by Helen Garner
But there was one thing he was very firm about. In August 1997, when Singh had told him she wanted to get a gun or some heroin, in order to commit suicide and to kill Joe Cinque because of the ipecac business, he had taken the view that this was ludicrous, that Anu would not kill either herself or Joe. Having made this clear, Len Mancini was dismissed, and departed, his curly lips widening in a smile of relief.
What was Mr Lasry doing? He hadn’t a histrionic bone in his body. He seemed to be labouring to haul up into the light, from the dim recesses of witnesses’ minds, every available skerrick of behaviour or thread of speech on Rao’s part that might conceivably be construed, in retrospect, as action – but his presentation so far was lacklustre, turgid, without pace or rhythm. Or was his unaggressive performance merely echoing the personality of his client, the young woman herself?
Where was she, in the tale?
Sitting there in court she was real enough: she had shape, she had colour, she took up space. But in the last days of Joe Cinque’s life she remained a phantom. One’s imagination strained to picture her, as the story circled back and round and back again towards the unbearable moment of Joe Cinque’s death. It was wearying, it was exhausting – and yet somehow, appalled and incredulous, one went on swallowing it down.
Joe Cinque’s parents sat shoulder to shoulder in the front row, macerating in their grief and rage, firing shafts of dull, violent hatred at Madhavi Rao where she sat side on to them, almost within arms’ reach, exposed to their gaze.
When the court rose for lunch I wanted to go outside, lie down on the grass under a tree and fall asleep. But I bought a sandwich in a bag and sat at a table on the terrace of the court cafe. It was a dry day, bright, with a fresh breeze. At the next table a bunch of law students who had been listening to Rao’s trial sat eating and loudly chattering.
‘They were just entertaining themselves with these nutters,’ opined one young woman in a colourful T-shirt. ‘Then suddenly the police are involved. They never realised it would go that far.’
‘I reckon I could drug my husband,’ said another, earnestly, ‘and then explain it away, and he’d believe me. ’Cause that’s why you’re with them. ’Cause you trust them, and they trust you.’
‘If you call the ambulance, you don’t go home, do you? You wait with your friend?’
‘If you’d killed someone, what would you do? First thing I’d do is, I’d go straight to the cops.’
‘I tell you what – in a thing like this, heroin’s the least of your worries.’
I threw my paper bag in a bin and went for a walk through Civic. Garema Place, the very centre of the city, swarmed as usual with junkies – gap-toothed, lank-haired, tattooed, with bruises and scabby lips. Many of them wheeled babies or toddlers in pushers. They didn’t bother to cover their scarred, wounded elbow crooks, but slunk or barged about blatantly. The city’s heart belonged to them now, their ‘chasing’, their buying and selling and using. Some civic hope had been abandoned. It was a plague that raged unchecked.
I had pictured Bronwyn Cammack, from my reading of the transcripts, as a wiry little toughie with spiky black hair and a snaky manner; but when her name was called, the person who responded was a slim, matte-skinned, languid young woman in a tight white shirt and grey trousers. Her lank brown hair was cut in an exaggerated bob, very short behind, then dropping steeply at the sides to skim her jaw-line, and held back off her face by a thin band. Her lower lip was pierced by a silver stud. She had a face out of a Vermeer, well-shaped and regular, like a large smooth river stone; if it had been animated it would have been striking, but it remained, throughout her entire appearance in court, almost completely without expression except when, very occasionally, she pressed her lips together in a line. As Madhavi Rao’s manner could, according to one’s attitude towards her, have been described as either ‘reserved’ or ‘affectless’, so might Cammack’s demeanour have been called either ‘relaxed’ or ‘limp’. She took her seat on the stand and at once twisted one leg over the other, laid her forearms on the bench in front of her, and twined her fingers together. Something about her was doughy. Her life spark was turned down to pilot. Time after time counsel and judge had to ask her to speak up. Her voice was feeble, as if she couldn’t be bothered projecting it: as if nothing happening here was worth expending energy on. She was not stupid. She was not angry. She was not resentful. But what was she? She was ‘unemployed at the moment’. She had been an addict, yes, but her most recent use of heroin was six weeks ago. No, she was not on methadone. She just stopped. Was she hanging out? No – she had been, for five or six days after stopping, but she wasn’t hanging out now.
