He says, ‘Do you find it hard to keep track of your stories?’
My face grows hot and the polyester of the dress starts to itch. I scratch at my neck, and then at my face. When I look in the mirror later, I have scratch marks on my neck, long tracks that match the red blotches on my cheeks.
I can’t remember how long it lasts. It seems like hours, days. He paces up and down, and I scratch at my neck. The jury look at me, and then at the man’s pretty wife. Eventually, as though summing up my school report, the barrister says, ‘In your statement, which I have here, you are unable to be certain whether you are speaking of a finger or of another body part. That is how intoxicated you were. I put it to you that in this state of extreme inebriation you invited this poor man to have sexual intercourse with you and then you regretted it. Isn’t that right?’
Now, when I look back at myself, trembling, my arms folded across my chest, looking for just one kind face in that courtroom, I want to applaud. Because I am resourceless, it’s true. But, somehow, the fury in me will not be daunted. Pressing against the ledge, I say, ‘Whatever the body part—whether it was a penis, a finger or a feather—I did not invite it. I did not ask for anything to be put into my vagina by that man.’
Eyebrows raised, he turns away.
But my one little outburst is not enough. After three days, the jury find him not guilty and, by extension, they find me guilty.
For three days I have held my arms across my chest, have kept my lips closed. For three days I have contained myself, held up by my own string and by that tiny angry worm flicking and turning deep in my gut. But now, my string is cut, the worm is sliced, and I sit outside the courtroom wailing and wailing and wailing so loudly and for so long that I have to be escorted from the building. When I stop crying, I feel like there is nothing left of me, no tears, no marrow, no bone.
We know the figures—I know the figures. How unlikely it is to get a conviction in a sexual assault trial. We know—I know—that it is not me on trial. And yet, and yet, and yet: always, in these stories, the victory, the fist-pumping celebration, the moment the girl is vindicated—that moment is always the one in which the man is found guilty.
So: if he is not guilty? What then? What am I?
Did I have to be an innocent to be innocent?
I sent off the forms to see the transcripts and the police records. What did they write about me, I wondered, this drunken girl with windmill arms and dripping make-up? First, I called the Office of Public Prosecutions.
The woman asked, ‘Are you the victim in the case?’ Her voice dropped a notch when she said the word victim. I imagined her leaning into the mouthpiece, bobbing her head, forming her mouth into a sympathetic circle.
‘Yes,’ I said. I had no wish to offer the alternate word, survivor. It’s obvious I survived. And, anyway, survivor would reframe the story so that the impact of the assault was entirely to do with me. Survivor means I’ve done well, been a good girl. Victim means that I have failed. These words remove the perpetrator and make the assault about me. They’re both wrong, but I had no other word, so I said, ‘Yes, I am the victim.’ The woman mumbled and rustled some papers, put me on hold for a while, asked me to call back the following day. I did, hoping that the transcript would exist, hoping that it wouldn’t.
That night, I called my most longstanding friend, in Oxford. I’ve known her since I was twenty-one, the year after all this happened, the year after I was changed. When I met her my muscle was already being built; I’d leaped into the open sea from the top of a fishing trawler, I’d spent nights and days winching up nets, clambering along decks and booms, months responding only to my body and to the work of the sea; I’d sifted through the mud and murk of memory, had been undone and had begun to put myself back together. She has only known me as the person I became.
She flickered into view on the screen, a sunny Oxford garden flowering behind her, a single apple tree budding into life. While she brushed her hair for the day ahead, and I prepared mine for the night, I told her about the call to the Office of Public Prosecutions, the way the woman’s voice had lowered. My friend nodded sympathetically, tugging at her hair. Then her expression changed—I could see the moment that she’d registered—and she swivelled back to the camera. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘You never—I never knew this. About the taxi driver? About—oh my God, I’m so sorry. And he got off? Jesus.’
‘I guess there wasn’t enough evidence. From my memory, there really wasn’t any evidence that he’d even touched me. I mean, what was a jury to do?’ I had taken into myself the slick swirl of their story, the sorry questions, the churning doubts.
