Joe Cinque's Consolation

by Helen Garner

  ‘I went to a conference,’ he said, ‘and they made us do that, too! They can tell things about you from what you cut out.’

  He and Maria glanced at each other tenderly.

  ‘Those people there,’ she went on, ‘they don’t laugh when I say Joe’s around me. When I tell my friends this, they pretend to believe me, but really they probably think I’m crazy. I go to the cemetery but I don’t feel him there. I feel him here. Not in his bedroom, but here in the kitchen, ’cause this is where he used to be – talking, cook, have something to eat.’

  We sat with her in silence, listening. She wiped away tears. Then in a rush she told us that Anthony had met a girl, that he had fallen in love and wanted to get married.

  ‘I’d like to think positive,’ she said, ‘but I –’

  Dario cut across her with great vehemence: ‘No but Mrs Cinque you got to. You got to.’

  At ten the two young couples set off to drive home. Nino emerged briefly to say goodbye. I got up to follow them out, but Maria seemed eager to keep talking, not to be left alone with the thoughts that the evening had aroused. ‘I don’t go to bed before eleven o’clock, twelve – stay!’ We sat down again at the kitchen table.

  ‘When Joe was here,’ she said, ‘we always had full house. They don’t come to see us so much now. We understand – they don’t know what to say. I didn’t even know John and Tina got married. It’s too hard for us, to go to a wedding.’

  In a little while Nino came into the kitchen, just in time to hear something I was saying to Maria about friends of mine whose son had committed suicide: how they longed for people to keep talking about him, not to let him disappear from memory. Nino listened, standing at the door. His face went dark and his mouth turned down in a harsh curve. I trailed off. He came forward and stood opposite me. He put both hands on the table, standing them upright on their outer edges like two fences facing each other. They were trembling. He held my gaze. With many deliberate pauses, breathing hard and controlling himself with difficulty, he said to me, ‘Some people. Their son. Kill himself. Very sad. He choose to die. He decide. But my son. Somebody take his life. For no reason. Somebody kill him. That’s different. My son got – no – choice.’

  I lowered my eyes. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That is different, Nino. It’s terrible.’

  I was afraid to say what I was thinking, which was – or would have been, had I dared to free my thoughts from the area he was delineating for them on the table between us – ‘At least your son wanted to live. You brought up a son who wanted to live.’

  But what difference does that make, now? Because Joe Cinque is dead.

  A month, six weeks went by. Autumn came. I received no reply from Anu Singh. I made no further approaches. Silence, as it had been in court, was her prerogative. As a writer, of course, I had my own prerogatives, but I knew from painful experience that pestering people who are determined not to talk to you is always counterproductive. All right. I would content myself with the public record, with the things I had observed in court, and with whatever I could glean from other people’s accounts.

  And besides, the longer I stayed in Newcastle, the more my attention turned away from Joe Cinque’s killer. Shadowy Madhavi Rao, of course, was long, long gone. It was Joe himself who seemed vital to me now. At last I was free to go looking for him.

  When the Cinques flew down to Canberra to identify Joe’s body on 27 October 1997, they were met at the airport by a young man called Robert Terrone. He was their godson; and his parents, in an interlocking Italian relationship, stood godparents to Joe.

  Now, in 2002, the three Terrones were coming to Newcastle, to stay with the Cinques for Mothers’ Day weekend. Maria asked me over for tea on the Friday evening. When I got there, Robert was still on the road: he had set out from Seven Hills straight after work. Nino and Leo Terrone were settled in the lounge room watching the football on TV. I was ushered straight through to the kitchen, where Maria was putting the finishing touches to one of her virtuoso meals. While she and Assunta Terrone were explaining to me how to make gnocchi, a powerful motor sounded outside. The women looked up eagerly. Doors slammed, there was a tap at the back, and into the room, pocketing his keys, strolled a slender young man in a leather jacket.

  I was rocked by his appearance. His hair was shorn right back to the skull, and his beard trimmed till it was no more than a pencil line along his upper lip and jaw. His wrists were decorated with silver bangles, his fingers with ornate silver rings. He was the sort of man I might have dismissed, had I glimpsed him through the tinted windows of his car, as some sort of spiv; but close up his face was of a startling and austere beauty: dark-eyed, unsmiling and private. Gravely he accepted the affectionate greetings of his mother and godmother.

