Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  He sat down. The long Wednesday drew to a close. The court adjourned.

  I set out towards my hotel along the cool, white, terracotta-paved galleries that lead to Garema Place. Sickened by the ugly divide between morals and the law, I wanted to put my head on a pillow and escape into sleep. But as I trudged along, I couldn’t stop thinking about the authorities that the lawyers had been working through. There seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of these tales of human wretchedness. A pimp laid a coat over a dying junkie prostitute. A lone burglar, abandoned by his accomplice, dangled on a rope from a hole in a warehouse roof. A man climbed out a window and ran for help from a suicide pact gone wrong. Another stood by while his wife drowned their two children and then killed herself. A robber on his way with his mates to a break-and-enter threw up in the car and went home. Two sisters fled a house inside which their friends were finishing off a half-dead bikie with a baseball bat. How soiled the stories were, how lacking in the glow of meaning, or even the high sheen of ‘wickedness’. They oozed pathos and despair, a clumsy, sordid hopelessness. I couldn’t understand how the summer afternoon could smell so grassy and good, so ordinary; how the world outside the court could continue its benevolent progress. Invisible magpies warbled in the plane trees. Softly, gently, never running out of melodic ideas, they perched among the leaves and spun out their endless tales.

  It seemed to me, next morning, that Mr Golding, for the Crown, had the worst job in the world. He was wrestling with a cloud. To commit the crimes that she was charged with, Madhavi Rao would have needed to display energy, purpose, a certain agency. But this young woman, even when one looked across the court and saw her sitting there on her padded chrome chair, never seemed quite to inhabit the story. She did not fill out the template. It was impossible to get her alleged behaviour into focus and keep it there. Once again, Anu Singh took up all the available air. No matter what witnesses said – and apart from Tanya Z—, not one of them had a bad word to say about her – Rao remained elusive. She was always in the background. She flickered in the corner of one’s eye: a phantom, the killer’s faithful, passive, earnest little shadow. How could Mr Golding make this moral wraith concrete?

  He did his level best, battling away with vigour in his husky, expressive voice. His arguments expanded my own confused ideas. On an emotional and psychological level they answered the seething disquiet I felt in the face of Rao’s failure to act. He drew on ordinary human concepts of decency. He emphasised the morbid atmosphere of that final week, its saturation with talk of death. He deplored the chilly abstractions that Lasry had used to relieve Rao of legal responsibility.

  Mrs Cinque sat in the front row with lowered face. Once she slapped her cheek with her open palm, and shook her head back and forth. Her husband in his good jacket sat beside her, occasionally coughing harshly.

  Golding fought to resurrect Tanya Z— from the demolition job Lasry had done on her. He insisted that her evidence should be seen in the light of the horror, disbelief and confusion she must have felt when Rao woke her on the Saturday morning and told her she had been involved in an attempt to murder Joe Cinque. Golding pointed out – and the judge agreed with him – that if the evidence given by every emotional and distraught young woman were to be evaluated as harshly as Lasry thought Tanya Z—’s should be, then ninety-nine per cent of rape and child sex charges would wind up being dismissed.

  But Lasry renewed his attack. Under his scalpel Tanya Z—’s testimony lost coherence and fell apart into many dubious strands. Its deepest weakness, he argued, showed in the long, long gaps between her bouts of memory. How come it had taken her eleven whole months after Joe Cinque’s death to remember this exchange, on which the Crown relied so heavily?

  Tanya Z—: ‘Did you know that Joe was supposed to go as well?’

  Rao: ‘Yes – that’s why I couldn’t look him in the eye when he was talking about the conspiracy book I’d lent him.’

  And if Tanya Z— had really believed Joe Cinque was going to be murdered, why didn’t she go straight to the police?

  Lasry had a high, clear, drastically simplifying approach that sliced through the entanglements of inaction and confusion. He made his points seem insultingly obvious, even while one’s blood ran cold at their disdain for the complex mess of human behaviour. Madhavi Rao sat quietly on her chair, listening hard. Her usually smooth brow was crimped with concentration.

