by Bri Lee
It was dawn and Vincent was sleeping deeply beside me, our heads almost touching. I began to cry. Would I contaminate him? How could I have created such a filthy thing and brought it into our bed? I didn’t know those people, I’d never even heard a case where a man did something like that to a boy. And why hadn’t I done anything? How could I have just watched that—had I really been there? None of it made sense if there wasn’t an ugly thing inside me. Had it left and returned? Half asleep that night, I imagined it was getting excited, reaching its tentacles out and hooking them up around my brain, squeezing my eyeballs. I couldn’t keep it down.
I HAD A WEEK OFF work and visited my friend Anna in Melbourne. She was in a new theatre show called The Living Museum of Erotic Women and I wanted to support her, and to just drink and smoke and try to chill the fuck out. She’d written an incredible monologue for one part of the show that she performed naked, and in another part she pulled a tape measure out of her vagina—it was epic. I also had to tell her about Samuel in person, for some complicated reasons. Anna had been abused by her stepfather when she was a child. She had also slept with Samuel while I was overseas on exchange in 2011.
‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry to hear this,’ she said, when I told her about it all, ‘and thank you for telling me.’
‘I’m just so sorry I didn’t say anything when you dated him. I just wasn’t ready to even deal with it myself, and I was on the other side of the planet, and when I found out you’d already slept with him I just figured it was too late, and…ahhh, these are just excuses, I’m so sorry.’
‘You don’t have to be sorry for anything,’ she said. ‘I completely understand.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and wiped a little tear off my cheek.
‘To be honest, I’m not surprised.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I never slept with him because I really wanted to,’ she told me. ‘I mean, it wasn’t rape, but he absolutely manipulated me. It was during the floods, and he told me he was really struggling and vulnerable because his family home had gone under and he’d lost everything, and that if I was intimate with him he’d feel better, and he put this relentless pressure on me. I just kind of gave in after a while.’
‘Oh no, I’m so sorry to hear that.’
‘I’m just grossed out!’ she said, and we laughed a little, and hugged for a long time.
‘I was really worried Vincent would treat me differently,’ I said, ‘but I think it’s okay.’
‘Yeah, I know what you mean. I’m not ashamed of what happened to me, and you know me, I’m okay to talk about it now, but mostly I just hate the thought that people will start making assumptions about my psychology.’
I walked home alone after her show later that night. Google Maps told me the walk would take forty minutes, and I felt like stretching my legs, but as the sun set I realised I was going past a long stretch of cemetery without lighting. I took my headphones out of my ears just in time to hear a car screech past me, and a man leaned out of the window and screamed at me, ‘FAT BITCH!’ And four other men in the car laughed and hooted.
I told Anna about it later when we were at her place together.
‘You should be more careful,’ she said, and I was about to remark that it wasn’t like her to wag her finger at me, but she continued, ‘Jill Meagher was taken from nearby here.’
We sat in silence for a bit, so much between us not needing to be spoken. We both knew we shouldn’t have to change our behaviours, but we also knew better than most that the monsters were men and the men were real.
‘People keep telling me to just compartmentalise my life,’ I said, pouring us each another glass of wine, ‘but I can’t even walk down the fucking road without being forcibly reminded that the rapists I see in court are the same as the rapists out on the street.’
‘I don’t know how you do that job, babe,’ she said, reaching out and patting my knee, ‘you’re amazing.’
I smiled at her. ‘No, you’re amazing! That show was amazing! Tell me all about it.’
And she did, and we had a blast.
Back at work, Judge asked me about Melbourne.
‘I had a wonderful time, thank you!’ I said.
‘What kind of theatre does your friend do?’ he asked.
I paused, cocked my head a little and smiled. ‘Experimental.’
‘Got it,’ he said, and went back to his work.
My brother’s thirtieth rolled around and everyone got together for a party.
‘Where’s Samuel?’ one of his mates asked, and I tried to act casual.
