Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  With gusto and a fair amount of eye-rolling, they filled me in. There had been more than one dinner party at the couple’s townhouse, in the week before the murder. Singh would send out her friend Madhavi Rao at the last minute to round up a random crew of guests from neighbouring student households. Some who’d been called to give evidence had heard gossip about a suicide plan, others had been told about a possible murder, but with a single notable exception they all claimed not to have taken it seriously. One girl, though, told the court she had actually dropped in to Rao’s house the morning after one of the dinners and asked, ‘Did anything happen? Did anyone die?’

  Anyway, Anu Singh had been in Belconnen Remand Centre for eighteen months. She now admitted having given Joe Cinque the lethal dose, but she was going for diminished responsibility. For this defence to work, the journalists said, you had to prove that at the time you did the crime you were suffering from ‘an abnormality of mind’. And this meant a lot of psychiatric evidence. Singh’s counsel – the sharp-voiced little guy with dark red cheeks – was Jack Pappas. The Crown Prosecutor, taller and rangier and less aggro in style, was Terry Golding.

  As for the jury – there wasn’t one. Singh had chosen to be tried by judge alone. The journalists laughed at the look on my face. Yes, you could do that in the ACT. He was Justice Ken Crispin, the same judge who had presided over the earlier jury trial that had been aborted. He was a Christian, they said, ‘a lay preacher’ in the Uniting Church. As a barrister he had acted for Lindy Chamberlain. He wrote a book about her case. He had also appeared for the victims in the Chelmsford Deep Sleep Therapy trial. He was well thought of in Canberra. People liked him.

  And the other girl? The ‘doormat’ friend?

  Madhavi Rao, said the journalists, was out on $100,000 bail, on condition that she live at home in Sydney with her parents: her father, a high school teacher, had put up the family house as surety. She would have her own separate trial, later in the year.

  The young journalists spoke of Anu Singh with a complete lack of sympathy, indeed with a rough contempt. ‘And you should have seen some of her friends who gave evidence,’ said the dark one, with a short, scornful laugh. ‘Talk about flaky!’ She stretched her neck, lowered her eyelids, and moved her head about in a parody of swan-like hauteur.

  ‘What sort of clothes?’ I asked, dismayed at how much I had missed.

  ‘Oh – Country Road,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘Daddy will pay. Daddy will pay.’

  In her cynicism I heard an echo of the primitive female hostility that had made the back of my neck prickle at the sight of Anu Singh’s photo in the Canberra Times. It occurred to me that if I had been Singh’s defence counsel, I too would have seized any opportunity to get rid of the jury, particularly if it had contained women.

  When the court rose that day I carried my backpack along Northbourne Avenue and took a room in the first hotel I could stand the sight of. It was a warm afternoon. I lay on the bed for a while thinking about Anu Singh and her distracted visits home from university. I wondered if my parents had guessed what was the matter with me, in 1964, when I took the train home to Geelong after I had had an abortion. I thought about money. I tried to figure out a way to follow this trial without having to commit myself to a publisher. Then I walked back to Civic and bought myself two new notebooks and a bunch of pens.

  Next morning in the courtroom, just before the judge made his entrance between the grey-green velvet curtains, I heard someone at the bar table humming. It was only a worker absentmindedly settling down to a long day’s slog, but how awful it seemed, this light, tuneful sound.

  A video of Anu Singh’s charging was to be shown.

  The monitor on the bar table sprang to life.

  On the bright rectangle a figure dressed from neck to ankle in glaring synthetic white is jerking to and fro in front of a high bench or counter, behind which a man in uniform stands. Her hair is clumped on top of her head in a knob, and her arms are swaddled against her torso as if by a straitjacket – no, it’s only the peculiar white jumpsuit she’s wearing, and her doll-like stance. Voices urge her to stand still, but she can’t, she won’t.

  Do you wanna do me a favour, says a man’s voice, and stand back on the yellow line? Just step back on to the line, just so the camera can film you properly.

