by Helen Garner
I walked into the toilets and found Mrs Cinque there again, at the mirrors, skilfully outlining her lips with pencil. We greeted each other. She seemed open to conversation. I asked for her phone number and she gave it to me. She watched me copy it into my notebook, and said tentatively, ‘In couple months I got to go overseas. I had a very bad operation on my foot, I have to get it fix. But after that, in a few months . . .’
Again the formal nod, the sustained eye contact, the sombre smile. She snapped shut her large leather bag and went out the door with her slow, stiffened gait.
When the court rose that day, while I was still crouched on my chair scribbling notes, Dr Singh stepped down from the gallery and into the well of the court where his daughter was speaking with her lawyers. Seeing him approach, she turned slightly towards him, smiled, and said, ‘Okay, Dad.’ At the same time she made a spontaneous fence in front of her waist, with her two hands bent sharply back at the wrist and her palms towards him: Back off. As both a daughter and a parent I felt the stinging whack of that gesture.
I caught up with Dr Singh on the shallow stairs, just inside the big doors. I introduced myself as ‘a writer’ who ‘might want to write something about this trial’. I offered my hand and he took it: his was very dense, warm and dry. I told him who I wrote for and his face brightened. ‘Come outside,’ he said.
Out there in the lobby I was awkwardly aware of the Cinque family, three metres away at the water cooler. I hoped Mrs Cinque wouldn’t change her mind about me if she saw me speaking to Dr Singh. He was a big, blustery man and he spoke with energy and eagerness, leaning down to me: a great rush of words surged out of him. I could see his thick dark lashes, the glistening pale skin at the corners of his eyes: was it moistening with tears?
‘We want people to know about this story!’ he said. ‘We want it to be a warning! You see that poor girl over there –’ (it took me a couple of beats to realise he meant Mrs Cinque) ‘– sometimes she’s angry. I don’t blame her. I’m not angry. I know my daughter will go to gaol. When we heard Joe was dead we were devastated. He would come to our house! She was going to marry him! We will give you an interview. As long as you like. We will all speak to you.’ He patted his pockets for a card. ‘It would have to be in Sydney.’
‘I live in Sydney. Give me your card tomorrow.’
But he did not want to let me go. He began vehemently to criticise Dr Hayes. ‘She was trying to please the prosecutor! She does not concede that eating disorder and depression are linked! This has been scientifically proved but she does not concede it! She’s a psychologist. We don’t think much of psychologists. We prefer psychiatrists. You must hear both sides! If you only hear the injured party’s side – this mother here – she is angry because her boy is dead. But our daughter –’
He got himself under control, and stepped back with a tense smile and a nod.
I picked up my bag and headed for the street. Hearing a woman’s voice as I passed the water cooler where Mr and Mrs Cinque were standing, I glanced back and saw the good-looking young fellow, with well-cut dark hair and a wedding ring, lean back from their tight group in a burst of laughter. What a strong family they must be.
The April evening was warm. Drifting through Civic, I climbed a flight of stairs to a Japanese restaurant, took a table and ordered something clean and delicate to eat. While I waited, tired out from a day of writing at speed, of trying to follow the battling arguments, my thoughts slid vaguely to Anu Singh, this young woman whose horrible deed had seized my imagination in such a troubling way. What was she doing now? Out at Belconnen Remand Centre. With slop for food. Under harsh fluorescent strips.
And Joe Cinque is dead.
The next morning I was standing in the sun outside the court building when the dark young man who often sat next to Mrs Cinque rocked up to me with his hand out. ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘We haven’t met, but I’ve heard you’re taking an interest. My name’s Harry Hains.’
‘Oh! I thought you were the Cinques’ other son!’
He laughed. ‘No! I’m the police officer in the case.’
Close up I could see the Australian Federal Police logo on the tip of his tie, but it took me a moment to shift my preconceptions. ‘I saw you being so nice to Mrs Cinque – I thought –’
He shrugged. ‘They’ve had a very hard time. I’ve got quite a close relationship with them. Been up and down to Newcastle.’ He was smoking, but politely, holding the cigarette down low behind him, out of sight. He looked young, maybe in his late thirties, and his face was smiling and mobile, with warm brown eyes and a lively expression. I didn’t know there were detectives like this: I lived near Kings Cross, where they had a different reputation.
