Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  What was the meaning of these neurotically frequent phone calls? Why didn’t they trust each other? The stereotype, of course, is the besotted lover who in his jealousy hounds the free-spirited woman, never letting her out of his sight, always checking up on her and demanding that she account for her movements. But I remembered Mrs Cinque talking about Anu Singh’s demeanour at the beautiful party her parents gave, six months before Joe was killed, and at which the Cinques had such a happy time: ‘Nino and I we comment later how she cling to Joe. Even with her relatives there, she didn’t leave him one minute alone all night.’ And, she added, ‘it was the same when they came up to visit us. No chance for us to speak alone with Joe. She was always with him.’ Which of them was the more possessive?

  When Mr Golding slashed Professor Mullen’s psychiatric report at Singh’s trial, he seemed to be stripping it of her descriptions of Joe. Tantalising fragments flew through the air: ‘fairly straight . . . materialistic but protective . . . inflamed by jealousy . . . with another man’. How I longed to read that report in its original state! Mullen had laughed charmingly as he was being censored – ‘All my best lines are going!’ – but he evened the score the very next day, under cross-examination, when he tossed into the ring his offhand remark, ‘To the extent that she was utterly terrified of this man . . .’

  Had I completely misread Joe Cinque? Was my gut feeling about him only an identification with the helpless, harmless dead? Had I been taken hostage by his parents’ suffering and love?

  Professor Mullen’s aside made it sound as if she had been intimidated by a violent brute. Yet everybody knew what she blamed Joe for: she had told anyone who would listen that it was the ipecac. Granted, her trial heard evidence that Singh had complained to a university counsellor, a month before she killed Joe, that he had hit her and ‘verbally abused’ her. She could not leave him, Singh told the counsellor, because she was rendered financially and emotionally dependent on him by her ‘medical condition’. But anybody who had sat through her trial would be tempted to see her approach to the counsellor as one more scene in the narcissistic melodrama she was staging. Nowhere else in any of the evidence does a witness breathe a single word about Joe’s having raised a hand to her. The suggestion that she was harbouring a terrible secret about domestic violence simply did not stack up.

  I walked back along Ainslie Avenue to my tiny hostel room, crept under the doona, and went to sleep. When I woke, night had fallen. I opened the window. The air outside was cold. The magpies had stopped singing. It was only six p.m.

  PART SIX

  At the end of August 1999, home again in Sydney, I called Dr Singh at his medical practice and told him I was interested in writing the story.

  ‘What sort of conclusion do you intend your book to have?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know, yet.’

  ‘Because whether this judge – Crispin – whether he’s put my daughter in prison for punishment or for treatment – I don’t know! I don’t know! Because why do you punish someone who’s sick? This girl is back to normal, now! She is back to normal! That Professor Hayes – she said my daughter was coming off drugs! If you are in professional bloody Behaviour medicine – God forbid you should treat someone! My daughter is much better now! She’s even looking after the other girls in there! And Helen – she is thinking of writing something herself! She says, “Dad, people in here, they shouldn’t be here! They don’t belong here! They don’t need here!” She is an intelligent girl! She’s not stupid! One girl is an arsonist! You know – burns things? And she’s getting no psychiatric treatment! Nothing! Because her parents can’t afford it! My daughter is getting psychotherapy! Once a week she is getting psychotherapy! Because I can afford! But these other girls – they get nothing! They are punished for being sick!

  ‘These people, though, Joe’s parents – they are still angry! They haven’t got over their grief! You saw the mother – she was angry! I don’t want to do anything that will hurt them even more!’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s very important.’

  ‘I’ll speak to my daughter. I’ll ask her if she will have a chat with you! You know, I think that being in gaol may even improve her! Perhaps the guilt will die out in her! I have a feeling she will become a normal person!’

  I phoned him again several days later, as we had arranged. He invited me to come to their house on the following Tuesday. ‘My wife will also be there. We will sit down and have a chit-chat. I have not yet made up my mind. I want to know what your ideas are and how you are going to tackle such a book. And it all depends on whether my daughter agrees.’

