The Feel-Good Hit of the Year

by Liam Pieper

  I spent the next ten minutes melting down in the mood-lit reception area until a bright-eyed young woman came up to me.

  ‘Liam?’ She was holding a folder with my name on it. ‘I’m Lara. I’ll take you to the magistrates.’

  On the way we stopped for coffee, a complicated order of six different iterations of a flat white. She handed me a cardboard tray to carry and I tried to make small talk.

  ‘How long have you been a lawyer?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m no lawyer!’ She laughed. ‘I mean, I’m doing my articles, but it’s a while off yet.’ At this point I made a pitiful little noise that made her whip around in concern. ‘You’ll be fine.’ She smiled and squeezed my elbow encouragingly. ‘I’m afraid your solicitor didn’t tell us about your contest hearing before going on holiday, and we don’t actually have anyone free to take your case.’ She seemed slightly pissed off but still breezily professional. ‘But that’s okay. You don’t need a solicitor, you need a barrister, and we can probably find you a barrister.’

  Lara ushered me into the barristers chambers across the road from the court. I stood nervously in the lobby while she darted off to speak to a law clerk about finding me a representative.

  One wall was decorated with portraits of distinguished barristers, past and present. I cast my eyes over them, noting the chronology from black-and-white photographs of stern old-world law-bringers in robes and wigs, through to modern guns, clean-cut and cold-eyed, all with the same expression. I looked away.

  Lara came back, grinning. ‘I found you someone!’ She sounded excited and relieved at the same time. ‘Just give him this.’ She handed me the manila folder holding my brief.

  My barrister was David, a good-looking, self-assured guy in his mid thirties, holding a coffee and rocking some stubble. He was hearteningly brisk in manner and soothingly Jewish in appearance. He shook my hand and took my case file. David opened the folder and scanned the contents, then let out a low whistle, the way a mechanic does when he pops the bonnet of your car to let you know he’s about to rob you. He snapped the folder shut and tucked it under his arm. ‘No problem. I’ll meet you in there.’

  Lara walked me to the magistrates court and shook my hand. ‘Good luck,’ she said brightly, which still sounded ominous. I went through the metal detectors and was patted down by security. I felt overdressed in my suit and my school shirt, which was starched so thoroughly it crackled when I fiddled with my tie. Many people were wearing nothing flashier than tracksuits and the monkeys on their backs.

  A few bespoke-suited crims milled about with their entourages of friends, family and lawyers. They looked neither stressed nor relaxed, just bored and impatient to get on with burying people or stealing fortunes or whatever it was they did. Their comfort made me feel jealous. The only spare seat was next to a gentleman who’d rolled up his pant leg to pick at a scab. Instead, I just stood about until someone let me know my case was about to be heard. He pointed me towards a courtroom.

  I shuffled in and caught the end of the preceding case, which happened to be a trafficking charge as well. A Vietnamese guy in his early twenties had sold a cap of heroin to an undercover officer. The cop detailed his case in clipped, officious policeman’s speech, and the prosecutor reiterated it in polished, accusatory language. Then the dealer’s lawyer stood up, a tired, harried legal aid guy, and laid out a simple guilty plea, mentioning a few extenuating circumstances, including that the kid was an addict and was only trying to support his habit and provide for his family.

  My ears pricked up. This was the excuse I was planning to use. At the time I’d thought it highly original.

  The judge was a red-faced, bearded man in his seventies. He looked like a retired rancher and erstwhile Klansman. He gave the kid three years.

  Court broke for a fifteen-minute interlude. I went back outside to the waiting chamber and sat down heavily next to the chap with the troublesome leg. He’d picked off his scab entirely by this time and was dabbing at the wound with a napkin. I wondered if he would end up being my boyfriend once we were inside.

  My parents and girlfriend entered the foyer. To show the judge what a normal, upstanding family we were, my folks had worn their finest office-party-in-1987 outfits, and Sarah looked dressed for synagogue in a modest ankle-length skirt and long-sleeved blouse. The combined effect was almost right, but subtly askew. I went to say hello and we stood about glumly. We all felt like we should say something meaningful.

