Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  ‘When she went out,’ said Mrs Cinque, ‘she dress properly. Elegantly! She put make-up. They went out, in the day and the night, and at least two, three times a week for tea. To restaurant. And what about holiday, Nino. They went on holiday. The Blue Mountains, Katoomba.’

  I followed Mr Cinque’s pointing finger, tracking the credit card entries: Jenolan Caves, Katoomba, Wentworth Falls.

  ‘Jenolan Caves,’ said Mrs Cinque, her voice quivering with scorn. ‘I never been there! Why they don’t show this to the judge?’

  ‘They didn’t ask us nothing. We can’t do nothing,’ said Mr Cinque.

  ‘When we saw her father go up there in the court, we were shocked. Because they told us the family cannot testify. Why was he allowed, then?’Mrs Cinque stood up at the table and began to shout. ‘They say he could not talk as a doctor – so he had to talk as a father. He’s a father – I’m a mother. Why not? What’s fair in this?’

  ‘We been at her parents’ house one time,’ said Mr Cinque, ‘to a party. There was about a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty guests. We spent four hours there, from eight to twelve o’clock.’

  ‘It was a beautiful party,’ said Mrs Cinque. ‘I know I say all the other things, but the party, I could not say otherwise – it was beautiful. The food, the service, the way they treat us. It was the first time I saw her dressed as an Indian.’

  ‘Her mother was the one with the old idea,’ said Mr Cinque. ‘How you have to get married before you live with your boyfriend. But that night when we was over there at the party, she come and catch me and dance with me –’

  ‘And he dance with me,’ added Mrs Cinque.

  ‘Ah, was beautiful. But this party was in April 1997. And in court we hear – one or two week after that, she ask Mancini and other fellows to get a gun for her! So she can kill herself and kill my son!’

  ‘Around that time, March, April 1997,’ said Mrs Cinque, ‘Joe and her was here for the weekend. We had lunch on the Sunday. After, he came downstairs and said to me, “Mum, she wants to talk to you. Can you go upstairs on the verandah?” I was washing the dishes and he said, “I’ll wash the dishes.” I went upstairs.

  ‘She could not sit down, but she say to me, “Sit down,” and she started telling me about aaaaaaall her problems. She said, “I’ve had this thing crawling under my skin.” She said her mother didn’t understand her – said she felt close to me because I been sick for a long time so I could understand. And her leg was going like this all the time, jiggling. I thought, “She looks like she’s on drug withdrawal.” And I said to Rosalba the day after, “If I didn’t know better I would say she’s on drugs.” That’s one mistake I made – I didn’t tell Joe.’

  ‘Usually Joe rang me on a Friday,’ said Mrs Cinque. ‘But on the Friday before he pass away, 24th October, he didn’t call. That Saturday he didn’t call. Sometimes they used to go away on the weekend so I wasn’t worried. Sunday the 26th I wait all day, then around five-thirty, I think if they gone away they must be home by now. And I rang his place.

  ‘A strange voice answered the phone. I said “I must have the wrong number.” He said, “Who you looking for?” I said, “Joe Cinque. I’m his mother – who are you?” He said “Constable Something.” I said, “What the police doing in my son’s place?” He said, “Just wait on the phone.”

  ‘And at the same time, somebody here in Newcastle knock on the front door. It was the police.

  ‘I thought he was here to talk to my husband about an accident he had in the car that week. He says to me, “Are you Mrs Cinque?” I said, “Yes – do you want to talk to my husband about the accident? He’s out the back.” He said, “I want to talk to both of you.”

  ‘I called Nino and he came down from the yard. The policeman said, “Are you Mr and Mrs Cinque?”We say “Yes.”“It’s about your son Joe.”

  ‘Soon as he said that, I scream at him. “Go ’way. Go ’way. I don’t want to hear you.”

  ‘The policeman says, “Your son has been overdose.”

  ‘Nino said, “What? Joe? You’re joking. Not Joe. He never touch the stuff.”

  ‘Before the policeman say “A woman’s been charged”, I knew. I said, “That witch has killed my son.” I come inside screaming. I thought this – this – Let this stop.