  Yep, says the white figure. But she keeps sighing, raising her hands to her hair, turning and pacing and moving about.

  You are charged, the voice announces, that in the Australian Capital Territory on the 26th of October 1997 you did murder Joe – he stumbles over the name, and bungles it – Joe Ching-koo. Do you understand that?

  In the public gallery Mrs Cinque put one hand over her eyes, then, holding her head high, folded and refolded her hanky.

  The tiny white-clad puppet on the screen rocks and jerks. Her answers to the laborious utterances of the police sergeant are more like sighs and murmurs than speech: she can’t seem to get her breath. The voice cautions her formally, asks her if she understands, cautions her again. It charges her with murder, then with administering to another person, namely Joe Ching-koo, a stupefying drug namely heroin, likely to endanger a human life.

  Just stand back a little bit, the voice keeps telling her. Just stand on the yellow line.

  Has anyone called? gasps the figure in white. Ah – ah – ah – did you speak to my parents?

  They’re coming down to Canberra.

  Are they? Energy surges into her voice.

  They know where you are.

  What’d you tell them?

  That you’re on a murder charge, that Joe had died . . .

  Okay, says the figure in white, rocking, pacing, shifting in and out of shot. Okay – when do I leave here?

  ‘Never!’ shouted Joe Cinque’s mother from her seat in the gallery. She too rocked and rocked, folding her arms across her belly. Her husband sat hunched and motionless beside her.

  The video, with its fixed camera, garish colours and muffled dialogue, was packed with more meaning than the most professional production. It was raw with pain. The Cinques and Dr Singh were sitting as far away from each other as they could get in a gallery that had only four rows of seats, but their faces in profile wore the same expression: heavy, the mouths low, the skin and flesh sagging off the bone.

  The video machine had developed a glitch, and the court adjourned briefly while it was repaired. Anu Singh left with her escort. She passed her father at the end of his row. They did not look at each other. Everyone else filed out into the carpeted hall. People vanished into the toilets, or drank water at the cooler from tiny waxed-paper cups. A group of whispering law students went into a huddle round their tutor. Sun came flooding through the glass walls of the atrium.

  Outside the building it was a late summer morning, grass-scented, brilliant. Joe Cinque’s father walked to the very edge of the lawn. He was a solitary figure under the high, pure Canberra sky. He dragged fiercely on a cigarette, clenching his jaw and staring across the dark green grass at the traffic.

  The first expert witness called by Anu Singh’s defence was Dr Kenneth Byrne, a clinical and forensic psychologist who practised in Melbourne. He was a New Yorker in his forties with pale hair and eyelashes, tasselled loafers, and a neatly packed little overnight bag that rested against the leg of his chair.

  It was immediately plain that Dr Byrne was in his element: he spoke with the relaxed and smiling assurance of a pro. His thing today was measurement, and in particular something called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. He declared the MMPI the most widely researched psychological test in the world. It was designed to measure pathology. A computer could score it. The person being tested was presented with 556 propositions, to which the possible responses were agree/don’t agree. It was sensitive enough to pick up faking – a subject’s attempt to make herself look healthier, or sicker, than she really was.

  Byrne rode the buffetings of Golding’s cross-examination in a breezy, high-handed style.
Something about him got up my nose. Was it his debonair and stagy demeanour, his habit of addressing the judge man-to-man, his didactic listing and numbering of points as if to a roomful of freshers? Or was it the famous MMPI itself, with its bombastic title and claims to omniscience? In my irritation I was tempted to think of the MMPI as an enjoyably wanky life-style quiz of the sort one fills out to kill time in a doctor’s waiting room. Maliciously I even permitted myself to imagine Anu Singh whiling away several idle hours, smoking cigarettes and doodling in the margins and ticking the little boxes, in her cell.

