Everywhere I Look

by Helen Garner

  The Craigieburn train slid in. For three stations, heading out of the city, we hunched over his photos and talked wildly about parents and children and migration, and marriage and work and houses. When the train reached my stop we shook hands, and kissed each other on both cheeks. I stepped out into the spring dusk, and away he went, a stranger whose life had just been blown wide open, going to look for his car where he’d left it on the side of the road, way out north in Broadie.

  2012

  The Man in the Dock

  THE man in the dock looks like someone you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. His hair is cropped to the skull. He has a pale, bony face, with long cheeks, still eyes, and sculpted lips that from time to time he purses. His name, let’s say, is John Kennedy. He is twenty-seven. He has spent the last two years on remand waiting to be tried for manslaughter, but he has agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge: reckless conduct endangering life. The most he can get for this is ten years. By forgoing a jury trial, Kennedy is throwing himself on the mercy of a judge.

  One winter evening in 2010, he was drifting round Melbourne’s CBD with a bunch of street kids known to the Department of Human Services and to the police. They wandered down to the Yarra, to drink and horse about on a concrete pontoon under the pedestrian bridge that links Flinders Street Station with Southbank. One of the girls went behind a pylon with a sixteen-year-old African refugee who had been removed from his parents’ care, against their wishes, by the DHS. While they were having sex, the girl let out a scream. Kennedy ran to them. ‘I’m gonna push this cunt,’ he said, and gave the boy a one-handed shove in the chest. There was no railing. The boy fell backwards into the river. He could not swim. Several hours later, divers found his body lying on the riverbed, in two metres of murky water.

  A sentencing hearing is a quiet, careful process, a conversation between judge and counsel that offers little drama to a casual observer. Yesterday the judge, a woman of famously unbending will, expelled Kennedy’s female friends for taking photos of him on their phones. Today the body of the court is empty but for four male lawyers, three women journalists, a dozen students upstairs, and a solidly built young woman with long, unwashed hair and a pugnacious expression, who is seated directly below the dock, with her arms folded and her back to the prisoner. Glances of curiosity she repels with a bulldog glare.

  The death of the young refugee, says the judge, is tragic. Judge and counsel deplore the awful irony that the boy should have fled a war-torn country and perished here as he did. His death is certainly relevant to the sentencing. But the prisoner is not charged with that. He is charged with conduct endangering life. There is no evidence that he knew the teenager couldn’t swim. He is not to be punished for the death.

  The unfenced pontoon was a disaster waiting to happen, but there’s a limit, says the judge tartly, to how much people can be protected; and anyway, going by the documents before her, Kennedy himself is a travelling disaster. His father bolted before he was born. His mother died of septicaemia. He is intellectually slow and has been a client of Disability Services since 1989. At eighteen he had a fifteen-year-old girlfriend and was registered as a sexual offender. In 2008 he fell from a roof and was in intensive care for three weeks. Since his brain injury, his mental function has dropped ‘from a pretty low base’ into the bottom one per cent of the population. He has a long criminal history of violence, and a tendency to become aggressive with very little provocation.

  Kennedy sits quietly in the dock, making occasional grimaces with his lips, seemingly unaffected by this alarming description. The long-haired woman sitting in front of him keeps her scowling gaze on the judge’s face.

  What, asks the judge, is the court to do with this man? She is obliged to think about the protection of the community. Locking him up is no solution. But his violence is ongoing and escalating. He needs something other than just prison, something that will help him. But he breaches community orders. He breaches parole.

  ‘I’m not saying that’s flash,’ says his counsel morosely. He asks permission to call the day’s sole witness. Everyone looks at the door. But instead, the scowling woman seated near the dock leaps to her feet and charges eagerly along the carpeted aisle to the witness stand. Up the steps she bounds, seizes the Bible and takes the oath in a clear, ringing voice.

  She is the prisoner’s penpal, his future partner. She has almost completed a Bachelor of Education at Victoria University. She began to correspond with Kennedy at the suggestion of a friend whose boyfriend was also in prison. ‘I had just come out of a three-year relationship,’ she gabbles, panting, tripping over her words.

