Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  Golding read out quotes and the two men duelled over them. Isn’t this rational? Isn’t this normal? It certainly is not! If my daughter had written that I’d be very concerned! They clashed over the teenaged Singh’s account of how she suddenly lost interest in one boy she had been sleeping with, dumped him, and went off with another. The discarded one, she wrote, was really cool about it. He said that he expected it to happen. I am really glad that we can still be friends.

  ‘Doesn’t that show,’ said Golding, ‘the capacity for developing some intimacy in the relationship with the first boy?’

  ‘No!’ said Byrne. ‘She’s a self-centred, angry girl who’s punishing this boy quite unnecessarily. She sees boys as an expendable commodity. You get one, you use him up, you throw him away.’

  Memories from my own selfish and carelessly hurtful youth flashed through my head, scenes I did not care to examine. I shifted in my seat. I had joked with the journalists about it, but this stuff was getting too close for comfort.

  Dr Byrne was asked to comment on a mysterious list of names that had been found in Anu Singh’s locker at the remand centre. He examined it carefully, then raised his eyes and said, ‘She had developed fantasies of revenge against the people on this list. Like a grandiose child, she was resentful that people did not conform to her wishes. I have no way of knowing if they were fantasies or real plans.’

  The judge ordered the suppression of the names on the list. Dismissed, the psychologist packed his papers into his bag and zipped it up with a tearing sound.

  The two journalists took me across the road to a restaurant called Tosolini’s. We sat outside under plane trees still in leaf. Huge buses kept roaring round the corner in low gear. To hear each other we had to lean right in over our plates.

  The young women were even more in sympathy than I with Mr Golding’s argument that Singh’s teenage diary contained ‘normal’ thoughts and attitudes, even behaviours. We confessed with blushes to our own ghastly adolescent diaries, at least as bad as Anu Singh’s, which we had all destroyed on leaving home. None of us could even begin to imagine why Singh had carried hers with her into adult life.

  ‘And whose were the names that the judge suppressed, on that list?’ I asked.

  ‘They were on the back of a letter,’ said one of them with a shrug.

  The women looked at me with raised eyebrows, then picked up their forks and attacked their salads.

  On Tuesday morning Anu Singh came in wearing a dark blue tailored jacket in a soft synthetic fabric, fitted to the curve of her waist – that womanly roundness she had fought so hard to eradicate from her body. Her hair was still hanging down her back, and while we all waited for the judge, she put it up. Although her back was turned to us, it was an almost indecently intimate and histrionic display, a series of age-old, deeply feminine gestures. First, the raising of both arms and the gathering of the hair in two hands. Then the twisting and rolling and flicking and doubling back of its dark mass, redder towards the tips, into a thick club; the binding of it with a broad black stretchy band; then the patting, the sensitive roaming of the flattened palms against the smooth round curve of her head; the feeling for loose strands at the temples and the anchoring of them over and behind the ears. All was in order. Satisfied, the small flexible hands flew up, out, and down to her lap, where they would lie, hour after hour, neatly clasped and occasionally twisting, while her inner life (or lack of it), her disturbances, her madnesses and cruelties were stripped bare and paraded before a small, intent cluster of strangers.

  Her father, in the back row of the public gallery, watched without expression the dance of hands and hair. His chin was sunk over his knotted tie.

  The second expert called by Anu Singh’s defence was an Englishman with soft, tousled white hair, a slight shoulder-stoop and a gently self-deprecating expression: Paul Mullen, Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at Monash University and Clinical Director of the Victorian Institute of Mental Health.

  When Mr Pappas, running him through his credentials, asked him if he was indeed born on 28 September 1944, he replied in a mild, jesting tone that would not have been out of place at a cocktail party, ‘So my mother gives me to understand.’ Nobody laughed. His vague, sweet smile did not falter: it would turn out to be his characteristic expression, as much a part of his persona as the humourless didactic mode was of Dr Byrne’s. But in an airy assertion of independence which went unchallenged, he chose not to take the chair on the witness stand, and gave evidence on his feet. Later, when declining Mr Golding’s invitation to be seated for cross-examination, he explained with his charming smile that he had been trained in the customs of British courts, ‘where only the elderly, the frail and the totally disabled sit’. He reminded me of a certain minor character in a D. H. Lawrence novel: the upper-middle-class educated man who disconcerts the unsophisticated farmers with his ‘courtly, naïve manner, so suave, so merry, so innocent’.

