by Helen Garner
Justice Crispin stirred on the bench. ‘They’re profoundly difficult cases to sentence, are they not?’ he said to the barristers in a quiet, almost conversational tone. ‘It’s obviously impossible to put oneself inside the head of someone who is seriously ill psychiatrically – and to make a judgement about what they were thinking, and why, and what measure of responsibility they had for their actions.’
He called for his diary: he would announce Anu Singh’s sentence on Thursday. But it was only Monday. Where would the Cinques go, in the meantime? What would the Singhs do? Would they go back to their devastated homes, and wait it out there?
At half past six that evening I walked across the tarmac in the dark. In a black sky hung half a moon, very high. The air was cold and smelt of wet grass. The fatigue I felt after the long day in court was also a kind of gratitude. I had been granted the inestimable privilege of looking into other people’s lives. What I had found there had absorbed my intellectual and emotional attention for many hours. Unlike the Cinques, unlike the Singhs, I could walk away.
As the small plane blundered along the runway and into the air, I suddenly remembered Facing the Demons, an Australian documentary I had seen on TV about restorative justice, the movement that sets up conferences between the perpetrators of crimes and their victims, or the families of their victims. The person I recalled most vividly from that hour of excruciating realness was a relatively minor figure, the mother of a young crim who had taken part in an armed robbery at a fast food outlet, in the course of which his mate had shot dead an innocent boy working behind the counter.
The mother, probably about fifty, had struck me as one of those mild women who are defeated by their sons’ destructive wildness. She had the demeanour of a church-goer, a dutiful, kindly neighbour: timid, thin, with short grey hair and big pale-rimmed glasses. She took her place in the ring of chairs and sat in a neat posture with her shoulders cramped. Her cheeks burned with an uneven flush. Her whole body was trembling.
The conference began. The murdered boy’s parents poured out at last their pent-up rage. His killer’s accomplices (the killer himself having declined to take part in the documentary) choked out maimed gobbets of speech or sat in shamed and brutish silence with their forearms across their thighs.
This mother waited for a pause, then began to speak. She stammered. She whispered. She tried to say that she felt herself partly to blame for her son’s character, for the terrible thing he had done, or helped to do, or allowed to be done. But the dead boy’s parents jumped on her. They came down on her like a ton of bricks. ‘It’s not your fault, Mrs X. He made his own choices. It’s not your fault.’ The woman subsided, unconvinced, unshriven, her entire face in spasm. Her son, a hulking, tattooed, low-browed boy in prison greens, sat silent beside her, holding her hand, his eyes fixed on the floor.
On the Thursday morning I took an early flight to Canberra. A man detached himself from the line of long black coats in the taxi queue outside the airport, and approached me.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I have the advantage of you – but would I be right in thinking I used to know you at Ocean Grove State School?’
Ocean Grove? I went to that school in the late 1940s. ‘You might. What’s your name?’
He said it. It was an unusual one, and at the sound of it I saw in a flash of shock a scene from my childhood: an angry man gripping a boy in short pants by the scruff of the neck, pressing his head down over an ugly grey cement basin where water streamed, and filling his mouth with foam.
‘I remember you! You had your mouth washed out with soap for swearing!’
He stood there in his good dark coat, holding his briefcase, and the smile faded from his lips. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘That never happened to me.’
‘But I saw it! I’ve told the story about a hundred times! I’ve dined out on it! I’ve never forgotten it!’
He kept shaking his head, looking at me in a puzzled way. ‘No, it wasn’t me. How could I have forgotten something like that?’
‘But I was there! In my double desk! The classroom door was open and we were all watching! It was awful! I remember you vividly! You were really clever! You had a brother! You were British migrants!’
‘Yes, I did, and we were. But I never had my mouth washed out with soap. No. Never.’
People in the taxi queue were listening and smiling. I gave up on it and stood impotently staring at him. We both began to laugh.
‘I married a girl who was in your class in Geelong,’ he said. ‘We’re about to move to Oxford. I’m going to take up a chair.’
