by Tracy Going
“Bruises on my face and eyes closed swollen, I believe are related to my work. Yes.”
Twenty-one
“Now in your evidence, and that statement,” he says, flicking his pale hand at an imagined sheet of paper, “you say, and I quote: ‘He was continuously kicking me all over my body.’ Do you remember that?”
How will I ever forget?
“Yes, and he was,” I say.
“I have instructions to put it to you that if that was the case … you would have marks on your body, which do not appear in the doctor’s report,” he announces loudly.
As the smugness slips from the defence advocate’s mouth I instinctively put my arms around my stomach and hold myself safe.
I remember how I cowered into a ball and rocked on the ground, in forced rhythm with each of his deliberate, running kicks. His grunts of exertion are loud in my memory, rumbling in my head as he heaves himself backwards and forwards trying to inflict the most damage, with my dog, Garp, muffling my screams with frenzied, warm, wet licks. I remember how glad I was that he wasn’t wearing his sturdy, leather boots.
As the defence denies yet again that his client was wearing shoes, my eyes are drawn to his feet. I will turn to look at them every time I hear this denial. I can’t help myself. As I look at him now his legs are crossed and he is leaning forward. He is resting his elbows on his thighs, his right foot jerking furiously. It is like a red-hot flare fighting its predetermined trajectory, like a beacon begging attention in its disavowal. He is wearing the very same brown suede shoes.
I turn my attention from his shoes as the defence advocate pushes toward me, waving the J88 medical forms about. It is being presented as hard, documented evidence that no bruises were recorded on my torso. It is a visual castigation and he is delighted to be brandishing it about.
“And I put it to you that there are no injuries recorded for anywhere on your body other than your face and head,” he says, pushing a copy into my hand.
“Yes … my primary injuries were from my shoulders up,” I agree.
“Do you see anywhere on this report that it is restricted to primary injuries?” he sneers.
“At no point was I asked to take my clothes off to check for bruising on my body … I had such pain in my head. I was not concerned about the bruises on my ribs.”
The image is with me as I speak. I am lying on a bed in the hospital ward. I am clutching my eye and I’m crying. I’m trying not to sob. Dr McKenzie is prodding and poking me with gentle hands, trying to establish the extent of my wounds, when I elbow her away and tug my T-shirt down.
It is yet another physical invasion and I don’t want it.
I don’t want to be touched. “Don’t worry about my back,” I mumble. “It’s my eye … Please do something about the pain in my eye.”
But the court apparently needs more.
The defence advocate proceeds to read the district surgeon’s statement out loud.
“Madam, do you see what paragraph 7 says …?”
“Yes.”
“Paragraph 8, ‘condition of clothing: intact with some blood stains’.”
“Yes.”
“Paragraph 9, ‘state of the person: physical powers, general state of health and mental state’. What is the doctor’s comment there?” he asks loudly.
“Stable. I am in stable mind.”
I am glad to be saying those words. The words roll off my tongue. I know what Dr McKenzie means, but I fleetingly appreciate another interpretation. I am in stable mind. I want to hold onto the phrase, but the defence advocate moves swiftly on.
“It says that you were stable – and you agree that there is no indication of any bruises or injuries anywhere on your body that would be consistent with being kicked all over the body.”
“Yes. I never reported them to her.”
“Any reason you chose not to?”
“Because I was more concerned with the pain in my head,” I say again.
He continues with his line of questioning, again accusing me of exaggerating my injuries in order to claim financially from his client.
“Because what I am putting to you, Madam, and you don’t seem to be answering, is that this is indicative of exaggeration on your part. It was never an issue before. You never mentioned it before and on our version it never happened before,” he announces, pausing for effect. “And now, months after the incident, you are referring to things that you never referred to in any statement or any letter or even to a doctor in a clinical examination.”
“I am sorry, what did I not refer to?” I ask, confused.
“To bodily injuries.”
“In my statement I said that he was kicking me. That is bodily injuries.”
The courtroom is quiet.
I don’t look around. I stare straight ahead.
“Madam … I am putting to you and it is the basis of my cross-examination that you are exaggerating.”
And still he moves on. He goes on to refute my allegation that the marks on my face are shoeprints.
I listen and I answer, but I’m getting tired. I feel it in my slouching shoulders, the constant banging in the back of my head, in my limp hands folded in my lap.
It is almost lunchtime.
I try not to think that the day is not even half over.
I concentrate to hear his words.
“I infer from your previous statement that Dr McKenzie is actually a female. It is a lady who examined you?”
“That is right. A lady,” I say.
“So there was no reason on your part not to show her any injuries on your body. Is that correct?” he asks.
Yes, he is correct, but I am having none of it. Again I feel the anger welling up inside me, breaking through the fatigue.
“If the basis of your cross-examination is exaggeration, then I can assure you I would have exaggerated and I would have documented all sorts of marks that weren’t there,” I say, looking straight at him.
“With respect, that is precisely what you are saying there,” he says looking at the magistrate, ignoring me.
