by Bri Lee
I wondered if Tuttu had perhaps felt the same way about her cancer—that her time and love and future were dictated by an external cruelty. Something that could grow and change whenever it pleased, and that we just had to follow along its unknown trajectory, accepting the havoc it wreaked on our lives. I felt grateful, though, that at least my ‘cancer’ had a name and a face I could punch in daydreams.
But after the conversation with my brother in the car, I was reminded that what I chose to do about Samuel, what effect my claim might have on his life, really could be at my fingertips. This was a dangerously hopeful idea to consider, given I still didn’t know if he would contest the matter in court, and I knew that he could be acquitted, and I would risk defamation if I spoke out. But I thought about it because I wanted to know what kind of woman I was. What I would do if the ball was finally in my court.
I wanted all of his friends to know. They already suspected his latest rift with Arron was more significant than ever before, and potentially involved something illegal. None of them had expressed surprise when Arron told them Samuel was no longer welcome in his house.
I wanted his current partner to know. There was a high probability Samuel was hiding the information from her, even after she’d told him that she had been abused once, but I found it difficult to separate my desire to ruin his life from my hopes to inform her. Was their relationship even my business? When I considered that my desire to tell her might be petty and selfish, I remembered what Anna had told me: that she hadn’t wanted to have sex with Samuel, but that he manipulated her. He found her weakness and he exploited it. It couldn’t be a coincidence that his current partner had also been abused. Then again, so many of us have. What was the likelihood that he was a loving and supportive partner to her as she tried to come to terms with her own abuse? What further damage would I be doing to a woman whose specific pain I ought to understand and empathise with?
But I knew my heart was in the right place for this one because I kept hearing his voice through the telephone: you weren’t the only one.
Maybe I could talk to Arron and his girlfriend once everything was over, tell them to pass the word on to friends of theirs with younger sisters. Give my mobile number to anyone who had questions. Word would spread quickly among all those men, and perhaps they would remember off-colour jokes Samuel had made. Times when they’d seen him do things at parties. Maybe they would see his face and think of him as a normal man they know, and see my face as a normal woman they know, and it would help people realise that these things happen. That their words and actions have consequences.
I wanted to tell Samuel’s parents partly because of another important thing he’d told me on the phone—that he had been abused by an older family member. They didn’t know that a cruel person might have been eating at their dinner table with them over the years; that their son’s reprehensible behaviour ought not be condemned until fully understood as a continuation of the cycle of abuse. That their sentence for him might be mitigated, the way it might be in court. I couldn’t have told my parents a day or an hour earlier than I had, though—I came to them when I was ready and braced for impact. Had someone forced me into that situation I might never have recovered. But I’d also never hurt another and used my past as an excuse. I could understand Samuel and empathise with him as a victim, but I would never sympathise with him as an abuser.
I could do all or none of these things. I felt a responsibility to the other women out there, the ones like me, to warn them about him. To shout and point at this crocodile gliding past them underwater. Perhaps if he pleaded guilty and spared me the trauma of a trial I would be more understanding, but he’d already insulted me by trying to duck and weave out of the charges with legal loopholes. That letter he and his lawyers had sent to the police was unforgiveable. He had no legitimate remorse. If he pleaded it would only be because his expensive lawyers managed to convince him it was in his best interests.
Sean warned me on the phone that I wouldn’t be happy with the sentence Samuel would receive even if I succeeded in court.
‘I’m prepared for that,’ I replied.
‘Yeah, I thought you might have already suspected that, but I just want you to be ready for it, and if you’re doing all this to see him punished, it might not happen.’
There it was again: Sean wondering why I was doing this, as though neither of us worked for the Department of Justice or had taken oaths to protect and serve.
So, was my desire to tell the world of Samuel’s crime a kind of vigilante justice? Would the law not punish him adequately? Did I not have faith in the system to take care of the matter of justice?
No, no I did not.
It took another month, from my conversation with Sean at the roadside in April of 2016, for Samuel’s solicitors to find a time in their schedules for him to be brought in and finally interviewed. Pending his answers, he’d be charged. It was all still a little up in the air. I got the distinct impression that it could all get chucked in the bin at any time. I was texting and calling Sean for updates, and he seemed to say different things each time, getting my hopes up then shooting them down, and there was always a reason he hadn’t followed up with the lawyers. Samuel’s barrister was an ex-cop and had been in the business for decades.
‘This barrister probably knows more than I do, to be honest,’ Sean said to me. I didn’t know how he intended me to take that—most likely he wasn’t doing a lot of thinking and the words were just dribbling from his chin like usual. But, regardless, I believed him. At least I knew I was outgunned.
Judge and I organised a time to catch up for lunch when work was supposed to be quiet for him, and I got dressed properly because we had planned to go to a fancy restaurant. But on my way to the city to meet him I got a call from his new associate—some defence barrister had messed up his closing address and so Judge would have to address the error in his summing up that afternoon to avoid a mistrial. Lunch would be sandwiches and about 15–20 minutes.
‘I’m so sorry we’ll be rushed today,’ Judge said after we hugged as old friends.