  The judge props both elbows on the bench. ‘No hurry,’ she says. ‘Take a deep breath.’

  The young woman smiles up at her. She grips the edge of the witness stand, draws in and releases a huge, audible breath.

  ‘I was reluctant at first,’ she says, ‘because I didn’t want to get hurt again.’

  First they wrote letters. She got herself on to the list of people he was allowed to telephone. She started to visit him at Port Phillip on Thursdays, when people can see prisoners in protective custody. ‘And now,’ she says, with a proud little laugh, ‘he calls me five or six times a day!’

  No, he has never behaved towards her with aggression, let alone violence. Well, yes, of course they have never actually been together; we’re talking supervised prison visits here—but no, she has never been afraid of him. Yes, she has met his ‘family unit’, the suburban household into which he will be accepted when he is released, and she has found it ‘appropriate: as far as I’m aware, she’s his auntie. She’s supposed to be his mother’s sister.’ The young woman is determined to maintain contact with her own ‘family unit’, though; she is not stupid.

  ‘And,’ she declares, squaring her shoulders and straightening her spine, ‘I have made it abundantly clear that I have a clean criminal record, and that I will not tolerate living in the presence of someone who’s going to continue to break the law.’

  Kennedy sits there, working his lips. He has certainly had ‘an unfortunate life’. He has badly hurt people, and now someone has died because of him. The judge will not sentence him today; she will go away and think about it. But for now she listens, chin on palm, with a genial, patient attention, her wig low on her brow, the corners of her scarlet mouth curving upwards. Like her, every person here trembles for the witness, this brave, foolish, big-bosomed girl in her white blouse and chipped nail polish, the girl who wants to love and to be needed, and who is offering to go in, carrying all our hope and dread, where justice fears to tread.

  2012

  On Darkness

  LAST year I published This House of Grief, a book about the trials of a Victorian man Robert Farquharson, who was found guilty of drowning his three young sons in revenge against his former wife. When the book came out I was struck by the number of interviewers whose opening question was ‘What made you interested in this case?’ It always sounded to me like a coded reproach: was there something weird or peculiar about me, that I would spend seven years thinking about a story like this?

  I would slave away in these interviews, trying to come up with sophisticated explanations for my curiosity, but after a while I got tired of being defensive. A man, I thought, loves his three sons. His heart is broken when his wife falls in love with another man and ends their marriage. A year later he’s driving the boys home to their mother after a Father’s Day outing. His car swerves into a deep dam. He fights his way out of the sunken car, hitches a ride to his ex-wife’s place and announces to her that he’s killed the kids. He tells everyone that he had a coughing fit and blacked out at the wheel. His ex-wife flatly refuses to believe he drove into the water on purpose. She passionately asserts his innocence at the trial. He is found guilty and gets three life sentences with no parole. He appeals his conviction. The appeal is successful, and he is given a retrial. But by the time he faces court again, his ex-wife has turned against him. She is the volati
le witness from hell, so wild and fearless that she makes the court quake.

  What’s not interesting about that?

  People seem more prepared to contemplate a book about a story as dark as this if the writer comes galloping out with all moral guns blazing. A friend of mine told me that the woman who runs his local bookshop had declared she would under no circumstances read my book. Surprised, he asked why. ‘Because,’ she replied, ‘I know that nowhere in the book does she say that Robert Farquharson is a monster.’ If he had been a monster, I wouldn’t have been interested in writing about him. The sorts of crimes that interest me are not the ones committed by psychopaths. I’m interested in apparently ordinary people who, under life’s unbearable pressure, burst through the very fine membrane that separates our daylight selves from the secret darkness that lives in every one of us.

