by Bri Lee
‘This sounds really shit, dude, I’m sorry.’
‘Argh, what can you do, hey?’
‘Unionise?’ We both laughed.
‘Unionised elves, sure, we’ll revolt against Saint Nick. Seriously, though, this one is pretty gross. He’s really gender-specific with the toys, shaming little boys who want a ring and scolding little girls who want a truck.’
‘Fuck that,’ I groaned. ‘Come on.’
‘I know. I’ve even made a formal complaint about him because of how he behaved to one little Asian girl. He made some joke about being made in Japan.’
‘What!?’
‘I know.’
‘Well, in other shit news, I still don’t know what’s happening with the court case. Sean—the cop in charge of my matter—keeps saying it’s fine, then it’s not, then it’s fine, and then it’s not again. For ages I kept trusting what he was saying, just thinking that I wasn’t the one who couldn’t keep up, but now I think Sean just isn’t that good at his job. It’s been so long, and I got him on the phone saying he did it. What the fuck more do they want?’
‘Oh babe, I’m so sorry to hear this.’
‘I should give you a content warning,’ we laughed, ‘sorry. I just—I know you get it. I don’t really have anyone else who gets it.’
‘You can call me any time you want, as much as you want.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’ve got Vincent there, though, right? He’s good about it all?’
‘Yeah, he’s great, he just…I dunno. When I talk about this stuff to a man I feel like I’m complaining, but really I just want to talk about it so I can process it.’
‘I know what you mean. Even if they don’t say anything.’
I sat on a bench in Queen Street Mall and watched people pass by, chatting to Anna about some happier things before we wished each other a Merry Christmas and said goodbye. An ad for Tiffany & Co. flapped in front of me, the baby blue background sitting dull against the Queensland summer sky; the skinny blonde pictured was blushing at a new engagement ring, a man gazing up at her. I thought that the summer was melting it all together, but then I remembered I had felt the same back in April. When would I break through? When would the dust settle and the future become clear again?
‘I’m going to the Magistrates Court on Monday,’ I said to Vincent back home later that day.
‘Can I come?’ he asked.
I didn’t know why I didn’t want him there, but he must have sensed it when I paused before responding. I knew why I wanted to go—because I couldn’t trust Sean to call me and tell me what happened. Because I understood the language they might use—because I understood the reasons a solicitor might ask for an adjournment. I knew what ‘my client is reconsidering his position’ meant, and I knew what ‘we’re waiting for the full brief before submitting a no-case submission’ meant, and that those two reasons for an adjournment had potentially colossal and opposite implications.
‘I won’t be upset like last time, when I fell down in the yard, but I’d like you to be there when I get home.’
‘Okey-dokey.’ He shrugged, and I tried not to feel bad for having told him what I actually wanted.
That night in the shower, as I leaned my head back against the tiles, I realised I wasn’t crying because of what Samuel had done to me, I was crying because of what he was still doing to me. The ‘re-victimisation’ process for me wasn’t about the sexual abuse, it was about the continued abuse of power. On that Friday afternoon when Sean had called and I found out that Samuel’s lawyers were still pushing back, hard, and I was asked, yet again, if I really wanted to proceed, and asked why, I’d felt totally powerless. On the trampoline again. Samuel in control again. He was taking up my time, my energy, my life. Calls about the case invaded my beautiful home. Reminders about the next mention invaded my mind when I slept. So long as the legal process continued I would be the complainant—and every two, three or four weeks, I would be reminded of that. Reminded that I was just the girl, reminded of being pushed onto my back, belly-up, frozen.
I WALKED TOWARD THE MAGISTRATES Court building down the street that morning and regretted going alone. I didn’t know if Samuel would be there and so in my panic I saw him everywhere. It was safest not to stop anywhere for a coffee even though I’d arrived fifteen minutes early for that reason. I didn’t risk straying into the newsagent to browse the magazines because he could pop in to buy some gum. I imagined how outraged I’d be if he won a scratch-it and got rich, and I let that thought upset me.
