Eggshell Skull

by Bri Lee

  I sighed. I’d spent hours wondering the same thing, sitting at a crossroads.

  ‘I know what it feels like to be afraid that someone won’t believe you if you say you’ve been abused,’ I said, ‘and I refuse to relinquish my own humanity by discrediting Samuel’s claim to being abused himself.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He nodded and left it alone.

  It sounded like a grand, performative statement, because it was. I wanted to think Samuel was lying, but I couldn’t do so without lowering myself to his level. I decided that I hoped I would forever be the kind of person to grant the benefit of the doubt to complainants. In the weeks and months and years that followed I would give up, completely, on his humanity, but I refused to give up on mine.

  I did wonder, though, how Samuel could have said things that made me feel bad about making a police complaint when he didn’t even know I had already decided to. It was true that I appeared to have been living a normal life without telling anyone about what he did—I finished high school, went to university, moved out of home, got a boyfriend—the regular, totally fine route. I felt defensive when he said ‘I don’t live my life as a victim’, as though if I made a big deal out of it all I’d be playing the damsel in distress. It was also true that one of the main things that had stopped me from coming forward was how much it would upset my parents and brother.

  The prospect that Samuel had been abused himself meant the waters were muddied. The bully was also the victim. I struggled with the feeling that my hands couldn’t be clean if I proceeded with my complaint. If he was telling the truth then perhaps there was a shared pain between us—a crippling that I ought to understand and have sympathy for. I thought I had been tactful in communicating with him on the phone that night, but he had also played me. I came close to dropping my complaint because he had planted a seed in my mind: a possibility that he wasn’t the bad guy, but that I could be the bad guy. By making a big deal out of a little opportunistic non-event, I would upset his life and his family and my life and my family. After the police complaint and phone call I kept getting up in the morning, kept stepping through my totally fine life with the outside world, but he had shattered me internally. For months, as I ruminated on what role I was playing, the good guy or the bad guy, over and over in my mind, trying to make a decision based on morality and logic. I flung far to both sides depending on my weight, on Vincent, on the weather, on anything. One minute I’d be proud of my bravery in shining a light on his insidious betrayal of my family’s trust. The next I was a cruel banshee, out to upset everyone and get some attention.

  Unfortunately for Samuel my line of work exposed me, every week, to men who used the same lines to girls and women they’d hurt, and none of them were original.

  I was proofreading a sentence for Judge when a quote jumped out at me. A man addicted to ice convinced his prepubescent stepdaughter to keep his abuse quiet by making her feel guilty that she would just upset her mother if she spoke out. He used her siblings as leverage too. I finished proofreading the document and looked around at the building I was in—all those previous cases, all those briefs and files, representing only a fraction of abusers ever even brought before the courts. I wasn’t special and neither was Samuel.

  That afternoon was the first time I thought of her. She had a composite face of all the girls and women I’d seen in court throughout the year. She was out there, somewhere. Maybe she hadn’t called Samuel yet, maybe she had but didn’t do it at the copshop. She would be my ward.

  I thought a lot about what would happen if Samuel’s parents found out and he had to tell them about being abused himself. Was I responsible for the pain and suffering that would result? Probably, yes, in a way, but also, in another way, too fucking bad, buddy. He had wormed his way into my brain when I was just a child, and he was doing it again now I was a grown woman.

  I said to Vincent, ‘I think that it was his right not to do anything about the abuse that happened to him, but it’s also my right to do something about the abuse that happened to me.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said matter-of-factly, as though the answer was self-evident and not muddied by layers of shame and guilt and confusion.

  ‘I think the cycles continue when people don’t speak out about it, right?’ I said.

  ‘Yep. It’s people like you who break the cycle.’

  ‘Or maybe I’ll blow the whole fucking cycle out of the water.’

  ‘That’s my girl.’ He smiled, patted my thigh, and kissed my cheek.