She was still shaking her head, hands to her cheeks. ‘I’m so, so sorry, darling.’
And that is why I never told her. Why I shook the dust from my feet and left it behind me, along with those transcripts. I didn’t want pity, couldn’t bear it, didn’t want to be known as a victim or as a survivor. Not of that, not of the court case, not of poverty, not of the broken bits of family, the cracked shards that I had glued together to make a whole. When I unfolded that map and ran my finger along the edge of the largest island on earth, I wanted to set fire to those questions. And when I spent those nights being tossed about in that sea, I wanted to undo what had been done to me.
Some months after sending off my request for the records, I received an email responding to my query. Attached to the email, a series of police statements. I opened the attachments and then closed my computer again quickly, as though it contained a virus. For several days I avoided looking at it; nausea twisted in my gut when I thought of it, when I thought of facing her, of seeing her anew, the girl that I was.
After a week, I opened the documents, my hands shaky. My statement was there, also the statement from the taxi driver who assaulted me and one from the driver who picked me up. There was also a statement from the biologist who found the perpetrator’s semen on my stomach and in my vaginal canal. And one from the detective who went to the driver’s house the next day, who drove with him to the rubbish bin on a public street where he had thrown my silk underpants and my wallet. My head felt cloudy, as though I were deep underwater.
Certain phrases had been underlined, but only in my statement: I fell asleep again, I don’t know for how long; when I woke up the car was stationary, and the taxi driver was kneeling over me; I could tell I was not wearing my underpants. I do not know where they were. I was wearing them when I got inside the taxi; perhaps I was asleep for twenty minutes, I am not sure. I can’t make sense of the underlining, what the common thread is. Early in the statement, underlined, there is a snatch of dialogue:
He said, ‘Can I take you for coffee?’ I said no. He said, ‘Can I take you out dancing?’ Again I said no. He asked me two or three more times if he could take me for coffee and each time my answer was the same.
The detective, in his statement, describes driving with another detective and the owner of the cab company to the man’s apartment. They walk up the stairs. Concrete, I think, these stairs would be, in keeping with the style of apartment blocks built in the 1970s. The detective knocks on the door and, after a moment, the door opens. A bearded man stands in front of him, the apartment behind him is in shadow. The bearded man says: I know why you’re here, fellas. It’s about the girl.
Bonaparte didn’t change during the days we were docked, didn’t suddenly start giving up prawns, calming its storms. Wind churned and churled again, and still each catch was thin. We folded cartons between catches, counting them off glumly. For five days we dropped the nets in and hauled them out and sorted and batched and put on the thick ski clothes for the freezer room and took turns climbing down, piling the boxed prawns to the front, counting them off again, noting that there were still not enough. On the fifth day it was my turn to be swaddled in the thick freezer suit and to climb down to the swirling cold air.
After the expanding heat of the deck, there was something soothing in the freezer room, the white of it, the cold. Da
vey waddled around while I lifted myself up to the shelf, pushing the stock to the back. I shouldered my way to the packs at the back of the tray, only half listening to Davey babbling like a child. There were rows of boxes—our entire catch, our entire income, parcelled up, ready to be cashed in for all our escape tickets. A wedding ring for Mick, a rental bond for Davey, a skippering course for Karl, a ticket out for me—a place to finally begin my proper story. Those packages meant all of that to us. It wasn’t the first time that I’d counted them out in my head, like a rosary, soothing myself with the calculation of what each batch would be worth. There was never enough, but there was something. This time, I could hear Davey’s voice—he was telling me a lengthy story, something about the factory he’d worked in, a fire or a fire alarm, the way his mum, who was a total legend, had gone round there and dragged him out—but as I bumped against the cartons, I could feel the difference in the weight of them. Squatting down, I shoved some of them forwards; I could hear the thud of the frozen catch, feel the weight. Perhaps three rows were packed full. But behind them, row upon row of boxes that did not rattle when I moved them, that contained only the weight of air. Row upon row of empty boxes, folded and stacked to look like they were full.
