Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  A stunned, thick silence filled the court. What? What did he say? How can she be guilty of murder and yet not guilty of murder?

  Mr Pappas leapt to his feet. ‘Your Honour,’ he said. ‘I believe your Honour has made an error. You said “Guilty of murder”, but with respect, your Honour, you meant “Guilty of manslaughter”.’

  Three beats. No one breathed. The judge had made a colossal, clanging Freudian slip.

  Crispin raised his head. His face was blank with shock. With a lawyer’s reflex he muttered, ‘I withdraw that.’ He pulled the document to him and read out the judgement again, correcting himself emphatically: ‘I find the defendant not guilty of murder, but I find the defendant guilty of manslaughter.’

  The dead man’s mother burst into wild sobs. D-C Hains, who was sitting right behind her, laid his flat palm against her back and held it there.

  Justice Crispin set the date for the sentencing hearing: 21 June. More psychiatric evidence, he said, would be presented on that day.

  Mrs Cinque covered her face and wept aloud.

  ‘The judgement,’ said Justice Crispin, ‘is fifty pages long. You’ll need time to read it.’

  He got to his feet and so did we. He bowed; we bowed. He strode out.

  Mr Pappas turned from the bar table to where Anu Singh was sitting between her guards. This time there were no handshakes. A cluster of men in dark suits and black robes closed round the young woman. I glanced down to scribble in my notebook. When I looked up, Anu Singh’s metal-framed chair and those of her escorts were being brusquely moved aside. Two uniformed sheriffs bent over the piece of floor on which the chairs had previously stood, where the little handles were recessed into the carpet. The two men inserted their forefingers into the metal loops, gripped them, and lifted. I saw what they were for: a whole section of the floor reared up on hinges, revealing, at an acute angle, the bare timber planks of a staircase. The two guards guided Anu Singh towards the trapdoor. She stepped into the hole. Down she went, with her head bowed. The last thing to disappear was her hair, bound in its thick club.

  Mrs Cinque stood in the front row of the public gallery, barely an arm’s reach from the hole in the floor. In a hoarse, wild voice she cried out; she cursed the descending girl. ‘This is where you belong. You stay. For ever. Rot in hell, you bitch. Devil.’ The girl was already too deep to be seen. The floor closed over her and became once more a rectangle of carpet.

  People pressed into the aisles and up the shallow stairs to the doors. A sheriff was handing out copies of the judgement. I grabbed one and pushed out into the lobby. The crowd was moving sluggishly away and out towards the open air. I staggered to a chair against the wall. The Singhs – father, mother and a teenage brother I had not seen before – moved past me slow and swimmingly, like figures in a dream. The boy looked devastated and puffy-eyed. The mother, shell-shocked, somehow maintained her dignity, eyes down, dark-faced, inward. Dr Singh caught my eye and made a formal nod to me, almost a bow.

  One of the young reporters hurried past me: ‘I’m gonna go file.’

  Out on the broad front steps of the Supreme Court, in blinding dry sun and chill air, the TV and radio journalists swarmed in a tight gang: the older cameramen in jeans and boots, silently lugging the heavy gear on their shoulders; the jabbering young journos in their power suits and gelled hair and make-up, yelling to each other, tossing their harsh jests back and forth.

  ‘So!’ said a sleek girl of twenty, with a shrill, cynical laugh. ‘He bought her story!’

  ‘Manslaughter still gets twenty years, though,’ murmured a less glamorous young woman, pressing her notebook to her chest. ‘She could be in for quite a while.’

  Twenty years! Stunned, I got the sum wrong: I thought, She’ll be my age by the time she gets out. Filled with an obscure shame, I slunk around behind the jostling mob and lurked on the lower steps, pretending to be only a passer-by. I tried to stay near the camera crews; I was comforted by their closed mouths, their stoical detachment. A sheriff came out through the revolving glass door and announced that the Cinques had been taken out of the building by a back door. There was no one to wait for now but the Singh family. I couldn’t take any more of this. I turned away, gripping Justice Crispin’s judgement under my arm, and jogged across the plaza to a line of saplings in large pots. With my back to the court I crouched against the cold concrete rim of a planter box and howled into my hanky. I didn’t even know who I was crying for.

