Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  Phillips was not found guilty, but he also wasn’t discharged. The jury could not reach a unanimous verdict. It was to be documented as another mistrial.

  ‘He may as well have been acquitted, though,’ I said to Judge. ‘I don’t think they could put Jessica through that process again.’ The only thing worse, perhaps, would be the likely outcome of the DPP refusing to re-run the trial. She was too strange, too emotional. Her hair too frizzy and her skirt too short. She wasn’t a good little innocent girl. She wasn’t a good enough victim to get a conviction against a man who confessed and fled.

  My notebook for the Phillips trial finished with: I AM ANGRY. I AM ANGRY. I AM ANGRY. Can I please scratch his face? Can I please punch him so hard that his glasses crunch into his eyes? That last note is curious to me now because the defendant didn’t have glasses. I think I must have been writing about the defence barrister.

  IT WAS SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT the Qantas Lounge and I was sipping a black coffee but gazing longingly at FIFO workers with free schooners. On the flight I read a magazine I’d nicked and drifted in and out of embarrassed sleep. We landed and wrangled the thirty-kilogram suitcase full of briefs into the hire car, and I drove us extremely cautiously to the shitty motel where we dropped our luggage off and went to find the IGA before it closed. I was getting the hang of circuit.

  ‘Do you want to take a look at the courthouse?’ Judge asked me on our way back to the motel. ‘It’s a beautiful old building.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Turn right at these lights.’

  We cruised along the wide, quiet roads, and I looked out across the scores of single-storey, brick-facade homes. I thought about how the IGA had a disproportionately high number of shelves dedicated to pre-packaged and junk food, and how the high prices of the fresh produce had thrown me. In Roma, weren’t we closer to the farmers?

  As promised, the courthouse was beautiful. Judge’s chambers had an old fireplace behind his desk, and my associate’s desk area in the courtroom was on a slightly raised platform. The building was completed in 1901, but a few decades before that, in 1872, there had been a famous trial of a man named Harry Readford for stealing a thousand head of cattle and driving them from Longreach in Queensland right down to South Australia. Burke and Wills had died on that same stretch less than a decade earlier. When Readford went to trial the jurors refused to convict him because they knew him as ‘Captain Starlight’, and his feat was so impressive that they considered him some kind of bushranger hero. When Judge told me the story I laughed, but at the end of that fortnight—when I’d taken verdicts for two trials, one against a white man and one against an Aboriginal man—I wondered if Roma’s jurors had changed much since 1872.

  The next morning we turned up and set the tone. Judge asked why certain matters were still on the list despite him having made orders about them when he was last there twelve months ago. We crammed our schedules full of sentences and solidified plans for two trials: one to start that morning and the other the following week.

  I started struggling with the bailiff immediately. He was a very old, very slow man. We scheduled appearances via videolink and he didn’t mention that he had no idea how to operate the controls. He fell asleep regularly, and was half deaf but refused to wear his hearing aids, so could not be relied upon to respond unless you were physically in front of him. The registrar apologised to me on the bailiff’s behalf multiple times throughout the week, and even Judge seemed to be turning a blind eye to his incompetence. The bailiff kept asking me whether or not he could go home early, and when the latest was that he could arrive in the morning.

  ‘Well, we have a videolink scheduled for 9.30 a.m. so however long you need to set the courtroom up to be ready for that,’ I replied to him once, quite curtly, and he didn’t look embarrassed or perturbed in the slightest. He’d been cruising through that job with a bare-minimum output for longer than I’d been alive.

  ‘I can’t always do his job and mine,’ I said to Judge at the end of the first week, exasperated, trying to get a response to validate my frustration.

  ‘Yes, I wonder about some of these bailiffs sometimes,’ he said. ‘I think some of them may be veterans.’

  ‘From what war?’ I asked, confused. There was no way this incompetent dude had been anywhere near the Arab–Israeli conflict.

  ‘Vietnam?’ Judge wondered.