  When the six of us gathered in the kitchen to eat, Robert’s father Leo asked me, ‘What’s the English word for the father of your godson?’ I racked my brains. I had to say I didn’t think there was one. For all its warmth, it seemed a deeply formal relationship. Robert addressed Nino as ‘Compà’ and Maria as ‘Commà’. They called him ‘Compà.’ He behaved towards them with grace and quiet respect. He knew where he fitted in here, how loved he was: without hesitation he took his place on Nino’s right, in Joe’s chair. The food – pasta with ragù, rabbit, polpette, a salad, a platter of fresh fruit, and heart-shaped Abruzzese waffles filled with creamy chocolate and vanilla – repaid in full the severe concentration that the young man brought to its ingestion. If I hadn’t been there, the four parents would have been able to relax into Italian, but they battled on in English, teasing and joking with a generous sociability, working hard but making it look easy.

  When the meal was over, Maria said to Robert and me, ‘You want to go in the other room and talk?’ We got up and went through the archway into the dining room where Joe’s photo was enthroned on the polished table. We sat down awkwardly and I got out my notebook. The fathers sloped off back to the TV. Maria and Assunta Terrone washed the dishes together, talking quietly in Italian. They were only five metres away from us, well within earshot. It wasn’t until they disappeared into the lounge room that Robert relaxed, opened up and began to talk.

  ‘I can’t remember my childhood,’ he said, ‘without Joe being there. My family moved to Wollongong when I was two, but we looked forward so much to seeing each other in the holidays – I used to sleep on the floor of his room and we’d talk till three in the morning. We used to cry when we said goodbye.’

  At the age of nineteen, Robert got into a serious relationship with a girl. Over the next few years, during which they saved money and bought property, he felt he lost touch with his youth, and with Joe. ‘I watched him become closer friends with my brother. I couldn’t go with them – I had to stay home with my girlfriend. It saddened me.’ At twenty-six, Robert broke out of the relationship and went overseas. When he came back he found a job that occasionally took him to Canberra. By that time Joe was living there with Anu Singh.

  ‘The first time I saw them together was after the Italian Car Show. Joe met us there with Anu and we went back to their place for coffee.

  ‘She was someone you felt wanted to make a good impression. She wanted people to walk away saying, “God, she’s intelligent! God, she’s beautiful!” She liked to start philosophical conversations, as if she was trying to prove something. She was articulate and well-spoken, but she had odd thought-trains. I never gave it much thought at the time, but she had very extreme views on the afterlife and reincarnation. She asked me, “Do you believe in an afterlife?” She said she did. I said I didn’t know. I said, “I’m a Catholic. I believe there’s a being greater than us. I believe we’ll be judged.”

  ‘She’d hijack the conversation. She’d dominate, and Joe would sit passively, or offer an occasional opinion. I thought it was quite ball-breaking – she’d go on and on.

  ‘One night we all had dinner at Rydges, and she spoke about the guy she was with before Joe. She talked in detail about their sexual relati
onship – about what it was like when they made love. I was very embarrassed. Joe was ill at ease. She hardly knew me. To share something like that with a stranger – it showed disrespect for Joe.

  ‘She was much more experienced than he was. He was very much in love with her. There must have been some sexual attraction that over-rode his moral sense – something about her that captured him. Joe was an extrovert – a sociable, highly interactive person. He was a great guy to be around. He was funny. He had this laugh. But you didn’t see Joe when he was with her. His character didn’t show through. She wasn’t the sort of partner who brought out the best in him. She needed to control and preside over everything. She stifled him.

  ‘After the car show, when we went back to their place, he was nervous, as if he was scared he’d do something wrong. I noticed his hands were trembling. He was serving the coffee and he spilt some – as if she’d looked at him with distaste.

