by Helen Garner
Football was the main conduit between Farquharson and the boys. In the first trial this was painted as something hyper-paternal, a passionate commitment on Farquharson’s part that he had boasted of and worn as a badge of virtue. Now Gambino shrugged it off as ‘his thing’. She had never denied his request to take the boys over to his father’s house, but added a stinging detail: ‘He never really asked to have them that often, and the children never ever asked, “Can I go and see Dad?”’
After she ended the marriage, Gambino said, Farquharson started to call the boys by their proper first names, and stopped the tormenting play. She quoted her favourite aphorism: ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’
On the Wednesday evening before Father’s Day, Farquharson phoned Gambino after tea. They spoke for twenty minutes. It was a conversation that Gambino was no longer permitted to say had made her fear that he was suicidal. He was very down and out, very ‘woe is me’, very ‘glass half empty’. He hated living at his father’s. He wanted their unfinished house to be sold so he could buy himself a place to live, and a new car. He would never get ahead while he had to keep paying maintenance. He said he was looking at starting some sort of business in Queensland. Gambino told him he could not do that—he could not leave his kids.
…
The story of the night at the dam belonged to Gambino by right. Led by the new prosecutor, Mr Tinney, she launched on it in a clear voice, spreading her well-kept hands in expressive gestures. At the first trial she had dragged it out of herself with a raw, agonised restraint, and people in the court wept with horror and pity. Now, like her hair, the story was coloured by an element of self-consciousness. Her account had become a recital, with the rhetorical figures and grace notes of a tale polished by many a telling. How could it have been otherwise? No narrative can remain pure. Often she spoke with a simple directness. Her tears, when they fell, were sincere. But in spite of Justice Lasry’s hint that the prosecutor might ‘slightly increase his degree of control’, Tinney gave her the green light, and she enriched her account with the sort of emotional detail that causes judges to scowl and journalists to bend to their notebooks. While she ran up and down the paddock in the dark, she said, she was screaming hysterically, ‘Please, God, not my babies, please don’t take my babies, please, God.’ Until that night, Stephen Moules had never ‘admitted any feelings’ for her, but when he reached the dam and ran to her, he took her in his arms and said, ‘Baby, it will be all right.’ And she characterised Farquharson’s demeanour, as he stood watching the rescue attempts with his arms folded on his chest, in a phrase that curdled with contempt: ‘like he’d lost his pushbike’.
…
Morrissey glided into his cross-examination with a pair of recorded telephone calls. These had been captured, several weeks after the children drowned, by a bug that the police had put on Farquharson’s phone. Gambino would have to listen, before a roomful of strangers, to two deeply revealing conversations of which she had no memory. Perhaps it was the intimacy of the exchanges that made her pull the faces she did, at first, while the tapes rolled: the grimaces of a woman who has been married to a man she did not respect, a man who needed a mother more than a wife.
She calls Farquharson at nine o’clock one morning, a fortnight after Father’s Day, and asks him what he remembers of the accident. Her voice is quiet and matter-of-fact, but Farquharson has surely been dreading such a call, for his tone is put-upon, and the high-quality audio registers the fact that he is lightly panting: his heart rate is up. He rattles out the account he has told to everybody: the coughing fit, waking up in the dam, Jai opening the door, the water coming in, his efforts to ‘go round the other side’.
‘Jai opened the door,’ muses Gambino. ‘Shit.’ She must be sedated, she is so slow and thoughtful, like someone hearing for the first time an interesting but only vaguely surprising fact. ‘How did the kids get out of the seatbelts, do you know?’
‘Not all of them would have had their seatbelts off.’
Would have? How come he didn’t already know? Hadn’t he asked?
‘They all did,’ says Gambino. ‘I asked Gerard Clanchy.’
‘What?’ Farquharson’s voice rises. ‘They must’ve undone Bailey or something.’
‘Yep. So I reckon Tyler’s undone Bailey.’
Starting to panic, he shifts oddly into the present tense. ‘Because how can—how can I reach him from where I am?’
Dully she soothes him. ‘I know, I know, I know it wasn’t you, they know it wasn’t you. I think the kids have undone their seatbelts and tried to get out.’
‘Oh no.’ He breaks into racking sobs.
For the first time it hit me that he must have fantasised their dying as instant and total annihilation—boom, gone—as in a cartoon or a dream.
She tries to keep talking, in her rational, unexcited voice, but he weeps on. In the far wifely reaches of herself, she begins to lose patience with him. ‘Come on, don’t get upset. I just need to know what you remember.’
He gets a grip, he sniffs, he sighs, but his voice trembles and he bursts out crying again. ‘How am I gonna get through all this?’
‘You’ll get through it, Rob, you will.’
‘They were the love of my life. I never, ever could hurt them.’
‘You know how much I wanted them,’ she says, with a flare of rivalry.
‘I’d never, ever hurt them.’
