Ana said, “Well, it’s…” After a minute, maybe longer, she said, “It’s.”

I said, “Ana? It’s … what?”

And that was that. She made a honking noise and the tears welled and spilled freely down her face. She closed her eyes so tight it seemed to screw up her entire face, and she opened her mouth wide and wailed like a baby. 

I said, “Um,” and then, “um, Ana, hey…” 

Tears in my shirt

So Ana turned around, still blind, and banged her head into my chest. Her tears kept coming, soaking through my shirt onto my skin. I’d already been as unprofessional as I could manage, so it was a bit late to be worried about the rules on touching my clients. I put my arm around her shoulders and rocked her gently. I said, “oh now, oh now, it’s okay to cry, you’re all right, you’re okay, oh now.”

And so on. Things you might say to a baby, where the words don’t really matter. I had no idea what to do. I’d started out being incredibly stupid. With Ana chastely wetting my shirt, I was none the wiser.

That’s the magic of shouting and saying “fuck” a lot. I had Ana’s attention. It was probably the first time. So I pulled out the wad of paper the desk sergeant had given me when I’d signed for her release. 

The five sheets of paper were her charge list. Not her criminal record, but a police list of all the things they’d ever charged her with, including charges that hadn’t gone to court, or where she’d been found not guilty. The charges, all of them, were just nonsense. She’d been arrested for taking a short-cut across a railway track. She’d been arrested for littering. She’d been arrested for obscene language. Someone really hated her. A cop, or someone with cop connections. 

I held these papers under Ana’s nose. “Look at this shit. No, look at it, Ana, bloody well look at it. These charges, they’re all bullshit things. It says here you got arrested for, what is it, for being unlawfully on premises. And the premises turn out to be the Sonsang plant. How do you get arrested for being in the front yard of a factory?”

She didn’t understand what I meant. I was angry, so I must be angry at her. So she tried to deflect by looking ashamed. “It was after hours. I had a friend worked there. I was looking for her.”

I doubted that that was the whole story, but I didn’t care. I’ve been a lot of places I didn’t have a clear legal right to be. And I hope so have you. I said, “This … stuff from the cops. You whole criminal record, it’s bullshit, isn’t it? You’ve never committed a real crime in your life. Have you?”

She sniffed.

“Or if you have, they never caught you. Look, Ana, I don’t know what’s going on here.   No-one gets arrested for this sort of thing. Except you. You do.”

Ana turned her head away. I caught the last bit of what she said: “… being Samoan in public.”

“Yeah, I thought that. But it’s too specific. It’s about you. There was that cop who pulled you in for swearing, because you didn’t fuck him.”

“Greg. Greg Curnow.” There was contempt and anger in her voice. 

“Yeah. Curnow’s an arsehole. But these arrests, this shit started back before you met Curnow. What’s going on, Ana? Is there some cop who hates your Dad, or what the fuck is it?”

Ana didn’t answer. But her eyes were glistening like deep brown rock-pools and they spilled over, tears running down her face. I hadn’t spanked her, but I’d made her cry.

So we had a slightly futile probation officer-client relationship. I’d try to talk to her, and she’d answer some of my questions as briefly as possible, looking at the floor on the far side of the room, in a tiny voice that involved almost no breath and no movement of her mouth. She had to repeat most things she said, because I never caught it the first time, but though that annoyed her she never spoke any louder.To keep things even, she didn’t listen to anything I said, either.

No, it’s okay. I don’t care what you were saying.

We went through the motions. I’d set her up with job interviews, and she’d turn up late to those interviews, sullen and uncooperative, and not get hired.

I’d give her brochures for job training, and she’d take them when I put them directly into her hand.

And she’d lose them.

I’d tell myself that this was her right, and that all she had to do, legally, was turn up once a week. I was – still am – fairly obsessive about keeping the coercive power of the state severely limited, so although I had some levers I could have used to make her take probation more seriously, I didn’t use them. You might think that a civil libertarian working as a probation officer is in the wrong job. Well, it was the right job, but it did make me almost permanently uncomfortable. 

Anyway, the shadow boxing between us had to end because I got a call from the local police station. At the time I didn’t realise just how deeply the local police despised me. But I was on the wrong side in all of my cases, and I didn’t like the cops enough to drink with them after the case, like the defence lawyers always did.