  Like Dr Byrne, Professor Mullen had visited Anu Singh at Belconnen Remand Centre. He had interviewed her for over five hours. He was confident in declaring that she had been suffering from a ‘significant depressive illness’ throughout 1997. Indeed, it was necessary to postulate a depressive illness in order to explain her actions on the day of ‘the tragic killing of Mr Cinque’.

  At Mullen’s use of the word ‘tragic’, the tone of the proceedings subtly altered. He was about to haul them up out of pathology and into the realms of archetypal drama. The clunky American jargon of testing and measurement was not his style. He spoke with a relaxed eloquence, in flowing sentences of interesting syntax and vocabulary.

  He talked about the brief periods of elation, even of positive happiness, that witnesses had noticed in Anu Singh shortly before she committed the crime. To explain these he introduced the concept of masked depression. She had certainly not had manic depression, the most severe sort; but she did have affective instability – and some of the best descriptions of this, said Mullen with his amiable smile, are to be found not in psychological texts but in literature – books written by people of high intelligence and creative ability who have also suffered from depression – Virginia Woolf, for example, in her novel Mrs Dalloway.

  Professor Mullen struck me as so plausible that I was surprised when his written report was fiercely challenged by the Crown. In a fury of correction Mr Golding now filleted the document of unsubstantiated material straight from the mouth of Anu Singh – specially things she had told Mullen about the character of the man she had killed. ‘Would you go then to the paragraph Relationship with Mr Cinque? Would you delete fairly straight? And materialistic but protective? Would you delete when inflamed by jealousy down to with another man?’ So ruthless was Golding’s attack that the professor made a comical protest. ‘You want me to strike that out too?’ he said with a rueful laugh. ‘All my best lines are going!’

  At lunchtime, to clear my head, I went for a walk in the autumn sunshine across Garema Place, the broad pedestrian precinct in the centre of Canberra. Men and women who work in government departments stride across this square with identity cards swinging on long chains round their necks. Junkies slouch whining in phone booths. Magpies perch, warbling their absent-minded melodies, on the chair-backs of outdoor cafes. As I walked I brooded crankily on the business of the defence psychiatrists. How can an expert witness hired by the family of the accused possibly be considered disinterested? This couldn’t be right. I must have misunderstood. Why didn’t the court itself appoint and pay the experts? Or was this a dumb question?

  As I returned across the thick, dark-green grass to the Supreme Court, I saw Mr and Mrs Cinque seated quietly together on a bench under a leafy tree. They seemed composed and civilised, sitting outdoors to take the air and to eat slowly a picnic lunch they had brought with them, while everyone else rushed into the cafeteria and bolted down bags of take-away, or blew ridiculous sums in restaurants.

  Anu Singh entered the court, shoulders high and cramped, her club of hair half-loosed
from its moorings. She got into position on her seat and, with obsessive niceness, arranged her long skirt over her crossed leg and ankle. She had a remarkable ability to sit still in one unchanging position, hour after hour, occasionally flexing and relaxing her shoulder muscles. The padded, steel-framed chairs that she and her escort occupied stood on a section of floor where several metal loops were recessed into the carpet. I couldn’t help thinking, with a slightly sick feeling, of the trapdoor of a gallows. In another country or a different era, she would have been hanged for this.

  Who would want to cross-examine Professor Mullen? In the face of his highly evolved manner, his light, nonchalant laugh and his nimble footwork, it was the most unenviable job imaginable. Mr Golding battered away at him about rational. Wasn’t it rational that Anu Singh had delayed calling the ambulance because she didn’t want Joe Cinque to find out she had injected him with heroin?

