Eggshell Skull Read online

  Praise for

  EGGSHELL SKULL

  ‘Brutal, brave and utterly compelling, Bri Lee’s extraordinary memoir shines a light on the humanity and complexity of our justice system and the limitless courage victims of crime must summon in a legal process stacked against them at every turn. In the age of #MeToo, Eggshell Skull is a prescient personal account of a young woman’s fierce and unflinching battle against her abuser. I can’t remember a book I devoured with such intensity, nor one that moved me so profoundly.’

  Rebecca Starford,

  author of Bad Behaviour and co-founder of Kill Your Darlings

  ‘An illuminating meditation on society’s complicity in sexual assault, told through one woman’s pursuit of justice in a system that has failed women and survivors for too long. Powerful as it is timely, Eggshell Skull is a courageous, heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful memoir from one of Australia’s sharpest young writers.’

  Liam Pieper, author of The Toymaker

  ‘Eggshell Skull is as finely wrought as its name suggests—a sensitive and clear-eyed account of childhood sexual abuse that ripples out to encompass both its psychic aftershocks and the gruelling work of seeking legal redress. Lee doesn’t flinch from the ugliness of the crime, but her eye for detail is always compassionate, never gratuitous. This is a book that honours its survivors, and one that should establish Lee as a serious name in Australian nonfiction.’

  Jessica Friedmann, author of Things That Helped

  ‘Eggshell Skull is a page-turner of a memoir, impossible to put down…A great book with which to open a conversation about sexual assault and the way in which the legal system has let women down for too many years. If you are confused or disturbed by the sudden upsurge of #MeToo accusations, Eggshell Skull will give you an insight into the anger and vitriol of many survivors.’

  Krissy Kneen, author of An Uncertain Grace

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Bri Lee is a writer and editor whose work has been published in The Guardian, Griffith Review, the VICE network and elsewhere, and she regularly appears on ABC Radio. In 2016 Bri was the recipient of the inaugural Kat Muscat Fellowship, and in 2017 was one of Griffith Review’s Queensland writing fellows. She is the founding editor of the quarterly print periodical Hot Chicks with Big Brains, which has published nonfiction about women and their work since 2015. In 2018 Bri received a Commonwealth Government of Australia scholarship and stipend to work on her second book at the University of Queensland.

  This book is a personal account based on real events and features a mix of both transcribed and reconstructed dialogue. Assertions of innocence or guilt are occasionally expressed merely as the author’s opinion, independent from court rulings. It has been necessary to obscure identifying features of some individuals for both legal and moral reasons, and so dates, locations and other identifiers have been changed where required. Every single name has been changed, therefore any correlation to real individuals is purely coincidental.

  First published in 2018

  Copyright © Bri Lee 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76029 577 6

  eISBN 978 1 76063 618 0

  Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Cover and design illustration: Lisa White

  Cover images: iStock

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Acknowledgements

  The eggshell skull rule applies in many common law jurisdictions in both civil and criminal law. The premise is that if Person A were to have a skull as thin as an eggshell, and Person B struck them on the head, intending only to punch them, but in fact killed them, B is responsible for the damage they cause A. In criminal law the maxim was first stated by Lord Justice Lawton: a defendant must ‘take their victims as they find them’.

  ONE AFTERNOON WHEN I WAS about ten, my dad drove me to get a pie for lunch as a treat. As his big red ute pulled into the carpark in front of the bakery, we saw a man and woman yelling at each other.

  ‘Stay in the car,’ my dad said, roughly pulling up the handbrake and getting out. The rusty door whined and banged shut behind him.

  I sat still and looked forward through the dusty front windscreen as though I was watching television with muffled sound. The yelling got louder and the woman raised her arms, gesturing, and the man raised his arms and shoved her, hard.

  My father reached them in a few measured strides, and it was as if I saw him transform. He became tall and strong, transcending his daggy, three-quarter cargo pants and floppy leather sandals. I saw the woman had also transformed, but in the opposite way: she looked tiny and terrified. I think she was clutching her face.

  With one hand Dad reached into his pocket and pulled out his badge, and with the other, keeping his palm open and down, he gestured for the man to step back. The situation de-escalated quickly. The three of them stood there, my father with his legs planted wide and firm, the other two shifting their weight, while he took down something in his notebook and they left. Later I would learn that the woman didn’t want to make a complaint and refused further police assistance. Dad waited until they were well on their way to the train station across the road before he looked back at me in the ute, beckoning for me to come out. I fought the urge to run to him, brimming with questions, my curiosity about this adult occurrence making me feel naughty.

  We went into the bakery. ‘Tell the lady which kind of pie you would like,’ he said in front of the hot box, his hand on my shoulder.