  ‘The last time I saw him, about a month before he died, I went to their place for dinner. Joe said, “Anu’s cooked an Indian dinner for you.” I had chewy in my mouth, and I went into the kitchen to throw it away. When I opened the rubbish bin, I saw it was full of take-away containers. The kitchen was totally clean. It wasn’t a kitchen that had been cooked in. It was all so nice, it felt unreal, as if they were shielding me from something.’

  He clasped his hands tightly on the shiny table. It was causing him pain to talk about this.

  ‘Joe went along with a lot of things he shouldn’t have. He was a very intelligent person. He reasoned well. He had sound logic. But she infiltrated him on such a deep level that his logic went out the window. He took her to Melbourne to see a specialist because she believed she had some muscle-stripping disease – and yet she was the picture of health. When he described her sickness, how he had to care for her, he never said it to be derogatory. He never spoke badly of her, or had a bad word to say about her.

  ‘I had the impression, though, that he was looking to end the relationship. He was becoming happier with things that were happening for him at work – positive things outside of Anu. I always felt Joe was going to make something bigger of himself than just an ordinary life in a town like Newcastle. The night we had dinner at Rydges he’d just bought a brand-new Mazda MX5 two-door coupé. He was really happy about it, and talked about it a lot, but Anu didn’t share his enthusiasm.

  ‘In Newcastle he had a lot of friends – whenever I was here with him the phone would be ringing every five minutes. But he didn’t have any of his genuine friends in Canberra – only Anu’s friends. His life there was Anu and that was it. It got to the stage where that wasn’t enough. She’d taken and taken and he just couldn’t give any more. He was sick of being her emotional crutch. If he was leaving, it wasn’t because he resented her – it was because he was tired.’

  The room with its tiled floor was chilly and the light hanging above him was harsh. He hunched in his chair.

  ‘A week,’ he said. ‘It took a week. Why wasn’t a phone call made to someone who was sane? The magnitude of what happened here is mind-blowing. And she’s walking free. People get more time for killing a dog.

  ‘I’ve prayed – I’ve asked myself, Why didn’t he call me?

  ‘When I went into their bedroom, the day after he died, the mattress was on the floor. The bed had no base. I know it was dishevelled because of the commotion with the paramedics and everything – but it looked like the room of a junkie out the back of the Cross. When I was gathering up his things I found tabs of Prozac all over the house. I didn’t even know what Prozac was. There was a dildo in the bedroom. Joe wasn’t like that. That wasn’t what he wanted from life. Joe never even took a Disprin. She’d had an impact on him – she’d changed him. She’d violated the way he’d previously lived.’

  He was shivering with misery and sorrow, rocking, with his arms folded across his chest.

  ‘Please forgive me if this upsets you,’ I said, ‘but I read something in the trial transcript, that Anu told a university counsellor. She said Joe had been violent to her – that he had laid into her.’

  He froze, staring at me with his mouth open. He took two slow breaths. Then he replied in a voice faint with shock, ‘I don’t believe it. I’d be willing to bet my life he’d never even have raised his hand to her. He wasn’t into confrontation, or aggression, or anger, or trying to overpower. That’s not what he was like. Even in a drugged state – oh no. No. No. I wouldn’t be surprised if Anu had made it up – if she’d orchestrated it as part of what she was about to do.’

  ‘It sounds like a pretty damaging relationship,’ I said. ‘You don’t think she might have goaded him till he snapped? I know that can happen, because I once did it myself to a bloke, when I was a student. I treated him so cruelly and hurtfully that he hit me across the face. It was only an open hand but it knocked me to the ground. I never felt badly towards him for it, though. I was ashamed. Because I knew he wasn’t that sort of guy. I knew I’d driven him to it. I pushed him past his limit.’

  Robert listened carefully, thought carefully, his eyes quite still. He began again to shake his head. ‘No. No. I can’t imagine him hitting her. I think I’d have sensed any resentment he had towards her, even towards the end – and I never did.’

  We sat there dumbly. Joe’s portrait stood on the dark table with its back to us.