  I knew Samuel didn’t have prior sex offences on his record, because Sean—when scrolling through a record on a computer screen I couldn’t see—had said something absent-mindedly about Samuel being a ‘cleanskin’. I decided that I just wanted something on his record, and that I would do it for her, whoever or wherever she was, so that when she came forward, eventually, people would believe her. A mark against his name might warn potential girlfriends and would ensure he couldn’t work with children or teenagers.

  Making that pretext phone call was the bravest thing I’d ever done. I was sitting in a police station with a detective outside the door and my mother downstairs, my arse on a cushioned chair, in aircon with a glass of water, and it was still the most frightened I’d ever been. Bravery can only exist in opposition to fear. That may be trite but it’s also true. The thing I had been most afraid of, for my whole life, was that the darkness within me was my own creation. That in my pathetic desperation for male attention I had fabricated a disgustingness that was incomprehensible to my conscious child mind. That I was manifestly unwanted and could only fantasise a world in which I could ever be desired. Not only all that, but also the possibility that in clamouring to create a narrative in which I was somehow appealing, I would unjustly incriminate an innocent man.

  That phone call could have undone me. I don’t know where I would have gone, if I really could have proceeded, if Samuel had denied the whole thing and done enough to act convincingly shocked and appalled. That was the fiery pit I saw burning, and I summoned my monster and ran toward it all on my own.

  The relentless waves of similar trials and sentences I saw that year finally eroded the absurd idea that my situation was somehow different or unique. It was all the girls and women with fears like mine, and all the men with excuses like his. It was all the time alone in regional Australia, when solitude forced me to peel back my own memories, to put myself on trial, to cross-examine the inconsistencies in my own beliefs.

  I went to work the day after the pretext call, like always, and Judge and I got on with dispensing justice from the District Court trenches, like always.

  A few days later the anxiety left over from the phone call was starting to fade and I had ingredients to make myself a nice dinner and I watched some historical lady detective shows on television. When I washed my dishes I was thinking that perhaps I really was strong enough to get through the coming year, but then I looked out the window above the sink and saw the neighbours putting a brand-new trampoline together in the backyard, and I got ants in my skin again. The plate slipped from my hands and landed loudly on the counter, cracking, and the shock of the sound and breakage made me start crying. What an incredibly average trigger. I rolled my eyes at myself and sighed, letting my hands sit in the warm, soapy water. One day Vincent and I might have children and they would ask for a trampoline, as all children do, and I would say ‘no’. We would pretend it was for their safety or that we couldn’t afford it.

  ‘If we ever own a house with a Hills hoist in the backyard I will hire a ute and tear it from the earth,’ I said to Vincent once.

  The kids wouldn’t know why and the neighbours might not either, but I felt sure that Vincent would help me take it to the tip. That seemed a good example of what love is.

  WHILE I WAS AWAY ON circuit in Gympie, Vincent stayed at my share house. He woke up in the middle of the night to a man outside screaming my name. Vincent presumed it was Samuel coming to get me, and with the bedroom window of the singl
e-storey house open, Vincent lowered himself off the side of the bed and crawled to the kitchen to get a knife, crawled back to the bedroom, and waited. He stood absolutely still, staring into the dark night at nothing, listening for movement, poised for intrusion.

  The man just kept yelling, though, and gradually a picture emerged out of the darkness. It seemed that I shared my name with the woman who lived next door, and that she had come home rather late at night to an aggressive partner. She’d tried not to wake him up when going through the front door but was clearly unsuccessful and, upon hearing his stirring and anger, ran and hid from him in the garden.

  Vincent didn’t relax until he eventually heard the woman answer to her name being called—until he was sure that nobody was looking for me—and then went back to bed. I only found out about the incident a fortnight later, after I returned home. A knife was lying forgotten just under the side of my bed.

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you,’ Vincent said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I dunno, I don’t want you thinking about it or worrying about it.’

