Harry Curry: Rats and Mice

by Stuart Littlemore

  The Vice-President of the Bar, into whose very expensive chambers Harry was shown immediately upon his arrival at the reception desk, was pleasantly surprised that Harry was so easily compliant with the Association’s request that he find another name for his professional address. (In fact, he’d never had any intention of naming it after Ned Kelly. That was just a bit of mischief he’d inserted in the Law Society’s contact list of counsel.) She’d always been told that Curry was abrasive and hard to get on with, and for that reason had equipped herself for a confrontation by placing a copy of the Bar Conduct Rules front and centre on her desk, but all he wanted to talk about was whether she had children and how she and her husband managed as working parents. In fact, she took to him and thought she was beginning to understand his attractiveness to her junior colleague Engineer. No, not exactly attractive — those close-together eyes, broken nose and untamed hair — but he certainly had something magnetic about him. A confident strength, or maybe a strong confidence. The unexpected ease between them made the next part of her task even harder.

  ‘Having dealt with that so amicably, I’m also expected to talk to you about the disadvantages of your practising one-out down there on the South Coast, far from the immediate assistance your colleagues can provide.’

  ‘Ah, well done — “immediate assistance”. I like a good euphemism.’

  ‘All right — far from disciplinary oversight.’

  ‘Why did you get the short straw, Ruth?’

  ‘The rest of them are scared of you, Harry. Especially Frosty, ever since the Ethics Committee stuffed up your suspension last year. I don’t think he could face you, having been your father’s pupil and everything that implies. Embarrassed is hardly the word. Mortified would be closer to the mark.’

  ‘To think that a stellar panel of equity silks could purport to rub me out, having denied me procedural fairness or natural justice or whatever this year’s trendy cliché might be! I imagine that what you’re supposed to negotiate, with fearful Frosty hiding beneath your skirt, is that I’ll keep a low profile somewhere south of the Illawarra, not insult the learned magistrates and highly regarded political hacks — sorry, esteemed dizzo judges on circuit — and generally keep out of trouble. Or so I infer.’

  ‘It’s a powerful inference. You do have a chequered history with judicial officers of the District Court, Harry — even you would have to admit that. Never mind the magistrates, most of whom believe you hold them in contempt.’

  ‘Neither my clients nor I admit anything. I make it a rule of practice.’

  The Vice-President sighed. ‘This isn’t going to become a problem between us, is it? We were doing so well.’

  ‘I’m going to be a father in six months.’ Harry smiled and folded his arms.

  ‘So Arabella tells us. Well, obviously, you’ll be a reformed character. Mellow, even.’

  ‘Got it in one, Ruth.’ They smiled at each other. ‘So Arabella’s already broadcast the news?’

  ‘Tell one Woman Lawyer, and you’ve told them all.’

  ‘You’re not telling me you’re a Woman Lawyer, surely? I thought you were heterosexual.’ She threw the Bar Rules at him, but missed. ‘Ah. You certainly throw like a girl.’ Harry stood and took a look around the room, as if to dismiss, once more, the trappings of success. ‘I’ve got a plane to catch, Ruth. Maybe you’d be interested in giving an after-dinner speech at the Bermagui Institute some time?’

  The Vice-President raised one eyebrow. ‘The Bermagui Institute?’

  ‘An occasional symposium of intellectuals, retired to the South Coast.’ She frowned. ‘And their wives,’ he added. She scowled.

  ‘Get out now, Harry Curry, or I’ll have you up before PCC 1.’

  ‘That’d be the industrial-strength Professional Conduct Committee? We’ve met before.’

  ‘No. It’s the Political Correctness Committee. Constituted entirely of women with short hair and boiler suits.’

  ‘Very good, Ruth. Frosty says you’ve no sense of humour, by the way.’

  ‘I already told you to get out, I believe.’ So he got out, with a wave.

  As she ate a sandwich at her desk, Arabella silently cursed Harry for not carrying a mobile phone (she’d bought him one months ago, but he hardly ever took it with him or even kept it charged). She wanted to ring him and ask him to stay the night with her, but didn’t know where he was.

