Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  Under her flailing sarcasm I began to panic. Nothing I could think of to say or do would ever be of any use to her. I was helpless, only a vessel into which she would pour forever this terrible low fast stream of anguish. The pressure of her pain was intolerable. I would give way under it. I too would fail her. I did not know how to bring the phone call to an end. But then she got a grip on herself. Once more she drew on her deep reserves of formal grace, and let me off the hook. We would see each other – yes, we would meet again in Canberra. I asked her to give Nino my best wishes, and offered the same to her. With dignity she accepted my timid crumbs. We said goodbye. I hung up, exhausted, in awe. I longed to know her, but I was afraid that I would not be strong enough.

  PART SEVEN

  I flew to Canberra on the evening of 23 November 1999. The plane was almost empty. A silent taxi driver took me into town. We sped along the dark, quiet streets under a raving moon. Dry air rushed in through the open window. Where would Madhavi Rao spend this perfect summer night? When your murder trial starts, do you just stay in a hotel? Would her family be with her? Would she have to take a pill to go to sleep?

  The small dark girl in the outsize cotton jumper, who might have saved Joe Cinque. Tomorrow I would see her for the first time.

  When I walked into the court at five to ten, Rao was sitting by herself on a chair near the bar table. She was so tiny, in her cream trouser suit and black loafers, her spectacles and neat haircut, that one could almost have missed her. Like the sweater in the police video, her suit looked too big for her: she resembled a child in adult’s clothing. She wore no make-up. She sat still with her hands in her lap and her feet squarely planted. She was not in custody and her status showed in her demeanour: she seemed ordinary, as quietly respectful and patient as any onlooker. She was alert to the minor dramas that unrolled in the court before the judge arrived, while counsel settled themselves. When a loud-voiced sheriff barged in and started throwing her weight around about note-taking, mobile phones and the wearing of sunglasses, Rao turned on her chair like the rest of us to see what the fuss was about. Beside her on the floor she had placed a large, flat-based, brown leather shoulder-bag. It looked brand-new. Its straps stood vertical in a stiff double curve, like things frozen in motion.

  The housekeeping part of the proceedings had begun two days earlier. I bailed up one of my two young journalists, who hissed to me a rapid précis of what I had missed. On Monday Rao had pleaded not guilty to all four charges: murder, unlawful and felonious slaying, attempted murder and administering a stupefying drug. To speed the whole thing up, many of the original witnesses from the aborted jury trial would not be called again: the judge had spent Tuesday in his chambers rereading the relevant evidence in transcript. Judge and jury, despite Mrs Cinque’s hopes, were to be combined once more in the person of Justice Crispin.

  Once he strode in, things went with a swing.

  The Crown called its first witness, ‘Mr T’, the man who had sold to Anu Singh, and loaded into syringes for her, the heroin that was to kill Joe Cinque. I had imagined someone sleazy, but the young man who stepped on to the stand looked serious, even severe. He must rue the day he let his fellow-students Singh and Rao cross his threshold; but he was now a law clerk, which meant, I supposed, that the immunity from prosecution he had been granted had worked its magic, and that he had been admitted to the next stage in the process of becoming a lawyer. He was tall and slender, pale, thin-faced, with dark eyes and hair, and dressed in a suit, blue shirt and maroon tie. On his right hand he wore a silver ring.

  In early August 1997, he said, Anu Singh came to his flat with Madhavi Rao. Singh confided in him about her ipecac symptoms and suicide plans, and asked him to help her get hold of a gun. Mr T’s attempts to console Singh in her troubles, and his mention of his own dark times and suicide attempt, rolled right off her back. He had no idea if she really had the money to buy a gun, and he didn’t care either way: he thought it was ‘too silly for words’. A few days later she changed tack and asked him to explain the mechanism of a lethal heroin overdose.