As I waited for the lights to change I reflexively glanced over to my old workplace further down the block and saw half a dozen well-dressed young people with fresh coffees walking into the courts building. How far away and absurd that version of me seemed. I longed for one of them to turn around and wave at me, even though they were hundreds of metres away. I craved some kind of recognition from them, a sign that I was still special somehow, different. But it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t want anyone from the previous year to recognise me.
When the lights changed I took long strides to break from the pack and get off the street into the building. Without thinking I started to walk straight past the metal detectors like staff do, but had to slot back into line, sheepishly, for my bag to be scanned. I had no power in that forum anymore. It wasn’t for me to pick up a phone to move a matter or request a file. Less than a year ago, in January, I’d been the voice and representative of one of the most important and respected figures in the justice system, but how tiny I felt without those robes! I had been flung out into the cold with all the other normal people and Jesus Fucking Christ I had even more respect for them now. I had made a complaint, I was a complainant, and the man I accused was presumed innocent, and so by necessity I was doubted. Proper process required important people to disbelieve and discredit me. Did I imagine the security guard pausing for a long time on my bag? Should I have worn more demure clothes? I was starting to doubt whether I should have gone there at all, but then I saw it. Up on the television screens in the cool foyer, hundreds of names were listed but his name jumped out at me like my own would have: Samuel Levins.
A bolt shot up from my gut into my heart like a big, rough kick up the backside, and I was smiling. I hadn’t programmed those television monitors. I never typed his name into the system or scheduled his matter for that specific morning. His name had been put there by people who were paid to get to the bottom of this business, and the true bottom of this was that he was guilty. All I had to do was not back down.
I spun on my heel, grabbed my bag from the tray and headed for the elevators, and while I waited for one to arrive I imagined the doors opening and him standing in front of me—or worse, that he would get into the elevator after me and the doors would close us in together, alone. The panic attack symptoms crept up into my body. All you have to do, I said to myself, taking a deep breath in, is not back down. I breathed out, and the doors closed on me, alone in the elevator.
The courtrooms Judge and I worked in were always solemn places, mostly very quiet. People didn’t speak unless they were being addressed by Judge or it was their turn, and they would be careful to whisper quietly to each other only when absolutely necessary. In the District Court you heard when people rustled papers or shifted in their chairs. I could hear my typing on the keyboard, and if someone had a cold you would know from the sniffling. By contrast, Magistrates Court was Central Station at peak hour. People were coming in and out all the time, talking with each other, asking counsel questions. Four people from the DPP were on one side, and dozens of solicitors and barristers were coming and going on the other. People from the public wandered in with their families, asking each other if they were in the right place, sitting down and standing up. I didn’t know if I’d be able to hear someone mention Samuel’s name.
A phone went off and I felt myself growing angry. Didn’t anyone take any of this seriously? I sat on the edge of my chair, straining forward with one ear out.
From what I could hear of the cases being mentioned, most solicitors were telling the magistrate that they’d be away through December into the first half of January. I felt gutted. How could they take so much leave when people were waiting for them? I thought back to Judge in Southport and Warwick, challenging solicitors when they requested adjournments, and I longed for all the professionals in the room to be more like him. I wanted everyone to be more like him. To be competent and expeditious. To make me feel as if they actually knew what they were doing.
After the first hour of waiting in the back of the courtroom with the rest of the public, I had relaxed in the confidence that Samuel himself wouldn’t be appearing. After the third hour of waiting I was just extremely bored. His matter—my matter—was called second-last. The solicitor who stood up and approached the bench was young with broad shoulders, blond hair, a bright blue suit, and a fancy leather portfolio case that matched his expensive, freshly polished R.M. Williams boots: exactly the kind of private school boy Samuel used to talk big about knocking the teeth out of. Now Samuel was employing the young heir-adonis, and it wouldn’t have been cheap. I grinned at the thought of it. I had seen the solicitor comparing photos on his phone, pictures from the weekend, with another young man while they were waiting. I wondered what his hourly rate was and how much he was being paid to wait there while I took time away from my own freelance work for nothing.