‘I know that!’ she snaps. ‘You don’t have to keep saying that!’
‘I feel like I’ve gotta try and justify myself to everyone,’ he says, breathing hard. ‘To the police. I’ve got this feeling they want to put me away.’
She asks him further questions that he struggles with and fails to answer. After each burst of his revved-up gabble she emits a short, soft hum of attention, or lets a pensive silence fall. This must be worse for him than if she were sobbing or raging: she sounds authoritative, like someone to whom he owes but cannot give an explanation. He protests that her questions are traumatising him.
‘But there are things I need to know,’ she says mildly. ‘As their mother.’
They agree that the two young blokes who picked Farquharson up on the roadside should have tried to get the boys out instead of driving him to her place. Why hadn’t they stayed with the car? This suggestion—so frightful and unjust—that the outsiders, Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland, are to blame seems for a moment to soothe something in both of them. Then Gambino cuts it off with a brisk realism. ‘But it doesn’t matter. There’s no point in talking like that now.’
Listening from her seat, Gambino darted one desperate look at Farquharson. Journalists corkscrewed to stare at him. While the technician cued the second tape, jurors put their heads together and compared notes, muttering.
…
Ten days later, Farquharson calls her late in the afternoon, ‘just to say g’day.’
Somewhere outside a rooster is crowing. A dog barks. She can’t talk properly, she says. The medication has made her tongue swell. He speaks at length, entirely about himself. Anything she says, in her thick, drawling voice, he tops, or appropriates. She’s had a bad week? So has he. She has to make a statement to the police? Imagine what he’s had to do. She has calm da
ys and then really shitty days? That’s like him. Her mum’s been having panic attacks, can’t face going back to work? That makes it hard on him. All those things affect him, ’cause he’s affected everyone’s lives and it’s on his shoulders too. How much more torture are they going to put him through? It rips his guts out that people would think he’d ever in his wildest dreams do something like this. It fuckin’ hurts big-time and he suffers. Anyone knows he wouldn’t do it.
How was it, she asks with a dreamy curiosity, that the car’s headlights came to be turned off? He stammers and fumbles. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember anything. Probably when it first happened he thought he was in a ditch. So he stopped the car, just in case it was a fire.
‘A fire?’ I said to the Age reporter beside me. ‘That’s new.’
‘I came across a bad car crash once,’ she whispered. ‘I was the first person there. There were people in the car, they were unconscious, and the motor was still running. The first thing I did was reach in and turn off the ignition. I didn’t think. It was automatic.’
Outside the house the rooster is squalling. They pay it no attention. Each of them confesses to thoughts of suicide. They don’t use the word. They call it ‘giving up’. But people tell them the kids would be beside themselves if they knew. She assures him that there is no evidence, that they have nothing on him. They compare griefs. He can’t smile, he says; he can’t laugh. If she laughs she feels guilty in seconds. She defers to him: his suffering, she says, is tenfold of hers. She has lost three children, but unlike him she doesn’t have that guilt behind it—not that she’s saying he should…
Gambino in the court got a fingertip grip on the gold cross round her neck, and cried in great gaping silent sobs. Tinney and Forrester flashed her glances of anxious inquiry. The tall blonde woman from Victim Support shifted to a seat behind her, watchful, ready to move.
But the voices on the tape slide into the dull, rambling familiarity of two people who have once been husband and wife, parents together. Farquharson tells her he has a new phone. They marvel that the SIM card of the one that went into the dam still works. Many pauses fall. Their silences are more comfortable than speech. Neither of them seems ready to break the contact. Perhaps, I thought, the children can still exist as long as their parents are in each other’s company.
Then she tells him that, though it has hurt them, she has left her parents’ house and gone to be with Stephen Moules. She used to be confident, but she has turned into a ‘timid, mild, insecure little being’ who doesn’t want to be left alone. Stephen is now her security.
At the mention of his victorious rival, Farquharson slips back into a doleful, guilt-tripping mode: ‘And I gotta ride this stuff out on my own.’
Still, she draws the conversation to an end with something like tenderness: ‘I know in my heart of hearts you would never harm those boys.’
‘Ohhh, no way known.’
‘You got to keep on fighting for the boys’ sake.’
‘I keep thinking of you,’ he says.
‘I think of you, too. I defend you. I do defend you.’
…
Morrissey rose. Gambino sat regarding him with narrowed eyes, her jaw set hard.
‘Are you very angry with Robert Farquharson?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you bare your teeth at him?’
‘Possibly.’
‘For the state you’re now in, do you blame Robert Farquharson?’
‘Correct.’
‘You hate him?’
A pause.
‘I hate him for what he’s done to my life.’
‘And it’s your wish that he be convicted of murder?’
A long, long pause.
‘Correct.’
At that moment the audio-visual technician who was trying to cue Gambino’s 60 Minutes interview hit the wrong key. Tinkling music rang out and on the high screen we saw the three little boys naked in their bath, moving and smiling in clean water. Gambino let out a stricken cry. I saw Amanda Forrester drop her head into her hands. Justice Lasry’s face went very long and grey.