Even so, the desk sergeant sounded quite sympathetic, this one time. My client, Tiana Vainu’upo La’asaga, had been arrested. She was in one of their holding cells. If I wanted to come and get her, they’d release her into my custody. 

To be continued 

But a week later I was pulled into the Director’s office. He told me I was good at doing these reports, but they thought they’d broaden my skills by giving me long-term supervision cases of my own. So I picked up some files. I had a case-load of a dozen, which was very light. And one of them was Ana.

I’m trying to work, here…

So two days later she was back with me in the interview room. She was wearing tiny white shorts and a torn tee shirt. She looked like she was going to climb a tree and steal apples. She looked like she wanted to be the hottest woman on the dance floor. She flickered from one to the other, within the same second. 

I coughed again. She must have heard men clearing their throats before they spoke to her.

I said, “Hey. Ana. Nice to see you again. Er, Jaime. I mean, I’m Jaime. It turns out I’m your probation officer.” 

She had brown eyes. I realised she’d wondered why I’d said “again”? She didn’t remember me, specifically or personally. I was just some pig. Part of the Ana-crushing machine. She said, “hello.” 

In spite of the power she had over me, I didn’t think she was using her beauty in a knowing way. I suspected that she didn’t really believe she was beautiful, or know the effect she could have on men. And she didnt see me as a man. Not that she liked men much, I thought. She liked boys.

I wasn’t much older than her, but I wouldn’t quite have been a boy even if she’d thought of me as human at all. I didn’t wear uniform, as a probation officer, but I might as well have. I was part of the horrible thing that had happened to her – cops, courts, geek with clipboard – simply because she was young, pretty and Samoan.

So I held on to my clipboard, coughed till my voice sounded solid again, and started asking her questions about her family, who she lived with, who she hung with, and what plans she had for jobs, education and so on. 

I didn’t put my reservations about the police charges into my report to the judge. It would have been pointless because she’d pled guilty, even though she shouldn’t have. She didn’t want to get involved in the fuss that would begin if she changed her plea at this stage. I’d tried to talk her into getting a new lawyer and going for a re-trial because she hadn’t been properly represented, but she didn’t want to do it.

And if she wasn’t going to change her plea, it would have just caused her trouble if I commented on the police conduct. The judge who was going to sentence her really hated lawyers, let alone junior probation officers, who accused the police of misconduct. He didn’t want to hear it, and he let it be known that it would backfire on their clients.

This girl – her name was Tiana, though she called herself Ana – was very vulnerable to a bit of judicial shittiness. Technically, she could only stay out of jail if she showed contrition. So if I argued on her behalf that she should never have been arrested and that the charges should have been dropped, that wouldn’t be contrition.

I’d be putting her in jail.

So I wrote a report calculated to keep her out of there. I claimed that she’d fallen into bad company but that there were positive influences in her family. She was taing active steps to find employment. This is the sort of stuff judges love. I argued for community supervision rather than a fine. She was broke, and unemployed. She couldn’t pay a fine.

The judge accepted my recommendation. I’d got paid less and done her much more good than her defence lawyer. I expected she’d go on the client list of a wiley old Quaker called Ethan who had an office down the corridor from mine. Ethan did a good line in gentle-but-scary father-figuring, that kept most of his clients from getting themselves into further trouble. 

To be continued.

She, my new probation client, had been arrested and charged with “obscene language”, “obstruction”, and “resisting arrest”.

The thing about those offences are that they are created by arrogant, stupid and not quite legal policing. They mean that a cop came up and harassed her, because she was young, pretty, and Samoan. She was eventually provoked into telling him to fuck off, and when he grabbed her she shook him off. Her defence lawyer should have threatened the cops with an improper conduct complaint.

The complaint would have led to an internal investigation, and that would be enough to make the desk sergeant drop the charges. Worse, it would have uncovered some awkward truths about some of the local cops. The cops would have dropped the case at the first hint of a threat. But her lawyer had been court-appointed, underpaid, overworked and burned out.

So there my client was, a young, harmless, non-criminal, girl, with three new convictions on her record.

She was in my interview room. She wore skin-tight jeans, faded from blue to almost white, and there were rips and worn patches that showed me patches of golden brown skin at her knees, her left inner thigh, and a larger patch just under her left buttock where she crossed her legs. I was supposed to be a professional, and she’d reduced me to the kind of tongue-tied awareness of beauty that doomed most of my attempts to talk to girls when I was 15.

To be continued.