This House of Grief

by Helen Garner

  This time I had brought with me a close friend’s daughter, a pale, quiet sixteen-year-old with white-blonde hair and braces on her teeth, dressed in jeans and a sky-blue hoodie. Her name was Louise. She was in her gap year. I would come to be grateful for her company, and for her precocious intelligence. We squeezed into the press seats of Court Three with a gang of cheerful journalists. From the tone of their gossip, Farquharson was already hung, drawn and quartered.

  The court was beautiful. It had a soaring ceiling, pale plaster walls, and fittings of dark, ponderous timber; but, like all the courtrooms in that grand old building, it was cramped, and awkward to move around in. The dock ran along the rear wall, and in it, behind a red velvet rope, sat Robert Farquharson in a glaring white shirt with a stiff collar and tie. He had entered a free man, but now his bail had ended and he was in custody. Though the room was packed with his supporters, he looked scared, and small, and terribly lonely.

  Jeremy Rapke QC, Acting Chief Crown Prosecutor and soon to be appointed Director of Public Prosecutions, had appeared for the Crown at Farquharson’s committal hearing. He was a lean, contained-looking man, with a clipped grey beard and a mouth that cut across his face on a severe slant, like that of someone who spent his days listening to bullshit.

  ‘Wow,’ hissed Louise. ‘He looks like a falcon.’

  Lawyers I knew said he was formidable in trials, and at the committal he had been enthralling to watch: he did not seem to exert himself, and he spoke sparingly, in a low, courteous voice, as if his words were only the upper layer of some more crucial process that was going on inside his head. But his final submission that day, delivered in the same conversational tone, had flowed out of him in a scorching stream, elegant and devastating. Now, beside his shiny-faced, brown-haired young junior, Amanda Forrester, who had clattered into court in ankle-strap stilettos, Rapke sat with curved spine low in his swivel chair, his wig tilted forward, his cheek resting on the palm of one thin, dry-looking hand.

  The narrow, glass-paned timber doors at the back burst open and Peter Morrissey SC came barging in, with his black gown hanging off one shoulder and his wig pushed back from a shiny forehead. He was big, fair and bluff, Irish-style, with the bulk and the presence of a footballer: as he strode towards the defence end of the bar table, dwarfing his junior, Con Mylonas, he whistled through exaggeratedly pursed lips the provocative anthem ‘Good Old Collingwood Forever’. He veered close to the dock and called out in a hearty, man-to-man voice, ‘G’day, Rob!’ If Farquharson replied, I did not hear him. Morrissey, people said, was just back from the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where he had won his case. His stocks were high. He looked a spontaneous, likeable man. Farquharson’s family seemed to share this view. Out in the lobby they would crowd around his massive, robed figure, looking up at him with trusting smiles that filled me with anxiety.

  Justice Philip Cummins entered, a silver-haired man in his sixties with an open, good-humoured face. He wore a scarlet robe, but no wig. A tiny diamond stud flashed a point of light from the lobe of his left ear. Cummins was well known in the city. I did not need the journalists to tell me that his nickname was Fabulous Phil. But he was reassuring to look at, not lofty or threatening; behind his high bench he would lean forward on his elbows and address the court with genial warmth.

  A jury was empanelled, ten women and five men, the requisite dozen plus three spares: this trial would not be short. By the next morning one of the women had already been excused. The jurors filed into the box and sat with hands folded, looking about nervously. Their shoulders were bowed, as if their new duties were pressing them into their chairs. From now until the end of the trial, every time they entered the court, Farquharson would spring to his feet in the dock and remain standing until they were seated—a protocol that seemed to say my fate is in your hands.

  …

  On the evening of Sunday 4 September 2005, Father’s Day, two young Winchelsea men, Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland, left their dogs to be minded overnight by a lady they knew, and set out in Atkinson’s Commodore for a barbecue in Geelong, to celebrate the birth of a baby that Atkinson’s fiancée had, that day, brought home from hospital.

  As Atkinson, the Crown’s first witness, negotiated the narrow aisle past the family seats, two women who, from the shape of their eye sockets, could only be Farquharson’s sisters raked him with cold stares. Dark-haired, tall and thin, he was dressed from head to toe in black. He stood in the box, facing the Crown’s Ms Forrester with the stooped, appeasing posture of a kid expecting to be told off. Speech was labour for him. He drawled and fumbled, writhed and bowed his head. Whenever a coarse word escaped him he would drop his face and grin with an embarrassed, goofy sweetness.

  It was about 7.30, he said, and already dark, when he and his mate Tony approached the railway overpass, four or five kilometres east of Winchelsea. They saw several cars ahead of them suddenly swerve and keep going, as if dodging something. Then a bloke stepped out into their headlights, vigorously waving his arms. Shane’s nerves were raw: his brother had taken his own life only a few months earlier. He slammed on the brakes and jumped out. The man ran towards him.

  ‘I said to him, “What the fuck are you doing, standing on the side of the road? Are you trying to kill yourself, mate?” We couldn’t get no sense out of him. He was swearing, like, “Oh no, fuck, what have I done? What’s happened?”’