We parted with expressions of good will; but his flat denial of the mouth-washing incident troubled me, and it still does. Nothing he said could expunge the scene from my memory, or even dim it: it shines as shockingly bright today as it ever did. If memory is not to be trusted, what can courts rely on? How can they establish what ‘really happened’? How can things from the past, even the relatively recent past, be proved?
The television crews were already loitering on the steps of the Supreme Court. Inside, Joe Cinque’s parents in their front row seats were surrounded by an intense group of police and Victim Liaison workers; but they seemed terribly vulnerable and alone. Of their son Anthony there was no sign. In the back row of the gently raked gallery, Anu Singh’s father wiped his eyes and nose on a big clean hanky. His wife sat very still, dark-faced, thick-haired, severe, her cheek twitching faintly.
The court was packed. There was a hum of subdued excitement. People bent to each other’s ears, hissing and whispering. Where had they been during the trial itself, its long arguments, its hours of tedium, its occasional flurries of drama? Why do people want only to be in at the kill?
Suddenly Anu Singh materialised between two women guards, one of them gripping her by the arm. Under her charcoal jacket she was wearing a striped cotton T-shirt, like the one she had on in the photo of her and Joe in the Cinques’ kitchen, that the papers ran and ran. She sat neatly on her chair and bowed her head.
At ten-fifteen a silence fell. It was like the moment before a funeral starts. I looked down at the Cinques. Mrs Cinque was crying quietly, wiping her eyes with a hanky, blowing her nose.
The tipstaff banged on the floor. We sprang to our feet and in stepped Justice Crispin to the bench, pausing only to make his sombre bow. He began to read aloud.
‘A profoundly tragic case . . . Ms Singh’s mental condition began to deteriorate . . . a bizarre and dark plan to kill herself, extending to killing Joe Cinque . . . a decent young man so full of promise . . . caused almost incomprehensible pain to those left behind . . . her parents blameless . . . tried to have her committed against her will . . . a tragedy for Anu Singh herself . . . lost her mental health . . . her plans for the future . . . sentencing unusually difficult . . . impossible to see clearly into the mind of the mentally ill and assess moral culpability . . . uncertainty about how long to serve . . . seriously ill psychologically . . . further psychiatric treatment in prison . . .’
Then, while the other fifty of us held our collective breath, he leaned forward across the bench and looked at Anu Singh, a few metres away on her metal-legged chair between the guards. She raised her chin and he spoke straight at her.
‘In the next few years,’ he said, ‘you will have to come to terms with the fact that you killed the man you loved. You have caused immense pain.’
The young woman wiped her eyes, but she kept her face up and continued to return his gaze, like a schoolgirl being hauled over the coals.
‘If you find the moral courage,’ he said, ‘you may be able to rebuild from this wreckage, to repay the trust people have put in you.’
Trust? Who had put trust in her?
The judge, for one. ‘Ten years,’ he said. Ten years with a non-parole period of four years. Back-dated to 26 October 1997, the day Joe Cinque died. I did the sum in the margin. She could be out by 26 October 2001. Two and a bit years from now.
The court let out its breath, a
nd drew another.
‘I recommend she be considered a prisoner at risk. I publish my reasons.’
Pappas was on his feet. ‘May it please your Honour.’
‘The prisoner may be removed. We will now adjourn.’
The judge bowed and swept out. The wiry little blonde sheriff got down on all fours to yank open the trapdoor. Anu Singh descended once more into the hole. Once more Maria Cinque’s voice, solitary, thin at first, then gathering a hoarse strength, rose in the hushed court and spewed out curses. People stopped in their tracks and turned towards her. Transfixed by dread and by a strange, breathless need, we listened once more to her jeremiad: ‘You demon. Rot in hell forever. I’ll never ever forgive you. She’s a demon. My son – that’s all? Four years? How can you sleep at night? Four years? Is that all my son is worth?’