  ‘Nino didn’t believe it till the day after. He was like a zombie walking around.

  ‘Anthony comes home. He comes inside. There was all these people in the house. He put his fist through the door. He starts screaming, “That bitch has killed my brother.” ’

  ‘I’ve seen sometimes a documentary about the way the lioness defends the cubs,’ Mrs Cinque said to me, that day in her kitchen. ‘I was sitting here watching TV when my son was dying. I didn’t do nothing. I didn’t protect him. I should have stopped him. I should have broke his leg when he went down there to live in Canberra. He didn’t want to listen to me.’ Her voice loosened and broke into tears. ‘She make me – she make me feel like a failure.’

  ‘But – when they come here,’ said Mr Cinque, with the strange gentleness that always softened his voice when he spoke of his son’s visits, ‘they look – happy. She say she love him, he love her, they was thinking to get married next year. When you hear things like this, when you see two young people kissing together all the time, touching together, what you think? You think, “Ah yes, my son is happy – good luck to him.” If you start to go in between of them, it means you –’

  Mrs Cinque cut across him: ‘How many times I complain to you that Joe wasn’t like he used to be? And you said, “Yes, but now he’s a man. He’s got responsibility.” Every time I say something, Nino say, “Your son is not a little baby! He knows what he’s doing. He’s twenty-six years old. Why you calling him? Don’t interfere! Don’t ring too much!” ’

  ‘When we was married, you was twenty-one, isn’t it?’ said Mr Cinque. ‘If something happen to us, why your mother have to know? You want to tell your mother?’

  It was an unhealed wound between them, the difference between their styles of loving Joe: Mrs Cinque had had a gut sense from the start that Anu Singh was trouble, an instinctive bristling which her husband, wanting to respect his son’s manliness and freedom, had put down to possessive mothering.

  ‘When you are an adult, you are an adult,’ he went on. ‘She was twenty-five, he was twenty-six. They got their own life. They have to live together.’

  ‘I knew she was no good,’ said Mrs Cinque flatly.

  ‘If she was no good, let him find out.’

  ‘Yes,’ cried Mrs Cinque with savage irony. ‘We know that now!’

  Her husband caught the charge of it, and fired up. He pounded the table-top with his flat hands. ‘That’s why she have to be killed! Because nobody can believe she done something like this – and she did. And she say “I did.” She said “I killed him.” She look at him dying. She look at him vomiting – people was disgusted when they see the photo – but she was there, she was around him, touching him – he was naked on the floor. We been in the house. We see all the blood on the floor.’

  He was panting. The silence was electric. His voice dropped back suddenly to a gentle, almost plaintive note.

  ‘My son haven’t done nothing wrong. My son was innocent. Let them kill the son of the judge, the barrister. Then they understand.’

  Silence, except for the hissing of the tape.

  ‘When we talk like this to our friends,’ said Mrs Cinque, ‘they say’ (she mimicked a tone of shocked rebuke), ‘ “That’s wrong!”

  ‘It’s okay for other people to say “I don’t believe in this! I don’t believe in capital punishment!” I say to them, “Because your son hasn’t been murdered yet. You wait till you’re in my shoes, and then see if you think that.” ’

  She was not ranting now, not shouting, but speaking quickly, lightly, firmly, with many pauses between her sentences; yet it would not have been possible to interrupt her, and one would hardly have dared, for she was laying out
her deepest thoughts, the product of the long, dark brooding that accompanies unbearable pain.

  ‘I can’t even kill an insect. When I got a little grasshopper inside the house I took it back to the garden. I tried to get it drowned in the water but it kept coming back so I picked him up, I put him outside – I can’t even kill that. But believe me – if I have my hands on her, nobody’s gonna stop me. Not even the police gonna stop me.

  ‘And if I find any of the Singhs on the street, I’m not gonna stop my car. They can put me in gaol – I don’t care. Because they are responsible. They knew exactly what their daughter was like. If they took her to the psychiatrist, like they say they did, why didn’t they tell us anything? My son was there with her. Why didn’t they warn my son?’

