by Bri Lee
‘I’m very sorry for what I’ve done,’ he said, and my anger faltered. He was thirty-eight, lived alone, and made a tiny income as a gardener. Would he ever have the opportunity to be consensually intimate with a woman? Was he lonely? He was so big—huge hands, extremely tall, a slim body but an oddly square head.
Judge used the word ‘attacked’ during the sentence. ‘It was entirely understandable that she was revolted by your behaviour,’ he said to the defendant. ‘Do you understand that?’
I looked at his lowered shoulders, his head hung in shame. He nodded. My heart was a tennis ball being hit across the court from ‘good guy’ to ‘bad guy’, never landing.
Judge was keen to get through as many matters as possible so we listed another trial the next day, but the defendant pleaded guilty right after the jurors were empanelled. The defence barrister had used every single one of his eight challenges on the women’s names I pulled from the barrel, so the result was two women and ten men. I still couldn’t believe defence were allowed to do that, and I was happy when the defendant pleaded guilty so we didn’t have to proceed with such an unbalanced panel. At sentence we heard from the prosecutor that the defendant had just broken up with his girlfriend and didn’t have a place to live on the night he climbed in the bedroom window of another young woman, who was sleeping, and tried to pull off her pants.
When she was wrestling him off her and her brother ran into the room to get the intruder out, the defendant yelled at her, ‘You are the only girls I know in town and you’re doing this to me, you dogs!’
How entitled to their bodies did he think he was? In his mind, was this the equivalent of yelling at the local IGA for not being open when he wanted, because it was the only supermarket in town he knew of? And to him, was a woman a ‘dog’ automatically when she said ‘no’ to sex with him? What if the brother hadn’t run in? She would have been raped with no witnesses, might not have gone to court, might not have got any justice.
The rest of Gympie was relatively straightforward. Michelle Payne won the Melbourne Cup, and I had a lively discussion with Judge about how I could be simultaneously happy for her and loathing of horseracing generally.
Judge and I went to dinner with Rebecca, the visiting prosecutors, and some of the local solicitors. I felt a subtle twinge when I saw her and Judge interact again. It was a reminder that my time with him would be ending soon, and I would miss his company.
The prospect of no longer working in the District Court was exciting but also frightening. I knew I was getting addicted to the feeling of significance inherent in my work. Addicted in the true sense of the word, too—I had a higher tolerance for horrific details, and the rush of awaiting and taking a verdict was fading.
Not many other jobs would give me the opportunity to examine life and liberty on a daily basis, but seeing Rebecca was good timing. We had a quick chat about her work and lifestyle, and I was instantly and freshly reassured that going into law—especially going into defence—wasn’t for me.
‘How are you going with PLTs?’ she asked, and when I groaned she gave me a knowing smile.
‘Nearly done,’ I nodded, ‘and that’s about the only positive thing about it.’
We laughed.
I would finish up as an associate, get admitted, and take Samuel to court. The rest of my life would just have to fall into place.
I WENT FROM GYMPIE STRAIGHT to Vincent’s house on the Friday afternoon. I found him in his bedroom and pulled him into a hug and toppled us over onto the bed, laughing.
‘Why do you always go away from me?’ I asked him, joking.
‘Babe,’ he said in a faux-low-movie-star voice, ‘you know I have to travel around the Australian outback dispensing justice.’ And we laughed again.
I woke the next morning to my phone ringing, and before I had even opened my eyes I was panicking it would be Samuel. I gently crawled over Vincent, silenced my phone, and stared at the screen: a mobile number I didn’t have saved. I knew it was him, somehow, and watched the phone in horror, feeling it vibrate in my palm to the beat of the ringtone, the light flashing, illuminating my face in the otherwise dark room.
Finally the vibrations stopped, and I waited. I stared down at the little grenade. I was perched on the edge of the mattress, every muscle in my body poised, blood pumping in my ears, minutes passing. Bzzzz’d. It went off and I jumped, absurdly—like waiting for the toaster and being startled even when you know it’s going to pop.