D-C Hains pushed through the frozen crowd in the aisle and stepped into the well of the court. He walked briskly along in front of the gallery railing, stopped before Mrs Cinque, seized the weeping, cursing woman by her upper arms, and gently kissed her cheek. The Victim Liaison people gathered around the Cinques and led them away, up the stairs of the courtroom and out into the lobby, along the carpeted hall past staring strangers, towards a place of shelter within the building. The supporters moved in a cluster, tightly jammed, like soldiers carrying two wounded comrades off the field; and the hot core of the group was Maria Cinque, stiff with anguish, staggering with her head back, wailing, weeping beyond shame. D-C Hains followed ten paces behind the stumbling group. Her sobbing cries streamed back to him. His face was closed.
Beside me in the lobby, watching this, stood a young TV reporter in a dark suit. Her smooth fall of blonde hair turned under perfectly at her shoulders. Her face was masked with makeup. She glanced at me.
‘Four years,’ she said.
‘She could be out in two and a bit.’
‘Before she even hits thirty,’ said the girl. ‘I’m nearly thirty. My whole life’s still in front of me.’
‘Still,’ I said. ‘She’ll have to live with what she did. They all will.’
The journalist said nothing. She was not convinced, and neither was I. We turned and walked out the big glass doors to the steps where the media crews were waiting in the bright, cold air, keeping themselves amused while the Cinques and the Singhs, in retiring rooms at opposite ends of the building, tried to compose themselves for the onslaught.
The doors opened and the press stirred, but it wasn’t the Cinques. A bearded man in his thirties with a hard face, square and mean, and a thin, ratty little plait hanging down the nape of his neck, emerged into the light. Beside him walked a broad woman who was obviously his mother. A car with a panel-beater’s logo stuck to the rear window screeched in to the kerb on the road behind the media. The pig-tailed man leapt with youthful vigour down the steps and across the footpath, yanked open the door and dropped sideways into the passenger seat. He lounged there, defiantly at ease, with one leg stretched out over the gutter. His mother, left like a shag on a rock at the top of the steps, saved her dignity by catching my eye and calling out, ‘Must be somebody important they’re all waiting for!’
‘What are you here for?’ I asked.
‘My son,’ she said. ‘That’s him, in the car. She says he come to her place and bashed her. Hit her in the mouth. But he wasn’t anywhere near the place!’ She smiled as she spoke, with an odd mixture of resignation and hollow bravado. ‘I’ve come up here to give him some support. You don’t like some of the things they get up to, when they’re grown – but you gotta back ’em, when they’re in trouble! The jury’s out. We’re just waiting.’
She fell silent. Together we watched her son blowing smoke out the open car door, sprawled there cursing and laughing coarsely with his invisible friend the driver. What sorrow or fear did her good-natured stoicism hide? Or did she really believe in this sleek, muscular thug with his nasty little pigtail?
‘Here they come!’ called the young woman from the ABC.
Maria and Nino Cinque stepped out on to the broad stage of the top step. A tide of cameras, microphones and shouted questions surged to meet them. The couple, squinting in the light, stood still for a moment, then Mrs Cinque began to speak.
‘For me,’ she said, ‘the sentence should be Hang on that tree over there. I know it’s not possible, but – for me, thirty years. When she come out, she’s sixty. That’s not possible, but it’s fair.’
Usually in public her husband stood quiet and let her do the talking. But one of the reporters shouted at him the hackneyed question: ‘Mr Cinque. How are you feeling?’
Nino Cinque stepped forward. ‘She write letter,’ he said, his voice trembling. ‘She say’ (he mimicked a falsetto tone) ‘ “I love him.” If she do good thing, why she don’t go to the other world and find him?’
The journalists closed in on him. His fragility was unbearable. I turned and ran away down the steps.
At the bottom I met D-C Hains, just hanging about. ‘What do you reckon, Haitch?’ he said, with his dry grin. ‘My wife was cryin’. She’s a police officer. She got upset because Maria got upset. Still . . . she got more than I expected.’
‘She could be out in two and a half years?’
‘Don’t be so sure!’ he said. ‘The parole board has to take her psychological condition into account – her own shrink said she needed seven years.’ And off he went with a wink and a wave, in his AFP jacket and tie-clip.