As soon as Gambino had got herself in hand, Morrissey hauled his gown on to his shoulders and opened fire.
He invited Gambino to list the psychiatric and medical conditions for which she was being treated—severe major depressive disorder, chronic adjustment disorder, chronic anxiety, heart palpitations, calcified shoulder, neck and back pain caused by stress—and the medications she had been prescribed: Effexor, Clonazepam and, for her physical pain, the Codalgin Forte on which she had accidentally overdosed when Stephen Moules was away. Quoting page after page of transcript, he forced her to contrast her statements at the first trial with things she was now alleging. She had changed her evidence, hadn’t she? Did she not tell Woman’s Day in 2007 that she didn’t blame Farquharson? Was she not now deliberately exaggerating the bad things about her marriage, putting a bad spin on things which in the past she had viewed as perfectly innocent? The way she described him at the dam, for example—that was just a deliberate piece of spite, was it not?
Gambino squared up to him. She answered with rudeness and aggression. She drew heavy, affronted sighs. She widened her eyes and sarcastically wobbled her head. She frowned, glared, muttered under her breath as if cursing. The judge sent her out for a moment’s break. When she returned, he leaned forward and said to her gently, ‘You must grapple with what’s put to you.’ Chastened, she replied, ‘I’ll do my best, Your Honour.’
Next Morrissey announced that he would play something horrific: the audiotape of the 000 calls that Gambino had made from the water’s edge. It was heart-breaking, he said, it was highly destructive and dangerous to the witness. But it had to be done, to show her unreliable state of mind when she accused Farquharson at the dam of behaving like someone who had lost his pushbike. Justice Lasry urged Gambino to leave the court while the tape was played to the jury. She rebuffed his concern and insisted she would stay and hear it. Morrissey flashed Lasry a look that said I told you so.
Frightful screams, hoarse babbling. Gambino chokes and shrieks: Ambulance! Police! Three ks out of Winchelsea! I can’t see a thing! The operator’s deep male voice: Where are you? I’m sorry, I don’t understand the problem. Where are you? In the background Farquharson is jabbering at her: he blacked out, he woke up in water, he doesn’t know where the car went in. And all the while, behind her in the dark, Moules’s boy Zach is shrilly piping, his voice thin and sharp as a piccolo.
Farquharson’s face, in the dock, was fat with horror. Gambino sat hunched with her hanky over her mouth, uttering a high, weak whimpering sound. When they helped her to the door at the end of the tape she staggered along, bowed over, clutching herself with both arms like someone who had been shot in the belly. Court rose.
Outside in the courtyard, with his father, Stephen Moules, the little boy Hezekiah was rolling on the ground with a dummy in his mouth, laughing and playing, bored, waiting for his mother, while she huddled in a side hall, surrounded by attendants, letting out long cries of pain.
…
By four o’clock Gambino’s turnaround was on the news. I got myself to the bar where I had a
rranged to meet a magazine editor I worked for. He chattered away gaily, not noticing that I sat there mute. I longed to tell someone, anyone, about the 000 tape; but a line had been crossed in court that day. I had heard something obscene, something it would have been indecent to speak of: a grown man gabbling like a child who, in a fit of angry spite, has broken a thing precious beyond price and, panicking now, has led his mother to the wreckage to show her what he has done.
…
‘For what purpose,’ texted my gallant old barrister friend next morning, ‘is Mr Morrissey so hard on Ms Gambino? Should not he be gentle with her? I cannot believe what I am reading.’
Gentle? Gambino was a woman so crazed with loss and pain that she was beyond caring. Cross-examination was trauma, said Morrissey to the judge next morning, but it was the only weapon his client had—and Morrissey was fed up, he said, with being constantly reminded that he was dealing with a grieving mother. Yet Morrissey was no sadist. Behind the lachrymose tabloid drama queen he sensed—and, I thought, respected—not only his client’s nemesis but a wild and worthy adversary who was spoiling for a fight. He gave her both barrels. She crawled away wounded, came back head high and faced him again. He goaded her and she bit.
It was under pressure that she had changed her position, was it not? Pressure from the police? And her family? And her psychiatrist? People who kept telling her she would never recover from her grief until she admitted she was ‘in denial’?
‘I have a mind of my own,’ she ground out. ‘I am a very intelligent person. I can make up my own mind.’
Hadn’t she and Farquharson, after the accident, worn twin lockets containing the children’s pictures?
He bought them. She no longer wore hers because she no longer believed in him.
Morrissey depicted Farquharson on the dark bank of the dam as an isolated, forlorn and rejected figure, bereft of consolation. Had she offered him a single word of kindness, or a blanket for his shoulders? Invited him to sit in the car with her? Did he not approach Gambino to offer comfort? Did she not push him away?