‘No problem!’ I said brightly, but it was a problem. I had to tell him about the trial, and I wasn’t yet used to telling anyone about anything to do with it all. We went to the cafe across the road from the courts and lined up behind the long lunch rush queue. We were chatting about the news and how my freelance writing was going, but then I glanced at my watch—over 5 minutes already gone. I had to get it out. Couldn’t come all this way and chicken out.
‘I wanted to meet up with you to let you know—’ but was interrupted by the woman taking our order. ‘Ah, yes, a long black thank you.’ I turned to Judge and spoke quietly but clearly as the woman punched our orders into the computer. ‘I thought I should tell you that I was offended against, sexually, I mean, when I was a child, and I’ve made a police complaint.’
‘Here’s your change, sir!’ The woman at the counter put some coins into his outstretched hand, and he paused before retracting it slowly.
‘Oh, I didn’t know.’ He put his wallet in his pocket and adjusted his glasses, ‘let’s take a seat.’
‘That’s okay,’ I replied, and we sat down, ‘nobody did. I mean, that’s the problem, right? We don’t talk about it.’
‘Of course. This must be very difficult for you.’
‘It’s been a long time,’ I shrugged, ‘mostly I just realised last year that he’s the same as all the rest of them, and that so am I, and someone really ought to put something on his record. I did a pretext call and he said there were other girls, but none of them have come forward yet, so I think it’s important I don’t back down.’
‘This is brave of you. You would know—more than most—how taxing this process might be for you.’
‘Yes. Unfortunately no blissful ignorance over here.’
‘And you did a pretext, and it went well, but he isn’t pleading?’
‘Correct.’
‘Well, they all think they can get aw
ay with it.’
‘I think he’s dragging it out, seeing if I’ll give up.’
‘Well, unfortunately, so many do.’
‘Yes. But, I suppose, I just wanted to let you know because it may be in the courts in a little while, and also that, well, it was a contributing factor to why I didn’t really feel…’ I wrung my hands under the table, ‘inclined to go straight into a law job after our year together. I felt like I disappointed you when I didn’t go to practice, but I just, I couldn’t, at least not without dealing with this thing first.’
He seemed surprised and smiled softly. ‘I never felt disappointed in you.’
A waiter dropped off our sandwiches and I quickly dabbed my eyes with my serviette.
‘Well, that’s all the serious stuff then, and we’ve still got five minutes!’ I laughed a little, ‘tell me, what’s up in Judge-town? What’s news?’
Every day that month before Samuel’s police interview, I fantasised about him telling Sean he would plead guilty. The relief in that daydream was overwhelming. I whipped myself into a state where I thought there was no possible chance he would take me to trial. He’d paid for good lawyers and his lawyers would tell him to plead and he would listen to them. I asked my dad about the process and he said that if Samuel was charged, it should take three weeks from that date for him to appear in Magistrates Court. I pictured myself in the back of the courtroom among the public, Samuel not knowing I was watching.
‘Guilty, your Honour,’ he would say, standing there, and he would cry. And in my daydreaming of that moment I would cry too, first with the imagined relief, and then with the real despair. The hopelessness that accompanies a complete lack of control.
It ended up taking six months for him to be charged properly and to appear in the Magistrates Court. In that time I cried a lot. My psychologist gave me an exercise to do whenever I got upset, to try to halt my normally inevitable spiral of self-loathing. I sat on the front deck of my share house when nobody else was home, watching parents pick their kids up from school; the girls in their checked dresses, like mine, blue and white on the black trampoline. ‘I am anxious,’ I would say, naming my feeling out loud. ‘I am having the feeling that I am anxious,’ I’d say next, separating the feeling from myself. ‘The feeling that I am anxious is making me feel like I should die,’ attributing the thoughts that flowed from the feelings. Sometimes it worked and I would finish, ‘This is an awful thing that is happening to me, and it is taking me time to deal with it, and that is okay.’
In those six months I think I appeared normal to most people I spent time with. I attended two literary festivals, one interstate and one overseas; I spent time with family at home; and I cooked dinner with Vincent while sipping cold beers. I saw friends and did my laundry. I would call or text Sean for updates, and he would reply that things just took time. Samuel’s lawyers were making things difficult. I needed to be patient. The rest of life carried on and I just sort of let it carry me along too.
Now I’m glad I did. If I’d paused everything, waiting for Samuel to take responsibility for his actions, for the matter to resolve, I would have lost over two years of my life.
THE SECOND WEEK OF NOVEMBER in 2016 was always going to be a tough one. The world was worried about the US election on Wednesday, and I was worried about Friday: the date Samuel, his solicitor and his barrister would meet with Sean to talk about his intention to fight or plead guilty.
On Wednesday morning I was desperately showing Vincent web pages that suggested Hillary Clinton might still pull through. He shot each one down.
‘What does this tell people who assault women?’ I asked him when we were standing in front of the TV in our share house, stuck on ABC News 24.
‘That people in the rust belt want their jobs back and for some reason they think Trump can give that to them.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I know,’ he said shrugging, and we slumped down onto the couch ‘but for people who are poor this isn’t about gender equality or race relations, it’s just about their jobs.’