  ‘I said it was very easy to overdose and die,’ said Mr T. ‘I told her how long it would take. She – or a person – would stop breathing fairly instantly and be dead in a number of minutes. She asked how much heroin would be needed. I told her fifty to a hundred dollars’ worth, for someone who wasn’t an addict. She said, “I don’t have the money now, but when I do, I’d like to get some.” ’

  Around this time Mr T had bumped into Madhavi Rao in a lecture hall. She said to him, ‘Don’t worry about Anu. I don’t think she’ll go through with getting the heroin.’ A week or so after that, Anu Singh called him. She had the money, and wanted to buy half a gram. ‘I said, “I can arrange that – come around.” ’

  The two women turned up at his place with $250. He went ‘elsewhere’ and scored half a gram. Then, at his dining room table, he showed them how to prepare a hit. ‘I mixed it in a spoon with water,’ he said, ‘showing and explaining what I was doing.’ After he had injected himself – ‘because that would have been the first thing on my mind,’ he added, with what could have been either hip irony or the harsh self-contempt of the reformed junkie – ‘they said they wanted to have some too. I injected Anu first, then Madhavi. I used the same syringe. Madhavi said, “That’s nice.” ’

  Mr T raised his eyebrows in a wry grimace. But his lesson, I thought, must have gone in one ear and out the other; only weeks later, the women had applied to Jonathan Bowers-Taylor for a refresher course in the use of the needle.

  In October 1997, Anu Singh showed up at Mr T’s flat with $500, wanting to buy a full gram. He went off and scored two half-weights, injected a small amount into her, then at her request loaded the balance of it into two syringes. ‘I asked her why she wanted so much, and in two syringes.’ Mr T sighed. He spread his hands on his thighs. His face was white and tense. ‘She said, “Someone’s coming with me.” I said, “What! You mean someone wants to commit suicide with you? Who?” We both said, at the same time, that I didn’t need to know who.’

  And then Mr T’s last sighting of Anu Singh, on the day Joe Cinque died: the Sunday morning visitor in the long white dress with $250 in her hand, her purchase of another half-weight, her grand statement, ‘Today’s the day’, his replying, ‘Don’t be ridiculous’, and her flurried departure with the loaded syringe.

  Madhavi Rao’s counsel, Lex Lasry QC, was a big fair solid fellow with a tanned face, who wore his wig tilted forward over his brow. Cross-examining, he stressed that at the time in question Mr T was using fifty to a hundred dollars’ worth of heroin a day, and suggested that his addiction must have affected his memory as well as his judgement. Mr T kept trying to protest this point, but Lasry repeatedly squashed him: ‘Your job is to sit there and answer questions.’

  Mr T subsided with a twist of the mouth and a sigh, and resumed his laconic manner. Yes, Anu Singh had been the instigator of the whole business with the heroin. Madhavi Rao was plainly not an addict. Even after such a small taste, she ‘tried to stand up and fell over’. Mr T believed Anu Singh was using the heroin ‘for pain relief and enjoyment’. He never thought she would commit suicide. ‘I didn’t believe she’d go through with it,’ he said. ‘I didn’t believe a word of it.’

  And indeed, I thought, in his hard-eyed way he had read Singh correctly. As for how he had read Madhavi Rao, nobody really asked him, and he did not say. She was hardly even present, in his account. Anu Singh might have been sent to gaol, but she was still right up front, in full colour, playing the lead. Rao was the blur behind her.

  During the morning break, Madhavi Rao wandered at large in the Supreme Court hallway. She appeared to be quite alone, except for a tall, kindly-looking woman in her forties whom I took to be her counsel’s solicitor and who occasionally hovered near her in the lobby. I could not get used to the fact that Rao could go, for example, to the public toilet unescorted. When she brushed past me in the doorway, I glanced down at her – sh
e must have been barely five feet tall – and saw her smooth face, her small pearl earrings, her thick cap of dark hair, the fine gold sides of her glasses. Her uncoloured mouth was closed without strain. I was struck by her self-possession. Anu Singh had been instantly recognisable as that classic type, the sex bomb round whom the air crackles with an agitating static, but Rao was a different proposition altogether. She was closed and quiet. I could not read her.

  She sat down on a bench in the lobby. A young man with cropped hair and an earring, dressed in a baggy green T-shirt and flares with embroidered hems, wandered in through the glass doors and strolled up to her.

  ‘G’day, Madhavi!’ he said with a tentative cheerfulness.

  She glanced up and smiled at him.

  He moved closer. ‘How you goin’?’

  ‘You’re a witness,’ she said in a clear, carrying voice. ‘I’m not allowed to talk to you.’

  His face faded. ‘I just wanted to make sure you . . .’

  She lowered her eyes, and he drifted away.

  Madhavi Rao at university had had plenty of ordinary friends. The next Crown witness, Rebecca Lord, was one who had been close to her: a slender, bright-faced girl whose ponytail and leotard-like black top gave her the look of a dancer. Like many other peripheral characters in this story, she claimed to have expressed real concern about Madhavi Rao’s passivity towards her devouring friend Anu Singh. Madhavi, she said, was always taking Singh here and there, looking out for her, even being called by Singh’s mother about Anu’s problems.