  And as for Robin Mantoszko, the work-mate to whom Rao had made her weird, tantalising reports of the sinister dinner party – her evidence, too, Lasry swept loftily aside. Which night did Mantoszko think Rao was talking about? The Monday? How could it have been the Monday? Because, your Honour, nothing happened on the Monday night. Nothing happened on the Monday night.

  At this, Maria Cinque, who had been silently weeping for some minutes, struggled to her feet and limped to the door. She turned to make a cursory bow, then shouldered her way out of the court, muttering audibly, ‘Bullshit. Bullshit.’ Several people glanced up. The door swung shut behind her with a soft clunk.

  ‘Nobody was murdered,’ Lasry persisted, ‘and nobody was attempted to be murdered.’

  ‘How do we know that?’ asked Justice Crispin flatly. What about Cammack’s evidence? Hadn’t Rao told her that there had been an attempt to kill Joe Cinque on the Monday night?

  Just for a second, the wind went out of Lasry’s sails. ‘There is no charge,’ he said. ‘I am really saying it on the basis of what the evidence shows. I do not know what happened on the Monday night.’

  The submissions were completed by lunchtime. Justice Crispin adjourned the court till the following Friday. I went outside and stood helplessly in the lobby. One of the journalists came out behind me.

  ‘What happens now?’ I asked.

  ‘Crispin goes off and decides whether or not she’s got a case to answer. And if he does find there’s a case, that’s when the defence will launch itself.’ With an ironic grin and a shrug she shouldered her bag and headed back to her office.

  I called the airline. The earliest flight they could get me on left Canberra at nine p.m. Five hours to kill. I could either go to the movies or find a bar to drink in, by myself. The December day was hot, the dry, gusty wind was full of grit. I went wandering through Civic in search of a cool cinema.

  The following Friday I got to the Supreme Court at eleven a.m. The lobby was almost empty. Mrs Cinque was sitting on a bench outside the closed door of the courtroom. She looked smaller and more densely made-up. She greeted me. Nino was outside having a smoke. Maria didn’t know why nothing was happening. Neither of us could think of anything to say. We took it in turns to pace, to go outside, to pace again. The tension was awful. Towards twelve-thirty I went to the toilet. When I came out I found Maria Cinque gone and the court opened. I hurried down its shallow steps. There was hardly anyone in the public gallery: compared with Anu Singh’s trial, this one, with its endlessly droning legal arguments and lack of high drama, had attracted little attention. Madhavi Rao in a jacket and long skirt was sitting with her back to the gallery. Her feet were crossed to one side. Her stiff new bag straps were drooping now. The rear legs of her metal chair were positioned on the trapdoor lid.

  At twelve-thirty-four the tipstaff knocked and Justice Crispin hurried in. Without preamble, maintaining an impersonal distance, he read out his findings on the four counts: murder, felonious slaying, attempted murder, attempting to administer a stupefying drug.

  Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty.

  With each blow of the hammer the monstrous thing shrank. At the fourth stroke, it was gone. The case against the girl was not strong enough. The girl was free.

  I sat there with my teeth clenched and my knees squeezed tightly together. The judge had barely swished behind his grey-green velvet curtain before Maria Cinque’s voice broke out in a hoarse cry of pain.

  ‘What’s happening here? They kill my son!’

  Nino Cinque was on his feet, yelling like a worker at a st
rike meeting, his head forward and his finger stabbing the air. In a frenzy, Maria Cinque dashed her handbag against the seatback. ‘Corruption in the court! It’s wrong!’

  The bar table was a rigid tableau. Lasry and his junior, two tall men in wigs, sat half turned towards Nino Cinque where he raged behind them in the low gallery. Each barrister was twisted, one arm over the back of his chair and one long leg thrust out, frozen in the act of standing. The wild fury of Joe Cinque’s parents pinned them to their seats. The air was thick with abuse. The lawyers could not get through it to their small client, who sat with clasped hands motionless on her metal chair.