Someone else replied, ‘Oh you know him, always bailing,’ and everyone else laughed.
One of the reasons I didn’t tell anyone about Samuel’s behaviour was that for a long time he was one of only two real friends my brother had. I’d always been worried that losing Samuel would hurt Arron deeply. I cracked another beer and grabbed a handful of chips, thinking that I was racking up quite the tally of things to feel guilty about.
Someone at the table asked me what I did, and once I’d explained my job they launched into a monologue about the Baden-Clay case. The trial had gripped the nation. A man was accused of killing his wife and dumping the body, and he had scratches on his face and had been having an affair, pleaded not guilty to murder, but was convicted by a jury. The conviction was then overturned by the Court of Appeal. Many Courier-Mail readers were outraged about the ‘low’ sentence and then the appeal. I was pleased that people seemed suddenly to care about victims of domestic violence, but I was also getting fed up with so much attention going to that one case. I felt as though every matter Judge and I heard deserved prime-time coverage. I was also fed up with people demanding more from the courts and from the legal system—many of the questions a case like Baden-Clay raised were social, not legal ones. I tried to explain my frustration to the person at the party but was definitely bringing the mood down.
Why was murder the serious thing? Why did people care so much more about it? Murder could happen in one day. A few hours is enough to show intent to kill, and you can kill a person who is nearly dead and it’s still murder because of the eggshell skull rule. But what about decades-long sexual abuse that eventually causes suicide? I remembered that photo of schoolkids from ABC News—the one with the faces blacked out. At least some Church victims were getting cameras and reporters. What about all the women I saw in court, though? I’d read and seen so many victim impact statements where abuse survivors outlined multiple suicide attempts. How many suicides meant that nobody was ever taken to court for homicide? How many times were a man’s actions buried with the corpse of his girlfriend’s daughter?
That weekend I got a call from Sean. Samuel’s solicitor was asking if I would consider an ‘out of court resolution’.
‘What does that even mean?’ I asked.
‘It would be a joint half-day counselling session,’ Sean explained. ‘You would speak to a psychologist, then he would, and then you would speak to the psychologist together.’
‘Right.’
‘And he would pay for it.’
‘How generous.’
‘But you need to know that if you accept this, the condition is that the psychologist could never be called as a witness.’
‘Riiiight,’ I replied. ‘Well, I’m not really interested in any of that.’
‘The solicitors said this would be an advisable course of action because of the “staleness of the matter”.’
I tried not to scoff. Stale to whom? ‘No. I want this on his record.’
For all I knew he’d been weaselling his way out of this bullshit for years. Maybe, at least, if I put up a fight, he would plead guilty the next time someone came forward. Whenever she did, whoever and wherever she was, I did it for her as much as for myself.
One Sunday Vincent and I went to Tuttu and Poppa’s for lunch. Mum, Dad, Arron and his girlfriend were also there to celebrate three November birthdays.
I sat with Tuttu having
a cigarette out the back of their house, pretending to be chirpy while I stared at their Hills hoist. Laundry was flapping on it, bright white against a bright blue sky. She had started getting sick and we were all still pretending it wasn’t a big deal. Her cigarettes were killing her, but I was glad to be smoking with her. Having a smoke with Tuttu in front of my family was worlds colliding. Nobody else smoked and Mum gave me a stern look when she passed by, but she couldn’t scold me without hitting Tuttu in the crosshairs so I was safe. I remember asking my parents once when I was young, ‘Why would you pay someone else to kill you slowly?’ But that was before I had a reason to want an excuse to stare into the distance with a relaxing substance for fifteen minutes at a time. When I sat with Tuttu smoking, I could bitch about men and mock the fancy people at work. When we sat together looking out in the same direction, doing something but not really—a catalyst to be there but no pressure for any particular result—in those smokos we became friends. We would only have a dozen such moments together.