The magistrate called for the matter to begin, and the process started with the solicitor making a standard request for his client to be excused from appearing, but it was cut short.
‘It looks like your client did not sign his bail undertaking at his last appearance,’ the magistrate interrupted, flipping through a stapled pile of papers. ‘He’ll have to get to court and make an appearance before close of business today or I’ll have to put a warrant out for his arrest.’
It was like I had won the million-dollar scratch-it. I almost clapped my hands together.
‘Would your Honour excuse me from the bench so I can step outside and call my client?’
‘Well, yes, you’d better,’ she replied, ‘those are the rules.’
And I beamed as the solicitor ducked out, and I was beaming for the thirty-five minutes it took for him to race back into the courtroom.
‘My client said he signed the bail undertaking and returned it via post as he was advised to do, your Honour.’
The magistrate searched through her papers for about a minute. ‘Oh, here it is, yes,’ she said, pulling a document out from the file. ‘I apologise. It had been filed incorrectly, but it is here.’
‘May I be excused to phone my client again, your Honour? He’s started the drive here from the coast.’
‘Of course.’
I was still grinning. That hiccup alone was well worth a four-hour wait.
When the matter was finally, actually mentioned, it was only to order that a full brief of evidence be provided to defence by January, ready for another mention date in February. I was disappointed: I had presumed the magistrate at the very first mention—the one I’d had to text Sean asking about—had already directed Sean to provide defence with the brief of evidence, but it seemed that nothing at all had happened that day.
I called Vincent as I walked to the bus stop and told him what had happened, trying to focus on the positive. ‘Imagine that!’ I said in a sarcastic voice. ‘Imagine how he must have felt, to have his day interrupted by a shit thing he has no control over,’ and we laughed.
‘The big cogs are turning now,’ Vincent said, ‘and they’re turning against him. He must be shitting himself.’
I decided not to mention how I’d been shitting myself waiting for the elevator doors to close that morning. On the bus home I pictured Samuel getting into his car, swearing the way he must have when he’d finally realised he was being charged—when he became ‘quite animated’ but also ‘extremely unpleasant’. Did he have to make excuses to his employer? Had he had to cancel lunch with his girlfriend? Was this his first experience with the fumbling yet insistent arm of the law?
‘Are you alright?’ Vincent had asked me on the phone.
‘Yeah, yeah, definitely,’ I’d said, and it was true. I was sitting on the same bus, just one seat behind where I had been after receiving Sean’s phone call the Friday after Trump got elected, and for the second time that morning I felt completely changed from my previous self. I looked down into the empty chair and I felt pity for that girl, that old me, but also a well of pride. How the fuck had I got on that bus that day?
Walking home I picked a hibiscus from a bush growing over someone’s fence where just weeks before I could barely put one foot in front of the other. How had I spent twenty minutes walking down that small stretch of footpath? I tucked the flower behind my ear and looked along the street that seemed so short and sweet and normal again. There wouldn’t be a single galvanising moment, I realised: I was already stronger. I knew I wouldn’t back down. I wouldn’t be afraid of Samuel for the rest of my life, and this had something to do with the fact that he was now afraid of me. I skipped down that street with a pink flower in my hair, purple sneakers on my feet, and my yellow skirt ballooning and deflating at my thighs. How terrifying I would have looked to him if he’d driven past.
Christmas was six days later. When I was in my first couple of years of university, I had struggled to ask my parents for Samuel not to be invited to Christmas.
‘Why is Samuel coming?’ I asked.