  ‘Thanks for . . . um . . . well . . . I’m sorry,’ I tried. Sorry for what, exactly, I didn’t know. Getting high? Selling pot? Getting caught? It just seemed like the appropriate thing to say. They, too, all tried their best.

  Sarah: ‘I’ll wait for you – for a while.’

  Dad: ‘Many fine books have been written in prison.’

  Mum: ‘Hamish wants to borrow your leather jacket until you get out.’

  We entered the Klansman’s courtroom and took our seats in the row set aside for the accused. The magistrate came in, trailing gin fumes and hellfire. I was, all things considered, feeling pretty good about the situation. Then, the main door opened and a line of teenagers in blazers trooped in. There is a truism at the magistrates court: whatever your crime, if there are schoolchildren in the courtroom, you will be staked out for the ants. The magistrate always goes harder on you when there are children around, as a cautionary example. I think I whimpered slightly. Then Lara tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Follow me,’ she whispered. ‘I think I’ve got you another magistrate.’  We followed her out and into another courtroom, where the clerk was calling my name. My barrister sat in front of us, playing with his phone. Lara appeared behind me and leaned over the bench to speak quietly in my ear. ‘It’s going to be okay. Trust me,’ she said, and then disappeared. The prosecution read out the charges and the evidence in the same clipped, mechanical tones that the cop from the other courtroom had. There was my old buddy Lacoste from Moorabbin Regional. I just hadn’t recognised him without his polo. He laid out his case, with some exhibits – Bondage Fairies thankfully withdrawn but the rest very much present.

  Then the police prosecutor did his thing and I shit myself. Not literally, but very, very nearly. Actually, I don’t know if I could have shit myself if I’d tried, all homeostatic functions deserting me in my panic, leaving me just an empty, quivering shell of a person. I could barely breathe.

  Then my barrister did something amazing. He didn’t try to plead my innocence, he didn’t deliver an impassioned lecture on justice like some coked-up social-work student. He just stood up and spoke quietly and intently.

  ‘This young man – this child – has freely admitted that he was a drug dealer, that he engaged in criminal behaviour. But he is not a criminal. No; he is a child. A child with a family and a loving girlfriend, here to support him.’ He waved briefly to where my parents were sitting rigidly. ‘The child of a family torn apart by tragedy: this boy’s elder brother, his only role model, was snatched away from him by the very drugs that now threaten to ruin this boy’s life.’

  His voice softened and he looked up at the judge. ‘All we ask, all I ask on his behalf, is that you consider what a criminal conviction would do to this boy, this budding social worker, if you decide to punish him for doing what he had to do to make life bearable.’

  He sat down. I felt the room should have burst into applause. Perhaps it was on me to start a slow clap? But no, I was still paralysed with fear. The police prosecutor made an exasperated coughing sound and my mum shot him a dirty look. The magistrate took a few minutes, shuffling papers, before addressing me.

  ‘Would the defendant please rise?’

  I rose. The magistrate was looking at me keenly. She had a soft, kindly face and sharp eyes. Those eyes were truly terrifying. Imagine eyes staring from the slit of a World War Two pillbox bunker, or the gloom of a childhood closet. I started trembling under her gaze. I wondered if she could see me shaking from up there.

  ‘You
’ve done some bad things, committed serious crimes, but I am not unaware of your extenuating circumstances.’ She asked me how I planned to plead.

  ‘Guilty, Your Worship.’

  She nodded, and then said reflectively, almost conversationally, ‘Tell me something, Liam. When you started smoking cannabis, did you know it was addictive?’

  My eyes flicked over to my barrister. He gave the tiniest of nods and I looked down theatrically, before again meeting the magistrate’s benevolent death stare.

  ‘No, Your Worship. Not until it was too late.’

  She banged her gavel and made her judgement.

  I got lucky. Lara had steered me into the courtroom of Magistrate Jelena Popovic, who went on to become a crusader for harm minimisation in the field of drugs law. The same year, right-wing columnist Andrew Bolt lost a defamation case to her over a column in which he claimed she’d ‘hugged two drug traffickers she let walk free’ and she was awarded $246   500 in damages, plus costs. She never hugged me, but she did save my life. I floated out of the courtroom clutching a good behaviour bond. My ears were ringing and my blood was singing as all my adrenaline flushed out and turned sweet. I was free.

