Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  The person who answered the phone was a tentative young woman. She told me she had been acquainted with Anu Singh and Madhavi Rao at university; she was a close friend of one of the guests at the fateful dinner party.

  ‘I’ve got ethical problems,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to rat on my friends. But the story’s in the public domain now, isn’t it.’

  She sounded less than convinced by her own argument, but offered to meet me in two days’ time at the NSW State Library cafe in Macquarie Street. A blue-stocking, I thought; a swot. She’ll chicken out for sure; and when she does, I’ll be able to fade out too, without giving offence to anybody. But before our date, acting on a trickle of curiosity, I went to the office of a newspaper I often wrote for, and asked to see the cuttings file.

  It was already surprisingly bulky. The murdered man’s name was Italian: Joe Cinque. He had been killed on 26 October 1997. The two women had gone on trial together in 1998, but a month into those proceedings, a legal problem had arisen. The jury had been dismissed and the joint trial aborted. The women were now to be tried separately, each with her own defence counsel. The trial currently in progress was Anu Singh’s.

  Anu Singh, I gathered from the phlegmatic daily court reports, was the daughter of two doctors, a rather bright student who had come from Sydney to Canberra to study law at ANU. She was a keen recreational drug user and her student career had been chequered. But by 1997, the final year of her course, she was living in the Canberra suburb of Downer with Joe Cinque, a young civil engineer variously described in the press as her boyfriend, fiancé and de facto husband. He was a stable fellow with a good job and they planned to marry as soon as she graduated.

  Singh’s closest female friend was Madhavi Rao, by all accounts a quieter and more studious person. Like Joe Cinque, Rao was devoted to the floridly glamorous Singh, and solicitous of her welfare. But looking after Singh seems to have been an ever more onerous task, for she was a drastic dieter and a driven frequenter of gyms, obsessed with her physical imperfections both real and imagined: she had worked hard for her six-pack; she declared that she would ‘rather be dead than fat’.

  During 1997 Singh got into her head the idea that she was suffering from an incurable and fatal muscle-wasting ailment. She consulted dozens of doctors. None of them would confirm her diagnosis but her conviction was unshakeable. She traced her condition to the fact that, in her endless quest for thinness, she had swallowed large doses of a vomit-inducing syrup called ipecac. This, like many things that were wrong in her life, she blamed on Joe Cinque: she claimed he had told her that models used ipecac to control their weight. She resented, too, the fact that while living with him she felt as if she had effectively ‘become a housewife’.

  A month before she killed Joe Cinque, Singh had apparently approached a university counsellor, and alleged that Joe had hit her several times and abused her verbally. She claimed that Joe blamed her for the abuse, saying he had ‘never been violent to a woman before’. But she could not leave him, she told the counsellor, because she was rendered financially and emotionally dependent on him by her ‘medical condition’.

  In the terse style of the press clippings, the story grew more and more bizarre. Singh’s fantasies were far-fetched and fluctuating. She used the words ‘vendetta’ and ‘rampage’. She bragged to companions that she had studied psychiatric texts and knew the law, that it would be easy to convince people you were insane. To her friends she spoke often and dramatically of killing herself – and as for Joe, she told some friends she would drug him so he would be asleep while she committed suicide, and others that she would go the whole hog and take him with her.

  Madhavi Rao, whose counsel had described her as ‘a doormat’ with a tendency to ‘become involved in flights of fancy’, had apparently been privy from the start to these plans. Together the two women were said to have researched suicide methods at the university library. Singh tried to get hold of a gun. When this failed they turned their attention to drugs. Fellow-students were happy to give Singh and Rao injecting lessons, to score heroin for them and even to explain what dosage would bring about instantaneous death. Guests were summoned to a dinner party. After they had gone home, Singh laced Joe Cinque’s coffee with the sedative Rohypnol, then, while he was unconscious, gave him a lethal hit of heroin.

  But the young man did not die the prompt and quiet death that she had been advised would follow such a dose. He lingered. For hours. Right through the night and into the following morning.