‘You have one new voicemail.’
I forgot where I was and hit play, and my premonition came true with such force and volume that it was as though the strength of my fear had willed it into existence. Samuel’s voice boomed out into the room, rupturing the peaceful, loving silence Vincent and I had been resting in, blissfully, ignorantly, until that moment.
I listened. Samuel was back in Australia and wanted to know if I wanted to meet up and talk about things. At the end was a casual apology and an offer to buy me a drink. As soon as the message finished I hit #3—Delete.
‘Was that him?’ Vincent asked me, half asleep.
‘Yeah,’ I replied, putting the phone on the ground, pushing it away with my foot.
‘What did he want?’
‘He just apologised again, and he asked me if I want to meet up for a drink to talk about it,’ I said, confused.
‘Ugh,’ Vincent groaned into his pillow, ‘come back to sleep,’ and he pulled me under the covers, but I didn’t get back to sleep. I felt invaded, as if I’d failed somehow and allowed Samuel into our bed, and I panicked that Vincent wouldn’t be able to forget it, that he might be repulsed by me like I felt repulsed by myself. Who wants some broken, dirty thing for a lover?
Later in the day I remembered the usefulness of the evidence I had destroyed and was furious at myself. I knew better than that. I’d seen so many trials, proofread so many sentences, studied so many cases, and I’d destroyed my own evidence. Jessica’s testimony about flushing the tampon full of evidence down the toilet came back to me, along with the memory that neither of her trials resulted in a guilty verdict.
I sent Sean a message to tell him that Samuel was back in the country, and I waited. We all think we’ll know what we’ll do, if it happens to us, but in The Freeze it’s different.
Life went on. Some days were better than others. It was another hot summer with skirts cutting into my waist. I saw my mum and asked her that we not talk about it. I went to work and made the most of the time Judge and I had together, picking his brain about this and that. I got to know my housemates a little better, smoking cigarettes on our rotting back deck, looking out over fiery Queensland sunsets.
I went on a judges-and-associates golf day. It cost well over a hundred dollars and Judge didn’t want to go, so I got paired with a different judge who was quite nice. I turned up in a floral tea dress, not realising that many people consider golf to be a ‘sport’ that requires specific ‘activewear’—namely a Polo Ralph Lauren shirt, preferably in a pastel shade reminiscent of gelati. And chinos. Chinos everywhere.
‘Well, that’s the most exciting golfing attire I’ve ever seen,’ the judge said to me, one eyebrow raised so high it would have hit his hairline if he had one.
‘Ah yes, well, I only ever golf in my finest,’ I replied with a fake curtsey.
The event was yet another affirmation that I didn’t belong in that world. The lunch that took place afterwards was similar fare to what had been served at one of my cousin’s weddings—the most important day of their young adult life and one they saved for over a year to put on—and there I was eating it, rather carelessly, with a bunch of twenty-somethings all pretending they weren’t wearing the same thing and me pretending I looked different deliberately. Fancy wine flowed and so I drank it. My most vivid memory of the whole day is of kicking my shoes off, in a quiet moment away from everyone, and watching some rainbow lorikeets and feeling the cool breeze in between my toes.
‘How was it?’ Judge asked me t
he following Monday.
‘I liked driving the golf buggy,’ I replied with a shrug, and we exchanged a knowing smile.
A call came through one afternoon when I was bustling around my room after work, kicking my heels off and unzipping an impossibly tight pencil skirt.
‘Hi, it’s Sean from Dutton Park Police, have you got a moment?’
‘Sure do,’ I replied, sitting at my desk and grabbing my notepad and pen.
‘So we sent a couple of officers to knock on his door, so now he knows what’s up.’
‘Right.’
