Quota by Jock Serong Page A

leave.’
    â€˜What do I do?’
    Les had his pot glass tipped on an angle, regarding it with a worried look. He drank the remaining beer and poked the glass into another tray with a sigh.
    â€˜Do it his way. Don’t do it your way.’
    A group of newcomers walked in the door and Les resumed his public face, beaming and taking orders. Whatever it was in the man that had just surfaced was now hidden from view.

SHE TRIES TO make a decent fist of it under cross-examination. Woollacott does a serviceable job for the other side without breaking a sweat: there are enough problems for Hayley Swan to explain that it doesn’t take any great feat of advocacy to tie her up. The older kid’s got Asperger’s. The little one’s fine except for a bit of eczema. They’d have got on, struggled through, because she loves them fiercely. But there are peds circling their lives like sharks, waiting without expenditure of energy for a swimmer to tire. Her mother’s de facto, for one: the one who likes to call himself a step-grandpa, the one with the knowing look behind his creepy little santa-claus smile. The social workers can’t say for sure that he’s breached the feeble walls of her protection, but there’s a sense of inevitability about it. If he hasn’t already, he’s going to. She’s been living at her mother’s, with the old bastard in a caravan out the back due to orders made years ago which prevented him associating with minors. And the aluminium shell of the Jayco isn’t going to hold him back forever. She watches over them but she falters; she’ll fall for men who tie her off and ease the needle in, send her nodding while those children sleep. So they sleep, hair askew and mouths open in peace, and one of those men, or the one in the caravan, will move watchfully in the night, will slip into the room that smells of schoolbags and stale bedding. Creeping and feeling forwards in the gloom, murmuring reassurances. Slumping against the woodgrain plastic of the stereo, she will never know. The promises and threats they weave around her children will ensure she’ll never know.
    So she’s trying to tell the magistrate that she’s done the course. She’s been to the office where she’s tearfully explained the smack and the men who visit and the need she has for the two forlorn little shadows she tows through life. She’s told him the social workers are impressed by her efforts, but everyone knows they aren’t. She’s told him she’s completed urine screens, learning to use the clinical jargon rather than talk about pissing in a cup. The language in the social workers’ reports is not for Hayley, it’s for the consumption of others, even though the reports are built from the aggregate of her admissions, the very enzymes in her piss. To Charlie, over the course of four hearings, the language has remained clear in its intent: this girl cannot go on as a mother. Biology is beside the point. No one can conceive at fifteen and again at seventeen in the midst of multiple, all-consuming addictions and a deviant cavalcade of sexual partners, each of them enmeshed in separate tangles of lives and courts; no one can walk the streets and no one can hawk their skinny ribs to the prodding fingers of strangers and be a mother.
    So little Hayley Swan stands there in her tracky dacks and pulls at one side of her hair as Charlie takes her through her evidence. Yes, she washes the children. No, nobody else does, except occasionally her mum. Yes, she tries to wash their clothes when she has coins for the laundry and can get a machine to herself. Yes, she cooks a bit, and yes, the kids get takeaway when they’re good. Yes, she receives a single parents pension, and yes there have been times when she’s had a de facto living with her and shouldn’t have qualified at that rate. No, she’s never bought drugs with the children in her