  By the time I had pulled myself together and crept out from behind the potted hedge, the journalists had dispersed. I climbed the deserted steps and cut through the Supreme Court lobby. Already the entry to ‘our’ courtroom was teeming with a fresh cast of characters: the same weird horse-hair wigs and scholarly gowns, but inside them different barristers, ready to prosecute and defend different people, to conjure up a whole new variation on the eternal themes.

  How soon even a frightful event like Joe Cinque’s murder is swept away into the past! Something in me rose up, indignant for him. What – not even a decent, respectful pause? No breathing space? On, on rushes time, without hesitation, without mercy.

  And yet the matter still hung unresolved: two months must pass before his killer would be sentenced, and the trial of Madhavi Rao, the second accused, was not even slated.

  PART THREE

  As soon as I got home to Sydney I caught one of those convenient stinking colds that hit freelance workers at times when they need to think rather than write. I crawled into bed with the judgement, a hot-water bottle and a stack of clean hankies, and stayed there for a week. Nobody came near me. I slept at odd hours of the day and night. Whenever I woke, I picked up the fifty-four-page document and tackled it again.

  A jury, I realised, is not required to give reasons for its verdict, but a judge must account for his. I racked my brains, trying in vain to get a handle on the bizarre tale it told. It wasn’t only the cold that made my concentration lurch about and fail to grip: it was the events themselves, flickering and sliding away from my intelligence. Every time I thought I had finally got the hang of their sequence, I would come across a detail that blew my understanding of the thing sky-high. The hardest thing was to believe that people like these were capable of such acts.

  And it began to dawn on me that though Joe Cinque died at lunchtime on a Sunday, it took practically the whole weekend to kill him.

  I called Dr Singh. Yes, he remembered me. I reminded him of our conversation about a possible interview. He became wary.

  ‘What would be the meaning of your story? Every story has a meaning.’

  I gave a bumbling reply: I didn’t know yet; I was still trying to understand what had actually happened, let alone what it meant. There was a brief silence as he absorbed this. Then, in his slurring, rapid, husky voice, hitting the odd high note for emphasis, he began to speak.

  ‘Because Helen, in Anu’s case there was no vendetta. I tell it to you in a nutshell. Joe was going to become my son-in-law. They were going to get married. There was no vendetta against Joe. It was all due to her psychotic delusions. This is a girl who went to many, many doctors but none of them could diagnose her! We knew. We rang bloody Mental Health! My wife knew! She said, “My daughter is moving towards psychosis! This state can become suicidal! Homicidal!” But in this country I can’t – I can’t schedule her. I can’t schedule her. You know what schedule is? You know what it is?’

  ‘Commit.’

  ‘Yes! I can’t schedule her!’

  Like a gospel preacher setting up call-and-response, he spoke in staccato stabs, establishing a strong rhetorical beat and leaving a pause after each sentence for my endorsement. Spontaneously I picked up his rhythm and began to utter brief sounds at appropriate moments.

  ‘That judge,’ he said. ‘He knows about psychiatry! He was judge for the Chelmsford Deep Sleep Therapy case! I bet that man has studied a lot! I bet he’s gone through . . . When this case is over, I may write something myself. I may write a book! Maybe a
little movie! So people can know! What can happen! She was a happy-go-lucky girl! Beautiful girl! Beautifully dressed! Who went to clubs!’

  A book? A little movie? Went to clubs? Mesmerised by his way of speaking, I sat there at the high window with the phone to my ear, looking out at the rain, the trees losing their leaves, the tall mist coming in from Bondi to blot out the coast and fill the valley. Dr Singh talked on and on in urgent bursts, as if leaning over me, haranguing me, and all the while, in a sort of half-stunned dream, I kept up my end, playing my supporting role: Huh, mmm, huh: wordless sounds that meant no more than You’re speaking, I’m listening.

  He paused for breath and I woke from my trance.

  ‘Perhaps I should send you one of my books?’

  He told me his address and made me promise not to give it to anyone. As soon as we had hung up, I crawled along the bottom bookshelf and hunted out copies of The First Stone and True Stories. While I was wrapping them for the post I thought that I should send them to Mr and Mrs Cinque as well: I had to do the same for both sides, and to make it clear to each family that I was speaking to the other. Everything was starting to get complicated. I took two more copies off the shelf and made a second parcel.

