Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  There was quite a long and turbulent period of overlap before Simon left Anu. She then took up officially with Joe. His old friends in Newcastle noticed how quickly he seemed to become infatuated with her: they were troubled by the grip she was already getting on him. They felt she was restricting him. When he was out with them, he would be on the mobile to her for twenty minutes at a time. They were wary of her, and she didn’t take to them, either.

  ‘We were sorry for Joe,’ said Matt, ‘that he couldn’t integrate her with his friends. That’s what you always want – for your girlfriend to get on with your friends.’

  Steve Bernardi worked with people who had personality disorders. Things Joe told him about Anu rang his alarm bells. ‘Doctors and nurses will tell you,’ he said, ‘that people with personality disorders are the hardest patients to treat. Because they’re people who are just all over the shop. They lack impulse control. And it’s lethal, the combination of a gross personality disorder and being very attractive. They lie and lie and lie. You can feel them undermining you – but they seem so attractive and sincere that you start to doubt yourself and your own take on the situation. You start thinking, “Maybe . . .” and suddenly you pull back – you think, “Look out! They’re doing it to me!” ’

  Early on he confronted Joe about Anu Singh. But Joe didn’t want to hear.

  ‘He only bit back once,’ said Steve. ‘We were at the pub. I made some comment about her, and Joe said, “This is coming from someone who Anu thinks is the most unattractive guy she’s ever met.” I thought, She’s got you hooked.’

  ‘After that,’ said Matt, ‘we never said much to him about her. We knew he’d tell her everything we said. So we bit our lip.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Steve, ‘before he moved down to Canberra to live with her, he’d ring her up from Newcastle and her other boyfriend, Simon, would be there. She’d tell Joe they were still together. All those times, when we thought Joe had broken up with her, we couldn’t have been more supportive.’ He gave a sly grin.

  ‘He must have known she wasn’t right,’ said Matt. ‘He told us stuff that happened.’

  ‘He’d talk to us about her drug use, for example,’ said Steve. ‘He’d say’ – he imitated a light, earnest, naïve voice – ‘ “She’s doing really well. She’s off speed. She only gets a natural high now, like guarana.”’

  They laughed, with twisted lips.

  ‘See what I mean?’ said Steve. ‘He was likeable. He was innocently likeable. He’d never hold a grudge. He was the butt of lots of jokes. Remember the swimming pool, Harry?’

  They lowered their faces to hide their laughter.

  ‘A bunch of us were going along one night in a car,’ said Steve, ‘and we passed a pool. Let’s go for a swim! So Joe, ever enthusiastic, jumps out, strips off, leaves his clothes in the car, runs to the pool and dives in. We waited in the car till he got out of the water and came back on to the road, then we drove off and left him there. We went round the block and there was Joe, crouching behind a buxus bush in his undies. He got up and ran towards the car. We slowed down, then just as he was about to get in we sped off. We did it three or four times. Finally we let him get in.’

  ‘And he wasn’t even annoyed,’ said Matt. ‘He was still laughing.’

  ‘His funeral was one of the worst days of our lives,’ said Steve. ‘The church flowed out on to the street. Joe had no idea how many people loved and respected him. I cried so much that I haven’t cried since. I loathe the thought of going through those emotions again.

  ‘And now, whenever there’s an election, I always vote for the Law Reform Party.’

