Port Vila Blues

Twenty-one

Baker trailed Ms Goldman back to her office, and the moment he pulled the ugly vinyl chair up to her desk he blurted it out: ‘You know what he bloody well called me? Stupid, useless, lazy.’

She took some time to respond, his file spread open in front of her. He’d noticed that about her before. Getting her attention was like trying to turn a ship at sea, you had to allow plenty of room and time. Well, she was Legal Aid, the government was paying her, so he wasn’t going to get top priority. If he had plenty of dough, she’d be all over him. Finally she dragged her eyes away from the file, saying ‘Hmmm?’ absently, looking more or less past his right ear, not into his eyes.

‘Useless,’ Baker repeated. ‘He said I was stupid and lazy.’

‘I don’t recall that.’

‘That’s what he said. Shouldn’t be allowed. I mean, fair go, there’s a recession on.’ Baker waved his hand to indicate the masses huddled in the corridors and waiting rooms outside. ‘I bet fifty per cent of the poor bastards who come here haven’t got a job, so why have a go at me?’

‘I remember he asked if you were a loafer,’ the Goldman woman said, twinkling a little.

‘See? Like I said, he called me lazy.’

‘Oh, Terry, that’s just his little joke, a play on words. Your name is Baker, right? Bakers bake loaves, hence loafer.’

Baker wasn’t about to let her mollify him. He felt obscurely ashamed and bitter. ‘What about calling me stupid and useless? Anyhow, what kind of name’s De Lisle? Wog name, not even Australian.’

The lawyer refused to answer that. She was looking into his face now, all right, so he knew he’d hit a nerve. She held his gaze, cool and blank, and he looked away, trying to make it casual, masking it with a cough, a scratch, a realignment of his limbs in the orange chair.

Maybe the Goldman woman was relenting, for she said, ‘It was the luck of the draw that we got him today, rotten luck in fact. He does have a reputation.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Baker muttered. He looked into the distance to show that he didn’t give a shit.

‘But he’s highly regarded and he does his bit, which is more than you can say about a lot of others.’

‘Yeah? How?’ Baker demanded.

She shrugged. ‘Well, he’s a circuit magistrate in a couple of Pacific countries.’

Baker grunted. ‘Let’s hope a shark gets him.’

He added the shark to the fall off a cliff, the shorting light switch igniting built-up gas, the smacking front of a Mack truck, the sort of thing he could set up so it looked like an accident.

Ms Goldman laughed, a genuine laugh, as if they were on the same wavelength when it came to De Lisle and what he deserved. Maybe the guy had squeezed her one day without being asked, Baker thought, gazing at her, thinking he’d like a piece of that himself.

She read it in his eyes and something in her shut down again, her shoulders hunching forward, her forearms on the desk, effectively closing her body off from him. ‘Now, Terry, your defence,’ she said.

‘She had it coming,’ he said promptly.

The Goldman woman took that seriously, jotting something down in her notes. ‘In what way?’

‘Well, I mean, she come up behind me flashing her lights, blasting me with her horn. I mean, how was I to know she didn’t have a carload of skinheads on board, like, you know, an ambush or something?’

‘But, Terry, you stopped the car. You wouldn’t stop if you feared for your life. I have to ask this-were you high at the time? Had you taken anything, alcohol and drugs together perhaps?’

‘Jesus Christ, I thought you were my fucking lawyer.’

‘I’m not fucking anything,’ Ms Goldman said, and it was like a slap across the face to Baker.

He put up his hands. ‘Okay, I apologise. I just want to know how come you’re, like, taking this woman’s side.’

‘Terry, I’m simply doing what the prosecution will do to you in the courtroom.’

Baker considered that for a while. ‘All right, how about we argue self-defence?’

‘But you knocked her to the ground. A chipped tooth, lacerations, a mass of bruises. How do you explain that, except as an overreaction? The kind of overreaction one might expect from someone under the influence of drugs or alcohol, I might add.’

Baker closed his eyes, tightened his fists. A wave of blackness and heat swept through his head, sparks popping behind his eyelids. He fought it down. ‘Fucking lay off about the booze and drugs, will ya? Please? Just lay off?’ His voice was high, pained. ‘Everyone on at me, all the time, I’ve fucking had enough.’

He’d scared her. He didn’t want that. He waited for his heart to stop thumping, then took a deep breath. ‘Like I said, she come up behind me flashing her lights, tooting her horn, so naturally I thought I had a flat, or maybe the boot was open. Then we both stop and she gets out of her car and comes at me, sounding off about the blasted kid should be restrained, whatever. Like I said, self-defence.’