“No. I never made any mention of the bruises on my body,” I say forcefully. “I underplayed the damage inflicted on me.”
I can just see Sheryl out of the corner of my eye. I see her fine curls flouncing around her as she firmly nods her approval. I don’t need to look to know that she is smiling.
But her movement draws attention and soon everyone becomes restless.
The defence takes the opportunity to gather together the photographs that have been submitted by me as evidence. They are stacked one upon the other, burnished images of destruction; my garage, my lounge, me. He holds them up, away from him, as though they might tarnish his hand, before throwing his next question across the courtroom.
“Is there any reason why you sought to have these blown up to the size of A4?”
His words crush me.
The red rises in my cheeks.
Shame comes over me in a rush as he belittles me and my printed evidence.
I can feel the magistrate’s eyes on me.
He too wants to know why I have enlarged the pictures to foolscap.
“I think for very obvious reasons. They are evidence of what your client did to me,” I say slowly, trying not to look at the images in the grip of the defence advocate’s hand.
It is the picture on top that distresses me most. It is me.
He is flaunting my face. He is denting the paper as he holds it forward, scornfully, dismissing me in my pain.
I know the picture well.
The deep shadow cast behind me frames my face where my eye has been battered shut, my lashes are knitted together in seeping ooze. My other eye stares ahead. I am marbled in red, purple, black and blue.
The photograph was taken a few days after he beat me.
“I put it to you that it is further indicative of the fact that you wish to exaggerate your evidence and to highlight that which suits you.” He is looking at the magistra
te as he erases me, reinforcing his viewpoint that I am not worthy of even a glance. “Do you have any comment?”
I really don’t want to comment.
I just want it all to be over.
But it isn’t – it continues for some time.
I almost don’t hear the magistrate when he finally adjourns for lunch.
“We can adjourn,” he says, his three words sounding as one.
This time, my mother, Sheryl, my friends and I avoid the restaurant in Fox Street and instead wend our way to the court canteen. None of us wants to fortify ourselves with the defence team only a table or two away. Yesterday was enough.
We make our way upstairs, away from the criminal courts with their dusty stairways leading down to basement cells. We step out onto the concourse. The walls are impressively clad in cold, cream-coloured terrazzo. The floor is grey stone, its brittleness long since polished away. It extends high and wide, enough for two double-decker buses to pass each other. There are signs hanging tiredly. They have lost their whiteness. They are warped with green borders and headings but they show us where to go. Four floors up.
To reach the lift, we move past the marble columns threaded with gold and black. They dwarf the corridors with their gilded tapestry of complexity, like truth intertwined with lies and deception.
The lift doors open into a canteen that is government standard, uninviting.
I order a plate of chips knowing I can’t eat.
My food arrives like a tangle of pale, pulpy limbs slithering in their own grease. They are like the appendages that will slide over the phone records for the rest of the day.
“Miss Going, my client says that you testified that you traced the call and you traced it back to the accused. Do you remember saying that?” asks the defence advocate, picking up on where we left off before lunch.
He is speaking of the call I received from Detective Potgieter many months earlier. I had given the details in my testimony with Sandra the day before.
“I did not say I traced it back to the accused.”
“So, in other words it was incorrect to suggest that he was behind the call?”
“I would say it was a foregone conclusion that he was behind the call,” I state confidently.
The accused is scratching at his notes again. He cannot sit quietly. He continuously drags his fingers through his hair and thrusts his fringe back. I don’t want to look at him, but he is difficult to ignore. He is constantly shifting around, his jaw moving furiously; he snarls and smirks and snorts, while I contend and fend his exhaustive allegations and denials.
He passes the paper forward, his pen clicking violently.
The defence advocate reads it quickly.
“You saw I received a note from the accused? Who was the call traced back to?”
It is a brave question and I cannot wait to answer.
“It is an unlisted number,” I announce clearly. “It is the same policeman that took his statement.”
Detective Potgieter had taken the accused’s statement the same day he pretended to be a reporter with the late-night ‘Dr Jekyll Mr Hyde’ phone call. He had signed his name as the attending officer as the accused detailed how he had lifted his arm in self-defence and how his elbow had accidently hit my eye.
“Who is this? What is the policeman’s name?” enquires the magistrate.
I’m surprised to hear his thin, reedy voice and am quite taken aback that he is finally asking a question that might favour me.
“Detective Potgieter,” I announce and then continue garrulously. “He has always referred to him as ‘Pottie’, and I think he has been promoted to superintendent.”
The defence doesn’t flinch.
“As I have put it to you, my client denies any involvement in this telephone call. Any comment?” he asks.
“I cannot comment on him denying it.”
And I really can’t.
Twenty-two
“Mommy, I drew you a picture,” he yells.
And in that moment, as his words soar across the schoolyard, suddenly nothing else matters. Seeing his grey socks around his ankles and his black shoes chafing at the ground as he rushes toward me are enough to hold back the past. As he picks up speed I watch his shirt escaping the confines of too-long shorts flapping around knobbly knees.
