Some stories are so dark and so evil it seemed only fitting to hear them spoken about under the ground. Aired in the daylight or to polite company, they might not be believed. One such story belonged to Tara, a tanned and attractive young girl of twenty-two I’d got chatting to while sharing a cell in the catacombs below Melbourne Magistrates’ Court. My case was up for mention and she’d just been arrested over a drug matter. ‘Are you out at the prison?’ Tara asked through sluggish lips. She was clearly off her face. I smiled and nodded that, yes, I was indeed from the prison.
‘I’ll be out there soon too,’ she murmured.
‘Tell me all about yourself, Tara,’ I said, settling on the bench next to her. ‘How did you get here?’
Tara’s father – some kind of Rabbi – started abusing her on the night of her eighth birthday party. She begged her mother to make him stop it but she refused to believe Tara, branding her evil for even saying such a thing. The raping Rabbi didn’t stop and at thirteen Tara turned to heroin. She had started menstruating and the possibility of an incestuous pregnancy loomed. Since Tara was of no real use to her father anymore, he banished her from the home to a life on the streets where she sheltered in cardboard boxes in alleys and parking lots. When police inevitably caught up with her, Tara’s father smeared her as ‘an uncontrollable whore and no daughter of mine’.
The lost little girl found herself a new family – a heavy criminal crew based in Carlton. She lived off the proceeds of petty thefts and nearly every cent went straight up her arm as anaesthetic to a ghastly reality. Even so, people with intent could easily penetrate her feeble narcotic force field and, just before her fourteenth birthday, Tara gave birth to a little girl. The Department of Human Services (DHS) stepped in and removed the baby, Alice, and placed her in the care of Tara’s holy and upstanding paedophile father.
‘Oh my God,’ I said, holding her hand and shaking my head at the tragedy of it. The clatter of a key in the door interrupted us. ‘Tucker, you’re up,’ an officer snapped and ordered me out of the cell where I was handcuffed.
‘Ask for me the minute you arrive at the prison,’ I urged Tara before I was led to the lift to ascend to the real world.
Paul Galbally smiled at me as I was escorted to the dock. ‘How are you going, Kerry?’
By comparison to Tara, I was almost living the dream. ‘Oh, I’m OK, Paul. How long will this take?’
‘About half an hour,’ he replied.
I had decided to plead guilty during my earliest days in the Moorabbin cells and today was about moving that process along. After listening to the police case against me, the judge addressed the room. ‘Is there a bail application before the court today?’
‘No, your Honour, my client does not seek bail.’
‘Will the defendant please stand,’ the judge said, motioning for me to rise. ‘Kerry Tucker, you have entered a guilty plea and the case will be adjourned to the County Court on a date to be fixed.’
I was glad that part was over – it put me another inch closer to getting back to my girls. I was actually relieved to be herded back into the Brawler for the long drive ‘home’. A few days later I was there to welcome Tara on her arrival at Reception. She didn’t look as youthful as she had the last time I’d seen her – primarily because she was now hanging out. I set about nursing her through the pain that burned every nerve ending and stripped her of her defences. Soon the worst of her emotional injuries started to show. Tara told me how in the years since giving birth, her contact with Alice had been minimal – her father had seen to that. Now Alice was eight, the same age Tara had been when her father first raped her. At a recent contact visit, Alice told her how ‘Grandad is putting his dick in me’. Poor Tara was powerless to act. Nobody believed a junkie – not DHS, not the police and certainly not Tara’s mother. To deaden the agony she binged on heroin and pills, bankrolled by a string of violent robberies which is how she came to be back at DPFC.
‘Tara,’ I said gently, ‘you tell me what you want me to do. I’m here for you. I can do whatever you need me to. There is nothing I won’t do to help you and your daughter.’
‘Thanks, Kerry. I know you care, I can see it in your eyes.’
‘Tara, I’m worried about what I don’t see in your eyes,’ I replied.
That night she quietly slit her throat in her cell and almost bled to death. I know she would have been crushed by her failure to die.