  On the appointed spring afternoon I took a train out to their suburb. I was early, and loitered for a while in the station shopping centre, which had a marked Asian flavour. In one shop I bought a white china bowl patterned with blue twining leaves in a vaguely oriental style. Later when I turned it over and examined the base, I saw a couple of squiggles that looked Chinese; but to this day I persist in thinking of it as Indian, and as an accidental memento of my first real contact with the Singhs.

  I had never been to that part of Sydney before. Three things about it surprised me: first, its old, established, bourgeois solidity; next, its splendid trees; and third, the fact that its wide streets were full of Indian and Southeast Asian people on foot – not strolling or taking exercise for the sake of it, as one would see morning and evening in the suburbs where I lived, but carrying shopping, walking fast and purposefully towards a destination. I too walked, along leafy streets studded with the odd grand old mansion, from the station to the Singhs’ Federation house.

  The two doctors welcomed me into an agreeably furnished living room. They were a good-looking middle-class couple, with the gloss of their profession on them. They called me by my first name, but gave no guidance as to how I should address them. Mrs Singh was a quiet-mannered woman, curvy and warm. She wore jeans and heeled boots, and her thick hair was cut shortish, but her presence was intensely feminine: her black mohair top was discreetly appliquéd with sparkles, and she had knotted a little scarf round her neck, 1950s style. Her face was serious, shadowed perhaps by years of sadness. Her husband, in a sweater, wool trousers and black lace-ups, wore a gold Sikh bangle on one wrist. He was a big man, spontaneous and outgoing, with a heavy, forceful energy.

  While Mrs Singh was out of the room getting tea, Dr Singh dived in at the deep end. He told me that on one of his visits to their house Joe had said, in front of his daughter, ‘Dr Singh – if Anu died I’d want to die with her.’

  ‘He meant to tell me how much he loved her – but I took him aside. I said, “Listen, Joe – you must not mention dying in front of Anu! She has talked about suicide!” ’

  Mrs Singh returned with a tray and invited me to sit on the sofa. She and I drank tea, but Dr Singh could not seem to settle. He crossed the room to a small table against the wall behind me. I could hear the clink of glass. Still out of my eye-line, he suddenly burst out, ‘Is there anything in this for us?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘Any money? If it should be a best-seller?’ He came back to the other sofa with a glass of scotch in his hand and sat down, planting his feet on the pale green rug.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I make a living as a freelance journalist. This book could take me years to write. I don’t want to get an advance from a publisher, in case I find I can’t make it into the book I want.’

  ‘We could do the book together.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like that,’ I said nervously.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I wouldn’t be independent.’

  He began to question me with a gusty intensity on what I planned to write.

  ‘What I want to do,’ I said, surprising myself, for until that moment I had not managed to articulate it, even in my thoughts, ‘is to enlarge my imagination to the point where it can encompass truths as widely separated as your version of events and the Cinques’.’

 
Mrs Singh, who had been listening to this with courteous attention, nodded and brightened, as if she had readily grasped what I meant. She caught my eye with a flash of intelligence and opened her mouth to speak, but her husband cut across her and declared roundly, ‘You must tell the truth! The main character is my daughter!’

  Mrs Singh subsided and so did I. I sat quietly, meeting his eye, while he spoke with vigour and at some length about how sick Anu had got, and how he and his wife had tried so hard to get help for her. Mrs Singh told me, having to sustain her line of thought against his excitable interruptions, that when she had called the Dean of the ANU law school to ask whether her daughter was going to class and handing in her work, the Dean had replied that since Anu was an adult, he could not report on or discuss her progress with Mrs Singh. We all agreed that, whatever the law said about the rights of adulthood, this was ridiculous.

  They had become so concerned about Anu’s state, Mrs Singh went on, that they had made an application to have her hospitalised against her will. The application had to be heard by a magistrate, however, and before the process could take place, Anu had killed Joe – or, as Mrs Singh put it, ‘this thing happened’.

  In the remand centre, no psychiatric treatment had been provided. Her parents tried to bail her out. Their application was refused. They considered making a second application, but decided not to, since they both had to keep working, and thus could not give her at home the twenty-four-hour care she needed.

