by Helen Garner
He sighed, staring at the carpet.
‘I do realise that they were speaking purely out of their grief. When they came back, I let Mrs Cinque go into the witness box and talk about how they felt. By that time I think their barrister had told them that I had lost a child – that I had some idea of what they were suffering. But I’m obviously still not their favourite person.’
He looked up at me and raised his eyebrows, with a weary smile.
What would be the point of my telling him how they hated him still? Of course he must know it, and it couldn’t have been the first time. How did he bear it? How could one bear it, without growing numb? A judge’s detachment, I thought, must be a skill that came and went. It might desert you without warning. How hard-won it must be, and how dearly paid for.
Rebecca was the name of the lovely girl with the dark curly hair and the red dress whom I had glimpsed in the video of Dario and Antonia’s wedding, the girl who had brought a big bunch of roses to the Cinques’ house, after Joe died, and laid them on his bed.
In November 1993, when Joe got his engineering degree and went overseas, he broke off his three-year relationship with her: he knew he was too young to marry, and he didn’t want to leave her hanging. While he was in Europe, Rebecca married someone else. Joe got home to Newcastle in November 1994 – only a few weeks before he met Anu Singh – and heard about it from Maria. He rang Rebecca’s mother to ask her if it was true. Yes, she said, it was. And Joe cried.
This was enough to turn Rebecca, in some people’s retrospective fantasies, into an emblem of Joe Cinque’s alternative fate – a figure from a parallel universe. The actual Rebecca, when I tracked her down by phone in the vineyards near Cessnock, was sensibly reluctant to adopt this role, though she spoke lovingly of Joe’s family, and told me that she called them every year on his birthday.
Her voice, which echoed off the walls and floors of the unfurnished house she had just that day rented, was very light and soft, almost girlish; and in her account of her time with Joe she stressed again and again how young they had been. She was seventeen and Joe eighteen when they first met. They waited on tables in Emilio’s pizza restaurant, an Italian family concern on Newcastle’s famous Darby Street.
‘Joe had good morals,’ she said, ‘and values that I always respected. He was so anti-drugs. He came from a solid background. There was a strength about him. He was an adorable guy. He had dreams, and plans – he made you feel excited. He was passionate about his car. He wanted to be sophisticated. He loved the idea of life in the fast lane. Even when Dario was getting married, Joe was making ball-and-chain jokes.
‘I’m half Spanish, but there was no Spanish community in Newcastle, so I loved the Italian community. I wanted that multicultural thing. I went to Italian weddings and parties with Joe. We used to have fun dancing. I liked his friends. And I used to love going to the Azzurri Club. He’d look at me as if I was crazy. He’d say, “But that’s where my parents go!”
‘He’d stand behind me and teach me how to eat pasta. Once he cooked dinner for me at his parents’ home when they were out. He was a pretty masculine guy, but sometimes I thought he was a spoilt brat. I remember one time his mother served him his meal, and he looked at it and said, “Is this pasta with oil or is it oil with pasta?” He was late for work at Emilio’s one night, and when he walked in – he was never in trouble for being late because everybody loved him – the boss says, “Where have you been?” and he says, “I had to cook my dinner because Mum’s out. Well, I had to put it in the microwave.” He was . . . well looked after.’ She laughed. ‘There’s no other side to Joe that I know. I never saw a dark side. He did have a bit of a temper – he could be fiery.’
‘Were you ever scared of him?’
She let fall a pause exactly like the one that had occurred when I asked Terrone, Harris and Bernardi if they thought Joe would ever have hit Anu: a short silence of stunned incredulity. Then she replied, with a quiet dignity that made me feel embarrassed to have asked the question, ‘No. I was never scared of Joe.’
‘Would you have liked to marry him?’
‘When it all happened,’ she said, ‘everyone suddenly thought, “What about Rebecca?” But I don’t think it was meant to be. We had a lot of very warm feelings for each other. But it was a case of wrong timing. We were too young.
‘I was so naïve back then, he didn’t know what to do with me. I was like a shy little girl. I didn’t even vote, when I was eighteen. Joe teased me – he said, “You’ll vote for Fred Hollows, won’t you!” I was scared of nightclubs – which is funny because I’ve ended up as a professional dancer – flamenco and Latin. But I don’t drink and I wasn’t into that scene. One time he wanted to meet some friends at Tatts or the Brewery. I didn’t want to go.’ She laughed, and said, in the voice of her younger, more timid self: ‘I’ll wait here at home and you come back when you’re finished.’ Joe and I used to do things more like going for a swim in the middle of the night, and running along the beach. We’d drive to Catherine Hill Bay and jump off the cliffs into the water.
‘He thought I was “too regimented”. Those were his exact words. Because I didn’t believe in casual sex. My beliefs are old-fashioned. I think nightclubs are really sleazy. I go to church every day. It scared me off, the nightclub thing. I shied away from Joe. People used to say to me, “What’s the matter with you? He’s so nice, he’s so good-looking, he really likes you.” But I wanted to wait.’
‘What exactly are you telling me?’ I asked.
She was silent for a moment, then answered carefully, with a delicacy I had never heard a modern young woman use. ‘It’s not that I thought sex was wrong,’ she said, in her light, rather gentle voice. ‘I was just too young. If I’d felt sure Joe and I would end up together, that would have been a whole different thing. But I wanted to save myself for marriage.’
I was thunderstruck. I didn’t know such people still existed. I thought about myself at that age, straining at the leash, dying to get out there and get into it, no matter what the cost or who would have to pay. And contemplating the wreckage that was strewn behind me now, the selfish cruelties, the terrible waste, I was flooded with respect for her clarity and her self-command.