  I did think and worry about it, but not for me, for her next door. My housemates and I had exchanged stories about the way that man spoke to his children. He seemed impatient and unkind, yelling at them about why they couldn’t follow simple directions and why they were so useless. I didn’t like living next door to him, I didn’t want to see him, to be reminded that for every case I saw in court, dozens never even made it into the system. Was he ever physically violent? Sometimes I wanted him to know that I was keeping an eye on him, but I was also afraid of him. No benches and bars separated us, I couldn’t take my robes home to protect me, he didn’t have to put on a state-issued jumpsuit, and when he washed his car in his driveway I reminded myself that there was no such thing as monsters. There were all kinds of people, all around me, a sliding scale. Reester, Baker, Phillips, they all had cars to wash. Everyone had trampolines and Hills hoists in their backyards.

  Once when I was young and asked my dad what he’d done at work during the day, he told me about a man who saw his girlfriend talking to another man in a car, and went out and punched that man. I thought this was a very romantic and dramatic thing to do.

  I asked my dad, ‘Doesn’t that mean he loves her?’

  ‘No, it means he is jealous and has a temper,’ Dad replied.

  But that was the apex of being cool for a girl in primary school: that two boys would fight over you. And I remember thinking that if a man was jealous and had a temper, it would just mean that he couldn’t contain himself—he was so affected by love for you. Although I was young I knew what jealousy and passion felt like, and the thought that one day I might inspire those feelings in someone else was exhilarating.

  I remember that afternoon, thinking about what my father had said as though it was silly, all I could hope for was a man who ran into battle for me.

  Gympie was the nail in the coffin for any aspirations I had to work in the legal industry. On the drive out Judge and I spoke about his previous associate, Rebecca, and what her life looked like now. Rebecca and Judge had been in Gympie together on their final circuit for the year when she asked the local solicitor’s office if they had any vacancies. Within six months she was an unsupervised duty lawyer—gaining experience and responsibility that wouldn’t be available to her for years if she stayed in a major city. For a qualified young woman from Brisbane, moving to Gympie for a year or two was a significant lifestyle sacrifice. Rebecca drove back to Brisbane most weekends to see friends and family, and to go to the supermarket without having one of her clients approach her in the dairy aisle admitting to a new DUI.

  ‘That’s always an option,’ Judge said to me casually, referring to Rebecca’s move ‘out bush’. I saw the countryside rushing past the car windows and wondered if I could be happy away from the city. I didn’t mind the idea of having a small, anonymous house to write from, but even thinking about a future in which I made money representing defendants in court made me cranky. How could Rebecca have seen all the same shit I saw, for more than a year, and still have gone into defence? I lied to Judge—saying something about being a city slicker—and resented his kind, encouraging inquiry. I already had my own father to disappoint, a second was just excessive.

  We were staying in large apartments that sat in a development area beside a deep-green golf course. Across the road from the big gates with their manicured landscaping, a scrappy old cemetery spread over some rolling hills. The grass was thin and dry, just gravelly dirt in patches, and old boughs from shedding grey gums lay sprinkled between the tombstones. The graves were much further apart than at the cemeteries in Brisbane, as though even in death people from Gympie prioritised land.

  I tried jogging around the neighbourhood on the first morning, but at work that day learned of the local ice epidemic and just how many muggings there had been in the previous month, by kids as young as fourteen. So I amended my track to stay nearer the development. It was a blessing in disguise: I saw rabbits and wallabies later in the week and when I burst through the web of a giant golden orb spider, sparkling with morning dew, I wrestled the sticky net out of my hair and wiped my hands on the cold wet grass, and some of the life returned to me. I was catching some kind of breath. Finally getting some fresh air. I only vomited once or twice that fortnight.

