by Bri Lee
I woke the next morning, went for a run, skipped breakfast, and said goodbye to Vincent. It was the first really cold morning of the year.
‘Keep me posted?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ I replied, but I was thinking: Fuck you. How often do I ask? I would never leave you like this. There was no guidebook for either of us.
I got off the bus, walked into the building and stepped into the elevator. No Samuel. I got out of the elevator, scanned the waiting room, went into Courtroom 20, approached the bar. No Samuel.
‘Good morning, I’m the complainant in the matter of Levins,’ I said to the clerk. This wasn’t my first rodeo and by then I even knew the number of the other courtroom my matter might have been moved to. ‘Can you please tell me if the mention will be here or in Courtroom 19?’
‘Ahh…’ She looked at me with confusion.
‘I’ve been here a few times now and I know sometimes files get pinballed between 19 and 20,’ I said, shrugging.
‘Umm…’ She flipped through her papers, and I saw his name, and pointed it out to her. ‘Well, I don’t have anything written here,’ she replied.
‘So it’ll be here? In 20?’
‘I think so.’
‘Can you please let me know if it changes?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied and began to turn her body away from me, but I stayed there, unblinking, so she couldn’t really ignore me. ‘Sorry, it’s my first day. I’ll try.’
I smiled at her and sat down, full of frustrated nerves about the possibility of missing the mention. Two hours passed with nothing. Someone said ‘Levan’ and my heart leapt, but that was followed by another hour of nothing. The magistrate announced they’d move on to the legal aid matters—a clear indication that all of the privately funded matters had been dealt with.
I jumped to my feet, pushing through to the bar table. ‘Excuse me, has the Levins matter been mentioned?’ I asked the clerk in a stage whisper.
She shuffled through her papers and then found the file. ‘No, it’s still here,’ she said, confused, and we both looked down at it for a moment. ‘I’ll ask for you.’
Within ten minutes the magistrate called for a short adjournment. I saw the clerk speaking with her senior and approached them. The senior was a very broad-shouldered woman with dark hair and intimidating curtness; I liked her immediately.
‘Nobody for this matter has arrived,’ the senior said to me.
‘Yes, I can see that. What happens if nobody from his side turns up today?’ I asked.
‘We just adjourn it and get another mention date.’ She shrugged and again started to turn away from me, but again I didn’t move.
I looked straight at her face. ‘So they can have a listed court date, and not turn up, and nothing happens?’
She turned back to me and paused for a moment, and I saw her lips purse as though she was trying to stop herself saying something, and instead she turned to the clerk. ‘Do you have your phone on you?’
‘Yes,’ the clerk replied.
‘Call them and see where they are.’
I smiled. ‘Thank you,’ I said, and she nodded.
Ten minutes later I ran into the clerk in the ladies’ bathroom and she explained, while we washed our hands, that after multiple calls and a voicemail, she had learned that the town agent for the matter had forgotten about the mention, and that he was now on his way.
Court resumed and the legal aid matters continued for another twenty minutes. As I waited in the back of Courtroom 20, I scrolled through my social media accounts and wondered where she was—the other girl—what she looked like and if she’d gone on to seem normal too. At the edge of my vision I saw a woman in a black suit run in, grab a file, and start to dash back out. I didn’t want to make a scene but I couldn’t risk missing this mention.
‘Excuse me!’ I said in a very loud whisper, and began pushing past people’s knees to get to the edge of the row, following the woman out the double doors, remembering to bow to the Magistrate—as is customary—at the last moment.
Out in the waiting area I caught up to her. ‘Is that the Levins matter?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied, not stopping.
‘And we’re going to Court 19 now? The solicitor is here?’
‘The town agent,’ she corrected me, ‘yes.’
We bowed and entered, and I saw a man sitting at the bar, on his mobile phone. In the ten minutes we waited for the magistrate to arrive he jiggled his foot incessantly.
‘Silence, all stand.’
The mention was over in two minutes.
The town agent mispronounced both the name of the defendant and the name of the solicitor’s office he was working for. He said defence wanted to cross-examine a witness.
DPP requested a date two months away for an application to cross-examine. The court wasn’t available on that date. They spoke about July. Everyone agreed that 12 July would be best. ‘Listed for 12 July for an application to cross-examine. Appearance required. Adjourned.’ The magistrate stood up. ‘Silence, all stand.’
I sat there at the back of the court, slapped in the face. Again! You idiot! Nervous for nothing. Not only was Samuel not there, but his solicitor hadn’t bothered coming and had paid for a cheap town agent to take his place, and even that agent had forgotten. Nobody gave a fuck about me sitting there. I could have missed the whole thing if I’d waited for people to tell me what was happening. And then—the worst bit—there would be three more months of waiting.
The town agent walked out and I looked at his face. I could have reached out and shoved him, but he seemed pathetic to me. He was incapable of doing his own job.
I approached the bar and waited for several minutes until someone from the prosecution side saw me.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked.
‘Yes, please, I’m the complainant in that last matter, Levins, the one that was listed for an application to cross-examine, and I was hoping someone could tell me what that means? What’s happening?’
