttling between the world of the streets and the world of indoor-voice-only institutional spaces, brooding, marginally less broken than her clients: no. Vanda’s sorted. You could attempt for TV script purposes drawing her as the conviction lawyer figure, the downtrodden’s poster woman, but it wouldn’t fit either while making dull viewing anyway so keep trying.

  At the washing line next to the backyard sewerage puddle I’m joined by my neighbour. Just lost a best friend, young, fit, no known health troubles, to heart failure. He wasn’t thirty yet; close to eight hundred made the funeral; they flew in, drove hours; he touched—is it pride in my neighbour’s voice, a little opening deep in vocal cords dried out by shock?—so many. I think of the tiggy game my son plays at school. Someone who is ‘it’ chases and tags somebody who becomes ‘it’ and chases others. A version is played in every childhood. Those funerals for ourselves we imagined as children, and often way past being children if people who should have known better badly hurt us—they were crowded. And at those funerals we were ‘it’ because we were dead and we could run around and tag as many people as we liked with sadness. We could tag and couldn’t be tagged. That’s what being dead gave us.