  Towards noon, according to the cuttings, Singh started to get cold feet. She phoned the friend who had got hold of the Rohypnol for her, a girl called Bronwyn Cammack, and told her what she had done to Joe. His lips, she said, were ‘a tiny bit blue, and he was taking a breath every ten seconds or so’. She begged Cammack to come over and revive him. Cammack, a sometime heroin user, insisted Singh dial emergency at once. Singh threw an hysterical fit: Joe didn’t know she’d given him the drugs – if the paramedics brought him round with Narcan, he would find out what she’d done and would be furious. Cammack stood firm. So Singh dialled 000, but by the time the ambulance reached the house, it was too late.

  While she was in custody after Joe Cinque died, Singh wrote a series of letters to her family and others. These were seized from her locker at the Belconnen Remand Centre, and admitted into evidence at her trial. I watched him die, she wrote. Didn’t save him. Then I thought, fuck, I don’t want to die . . . The prosecution has a very strong case against me. I could be looking at 20 years . . . What a mess I have made out of a potentially perfect life. How much I wish this didn’t happen so my life could be normal now – married to Joe, couple of kids, luxury, the works. I had the perfect life. Attractive, money, law career, everything. Now nothing because of my utter, utter stupidity . . . I could have had the most wonderful man in the world . . . Now everyone else is better off than me, when I had it all . . . I bet everyone is laughing at me now. People would have envied me before. Now no one would want to be in my shoes.

  The letter got under my skin, with its panicky tone, its angry, shallow clichés. I had it all. Luxury, the works, the perfect life. It was a very adolescent voice. She seemed to lack a language deep enough for the trouble she was in, a language fit for despair. With dread I recognised her. She was the figure of what a woman most fears in herself – the damaged infant, vain, frantic, destructive, out of control.

  In the fluorescent glare of the newspaper office I studied the pictures, smudged and blackened by the photocopier.

  The first was an indistinct close-up, perhaps from a family album, of a young man with his peaked cap on backwards. He grinned frankly, straight into the lens, but the flash had bleached out his forehead, nose and mouth; the contrast gave his eyes a dark, warm glisten.

  The second photo showed the same man standing against what looked like a kitchen wall. He was holding proudly in his arms a slender young woman in a striped T-shirt and black jacket. Her dark hair was up, her eyebrows were skilfully plucked into wing shapes. The man’s bare arm was strong, but the masculinity he radiated looked very youthful: he reminded me of the Italian and Greek high school boys I used to teach. He held his chin up with a shy, almost defensive smile, while the girl in his embrace turned her head to beam into the camera with the ease of someone accustomed to being adored and to looking good in photos.

  The third picture was crisply focused, a professional news shot of a different young woman, against a background of asphalt. She paid the camera no attention. Her black hair was bobbed, with a centre part. She wore an open-necked striped shirt, rimless spectacles and no make-up. She looked serious, round-cheeked and strong-browed.

  Anu Singh raised my girl-hackles in a bristle. Joe Cinque provoked a blur of warmth. Madhavi Rao filled me with a wary, puzzled curiosity. These were my instinctive responses, and over the ensuing years, as I picked a path through this terrible story, they remained remarkably stable. But that day in the newspaper office, ploughing through the repetitive
cuttings, I thought it was all a waste of time. I was way behind the action. I had already missed the entire Crown case against Anu Singh. There was nothing here for me. I might as well go home.

  Still, I kept my rendezvous at the State Library. The contact turned up, right on time: a straight-backed young woman with well-brushed brown hair and an intelligent, watchful face. We sat down and ordered coffee. I knew her name but she begged me, with an anxious grimace, for anonymity.

  ‘I’m angry,’ she said. ‘I never even met Joe Cinque, but I’m angry. People close to this have been miserable ever since – even the ambitious ones. It stuffed me around, and I’m peripheral. It’s the waste – the waste of someone’s life.’

  She described the two women in fast, vivid strokes: ‘Anu’s tall. She’s thin. She came across as a very sexual person. She talked about sex a lot. She always had lots of men after her. She’s got the hair to the knees, the tailored suit – whereas Madhavi’s more the independent rock, Triple-J type of woman, with a pierced nose – warm, and a bit vague, with strong beliefs about stuff like environmentalism. Madhavi won’t cope in gaol. Anu will, but not Madhavi. She’ll be manipulated.’