  The next day, having to push against a powerful resistance, I called the Newcastle number Mrs Cinque had given me. Her husband answered. I introduced myself and mentioned the trial. A silence fell. I asked to speak to his wife. There was a rapid murmuring of Italian in the background, then Mrs Cinque, very cautious, came to the phone. I told her my name and reminded her of our meeting in the Supreme Court toilets. Her voice lightened a little.

  ‘I remember you now. I see you talking to her father. You know how I feel about him.’

  I suppressed an urge to apologise. She paused, then drew a quivering breath, and out of her poured the first gushes of a cataract of pain.

  ‘We are devastated. We are in a mess. We spent thousands and thousand of dollars travelling up and down for what I rudely call this bullshit in the courts. We had to have a motel room in Canberra for thirteen weeks. We’re nearly broke. If it was me I’d hang her right outside the court. But you can’t do that, because we live in a country where – where justice –’ Her voice flagged, then rallied. ‘We trust the courts to do it – and she gets manslaughter. Manslaughter! Manslaughter’s when you drive in the street and have an accident. We’re so angry with justice – you got no idea.

  ‘The morning after the judgement, my son is on the front page of the paper here in Newcastle. They say he use drugs. But he no use drugs! He’s civil engineer, he has successful career, he has nothing to do with drugs.

  ‘I’ve always got fresh memory – like it happened yesterday. This law student who sold her the drugs – who teach her how to inject – he got his name suppressed. He sold her the drugs! While my son was dying he sold her more drugs, and my son dies. All these law students, eight, nine – they know what she’s doing – for three days they do nothing! And now they’re all working as lawyers and my son is dead.

  ‘If you know my son, what sort of man he was! He was not an angel. He had his faults, like everybody. But he appreciate very much what we did for him – Catholic school, university – we pay. He was naïve, that’s all. He didn’t believe she was going to do it. He must have thought she was just gonna try and get him on drugs, that’s all. But she was the devil. My friend was talking about the devil and I said to her, “Don’t take the devil lightly. The devil’s not ugly. The devil’s not ugly.”

  ‘She deprive me of everything. He had no children. I will never be grandmother of his children now.’ She began to weep. ‘He loved children so much. Now people will forget him. They go on, they have their children, they forget him. I will fight till my dying day,’ she said, but the threat was so vague, and her voice so weakened by tears, that it was no more than a tiny fist being brandished, a very long way away.

  With the hanky in my hand, I waited. She composed herself. ‘If you write a book,’ she said, ‘can it make trouble for us?’

  ‘I can’t promise to write the book you want, Mrs Cinque,’ I said. ‘I’d have to listen to both sides. I would never want to do anything that made you suffer more – but I can’t promise not to – because whatever anyone writes will hurt you.’

  She heard me without protest. This is a woman, I thought, who has learnt to ask very little of life.

  ‘We pay his way through uni,’ she said, ‘but if you do this book – if there is profit – I want maybe a scholarship? To help somebody? I want people to remember him. Something in his name. So – you think – ?’

  Her awkward suggestion wrung my heart.

  I called Dr Singh at his clinic.

  ‘You understand, Helen,’ he said in his rapid, slurring accent, ‘that nothing has yet been resolved. You understand that until after the sentencing we can’t say anything. But if you wanted to write a book about her, I would be prepared to help pay for the publication of it.’

  ‘Oh, that wouldn’t be necessary, Dr Singh,’ I said, trying to conceal the sting to my pride. ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t have any trouble getting it published.’

  A book about her. A book about my son.

  That afternoon, as I was rubbing out my underlinings in Justice Crispin’s judgement so as to photocopy clean pages for Mrs Cinque who, incredibly, had not been given or sent a copy, my eye fell on a passage Crispin had quoted from a 1996 decision in NSW, R v Gieselmann:

  Whilst the behaviour of the accused could legitimately be taken into account in determining whether she had been suffering from an abnormality of mind, abnormal or outrageous acts could be seen as the result of other things such as stupidity or simple wickedness.

  I sat and stared at the words. What is ‘simple wickedness’? Does such a thing exist? Was there ever such a thing, or did it die with the arrival of psychiatry?