  At that moment, Harry was still in town, picking up some smallholders’ publications from the Department of Agriculture’s bookshop (on care and management of guinea fowl and grafting stonefruit trees). He then caught a cab out to Mascot and bought a ticket for the afternoon flight to Merimbula. Before the flight was called, he put a dollar into a public phone in the departure lounge and dialled the first six numbers of Arabella’s room in chambers, but hung up before completing the call.

  Harry had asked for a seat on the right-hand side of the plane so that he could watch the coastline as they flew south, but cloud had built up and there was nothing to see. He hadn’t brought a book, and his legs were too long for the space he was given. His mood when he got off the plane was not good. He clipped another car’s mudguard backing the LandCruiser out of its parking space, but pretended he hadn’t noticed. His driving back to the farm had a take-no-prisoners character. When he reached the Burragate turn-off on the Princes Highway, he U-turned and drove back to the Fishermen’s Club in Eden for an early dinner. He was in no mood to cook. It was not much later than five o’clock, but there were other diners, already on their puddings. Grey nomads, most of them, up from the caravan park.

  The LandCruiser got him home to RonLyn as night was falling. Harry fed the chooks still wearing his Savile Row suit and suede shoes, checked the pump down at the river and stood for ten minutes skipping stones across the water. Downstream under a willow, a fish rose and he thought of his neighbour Robert’s assurances that there were bass in the deeper pools of the river, but Harry had yet to see one. Back in the house, he played his Magic Flute CD. Loudly. He ate a whole container of pistachio ice cream, straight out of the freezer, and went to bed at nine o’clock, but got up an hour later, unable to sleep, and phoned Arabella’s mobile. She was still working in chambers, preparing her evidence and cross-examination in the defence of the Department of Education against an employee’s personal injury claim. She looked at the incoming number, and let it ring. Harry didn’t leave a message on the voicemail, but boiled the kettle, made tea in his chipped enamel mug, and took it with him to bed. He didn’t get to sleep until 2 a.m.

  David Surrey rang at ten o’clock while Harry was having his breakfast at the kitchen table, and asked him to lunch at the Waterfront in Merimbula, because he knew Harry liked the place. The bouillabaisse, in particular. ‘I’ve volunteered to take the Legal Aid list at Bega next week, Harry, and one private payer. I’m going to need a hand from you. A week or so of rats and mice, probably mostly guilty pleas. You just have to roll your arm over. We might not get rich, but there’s a quid in it. I’ll bring the briefs with me.’ Surrey had added a Merimbula office to his Southern Tablelands headquarters (two rooms above the Commonwealth Bank in Goulburn’s main street), and was negotiating with his wife to move the family (two teenaged girls, reluctant to leave their high school friends) to Tathra and a new house, perhaps with a view of the sea. The trick was going to be maintaining the loyalty of his longstanding if slow-paying rural clients, when he planned to spend most of his time on the coast, away from the extremes of the Goulburn climate (‘Either too cold, too hot, too dry, too windy, or too wet,’ he was wont to say). There had proved to be lots of minor crime on the coast, which augured well for the seachange.

  ‘I haven’t agreed to do it yet, Dave.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Harry. You need the money. We both do.’

  ‘Who’s buying this lunch?’

  ‘You are, of course.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. For a moment, I thought you were going to duchess me.’

 
Arabella was back in chambers at 6 a.m. the next day, finalising preparation of the District Court civil trial in which her task, as it had been explained by a Woman Lawyer working at the Crown Solicitor’s office, was to keep a lid on the quantum of damages that the solicitor was certain would be awarded against the State government’s Treasury Managed Fund. The plaintiff in the suit was a Greek woman of sixty, employed by the Education Department as a cleaner at one of its shamefully disadvantaged inner-city primary schools. Her statement of claim alleged that while performing her cleaning duties she had been struck on the head by an object thrown by a child in the unsupervised playground. She had the support of a general practitioner (with a Greek surname) whose opinion was that she was suffering from a neurological disability preventing her from ever working again. Arabella was reading the defence’s contradictory medical report, the author of which was highly doubtful that a blow from a mere bouncing ball could have induced the disability for which the plaintiff’s lawyer was claiming substantial compensation. The plaintiff’s solicitor (Greek surname) had offered, on his client’s instructions and notwithstanding the government expert’s adverse opinion, to settle for the sum of $200,000 clear in the woman’s hand, plus his inflated costs and disbursements which he presently estimated boldly at about $80,000. A trial would add, he wrote, a further $6000 for each day of hearing, together with witness expenses and charges for the service of subpoenas and for photocopying the transcript of oral evidence. The government’s lawyers, on the strength of the assigned solicitor’s assessment, had filed a counter-offer of compromise for $75,000 plus costs as assessed by the court, or agreed between the parties, but it had not been accepted.

