Quota by Jock Serong Page B

care. No, she’s never denied buying drugs, and yes, the drugs are mainly meth and mull, but there have been periods on smack as well. Yes, she’s been given cash by people who’ve stayed with her and her mother, and yes, she’s had sex with some of those people, but it’s never been discussed, the sex and the money. It’s just money that helps cover the cost of these people being there. The sex, she agrees, is independent of that. It just happens. Most of the time she agrees to it happening.
    Charlie leaves her to the Department’s lawyer for cross-examination, thinking she’s given herself a slim chance, where before she’d had none. If dull honesty can feed the machine the same way bureaucracy does, then the machine should be sated. Each problem he’s handed her from the report he holds in front of him, she’s wrestled into a response with her awkward language, wrapping her thin words around it until it seems she’s smothered that one, the next and the next. Sometimes she sounds feisty; she’s got explanations for some of the barbs in those reports. The social workers are perched on their generous arses in the gallery, looking grim. Charlie knows if they fail today they’ll be back within months. A new report, another twenty urine screens and another chance to prise the children from Hayley Swan.
    But the moment the cross-examination begins, it’s clear they’ve already won. As the morning wears on she’s tiring, and worse than that, she’s hanging out. Charlie knows the lost concentration, the picking at the skin, the repetitive drumming of the fingers. She’s looking at the clock while unanswered questions hang in the air. The magistrate is losing patience and he’s a bastard at the best of times. Underneath the cheap lace edging, her top may as well bear the words ‘Need to score urgently’. Time is slipping away towards the lunch adjournment, when she’ll be on her own for an hour, and he can do nothing to hasten the cross-examination, which by now is raking over things that interest no one. The magistrate keeps feeding questions to the cross-examiner, fuel for the bonfire. ‘Ms Woollacott, I don’t think you asked her about the urinary tract infections…’ When the old turd adjourns for lunch, Hayley bolts from the building without a word, Charlie following in time to see her heading east down the laneway in the rain. The social workers cluck around him, talking over each other in their eagerness to condescend. You gave it a shot dear. She’s gone. It’s for the best.
    He wanders out with the rain speckling the shoulders of his coat, then working its way under his collar. Makes his way to Russell Street, looping through video arcades, an alien in a suit. No one looks at him. None wears any sign of having passed her a foil and taken her cash. She’s gone, swallowed whole by the city.
    He circles back towards the court, and as he reaches the stairs he can see her sitting there. The damn bag she hauls everywhere, piled by her side. In it, the photo she presses on those who challenge her. He’s seen it many times: her in the full blush of health, heavier, smiling and bathed in sun, a baby clutched to her shoulder and a stumping toddler in the foreground, reaching towards the camera. The optimism caught in that instant is unbearable: the impossibility of a child and her children.
    He rushes up the first few steps and hauls her to her feet. ‘Where did you go? We were getting somewhere…’ But her head is limp and heavy. The fury wells up in him and he grips her chin, yanks her face up. There are tears gathered in her eyelashes, pooled and not falling, and the eyes are not hers anymore. A sucking, choking horror consumes him and he looks down at the arm he’s taken, at the crook of her elbow, where a bright spot of blood sits in the smooth white curve of her skin.
    On the nights when the