  ‘To the extent that she was utterly terrified of this man,’ said Mullen, ‘it doesn’t seem rational – no.’

  Utterly terrified? Where was that coming from? He slid the phrase in so silkily that it made hardly a ripple.

  ‘I watched him die and I didn’t save him,’ quoted Golding. ‘Why is that a psychiatric illness? Wasn’t she just a very selfish young woman?’

  The professor turned on the prosecutor a gaze of shocked reproach. ‘Your notions of selfishness,’ he said, ‘extend way beyond mine. This isn’t a selfish act. It’s an extraordinary act. To try and reduce it to the mundane notion of selfishness does such harm to the awfulness of these events.’

  ‘And the fact that after all her elaborate planning she didn’t kill herself? Does that suggest she wasn’t all that depressed?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what she said,’ said Mullen. ‘It made sense to me. She said, “Up to that time it was like executing some power plan. Seeing him lying there gasping for breath brought me back for a moment to reality.” ’

  Mrs Cinque lurched forward and clutched her arms to her belly, as if she had been stabbed. The young man in the dark jacket put his arm round her shoulders. She went pale, a bad yellow colour. She unfolded a tissue and held it to her mouth. She struggled to compose herself. I wanted to cry out with horror, and pity.

  When the court rose at the end of the day, Anu Singh turned to Professor Mullen as she passed him with her guard, and flashed him a bright smile. She gave him a little wave. She mouthed to him, ‘Thank you!’ The ordinariness of her demeanour knocked the breath out of me.

  Why wasn’t she down on her knees, grovelling for forgiveness? From the Cinques? From the whole human race? Begging for pardon, and with no sense that she was entitled to it, no expectation of ever receiving it?

  Mullen had fought hard for her. He had gone to the wire. ‘Utterly terrified’, this phrase he had plucked from the ether and tossed down so casually before the judge, could only have been an artful way of hinting at what Golding had forced him to excise from his report. On a dumb gut level I did not believe Anu Singh had been ‘utterly terrified’ of Joe Cinque. It was unthinkable that the cause of ‘utter terror’, if it had existed, wouldn’t have emerged much earlier in the story, and been heavily leaned on by her defence.

  On my way across Garema Place I noticed an internet shop. I sat down at a computer, went to google.com, and keyed in the name of Professor Mullen. The entries scrolled down and down and down forever.

  I stumped back along the broad eucalypt avenues to the hotel. My room had an ugly floral bedspread and purple net curtains. I couldn’t sit still. I went downstairs to the bar and drank some whisky. I tried to examine rationally my response to Byrne and Mullen. Were they really as glib as they seemed? Psychiatry is very hard to gainsay, I thought. If you aren’t satisfied by a category from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which claims to explain a person’s dreadful actions, you are thrown back on simple, quotidian concepts of moral disapproval such as Mr Golding’s selfish, that shallow, old-fashioned, tinny little word that rang so cheap and caused the cultivated professor to throw up his hands. At the other end of the scale you may wind up having to endorse terms like wicked or evil – words that people these days (unless they are discussing Islamic terrorists) find repugnant, because they sound religious, or primitive, or naïve – or, more convincingly, because they mark the point at which we are overcome by fear and revulsion – the point where we stop thinking and start shouting. But does psychological sophistication over-ride a sense that some actions are just plain bad? How much of human behaviour, in the end, can one understand?

  Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. When I came upon this maxim, as a young student of literature in the ’60s, I extravagantly admired it and took it as a guide. Only a few years later, though, I read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and found that his character Aschenbach scorns what he calls the ‘flabby humanitarianism’ of the saying. I hated seeing my treasure of wisdom scorched by his off-hand contempt.

  Now, though, I wondered if one ought to be wary of allowing oneself to ‘understand’ so readily – to skate all the way through to forgiveness. Doesn’t a killer have to carry any responsibility for her actions? Doesn’t she have to make some sort of reparation? Because when all is said and done, one brutal fact remains.

  Joe Cinque is dead.