  Arabella folded her wig into its Victorian-looking shiny black tin (Ede & Ravenscroft, Chancery Lane WC2), lettered in gold with her name, and put her gown and black Bar jacket into her blue bag (embroidered with her initials, ASE), picked up her briefcase and descended in the lift with the morning rush of counsel from Phillip Street to the uptown courts. She walked to the corner of Elizabeth Street outside the Sydney University Law School building and joined her colleagues catching taxis to the Downing Centre (crime) and the adjoining Maddison Tower (money), a poorly designed and hastily built skyscraper of courtrooms at the depressed end of the city approaching Central Railway Station. Bits were falling off the Tower already — inside and outside. Paying off the driver, she caught the lift, overcrowded with lawyers and anxious litigants, to the thirteenth floor where Narelle, her solicitor, was waiting for her, sporting a severely tailored striped suit and product-laden spiked hair. They compared notes and nodded to the plaintiff’s lawyers, then moved to the southern end of the building to stand in front of the floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over trains coming and going from Central, and the jumble of old rag-trade buildings climbing east away from the tattoo parlours towards Surry Hills. Arabella asked whether there had been any movement in relation to settlement of the case.

  ‘No, and I wish there was. This one’s really important to me, Arabella. I advised the client department that it was going to lose the case and that it should make provision for $300,000 in damages and costs.’ Arabella found it bizarre that the government’s lawyers should speak of clients, especially among government departments.

  ‘Seems such a lot for such a little injury, Narelle,’ said Arabella, watching a train pulling out of the North Shore Line platform to disappear beneath a multi-storey car park. ‘Your doctor isn’t too impressed. He’s hinting that she’s malingering.’

  ‘Sure, but he’s unapologetically anti-Greek. He was the star prosecution witness in the Greek Social Security conspiracy case years ago. Huge scandal … before your time, Arabella. It jaundiced him. He’s convinced they all do it. In any case, the plaintiff’s got the support of that neurologist, to some extent, and he’s not Greek, and I’m sure we can count on the husband to give evidence that she can’t do any housework.’

  ‘Not an earth-shattering legal or medical controversy, though?’ Arabella checked her watch. Ten minutes to ten.

  ‘Maybe, but what’s of most importance to me is vindicating my professional judgment, and I’m hoping that you’ll support me.’ Narelle was making no secret of her priorities and to hell with protecting State revenue. ‘In fact, I’m rather expecting that you’ll support me.’

  ‘On the issues of both liability and quantum of damages, I assume?’ said Arabella.

  ‘Yes. Office politics at the State Crown are such that it goes on my file if I get it wrong.’

  ‘As to the form of this support from me — it’s in your interest that we prove you right by losing, and losing heavily?’

  The solicitor nodded firmly.

  ‘Perhaps we should admit liability, then, and just fight about the extent of her disability?’ Narelle had no answer, which — to Arabella — slammed that door shut. But whatever Narelle expected of her, her duty was to contest all the allegations in issue, pulling no punches. Even if that left a black mark in the solicitor’s personal file.