I stayed on my knees on the tray while the sharp air cut into me. Those boxes were all our work, all our sleeplessness, all our storms, all our bruises, all our hopes. Davey’s voice was muffled, but I could hear him anyway, calling, ‘Kacey? You okay? Are we done? I hate it in here. I’m going up.’
Then the dull clang of his feet on the ladder, the creak and clack of the hatch lifting and closing.
I stayed there for a while, counting off the empty cartons, letting the hope seep out of me slowly, and then I went to find him.
The engine room was dark, suffocatingly loud. I don’t know how he stood it, with his earphones and his shirtless body and the steam on his moustache. I tapped him on the arm, mouthed, You bastard. He shook his head and shrugged elaborately. I shoved him in the chest and pointed to the ladder, waited for him to follow me up. At the stern I scraped at the gunwale with a palette knife, keeping my eyes down, and when I felt him beside me, I didn’t look up but said, ‘You stole the catch.’
He leaned on the gunwale, back to the water, eyes to the wheelhouse. ‘You already knew this.’
‘I bloody didn’t, Frenchie. The whole catch.’
‘Not all.’
‘Most.’
He took a pack of tobacco from his back pocket, his yellowed finger trembling slightly as he rolled a thin cigarette. ‘I am an old man and I cannot keep doing this. The catch is too small for all of us to share. And it is time for me to stop. To retire. So.’ He took a drag; when he pulled the rollie away, a shred of tobacco clung to his lip.
I was looking at him now. ‘We all need it.’
‘But there is not enough to share.’
‘Christ, Frenchie. There isn’t now. You’ve screwed us all over.’
‘No. No, I was being screwed over myself. You need to understand—I needed this. All my life I have—’
‘We’ve all worked. Why should you have it?’
‘I need it most. You are all young and pretty. And you’re a girl. You don’t need this. You will be fine.’ He spat the tobacco away, then looked down at me. ‘And you cover my back. This is our deal, Kacey.’
In the galley, Mick was standing at the bench, arms folded, staring at the floor, Davey and Karl standing opposite. Coffee grains were scattered on the bench, bleeding brown blobs into the laminate. I knew before I asked, but I asked anyway. ‘What’s up? What’s happened?’
Mick kept staring at the floor. ‘They found the boy. The decky.’
Karl rubbed at the coffee grains, flicking the brown spots to the sink, scratching and scratching. ‘He was tied to a gas canister.’
Davey added, ‘Like a barrel. A weight. But he floated.’
I waited for more, but they were silent. ‘But he’s … ?’
‘No. There’ll be an inquest in Darwin.’ Mick’s voice wavered. ‘They’ll probably rule suicide.’
We stayed like that for a while, standing in the galley, staring at the dirty green floor, each of us thinking about the deckhand floating alone in the Timor Sea, thinking about what might have led to that moment, and what might follow.
The engine cut out and there was silence, and then without thinking about it, I said, ‘Frenchie stole most of the catch. He’s replaced the boxes in the freezer room with empty ones. This whole season has been worthless. We’ve got nothing.’
Except, I thought, I do have something. I have this, only this: I am here, alive, on the Ocean Thief, and not floating, tied to a barrel, skin seeping away into the salt.
By the time we motored back to Darwin, the storms had started to calm, the water was smooth and settled, the sun blasting down again. Frenchie took the mattress from his bunk down to the engine room and refused to leave, refused to speak, refused to cook.
We kept under power and ate toast and cheese and packets of biscuits and we sat silently at the galley table. What was to be said? We had failed, that was all. Each of us used the time returning to shore to count off our own disappointments, to find our own way back.
The flat shape of the land started to come into view, a cloudy haze huddling over it. Only the plain black terns and the gulls stayed on the booms as we came in from the heads, the wind playing with their feathers. On the upper deck, I pressed my back against the heat of the wheelhouse wall and tried to sketch them in the end pages of one of my journals.