  Maria came into the room and asked them about girlfriends – anything happening there? They shook their heads, smiling awkwardly, indulgently, with a sort of gentle defiance. Now, as planned, they had to go and play football. They stood up to leave, but Maria, talking in a rapid stream, started urging them to stay, stay, eat, eat, have something to eat. Gently, sweetly, they declined and edged towards the door, but she put heavy pressure on them: she thought they were staying, she thought they were coming for lunch, she made a lot of food for them, she bought some really good prosciutto for them, the best one, the one they like, she knew they liked it. They said they couldn’t eat before they played, they’d get sick, their stomachs couldn’t stand it, they’d throw up; they were sidling towards the door, smiling, smiling, but she pressed them, she must feed them, she must give them something to eat, she couldn’t let them go, she couldn’t let them go without putting some food into them, they were not to go out the door empty-handed, with empty stomachs, they needed to keep their strength up for playing football, have some prosciutto, here, have some of this bread, look, I got this special bread for you. She seized off the bench a clear plastic packet of sliced bread and held it open to them, she nodded at the table on which lay a platter of delicate pink prosciutto sliced into almost invisible feathers. Matt Harris kept up a steady sideways movement towards the door, he would not be swayed or turned aside, no, he wouldn’t eat, thank you Mrs Cinque, no he wouldn’t have anything, no, he couldn’t because it would make him sick; and just as he was dragging Steve Bernardi through the archway and out towards the hall, Bernardi cracked. He peeled away at an angle, made a swerve past the head of the kitchen table, plunged one hand into the packet of bread and pulled out two slices: swinging the other hand over the platter of meat he swiped a couple of the translucent shavings, and dashed after Matt across the living room, roughly shoving the prosciutto between the slices of bread and wolfing down his first bite. Maria burst into a laugh of triumph. The front door closed behind them.

  ‘Beautiful boys,’ said Maria.

  ‘Gorgeous. Lovely boys. But why aren’t they married?’

  ‘Joe scared them. What happened to Joe.’

  I was silent with surprise.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I think so. They were shocked. They see what can happen. They scared.’

  PART NINE

  It is a very strange thing to go back, years later, to a court building within whose walls you once sat gripped and disturbed by a murder trial. The ACT Supreme Court, on the fine Canberra day in February 2003 when I visited Justice Crispin in his chambers, had lost the mystique that had hummed around it while it dealt with the killing of Joe Cinque. Now I saw it as a shrunken edifice, bled of meaning, pale and two-dimensional.

  Justice Ken Crispin himself, though, was more vivid than he had ever seemed on the bench. Without his wig he looked ten years younger: a small, densely sprung man in his late fifties, with clenched shoulders, brown eyes, and wavy hair that had gone silver. He wore a grey and white striped shirt, dark trousers and a tie decorated with tiny human figures. He greeted me so cordially, jumping to his feet with his hand out, that he knocked his cup of coffee on to the carpet. Carrying as I was the Cinques’ hatred of him for the two decisions he had handed down and for Anu Singh’s sentence, I tried to examine him with reserve. I don’t know what I thought I would learn from meeting him that wasn’t already in the Singh and Rao judgements. Perhaps I wanted to know if judges, too, suffered from the icy chill, the moral failure of the law. Maybe I just wanted to see him at close quarters: to get a sense of his nature, the tone of his being.

  He struck me at once as a man of unusual directness and warmth. He seemed devoid of self-importance. Rather than keep his huge desk between us, he came out from behind it, and we sat together at a low coffee table in the centre of the room. His assistant brought in a tray of tea and biscuits. Perching on the very edge of the sofa, he gave me his full attention.

  I didn’t know if there was some protocol I was supposed to observe, so I asked him if he thought there was such a thing as ‘simple wickedness’. His reply was an exemplary short lecture on the theories and principles of sentencing. He segued seamlessly to the legalisation of addictive drugs, and outlined in a crystalline manner the mechanisms by which the pressures of addiction can turn a user into a dealer. He had the lawyer’s skill of keeping
the conversation general. It took me several tries to steer him on to the specific topic of Anu Singh and Madhavi Rao. He seemed to find my speculations interesting, even at times amusing; but for quite some time his discretion was iron-clad. Eventually, though, he relaxed his vigilance and began to speak about the two trials.

  I asked him how it was that the Crown psychiatrists had no access to Anu Singh: ‘Doesn’t that render their opinions a bit hollow? A bit meaningless? If they’ve only got half the picture?’

  He paused, as if to order his thoughts. ‘In most cases,’ he said, ‘where somebody kills someone and raises a defence of diminished responsibility, they’ve never seen a doctor before the incident. Everyone has to try to look backwards at the state this person would have been in, six months ago, when they committed the murder. That’s difficult to determine. You’re dependent on objective evidence – like the video of the way they behaved when the police interviewed them.