‘But being a decent human being shouldn’t be optional. I understand that economic policy is extremely important, but surely the basic belief in human equality can’t be sacrificed for anything. It’s not a point of comparison between candidates, it’s supposed to be a prerequisite. I don’t understand. I feel like this is connected to Friday.’ Vincent started to interrupt me but I pushed through a fleeting worry I would sound hysterical. ‘I’m not an idiot,’ I said, ‘I know that one won’t cause the other, but I feel like they’re connected—no, I know they’re connected. The same attitudes that just got Trump elected to the highest office in America are the same attitudes that made Samuel think he could go around molesting girls and get away with it. Because obviously you can!’ I sat up in my chair and yelled at the television, pointing. ‘He did! And somewhere Samuel is watching this, and he will hear this thing, this attitude in the wind, saying he can do whatever the fuck he wants to women and nothing can touch him. That he could be the prime minister! I don’t know what to do, Vincent. What can I do?’
He reached out to me again and I collapsed back into the couch, into his arms. ‘You’re already doing it,’ he said, kissing my forehead, ‘you’re fighting him.’
I couldn’t tell if the dread in my belly was nervousness or an intuition, but I sat still for a long while as dozens of angles of Trump’s grinning orange face washed over the screen. His wrinkly hands waved in front of cheering crowds and I imagined those hands ‘grabbing’ the ‘pussies’ of terrified women, those stubby fingers pushing past the underpants of frozen girls. The ABC broadcasters were trying to mask their disappointment while taking an appropriately grave tone, as though they didn’t know how to calm viewers in a politically neutral way.
I had to go into the city that day for some errands, but it was a particularly muggy afternoon in Brisbane and I was sweating before I even left the house to walk to the bus stop. Everyone seemed to be down somehow. All the people I passed had been caught off guard and reminded of the true ugliness in humanity. It was as if we’d all just found a border collie hit by a car and left for dead in the street. It was the feeling I’d had at the end of most days in court, that the aircon was circulating the dead skin cells of paedophiles so that I couldn’t help but taste and inhale them. That afternoon in November the progressive people of the Western world tried to tell ourselves we didn’t need to take responsibility for the result. We pretended the heat wasn’t hell, that we weren’t both suffering and implicated.
The moisture in the air didn’t even break with the usual sweet and spectacular south-east Queensland afternoon storm. It hung in the streets, and it swirled and gathered around my brain, and the 199 bus drove by me before I realised I’d forgotten to hail it, but I didn’t have the energy to lift an arm. If another person hadn’t come by to hail the next bus I might have sat at that stop for hours, waiting for rain to break the heat, and it wouldn’t have come.
Later that night my housemates and I all sat on our deck, having beers with some mutual friends, and we were talking about Trump.
‘This guy just started at my work,’ one of our mates, Steven, said, ‘and he’s been accused of a rape. I can’t even remember how I know, but he’s like a friend of a friend of a friend, and yeah, the girl dropped out before it went to trial. So now he’s just going about his life like normal, I guess, and he’s starting at my office next week.’
‘Shit, dude,’ I said unhelpfully, taking a gulp of my beer.
‘I guess there’s nothing I can do?’ he said, but lilting up at the end, like a question.
‘I dunno. What would you do if he made a move on one of your friends?’
‘I suppose maybe I’d tell her? I dunno.’
‘I dunno either.’
‘New beer?’
‘Yeah, great, thanks.’
The minutes between Wednesday and Friday dragged out. At first I fought the unpredictable waves of anxiety an
d tried to keep myself busy, but by Thursday afternoon I was sitting on the front deck of our old Queenslander smoking cigarette after cigarette, sweating and feeling sick from the increase in nicotine and gradual arrival of heatstroke. Paralysis nightmares kept me from sleeping both nights, and I kept being slapped with news broadcasts of Trump. Yet again I had the overwhelming sense that everything was happening to me, that control or independence or even basic bodily autonomy were just an illusion. That my body and mind and voice had been irrevocably compromised, and that even if they were somehow still unsullied, they could be robbed from me at any moment. I saw friends and filed invoices for copywriting gigs. I went to Coles just to push a trolley around and gaze at the bright colours, being sure not to pick expensive ingredients that I prayed I had the fortitude to vomit up anyway. I chatted to my mum on the phone but didn’t tell her of the significance of Friday.
There was nothing for me to do but wait until I was told what my future looked like. Nothing to do until I was told whether or not my trauma mattered, or if it was agreed upon by others that it had even occurred.
The call came while I was waiting for the bus home on Adelaide Street in the middle of the city. Men in hi-vis jackets were putting up the large Christmas tree in King George Square and a mother was chatting happily to her tiny daughter about the coming school holidays. My mobile was sweaty in my hand and when I heard it vibrate I fumbled with it, extricating myself from the crowd by the bus stop and swiping the screen that showed Private Number.
‘Hello?’ I answered, blocking my other ear with my finger, walking to a shady spot with nobody in earshot.