As Vincent and I were driving home, we spoke about Tuttu getting sick and what we wanted to do with our lives. It was the kind of conversation that can’t begin on its own. The kind of thought processes that you only engage in when forced to by an external event—births, deaths and marriages. When we got back to my place and lay down together I told him how much he meant to me and that sometimes I could feel him swimming in my heart.
‘I think I’ll love you forever,’ I said to him.
‘Yeah, of course, we’re going to get old and fat together,’ he replied, without hesitation, and kissed me more.
The next month we moved into a share-house room together.
Summer meant it was house-party season in Brisbane. One Saturday I was by a pool talking about the wage gap with a woman I’d just met, and we exchanged some funny workplace stories. Hours later that evening she pushed through the dancefloor and found me again, and outside by the pool in the cool breeze she told me that she was raped by her first-ever boyfriend.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, touching her arm.
‘I don’t even know why I’m telling you this now, we’re at a party, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry, we can talk about it as much or as little as you want. Are you okay?’
‘Oh, ugh, it was ages ago now, I’m not even sad anymore, I’m just fucking angry. Like, I don’t even think he would realise how shitty what he did was. Maybe he doesn’t even know it was rape. And I feel guilty wondering if he did it to other girls because I didn’t call him out about it, you know?’
‘I know,’ I said, nodding.
I didn’t tell her this, but she reminded me of one time when I was walking around Yeronga; for some reason, Samuel and I were alone together, going from his house to ours, or perhaps vice versa.
‘So, you got a boyfriend yet?’ he asked without prompting.
‘Ah.’ I shrugged and half-nodded, lying to impress him.
‘Ha! Playing it cool! Nice one, nice one.’ He clapped. ‘Have you, you know, given it up yet?’ He nudged me in the ribs, hard, with his elbow.
‘Nah,’ I said.
‘Yeah, good one, there’s no rush,’ he said, nodding, as though he was seriously considering the situation, ‘and if you think he’s getting impatient you can always just give him a—’ And he made a gesture in the air of sucking a dick, and a guttural pop with his tongue in his mouth, and grinned at me.
At the time it just felt cool that he was even talking to me, the ugly little desperate thing. Now I look back and see a creep exploiting a young girl’s blatant innocence.
During those six months, when I started to tell close friends whom I trusted, so many stories came out of the woodwork. People I’d known for decades listened patiently to me, hugged me, then took their turn to tell me about their own rapes and assaults. I wrote to Hanna—a girl I’d become best friends with while on exchange years earlier—about it, and she wrote back telling me that she had almost been molested as a child by a school groundskeeper in her hometown in Finland, and she had the man arrested and dozens of other girls emerged with stories of his abuse. How interesting, she wrote to me, that we lived together for so long and went through so much, but didn’t know this about each other.
I had nightmares about running into Samuel around Brisbane. Sometimes I froze, sometimes I punched him, sometimes he apologised and sometimes he said cruel things. Every time I woke up furious. Why was nothing up to me? Why was nothing in my control? Who gave him permission to haunt me at night in the beautiful bedroom I shared with my lover? His prying fingers everywhere. I thought of him when I plucked my washing from the line, and when I jogged and the fat of my inner thighs rubbed together. When I was out walking and a car pulled up alongside me, for a moment I would always be most terrified that he was the driver. Why was I letting him in? How could I stop it?
When I was drunk and alone I wondered if I was the ugliest of all the girls and women Samuel had abused. Perhaps he would plead guilty if I was more beautiful. If, upon looking at me, people could understand why he ‘couldn’t help himself’. That summer, when I was still vomiting sometimes, I wondered if my ugliness made Samuel embarrassed to admit he did what he did. I was more beautiful when I was a child. I remembered I was cute—I’d seen photos. Would those images of that adorable little girl with those golden pigtails, in the bright blue checked school uniform, help the jury find Samuel guilty? ‘See!’ I could say to them. ‘I didn’t make it up! You may think I’m fat and ugly now, but I was a perfect child then! A sweet thing. Something a subconscious part of you didn’t fear and loathe.’