  I didn’t criticise the bailiff after that. It felt like some kind of Aussie blasphemy. Diggers, veterans, bushrangers—all beyond reproach.

  The trial that first Monday was estimated to go for two to three days, and the estimate held true. As with most rapes, there weren’t any third party witnesses or much in the way of expert testimonies, but the battle was about to get harder for the Crown. Brendan Strow stood in the dock and as the prosecution opened their address and outlined the charge, I could see the confusion on the faces of the jurors. Even the local journalist in the back row of the public seats crossed something off her pad, furrowed her brow, and started a sentence again. The rape was ‘digital’ not ‘penile’. If convicted, Strow would have a rape on his record, but it seemed to be on the tips of their tongues, that it wasn’t a ‘real’ or a ‘serious’ rape.

  Strow didn’t give evidence, but certain parts of the night weren’t disputed. It wasn’t disputed that Strow’s wife had dropped him off into town for a weekend night of drinking, and that at some point that night he met a young woman, an American backpacker, who was working in the pub to pay for her stay in town. There was CCTV footage of Strow buying some things for her at a convenience store after hours of drinking together, time-stamping them being in each other’s company at the right time. And through the grainy footage, much to defence’s frustration, it could be seen that Strow had taken off his wedding ring for the night.

  Thirty minutes passed and Strow, the young backpacker, and two friends were back at the pub, this time on the second storey, on a balcony outside the shared living quarters of the transient staff. There is video footage from this balcony showing them all having one last beer together before people peel off. The complainant goes to her bedroom and turns the light out. Strow waits for a moment and then goes into her bedroom, is there for less than ten minutes, then leaves the bedroom, walks out on the balcony and away into the night. Moments later the complainant emerges, upset, and the police are called.

  She alleged that she’d awoken to find Strow sitting on the side of the bed with his fingers inside her. About two years had passed since the alleged act, and the complainant had flown back to Australia to give evidence at the trial. Strow had probably been banking on the whole thing fading off into the distance.

  After the opening addresses we adjourned for the day and sent the jury home. None of them excused themselves for knowing Strow, but I doubted that none of them hadn’t at least heard of him, or heard about the trial, or spoken about it at the main pub in town, the same one where it had all gone down.

  I wondered all the usual things: How much had he told his wife? Did he still have the same job? Was this the first time he’d done something really, truly bad? Had he spent the night drinking with that young woman expecting to have sex with her, presumably cheating on his wife in the process? Perhaps I was a moral absolutist after all, focusing on this aspect of his psyche somehow making things worse. Why had he taken off his wedding ring if not to do something wrong? All rapists are guaranteed dickheads but not all dickheads are rapists. Was his wife at home that night, waiting for him to call asking for a lift? Did she think he’d just be with the boys? What specific kind of surprise did she feel when the story emerged? What was her life like, from that night onwards, in that tiny, suffocating town?

  Judge and I had dinner together at the small restaurant attached to the accommodation. We agreed that it would be difficult for the residents of Roma to feel comfortable convicting a man of a rape when it was digital.

  We also spoke briefly about jobs in the industry, and I assured him my PLT studies were on track. Bu
t as I popped some roast potato in my mouth, I chewed over the idea that I wasn’t cut out for his line of work.

  At the end of dessert I went back to my room, grabbed a cigarette, and snuck outside around the back of the building to smoke. I felt sick from eating too much and christened the third circuit bathroom of the year by crying and vomiting in the bottom of the shower. I thought of Strow’s fingers as I stuck my own down my throat. In my exhausted packing I’d forgotten pyjamas and when I got into bed the feeling of the sheets on my bare skin irked me. Roma was all over me, around me, inside me. I couldn’t sleep.

  The morning was a little crisp and I liked seeing my breath puff up and out into the air, but I hated seeing my lumpy body in my old running gear. Binge, smoke, vomit, run. I knew it wasn’t sustainable, but I couldn’t see ahead with any clarity to a point where I felt good about myself but wasn’t starving. I couldn’t break the cycle. Every few weeks I would drop a couple of kilos, start feeling confident, relax, enjoy life, and put on weight again. Self-confidence was perpetually out of reach.