  The man jabbered that he had put his car into the dam—that he had killed his kids, that he had done a wheel bearing, or had a coughing fit. He had come to and found himself in water up to his chest. All he wanted, he said over and over, was to be taken back to his missus’ house, so he could tell her he’d killed his kids.

  The bloke was short and chunky, panting and wringing wet, covered in slime and mud. What was this crazy story? Was he all there? Shane thought he might have Down syndrome or something: they got some weird cunts out that way. Tony was a relative newcomer to the township. Until this moment he had barely registered that there was a dam at the foot of the overpass. Shane was a Winch boy, and had driven past the dam countless times, yet even he had no idea it was deep enough for a car to vanish into it without leaving so much as a bubble. He stood up in the doorframe of his Commodore and strained for a better view of the water. He and Tony walked off the road as far as the fence. The night was very dark, but dry and clear. Every time a truck roared down the overpass, they followed the sweep of its headlights to scan the dam’s surface. The water looked like glass. Surely nothing had happened here.

  Shane had credit on his mobile. He tried to give it to the man so he could ring the ambulance, the police. The man refused. Again and again he begged them to take him to Cindy’s.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Shane, ‘if you’ve just killed your kids! We’re two skinny little cunts—we can get in the water and try to swim down!’

  But the man kept saying, ‘probably a hundred times, “No, don’t go down there. It’s too late. They’re already gone. I’ll just have to go back and tell Cindy.”’

  Farquharson, who had wept helplessly right through the terrible accusations of the prosecutor’s opening address—‘a shockingly wicked and callous act’—listened to all this in the dock with his head tilted and his small eyes narrowed in a sceptical expression.

  ‘And,’ said Ms Forrester gently, ‘did you take h
im back to Cindy?’

  In the front row of the public seats, accompanied by their quiet husbands, Farquharson’s sisters sat still, their mouths stiffly downturned.

  Shane Atkinson hung his head. ‘Yes,’ he said, in a low, miserable voice. ‘I done the stupidest thing of my whole life, and I did.’

  Shane made the sodden man sit beside him in the front, with Tony in the back ‘so he could punch him in the head if he went nuts’. He spun the car round and headed back to Winchelsea. Just as they reached the outskirts of the town, Shane flicked on the interior light and took a proper look at their passenger. The penny dropped. It was Robbie Farquharson. Since Shane was a little fellow, he had seen Robbie mowing people’s grass and driving the same sort of Commodore as Shane had now, except that Shane’s had mag wheels. And suddenly he twigged which Cindy he was raving about, this wife he was so keen to see—Cindy Farquharson, his ex, who everyone in Winch knew was on with another bloke, Stephen Moules.

  They pulled into Cindy’s drive, all three men panicking and yelling. Farquharson and Shane ran to the back doorstep and shouted for Cindy. One of Stephen Moules’ kids came to the screen door. Cindy followed him. Where was Rob’s car? Where were the kids?

  Farquharson gave it to her straight. There’d been an accident. He’d killed the kids. Drowned them. He’d tried to get them out, but he couldn’t. Cindy started to scream. She called him ‘a fucking cunt’. She went to hit him. Shane stepped between her and Farquharson and tried to take her in his arms. Then he leapt back into his car and drove so fast to the police station that when he pulled up outside he did a doughnut.

  The station was locked. He ran to the sergeant’s house next door. Nobody home.

  By now every man and his dog was out on the street. Somebody dialled 000 and Shane told the ambulance where the car had gone into the water. A bloke called Speedy from the State Emergency Service rushed off to get his truck. Shane got into his car with Tony and a couple of strangers who had jumped in. He drove back to Cindy’s but her car was gone, and so was she, with Farquharson and the kid from the kitchen door. Shane roared out on to the highway.

  He pulled up near the overpass. Farquharson was standing against the fence, nodding, lurching, wheezing. He was ‘smoking cigarette after cigarette’, and begged the new arrivals for another. Tony McClelland threw a whole packet at him, climbed through the fence and ran stumbling across the dark paddock. Shane hung back. ‘I didn’t wanna go near the dam,’ he told the court, hanging his head as if ashamed of his dread.

  Cindy had got through to 000 on her mobile and was rushing back and forth on the bank in the dark, sobbing and shrieking directions to the operator, but she kept calling it the Calder Highway instead of the Princes. She must have rung Stephen Moules earlier. He was already there, stripping off to wade into the dam. The water was black and terribly cold. Moules took a few steps in from the edge and the bottom dropped away under his feet. Tony had to grab his arm to save him. This was the moment they all realised how deep the dam was.

  But not until the police gave their evidence in court would its true dimensions become clear. It was not an ordinary farm dam with sloping sides. It was the pit left behind when the road-makers dug out the soil to build the overpass, and it went straight down for seven metres.