‘Because his family isn’t here at the moment,’ Mum replied. I made a face. ‘Oh, come on now, don’t be so selfish, he’s Arron’s friend, and everyone should have somewhere to go for Christmas.’ She left the room. End of discussion. It reminded me of George telling the Court how he had asked his mum to get her boyfriend to leave.
I think back to this often. How horrible a child I must have been, that my own mother presumed selfishness where I just couldn’t enunciate my need for self-preservation. Back then I didn’t even have the words to explain why I hated him so much, why he made my skin crawl. Who would believe me if I tried to say that he ‘looked at me funny’? I would be a Drama Queen. Boy-crazy again.
IN THE 113 YEARS OF the Australian High Court there had only ever been five women justices, and on 30 January 2017 Australia was going to get its first ever woman Chief Justice of the High Court. My Facebook feed exploded with my law friends sharing articles covered in celebratory emojis. In Queensland only seven of the twenty-seven Supreme Court justices were women, and only nine of the forty-one District Court judges.
I was doing talks on the radio and at writing festivals where people—mostly men—asked me if we just had to be patient: all these young women graduates would just take a little time to work their way up to the top. I thought back to the first barrister I ever worked for and how I’d only been his secretary for a fortnight when he told me of his perception of the ‘feminisation’ of the legal profession. He had seemed concerned, and I was just so shocked and so grateful for the job I didn’t respond.
I thought I’d been doing alright, but the nerves came in a huge wave the night before the next mention. Or rather, the anxiety dumped on me while I was chopping onions and my tear ducts took their cue to release the tidal waves they’d been valiantly containing. When Vincent asked me if I wanted him to come with me, I knew I shouldn’t say yes, but I did, and I thanked him and he held me in the kitchen as my nose dribbled on his shirt. I had been hoping he would remember and offer to come with me all week, but he hadn’t brought it up and neither had I.
‘I’m just so afraid Samuel will get into the elevator after me and the doors will shut,’ I said between sobs. ‘Also, I’m chopping onions.’
The next morning we dressed neatly, put some paperbacks into my handbag, and took the bus into the city together.
‘This doesn’t count as a date,’ I said to him with a stern look and he kissed my cheek.
The Magistrates Court was bustling as usual, and we passed through security and gaze
d up at the monitors to find Samuel’s name.
‘There,’ I pointed, ‘LEVINS—Court 20, let’s go.’
We got in the elevator and the doors closed on just the two of us.
Court felt funny with Vincent by my side. Videolinks were scheduled with various prisons, but all the times had been bungled so random men were wandering in and out of the sight of the camera while asking the judge why they’d been pulled in.
‘Nobody told me I had court today,’ one Caucasian man said, dropping down onto the chair like a sack of potatoes, leaning back and spreading his legs out.
‘Are you Van Nguyen?’ the magistrate asked.
‘Nope!’ he shouted and shrugged.
‘I see, well, you are not the man we need to speak to. So you may go.’
We watched on the TV screen as the man in the jumpsuit got up, turned around and banged on the door. ‘Oi! You got the wrong bloke!’
Vincent and I stifled giggles.
‘What were you telling me,’ I whispered to him, ‘about the mammoth cogs of justice turning on my behalf?’
Time passed and we both got out our books. I looked up each time the prosecutor began the words ‘Would your Honour take the matter of—’ and after another hour they spoke the name ‘Levins’, and my ears pricked and I sat up straight. Vincent felt me shift and put his book down. A barrister was at the bar table and it made me hopeful—things were more likely to happen when the barristers were there, rather than just the solicitors or a stand-in town agent.
‘The brief of evidence provided last week was incomplete,’ Samuel’s barrister, Carter, said. I tensed. He was tall and fair-haired, a blond-turning-grey, and his face was soft.
‘Well, according to the arresting officer it was complete,’ the prosecutor replied.
They went on for a couple more rounds—reminiscent of a playground game of ‘is-so’, ‘is-not’—until the magistrate interrupted. ‘Adjourned for another four weeks.’