  Most of all, she wanted me to understand about drugs. This story might strike me as weird, she said, but in Canberra as it was in 1996, 1997, 1998, when hard drugs had cut a huge swathe through the city, it wasn’t weird at all. Small-time dealers hung out at all the university colleges. There were a lot of bored rich kids. The ANU Bar was where people would go to buy dope. Plenty of drugs were exchanged there for sex: fresher girls, she said, were ‘prepared to fuck guys in the toilet in exchange for a couple of tabs of ecstasy’.

  I tried to register this gross fact without blinking, but she flashed me a wry look. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I brought you something.’ She took out of her bag a folded sheet of newsprint and passed it across the cafe table. We shook hands and said goodbye.

  On the train home I opened the paper she had given me. It was a double-page tabloid spread from the Daily Telegraph’s report of the committal proceedings: the transcript of the emergency call that Anu Singh had made to the paramedics while Joe Cinque lay dying on their bed.

  It was the shrill blast of this dialogue that broke through my indifference and galvanised me: the killer’s voice pleading, dodging, feinting; the dispatcher’s desperate striving for command; and the jolting visual flashes of Joe Cinque’s death throes – the close presence, behind the screaming, of a young man’s body in extremis – his limbs, his mouth, his teeth, his heart.

  PART TWO

  I understand now that I went to Canberra because the breakup of my marriage had left me humiliated and angry. I wanted to look at women who were accused of murder. I wanted to gaze at them and hear their voices, to see the shape of their bodies and how they moved and gestured, to watch the expressions on their faces. I needed to find out if anything made them different from me: whether I could trust myself to keep the lid on the vengeful, punitive force that was in me, as it is in everyone – the wildness that one keeps in its cage, releasing it only in dreams and fantasy.

  That day, though, as I went straight home, called the airline and packed a bag, I was still thinking of myself as a writer at a loose end who had stumbled on something interesting. I thought I would be able to slip quietly into the court with my notebook for a shield. I could watch and listen for a while, satisfy my curiosity, and wander out again at will, unscathed and free of obligation. But I was about to learn a hard lesson. A story lies in wait for a writer. It flashes out silent signals.

  Without knowing she is doing it, the writer receives the message, drops everything, and turns to follow.

  When I got to the ACT Supreme Court on 6 April 1999, Anu Singh’s defence was already in progress. It took me a moment to get my bearings. The courtroom was so palely timbered and greenly curtained, so shallow and wide and muffled by carpet, that it could have been a suburban lounge room.

  Two women were stationed side by side on padded chrome chairs, out in the middle of the space. One was a tall, blonde, scraggly-haired security guard. The other was Anu Singh. Her hair, dark and reddish-tinted and very long, was pulled back and firmly bound into a thick club that bulged on the nape of her neck. She was wearing street clothes: a long skirt and a dark-blue jacket laced criss-cross in the small of her back. Her bare feet were slipped into high wedge-heeled sandals. She sat very still, very erect, with her right leg crossed over her left. Beside her slouching escort she looked dainty, almost prim. A sliver of profile was all I could see of her face.

  The witness on the stand could only be her father. Heavy-shouldered, with a close-clipped beard, Dr Singh leaned back in the chair with his hands folded on his belly. He was a man of substance, unfazed by the formality of his surroundings; but the version of his daughter’s life that the barrister was drawing from him, as I slid into the back row of the gallery, was a sorry one.

  Anu, he was saying, had been barely a year old when the family migrated from the Punjab and settled in Newcastle. She was a clever little girl, but very clingy. She slept in her parents’ bedroom till she was four or five. Puberty hit early – by thirteen she was ‘fully developed’.

  As a teenager she became a real headache, slacking off on schoolwork, wearing revealing clothes, refusing to help her mother, always sneaking out to see boys. Then, from year eleven, the dieting started. Somehow she stayed near the top of her class, and in year ten she was dux. Her HSC score was high, but not first rank. In 1991 she went to Canberra to study economics and law at the Australian National University.