‘It’s you who should have been restrained, Terry.’

He looked at her and it was full of hate. ‘So that’s how it’s going to be, you’re all gunna have these digs at my expense, turning everything I say around. Yeah, thanks a lot.’

‘Terry, did she actually assault you?’

He shifted in his chair. ‘Sort of.’

‘How do you mean? Did she hit you, spit on you, threaten you with anything?’

‘If I’d’ve been closer I would’ve felt the spit coming off her. She was good and toey.’

‘Did she threaten you verbally?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Did she say she’d do something to hurt you if you didn’t restrain the child-what’s his name? Troy?’

‘Troy, yeah, little brat. Well, she reckoned I was careless, kind of thing, letting the kid ride around without a belt on.’ He showed her his palms apologetically. ‘I know, I know, I should’ve strapped him in, but you know how kids are, all over the place, can’t keep still.’

‘Terry, I’m trying to work out if you were provoked in any way, and, if so, whether or not you were justified in striking out at Mrs Sullivan. Mitigating circumstances, in other words.’

‘Talk English, can’t ya?’

She leaned forward. ‘We may be able to obtain a fine and a suspended sentence if we can show that your striking the woman-though to be deplored-was understandable given the nature and degree of her provocation.’

Baker muttered, ‘We should get the bitch to back down.’

‘I didn’t hear that, Mr Baker.’

Baker put his head on one side. ‘But you’d have her address, right?’

‘Terry, I’m warning you.’

But Baker was lost in staging another revenge and his mind drifted. Wait till the Sullivan woman was in a multi-storey carpark somewhere, shove a spud up her exhaust pipe so she can’t get the car started, then jump her, get her to withdraw all charges, maybe put her out of action somehow.

That’s if he could find her. Christ, the Sydney phone book was probably chocka with Sullivans.

He became aware of a snarling exhaust note outside the building. When it didn’t let up after half a minute, Baker went to the window.

He liked it, oh he liked it very much. Some bloke was parked across the street in a hotted-up panelvan, brrrapp-ing the motor, letting the vehicle hunt and rock a little as if he were slipping the clutch, ready to take off. But it wasn’t the panelvan that interested Baker, it was what it stood for. Clearly the poor bastard had been given a bum’s rush in court and he was shouting his grievances to the world through a megaphone: ‘Men and women are not equal… Justice for women, injustice for men… Modern justice, keeping a father away from his kids.’

‘Go for it,’ Baker muttered.

The lawyer joined him at the window. ‘Oh, God, not him again.’

Baker laughed. ‘Got lumbered with De Lisle, did he?’

‘If anything, De Lisle would be on his side. No, he’s been hassling us for months.’

She had her mouth open for more but just at that moment the traffic cleared and the panelvan screamed and leapt smoking and snaking away from the kerb, across the street and through the main glass doors of the courthouse.

They heard the crash. The screaming started a couple of seconds later. ‘He’s hurt someone,’ Ms Goldman said, and she hurried out.

Baker left, too, but he paused for a moment at her desk first. He spun the file around. There it was, Diana Sullivan, an address in St Leonards.

They were all moaning and wringing their hands at the front of the building. The panelvan had come right into the foyer and buried itself against the front desk. Baker saw blood and glass, a lot of it. If he’d been a different kind of a person he could have lifted the occasional wallet and handbag in all the confusion. As it was, he saw Ms Goldman helping a woman into the Ladies’. She saw him. ‘I’m sorry, Terry,’ she said, harried, pale-looking. ‘Ring me tomorrow?’

‘No worries.’

‘Great.’

Baker slipped away through a side door. Carol’s Kingswood was in a K-Mart five blocks away. It took him a while to find the street directory under the UDL cans and toys and other crap on the back floor. St Leonards.

But when he got to the address, no one answered his knock, and when he went around the side of the house, a woman from next door poked her head over the fence, demanding to know who he was and what he wanted.

He waved the classifieds section of a newspaper in her face. ‘I’ve come about the VW.’

‘I think you must have the wrong address. Diana doesn’t own a VW.’

Baker was perplexed.

‘Besides,’ the woman went on, ‘someone assaulted her and she’s gone to stay with her mother till the trial.’

Then, conscious that she’d said too much, the woman frowned and reached a fleshy arm over the fence. ‘Let me see that ad.’

Baker backed away. He said, ‘It’s okay, no worries, my mistake,’ and other unconvincing things as he backed out of there.

In the Kingswood again he planted his foot. If the nosy cow was calling the cops right now he’d better track down some mates who’d swear he’d been on the piss with them all afternoon.

So, forget the Sullivan woman.

Fix De Lisle instead.