As her version of the tale unrolled – she volunteered little: in her profound passivity she had to be led, led, led, all the way – her mother was mentioned several times. It appeared that Bronwyn Cammack could call home from Civic and her mother would come into town in the car and pick her up, take her to where she wanted to go, come back and collect her afterwards, give her friend a lift to wherever she was going, and then drive Bronwyn herself home. Her family had not given up on her, then. Perhaps they even danced attendance on her, the stone-faced girl who carried, buried deep inside her, more of a practical moral sense than did many another in this story. Suicide she may have casually countenanced and even been ready to abet, but when it came to murder, when the chips were down she got angry, she gave tough advice, she took it right up to Anu Singh, she drew a line – too late.
Cammack was a distant acquaintance of Madhavi Rao’s. In early 1997, when Cammack was a regular user of heroin, the two young women would run into each other every now and then around town or in Civic. In August 1997 Cammack saw Rao sitting on a seat in Garema Place with a girl whom she introduced as Anu. Without preamble Singh began to talk about wanting to get hold of a gun. When Cammack pointed out a dodgy character she knew who chanced to be walking by, Singh buttonholed him and asked him on the spot whether he could get her a weapon. No transaction was concluded, and Singh offered to drive Cammack home. On the way she spun out the ipecac scenario, and explained that she wanted a gun to kill herself with. Cammack remarked that if she wanted to kill herself she wouldn’t use a gun. She would overdose on heroin.
Some time later Anu Singh got hold of Cammack’s phone number from Madhavi Rao, and called to ask her where one could buy heroin and how much it cost. It was readily available at Civic, said Cammack – you could ‘just get it off someone in Garema Place’. She explained the forms and quantities in which it was usually bought.
On Tuesday 21 October 1997 (the day after the first dinner party), Madhavi Rao phoned Cammack and put Anu Singh on the line. This time Anu wanted to know how to get hold of some Rohypnol. Cammack told her you could buy that in Civic too, but if she herself wanted it she would get a prescription from a doctor by saying she was ‘having difficulty overcoming her addiction to heroin’. Anu said she didn’t think she could deal with a doctor. She asked if Cammack would do it for her in exchange for some heroin. Cammack agreed to this, and made an appointment with a GP in the suburb of Farrer.
The following morning, Wednesday 22 October, Anu Singh picked Cammack up from her house to drive her to the doctor’s. On the way they pulled over and Singh showed Cammack a little box with two syringes in it, each one containing a half-weight of heroin. Cammack extracted from one of the syringes the equivalent of a $50 deal and hit it up, right there in the car. Off they drove to Farrer.
The GP responded to what the Crown politely called Cammack’s ‘fib’ by writing her a script for fifteen Rohypnol. Cammack didn’t have the money on her to complete the process, but she said Anu wouldn’t have any trouble at a pharmacy. Cammack’s Health Care Benefits card was about to expire; she gave it to Singh so she could get the script filled more cheaply. While Singh was driving Cammack to her bus, she explained that she wanted to use the Rohypnol to ‘knock her boyfriend out while she committed suicide’. She milked Cammack for information about the effects of Rohypno
l combined with alcohol and heroin. Cammack said that she personally would be rendered unconscious by one or two Rohypnols followed by a hit of heroin. Having offered this advice, Cammack hopped out of the car and caught a bus home.
Her next real contact with Anu Singh was four days later, at about midday on Sunday 26 October, the day Joe died. Singh called Cammack on the phone and told her, in great agitation, that Joe Cinque had taken an overdose of heroin. Again the court heard the story: Cammack told her to ring the paramedics; they would give Joe an injection of Narcan, which would almost certainly revive him. But no, cried Singh: she couldn’t call the paramedics, because if they did give Joe some Narcan and he came to, he would realise at once that she had given him the drug, and he would be furious. Singh became ‘hysterical and manic’. She described Joe Cinque’s state – breathing, then not breathing, then vomiting – and tried to get Cammack to come round to the house, but Cammack would not. She kept urging Singh to call an ambulance. She shouted at Singh that she had no right to take someone’s life away, that she was a selfish bitch, that she must ring the ambulance. Singh finally said she would and hung up, but almost immediately rang Cammack again – she couldn’t make the call, she just couldn’t. Cammack at this point spat the dummy: ‘Listen – if you ring the paramedics, you’ll have an angry boyfriend. If you don’t call them, you’ll have a murder charge.’
