What You've Got Within You

4: Wollongong 2002

4Wollongong 2002

Vivienne Glosioli relaxed a little after Shaw had left. He gave her the creeps. She yearned for the day she could leave the firm and set up her own practice. She thought she could offer so much more than the sausage factory Shaw & Fletcher was becoming. Money appeared more important than principle. She knew fighting for justice cost money, and she enjoyed the trappings that came with her associate’s role and her position as Shaw’s favourite solicitor. But sometimes you had to be prepared to run hard cases to keep the bastards honest as the saying went.

Vivienne’s Italian immigrant parents had worked demeaning, dirty jobs to put her and her two sisters through university. They were immensely proud of her, even though her father constantly tried to fatten her up and marry her off to the sons of his Italian friends. They would be devastated if they discovered the sordid truth behind her stellar legal career. She could live with what she had done. The law had taught her how to rationalise most decisions and outcomes in her life. Even her relationship with Shaw she could justify. She had managed to chew over it, to soften its sinewy, tough aspects, to eventually swallow the humiliation whole. What she could not do, however, was lose her grip on principle. She would be unable to cope with her parents’ dismay if they thought she had given up the fight for the disadvantaged, the battlers – in short, people just like them. People like James Henderson. Of course, she told herself that there was no place for sentimentality. Emotions were for the weak. Yet she could not let her values go. She could be as hard, tough and nasty as the litigation required, but there had to be a point to it all. There had to be a purpose. That purpose could not be limited to simply turning over a dollar. It was not settling a case to secure the win and charge the fee regardless of the sum of money the client ended up clear in his hands. The clients were usually too sick or old to know whether the settlement was good or bad. As long as they did not have to go to court and a cheque for some amount arrived in the mail, they were usually grateful. Vivienne wanted them to know she had fought for their rights. She wanted them to get the best. They usually had nothing. Their deaths had to mean something to those who had exposed them to the killer dust. Otherwise, what was it all for? She wondered whether she was losing insight. Becoming a zealot. She hoped not.

She had doubts about Shaw’s motives or, at least, his drive. She appreciated that he could not be disregarded. He had, after all, won some momentous cases for the underdogs. Nearly ten years earlier, he had been at the forefront of landmark decisions against V&L and Henry King Industries: decisions that now made it unlikely those companies would ever fight the question of breach of duty again. They were pretty much dead in the water on negligence. But Shaw somehow seemed to have lost that fight. His reputation no longer was attractive to her. His physical bulk and personality now made her bilious.

She pushed those thoughts aside and pressed on with the task at hand. Over the remainder of that day and the following two, she sedulously traced through James’s work history. He certainly had had significant exposure from a number of sources across his entire working life. As she rapidly took notes, with Jenny seated by James’s side, Vivienne soon realised that the history she was recording was a story of the couple’s lives rather than simply of James’s exposure. The two could not be separated. Asbestos had bound them together.