I set out for my hotel, but almost at once I spotted the Cinques across the stretch of unnaturally green grass that separated the Supreme Court from the Magistrates’. They had gone from the ordeal on the steps to sit out in the wintry air, on the terrace of the court cafe. I approached their table and stood at a respectful distance. When they noticed me they smiled and offered their hands. I leaned over and we exchanged formal pairs of kisses.
I was awe-struck by Maria Cinque’s composure. Nino Cinque maintained his place, with few words and a sweet expression, alongside the huge, elemental drama of his wife’s persona; but such power dwelt in her that others shrivelled in her presence, became wispy, insubstantial. She never grand-standed or behaved falsely; yet as their suffering and outrage intensified, there rose from the depths of her a tremendous, unassailable archetype: the mother. We recognised it. It answered to a need in us as well. Her outburst after the sentence was not a rupture of protocol. On the contrary, we had waited for her to speak, holding open a space for her to utter. It was an honoured and necessary stage of a ritual: a pietà. We listened in respect, almost in gratitude. We needed to hear the sufferer cry out against her fate, although we knew that for this pain and loss there could be no remedy.
That night I sat by myself in the empty hotel bar. The weight of the trial hung round me; I couldn’t shrug it off. Justice Crispin had said it was impossible to see into Anu Singh’s mind, to determine her moral culpability. But didn’t the fascination, the terror of her story lie in the fact that she embodied a barbaric force in each of us that we must at all costs control? I thought of her arriving at Silverwater in the dark, being bundled out of a horrible van. I tried to imagine her parents, how they must be suffering now at the thought of their only daughter in that place teeming with harsh, wild people who would corrupt her. Eighteen months in a provincial remand prison was one thing, but now she was being delivered to the very centre of punishment in this country to which her family had migrated, where they had thrown in their lot.
But she had killed someone. Perhaps she was already as corrupted as the worst of them. What is corruption? Is corruption ‘sin’? What is sin? Is it the inability to imagine the suffering of others? Surely she belonged in prison. Surely, now, she would pay for what she had done.
At last someone had cut through the euphemisms, the circumlocutions, and had stated it bluntly, in front of everyone, right to her face: ‘You killed the man you loved.’
PART FIVE
I still had no idea how Madhavi Rao fitted into this story. I did n
ot understand exactly what she was supposed to have done, or how it was that she had been charged with murder. She would not be tried for months yet. I would have to go back to Canberra and read the transcript of the aborted double trial. But before I could organise it, I received a phone call, late one winter afternoon, from a funny and friendly young doctor I had met the year before at a consulate party. At the time he had made me laugh with his rueful caricatures of the problems encountered by children, like himself, of Indian immigrants. ‘There are two acceptable things you can do,’ he said. ‘You can either be a doctor, or you can open a restaurant.’
Now, however, he was in a serious mood. ‘I hear you’re writing a book about a murder,’ he began.
‘I might be.’
His voice dropped a few tones. ‘They’re family friends.’
‘Who – the Singhs?’
‘No. Rao.’
I didn’t need to ask a single question: he threw himself into it with feeling. He had known ‘Madhu’, he said, since they were small children. He was fond of her. He said several times that he could not imagine her doing any such thing. (What, though? What was she supposed to have done?)
‘They put more blame on her than she deserves,’ he declared. ‘Madhu was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was with the wrong people. She won’t be able to practise as a lawyer with this charge against her. She’ll have to leave the country – change her name.’
He sketched out her family situation. The Raos came from Hyderabad. Madhavi was an only child till the birth of a much younger sibling, who was disabled. The family hopes then focused on Madhavi. There was a lot of pressure on her. She was a very good tennis player – second in the state. Her HSC score, in the upper nineties, was not quite high enough to get her into medicine, so she repeated the year, but got a similar score, and enrolled in law. Her mother was a doctor, her father a teacher: he in particular was held in affectionate regard by the Indian community. They had both retired, but had to go back to work to pay for Madhavi’s defence.