  ‘But in the case of Singh, both her parents were doctors. They were terrified about the way she was behaving. They lugged her to doctors and psychiatrists. And they’d twice tried to have her locked up as an involuntary patient – imagine how frightened you’d have to be about your own child, to want to do that.

  ‘So there was a wealth of evidence available to all four of the experts, that wouldn’t normally be available to either side. They had medical records, they had nursing notes, they had psychiatrists’ reports. To be frank, I’d never seen a case of diminished responsibility that was as easy to prove as that one. You couldn’t have convicted on the evidence of either of the Crown expert witnesses. I’m not sure why they bothered calling them. I thought in fact that Dr Diamond proved diminished responsibility more clearly than the two defence experts.’

  Did he? Surprised, I missed the moment to follow that train of thought.

  ‘Also,’ the judge went on, ‘Anu Singh was part of this university group. They were law students, who were able to make observations about her behaviour. It had been so bizarre that it had stuck in their minds. And they were able to recount it with a degree of recall and accuracy that one wouldn’t normally get.’

  ‘You mean it was a middle-class story,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not that she got a better deal,’ he said quickly, ‘by being middle-class.’

  ‘But the milieu of the story was an articulate one.’

  ‘It was. Here was a woman,’ he said, ‘who on all versions was pretty ill psychiatrically. And the interesting thing about it was that even that degree of mental illness did not evoke any sympathy – whereas it normally would, you see. If somebody has brain damage, if they’re shuffling their feet when they come into court and slurring their words, they’ll get a lot of sympathy. But if somebody has a personality disorder that makes them obnoxious, people tend to say, “She’s just an awful person, and we’ll discount the fact that it may be due to a mental illness.” ’

  ‘I was very upset,’ I said, ‘about Professor Mullen’s saying that Anu Singh was “utterly terrified” of Joe. He seemed to have taken it at face value when she claimed he’d been violent to her. This went totally against my gut feeling of what sort of a person he was. I thought, Not only has she killed him – she’s blackening his character as well.’

  ‘But that full report wasn’t run in the trial,’ said Crispin sharply, lowering his formidable brow. ‘Not – in – the – trial.’

  I backed off. He was right: I remembered Mr Golding vigorously filleting the report before it was admitted into evidence, and Professor Mullen’s rueful joke: ‘All my best lines are going!’ We sat in silence for a moment.

  Then he went on, ‘I thought the case against Rao was pretty bodgie all round, frankly.

  ‘The Crown case was that it was essentially a conspiracy between the two of them to kill Joe Cinque. Singh was deluded – that’s why she wanted to kill him. But why would a person who was not deluded want to kill her friend’s boyfriend? She had no grudge against him. The Crown wanted to draw great inferences from the fact that she’d been present when Singh had threatened to kill him. So had half the witnesses, and they weren’t accusing them of being complicit in the murder.’

  He was leaning forward, holding my eye, arguing earnestly.

  ‘I think Rao was very concerned as to what to do. She was paralysed with indecision. Her friend was saying things that were off the planet. Nobody else was taking it seriously – should she take it seriously? What if she blew the whistle and rang the police and then it all turned out to be a hoax?

  ‘She was a close friend, yes, and she bought the Rohypnol tablets. But that had to be considered in the context of what all the witnesses said about her personality and character – that she was a kindly, nurturing, dithering person who couldn’t say no to anybody.

  ‘When you considered all that, it seemed to me that the case against Rao was threadbare. The Crown just didn’t prove that she knew or should have known Singh was going to kill him.’

  But what about the Sunday morning visit to Antill Street? What about seeing him there on the bed, turning blue?

  The miserable refrain ran through my head. But I didn’t sing it. Justice Crispin had teased out these questions in his judgement, a document I had slogged through, in my ignorance of the law, a dozen times. From its painstakingly reasoned pages I understood the bases for his decision.

  I knew he was deeply disturbed by the failure of the criminal law to recognise a general duty of care to intervene, in order to save the life of a person in grave peril. ‘On the present state of the authorities,’ he had written, ‘it would appear that a person could watch a small child drowning in a shallow wading pool and walk away with legal impunity. However morally reprehensible such behaviour may be, it would seem that the law does not presently require anyone to be a Good Samaritan.’ I knew he deplored this, but that he believed it was the job of the legislature, not the judiciary, to change such difficult aspects of the law. I knew too that, even if the Crown had been able to establish that Rao did have a duty of care, he would have had to acquit her on that charge, simply because it had not been proven that when she saw Joe Cinque on the bed, he had already been given the injection that killed him.

  Sitting there at the coffee table with this tired, serious, decent man, I felt the self-righteous anger seeping out of me. There was nowhere for me to go with it. All that remained was sorrow, and loss.

  ‘Is sentencing the hardest thing you have to do?’

  ‘It’s the most emotionally draining,’ he said. ‘Whatever you do is going to hurt innocent people as well as the guilty. It’s a natural human reaction, when something terrible happens, to say “Someone must pay for this.” The victims expect that the sentence is going to be a big thing for them – that they’ll get justice. But even if the guy goes away for as long as they think he should, it doesn’t make anything better. It’s a false hope.’

  So we don’t punish, then? Punishment is primitive?

  ‘The real aim of sentencing,’ said Justice Crispin, ‘is not retribution. The real aim is to try to protect the community by imposing sentences that are heavy enough to deter, but not so heavy that someone becomes institutionalised. And there’s also the simple justice of it all. What would be a fair response under the circumstances? You’ve got to take some sort of hard line, but you can’t throw humanity out the window.

  ‘I’ve been involved either as prosecutor or defence counsel in two or three murders by people who’ve been completely cold-hearted, probably psychotic. You look at them and your blood runs cold. You think, this bloke should be locked up for the rest of his life. He’s always going to be a danger to people. But the vast majority of people who commit a murder are people you can feel sorry for. They’ve usually given way at a time of acute stress and in extraordinary circumstances. They’re weak people who couldn’t manage in life, who couldn’t cope with the stresses, and suddenly they just snapped.’

  Everything he said was calm and persuasive. It was reason, reason all the
way, and I could not see a gap in it. I listened to him without arguing. But I was thinking, Where does all the woundedness, the hatred go? What becomes of the desire for vengeance, for a settling of the score?

  Do we just pretend that this anguish doesn’t exist? Is it a load that can only be shouldered by the sufferer? Is this what tragedy means – that you have to carry it inside you, weighing you down, poisoning you, for the rest of your life? I remembered what Maria Cinque had said to the judge: ‘How am I supposed, your Honour, to go on?’

  I knew that Justice Crispin was a practising Christian. I guessed what he would say if I voiced these thoughts. He would say, This is not the province of the law. This is the province of the Almighty. But I had seen those fundamentalists on TV and in the pages of magazines: the ones who had ‘forgiven’ the psychopath rampaging through the high school with a handgun, who ‘felt no bitterness’ against the drunken driver who had mown down their child in the street. Their protestations did not convince me, though I longed to believe that what they were claiming was possible, that transformation and healing might be within reach of the wounded. Just the same, I would have liked to ask him. I would have liked to say, ‘Is forgiveness all there is, then? How is it done?’ But we weren’t in a church. We were in the Supreme Court, the temple of reason. So I said nothing. I sat at the little table, trying to swallow my sugared biscuit.

  Then Justice Crispin said, in a low, difficult voice, ‘I really felt for the Cinques.’

  At the thought of Joe’s family – bent double, the heart gouged out of them – I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  ‘We lost our first child,’ he went on, ‘when she was not quite two. We were . . . devastated. It’s a long time ago. Thirty years. But you never forget it. And that made me acutely conscious of what Mr and Mrs Cinque must have been going through. The grief, of course, is very different. We lost a two – a not quite two –’ He paused, and put one hand to his face. ‘And they lost a grown man, nearly thirty. But you never forget. The Cinques made a speech on the front steps of the court. They said they hoped somebody would kill one of my children, so I’d understand.’