There was a ribbon in the journal I’d carried with me from my bunk, and the page it fell open at had a list of names. Some of the names were scribbled in capital letters, some in tiny pen. Some names had clearly been written in the dark, after one of the feverish dreams and surging memories that accompanied me in those months on the Ocean Thief. Some were underlined, others circled on the outer margins of the page.
The list was long. My father was on it, and Ben Billman, David Fox with his louche grin and uninvited fucking. Some of them were names: Tony de Ropp with his father’s car; the boy who lived next door to me with his soft boy’s penis; the bass player with his unwanted sperm; the high school science teacher who stood below the stairs and watched me walk up them, barely even hiding his gaze; the boys at school who, daily, asked me to sit on their faces. Some were titles without names: the boy on his bicycle giving me a linguistics lesson; the man wanking on the end of the phone; the man on the sailing boat with his wrinkled testicles sticking out of his shorts; the man on the street doing the same; the taxi driver; his barrister. Two pages of them circled and underlined, boxes and arrows drawn around them and through them. Around some of them, I’d doodled sharp spikes, or barbed wire, like a prison fence.
A corridor of breeze lifted as we came closer to shore. I could make out the outlines of the docks, the boats and buildings, and I didn’t want to step back onto land carrying that list. I’d carried it so far and for so long; I was done with it. I wanted to be done with it.
The pages made a pleasing shred as I ripped them from the journal. It was bound with string, and I had to tug to get the second page to come away. I tore it first lengthways, into narrow strips, and then I tore the strips into gum-sized pieces. Fumes mixed with the smell of salt and I closed my eyes, inhaled, tried to commit it to memory.
I stood on the port side, away from the shadow of the land. I could see the land on one side, and on the other the long stretch of the horizon. Light slanted across the water and it was lit up so brightly that I saw everything—the horizon, the harbour, the whole world—with a shining halo. When the wind rose, I lifted my hands and opened my fists. Paper pieces scattered on the breeze, swirling in the air like snow, or breadcrumbs. Gulls lifted from the boom, squawking and swooping, fighting over the flimsy pieces of paper sifting on the wind. Some pieces drifted to the surface of the water, where gulls fought over them. Although no one could hear me, I shouted, ‘It’s not bread, you fools.’
I remembered, then, a quotation written on the blackboard during my stint in a Catholic girls’ school, a quotation from the Book of Job. Tears have been my food, day and night.
This list was not food.
Those men were not my story.
We came into the shelter of the bay and I went into the dark cabin for the last time, dragging my backpack out into the galley. I stripped the bed, folded my spotted cloth and put it in the top of my pack, and I peeled my sketch of Robbie from the wall. Damp had seeped into the paper, making it mottled and brittle. I threw it into the galley bin.
I could hear shouting from the dock, the slowing of the engine; we juddered as the hull hit the side of the wall. My pack felt lighter on my back when I lifted it; I was stronger now. Karl and Davey were waiting for me on the deck; Karl in his board shorts, chest bare, unchanged from the months on board, and Davey, tanned now, and without the soft milky curves on his face. Three cops were waiting on the concrete dock. Frenchie went without a word, without a glance. He threw his bag over the hull, and one of the cops caught it for him. Frenchie was loud and blustery, shouting down, ‘Good catch, mate.’
The cop called back, ‘You’re the catch, buddy.’
Frenchie laughed. They had nothing on him.
We stayed on deck, watching the blue police light flashing; Frenchie ducking his head as he slid into the back of the car, lifting his hand in a middle-finger salute. There he was, the hero of his own story: unwashed and red-eyed in the back of an overheated Territory police car. Karl hugged me, for the first time, and then he leaped down to the dock. Davey shook my hand, all formal. I have no idea where either of them went, what they became. There are men like them everywhere in the Territory, men like them on boats or in the middle of nowhere. Middle-aged now, rough-faced and thick-set. Some of them are pickled with booze. Some are kind, some are not. But I want to remember those boys as they were: soft-skinned, not yet turned.
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