  Only after the Victim Liaison workers had once again helped the Cinques to limp from the court, trailing cries and curses, did Lasry’s instructing solicitor get to her feet and go to Madhavi Rao. Standing in front of the seated girl, she took hold of her head and, like a mother, pressed it against her own belly. Madhavi Rao let her weight go, leaned on the woman, and burst into sobs. Mr Lasry drifted towards the two women and stood a few paces away from them, staring absently into the distance and murmuring the mantra of a worn-out father to a weeping child. ‘It’s aaaaall over now. You won’t have to worry about it aaaaaaany more.’

  A tiny, slender man with glasses and greying hair, correctly attired in a dark blue suit, walked shyly into the well of the court. He could only be Madhavi Rao’s father – so self-effacing that until that instant I had not even noticed him. Trembling, he gripped the hands of the tall, fair-headed barrister in his robe and wig; then, wiping tears from under his glasses, he approached his daughter. She stood up and he enfolded her in a humble, almost timid hug, from the side, awkwardly, his head bowed lower than her shoulder.

  At the outer door of the court a thin, blonde, tough-looking sheriff was handing out copies of Crispin’s judgement. The stapled sheets she offered me from her folder were straight from the printer: I could feel their smooth mechanical heat. Did she hold my glance with a narrow look, or was I imagining it?

  I carried the judgement to a cafe on the colonnade, took a window table, and tried to read it. My eyes wouldn’t lock on to the print. All I could grasp was that the case the Crown had sought to make out against Madhavi Rao, though it was ‘stark and brutal’, had been circumstantial. Nothing could be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Justice Crispin had found hypotheses consistent with her innocence. There was a big, ragged hole between ethics and the law, a gap which only the legislature could close, and through it Lasry had masterfully steered the powerful vehicle of his defence.

  I sat there at the big window, stupefied, hollow. Across the road, beyond the carpark, I could see the black-robed barristers in twos and threes striding down the steps of the building, heading for lunch. The Supreme Court had finished at last with Joe Cinque. The public drama that had surrounded his death was over. There was nothing left to say. His parents would have to drive home now, all the way to Newcastle, hauling behind them the fact of their son’s murder, unsatisfied, unavenged. They would have to cram the huge foul beast into their house and cohabit with it for the rest of their lives.

  Later I heard that, at the Italian club in Canberra that evening, while he and his wife were having a meal, Mr Cinque collapsed. He was rushed to hospital. A large quantity of fluid was drained from around his heart.

  PART EIGHT

  The following week, I sent a letter to Madhavi Rao in care of Mr Lasry, asking if she would agree to an interview. Then I phoned Dr Singh at his Sydney clinic. He couldn’t speak to me right then, but took my number and promised to ring back. I waited for hours. He didn’t call.

  Weeks passed, Christmas, New Year. Now it was 2000. I called Dr Singh again.

  ‘We don’t want to open old wounds,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t matter what you do, Helen, but there’s nothing in it for us. It will only bring old traumas back – and for the other party too. I’ve heard the other party was very hurt when Madhavi went free.’

  ‘What do you think about that?’

  ‘I think they’re crying wolf,’ said Dr Singh. ‘I think Crispin made a very good decision. I always thought her dumb. You see Helen a lot of professional people they’re very clever but their lateral thinking is zero. Madhavi is one of these people. As far as I’m concerned she has no intelligence. I met her once or twice. I thought, “She wants to be a lawyer? She’s bloody dumb!” There are even some doctors who know nothing but their profession! They are hopeless as a human being, a husband, a brother! Madhavi could have been given something, just to wake her up. If she’d had more human value she could have stopped it. Don’t you think so, Helen?’

  ‘I was amazed throughout,’ I said, dodging his question, ‘that virtually nobody tried to stop it.’

  He pressed me. ‘She could have stopped it – more than anyone else – don’t you think so?’

  ‘There’s some truth in that.’

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘My daughter’s getting used to it now. Time’s a big healer. The other party’s still very angry, though.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll always be angry.’