  ‘My godparents feel abandoned by justice,’ he said. ‘They feel abandoned by all that’s right in the world. You’d think it was worse for Commà, because she talks so much about it and she’s so angry – she’s a tormented soul. Compà’s quieter, but he suffers at least as much as she does. It’s affecting his heart. My godmother probably seems a very bitter person, but it’s a superficial bitterness. Underneath it there’s a huge warmth.’

  His voice trembled. He huddled on his chair, holding himself in his arms as if he were chilled to a level that could never be reached or comforted. ‘What I pray for is that Anthony will be all right – that he can be happy again. And that in the end they’ll have a grandchild. If they could just –’He made a helpless cradling gesture with his two arms.

  The room seemed to have grown colder. We were both shivering. I put my notebook away.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go in there.’

  In the lounge room the Terrones and the Cinques were companionably absorbed in Italian cable TV: a cooking competition with a time limit. One contestant was frantically making pasta, rolling the dough flat-handed on a board and producing primitive worm-like shapes that were fatter in the middle than at the ends. The host of the show kept up a high-pitched running commentary. It was very funny. Nino turned to me and with a cheeky grin uttered a stream of jabbering nonsense syllables: how he thought the Italian must sound to me. We all burst out laughing. When the winner was declared I noticed it was after midnight, and took my leave. Everyone shook my hand and kissed me on both cheeks. Robert Terrone leaned against the door frame. His face had reverted to its cool impassivity. As I turned away, our eyes met. I smiled and nodded. His eyebrows intensified, infinitesimally.

  ‘I like having boys around,’ said Maria to me at the front door. ‘They not picky, they eat everything, you can tell ’em off and they come back again.’

  Joe’s friends Steve Bernardi and Matthew Harris came back again to the Cinques’ house on the Saturday morning of that Mothers’ Day weekend, and so did I. Maria settled us at the dining room table and went out into the yard.

  The two young men sat smiling warily at me. They were an appealing pair, the sort who radiate a familiarity with laughter and fun. Steve Bernardi had a narrow clever face with a glint of sharpness in it, and a voice that was surprisingly deep and resonant. His shirt-sleeves, rolled back to the elbow, showed powerful, smooth-haired forearms. He had trained as a nurse, he said, but was now the director of clinical services at a private psychiatric clinic in Sydney. His friend Matthew Harris looked like a straight-ahead Aussie bloke from some earlier era: fair-haired, square-faced and squa
re-headed, with excellent teeth and an open manner. Harris had been, according to Maria, a very talented and respected young Newcastle footballer – ‘he could get any girl he wants’, as she put it – but he was injured too many times and had to get out. He worked as the assistant manager of a Leagues Club.

  The robust conversation I had with Bernardi and Harris could hardly have been more different from the raw intimacy of my encounter with Robert Terrone the night before. Of course, it was daylight. There were two of them. They were on their way to play a game of football. They were not going to bare their wounds in front of a stranger. But their affection for Joe was just as obvious, as was their loyalty.

  Joe never had much success with girls, they said, when he was young. His looks didn’t mature till he was in his early twenties, and physically he was flowering towards the time of his death. He was something of an innocent. ‘In the school of Machiavelli,’ said Steve, ‘he didn’t rate.’

  ‘Machiavelli?’ I asked. ‘Or Casanova?’

  ‘Both, actually. I meant not only that he wasn’t a classic charmer, but also that he wasn’t deceitful.’

  ‘His approach to a girl,’ said Matt, ‘would be to tell her a joke, something completely wrong, like a fart joke’ – he gripped his temples and bared his teeth – ‘and we’d be going, “Oh, Joe!!!” ’

  ‘My parents adored him,’ said Steve.

  ‘Everyone’s parents did,’ said Matt.

  It so happened that both Harris and Bernardi were down at the Brewery with Joe on the night he first met Anu Singh. She was studying in Canberra and living there with her boyfriend, Simon, but she had come back to Newcastle over Christmas and New Year. Her friend Rachel Fortunaso was going out at the time with Matt Harris. Newcastle is a small city and Singh was a girl with a reputation. But that night Joe, who had just got back from Europe and started his new job, left the bar with her. ‘We said to him afterwards, “Have fun! She’s an attractive girl. Have fun – but don’t get serious.’’ ’