These burning hearts in hell

I've been very busy.

For anyone with an interest in engaging with the most urgent and turbulent aspects of other people’s lives, criminal defence practice surely provides an embarrassment of riches. On a daily basis you deal with people stealing things like hairspray to fuel alcohol addiction, folks so poisoned by anger that they would hit the ones they’re trying to love, the most lost of the many domestic refugees who straggle between cities, reserves, cells and hospitals. Among these many will be the ones who hold your eyes a touch longer, who rub troubled hands on overused sweatpants, use your pause to start talking about the hanged siblings, or the hanging self. The few you might lurchingly find some patience for, to whom, however impotently, you listen.

Ricky's this kind of guy. He'll probably keep tumbling through the system like some lost sock, washed but forgotten. There's always an official reason, of course, for his stumblings back to jail, but the story Ricky knows tells of a different understanding. The shackles are on again because he was caught drinking cleaning products with the woman he was to be tried the next day for assaulting. Both are brought in for disobeying the court's orders, and sit next to each other in the dock. "Well", he mumbles to me, "we knew I was gonna go in anyway, so I guess we were jus gettin' together while we still could". Predictably, her reconfigured memory of the instigating event means the case doesn't go ahead, but the judge, perhaps realising we've done nothing to resolve whatever problems brought them here, struggles to relinquish jurisdiction. Ricky's asked what he'll do when he's back on the streets. "Dunno...break down, I guess". His sad honesty jumps the grooved conventions of the room. Our exhortations to change, to attend treatment, get ahold of life, everything seems suddenly dwarfed by an enormity of grief, squeezed out through monosyllables into the estranged familiarity of the court. Ricky gives me a sideways smile as he leaves, relieved, at least, to be walking out the door to something like freedom, with someone like love at his side.