For my first few appointments at Headspace, my psychologist just sat there and listened. The words were pouring out. She’d ask a single question about my life and I would speak for twenty minutes. She expressed shock when I said some things, sadness when I said others, and when I paused and wrung my hands she would wait in silence for as long as I needed to find the right word. I kept it together for those first few sessions, trying to play it cool or somehow keep things low-key, then one afternoon she asked if we could talk about Vincent more.
‘Sure,’ I said before adding, ‘actually, I would kind of rather talk a bit about him. He’s my future but all the investigation stuff is my past.’
‘I have in my notes here that you said one of the reasons you wanted to come to these sessions was because you wanted someone to talk to about the investigation, because you didn’t want to talk to Vincent about it too much, because you didn’t want him to think of you like that or see you in that way. Is that still how you feel?’
‘Well yeah,’ I shrugged, ‘I want him to, like, desire me and I think that’s normal. I want him to see me sexually and as, like, his partner.’
‘Can you tell me what you mean by not wanting him to think of you in that way?’ she asked gently, and I paused.
‘Like a victim? I want him to think of who I am now, not the thing that happened to me. Spoiled or something.’
‘This isn’t necessarily the case for you, but often people who have lived through abuse say they feel a dirtiness or shame about what happened, and they don’t want to reveal that to other people.’ I sat silently. ‘Do you think maybe that you don’t want to talk to him about it because you think it’s somehow not okay? That it makes you undesirable?’
I took a deep breath in, and as I tried to exhale I started crying, and I cried for a long time. She had looked into me and seen the ugly thing curled up there.
‘I know that I didn’t deserve what happened or ask for it, but,’ I tapped my fingers on my chest, ‘there is something in there.’
She said that we needed to work on my self-esteem. She said that we needed to get me feeling good about myself so that I didn’t rely on other people to affirm my worth.
The next day I made lunch for me and Vincent, and he remarked that my bowl of pasta was quite large, and I had a panic attack. In hindsight that’s a little bit funny, but I was crying and crying. I told him I hated my
body because I was getting fatter and fatter, and he seemed to become frustrated by that, and he left my side.
But a few minutes later, when he saw me crying, he came and held me.
‘Where is this coming from?’ he asked. ‘You were so happy a minute ago.’
‘I feel like I have an ugly thing inside me, and it doesn’t matter what I do. Even if I did get skinny, I’ll always be ugly!’ He kissed me and protested, but I tried to tell him what I felt: ‘I feel like people can see it when they look at me, when I walk down the street.’ I was frantic.
‘See what?’
‘The ugly thing.’
‘There’s nothing there. No ugly thing, you are beautiful.’
I wouldn’t look at him, I felt so ashamed.
He put his hand under my chin, firmly, and made me look at him.
‘The thing that happened to me,’ I said. ‘It’s inside me all the time. And I don’t want to talk to you about it because then you’ll see the ugly thing too.’
‘There is no ugly thing inside you. There’s nothing there. You can talk to me whenever you want, as much as you want. You are beautiful.’
We stood in the kitchen together, him holding me and holding me up, for a long time, until I let go first.
Vincent and I drove to the police station one night at ten for me to make an addendum statement. My mum had remembered that a primary school friend of mine, Dylan, had broken his nose while playing on the trampoline, and that after the accident we moved it to a different area of the backyard with fewer bricks and more grass around it. The infamous nose break happened in the year 2000, and that put Samuel at a minimum of fifteen years old. It was weeks since I’d made my complaint and Samuel knew how old he was that afternoon, and he’d still sent the lawyers in with the only defence they could scrounge up—that he was only a child himself. I was furious at him.
On the drive over to the station, Vincent ate Maltesers and we spoke about lovely, silly things, and I tried to hide how elated I was that he kept his hand on my thigh like he usually did when we drove anywhere together.