‘Oh.’ The two prosecutors at the bar table looked between each other, confused, and one started flipping through papers. ‘The file says that defence made a request to cross-examine a witness, and the DPP rejected that request, so now the matter is listed for an application in front of the court.’
‘Right,’ I said, ‘so this new date we have, that’s not for a cross-examination. That’s just the application to see if the magistrate will allow a cross-examination?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And which witness was it? Can you tell me? Am I even allowed to know that?’
She spoke back into her folders. ‘How about I get someone to call you?’
It was hot by the time I walked out of the building. I called the number of the Brisbane DPP.
‘Good afternoon,’ I said and introduced myself, ‘my matter was just mentioned this morning and I was hoping to speak to someone about what happened?’
They put me through to the victim liaison officer, Rhys.
‘You want to know what happened in court this morning?’ he asked.
‘No, I was there in court this morning, I know what happened, but things were mentioned this morning that I wasn’t aware of, and I’d like to speak with someone about my case, if I can—if I’m allowed.’
‘Well, I might just get the legal officer to call you back when she has time.’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘Was that everything?’
‘Yes.’
He hung up. I stood still for a little while, watching the people come and go around me. A bus rushed by on the road very close to me and I almost thought I didn’t see myself in the reflection of the windows. I was a small ghost.
A text came through from Vincent: How’d you go?
I was still angry at him. If you cared you would have come! I wanted to reply. Stop doing things in halves! I need to know if you’re here for me or not. But now I was angry at everyone. What could I do?
How could I
keep living until July?
I’M NOT SURE WHEN THE seed of thought—the thought that my matter wasn’t that important—finally took root. I’d been told it in many ways, by many different mouths. I had fought against that chorus for so long, trying to find pride in the perseverance, gaining strength from the act of opposition, determination breeding determination.
Sean called me and said he’d received an email from the DPP requesting more information about a few different things. It should have been straightforward but Sean stayed on the phone. I had questions about the delays, and he started talking to me about the process from his end, saying that the police didn’t know if they ‘should or shouldn’t have charged Samuel based on the evidence’ and that they ‘were on the fence and then thought, You know what, let’s just run with it’.
Those things were so hard to hear. I don’t think he realised how brutal he was being.
Sean called again a few weeks later and said, ‘His solicitors have sent through a list of things they’re seeking. Over twenty things.’
‘Huh? What twenty things?’
‘It looks like they’re preparing to cross-examine all the witnesses with the intent of getting the matter thrown out, or taking it to a full trial. I’ll need you to come in and make another addendum statement.’
I banged my little fists against my thighs.
‘It seems they’re just trying to make the whole process as difficult as possible, in the hopes that we’ll drop it.’
I wanted to ask him: Will you?
After I put the phone down I sat on the edge of the bathtub for a long time. Vincent had headphones on in the other room. With nobody to perform for, I realised my feelings were more complex than just tears or frustration. I sat, perched and cold, approaching the discomfort, peeling back the shows I’d put on. How did I truly feel? How would I think and feel without an audience? Things I could never be certain about, but felt sure of, emerged. I underlined a note I had made—that Sean said they’d pressed charges because of my ‘reliability as a witness’. He meant that I was the right kind of complainant: white, educated, articulate. I felt a suspicion that Samuel really might not have been charged if my father hadn’t been a police officer. Things were dragging on and I was draining resources for a one-off, historical matter.
Another thing I felt sure of: I pitied Samuel. Almost two decades later his behaviour as a teenager was haunting him, and no matter what he paid or said, I wouldn’t go away. Malevolent, persistent spirit. I stood and washed my face, quelling the dread again, and looked at myself in the mirror. Why was I doing this to him? Really?
It wasn’t just him in the same way it wasn’t just me. It was because I was sick of men like him. Because I’d seen them all, each as unoriginal in their selfishness as the next. Because they needed to be taught a lesson. Because the harder he pushed back and the more money he spent on lawyers, the more he proved his own inability to take responsibility for his actions. Because he’d let those words slip from his mouth: that I wasn’t the only one. Because the girl he’d molested had grown into a furious feminist, and that just made him plain unlucky, and that was just too bad for him, because that’s eggshell skull.
I went back to the police station to make the addendum statement by myself. A sunny skyline opened up as I hopped off the bus and I was listening to good music, and I felt okay. When I walked in the sliding doors, I saw ghosts of myself coming and going from the building: first being stoic with my father, then falling into my mother’s arms, then putting on a brave face with Vincent, and finally, there and then, alone and average.
I read over my initial statement and realised how much detail was missing—I must have been so exhausted and overwhelmed. Sean’s two-fingered typing technique hadn’t improved.
I got another letter from the DPP dated the week of the last mention: ‘The purpose of the committal hearing is for a magistrate to determine whether there is enough evidence for a trial to be held in the District Court at Brisbane.’
The letter was signed by Kirsty—a new, different victim liasion officer.