  I know plenty of people hate cops. I’m young and blessed to be friends with lots of creative people, left-wing political activists, and older friends who remember Queensland under Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen when unions saved both livelihoods and lives. I’ve met bad cops who misuse their power, and I know there are lazy cops who make life difficult—and of course I wonder who guards the guards—but I can’t think of cops without thinking of my dad. For most of my life, I’d been blinded by anecdotal evidence full of love and sacrifice. The cop I know best was admired for his calm, non-violent approach. The cop I know best launched me, squealing, from his shoulders into sparkling pools on birthdays. He helped me grow a veggie garden and watered it every morning when I lost interest. He raised me on an addictively binary vision of right and wrong. His uniform was crisp. He got up early in the morning without an alarm clock. People in the neighbourhood called on him, asking for advice. When he moved from patrol work to prosecution he had to take a pay cut of about 20 per cent because he was no longer in danger on
a daily basis, but I remember sometimes he would notice cars following us home from school and we’d have to double around dead-end streets until they knew he’d seen them and tore off. Stranger danger was real.

  After he’d spent a few years in prosecution, some rich barristers offered him a job at about double his wage. Mum and Dad fought about it because the money would have made things a lot more comfortable at home, but neither of them wanted him to work for defence. I’ll never forget my brother and me agreeing that our dad would never go ‘dark side’. He was our hero.

  Dad often came home with stories about the best and worst in human beings. We talked about why people did bad things. Life was understood as a series of choices, actions and consequences.

  Later, friends and people at work asked me all the time if I went into law to follow in my father’s footsteps, but it was never that literal. If anything he tried to direct me away from the pursuit. ‘Never look for justice,’ he’d say when he’d finished unloading on Mum after days at domestic violence callover in Holland Park Magistrates Court. Sometimes I was allowed to listen to these discussions, and sometimes I’d be shooed from the room, forced to eavesdrop.

  ‘What is rape?’ I remember asking him once, as he took off his boots. I was in my primary school uniform, young enough to be asking the definitions of words as I heard them for the first time.

  ‘Cameron,’ my mum said, frowning at him as she exhaled loudly and left the room.

  ‘Rape is when one person has sex with another person, but the other person doesn’t want to,’ Dad explained.

  I thought quite clearly, That’s weird, and dismissed the word as being entirely irrelevant to me.

  Another time my father came home after visiting someone in the neighbourhood and told me that I was to ‘get a man drunk’ before I married him because some men ‘become very nasty’, and you wouldn’t be able to tell until they drank.

  When I finished high school, being young and dumb, I presumed that only particular jobs could offer significance and humanity. I fantasised about dying young as a wiry doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières, but didn’t get the grades for medicine. Not smart enough to be a martyr, and with Agatha Christie-style ‘lady detectives’ apparently not really existing, I started a journalism course at university. I thought an internal compass that pointed toward ‘truth and justice’ would be enough, but I also believed that I wasn’t enough. There was a mince grinder inside my mind, pulverising my self-esteem, manifesting in all kinds of masochistic quirks. I would run cross-country until I vomited, take exhaustive lists of my physical faults, reject invitations to events where I might be made to experience happiness.

  ‘I think I’m going to change across to law,’ I announced at the dinner table one night, having just turned eighteen.

  My mum tried to talk me out of it, sensing it would make me unhappy. ‘I always thought you’d make a wonderful tour guide—why not study tourism and hospitality? You could travel the world and have your adventures that way!’

  I rolled my eyes. Mum was an artist and ran a wonderful art supplies store. I was harsh on her, confused by why she didn’t want to watch the world news every day and boycott Nestlé with me. I was that kind of youth: the angsty, self-important, skinny white girl with an XXL ‘Make Trade Fair’ T-shirt and a clarinet exam every six months. If I’d been eighteen in 1986 I would have been one of those poor suckers who walked out of seeing Top Gun at the cinema and straight into the US Air Force recruitment booth—blind to my own cliché, craving heroism, secretly longing to make a sacrifice of myself.

  Looking back on all this is bittersweet. I wanted a battle but rather got sucker-punched and almost didn’t get back up.

  ‘Never look for justice,’ my dad said to me that night, and then time and time again.

  I didn’t listen.

  IT WAS A SWELTERING JANUARY in Brisbane, my first day at my new job, and my tweed pencil skirt no longer clipped up at my waist so I had to keep my jacket on as I walked from the bus stop to the Supreme and District Courts building. I had finished law school at the end of 2014 and returned to Queensland in the new year after two months on a graduation trip eating hotdogs and drinking Budweiser around the USA. New stretch marks at my hips were itchy from my fast increase in weight over the holidays. Sweat was soaking into the underarms of the shirt I had just ironed that morning. Things were off to a bad, and late, start. I hadn’t got all my things ready the night before for the same reason I never bought more tampons when I finished a period—an absurd optimism rendered me perpetually unprepared for anything I didn’t really want to happen.

  As I was heading down George Street I passed a bakery, and as the smell of pies washed over me in a blast of heat I remembered The Pie Incident. Thirteen years had passed and my father was semiretired, leaving the law just as I was entering it.