‘There’s definitely something wrong with the girl,’ he went on, ‘but there’s something wrong with all of us. None of us have got a perfect personality. None of us would say we’d never hated anyone. But . . .’
He took a furtive drag on his cigarette. When he breathed out, the skin around his eyes contracted into fine wrinkles.
‘What about the other woman,’ I said, ‘Madhavi Rao? How does she fit into the story?’
He looked around. People were stirring themselves and walking into the building. ‘Wait for her trial,’ he said, dashing out his smoke. ‘You’ll see.’
That morning the last of the four psychiatric expert witnesses was called to the stand. When I had first spotted this tough-looking man, with his designer stubble and short greying hair, louring against a wall outside the courtroom, I had idly cast him as Greek or Lebanese, and probably a detective, he was so dark and hulking and self-contained, so perfectly at ease in the outer chamber of a criminal court. But his name turned out to be Dr Michael Diamond, and the minute he opened his mouth, his nipped-off consonants and fastidious vowels placed him as a South African. He was a graduate in medicine from the University of Cape Town who practised as a psychiatrist in North Sydney. He settled his considerable bulk into the chair, dropped his chin on to his chest, and studied his interlocutor from under his brow.
Diamond shifted seamlessly between technical vocabulary and ordinary moral language. It was startling to hear him throw round terms like ‘immature and dramatic display’ or ‘superficial, glib attention-seeking’. He didn’t accept that Anu Singh thought she was dying. He didn’t agree with Professor Mullen’s emphasis on ‘masked depression’. And he was not convinced that when she killed Joe Cinque she was suffering from a significant abnormality of mind.
He was more interested in her borderline personality disorder, her eating disorder, and her body image disturbance. She could think all right, he said, and she could reason. Where her real impairment lay was in the process of maturing. She couldn’t handle complex emotions. She couldn’t withstand a less than perfect body image. She couldn’t resolve conflict in her life in a mature way. She couldn’t maintain composure, or control her moods.
And he took a very tough view of the frantic phone call to Bronwyn Cammack when Joe Cinque lay dying. He quoted Singh’s response to Cammack’s enraged command: ‘I can’t call the paramedics. I gave him the drugs. He doesn’t know. He’ll be furious.’ The reasoning behind this was not disordered, he said. It was focused and purposeful. Her fantasy was that she could be rescued. She was trying to get her friend to reverse what she had done, so as to keep it away from the authorities. It was clear and callous reasoning, he said, at an intensely distressing time.
Of all the four expert witnesses, Diamond was the one whose demeanour was least affected by the change in tone between examination and cross-examination. Nothing piqued or rattled him. There was something immovable, almost sphinx-like about him in the witness chair, a massive, stable repose. He sat there unperturbed while Pappas strafed him from left and right.
‘Is borderline personality,’ said Pappas, ‘an abnormality of mind?’
‘I don’t accept that,’ said Diamond. ‘It’s a disorder of psychological development that occurs very early in life. There are people with borderline per
sonality disorder who have no problem with their mind. But they can exhibit abnormality of mind, particularly when they’re threatened with abandonment. They lack a secure and developed sense of self to rely on in times of difficulty. They feel susceptible to annihilation – that they might fail to exist.’
‘Borderline personality disorder,’ said Pappas, ‘is not a transient condition, I take it?’
‘Personality per se,’ said Diamond bluntly, ‘is not transient. We are who we are.’
Diamond tackled the conundrum at the heart of the story: the fact that Singh had talked so obsessively about killing herself and yet had ended up killing someone else. The whole scheme, he said, with its support roles and large cast of extras, had been a tremendous drama she was staging – part of her narcissistic need to be taken seriously and helped. She derived so much gratification from being at the centre of this drama that the point was not to commit suicide.