  ‘I told Madhavi,’ said Rebecca Lord, ‘that Anu was exerting a lot of pressure on her – that she should tell Anu to back off.’ Madhavi tried, but Anu didn’t listen: she just kept coming round.

  Rebecca had no time for Singh. She spoke about her with a wary distaste. When Singh big-noted in her presence about the heroin she was going to buy, Rebecca warned her: ‘You’re going into the dark.’ Madhavi had told Rebecca that Anu was planning to kill herself, and that she was going to throw a send-off party before she did it. One of Madhavi’s tasks, in preparation for the Monday night dinner, was to get hold of some syringes from a chemist.

  ‘Why are you doing all this?’ Rebecca asked her.

  Madhavi explained to her Anu’s reasons for wanting to die. She added that Anu was upset because Joe didn’t trust her ‘fidelity-wise’, and that Anu was angry with Joe because he had been the one to break up her relationship with her previous boyfriend, Simon Walsh.

  By this time, Rebecca had made it very clear to Madhavi that she wanted nothing to do with Anu Singh’s ‘last night on earth party’.

  On Saturday 25 October, the night before Joe Cinque died, Madhavi Rao had arranged to go with Rebecca and Olivia Pipitone to the Art School Ball. The three women were supposed to get dressed for the ball at Madhavi’s place in Condamine Street, but when Rebecca arrived there with her outfit, Madhavi wasn’t home. Rebecca hunted her down by phone, and located her at Anu and Joe’s place. Eventually Madhavi rushed home, distracted and odd. She advised Rebecca and Olivia to forget all the things she had told them about Anu; she said she didn’t want to get them into trouble. The three friends got dressed and took a taxi to a nightclub in Civic called Heaven, where they stayed till about eleven-thirty, then walked to the Art School where the ball was in progress.

  Rebecca saw Madhavi on and off throughout the evening, and occasionally greeted her in passing. Sometime after midnight she noticed Madhavi sitting on the floor, looking upset. She went to her. Madhavi told her that when she had been at Antill Street earlier in the evening, before she had come home to dress for the ball, everything between Anu and Joe had seemed to be resolved – but that Anu had suddenly turned on her, and accused her of having put something in Joe’s drink.

  ‘Something’s not right with her,’ said Rebecca. ‘If she doesn’t trust you, her best friend, there’s nothing you can do to help her any more. You should call her parents.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Madhavi. ‘She’d come after me.’

  ‘Go to the police, then,’ said Rebecca. ‘They might be able to take out a restraining order or something.’

  The friends stayed at the ball till ‘around dawnish’. Soon after that the group dropped Madhavi Rao at home in Condamine Street.

  Rebecca Lord was a Crown witness, but even so, like almost everyone else, she didn’t have a bad word to say about Madhavi Rao. Indeed, under cross-examination she willingly drew a very affectionate picture of the accused. She was fun-loving, said Lord, and always available to help – in fact she would go out of her way to help people. She had some difficulty in standing up for herself, but she was warm, she was ‘deeply caring’, not at all the sort of person who would be interested in doing harm to anyone. The time she spent with Anu Singh caused her a good deal of annoyance, and she had tried many times to break away from her. Anu overwhelmed her, but Madhavi felt an obligation to help Anu if she could, specially regarding her physiological complaints, which Rebecca herself, however, was ‘dubious about’. Rebecca considered Anu Singh to be ‘a very manipulative person who put on shows’. Her talk about buying heroin had struck Lord as ‘a bit of a production’. Madhavi, however, had persisted in trying to be helpful: she did things like taking Anu to yoga, though Anu had told Rebecca on the phone one day that yoga was ‘a lot of crap’.

  The lady who lived next door to 79 Antill Street was a retired public servant called Ms Josephine McLaughlin. This witness recalled that in January 1997 new tenants had moved into the adjacent townhouse, and that one of them had been ‘an Indian girl’ with ‘her hair on top of her head’. Ms McLaughlin had had little to do with her neighbours, apart from saying hullo, but she had sometimes been able to hear their conversation, specially at night when both houses had their windows open. On one occasion, perhaps three weeks before Sunday 26 October, the day Joe Cinque was killed, she had heard raised voices from next door – ‘yes, but not a nasty raised voice’: usually when she heard her neighbours they were happy and laughing.