  Yayoi Kusama’s Eyes are Singing Out mural sits opposite the smooth cement and glinting chrome courts building. The work is a huge row of black and white eyes set on a diagonal so that people walking past can see it, but so that the eyes clearly look upward toward the courts. Sunlight streamed through the colossal panes of glass that rose from the ground to the third storey. It was all very open plan. Very heels-click-on-marble.

  I stepped into an elevator hoping for a moment to myself but a dozen people pooled in after me and I got stuffed at the back. My collar was tight at my throat, stockings cutting into my waist, and my toes were being crushed into my stiff high heels. I felt a kind of claustrophobia inside my own sweaty body. I couldn’t catch the breath I needed in that elevator; it was as though I was in a clothes dryer, tumbling around, getting hot and disoriented. I had no moment of calm before being thrown into the first-impressions competition—I felt big and round and everything about the room I stepped into seemed trim and square. It was day one of a full year of everything about that place sanding off my edges.

  I found the other associates milling around our training room in the Supreme Court Library and tried to act cool while my eyes darted about, searching their faces for someone I’d recognise. Most of them had gone to the University of Queensland—as usual—but I hadn’t moved in the right circles to know them. Hadn’t studied enough, hadn’t sat at the right dinner tables with the right gown.

  Someone waved to me, and I was relieved to see it was Evelyn. She and I had known each other since taking an acting class together in high school. I liked to joke that I spent my life following in her footsteps, in her slim shadow, doing everything she did, just a little bit shitter. Not wanting to break that trend, I had been appointed to the District Court and she to the Supreme Court. The distinction was important: everything in this new world needed to be measured. Everyone sat somewhere in the hierarchy.

  Within moments of stepping into that room and being confronted with that new peer group, I lost perspective. To get a job as a judge’s associate—at any level of court—is a prestigious and significant achievement. Of all the graduate positions a young law student can hope for, an associateship is the dream most of us don’t dare to tell anyone we’ve dreamed, let alone applied for. I had posted in fifty individual applications. We were to be assistants, clerks, mentees, travelling companions, and foot soldiers to judges. With only one associate to each judge, the tradition effectively bottlenecked entry-level jobs in the judicial segment of the industry and encouraged rampant nepotism. Several associates in the room literally shared last names with judges and Queen’s Counsel. I didn’t doubt their merit—I envied it.

  As I approached Evelyn’s group, I stared at her hair. A shiny, dark, long-yet-professional bob. It was a visual representation of how perfect I imagined her whole life to be. Once, years ago, I’d found out that her parents paid for her to get it cut regularly at Oscar Oscar, and I’d never felt so simultaneously vindicated and inferior; my mum cut my hair for most of my life. Evelyn was chatting to others in the group about the graduate position she had lined up at a top-tier law firm for the following year. I smiled and nodded b
ut thought I caught someone looking at the pimple above my lip and tried not to draw attention to myself. I didn’t have a job lined up and didn’t want to be asked the same question. Couldn’t we all just have celebrated the achievement of being an associate a little longer? I zoned out, imagining what would happen if the chip on my shoulder manifested itself into an actual wound: it’d be like that scene in Kill Bill where an arm is chopped off and the blood gushes out like a spectacular column of water from a busted fire hydrant.

  Someone else joined the conversation, and I leaned back on my heels and scanned the room again. So many handsome young men in R.M. Williams boots, so many stunning young women in Rhodes & Beckett suits.

  ‘I’ll bet you brought a suitcase full of incredible clothes home from the States?’ Evelyn asked me.

  ‘Oh, dude, it’s fucking amazing—the consignment stores are like Lifeline on crack,’ I replied, flinching at how crass I sounded. I tried to start talking about the Press Museum in Washington, DC, wanting to make a better impression on the beautiful strangers, but one of the judges came into the room, and we all hushed and took our seats.

  Three hours flew by as we were reminded of the importance of discretion in our roles as assistants and confidantes to judges. We heard horror stories of how previous associates had fucked up. We were the public faces of our judges: we were not to say, do or even think anything that could ever possibly be considered bias. There were to be no emotions on our faces, regardless of how intense testimony or the return of a verdict might be. We could never speak to the media. Our Facebook profiles needed to be trim and respectable; the mood in the room stiffened as we all catalogued the Halloween costumes and beer kegs of undergraduate years. I’d already done a bit of a purge. It would not be unheard of for The Courier-Mail to trawl through an associate’s profile if their judge was in a high-profile trial. This was the new rule of thumb for us all: how would something look in The Courier-Mail? Similarly, expressing political opinions was inappropriate. A Federal Court associate had written an open letter about political preferences to The Australian one year, and his legal career dried up in front of his eyes despite his family name. He was the cautionary tale of pride, the Icarus none of us could afford to forget.