I wanted to shout, “Jelly Tots.”
Those are his words always: “Mommy, I love you lots and lots like Jelly Tots.”
As I stand excitedly behind the high wire fence waiting for him to break through the open gate, it is as though my heart is a melted, glistening mass of bright gelatine. It is squidgy and hot and sticky.
His smile is big and broad and toothless, his two front teeth newly missing. His eyes are crinkled closed and disappear into a face, scrunched and smiling, beneath a head of light, blond hair bleached even whiter in the shining, midday sun.
It is beautiful to see my child lost in such glee, such happiness.
He seems to have settled into Grade 1 nicely and appears to be coping well with the fact that his father is now living overseas – although he still has those inevitable moments when he is withdrawn and quiet and prefers to be alone, or otherwise insists on having me close by and within his sights. But, as the child psychologist assures me, it is acceptable behaviour given the trauma he’s had to endure.
For now, as I watch him through the diamond shapes of the fence, he is a blithe six-year-old accelerating toward his mother after an exhausting morning at big school. His small, pudgy hand is clasping a huge sheet of paper. It is almost as big as him and is billowing and crackling like a large, white sail as he approaches me.
“Look, Mom, it’s you!” he calls, pleased.
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” I squeal.
I snatch the picture away with child-like enthusiasm.
“Let me see,” I say breathlessly.
It is me in stick form. My arms are open wide. I had five straight fingers on each hand. My head is an enormous circle and my smile red and wide. I have two eyes. The one a crisp, cobalt, crayon blue. The other a scratched-out, dark hole staring back at me like a damning blot of blackness.
The hot, dry air fills the last of my laugh.
Oh my god!
My child!
What have I done!
I stare at the picture.
“That’s lovely,” I say quickly, my smile locked to my face. “Let’s go,” I continue, before we turn the corner and walk the one block home.
As I tuck the picture beneath my arm, I take his hand. I try to hold it loose between my fingers so that he knows nothing of the tightness within me. His drawing has seared my soul. To be reminded that his innocence, his purity and his wholeness are forever gone is a heavy burden for a mother. This is further proof of how deeply he has been affected. I know there is nothing I can do to change it and I accept that I have to let his fear, his confusion and his pain rise to the surface. I have to allow him his hurt.
And I am the one who has brought it upon him.
It is me who has passed on the violence.
I had never considered for a moment, when moulding my own life, that I would ever fall victim to any form of abuse, and I had most definitely never foreseen it for my child. I have only ever wanted him to grow up sure, safe and confident. He is a gentle child. An only child. He has never learnt to fight, not even with a toy gun. I wouldn’t allow him to have one. I will have nothing in my home that suggests anger and hatred in any form, and somehow, in some unfathomable way, I’ve allowed the violence in.
I have to accept that this is in him now and it will always be between us.
As I keep him slightly separate from my side, I know I have to let it be. I have to leave space for the ineludible sting of having invited violence into his life. It is a sting that will arrive unbeckoned, even in times of safety, hidden in innocent and colourful artwork.
When we get home I place the picture at the back of a cupboard. Soon I will throw it away. I don’t want i
t lying around. I don’t want to come upon it unexpectedly, and I most definitely don’t want my son to happen upon it unnecessarily and be reminded of me, his mother, being battered.
It is not right to see your mother broken. It is not the natural order of the world. It is not meant to be.
I want to be unbroken – for him. I want to stand before him brave and strong, otherwise how will he ever be able to trust me to protect him and keep him safe if I was unable to defend even myself, or to keep myself whole.
I am his mother. I carried him in my womb.
He is from me and of me. I am in him, he in me.
It will be my actions that flash as visual cues through his life. It will be my voice in his head when he tries to make sense of the world. It will be me who allows him his birth right, that he be protected, loved and nurtured.
I want him to confidently take his place in the world and it is me that should let him know that he is deserving of it. It should be me who leads the way. However, in order for me to do that I need to know where I, myself, am meant to be. I have left my childhood behind and for much of my adult life I have focused on making another existence for myself. I had reached a point where I considered myself worthy. I had found and taken my place and I had believed that where I was standing and where I was going was nothing less than absolute and defined. But the day I was beaten up was the day I was robbed of my certainty.
I know I need to reclaim my sense of self, my being, my value and my importance so that I can heal and, in so doing, engage completely with my son. And the most immediate way to do so is through the court case.
But I hadn’t thought it would be the way it is. I hadn’t expected not to be believed. I hadn’t anticipated being disregarded, ignored and belittled. I had proceeded with legal action trusting that all would be fine; that the court is about upholding the law and that justice is much more than incidental. I had naively thought that power and privilege know their place.
So although I still believed, more than ever, that what I was doing was necessary and right, especially for my son, I can’t pronounce with certainty that I would have laid charges if I’d had any understanding of the tirade of abuse that lay ahead.