  The Anu Singh that Dr Byrne described to the court, however, was a disturbed and suicidal young woman, lost in a deluded belief that she would soon die from a degenerative disease. She suffered, he said, from a severe borderline personality disorder, which he dated to her mid-adolescence, and a severe depression, which she had had well before she came into custody. He worked his way down a list of the features that signalled the existence of a borderline personality disorder: of a possible nine, Anu Singh exhibited the high score of six.

  In the lobby at lunchtime I stood about with the two journalists. They giggled and glanced this way and that, comparing notes in whispers on how many of Dr Byrne’s categories and symptoms seemed to apply to them. A problem in establishing a solid sense of Who am I? Definitely. Mood swings? Absolutely. Significant impulsivity? Of course. Fear of abandonment? Totally. Easily angered? I mean, hellooow?

  Our laughter was slightly shrill. No one said it but we were all thinking, Call that mental illness? She’s exactly like me.

  As the break was ending, I came out of a toilet cubicle and saw Joe Cinque’s mother standing with her back to me, combing her hair at the mirror. She moved aside to let me at the basin. We glanced at each other’s reflections and smiled. She was a solid, broad-faced woman of fifty or so, rather handsome, with straight brows, tilted eyes of a striking clear green, and thick hair cut short and tinted fair.

  ‘I see you writing in court,’ she said in a friendly tone. ‘Are you journalist?’

  I blushed. The blunt truth would have been, ‘Right now, in spite of my notebook, I’m still only perving.’ But I said, ‘Sort of. I’m a freelance writer.’

  She nodded, zipped up her capacious bag and stepped past me to the door. She moved carefully, as if some part of her body hurt her. In repose her face held the shape of courtesy, but her brow was frozen, her expression severe: she radiated such iron fatigue and reined-in sorrow that when she stopped smiling, the world around her darkened. Something inside me, something I had forgotten was there, gave a lurch. I did not want her to get away. I leaned after her and touched her sleeve.

  ‘Excuse me, Mrs Cinque. If I wanted to write something about this trial, would you be prepared to speak to me?’

  She turned and examined me with dry attention, up and down. ‘Yes.’

  I told her my name.

  ‘Maria Cinque,’ she said, with a slow, formal nod. Then, limping slightly, she hurried back into the court and took up her position beside her husband in the front row of the gallery.

  When the police searched Madhavi Rao’s house, the day after Joe Cinque died, they found in her bedroom rubbish bin a torn-up diary. The detectives took it away and glued it back together. It was a journal that Anu Singh had kept during her last two years of high school. How it had got into Rao’s wastepaper basket, or when it had been torn to pieces and by whom, did not concern Mr Pappas. He asked Dr Byrne to tell the court what its contents showed about the sort of teenager Anu Singh had been.

  The diary was passed hand to hand along the bar table: a bundle of pasted-together pages in a clear plastic bag. I was aware of holding my breath. The pathos of one’s girlish fancies and romances, the idea that they might one day be laid out before strangers in open court – it was enough to make a woman faint with shame. I glanced at Anu Singh. She sat quite still on her chair, one leg folded over the other, her hands clasped in her lap, her hair bound thickly and firmly on her neck.

  Four words, said Dr Byrne, summed up the preoccupations of the girl who had kept this diary: Will boys like me? If a boy did like her, she was an attractive person. Nothing much else seemed to supply her with that reassurance, and to get it she was prepared to engage in a very risky degree of sexual activity. He listed the developmental stages that a girl in years eleven and twelve should pass through, and the qualities we would expect to see in her. Evidence for any of these qualities, he said, was completely absent from Anu Singh’s diary.

  What was in it, then? Surely, I thought, remembering with a shudder the reams of self-obsessed ravings that had flamed in the backyard bonfires of my life, a diary is the one place where a girl can indulge her unacceptable narcissism with impunity?

  But the diary showed, said Byrne, that he had been right about Singh’s serious and very long-standing depression. On the day she killed Joe Cinque she was mentally ill, even psychotic. Yes, a borderline personality disorder was an ‘abnormality of mind’. Her plan was ‘a homicide/suicide arrangement –’

  Mrs Cinque in the gallery let out a sceptical grunt.