  ‘And I think she was always a headstrong girl?’ I said.

  ‘Always,’ said Dr Singh. ‘Always.’

  So they engaged and paid for the psychiatrist who treated her in Belconnen Remand Centre, Dr Fatma Lowden. Otherwise, said Dr Singh, she would have had no treatment at all ‘for her psychosis’.

  ‘She is studying now,’ he said. ‘She is about to sit her final exams.’

  ‘Will she still be able to practise law, though?’ I said. ‘With a criminal conviction?’

  Dr Singh sprang to his feet. He propped one elbow on the mantelpiece above the empty fireplace, and rapped at the air with the forefinger of his hand not holding the glass of scotch. ‘She will! She must!’ he said loudly. ‘I will see to it! If she is not allowed, I will take it all the way to Human Rights! When she’s served her time, she must not be punished further! That’s discrimination! I will fight it!’

  Mrs Singh said nothing. Her eyes seemed to darken. There was a pause.

  ‘Which of her friends from university is she still in touch with?’ I asked.

  ‘None,’ said her father.

  I was surprised. ‘Not a single one?’

  ‘No. You see, Helen, to her now they don’t seem very mature.’

  ‘That’s one question I would like to find an answer for,’ I said. ‘Her so-called friends. Why didn’t they do something, when she started obsessively talking about suicide – let alone murder?’

  Dr Singh did not reply to this, but raised his eyebrows, looked me right in the eye and held out one hand in a palm-up gesture.

  They asked me if I was going to talk to Joe’s family.

  ‘I’ve already spoken to them.’

  ‘That poor woman,’ said Dr Singh, ‘is still very angry! But what can you do?’

  ‘I suppose,’ I said carefully, ‘they will be angry forever. Their family is smashed. Joe’s brother is terribly wounded.’

  They nodded. They did not appear to be offended. We sat for a moment without speaking. Then Mrs Singh sighed.

  ‘We loved Joe,’ she said. ‘They had a marriage account. They put money into “Anu and Joe’s Marriage Account”.’ Her face had become bleak, filled with a pained darkness.

  I suddenly recalled having glimpsed, at the Cinques’ house when they were shuffling through a folder of documents they wanted to show me, a letter that Mrs Singh had written to them after Joe died. They flipped past it in their search, pausing only to identify its writer, but in that one flash I had seen the strickenness of the handwriting, the way each line started level then plunged as it approached the right margin, as if the hand pushing the pen were barely able to keep moving under its load.

  Someone knocked at the front door. It was a maths tutor for Anu Singh’s younger brother: we must vacate the room. As her parents led me through a modern kitchen and into a small TV lounge lined with books, they spoke about Anu’s amazing ability to do brilliantly in exams with a bare minimum of study. ‘She could look at one page,’ said Mrs Singh, ‘run her eye down it, and know it by heart. She has a photographic memory.’ In any other circumstance I might have quoted a deflating (and haunting) remark that my grandfather had made to me when I was a bright and bouncy schoolgirl: ‘You are quick on the uptake, my girl, but that is not enough.’

  The phone rang in another room. Dr Singh went out to answer it and returned to tell his wife the call was for her. Mrs Singh hurried off. While she was away, Dr Singh said, ‘It’s Anu. We haven’t told her you’re here. We don’t want to upset her, or worry her. She is doing her exams soon.’

  He explained that his daughter was in Mulawa, the women’s section of Silverwater gaol, a mere five-minute drive from their house. This information, and the fact that she could casually call home, stunned me. I sat in silence, sunk in the leathery depths of an armchair, until Mrs Singh returned.

  The couple remained standing, leaning against bookshelves, plainly waiting for me to leave.

  ‘Anu has the job of librarian at the gaol,’ said Mrs Singh. ‘She’s teaching an Aboriginal girl to read and write. One hour a day.’

  ‘Shouldn’t they have tutors?’

  ‘They have tutors,’ said Dr Singh. ‘But the girl wouldn’t ask them for help.’