  My barrister walked out.

  ‘Shit!’ he said, grinning. ‘That went well.’  Then he shook everyone’s hand, like at a birth, congratulated me, and left.

  I had a coffee with my family at a nearby café and then called my friends to tell them the news. That night I got high as a kite at a party a buddy threw at her apartment in town, where my friends lifted me up on their shoulders and gifted me a shirt that read, ‘I got booked for trafficking and all I got was this stupid T-shirt.’

  The next morning I stood on the roof of the apartment, smoking a cigarette and watching the sun rise over Melbourne. For the first time since Ardian had died I felt optimistic about the future. The dread of the court case had weighed so heavily on me that I hadn’t noticed that my fatalism was waning. It turned out there could be outcomes other than tragedy and, for the first time in forever, I was looking forward to whatever was coming next. ‘Okay,’ I said out loud to the sunrise. ‘That’s enough.’

  I was aware that I’d been given a second chance and I was determined not to waste it. I made a vow that I would never again touch drugs, an undertaking that lasted until I finished the cigarette and went downstairs.

  14

  Getting hauled through the court system didn’t turn me into an upstanding citizen. Arresting someone, punishing them, incarcerating them: none of that teaches them the fundamental problem with committing crime. What it does teach them is not to get caught.

  I had been rattled by my recent excursion, though, and decided that I was done with dealing drugs. That said, in the six months of terror preceding my trial I’d learned that when feeling anxious and having to do something taxing, such as, say, drive to uni, the best thing was to enjoy a bottle of vodka and a bump of coke. So I’d been dissuaded from pursuing a life of crime but I hadn’t been scared straight – quite the opposite. My real takeaway message from the experience was that there is almost no situation in life that isn’t easier to deal with after a couple of belts of something or other. I wasn’t going to sell drugs any more, but I sure wasn’t done taking them.

  Another lesson was that maybe I wasn’t the hard-boiled gangster I had assumed. This was confirmed for me when, a few months later, Sarah went to art school and took up with a guy in her class: a tall, skinny Nick Cave doppelganger who painted portraits of himself as Jesus on the cross. I walked in on them making out, started a fight and had my arse handed to me.

  I walked away bleeding and downhearted. It hurt to catch Sarah with another guy, but I was more upset that I’d gone to defend my honour and been whipped. For years I had based my persona on being a kind of suburban ronin, whose deadly wit was matched only by his fists. Now I’d been dragged into the front yard of an Ormond townhouse and tenderised by a guy who painted with acrylics. Acrylics.

  I wasn’t cut out for a life of crime, and slowly, as my virtuoso-inflicted bruises started to fade, I began to realise this. My old associates and suppliers had distanced themselves from me, changing their numbers and switching up their codes, and my clients quickly moved on as other reprobates filled the gap I’d left.

  Hamish, who’d been entertaining his friends and partners for years with an unlimited supply of weed and cash from my room, started casting further afield, and my parents went back to paying way too much on the ounce. All this seemed incidental to me at the time. Crime was the furthest thing from my mind. I was trying to get my life back together, which meant moving out of home and finding some kind of vocation.

  Although I’d been a mediocre student my whole life, I did quite well in my first year at university. One of my tutors had mistaken my coked-out ramblings for passion, and I knew how to turn out an essay, which is all you need to be a humanities superstar. She took me aside to explain that she thought I could do some good as a social worker, so she had marked me higher than I deserved. I thanked her and then used the inflated grade to transfer out of social work and into an arts degree at a more prestigious university. I needed less direction and, besides, I figured my future social-work clients were better off without me.

  I started moonlighting as a music critic and supplemented my income by working at a pizza shop. Once I had a few bucks, I set about to find myself, in all the usual ways. I hitchhiked up and down the east coast, wrote a terrible novel on an old laptop that was stolen from me by a burglar, thankfully before I had a chance to send the manuscript anywhere. Slowly, I healed what I was telling everyone was a broken heart but was really just a bruised ego.