This seemed to jolt Singh, who replied, ‘Oh, shit – you’re right’, and hung up.
‘Is that the last time you spoke to Anu Singh?’ asked Mr Golding.
And Bronwyn Cammack said, ‘Yep.’
But now the focus of her story shifted to Madhavi Rao. At lunchtime the next day, Monday 27 October, Cammack phoned Rao and told her in detail about the weird phone calls she had received from Singh the day before. Madhavi Rao didn’t want to talk about this on the phone. She suggested they meet in town, at Gus’s Cafe in Civic, and at two o’clock that afternoon they did.
Once more, it seems, Madhavi Rao could not hold her tongue about the adventures of Anu Singh, this all-consuming so-called friend through whose extravagances she vicariously lived. She sat down at a table in Gus’s with a junkie she hardly knew, and poured out again the whole gruesome story.
‘First,’ said Cammack to the court, ‘she was hesitant – she said she didn’t know if she should involve me. Then she told me that Anu had attempted to kill her boyfriend twice. On the Monday night she’d given him Valium, but he was tossing and turning too much. And she hadn’t gone ahead with it on the Friday night either. Madhavi said that on the Friday night everyone else had gone home but her, and she was in the lounge room while Anu was upstairs.’
Cammack and Madhavi Rao spent two hours downtown together that Monday afternoon, while unbeknown to them Joe Cinque’s body lay in the city mortuary. As they were leaving Gus’s Cafe, Cammack spotted a dealer she knew, and asked Rao to lend her the money to buy some heroin. Rao waited nearby while she scored and hit up. The two women walked to Glebe Park and resumed their conversation under the trees: they spoke ‘about other things’, then Rao went off to the university library and Cammack called her mother, who came and picked her up and took her home.
So dully and faintly did Cammack tell this story that Mr Lasry was moved to challenge her blankness.
‘After you left the park,’ he said, ‘am I right in saying that you then went to McDonald’s? Where you bought something to eat?’
‘I doubt it. I don’t eat McDonald’s.’
‘I don’t blame you for that,’ said Mr Lasry sympathetically. ‘I try not to either.’
The faintest shadow of a smile flickered across Bronwyn Cammack’s face, and was gone.
That evening Cammack saw on the television news that there had been a murder in Downer. In the shot of the crime scene she recognised Anu Singh’s car. At eight-thirty p.m. she called Madhavi Rao again and they spent another hour together, downtown at the Wig and Pen.
‘Madhavi was worried that she’d be implicated,’ said Cammack in her small, toneless voice. ‘She was stressing about it. And she said maybe she shouldn’t have told me everything that afternoon. She kept expressing sympathy for Anu. She said her life and her career were over. I told her she shouldn’t be sorry for Anu. I said she deserved what she got – that it was disgusting, what she’d done.’
Home in Sydney for the weekend, I got a phone call from a young woman, now a journalist, who told me she had been a student at ANU with Madhavi Rao and Anu Singh. A lot of people who knew them, she said, and who had been distressed by the murder trial, were ‘over it’ now.
Over it? But Joe Cinque is dead.
She rattled on: ‘All her friends are very defensive of Madhavi. They’re scared that because Anu got a light sentence, Madhavi will bear the brunt, which would be the wrong way round.’
‘People seem to feel warmly towards her,’ I said.
‘Oh, I do,’ said the journalist. ‘She was always ready to be in things – always smiling and friendly. How does she look?’
‘I can tell you – she’s not smiling now.’