  ‘She came to Anu and asked her,’ said Mrs Singh. ‘She said “Because you’re Indian”. She wouldn’t ask anyone who was . . .’

  The word white hung in the room, unspoken.

  The Singhs were due at a medical meeting in Liverpool. They kindly offered to drive me to my train. Because her husband had drunk two scotches while we talked, Mrs Singh took the wheel, and off we went in a softly rumbling, high 4WD. They delivered me to the station. We said goodbye. It was already dark. A train came and I got on it. In my carriage several crazy-looking, stupefied people sat slumped in their seats. All the way to Central a small, wiry, tattooed fellow paced up and down the aisles, foully raging and cursing, trying to pick a fight. The other men ignored him, but the air in the carriage hummed with fear.

  Thinking next day, in a troubled way, about Dr Singh’s unqualified backing of his daughter, I remembered one of my sisters telling me about a conversation she had had, years before, with our mother. ‘Mum said, “You can always come to me and Dad, you know, if you’re ever in trouble. We’ll always help you – unless, of course, you’ve done something really bad. Like murdering someone.” ’

  We both laughed; it was typical of Mum, a diffident woman, to make a splendid offer then hedge it round with conditions.

  ‘I said thanks and everything,’ my sister went on, ‘but actually I was furious. I was thinking, Wouldn’t that be when I’d really need help?’

  I related these things to my close friend, a Jewish mother of three. Perhaps I meant to amuse her, but she didn’t laugh. She looked at me seriously. ‘The world ends,’ she said, ‘at your children’s skin.’

  In early October 1999 Maria Cinque called to tell me she was back from Italy. She gave me a rapid account of the ankle operation she had undergone in a Bologna clinic, another attempt to repair the botched surgery she had had in Australia after the car smash twenty years earlier. The surgeon had found a small piece of bone pressing against a nerve, and removed it: she was hopeful.

  I asked after Anthony.

  ‘No good. He come to Italy with me, he come back, Nino kick him out, I don’t know where he is. I hope he’s gonna get over this and have some sort of life.’

  She asked me if I had interviewed her, if I’d visited her in prison, if I’d seen her parents. I replied th
at I had been to the Singhs’ house to discuss with them the possibility of an interview with their daughter, but that they didn’t want to ask her till she had finished her exams.

  ‘So,’ said Maria Cinque bitterly. ‘She’s gonna do her exams, is she. She gonna be a lawyer over my dead body. She ruin my family. My son is dead – who cares. I’m a very angry person at the moment. They can go on with their life, but my life is shit, if you’ll excuse the language. I’m gonna make trouble for them. If I ever see her walking down the street I’m gonna –’

  ‘What?’ I said anxiously. ‘What are you going to do?’

  She forged onwards, in a voice dark with irony. ‘If there’s no justice,’ she said, ‘you gotta make your own justice, eh?’

  ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘If she can kill an innocent person and get only ten years because she’s not sane, why can’t I? Do you think I’m sane, at the moment? Do you think I’m sane?’

  ‘Are your friends still around you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said impatiently. Then her voice thickened and weakened. ‘Two years ago he was here . . .’

  With horror I realised what month it was. ‘Oh – it’s almost – it’s coming up to the anniversary! No wonder you feel so terrible!’ I heard myself babbling and winced, expecting her to bite back savagely, as my widowed sister did: What do you mean? I feel terrible all the time. I don’t need an anniversary to feel terrible.

  But she only said, rehearsing the precious fact, ‘Two years ago he was here, he stayed the weekend . . .’

  I could hear her slightly accelerated breathing. There was a pause. I asked her if they would be going to Canberra in November for Madhavi Rao’s trial.

  ‘Of course we’ll be there,’ she said. ‘Of course we will. She’s gonna talk, we’re gonna find out more things. They’re gonna do it with judge alone too. We hope we get another judge because we hate that one. He’s a bastard. I’m very angry. I’m angry. Singh’s probably got her degree by now. I saw on TV last week the thing about the women’s gaol. It’s a hard life they have there, eh. A little room, a TV, a computer – yeah, a very hard life, isn’t it.’