  Hitting the button on my Fitbit, I started jogging out of the motel complex, to the side of the road, and tried to find a steady pace. The bush on either side of me felt familiar but also frightening. It was tough to come to all these towns and only learn the names and faces of the rapists. We never met the self-sacrificing teachers, or the community-minded cafe owners, or the local Scout leaders.

  A couple of minutes of puffing later, I reached the low-density town centre. Cement footpaths in generous grids reached out all around and I stared through huge glass shopwindows, admiring the lettering on the old signs and smiling to think that every one of these towns had a generic-Asian-food-restaurant that sold Chinese fried rice beside pad thai and Vietnamese noodle soup. Lace covered every surface of a haberdashery shopfront. The local hippy ran a trinket store full of imported incense and crystals.

  A few more minutes in and the density of utes driving past increased, and I felt eyes on me. A man in hi-vis necked a bottle of Ice Break while watching me from across the road, and I saw him lower the bottle and wipe the brown milk from the top of his lip onto his sleeve. I felt immediately self-conscious of how my shorts were bunching up between my thighs. He might have known most of the people around Roma and just been trying to figure out if he’d seen me around or if I was new. After all, I never saw anyone else jogging in the morning in Roma. Maybe he was gazing off into the distance and I simply passed his line of sight. These are the things we tell ourselves in the middle of confronting situations before the clarity of hindsight illuminates, yet again, how we should have trusted our gut. I saw more men that morning, most with utes, and sure as shit they saw me. They stared. Two others that morning alone were also drinking Ice Break and they laughed with each other a moment after I passed them. Who the fuck even drinks Ice Break past the age of fifteen? It’s a litre of sugary milk with some coffee flavouring. Was I being classist?

  I was deep in revenge fantasies when I misjudged a crumbling part of the tarmac, faltered mid-stride, and watched in slow motion as my heel slipped into a pothole and my body was flung away from where my mind willed it to travel. My left knee came down hard on the cement kerb and my left arm slid along the ground, sacrificing a few layers of skin to narrowly preserve my face and teeth. The shock of the fall lasted for just a second before I was winded with pain. The cold town was still quiet as I used my good leg to push myself along the ground, off the road, stuffing my sweaty singlet into my mouth and biting down. Blood came out of a few places, hot and fast, smearing across my clothes. I felt along the bones in my leg, pushed and prodded, decided nothing was broken, but the knee wouldn’t bend. A huge truck came rocketing down the road and kicked dust onto me, and as I gazed up at it I saw dozens of terrified cows in the back, and after the truck passed its stench followed. Cattle piss and shit filled my nose and mouth, and the muck and gravel it had flung at me had settled from the air into my open wounds. I looked up and around but all the strapping Ice Break-guzzlers had disappeared. I was still on my arse as the sun rose, then I finally started hobbling home. I got back in the shower and scrubbed the cuts, thinking how absurd it seemed that I would sometimes cut myself deliberately, and yet be so upset and perturbed when I did it accidentally.

  The feeling of those men’s eyes on me before I’d fallen reminded me of one morning in my first year of university. I had been running along the Brisbane River, and I was self-conscious about not having jogged for a while, but I’d pulled my shoes on and left the house, feeling proud of myself. I got a fraction of the way I’d previously been able to run non-stop, but pushing my lungs and stretching my legs felt good and I thought to myself that the spring was full of promise. My face was bright red but it was a beautiful day, and I dropped down to a walk for the final stretch home.

  ‘Hey!’ a man yelled from a car. ‘Why aren’t you running!?’ It was Samuel calling from far across the road, leaning out the side of his bright blue Toyota Hilux. ‘Come on!’

  ‘I just finished running,’ I called back.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, driving off, and when I got home I cried in the shower.

  The bailiff made a condescending remark when he saw me limping, and we settled into our new routine of mutual avoidance. The Strow trial continued and things got messy.