On Monday, a fine fresh morning, I got to the Supreme Court ten minutes early and walked into the courtroom, expecting it to be empty. It was, except for Madhavi Rao. She was sitting quietly on her chair with her back to the side wall of the room, half-obscured by a trolley that overflowed with cartons of manila folders and envelopes. She looked very small and solitary, in her loose cream suit with a pale-green flowered shirt under it. She heard the big door open and looked up. Our eyes met. Neither of us made a sign or gesture of any kind, but a flood of significance passed between us – or so it seemed to me, as I sat down in the back row of the gallery. Of course I knew that there was no ‘significance’, that I was projecting it. But it unnerved me. I compared my response to Madhavi Rao with the feeling that the very sight of Anu Singh had provoked in me. Even without having met them, I was just like everybody else who had come in contact with these two women: one made my hackles go up, while the other aroused a puzzled, muted compassion, a curiously protective urge.
As Rao and I sat on opposite sides of the room that morning, waiting for the court to come back to life, it struck me that the world is full of these female doublings. I looked back and saw my own past, youthful and adult, sprinkled with them: symbiotic power arrangements that are called friendships because (outside of psychology, at least) we have no more accurate name for them. Perhaps they are most flagrant in adolescence: one girl is wild, bossy, selfish, flaring with hormones, crackling with sexual thrill and careless of risk, but still dependent on the ballast provided by her companion, who is prim and cautious, not yet at the mercy of her body, one foot still planted in the self-containment of girlhood. They need each other. The well-meaning ‘supportive’ one trails along in the wake of her narcissistic friend, half aware that she is being used – as a cover against parental suspicions, a second fiddle, a handmaid, a foil. But she also feeds off the wrecker’s high-voltage energy.
The tendency to form such partnerships doesn’t end with youth. Every woman I have asked about this knew immediately what I meant and could provide examples. Many a woman has shifted, as different stages of her life brought forth different needs, from one role to the other in the double act. We feel the depth of the pairing most poignantly when it inspires comedy: Dame Edna and her drab bridesmaid Madge; Kim and her browbeaten best friend Sharon Strzlecki in Kath and Kim. Even as we laugh, the spectacle disturbs us: we wait breathlessly for the worm to turn. And yet it is a relationship that benefits both partners. It would be hard to say, at its height, whose power is the greater.
Maria Cinque had told me one day, outside in the sunshine, how much she and her husband hated listening to the scientific evidence. I hated it too, partly in sympathy with them, but also because (as Maria had accidentally discovered when I sent her one of my books) I had once spent several days in a tile and steel mortuary, watching technicians perform post-mortem examinations – or, to put it more bluntly, cutting up de
ad bodies to figure out why they had died. I could barely imagine how Joe Cinque’s parents could tolerate hearing a long scientific discussion about the drugs that had been put into their son’s body without his knowledge or consent, and what these drugs had done to his stomach, his bowel, his blood, his lungs, his brain – all those poisonous intimacies coursing through the body they had conceived in hope, nurtured, set free, and tenderly, proudly loved. But there they sat with the rest of us, listening, listening, and trying to understand.
Professor Olaf Drummer, a forensic pharmacologist and toxicologist from Melbourne, told the court that he was not able to state with any certainty whether Joe Cinque’s death was the result of two injections or one. But the concentrations of total morphine found in Joe’s body, he said, were consistent with the scenario that he had been injected first at about three a.m. on the Sunday, and again at some time between ten and eleven that same morning.
There was a great deal of discussion about absorption rates, plateaus, deep and shallow comas and so on, but Professor Drummer was questioned most closely on the matter of position.
If somebody injects heroin, said the pharmacologist, and collapses on the end of the needle, he can nod off to sleep in a position that obstructs his airways. If he’s too out of it to change his posture spontaneously, his breathing can be dangerously compromised. It’s even more serious if he’s in a posture where he can inhale his own vomit. Heroin affects the cough reflex, the gag reflex. Such a person would have to be rolled on his side, and his mouth checked for objects or vomit – and then, if an ambulance were called and the paramedics suspected a heroin overdose, an injection of Narcan would rapidly reverse the effects of the drug.