  …

  Tony McClelland stalked past the Farquharson family to the witness stand with a self-possession that looked like anger. He too had dressed in black. He was thin and tousled, with sharp cheekbones and high eyes, a face of striking beauty. He had no memory of Shane offering his mobile to Farquharson, but he recalled that, on the wild drive back to Winch, Farquharson had mumbled, ‘My wife will kill me.’ When Farquharson announced to Cindy that the boys were in the water, she cried, ‘Why didn’t you stay there?’ Farquharson replied, ‘They’ve already died.’

  At this, Farquharson lurched forward in the dock and covered his whole face with his handkerchief.

  At the dam it was McClelland who enfolded the shrieking Cindy in a bear hug and grabbed the phone from her hand. He gave the 000 operator coherent directions. It seemed only moments then until the emergency services arrived. Shane moved his car to make way for the ambulance. He and Tony gave the police their details.

  Then they sat in the car for a little while, Tony McClelland, twenty-three, apprentice carpenter, and Shane Atkinson, twenty-two, new father, currently unemployed. They had a smoke, and tried to talk. They told each other that they should have looked for the car. They were distraught because the kids had died, and because they were the ones who had taken Farquharson away.

  …

  A big plasma screen had been set up facing the jury, in the narrow space between the press seats and the pews where the families were sitting. Displayed on this Smart Board were digital photographs of the road, the paddock and the dam. Mr Morrissey, cross-examining, asked Atkinson and McClelland to make marks on the images with a special pen, to show the relative positions of various vehicles on that night of the crash. Farquharson’s family continued to gaze faithfully at Mr Morrissey, but the purpose of his complex manoeuvre was a mystery to me.

  The young men too looked baffled, but strove to cooperate. To sketch cars and trucks and ambulances with their little markers, they had to leave the witness stand, edge along the aisle, and reach up past the journalists’ heads to the screen. We could see the gel that messed up their hair, the fineness of their skin, the tremors of their facial muscles, the details of McClelland’s piercings. On the stand, inarticulate and awkward, they could have been misread as off-hand. Up close, they radiated a troubled solemnity, a jaw-grinding guilt and sorrow. When Atkinson was finally excused, when he trudged out of the court followed by the glares of Farquharson’s sisters, Louise, the gap-year girl, said to me in a shaky whisper, ‘You feel you should at least be able to give him a hug.’

  Next morning I opened the Herald Sun and saw a photo of the young men crossing the road outside the Supreme Court. Tony leads the way, scowling, gripping a bottle of water in one hand, his knees flexed, his torso bending forward as if he is about to break into a run. Behind him strides the taller Shane, with a wool beanie pulled down to his brow, shoulders back, arms along his sides, his face broad and sombre. They are thin, dark-clad figures with haunted eyes: two souls fleeing before the blast.

  …

  Farquharson may not have plunged into the water to search for his boys, but other men did.

  One of the Winchelsea SES members who headed for the dam as soon as Shane Atkinson raised the alarm had rushed out the door barefoot in track pants and a singlet. His level-headed wife gathered up an armload of dry clothes and towels, and drove out the highway after him. She told the court that she pulled up beside the dam and saw Farquharson standing on his own, soaking wet, with a blanket round him. ‘Robbie!’ she said. ‘It’s not you?’ She threw her arms around him and he began to sob. Then he stepped back and looked her in the eye. He said, ‘I’ve had this flu. I had a coughing fit and blacked out. Next thing I knew, the car was filling up with water.’ He told her he had tried and failed to get the kids out. Then he said, ‘How can I live with this? It should have been me.’

  Two volunteer fire-fighters from the Country Fire Authority, one of them a high-school student of sixteen, took the stand. They had arrived at the dam towards 8 p.m. and heard a w
oman sobbing somewhere in the dark, crying out that she would not be able to bury her children. They stumbled round with their torches, following tyre marks in the grass, looking for the spot where the car had gone in. Was it here, where a piece of a tree had been snapped off and broken glass was scattered on the ground? By then a police chopper was hovering over the dam, shining a spotlight on to its surface. There was no sign of the car. Someone would have to get into the water.

  Tethered by ropes to other firemen, the two CFA volunteers and the owner of the property waded into the dam. Not far from the edge, the bottom drastically dropped away. They began to swim. The water was shockingly cold. They put their heads under and were blinded by murk. They could not feel the bottom with their feet. Had the car floated before it sank? Had it drifted sideways? Without equipment, shallow diving was the best they could do. They floundered about in the water for fifteen minutes, gasping and shivering, until the paramedics shouted at them to get out. Of the car they found no trace.

  …

  When the paramedics had pulled up on the shoulder of the road, they found Farquharson standing near the fence, wet through, with a blanket round his shoulders. His skin was cold and he was shivering. His pulse rate was up, his blood pressure normal. Neither of his lungs was wheezing or crackling. They asked him to cough. He brought up no phlegm. Breathalysed, he blew zero. He had no history of blackouts, he said, but had had a dry cough for the past few days.

  He told the paramedics that his oldest son had opened the door, causing the car to fill up with water and sink; that he himself had got out, flagged down a vehicle, and gone to Winch to tell the police and his ex-wife what had happened.