  ‘The next morning,’ said Mrs Cinque, ‘we got up at seven o’clock and they took us to the airport. We arrived in Canberra. Our godson Robert and his brother Nick were waiting for our plane. The detective Harry was there. He took us to the police station and talked to us. Then we met Gail, the policewoman.

  ‘At the time I thought she just injected Joe and he die straight away. The police don’t tell you everything. They tell you a little bit at a time.’

  ‘Yes – it was only when I read the judgement,’ I said, ‘that I realised it took the whole weekend to –’

  Mrs Cinque cut across me with great force. ‘NO NO NO!

  The whole week! There was a party on the Monday. There were witnesses there who said they went to that party. They knew she was going to kill herself and Joe. And the judge dismissed that. He said not enough evidence. I don’t know what’s enough evidence. They gave Joe Valium. They tried to inject him.’

  ‘What?’ I stared at her. ‘Even back then, on the Monday?’

  ‘YES!’ cried Mrs Cinque, frantic for me to grasp her point. ‘Monday the 20th October! The day before that, on the Sunday, they were here and Joe asked me for some food, because they were going to have a party that night when they got back to Canberra, and he didn’t have nothing ready. I said, “I haven’t got nothing prepared – if you told me before, I make something” – but Joe said, “Don’t worry, Mum, we’ll get some fried chicken or something.” They left here about two o’clock on Sunday the 19th, and that’s the last time I saw Joe.

  ‘He rang me the next day, on the Monday. I said, “How are you? You had the party last night?” “No, we didn’t have one, Mum – we’re going to have one late in the week.”

  ‘I don’t think he even knew there was going to be a party on the Monday. Why did he tell me “late in the week” if he was going to have one that night?

  ‘There were quite a few witnesses at the party on the Monday. Pappas asked one girl, “You went to the party, knowing she was going to kill herself and take Joe with her – you still went to the party?” And she said’ (Mrs Cinque mimicked a tiny, feeble, girlish voice), ‘ “Yes.” Pappas stand there, he says, “What kind of people are these?” ’

  ‘On Monday night,’ said Mr Cinque, taking up the story in his careful English, ‘when they had the first party, they give him just Valium tablets. When he was sleeping, he keep moving around – they can’t reach, uhm –’

  ‘Can’t get the vein,’ says his wife, holding back with an effort her urgent flow of words. ‘This was said in court.’

  Mr Cinque exploded again, beating his hand on the table in rhythm. ‘They – said – this – in – court! Why the judge don’t take notice of this? On Monday they already made the first attempt to kill my son!’

  ‘Joe wasn’t stupid,’ said Mrs Cinque. ‘After the party on the Monday, if he knew she was trying to kill him, he would have left straight away.

  ‘When we went to the house to get his stuff, the day after he passed away, we couldn’t find his set of suitcases, his overnight bag, the hanger for his suits. None of this we find. My son dress beautifully. He had at least twelve good shirts, Country Road. But we only found two shirts. I said this to the police straight away: “Joe hasn’t got his stuff. He was going to move out.” ’

  ‘You don’t think,’ I said, ‘that somebody just stole his stuff?’

  ‘When,’ said Mrs Cinque, challengingly.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Hard and fast she pressed me. ‘When. She call the ambulance and the police come straight away. When.’

  ‘Yes – okay,’ I said, my voice fading.

  ‘When.’ She was fierce. ‘WHEN.’

  I caved in. There was a pause.

  ‘That’s why I think he was gonna move out,’ she said.

  ‘You mean he was half moved out?’ I asked. ‘He’d started to move his stuff – he was trying to get away?’

  ‘Yes!’ she cried. She limped into the next room and brought back a chunky appointments diary. ‘Look. This is from his work. It was kept by the police till April this year. His diary said he was gonna leave her. On Monday 27th, here it is, look – “2 o’clock, get ready to move” – see? It’s his own writing, you can see it right here. Then he’s got an arrow down to six o’clock that night: “Move urgent today.” He must realise after the party on Monday 20th that there was something wrong. He was gonna move out. He was gonna move out, and she knew, and that’s why she killed him.

  ‘He didn’t know nothing about the Friday party. If you had one on the Monday why you want to have another one the same week? So when he came home from work on the Friday, she had a party ready, and that’s it. He never left.’

  Towards tea-time Mrs Cinque got up from the table and set to work at the bench, preparing something for us to eat. For the first time her husband lost the shyness about his English that had been making him defer to his wife throughout the day: he began to speak at length, on his own account, into the tape recorder. His voice was low.

  ‘We used to say in Italy, “Wifes and cows you have to buy from your own town” – because you know the girls, the way she look, the way she dress – and the cows, you know how much milk she make daily. You can’t lie.

  ‘When I was twenty I go to work in Germany. And then I read on the newspaper, if you like to go in Australia or Canada – you don’t have to pay nothing. The ticket was free. So in the year 1967, September, when I was twenty-six and a half, I prefer to come in Australia. Maybe this was the mistake I done.’ He uttered a tiny, soft laugh. ‘The biggest mistake of my life.

  ‘After one week I got a job as fitter in railway station in Redfern. Time to see around. Sydney was beautiful. Then I change the job. I come here in Newcastle. On New Year’s Day 1968, I been away to make some money so I can marry. I been in Western Australia for six months, and coming back to get married and start a family.

  ‘At that time I was the only one fitter which was coming from Europe. In the year ’69 they change all the inches in millimetric and I was on the top of everybody else.’ Again the small, quiet, modest laugh. ‘After all I wasn’t a bad fitter. They try me, I was good.

  ‘We try to grow a family, which we done. Every family suffer a little bit. Every family laugh, and every family enjoy, every family do things – but – never, never, never was I think anybody kill my son.

  ‘I had an accident with a car. I saw people die on the job – falling down – I see a bottle of oxygen – When we were working, something can drop down, sometime wedges, sometime hammer, sometime a piece of steel. Anything can happen, and people get hurt.’

  His voice dropped to an incredulous whisper. ‘But you never – you think your family safe at home!

  ‘You try to send your son into school, to change job – to don’t do what you are doing, because you know your job is danger. You send your kids to school, to university. You suffer your life to help your sons.

  ‘And then somebody else come in – a girl – and kill your son for nothing. Wasn’t an accident. Was nothing burning. Was nothing in work. Just – she enjoy to kill my son.’

  He laughed again, soft and ironic; he let out one of his shattering coughs, then took in a gasp of air and expelled it in a long, faint whi
stle.

  ‘I think everything you can repair. But this – you can’t do nothing – when you see your son dead and you can’t help him. It’s something which – I – I can’t forget.’

  From the bench his wife began to speak over her shoulder: the microphone picked up her words but the distance hollowed them. ‘Nino one thing he always –’

  But under her gush of confident, more fluent English, Mr Cinque lowered his voice and persevered, in a repeated whisper of disbelief: ‘I can’t forget. I can’t forget.’

  PART FOUR

  Anu Singh had been found guilty of manslaughter, but two months passed before her sentencing hearing was held. On that day, 21 June, I flew to Canberra and ran into D-C Hains outside the Supreme Court, lighting a cigarette in the lee of the building. He was the sort of man who, when shaking hands, kept his elbow bent so you had to stand quite close to him.

  ‘She could get as little as three years, you know,’ he said. ‘She’s already been on remand for six hundred and three days. She could be out in a year from now.’

  My jaw dropped and he laughed, then pulled himself up. ‘Anyway it won’t happen today,’ he said. ‘This is only a hearing. We’re gonna hear more stuff. Another psychiatrist, and a parole officer.’

  At that moment Anthony Cinque wandered up, in a loose dark jacket and sunglasses, smoking. There was something heart-stabbing in his smile. He was thin, wasted as if from within. He and Hains exchanged curt manly syllables.

  ‘Is she really only gonna get three years?’ asked Anthony.

  ‘Mate. Mate,’ said Hains quietly. ‘Mate, you gotta keep cool in there. It’s best for your family. Best for your parents.’

  ‘I’m worried about Dad,’ said Anthony.