The envelope also included a printout of a flowchart depicting the stages all criminal matters go through. The chart had about fifteen levels, and on most of them there was a line from the bubble out to the edge with a possibility saying ‘Dismissed’ or ‘Discontinued’, and then no more lines from that bubble. One of the bubbles had been highlighted in yellow for me—I was pretty early on in the flowchart, and there were still half a dozen major potential movements for my matter to go through. I wondered what it would look like to a non-lawyer.
On the opposite side of the chart there was a ‘commonly used terms’ sheet. ‘Discontinued’ was defined and finished with: ‘Our office will contact you before this occurs.’ I knew from my research work that case attrition is highest at the police stage: fewer than one in five sex offences reported to the police result in charges being laid and criminal proceedings being instigated. The flowchart should have included some stats after the first ‘Police/Investigation’ level saying, ‘Make it past here and you’re in the top 20 per cent, gold star’. The second most likely stage is where I was at—where the DPP can decide at any moment that they don’t think it’s worth proceeding. My perceived credibility was critical to a prosecutor’s estimation of the probability of success at trial. It would be good for my image if I showed up to each court date, well dressed and well spoken. I hadn’t been injured physically and Samuel wasn’t a stranger who’d jumped out at me from the bushes, so to a jury my matter might not look terribly ‘convincing’.
I didn’t think I was too nervous, but then I couldn’t stop putting makeup on. There had been four or five mentions in the Magistrates Court, but this one, on 12 July, would be the first one where Samuel’s appearance was required.
‘Should we go soon?’ Vincent asked me, ten minutes after we both knew we should have left, standing in the doorway to the bathroom. I had to look good. I had to look beautiful. So much, and yet nothing at all, hung on it. It was seeing an ex or walking into a school reunion. Caring so much only proved you weren’t over it. Over him. I blow-dried my hair.
We walked down the street to the bus stop.
‘Thank you for coming with me,’ I said to Vincent, and as a sensation of guilt arrived in my belly—that I was wasting his time when he was so busy with his doctorate, and on such a gross thing—it was replaced almost instantly with fury.
The anger arrived in my chest so quickly I only just managed not to direct it at Vincent, instead kicking a seed pod violently. It skidded once then hit some rich turf on the side of the pavement and sat, unaffected, and I could have screamed at it. I longed to throw my handbag across the street, to slap and strangle someone, anyone, and then to smack my head onto the rough bark of a tree until it bled and I cracked my skull. I fantasised about the impact of a high-speed vehicle and a body—my body—being flung across a busy intersection. Then I was tapping my go card and a bus driver smiled at me, saying something pleasant, and when the bus lurched forward and I reached up an arm to grab hold of a support bar, I smelled how much I had been sweating already. Just breathe.
‘Do you need some water?’ Vincent asked me, the side of our bodies touching.
‘It’s fine,’ I replied curtly, but as I breathed and let go of the anger the strength left me, and I was blinking away tears.
My phone was vibrating and lighting up, Mum and Dad wondering where I was. They had been waiting for us. More guilt.
We got off the bus and walked the final two blocks to the courthouse; a freezing wind tunnel formed between high-rises and whipped my hair around my face. I lowered my head, trying to imagine I was ploughing through the weather, ploughing through it all, but the strength wouldn’t come. The anger wouldn’t well up inside.
When we made it through the security check, Dad saw me. ‘Ah, here she is,’ he said cheerfully, and my mother looked up from her seat, smiling, and they both opened their arms to embrace me, and I started crying.
‘Ohhhh, hey, what’s the matter, lovey?’ Mum asked, holding me, patting my back.
‘I’m scared,’ I said, my face pressed into her neck, and my father’s arms closed around us. They smelled like home.
When we disentangled Mum found a tissue from her bag and I saw she had tears in her eyes as well. The tissue was very soft, not the generic-brand ones Vincent and I bought, and I touched it to my face. It smelled like home as well. Vincent and my father shook hands, that age-old absurdity for men to avoid an embrace, and said good morning to each other. Then we set off, with Dad giving directions to the elevators, to the right floor, to the courtroom, and all the while my eyes darted around us, searching for Samuel’s face or gait. I tuned out of my family’s conversation and listened for his voice. When I conjured it in memory, it came from down the phone line of the pretext call.
‘Yeah,’ his voice replayed, ‘and you weren’t the only one.’
Then we were outside the courtroom. My family turned to look at me, waiting for a sign. People bustled around us: barristers, solicitors, police officers, prosecutors, volunteer support staff. Wheelie bags knocked against seats and phones went off.
‘Hey mate.’ A barrister waved to Vincent, strolling past confidently with his wig in his hand. I recognised him from one of our house parties months ago.
‘Hey,’ Vincent replied with a smile, and the man almost paused to chat, but then in a flash I saw recognition on his face. ‘Catch up with you later.’
There was to be no real demarcation of the battleground then, I figured. I couldn’t build walls between the court occurrences and the rest of my life. I had brought my safety blanket into the fire, and in doing so sacrificed any final opportunity to make a clean break from the wretched mess. I looked at the faces of the people I loved and regretted having asked them to come, dirtying all our lives. I wouldn’t have cried if I was alone—I knew that much—I was always weakest when I was with them. A true self revealed under the looking glass of their unconditional love.