  On that first morning we were preparing for a dangerous operation causing death sentence, and Megan and I were emailing again. Driving-related offences are tough because people’s actions are always accidents but the stakes are so high. Unlike the terrors of most crime—where you listen in court and worry it might happen to you—dangerous ops are terrifying because you could also possibly do one yourself. Megan had worked on a few of these trials in the year already and by email reported the same fears I did.

  On a stretch of road between two properties, less than an hour’s drive from the Gympie courthouse, a young German man had driven with two friends in the car. He was sober—the designated driver—but it was late at night, and in a distraction that the court would later classify as negligence, he reverted to driving the way he had learned, on his country’s side of the road. Being out in the bush, with barely any signs to remind him he was on the other side of the planet, he rounded a bend and collided, front-on, with a vehicle. The woman in that car, driving on the correct side of the road, was a mother in her forties on her way home to her kids.

  Judge took a long adjournment before resuming the court to sentence the young German man to a period of imprisonment instead of a fully suspended sentence. Judge spoke softly, and proceedings were carried out more formally than I’d experienced all that year. I understood that the sense of finality that came with this matter, distinct from all the others, represented the fact that a life had ended. Dangerous ops were the only offence causing death that could be dealt with at the District Court level, rather than being referred straight up to the Supreme Court.

  The young man’s mother had travelled over from Germany, and she wept in the public seating area. Four people from the deceased’s family also came to watch, and they wept too. I took exacting minutes, leaving a perfect record of proceedings, focusing on my small court rituals to build a buffer between myself and the raw pain on display that might otherwise uncontrollably tumble forward.

  Negligence—in the legal sense—is a remarkably tricky concept. At once an aspiration that we hold each other to an objective standard of care yet simultaneously an acknowledgement that we can all disappoint one another without meaning to. Sometimes catastrophically. Negligence is a fancy way of saying ‘not good enough’. A pointed index finger reminding people they can’t stomp through life with reckless indifference to how their actions might affect others.

  Just that weekend I’d read some adoring letters to the editor in The Australian. Old and politically incorrect people whined about this new age of accountability: casual ableism, cultural appropriation, subconscious gender bias—all bad things that people get ‘called ou
t’ for all the time, all things that people refuse to accept responsibility for when the act or utterance wasn’t done with deliberate or conscious malice. Hands get thrown in the air—‘It’s up to you to take offence!’, ‘I didn’t mean it like that!’ I wished that all of these letter writers had done legal studies at high school, like some schools do, and learned about how in our power and privilege also comes responsibility.

  Sentencing someone for a negligent act is also difficult because one of the main aims of any criminal sentence—specific deterrence—isn’t as applicable. That German boy was going to gaol for reasons of general deterrence; a reminder to the rest of us that driving a car comes with responsibility to match the potential for damage. A giant metal machine had crushed a mother’s bones, and now her family wept in court. Of course it’s frightening to consider that without constant vigilance you might be responsible for evil actions despite not considering yourself to be a ‘bad’ person.

  Many years before becoming an associate, when I first began to reckon with the memory of being molested, I became afraid that I would one day inflict the same strange torture on someone else. This was also around the time I was learning—properly learning—about sex, and Samuel’s acts came to my mind in flashes. I saw babies being changed in bathroom stalls at shopping centres and terrified myself into premonitions about awful things I might do to them. In trying desperately to understand my abuser I had projected myself into his experience and gone too far in attempting to humanise him. I thought the event wouldn’t make sense to me until I discovered what would have to happen in my own life to make me capable of such callousness.

  After reading a little about the cycle of abuse—and this was years before the pretext call where Samuel said he was abused—I was convinced that the ugliness done to me had come to rest in me, and that it would leak out against some unsuspecting victim unless I was constantly vigilant. I thought, for a long time, that if I didn’t monitor myself I might somehow negligently continue the cycle; that Samuel’s act had somehow initiated me into a category of humans who were timebombs for further acts of cruelty. Something had been deposited in me and would sit there, forever trying to breach the surface of my consciousness, to release a heinous act.