  That’s when I met Katya. Katya was, in a word, Russian. She was diminutive, violent, sexy, vicious, brilliant and alcoholic. The first time I saw her she was standing on a table at a party, waving a bottle of Stolichnaya and screaming, ‘WHO WANTS TO SEE SOME TITTY?’ It was love at first sight.

  She lived with her mum and step-dad, Vasily, a drunken, abusive retired Siberian soldier who ran a string of quasi-legal companies and collected Scarface memorabilia. Vasily was a properly bad man, a tightly wound ball of rage who could have tied me into a pretzel without breaking a sweat. When Katya was growing up, he would often beat his wife and step-daughter when he was drunk or just angry. After Katya and I had been seeing each other for a few months, Vasily revealed that he was having an affair with his wife’s best friend. Then he ran up a couple of hundred thousand dollars in credit card debt, stole everything of value from their joint accounts and disappeared to Russia. I was looking to begin a new life, and so was Katya.

  We got a flat together in a Russian ghetto in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. We were both at university but Katya worked to support us while I wrote mediocre short stories, which brought in almost nothing. She got to know my family and I got to know hers, something I’d never really experienced with a girlfriend before, what with all the anxiety meds and police raids that had characterised my previous relationships.

  I had no idea what I might do for a living. Between my general sloppiness and my legal troubles, I wasn’t having to fend off potential employers with Sunny’s trusty .22. My folks had, in their grief, more or less withdrawn from the world, only leaving the house to work or buy microwave dinners, so we weren’t about to start a wholesome family business. In a way, actually, that’s what had got me into this mess in the first place.

  Surely, someone out there – an employer with deep pockets and the wisdom to appreciate my anti-authoritarian tantrums as a valuable corporate asset – would be willing to pay me to be me. It had to be that way. The alternative meant that blueprinting my life based on a Slim Shady album and On the Road was a mistake, and that was just unfeasible.

  Following Ardian’s death, friends and family became scarce in our lives. Sympathy is a finite resource, even for the most compassionate, and as the years passed and the world moved on, my parents remained moored in place by their grief as the rest o
f their lives broke apart and drifted off. If you’ve suffered an immense tragedy, a two-fisted, world-ending tragedy like losing a child, you never really get over it, in a way that most people can’t understand. The cousins, uncles and family friends who supported you incrementally start to inch away from the exhaustive grief. They stop inviting you over because you can’t stop crying. You turn down an invitation to a holiday abroad because where would you get hold of your not-quite-legal medication? You get into a fight over some bullshit because you’re already strained to the point of breaking and stop speaking entirely. The loved ones who should be there to notice things have gone awry are absent, and you find yourself alone when trouble finds you.

  So when looking for someone to emulate, Hamish had to improvise, and I was all he had, the poor bastard. On any objective scale I was a fuck-up – I drank far too much, I used drugs, I was a failed dealer – but that kind of thing looks good to a twelve-year-old. As he grew he started to walk with the same bouncy, effete caveman gait I had going. When his voice broke it assumed the same mumbled cadence that mine has always had. I once talked to a shrink who told me I probably spoke that way because I’d learned English from people who were stoned most of the time.

  Hamish talked a little faster, was a little quicker on his feet, a little more street smart when it came down to it, and maybe he was a little more considerate. Still, there were plenty of similarities that you couldn’t help but notice if you put us side by side in, say, a police line-up.

  He had, for instance, inherited my passion for intoxicants. Can’t say I blame him. When he used to creep into my room to pinch weed and money, he found plenty of both, and I was always too wasted to notice. In later years I was angry when I realised just how much he had been stealing from me, and mortified when I realised he had also been reading the notebooks I wrote in that dark summer after I saw 8 Mile and decided that I was a rapper.

  By any metric, I was a shit big brother and a terrible role model; an exemplar of how you can succeed through laziness, selfishness, churlishness and vanity, if only you are ready to walk over enough people to do so. While this is absolutely true, and remains an important life lesson for many young heirs and heiresses of the world, it gives a middle-class hippie kid a poor grounding in life.