‘So the first thing is, I suppose, to look out for yourself. It’s very rare, but sometimes we get an accused who will try to find or contact the victim,’ he said, and I didn’t mention Vincent’s scare. ‘Like I said, that’s very rare, but it’s definitely a good idea to make sure you’re locking the house properly and, you know, just keeping an eye out for anyone who might be following you or anything.’
‘Right.’
‘But I’ve also received some correspondence indicating that Samuel has hired a solicitor and briefed a barrister.’
‘Oh,’ I said, confused, ‘but they know he admitted it on the pretext call, right?’
‘Yep, but, ah, basically they’ve come back and said that he was ten.’
‘What?’
‘Ten when it happened, when he did it.’
‘Huh?’
‘I know, yeah.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’ I said.
‘They’re saying that the incident occurred when Samuel’s family had just moved to the neighbourhood, and that he was ten.’
‘Well, that’s just impossible. He’s at least six years older than me, and I was in my primary school uniform. I would have had to have been four for what he’s saying to be true! I don’t think I could have even really remembered anything that happened when I was four!’
‘Yeah, look, I think they’re just trying it on and, at this stage, without you having any strong evidence about the date you say it took place, I don’t have much to say back to them.’
I was furious. ‘And this couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that ten is the last age at which an individual can’t be held criminally culpable, can it?’ I said, almost spitting with sarcasm.
Sean outlined what was to happen in the coming months and told me to brace for a bit of a fight. It seemed as if Samuel and his lawyers knew they couldn’t fight the fact that the offending occurred, so all they could do was to dispute the year it occurred. I tried to see the positive side—they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. I hung up the phone, a little sad but mostly infuriated. Something inside me, in my belly, fired up for a fight. I thought for a moment that perhaps I wasn’t a Freeze kind of person anymore, that maybe I really could take him on. I thought back to Maggie, how she’d frozen in the model aeroplanes room but then fought back in the van, and then how she testified in court, and I thought maybe I could learn to be strong like her. That maybe, after all these years, I was on even ground, that with my education and my job and my partner and my family, I could fight for myself.
Nobody tells you that if you want to press charges against the man who molested you, you still have to go to work, get jobs done and interact with people as though you’re a normal human being—more difficult than that, even: that you are your normal self. You can’t put your life on pause and tap out while you ride out the bad waves. You’ll still drop the roast you just made, and miss your bus, and run out of toilet paper. And all the small things make you furious because, goddamnit, can’t the universe see you have some bigger fish to fry? I had good days, sometimes a few in a row, and then I would get very drunk and vomit up dinners, or cut myself, sometimes both depending on what new bullshit trial Judge and I were sitting in that week.
My psychologist appointments were rare because I couldn’t find slots to fit around work very often. I was also nervous about having to disclose my mental health care when I went for admission to the legal profession in a few months’ time: a section in the paperwork is dedicated to things you have to put on the record that might affect your ‘suitability’ to practise law, and that’s where you disclose your criminal convictions, Centrelink frauds, speeding fines, and whether or not you have any mental illnesses. I didn’t even know who I could ask about this process without making it pretty damn obvious that I was on, or was considering going on, a mental health plan. In the meantime my weight yo-yoed and I bought lots of cheap white wine and extra bandaids. Once I bought myself flowers and wine and bandaids on the way home from work, all together, and laughed out loud, at a crowded pedestrian crossing, about what a cliché I was.
It’s a realisation most of us have at some point in our young adult lives, that there’s no guidebook for the important stuff. When you most want to stride out from under the wings of your parents, you will simultaneously long for their guidance and reassurance like never before. In the worst moments of those nights I thought of my mum, and how I could burn down everything around me and that she would still come help me if I just picked up the phone. Like most of my female friends, I rarely fought with my father and often fought with my mother, but we all knew that when the chips were down our mums would be the first to run into the blaze after us. Sometimes I wondered if I could ever be a mother like that, the way you had to, and whether I could bring a girl into a world where she had a one in five chance of someone molesting her. Some of the evenings I spent alone were touch-and-go, and my mum didn’t even know she was the one who got me through. I never called anyone. I didn’t know how long the whole process would take and I didn’t want to use up favours too early in the game.