  On Wednesday I learnt something that amazed me: the two Crown psychiatrists had not been permitted to interview Anu Singh. They had to base their reports on documents: the results of the MMPI and a Rorschach test, Singh’s medical reports, the police statements of various witnesses, and some of the letters Singh had written from custody.

  ‘How can this be?’ I asked the journalists. ‘When her whole defence rests on psychiatric assessment?’

  It was her legal right to remain silent, they said. Once you chose not to give evidence – and Singh had made this choice at the start – you didn’t have to say anything to anybody. Pappas, they told me, had even tried to argue that the Crown shouldn’t be allowed to call psychiatric evidence in reply to Byrne and Mullen. Crispin had ruled against him on this. But the defence had offered the Crown shrinks access to Singh only if they first agreed to support the defence of diminished responsibility. This floored me. It seemed so madly unjust, so meaningless and perfunctory, that I didn’t even know how to phrase a question about it, or to whom I should direct it.

  First the Crown called Dr Susan Hayes, Associate Professor of Behavioural Sciences from the University of Sydney. Hayes was a small, motherly-looking woman of fifty or so in a cream jacket and shiny earrings. Her manner was modest and her voice so quiet that one had to strain to hear it, in the muffling acoustic of the carpeted courtroom.

  She came at the matter from a fresh angle: the eating disorder. The sort of depression that comes over a woman when she can’t achieve the body image she desires, she said, is different from clinical depression. At such times a woman can experience an ultimate dislike of the body that can tip over into ideas of suicide.

  Dislike of the body. I imagined every woman in the court thinking, with an ironic twist of the mouth, Tell me about it! Suddenly, after all the lofty conceits bandied about by Byrne and Mullen, this was starting to feel real. Maybe only another woman could intuitively grasp the extent to which Singh, like the rest of us, was ruled by her body, imprisoned in it and condemned to struggle against it. But, oddly, this insight did not melt the hearts of the women who sat listening in court. On the contrary, the more like an ordinary woman Singh came to appear, the less sympathy she had to draw on, and the more the psychiatrists’ explanations of her behaviour sounded like excuses which would not stand up in the harshly sceptical forum where women face the judgement of their sisters.

  Hayes took a tremendous pounding from Mr Pappas for her view that many of Singh’s fancied complaints – rotting flesh, ants crawling under her skin, a different head on her body – might be interpreted not as signs of psychosis but as side-effects of the recreational drugs she was taking.

  He roared, he sneered
.

  Her voice trembled with anger, it sank at times to a thread. She dug her heels in. She became quietly mulish.

  He had to push her every inch of the way to the desperate phone call Singh made to Bronwyn Cammack while Joe Cinque lay dying. Didn’t this show, Dr Hayes, that her thinking was grossly disordered?

  ‘There was conflict in her mind,’ said Hayes stubbornly. ‘She was in two minds about calling the ambulance. She wanted to appear to be saving him, but not to actually save him.’

  The court rose. I chanced to bump elbows with Dr Hayes in the crowded lobby. I must have flashed her a sympathetic look, for she grinned at me and pulled a self-mocking face. ‘It’s so frustrating!’ she muttered. ‘They want you to make absolute statements! I can’t! I work in probabilities. And when it comes to intent! Most of the people I see say that forming a conscious intent was the furthest thing from their minds.’

  She hurried away. My two young journalists emerged from their neighbouring courtrooms.

  ‘There’s a couple of junkies in there,’ said the fair-haired one, putting her notebook away, ‘about to be sentenced. Their five-week-old baby had every bone in its body broken. The mother’s still hitting up. She was nodding off in court. But she’s still got custody. And she’s pregnant again.’

  ‘How’s your thing going?’ asked the dark one, jerking her thumb at Justice Crispin’s court.

  ‘Still the shrinks,’ I said.

  She breathed out hard through her nose. ‘Anu Singh puts on acts!’ she said. ‘Let me up there! I’ll tell them she puts on acts for Daddy!’

  They trudged off to file their copy from the so-called Media Room, a narrow windowless cupboard full of computers and phones.