Personal Narrative

It was the storytelling part of law that fascinated Sarah. The challenge of finding a way of turning the ‘accused’ into a person, someone real and vulnerable; someone that the judge and jury – if there was a jury - would warm to and empathise with. There was a way of presenting the evidence, the arguments that gave the court a sense of the person beyond the crime, before the crime; storytelling was what made the difference between a good barrister and a mediocre one. The prosecution would produce victim statements from the dead girl’s parents and her sister, the grandparents, the aunts and uncles and friends. These would be sad accounts. Narratives that would fill the courtroom with grief and with anger, that would make no sentence seem long

enough.
Of course some people lied. When Sarah was a child – her mother would say, ‘Don’t bother Sarah, I can tell when you’re lying to me’. It was not a bluff, no matter how elaborate or straightforward, no matter what voice or tone Sarah used, her mother picked the lies. Sarah had inherited the gift but there were times when she wished she could believe the lies. Greg, one of her clients, a young guy robbed several stores and bashed a teenage girl who was working at the petrol station to save enough money to go to Bali with her girlfriends at the end of the year. The girl spent six months lying in a coma in a hospital. At the hearing, the doctors said that even if she lived she wouldn’t be able to walk again, she might not be able to read or write. ‘She loved to travel,’ her mother told the court, ‘She has a big map of the world on her wall. With pins marking the places she is planning to visit. I don’t know what I should do, should I pull it down before she comes home?’ In court, Greg cried and said he was sorry, and that he didn’t know why he did it and that he wanted to apologize to the family. Sarah knew he was lying. There was no evidence in the stories other people told about him that he had any redeeming qualities. She hoped to find something somewhere that might convince her that he was remorseful and that he wouldn’t hurt anyone again. But she couldn’t and that made mounting a defence difficult. She had the skills and the training to argue on his behalf, to plead for the minimum sentence, but she hoped he’d get the maximum and that no one would ever let him out again. He had a ‘good’ story. A tough life. His parents were addicts, rarely conscious enough to bring up a child. They tried but failed to look after him. Society owed him, but she knew he would re-offend.
Jo was not Greg. Jo would not go out and deliberately hurt someone. She was not evil or malicious. But Sarah knew there would not be many people lining up to tell her the sorts of stories that would convince the judge to keep Jo’s sentence to a minimum. Jo was an ordinary young woman, very ordinary, and from a working class family, and it was unlikely that her family knew anyone who was prominent or in a position of power or respect who could speak up for the girl. An ordinary young woman except that she was driving while she was drunk and that she’d had the misfortune to have an accident, a fatal accident. Luck, good and bad was responsible for so much, but the law was not interested in arguments about luck. If Jo had been stopped by the cops that night, before the accident, she might’ve ended up with a fine and lost her license, she might’ve been charged and ended up on probation. The difference was what – a spill of oil on the road? The difference was a life. Ashleigh’s life.
Sarah read her notes again - ‘Best friends,’ Jo said, ‘since year 7.’ Sarah didn’t have a best friend. She had not managed to keep her friends for long. Her interest in people wore out, she was bored, irritated with them. She didn’t see anyone from primary school or from high school. She’d kept in touch with Ada; they’d been friends through high school, and then university, and if Ada was alive they might still be friends. She might have a best friend. Maybe even more than a friend, though Ada was an active heterosexual and had never given any indication that she might be attracted to women. But then neither had Sarah, not then. In her teens, she’d a couple of boyfriends, one serious enough for him to ask Sarah if she wanted to get married. But she’d always preferred women. Women’s company, women’s bodies. But nothing was permanent, relationships began and ended. Her most recent ex-girlfriend Laine was living in New York and sometimes they skyped and wrote emails. If they were both in the same city, they might’ve continued to see each other. But Laine did not hesitate when her mother asked her to come home - there’d been an accident, her brother’s head injury was serious. For the first few months Sarah thought Laine was planning to come back, then she thought Laine might ask her to come to New York, but it had been 18 months now and there was no mention of them being together again.
Sarah had vague connections with a couple of people at university and saw them once every six months or so but she could hardly call them friends.

They were not people she would ring if needed help. Who would she ring if she needed help? Her brothers? They would lend her cash if she was short of money, give her a bed for a couple of nights if her building collapsed in an earthquake or was guttered by a fire. She could count on them; they were the sort of brothers, sisters said, they’ll do anything for me. But they didn’t know her. Conversations at family dinners were possible only if they focused on the football, or travel. Intimacy was dependant on collusion - always against their mother – they complained about her outrageous demands, laughed about her latest acquisition.

Sarah liked most of the people at work, sometimes they went out for lunch, occasionally for drinks on a Friday night. If she needed advice, she could ask them. But if she left work she’d hardly see any of them at all.

What made Jo the kind of person that Ashleigh would have as a best friend? What made Jo the kind of person that would have a best friend? What was Jo’s story? And what if Jo didn’t have a story? Was that possible? Were some people only ever secondary characters in other people’s stories? And if Jo didn’t have a story how would Sarah give the judge insight into her life, create

empathy?
When she was working on Greg’s case she’d been confident that the right story, told effectively could shift the court, not just the jury but the judges too. There had to be evidence and precedence. Stories had power. That was the danger of a good story, you could illicit pity and empathy for even the worse sociopath – for his rotten childhood, for the abuse and the bullying – but if it impacted on the verdict, on the sentencing, then a killer could be set free to go on killing.
Jo was too ordinary. Maybe there was no story to tell? Was it possible that some people’s lives were not worthy of a story?