‘The purpose is not death,’ said Diamond. ‘Death here is almost ignored. The purpose is to keep the drama going for as long as possible. Look at the business of arranging the dinner party – assembling the gathering, putting energy into it. But when the support and feedback is suddenly no longer available – and when the moment comes for her to inject herself – the whole thing evaporates.’
Steady and calm, sunk in his chair with his hands clasped easily in his lap, Diamond argued Pappas back against the wall about the depressive illness that the defence psychiatrists had diagnosed in Anu Singh. ‘Depression,’ he said, ‘is fairly responsive to medication. According to her medical records, she took four months of Prozac with no response. She was a narcissistic person in terrible distress –’
Mrs Cinque cut across him in a low, bitter voice: ‘Bullshit.’
‘– who tenaciously sought help, but never pursued it or undertook any form of treatment. What she did was, she consulted. She had her beliefs challenged and she moved on. This is not the way people with profound depression respond. The subjective experience of depression is unbearable. It’s very difficult not to reach out for help.’
Justice Crispin leaned down from the bench and addressed Dr Diamond. ‘I just wonder, though, Doctor,’ he said, in an oddly dogged tone. ‘What if somebody who really believes they’re dying goes to a doctor. What if the doctor says to them, “I can’t find out what’s killing you, but hey – I’ll refer you to a psychiatrist who’ll make you feel happier while you die”? Would the patient really say, “Okay – I’ll have some psychiatric treatment so I’ll be cheerier as I cark it”?’
A thought flashed across my mind. I forgot it at once, but years later there it was, scribbled in the margin of my notes. He’s going to send her home.
The following morning the two barristers summed up. Perhaps it was the absence of a jury to impress with grand, passionate rhetoric that made the final speeches so pedestrian and anti-climactic. The story dwindled to a halt. Justice Crispin promised a judgement ‘sometime next week’, and adjourned.
I stayed in my seat and watched Anu Singh, with her hair well bound and wearing a long, fluttery skirt, thank Mr Pappas and his solicitor. She shook hands with them, using the two-handed grip that denotes ardent sincerity. She smiled at each man and managed to speak to him a few intense words before her guard led her away. Again I noticed her odd, erect, slightly bouncing walk as she was ushered rapidly up the stairs and out through the double doors into the lobby. Much later, watching the animated movie Toy Story with my grand-daughter, I would be reminded of Singh’s gait by that of Buzz Lightyear at the moment when he sees on TV a commercial for himself, and realises that he is not a unique and invincible intergalactic superhero but merely a mass-produced plastic doll labelled MADE IN TAIWAN. It was the walk of someone desperately trying, against a total collapse of self-image, to maintain bella figura.
I turned to leave the court and saw that the quieter of the two journalists, the fair-haired one, had been sitting behind me, also watching. We looked at each other, but did not speak. We were the last to go.
The driver of my cab to the airport told me that he had spent six and a half years in the police force. He had left because he ‘wanted to become a human being again’.
‘What made you feel you’d stopped being human?’
‘Ooooh,’ he said, thinking as he drove, ‘if I saw a dead body it’d be . . . well, not exactly a joke, but . . .’
‘Do you mean you’d become hard?’
‘Not hard. More . . . that I’d seen everything. Nothing could surprise me any more. There was no joy left in life. And as soon as I realised that, I said to myself, Right. Time to get out. And I went back into hospitality. Motels – relief managing, for a chain. The wife and I went all over Australia. Never stayed anywhere for more than eight days. We had two suitcases, that was all. We loved it. One day we’d be in Dubbo, the next in Armidale. It was great.’
He told me he was forty-two, but he looked much younger: a tough, handsome bloke, who laughed and smiled a lot, as if he enjoyed being alive.
What would become of D-C Harry Hains? How could that warmth and openness last?
At home in Sydney, life lost its forward impetus and became limp and pointless. My mind slackened off again into self-obsession and regret. My family was far away, my friends busily absorbed in their own affairs. The only thing that could drag me out of my own cramped sorrows and shove me into the reality of other people was the story of Joe Cinque’s murder.