‘I have something for you,’ Judge said to me one morning, and handed me two printed pieces of paper. It was the draft for an update to the legislation for domestic violence adding strangulation as a specific offence, as recommended in Quentin Bryce’s report.
‘Oh, for me! You shouldn’t have!’ I replied, and we laughed, but my smile was genuine.
In the seven months after non-lethal strangulation became a separate criminal offence in Queensland in April 2016 when the law was eventually passed, The Courier-Mail reported that more than five hundred allegations of non-lethal strangulation had been made.
That morning had significance for me as well. I liked that Judge had printed that memorandum off for me. I appreciated that he knew I cared, that it would make me feel good to see that. It was a sign that he knew me properly, and perhaps even respected me.
I took the printouts with me when I met Dad for a coffee—to tell him of the process as much as to gloat. I was happy for about five minutes before becoming sad again about the fact that the legislation was even necessary. I told him I was afraid, that at work baddies were all around and on the street they were all around. He said that in our jobs lots of people burn out because all they see is the worst cross-section of society. He said the baddies really are a minority and that the overwhelming majority of people in the world are good and nice.
‘You only see the 5 per cent,’ he said.
‘Five per cent!? One in twenty people hurts another person?’
‘Well, no, I just mean, not many.’
‘One in twenty is a lot!’
‘It’s not one in twenty.’
‘Well then, what is it!?’ I asked loudly, and tears came to my eyes. ‘How many people are actually criminals?’ I gestured around the cafe.
He went quiet for a bit. He didn’t have an answer for me. ‘Are you still talking to someone?’ he sort-of asked.
I thought I had been talking to someone.
When I slept I had nightmares about sex abuse and assault. Horrific things that I woke up feeling ashamed of. In these dreams, sometimes things would happen to me, or I would witness them happening to a woman near me. Other times I was floating around a scene, invisible at the sidelines, watching. I never recognised the people’s faces but each of them was different—a never-ending cascade of boys and girls, plen
ty of different women, and a plethora of men I’d never seen before. It made me nervous that I’d been wrong about myself in Gympie, and I worried that the nightmares coming from within were a signifier of the horror that sat within me somewhere, that my daytime brain was a pathetic bandaid over the pus, slipping off my rotting, slimy core when I closed my eyes. If Vincent was sleeping with me he would cut the nightmares short by shaking me awake when he heard me crying or screaming.
One night I was walking through a primary school that looked like my own, but I was invisible to everyone, just watching. I saw a man leading a boy away by the hand and I followed them to the bush nearby. The man was tall and broad-shouldered, and he had brown hair and a short beard. He was wearing a relaxed hunting outfit, like recreational hunters I’d seen in the North American woods. The bush we were in was dry but thick with gum saplings, and it must have been autumn because the ground was covered in foliage of classic Australian greys and browns. The man and boy snapped twigs and rustled dry leaves as they walked along but I floated by, unseen. The boy was Asian and had a neat haircut, and he never looked at the man. He didn’t even look around, he just watched the ground ahead and showed no emotion. His feet were moving, sure, but I could recognise The Freeze anywhere. I watched as they reached a rise in the gully and the man laid the boy down on his back, and the man straddled the boy’s face and raped his mouth until the boy vomited and sat up with a bloody nose. I did nothing. I watched the man pull a full bottle of Bundaberg Rum out of his khaki backpack and stick the neck of the bottle into the boy’s mouth like a pacifier, and as the man directed the boy’s arms to hold the bottle for himself, and the boy complied, glassy-eyed, not even crying, the man started raping the boy’s anus, first slowly, then more and more aggressively. I looked at the boy’s face once more, but I didn’t recognise him, and then I woke up.