  Ms McLaughlin had been woken early in the morning of that Sunday by the sound of a car being started very close to her fence. The previous night had been the change-over to daylight saving: was she absolutely certain about the time? ‘I’ve got thirteen clocks in my lounge room,’ said Ms McLaughlin stoutly, ‘and I adjusted every single one.’

  Dismissed, she marched out of the court in her black suede heels and loose striped pyjama suit, her brows pinched in an efficient frown.

  Now the Crown called Wholly High Dunstan, another skinny little Audrey Hepburn figure in a black top, with her dark hair in a ponytail, and clear, glowing ivory skin. In one of those tiny, creaky, nasal modern voices, she told the court how Madhavi Rao had moved into her share house, in Condamine Street, Turner, and taken the room closest to the front door. The household phone was kept in the hallway of the house. Once Madhavi moved in, however, it began to ring at about seven every morning and continued through the day and into the night. The frequency of the calls, which were more often than not from Anu Singh, drove the other residents crazy, so eventually the phone was moved into Madhavi’s room each night and left there till morning.

  Towards midnight on Saturday 25 October, Wholly Dunstan saw Madhavi Rao at the Art School Ball. Because she was concerned about Madhavi’s relationship with Anu, she asked Rao if she was all right, and ‘told her to knuckle down and study hard’.

  Wholly came home from the ball well after sunrise on the Sunday morning. As she came down the hill towards the Condamine Street house, she saw Anu’s car parked at a dangerous angle on the road in front of the house. Madhavi was standing on the porch, and Anu was walking towards the car, wearing an off-white empire-line dress.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the judge, ‘what is an “empire line”?’

  Eagerly Wholly Dunstan turned to him to describe it – something the young woman knew more about than any of these men. Making illustrative gestures at her own torso, she said, ‘It’s where the sort of waist of th
e dress is up here, and it goes up and out.’

  ‘Jane Austen’s heroines were fond of wearing them, as I recall,’ said Mr Golding, ‘if your Honour pleases.’

  ‘I’m afraid my experience with heroines has been somewhat limited,’ said Justice Crispin, ‘but I will defer to your obviously greater experience in life.’

  Wholly Dunstan agreed, under cross-examination by Mr Lasry, that whereas she and her friends tended to go out to clubs, the people in the social group Madhavi shared with Anu Singh were in the habit of going to dinner parties at each other’s houses. She described Madhavi Rao as gentle, concerned at all times to make other people happy; maternal, open, caring, occasionally talking round in circles; and ‘very giving’. Being nice meant that Madhavi was popular, but it also meant she had a lot of crazy friends – like the obsessed and peculiar Anu, who constantly dominated her time. In fact, Madhavi had expressed envy of Wholly Dunstan’s ability to confront people over some domestic issue: ‘I wish I could stand up to people,’ she had said to Wholly, ‘the way you do.’

  Madhavi Rao, said Dunstan, was ‘in the nicest possible way someone who couldn’t plan her way out of a paper bag’. Here even the judge laughed. The witness, emboldened by his human response, risked an unsolicited comment. ‘Oh,’ she said, fluttering her hands round her face, ‘I think this whole idea of her being the mastermind is very far-fetched. She was scatty. She gave too much of her time to other people.’

  Several other witnesses, young men coming home at dawn on the Sunday from the Art School Ball, had seen Madhavi Rao and Anu Singh in the street outside the Condamine Street house at about six-thirty a.m., looking ‘pretty strange’ and behaving as if they had quarrelled. The bloke in the embroidered flares whom Madhavi Rao had rebuffed in the Supreme Court lobby said he got back to Condamine Street at about two a.m. and stayed the night with his girlfriend, who lived there; from ‘sun-up’ on, he had heard the phone ring several times, but had not bothered to answer it till after eleven-thirty a.m., when his girlfriend had left for work. When he did answer it, at about noon, the caller was Anu Singh. She asked if Madhavi was there. He thought she was, but because she had had ‘a big night out’, he told Anu that she wasn’t. Ten minutes later she rang again, and again he protected Madhavi by saying she wasn’t there. At some time during the afternoon he met Madhavi in the Condamine Street kitchen. ‘She looked like she just got outa bed. I told her there’d been a call from Anu. She said, “If Anu calls again, let me know – I’ve got to ask her sumpthin’.” ’