  On 3 June 1999 I hired a car in Kings Cross and drove up the F3 to Newcastle, where the Cinques lived in the southern suburb of Charlestown. Their house stood at the top of a hill, on a wide, rather bare street. It was a two-storey red brick building with Italian-style arches, a balcony, and a facade that included the roller-doors of a double garage. Outside its front door, on well-trimmed buffalo grass, grew a thick, pointed, dark-foliaged cypress tree.

  I rang the bell. A woman’s voice called out, ‘Hullo?’ I stepped back and saw Mrs Cinque leaning over the balustrade above my head. She was smiling.

  At the door she shook my hand and invited me in. The raging figure of the courtroom was transformed, on her home ground, into a welcoming housewife pleasantly clad in dark jumper, pants and flat shoes. The front hall was dim, with a terrazzo floor, a mirrored coat-stand, and a staircase elbowing away to the upper storey. Mrs Cinque led me into a living room whose brick walls were hung with family photos and trophies. Here she stopped and faced me, and got straight to the point.

  ‘I got two videos of Joe,’ she said. ‘You want to see ’em? I’ll make some coffee.’

  She settled me on a velvet-covered sofa and withdrew through an archway to the kitchen. While I waited for her, I couldn’t help looking at a large hand-tinted photo that hung in a frame near the window. It must have been taken around 1970: a head-and-shoulders portrait of Maria and Nino Cinque on their wedding day. They were young, their features were soft, they were smiling. At first glance I saw it as a record of simple, formal happiness; but as I gazed at it, it seemed to me that the face of the bride, a pretty woman with long hair parted in the middle and drawn back under a lace veil, was so bright with energy that she seemed to be leaning forward in the frame, ready to leap out into the world of her future. Now I am a wife! said her eager expression. I will be a mother!

  Mrs Cinque soon returned, carrying on a tray two tiny cups of espresso. The VCR was loaded and primed to go. She handed me my coffee, sat down and aimed the remote. The first video was in blurry black-and-white. It showed a rock & roll band crammed on to a proscenium stage in what looked like a school hall.

&
nbsp; ‘That’s him,’ said Mrs Cinque. ‘The singer.’

  A thin, shy, cheerful-looking teenager with unruly hair capered about, gripping a microphone in one hand and keeping the other wedged in his jacket pocket. His shoulders were stiff, his movements awkward and constrained. The hapless band battered away merrily behind him, giving ‘Twist and Shout’ a thrashing, and he yelled the tune with neither rhythm nor melody.

  ‘His voice is terrible,’ said his mother with an agonised laugh. ‘He was eighteen. He didn’t want me to see this video for years, he was so embarrassed.’

  The film cut out suddenly, and she loaded the other. This one, in colour and much more competently shot, showed a big Italian wedding reception in a hall decked with balloons, flags and streamers.

  ‘Look,’ said Mrs Cinque. ‘Joe’s the MC.’

  Again he was holding a microphone, but the scrawny, jigging youth of the first video had grown into a young man with the authority and the presence to run a large formal event. The messy schoolboy hair was cut now in a manly style, and severely, so that the hard lines of his well-shaped skull were visible.

  While the video rolled, Mrs Cinque kept up a low murmur that required no response from me. Her tone kept changing, according to what was happening on the screen: she shifted from simple information to fond pride, from deeply possessive maternal devotion out into irony and savage bitterness, then back again to a gentle, sorrowing regret.

  ‘That’s the tie I put on him . . . She was invited to the wedding but she wouldn’t go . . . Joe was so good with people. He couldn’t stand smart-arses . . . Joe wouldn’t buy take-away. I had to make his lunch. I used to peel his orange, cut it in four, then put the peel back on. And a man at his work say to him, I can see that’s a mother who did this lunch – a wife wouldn’t do that . . . He had beautiful hands, see? Loooooong fingers . . . but he always bite his nails. He always looked young . . . He could never stay still. I always tell him, Calm down. Stop. Stay still. He start to do architecture but he didn’t want to stay inside – so he change to engineering. His sketches, I don’t know how he did them because he couldn’t sit still. When I saw him in his coffin – then he was still . . . I wonder if Crispin got a son like that . . . That scumbag, to make this decision. How can we accept this verdict?’