  ‘I’d like to sit down,’ said Dr Singh, ‘and talk to them.’ His speech sped up again to a rapid, slurring pace. I hung on by a thread as he galloped wildly forward. ‘Perhaps you could help. I would speak rationally – tell them how we feel. “I feel so sad about your child.” And of course they might say, “Rrrrrreally?” They might say, “Oh gee! Do you?” But there’s nobody I know on their side. If you could convey that message: We are sad.’

  I didn’t know how to answer. He too fell silent.

  After a while I asked, ‘How did Anu go in her exams?’

  ‘She passed. Yes – she may have been psychotic, but she has a brain. Now she’s doing a Masters in criminology. She still doesn’t remember it, you know. It just goes blank. Even the Monday only came back when she saw the video. She has lapsed memory. After such trauma, people don’t remember what happened. Even normal people, when they’ve had such a hard trauma . . .’

  He trailed off. Silence. He sighed. I sighed. I thanked him and we said goodbye.

  Months later the postman delivered a letter. The writer identified herself on the back of the envelope, and at the top of the single tiny page it contained, as Miss Madhavi Rao. Her writing was small and unemphatic, young-looking, more like printing: an efficient student’s hand. She apologised for her delay in replying to my letter. She had ‘a plethora of excuses’, none of which she would bore me with. Very courteously she declined my invitation to be interviewed. She hoped that I would understand the ‘stance’ she was taking in not wishing to put herself through the ‘ordeal’ again, and wished me all the best for the future.

  I looked at the letter for a long time. This was as close as I would ever get to her. She had every right to say no. I folded the little page and put it in a drawer.

  The women won’t talk to me. Suddenly I felt very tired. Here I was, back at the same old roadblock. My fantasy of journalistic even-handedness, long buckling under the strain, gave way completely.

  I wrote to Maria and Nino Cinque. I didn’t tell them that I was scared to go on, to step round the barrier of the women’s silence and face another public roasting. I told them that because Anu Singh and Madhavi Rao had declined to speak to me, there would be too many problems for me to go ahead with a book. Anything I wrote would be too unbalanced. I told them I was about to move back to my family in Melbourne, and gave them my new address. I thanked them for their kindness to me, in spite of their long suffering and terrible loss. I said that the privilege of having met them, and of witnessing their dignity and strength, had helped me to see that there was still a lot to value in life.

  I must have actually imagined that they had not come to depend on me; that they would accept my mealy-mouthed abandonment of them without protest.

  Four days later Maria Cinque called me. In a thick voice that shook, she said, ‘Why. Why can’t you do it.’

  ‘I hope you don’t think it’s because I don’t care,’ I stammere
d.

  ‘No – I understand that you care. But all I want – all I want is my son to be acknowledged.’ She broke into hard sobs. ‘Anthony’s had a breakdown. He ran away from the psych hospital and tried to kill himself.’

  Horrified, I too began to cry.

  ‘You were in the court, she said. You read the transcript. You know what happened. My son was murdered. For no reason. No motive. Without mercy. My family is destroyed and I have to be silent.’

  For several minutes there was nothing on the line but the sound of her weeping. I was dumb with shame. How could I have thought that when I couldn’t bend the story to my will I could just lay it down, apologise for inconvenience caused, and walk away? Her son’s murder was not an opportunity for me to speculate on images of disharmony and disintegration. It was not a convenient screen on to which I could project sorrows of my own that I was too numb to feel. It was not even ‘a story’. It was real. It was the brutal hand that fate had dealt her. It was the unendurable that she had to endure. Never in my life had I felt so weak, so vain, so stupid.

  At last she became calm.

  ‘Listen, Maria,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to move back to Melbourne. Let me think about it. Let me think what I can do.’

  With her beautiful, unshakable courtesy, she wished me well for the move, and let me go.

  So I gave up on Sydney, that summer of the new millennium, and went back to live in Melbourne. I had to rent a house. I had to find a money-making job. I had to organise my divorce. I had to help care for our ageing, demented mother. Months went by. A thousand distractions came between me and Joe Cinque’s story. But it was always in my mind. It billowed like a dark curtain on every breeze that blew. It was standing by the bed when I turned over in my sleep. It was waiting for me when I woke up in the morning.