  Followed by Narelle, and tugging her wheeled suitcase of documents, Arabella entered a glass-windowed conference room across the corridor from their appointed courtroom and hung her Armani jacket in a locker. She put her blue bag on the table and pulled open its drawstring. From it she removed and put on her white jabot, fastening it behind her neck, then her Bar jacket and gown, and finally her wig, looking at her reflection in the glass to get it level on her head. The locker door wouldn’t engage properly when she shut it, and as she turned she noticed that the opaque privacy film that had been spread over the room’s windows (cheaper than etched glass) had been picked off in places by bored fingernails. The overall impression was of seediness and neglect, which she found dispiriting in such a new building.

  Narelle had timidly put her hand out to help with the gown, but Arabella pretended not to notice.

  The solicitor wouldn’t relent on the liability issue. ‘All we’ve got’s a recalcitrant neuro’s opinion that she mightn’t have a disability at all, and I’m supposed to let my superiors have an infallible assessment of our prospects of success on liability, or just of the likely damages in the event of a verdict against us, based on nothing other than that — one rotten medical report. No private investigator, no witnesses from the school. They refuse to spend any money on the defence, they overload us mere solicitors with a million files, and take it very badly if we’re wrong. So we tend to protect ourselves from Pollyanna-ish predictions by going the other way.’ Highly aggrieved.

  They emerged, carrying their papers, and saw a Greek couple with their Greek solicitor and Anglo barrister standing at the door to Courtroom 4, speaking together. Narelle exhaled loudly. ‘We better go in.’

  The courtroom was typical of the rest of the building: it said budget, and missed the mark of judicial dignity by a mile. Low ceiling, light wood-veneer surfaces, dark carpet, fake brass rails and a coat of arms on the wall behind the judge’s chair that looked for all the world like a gaudy polychrome logo above the reception desk of an insurance company. No jury box, because juries had been dragged out of the court in the interests of judicial efficiency. Saving the State money, in other words, and bugger the public interest in keeping community values in the court system. Judge Gosling, an I’ve-heard-it-all-many-times-before veteran recently transferred from the all-but-abolished Workers Compensation jurisdiction (more judicial efficiency, this time in the interests of the insurance industry) plodded in behind his gowned associate, nodded at counsels’ bows, but remained standing (his piles were giving him hell and the Attorney-General still hadn’t engaged a carpenter to put a well where the judicial throne usually stood, so that the afflicted judge could stand, yet look as if he were seated normally), took the appearances from opposing counsel — May it please your Honour, I appear for the plaintiff/the defendant — and displayed only the barest interest during Mrs Papadopoulos’s barrister’s opening.

  ‘May it please your Honour. The plaintiff seeks damages, your Hon
our, for injuries she sustained in a work accident and for continuing disabilities caused when she was struck by an object thrown by an unsupervised child at her place of work eighteen months ago. We say that the defendant was negligent in that it had no, or no adequate, system of supervision of children playing in the playground at the school from as early as 7.30 a.m. The school was well aware of that, but there were no teachers on duty until 8.30, your Honour, as the evidence will show. Our client emerged from the toilet block, carrying a mop and bucket, and at that moment she was struck in the forehead by what is known as a superball — that’s a toy, a small rubber ball that is made to accelerate impacts and jump far higher than one would normally expect after it reflects off a hard surface.’

  His Honour interrupted. ‘Experience in my previous jurisdiction tells me, Mr Buchanan, that trigeminal neuralgia is a nerve disorder that causes an occasional stabbing pain in the face, something akin to an electric shock. Is that the continuing disability you rely on?’

  ‘It is, your Honour.’ Mr Buchanan appeared to be grateful for his Honour’s grasp of the medicine.

  ‘No other injury? Just a momentary bump on the head, the odd stabbing pain, and then a claim of total and permanent incapacity for work?’

  ‘Without adopting your Honour’s derisive tone, no further injury is alleged.’ The barrister looked daggers at Gosling DCJ, whose grizzled visage was studiously indifferent.

  ‘I did some reading up on the subject this morning, Mr Buchanan, when the papers in this matter were brought to me. As I understand the facts pleaded, you might have a bit of difficulty persuading me that the disability — if you can prove it exists — was caused by a blow to the forehead. The medical textbooks say trigeminal neuralgia can be caused by multiple sclerosis or even a tumour, but most of the time nobody knows what has caused it.’