  Dr Byrne did not pause in his flow. On a continuum that ranged from clear and rational at one end to completely psychotic and insane at the other, he said, Anu Singh was well down towards the dark end. She would also have been highly suggestible. Her friends and associates, he said, had either implicitly encouraged her along the fatal pathway, or failed to restrain her from it.

  Her reasoning in the moments before Joe Cinque’s death was ‘bizarre’ and ‘grossly impaired’. Before she rang the ambulance, she had made a hysterical phone call to the young woman who had helped her get the Rohypnol. One minute Singh was screaming to her to come and help; the next she was shouting, ‘It’s too late! There’s black stuff coming out of his nose!’

  Mrs Cinque flinched. Her upper body bowed forward over her folded arms. Her husband sat staring straight ahead.

  On Thursday the court was adjourned till the following Monday. At dusk my flight was called. I stepped out of the terminal for the short walk across the tarmac, and took a gasp of fresh, cool air. Several big, grey-blue arrowheads of cloud lay parallel with the low hills, in whose gathering darkness points of light winked. Later, remembering the beauty of those clouds, I would pick up the significance of ‘arrowheads’. But as I took the few steps between building and plane, grateful after a day spent indoors to be inhaling the perfume of dry grass, I suddenly understood that Anu Singh would be incarcerated. Her life was ruined. Her youth was lost. For whatever reason, she had thrown it all away.

  Back in Sydney, my hilltop flat was just a set of rooms. What little homeliness I had managed to imbue it with before I left for Canberra had already leaked away. I could not get interested in my new couch. The famous view across the valley to Bondi bored me. I found I missed the trial: the daily intensity of the drama as it unfolded, the rituals of leaping to one’s feet and bowing, the silent companionship of the other watchers, the long tracts of intent listening. I could hardly wait for Monday.

  I got to the court early, straight from the plane, so I could watch the lawyers.

  As the power dynamic between students reveals itself in a classroom before the teacher strides in, so does the pecking order at a bar table. Everything social at this table seemed to revolve around Anu Singh’s counsel, Jack Pappas. He was a tough little package of a man with an almost shaven head, a hooked nose, the rosy cheeks of good circulation, and the thick neck of a boxer. You could have drawn a diagram of the lines of attention that centred on him. His voice was the sharpest and most carrying, his enunciation the crispest, his pacing the most leisurely, his gestures the most dramatic. The jokes were his, and others laughed.

  A quieter figure was the young man in a dark suit who often took the seat beside Mrs Cinque, or hovered briefly over her with his hand on her shoulder. Thank God they had another son. He looked an appealing person, even at a distance: thick dark hair well cut, a tanned face, a body free in its movements of
affection and concern. The couple would turn their stiff faces up to him, and nod, or smile. His presence seemed to lighten something in them. In the complex field of the courtroom’s dynamic, he was a site of benevolence and warmth.

  When the lawyers were settled at their table, before the judge entered, Anu Singh materialised in her ankle-length skirt and high sandals. She had a springy, tight-bottomed, almost bouncing walk, and she came in fast and silently. The young security guard who was her escort that day sat down beside her, propped his elbows on his knees and turned to chat with her. She sat in her customary neat posture, but with lowered head. The guard had the look of a country boy. He tilted his face, smiling and grinning at her in a flirting manner. He bent his head and shoulders right down to his knees and peeped up at her sideways, as if to get under her resolute ignoring of him. In any other circumstance you would have said he was coming on to her. She remained quite still, with her back to us and her head bowed. Her father, several rows back in the gallery, watched them with a heavy face.

  The prosecutor, Terry Golding, took on Dr Byrne about the meaning of Anu Singh’s journal. ‘There’s no research text,’ said Dr Byrne, ‘to guide us in reading a diary.’ Maybe not, but any woman there could have made a pretty fair stab at it.