  Back in 2000 I was still living in Sydney. My third and last marriage had crashed and burned eighteen months before. I was in a very poor state, emotionally and psychologically. I lived by myself on the fifth floor of an apartment block on top of a hill. Its windows had so much air and light outside them that I was constantly drawn to lean my elbows on the sill. I would look out across the golf course with its lines of massive dark green trees, and its hoses sprinkling bridal veils of spray, and further east, the ruled blue-grey line of the sea beyond Bondi. Some days, though, I couldn’t help looking straight down to the well-placed concrete retaining wall directly beneath me, five storeys below. There were days when it seemed wiser not to go near the windows.

  Even work was no use to me; I was paralysed. I had spent months in Canberra at the trials of the two women who had been charged with the murder of a young civil engineer called Joe Cinque. One had got ten years (she served four) for manslaughter; the other had been found to have no case to answer. The families of the two young women, and the women themselves, had politely but firmly refused my approaches. I had already conducted long and painful interviews with Joe Cinque’s parents, and in doing so had entered into a dangerous relationship of trust with these two suffering people. I had a mass of material to work with but it was all one-sided, hopelessly unbalanced. I was drowning in it. I had no idea how to write the book. I didn’t have a commanding place to stand; I didn’t yet have the right voice to tell the story of what had been done to Joe Cinque.

  Around that time I heard there was a place in Sydney, down near Circular Quay, called the Justice and Police Museum. I read in the paper that a curious new curator had gone up into the roof or down into a cellar and come upon a forgotten cache of old black-and-white photographic negatives. A series of crime-scene photos from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s had been developed and presented in a small exhibition. I could not get there fast enough.

  Since that first public opening of the archive, many more photos from its fabulous trove have been resurrected and displayed. Certain mug shots have become famous, even hip: there are books of them, you can buy them on postcards. They are striking evocations of period, and of class—precious historical documents. The most popular ones are full-length portraits, unceremoniously shot and unintentionally very beautiful, of men and women who have just been taken into police custody. They front the camera, unsmiling—racy, sinister types, alarmingly worldly or damaged, with a Weimar Republic sort of loucheness in their demeanour. They stand defiantly, chins high, in their pointed strappy shoes and felt hats and unbuttoned wool coats, in the bare stone courtyard of a police station.

  At the turn of the millennium, though, when I first slunk into the Justice and Police Museum, there was something discreet, almost tentative about the show. Many of the pictures were free-floating; they had been unearthed minus any identifying material. Some of the most dramatic images contained no human figures at all. A blighted street corner; the scarred door of a warehouse; an overgrown track curving down towards a river; a bedroom of grim poverty, with a candlewick bedspread on a sagging mattress and cracked lino on the floor; a dingy hotel room whose open window, its cheap lacy curtain lifting on an invisible breeze, looks straight on to a brick wall. Where are the people? What has happened here? The photos don’t say. The police photographers didn’t fancy themselves as artists. Their job was to record what was in front of them, and they did it with a fidelity to duty that sometimes, in its utter lack of rhetorical ornament or self-importance, can reach us, lifetimes later, as an impersonal, manly tenderness.

  The photo that haunts me most, though, from the show I saw in 2000, did have a plaque beside it: it stated that a young woman had committed suicide in a cave, in the Blue Mountains. As a viewer, you stand at the cave’s mouth looking in. On a rock shelf just inside, the woman has placed her handbag and an ominous-looking black bottle. Her dropped shoes lie on their sides. But where is she? You scan the surface of the photo in vain. Then you spot her face, tiny as a coin, far from you in the depths of the cave. She’s taken all her clothes off, to die. She’s lying on the ground as if asleep, her hair drawn back off her brow and her head turned to the light. She’s a figure from a timeless mythological world—a strange, slender, naked little cave-dwelling nymph.

  I treasure the memory of this photo because of the purity of the recording eye: its respect for the deep calm of a place where a person has died, or been murdered, or has killed herself; its reverence for what I would even call the holiness of a place where something unthinkable and final has happened. Such a place, if you can bear to stand there, is imbued with a rich and sacred meaning.