As the week between the trial and the judgement dragged along, I became restless. I paced, I ate lollies, I scrubbed every surface in the flat, I washed clothes that weren’t dirty, I got up at four in the morning and heaved furniture from room to room. I wasn’t just worried about getting back to Canberra on time. I was agitated by the prospect of a solemn judgement on the meaning of a woman’s life.
Do we identify with a criminal in that we too secretly long to be judged? Popularly, being ‘judgemental’ is ill thought of and resented. But what if we want our deeds, our natures, our very souls to be summed up and evaluated ? A line to be drawn under our acts to date? A punishment declared, amends made, the slate wiped clean? A born-again Christian, trying to explain his new sense of freedom, once said to me, ‘All my debts are paid.’ Anu Singh, with her ‘promiscuity’, her frantic need to be found attractive by men, her ‘using up’ of men and ‘throwing them away’; her perhaps turbulent relationship with her father; her blaming of a man for everything that was wrong in her life; her crazed desire for revenge on him; her lack of empathy with others, her self-absorption, her narcissism: I was hanging out for judgement to be pronounced on such a woman.
By mid-week I had taken a punt that Justice Crispin was the sort of bloke who liked his desk to be clear by Friday afternoon: I booked a flight and a hotel. On Thursday afternoon the DPP called me and said they were ‘ninety-five per cent sure’ that the judgement would be delivered the next day. I threw skin cream and a toothbrush into a bag and took a cab to the airport.
In Canberra the late April air was bright and dry. I checked into my hotel and walked to Garema Place. Even on a pleasant autumn afternoon the enormous plaza, designed at some more innocent era of the city’s history, was made squalid by the drifts of anxious junkies, distracted by their searching, who congregated round the phone booths at the top of the rise near the bus terminal. At five o’clock the temperature dropped and there was a dark edge to everything. I turned a corner on my way back to the hotel and saw in the west a pure sky with one tiny orange cloud floating in it.
Does a person get any sleep at all, on the night before her acts are to be judged?
The next morning was fine and sunny. I walked along Northbourne Avenue towards the court. I didn’t feel good. There was something wrong with my stomach. I had a general sensation of bodily disturbance. Was it loneliness, as usual, or was I coming down with something? Could I be gearing up for a heart attack? The first person my eye fell on, in the lobby of the Supreme Court, was Dr Singh. At the sight of him I understoo
d what was wrong with me: I was sick with suspense. I greeted him and he spun round to face me.
‘What view will you take?’ he cried, almost babbling with tension. ‘What view? From what view? You must write it from the point of view that it is not a game! People say, “Oh, he’s a doctor. He got the best psychiatrists for her” – but if it was a game, would we have called the Mental Health Crisis Team? Would we? Would you?’
I asked him for his phone number. He rattled it off and rushed away.
Inside, the courtroom was transformed. During the fortnight of the trial proper, observers had been few and far between, but today the public gallery was packed. The greater volume of flesh and clothing and shoe leather produced a different acoustic: the ceiling felt lower, the air denser, harder to breathe.
Anu Singh was brought in. Instead of her customary single guard, she had today an escort of two: a wild-eyed, thuggish-looking fellow on one side, and on the other a woman with straw hair. Anu Singh’s own hair was shinier, less tightly clumped on the nape of her neck. She was dressed in a dark jacket and trousers, and high backless shoes. She looked smaller. She did not cross her legs, but placed her feet neatly side by side, then lowered her head and fidgeted with her fingers.
The tipstaff behind the velvet curtain rapped a warning on the floor. Justice Crispin entered on a tide of seriousness, not with his habitual hasty sweep, but slowly, almost grandly, looking sombre as always, but also paler, and with his head held higher, giving more eye contact: offering his face. He bowed and sat down. Laying his papers on the bench before him, he raised his eyes to the room, and launched into it without prologue or preamble.
‘I find the defendant not guilty of murder,’ he said, ‘but I find the defendant guilty of murder.’
Mrs Cinque uttered a choked cry.