‘Did you ever meet Anu Singh?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘but I had a phone call from her once. I’d been working away from Newcastle, and I wrote Joe a letter. He answered it. And then one night she rang me up. She told me he was hers now and I should stay away. She sounded very forceful, very confident. She said, “Joe and I are unofficially engaged, so you shouldn’t be in contact with him.” I was shocked. I was speechless. I didn’t expect that. Joe and I had had a relationship. I didn’t feel good about her calling me like that. And I remember thinking, too, “That’s weird.”
‘She had to be a very sick person to do what she did, but I think at the start she probably came across as confident and strong. He would have been attracted to that. She must have seemed stable, and warm. Loving. And when she showed her true colours, he wouldn’t abandon her.
‘I carried guilt around for a long time after Joe passed away. I feel guilt about Maria, because I moved on in my life, but Joe couldn’t. It’s different for me. His family and his friends still had real, ongoing relationships with him, but my memories of him are what could have been. For me, it’s like a sad story from the past.’
The next morning she called me back. She had thought of something else she wanted to tell me.
‘I know this will probably seem really trivial,’ she said, ‘and maybe it is – but Joe always used to eat a lot of apples.’ She laughed. ‘He really believed that if you ate an apple a day you’d always be healthy.’
‘You wanna watch the whole thing again?’ said Maria, as we settled on the couch in front of the TV. ‘All the stuff in the church?’
‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘I really just want to see Joe.’
She flashed me a small, conspiratorial smile, raised the remote and pressed the
button.
The video opened on an extraordinary scene: among petrol bowsers on oil-stained concrete, a bridal party of young Italians was assembled, the men in dark suits, the bride in a froth of stiff white tulle, the bridesmaids with big hair and wearing cobalt-blue dropped-waist cocktail-length dresses with puff sleeves and low necks. Every single member of the party wore heavy, black-rimmed sunglasses. The camera panned across a strange industrial landscape in which the groomsmen leaned against lamp-posts and glanced moodily over their shoulders. A line of be-ribboned Chevrolets cruised in a sinister motorcade along King Street, Newcastle. Then a series of magisterial cuts shifted the action to the upper floor of the Azzurri Club. The tables were set, the balloons inflated and the streamers rigged for a big celebration.
With a joyful racket of laughter and shouting, the guests streamed up the stairs and took their places at the tables. Right across the top of the stairs, under a home-made arch all twined about with pale ribbons, someone had parked a large, empty pram. Nobody minded. They stepped around it, or gently pushed it an inch or two aside so they could squeeze past. Near the head of the staircase, microphone in hand, stood a nervous young man in a grey double-breasted suit, waiting for the commotion to resolve itself. It was the master of ceremonies, Joe Cinque.
Somebody wheeled the pram out of the way and stationed it against a side wall. Music broke out in a flourish, and up the stairs surged the official party: the bride’s parents, the groom’s, the bridesmaids and groomsmen in their shy or brazen pairs, and last of all the newly-weds, Dario and Antonia. They paraded towards the camera, beaming and shining. In a cheerful, unforced voice, rolling the Italian names euphoniously off his tongue, Joe Cinque identified each attendant’s role and relationship to the bridal couple, and made the whole company welcome.
Maria and I leaned forward, rapt.
‘Look how he moves,’ I said. ‘He’s graceful.’
We heard Nino’s key in the front door and he came in, smiling and wind-swept. He greeted me with a handshake and kisses, but when he saw what we were watching his face fell. ‘I don’t wanna see it,’ he said, and walked on into the kitchen. For the rest of the video’s duration I was sorely aware of him out there, moving restlessly, pushing his chair across the tiles, occasionally giving vent to his shattering smoker’s cough.
But Nino too appeared in the video. Once or twice I glimpsed him at one of the long tables, elegant in a dark suit, standing behind Maria’s chair while she, fresh and cool in a mermaid green dress, turned her face to smile at the camera as it glided past.
As MC, Joe knew how to play his part – how many such extravaganzas had he sat through, in the acceptance of social duty that to a lost bohemian like me is so awe-inspiring in its faithfulness? – and he played it with a light touch, hovering behind the bridal table to introduce each speaker, reading out the telegrams, smiling and gesturing and paying the ritual compliments; but he looked somehow different from his companions at the wedding, with his rather harsh haircut that swept away any hint of a mullet, bared his long slender neck, and stripped his cheeks of sideburns. How much of this was I projecting, with the knowledge I had of his horrible fate? It was magic thinking, sentimental. I tried to pull myself into line.
But I wasn’t the only person to be struck by Joe. At a casual moment of the proceedings, while the guests were contentedly attacking their dessert and nothing formal was in progress, when children were tearing about the dance floor among the drifting balloons, and Joe was just standing there alone behind the long bridal table, smiling benignly and looking around him with a calm, bright curiosity, the camera zoomed in discreetly and framed him front-on, head and shoulders, against the dark curtain.
It had no reason to single him out at that moment, let alone to focus on his agreeable face. But it found him, and it dwelt on him. It lingered, intimately and without his ever realising, for a good seven or eight seconds. His face was fine and sensitive, still faintly blurred with youth, not yet set in the hard lines of manhood. He looked like a man who was lightly poised on the very rim of the world he came from. I sat on his parents’ couch and watched him with my heart in my mouth. Maria too ceased her murmured commentary. We gazed in silence on her undefended son.