  I see now that for some years already I had been trying to turn myself into the sort of person who could look steadily at such things, without flinching or turning away. I remember how my friends reacted when I begged them to come with me and look at the photos at the Justice and Police Museum: most of them really did not want to see them; they couldn’t understand why I thought they were beautiful. But I knew I could learn from them. So I went back, again and again, usually on my own. I longed to mimic in my own work the brutal simplicity of the police photographs.

  I belong to a reading group. We wanted to get real about mighty works of literature. We started with Paradise Lost. Then we tackled Homer. This year we’re working our way into Virgil’s Aeneid. Whenever the story explodes into bloodshed, one of the women in the group, an experienced and respected journalist, is assailed by fits of laughter that she can’t muffle or control. The rest of us have learnt to pay no attention. We calmly go on reading, taking it in turns around the ring, and in a while she gets a grip, returns to herself and takes her part again. It’s actually quite endearing. We don’t even comment on it any more. It’s her defence against the wild, ancient darkness of what we’re reading.

  Human beings have many shields against the darkness. A woman is raped, or murdered, and the old cry goes up. What was she doing out on the street alone in the middle of the night? Women shouldn’t take short cuts through parks on their way to work, or go running along the riverbank with headphones on. These official warnings drive women crazy because they seem to proceed from an enraging assumption that the public space belongs to men, and that women have no claim on it: we broach it at our peril. But I’ve come to think that the subtext of what the politicians and police chiefs are saying, in their clumsy, poker-faced way, is this: no matter what the political rhetoric is, please do not assume that because you should be safe in public spaces you will be safe. There is no way that we can police the world and guarantee your safety. We are as helpless as you against the darkness.

  Why are we ever surprised by the scorched earth around a broken family? Our laws and strictures and conventions have no purchase on the dark regions of the soul into which we venture when we love. In the Farquharson trials, people would passionately protest, ‘But he loved those boys!’ Again and again it surfaced, the sentimental fantasy that love is a condition of simple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit region in which we are safe from our own destructive urges. But everybody knows that love is brutal. A thousand songs tell the story. Love tears right through to the centr
e of us, into our secret self, and lays it wide open. Surely Sigmund Freud was right when he said, ‘We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.’

  What people find really hard to bear is the suggestion that they themselves might contain their share of human darkness, hidden inside their souls. I believe this refusal lies behind the strange hostility I encountered, many times, when I was trying to write about Robert Farquharson’s trials. Friends would ask me what I was working on. When I told them, they would be at first quite curious—what’s he like? What sort of man is he? I would be barely three sentences into an account of his family background, his broken marriage and his broken heart, when my questioner’s mouth would harden into a straight line and she would make a sharp stabbing movement at my chest with a straight forefinger and say, angrily, ‘You’re making excuses!’

  There’s a term that would often come up at this point in the conversation. A man like Farquharson, some people declared, is evil. That’s all he is. He is no longer a person. Neither he nor his crime deserves our attention. ‘He was found guilty by two juries,’ one woman said to me. ‘What else is there to say? I don’t want to hear any more about him.’ Sometimes I tried to argue. More often I backed away with my tail between my legs. But I kept thinking, and I still think, that there are thousands of men like Farquharson out there—hard-working, tongue-tied Australian blokes who don’t understand why their wives got sick of them and turfed them out; dull men whose hearts are broken by rejection and by the loss of their children, and who can’t even begin to articulate their pain and rage. Men like these can be dangerous. Isn’t that worth thinking about?

  Over the seven years of the Farquharson trials I was obliged to develop my own set of defences against the darkness. I had thought of myself as mature and thick-skinned enough to handle it. I never did what I saw some of the more battle-hardened journalists do while witnesses wept and writhed under cross-examination—they would fill out a crossword under the desk, or read the footy pages, or furtively clip their fingernails, or doodle a page full of graves. Like everyone else in the court I allowed myself at certain moments to shed tears or to put my head down on my arms for a moment’s relief. But at times I found my reasoning powers cracking under the strain. It wasn’t till the trials were over and I started to write the book that I could acknowledge these states: