Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  Thus, when a young prosecutor laid before me the transcript of the Singh/Rao committal, I opened the sky-blue folder and found a document of raw human richness, clanging with artless voices, shot through with colour and marked by a sort of fabulous crudity. The proceedings are slowed down by Mr Pappas’s need to keep taking notes – ‘Your Worship, I am not a writing machine!’ – but they are also a showcase for his old-fashioned glorying in the performance of it all. ‘Madam,’ he says, ‘let me beg to differ . . . I am growing old at the bar table while my learned friend . . . Let us not exhaust your memory so quickly . . . If you’d be so kind . . .’

  Surly, resentful-sounding witnesses, certain of them distinguished by unabashed histories of drug use, affect a world-weary tone. ‘Okay,’ drawls one, when questioned about recreational drugs, ‘LSD, cocaine, speed, ecstasy. I’ve tried them all.’ Another remarks that he does not go to Garema Place to score after dark: ‘Canberra’s a very ghost town,’ he adds poetically, ‘when night hits.’ Others bandy words with Pappas and have their knuckles rapped for it: ‘You think you’ve made a joke, do you, sir? Is that why you’re laughing? Is that why you’re laughing?’

  One young man who unwisely attempts to spar with counsel is Jonathan Bowers-Taylor, an ex-squeeze and former housemate of Anu Singh’s, and the possessor of two bachelor degrees. A few days after the murder, he tells the committal, Anu Singh called him from the remand centre and asked him to look up and bring out to her ‘relevant High Court cases’, and cases on insanity. Bowers-Taylor is a peevish witness, insolent and evasive. He has to be asked countless times to stop mumbling and speak up. He comes the bounce with Pappas, who looses thunderbolts upon him. On his way out of the court at a morning tea break he calls Mr Adams, Rao’s counsel, ‘an imbecile’. When brought to heel he becomes aggrieved: ‘I felt like I was being harassed and nitpicked.’ He doesn’t enjoy giving evidence, he says: indeed, ‘the whole thing has been quite distasteful for me. I, as a young person, have a natural inclination not to dob in my friends.’

  Bowers-Taylor does, however, have at his fingertips a certain amount of information about the build-up to the events in question. I had read in his evidence at the jury trial, that in late September 1997 he gave Singh and Rao an injecting lesson using a water-filled syringe. He was also, some weeks later, asked by the women to unblock a syringe in which heroin had congealed. On Saturday 25 October, the evening before Joe Cinque died, Anu Singh called Bowers-Taylor as many as eight times. She was still phoning towards eleven o’clock at night, pestering him with questions about injecting: can’t you shoot up in your legs? Can you use the veins in the back of your arm?’ He was ‘terse’ with her, he says; she kept hanging up and dialling again; and she abruptly terminated one of the calls with the words, ‘I’ve got to go – that’s Joe moving around.’

  Bowers-Taylor’s live-in girlfriend, an erstwhile waitress by the name of Jasmin Kent, is another of those called to the witness stand. This young woman is also, as it happens, an ex of Mr T, the law student who scored the second dose of heroin for Anu Singh on the morning of Joe Cinque’s death. Kent seems unenthusiastic about being required to give evidence, and responds to Pappas’s questioning with reluctance. She tells the committal that Singh often used to ring up their house and talk about killing herself. ‘I told her that OD’ing from heroin was like an easy way to go, because I’d done that once. She said she couldn’t kill herself with heroin because of the social stigma attached to the Indian community, so that kind of killed that one.’

  When I traced Jasmin Kent through to the jury trial, I found that she had been present on the September day when Singh and Rao came over for their injecting lesson, bearing as a gift some Danish pastries. ‘They came to my house,’ Kent reports. ‘They brought me food. I asked, because I was starved. I was pretty happy about that. I said hello. I sat down and chatted to them. They were there because Jon was showing them how to shoot up. I wasn’t really listening to the conversation between Jon and Anu. I was kind of watching TV. I was eating. I wasn’t really switched on to it. Jon had a syringe. She put her arm out. He was showing her which vein to go in. He showed her how to draw back to get blood, that you should hit the vein. She was really squeamish. Jon would put the needle out and she’d go no, no, no. Like I said, I wasn’t switched on to it. I mean that’s what they came round to do.’

  Still later, Jasmin Kent tells the jury trial that she had discussed with Anu Singh a range of suicide methods: ‘Shooting herself. Overdosing. Running into a tree with a car.’ Kent articulates, in her bolshie way, a belief that seems to have been common among many of the young people in this extended social milieu, namely that if someone wants to kill herself, it is her inalienable right to do so and scant further inquiry is called for. ‘Well, if she was sick and she was dying,’ says Kent under cross-examination by Mr Pappas, ‘and she wanted to kill herself, that’s her business.’

  Several of the students who attended the Monday night dinner tell the court, in the jury trial, that they were informed ‘quite categorically’ by Madhavi Rao, as she drove them home afterwards, that ‘the suicide was going to happen that night’, and that she herself ‘had to help’. They asked her if they should call an ambulance, or get some help, but she told them not to. The three young men speak with fervour of their concern. ‘We took what was said to us extremely seriously,’ says one of them, ‘and we did not sleep that night.’ The whole thing seemed ‘so strange, like a joke or something – melodramatised, a little bit unreal’. They thought hard about whether or not it was their business. They tried to determine ‘what would constitute a good action, here’. They considered ringing the police. But in the end they ‘took the view that if she wanted to kill herself – and because she had deliberated this over a long period of time – it was the best action for us not to get involved’. If it had been her choice, adds one of them, ‘then it would have been okay by me’.

  How has it come about, this ready acceptance by people so young of the idea of suicide? Is it just mutinous rhetoric, or does it signal a new loss of heart, a collapse of shared meaning and hope? When I was twenty or so I was gripped by a novel called Bright Day, published just after World War II and written by J. B. Priestley, a writer who had gone out of fashion long before I ever heard of him. The only sentence from it that had stuck in my mind over the intervening forty years was its epigraph: ‘The bright day brings forth the adder.’ But now, when I went looking for a copy and reread it, I came across a pertinent observation: ‘As we grow older we are apt to forget that the despair of the young is even more gigantic and immediately overwhelming than their hopefulness: we never again face such towering blank walls of misery.’

  The video of Anu Singh’s charging at the police station, which I had seen in court and which, like the phone call to Bronwyn Cammack, had been decoded so variously by the psychiatrists, was not the only film this matter had produced. The police interviews with the two women had also been videotaped. In the DPP conference room I loaded the first cassette, dated 26 October, the day Joe Cinque died.

  It had been shot by a high, fixed camera in a room whose paintwork of crimson and intense blue seemed to have been chosen with film in mind. For a moment the soundtrack was drowned out by a coarse electronic buzz, and I found myself watching a mime show, dramatic in a primitive, frightening way, all gesture and posture and grimace; then the noise cleared and it became a comprehensible official record.

  Anu Singh sits at a bare table with three men in suits: D-C Harry Hains, a second detective, and her solicitor. Her long hair is up and she is wearing an ankle-length white dress with thin straps, in a silky synthetic material printed with tiny flowers. D-C Hains informs her of her rights. She replies in a light, low, ordinary voice: ‘Yep. Right. Yep.’ While Hains reads in a monotone from a sheet of paper, she keeps getting up and moving round the room in a fretful manner. Glancing down at herself, she notices that the skirt of her dress is stained with long streaks of black liquid. She fusses with it,
trying to fold it so as to cover the marks, and returns to her chair, but her veneer of self-command is breaking up. Hains intones the words ‘the death of Joe Cinque’. She lets out a stifled cry of protest, then states in a clear, measured voice, ‘I’m not comprehending death, yet.’ She springs to her feet. She paces and pants. She wanders to and fro in the small, brightly painted room. She covers her face with her hands, fiddles with her hair, grazes the wall with her shoulder. She drifts out of shot, then veers right up against the camera lens so that she looms into close-up, bringing to the scene a brief flash of cinematic life. The men ignore her as they would a distracted toddler. They begin to discuss her mental state and the risk of suicide. They negotiate among themselves in slow, formal voices, as if the young woman weren’t there, as if she weren’t brushing and rustling and bumping around the walls behind them like a moth in a lampshade.

  The second video, shot two days later, shows Madhavi Rao in the same setting. It was my first clear sighting of her image. I had imagined a plump, untidy, even motherly creature, but here she is, seated at the table in the coloured room with the two detectives and a different solicitor – and at first glance she could be mistaken for a ten-year-old boy. She is small and slight, soft-faced, without makeup. Her thick black hair is cut to ear-lobe level and lies in a smooth curve against the nape of her neck. She sits very still, with her forearms laid on the table. Only her fingertips peep out of the cuffs of an enormous, loose, cream cotton jumper. Her posture is attentive, like that of a co-operative pupil: listening, concentrating hard. But when the detective tells her he is going to charge her with murder, a jolt of energy straightens her spine. Her eyebrows go up. She asks him to repeat himself. He does so. On the table-top her forearms fly apart in a gesture of amazed innocence. One hand, palm up, stops at the first detective’s notebook, the other at the second’s. She freezes, mouth agape, pointing with each open hand at a notebook. Then she lets out a short harsh breath of indignation: ‘Hoh!’

  The detectives do not speak.

  ‘I tried,’ she gasps. ‘At every stage. To intercede –’

  The men caution her again. She subsides. She closes her mouth and rests her head on one hand. She is silent.

  What deep, deep trouble Rao was in! How much she knew, how little she did! I had read only that morning, in the transcript of Singh’s solo trial, how Mr Pappas and the two defence psychiatrists had strongly hinted that Rao ought to carry a certain degree of responsibility for Singh’s acts. A cold draught blew across my shoulders. Would she have to carry the can, the tiny, indignant girl swamped in her cotton sweater, spreading her hands to the detectives with a gasp of disbelief – this polite, vague, spineless creature who preached the saving power of yoga and meditation, who stepped over columns of ants? I wanted to turn back the clock, the calendar, to 19 October 1997 – to grab her by the arm, sling her into my car, hustle her back to the house for her stuff, talk right over her protests, drive like the wind to another city, enrol her in a different university, straighten her out, wake her up, get her away from voracious Anu Singh, her nemesis. Too late, too late. She was going to get more time than Singh because she wasn’t mad.

  But if the judge gave so much credence to the evidence of Anu Singh’s psychiatric disturbance and to the force of her delusions, where did he see them stop? Did he think of people as discrete bubbles floating past each other and sometimes colliding, or did he see them overlap, seep into each other’s lives, penetrate the fabric of each other?

  Where does one person’s influence end, and another’s responsibility begin?

  In The Silent Woman, her book about the way public opinion has always taken the part of the suicidal poet Sylvia Plath against her husband Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm makes the Freudian point that we side with the dead ‘because of our tie to them, our identification with them. Their helplessness, passivity, vulnerability is our own.’ Whatever the reason, I sided with Joe Cinque. I searched for him in all the documents. But every place where he should have been was blank, without scent or colour: a point where nothing resonated. His direct speech is rarely recorded. He is forever upstaged by Anu Singh. As the transcripts’ tapestry of versions unfolds, she kills him again and again. Attention always swings back to her: why she did it, what sort of person she is, what will become of her. She gets bigger, louder, brighter, while he keeps fading. He blurs. He sinks into the shadows and leaks away, until all that is left of him is his name, and the frozen, saintly lineaments of a victim.

  The famous twenty-minute 000 call enacts the whole tale in miniature. The foreground action is all Anu Singh’s: garish, loud, full of obsessive movement, jangling with her histrionics, her hysterical demands for reassurance, her towering sense of entitlement. She babbles, she swears, she invokes God, she invents a name and gives a false address. The ambulance dispatcher, as helpless as everyone else in the face of her antics, does his utmost to calm her, to get sense out of her. He tries to force a path through her flamboyant racket, but she is busy setting up a wall of sound behind which lies Joe Cinque on the messy bed in the upper room, quietly turning blue, quietly losing his pulse; then vomiting black muck, then choking on his vomit; then quietly dying.

  What was he like? What made him laugh? Was he grouchy or cheerful in the mornings? Did he use after-shave? What did he drink? Did he like to dance? Who did the washing? What football team did he follow? Why did he ‘love’ Anu Singh?

  Would he ever really have married her?

  Did he get on with Madhavi Rao, or were they rivals for Anu Singh’s attention? Did Anu play them off against each other? And what did her cool friends make of Joe? They were law students; he was a scientist, an engineer. Did he cut it with them socially? Did he care, or did he draw his sense of self from a different, deeper well?

  What were his friends like? What did they think of her? How did he manage, living so far away from them, and from his family?

  I raked over the transcripts for scraps. I picked them up and shook them, listening for echoes of his voice.

  Tanya Z— told the court that, after the dinner party on the Friday evening, people were standing around outside Joe and Anu’s house, talking about what to do with the rest of the night. Anu Singh said, ‘Maybe we can all go to the casino.’ And Joe said, ‘The women can dance and the men can gamble.’

  Anu Singh’s erstwhile best friend Rachel Fortunaso told the police, ‘I thought that Joe was a very nice person and he was obviously smitten with Anu. Anu however regularly put him down by telling me that he was not intelligent, and would make fun of him even if he was there. I recall one instance when Anu and Joe came up to Newcastle and joined myself and a friend for dinner. Joe said something and Anu nudged me and rolled her eyes, mocking what he had said. I thought this was cruel but Joe did not seem to react to these actions or comments from Anu. He appeared to be totally devoted to her.’

  Perhaps it was at the same dinner in Newcastle that the subject of ipecac first arose. Rachel Fortunaso had told the committal hearing that when Anu spoke about her weight, Joe said, ‘I’ve heard of a substance that models overseas use, called ipecac. Apparently it induces vomiting. It’s used to suppress appetite.’ Anu appeared very interested. ‘She said, “Can you tell me more about this?”And Joe said “No”.’ It wasn’t hard to imagine the way in which a man – certainly any man I have ever known – would mention such a drug and its misuse in the service of vanity: in a tone of incredulous disgust.

  Shortly after that Newcastle evening, Singh called Fortunaso to tell her she had got hold of some ipecac and was taking it. Sanjeeva Tennekoon, a chef who was at that time a house-mate of the couple, gave evidence in the jury trial that he had come home from work, towards the end of 1995, and seen Anu Singh ‘dry-retching’. She told him she had taken ipecac which, she said, Joe had brought her from Newcastle the previous weekend. ‘I took that bottle of ipecac,’ said Tennekoon, ‘and I threw it out.’ Four or five days later he found a new bottle on top of the fridge where Anu Singh’s colossal
array of medications was kept. ‘What’s ipecac doing up there?’ he asked. ‘I got Joe to bring it,’ said Singh. ‘Did you?’ he said to Joe. ‘Yeah.’ ‘Why did you bring it?’ ‘Because Anu wanted it.’

  Mr and Mrs Cinque, I knew, were enraged by this evidence. They refused to believe that their son, who never even took a Panadol for a headache, would have supplied someone else with such a stupidly damaging drug. To me, though, it fitted the overall picture of Anu Singh, and of other people’s helplessness before the force of her erratic will. I remembered the Crown psychiatrist Dr Diamond, with his analysis of the ceaseless drama Singh scripted and starred in, to make her collapsing life bearable. She could have walked down to a pharmacy at the local shopping centre and bought herself a bottle of ipecac over the counter; but instead, the ailing princess commands her lover to bring the potion to her, all the way from the provincial city. I thought about her well-attested ability to get her own way, to coax people to act against their better judgement and even their moral code. She could get her father, a doctor, to make an appointment for her with a liposuction specialist, even to pay a deposit, when by his own admission she was virtually a skeleton with skin hanging off her. This was a woman of formidable coercive powers.

  Sanjeeva Tennekoon told the jury trial that he and Joe went to the same gym, where they saw each other nearly every night. At the Friday night dinner party, Sanjeeva and Joe talked together at some length about Joe’s new car, and about holiday plans: Joe wanted to go to Queensland in January, and he and Sanjeeva were thinking of going to Melbourne in March for the Grand Prix. Tennekoon also told the court that Joe and Anu ‘used to call each other maybe sometimes about twelve to fifteen times a day’. There was no pattern, he said, as to who called whom.