  The police had recovered transfer DNA from the complainant’s underpants that belonged to a man who wasn’t the defendant; they were trying to pre-empt the shitshow that we all knew would take place as soon as cross-examination began. Photos of the shared bedroom were tendered by the Crown that depicted clothing strewn all over the floor, and showed that the room was shared between men and women. It was suggested that the DNA could have simply been transferred from the floor to the complainant’s underwear before she put them on; it was suggested that they hadn’t been cleaned thoroughly since a previous sexual interaction; it was suggested that they weren’t even hers but that in her intoxicated state she’d put them on that night before going to sleep unawares. A forensic specialist said that if the allegations were true, the defendant’s DNA wouldn’t necessarily have transferred onto her underpants, so the lack of his DNA didn’t indicate anything in particular either.

  We broke for morning tea and when the jurors finished their Monte Carlos, defence dug in. ‘Why didn’t you scream or cry out?’ ‘How do you know it was him if you were so drunk?’ ‘Are you sure you didn’t invite him into your room?’

  I emailed Megan when defence got to the underpants part. It was all too exhausting. What the wedding ring was to me, the underpants were to the jury. I judged the defendant’s credibility because his conduct indicated he was deceitful; those jurors probably doubted the woman’s complaint because she was careless with laundry. I felt alone sitting there, unable to call out the slut-shaming inherent in the barrister’s cross-examination. Megan replied to my email with sympathy and understanding, but she was in Kingaroy where things were even worse. I’d heard about Kingaroy, all the associates had.

  I limped down the road for a coffee while the jurors deliberated. I’d asked the bailiff loudly and clearly to call me if there was a note.

  ‘Of course!’ he said, as though he knew what his job actually was.

  I stirred my long black, waiting for it to cool, keeping my sunglasses on, mulling over the case. They had the most CCTV footage any woman could hope for: there Strow was entering and leaving her room, and she made a complaint just moments after he left, and she never changed her story. I thought it went to her credit that she was alleging one count of digital penetration—there was no witchy conspiracy. She wasn’t out for some vendetta or man-hating revenge. I felt she was telling the truth, completely, and she’d flown all the way back to that wretched place to do so. There seemed to be nothing else she could have done.

  But later that afternoon when I took the jury’s not guilty verdict, I wasn’t surprised. I couldn’t be. She should have been a virgin. She should have been a born-and-raised Roma resident of
many generations, like he was. She should have displayed cleanliness next to godliness. Then maybe people would have believed her.

  My leg improved over the middle weekend back in Brisbane, but I felt panicked not knowing how long I wouldn’t be able to exercise for while it healed. I spent some time with Vincent but struggled to feel as though I was really there with him. In the four months since starting work at the end of January it had been a-few-weeks-home, two-weeks-away, and my disgust at my body didn’t help. When we went more than a week without sex, some alignment—like a level or compass in my brain—slipped a little, and I became unsure of him as well as me. I grew convinced that he didn’t want to see me naked. My head was in a kind of hurricane. In my nightmares I carried suitcases full of heavy briefs until they broke my knee, the rapes toppling out everywhere onto the ground, then growing up around me, manifesting.

  ‘Do you not want to have sex with me now that I’m fat?’ I asked him eventually on the Saturday night, so quietly that he asked me to repeat myself. ‘Is that why we don’t have sex anymore? Because I’m big now?’ We were facing each other, just resting on the bed, and I buried my head in his chest, crying before he had the chance to answer. He protested as much as any good boyfriend ought to have, and in my exhaustion I decided to just believe him for the night.

  Going from Vincent’s bed back to Brisbane Airport on Sunday afternoon was gruelling. Managing suitcases with a bung knee was one thing, but the real struggle was emotional. I felt as though I were a lightweight amateur among heavyweight pros. The courtroom—that ring—was work to Judge, but each blow was flooring me. So early in the year and already stumbling. How long before the black lights? I knew they were coming for me, it was just a question of when I wouldn’t be able to get back up before the bell.