  She coped poorly away from home, he thought – always on the phone to her mother – until in late 1993 she took up with a fellow student, Simon Walsh. Dr Singh was annoyed with her for becoming a vegetarian and overdoing the aerobics classes, but for a while she seemed to become more stable.

  In 1995, the doctor went on, the Singh family left Newcastle and moved to a middle-class suburb of Sydney. That year Anu came home from uni at the September break in an odd state. She wouldn’t go out or dress up, but sat about in casual clothes, crying for no apparent reason. Whenever her father saw her she was coming out of the shower. She paced the floor all night.

  Any woman who has left home for university could fill in the gaps here, I thought. Drugs. Booze. Stupid, risky sex. ‘Love’ affairs. Casual wounding. Pregnancy. Abortion. What do parents know? What can a girl afford to tell them about her stampede towards danger and self-damage?

  Another set of parents sat in the middle of the front row of the public gallery. They looked like Italians. They sat shoulder to shoulder, quiet and still, rarely speaking or turning to each other, but it was obvious who they were. Around their attentive heads glowed an aura of anguish.

  That summer of ’95–’96, Dr Singh told the court, his daughter became frighteningly thin – no more than forty kilos. She ate nothing but Coke and TimTams. He could see her bones. She would pull up her shirt (here his voice choked, he wept, he wiped his eyes; his daughter, listening on her chair, did the same) and show him hanging skin. ‘Look,’ she would say, pinching it. ‘It’s fat.’

  Dr Singh told her she had an eating disorder and must see a psychologist. She flatly refused, and begged and pestered till he made an appointment for her to have liposuction. Such was the power of his daughter’s will that he even paid a deposit of several hundred dollars to the cosmetic surgeon. At the eleventh hour she cancelled.

  In September 1996 she brought home a new boyfriend, a young man from Newcastle called Joe Cinque. His daughter was happy, said Dr Singh. He could see it in her face. But that summer her litany of complaints began again: aching legs, hot flushes and pains, things crawling on her skin. She became withdrawn and tearful. She refused to see a psychiatrist.

  By May 1997 she was convinced that her muscles were gone. Life wasn’t worth living, she said. In August, she started to sell her clothes and give away her CDs. When she went back to university, her parents twice rang the Mental Health Crisis Team in Can
berra; but each time they came to Anu’s house, she sent them away.

  ‘On 26 October 1997,’ said the barrister, ‘you saw your daughter?’

  ‘In the Canberra lock-up,’ said Dr Singh. ‘She was agitated, crying, pinching and pulling at her arms. She asked me “Where am I?” We could only stay ten minutes, because of her state of mind.’

  Cross-examined by the Crown, Dr Singh said his daughter missed Joe now, that she was deeply saddened he was no longer with her – I glanced at the couple in the front row, and saw Mrs Cinque’s shoulders stiffen – but she had never told her father she regretted killing Joe, for Dr Singh had never asked her anything about how Joe had died.

  ‘She has never told you she injected him with heroin?’

  ‘I didn’t raise that question,’ said Dr Singh. ‘She’s too disturbed. It’s a very sad thing. I don’t want to bring it up. I only tell her all the time, “What you did, you were sick. You were sick.” We have general chitchat. I want to relax her. I talk about family. I talk about religion. I talk about peace of mind.’

  ‘What religion are you?’ asked the prosecutor.

  ‘I believe in humanity.’

  ‘And her beliefs about humanity?’

  ‘She is too young,’ said her father, ‘to have any beliefs.’

  What I needed was a journalist. At the break I looked around the lobby for one of those shockingly young reporters who are sent to cover Supreme Court trials. The squalor and misery they are exposed to every day can make them seem thick-skinned, even coarse: I like them. They are always good company, full of ‘facts’ and keen to gossip and speculate. I spotted two of them, smartly-dressed and friendly-looking women in their twenties, hanging about near the glassed-in atrium with its struggling plants. I sidled up and introduced myself. They were a classic pair: one a thin, quiet, thoughtful blonde, the other dark, irreverent and bouncily talkative. Yes, they’d been there for everything I’d missed – the whole Crown case against Anu Singh. What the hell, I asked them, was this story about a dinner party? And where was the jury?