This House of Grief

by Helen Garner

  …

  Late in 2004 Gambino offered, in a neighbourly spirit, to pick up Moules’ two boys from school in the afternoons and look after them at her place until he finished work. Moules saw no harm in it, and was grateful for the help. It made me flinch to think of Farquharson stumping home sore-footed from his cleaning job, only to find his house thundering with another man’s kids and his wife flushed and enlivened by her new friendship with their father.

  Across the dying months of the marriage, though, Farquharson naively confided in Moules his anxiety and distress. Even after his wife had called the whole thing off and he had moved back to his father’s—which chanced to be only five doors along from the house Moules was renting—Farquharson would often turn up at Moules’ place looking for somebody to talk to. He took the break-up very hard. He was distraught when Cindy did not want to reconcile. ‘He did not know what to do,’ said Moules, ‘in any way, shape or form.’ Moules ran a Christian line with him. He ‘counselled’ him on how to get his marriage back together. ‘I tried to sort of steer him,’ he said, miming the two-handed motion of driving a car. He gave Farquharson advice both spiritual and worldly, and recommended he see a counsellor from Bayside Christian Church. Finally he realised his efforts were falling on deaf ears. He gave up.

  But Moules’ role as his neighbour’s counsellor must have been uncomfortably compromised, for Cindy Farquharson too, over the same period, was a frequent visitor to his house. She used him as an ear, said Moules, to ‘vent to’. They would ‘just sit there talking’. According to Moules’ police statement, she told him that Farquharson had spoken of moving up to Queensland, that he wanted to ‘wean himself off his boys, because that was how it would end up anyway’.

  Once Farquharson had moved out of their house, Cindy made it apparent to Moules that she had feelings for him. Next, she changed her name back to Gambino. Her signals were unmistakable. Moules had to struggle, he said, to keep their relationship platonic. He declined to be used as a scapegoat. He wanted Gambino to ‘have all her business clear-cut’ before anything further developed between them. But Farquharson, he said, was beginning to hold him responsible for the failure of the marriage.

  ‘It’s got to be your fault,’ he said to Moules. ‘I can’t understand any other reason why the marriage shouldn’t be.’

  And Moules replied, ‘Your wife is your wife, okay? I’ve got custody of my kids. I’m starting my life again. I don’t need any more dramas.’

  …

  When he spoke about the night of Father’s Day, Moules’ voice became low and husky. Tremors flickered in the skin around his eyes. To control the trembling of his hands he had to clasp them on the timber rail of the witness stand. He mimed his incredulity at Farquharson’s first words to him when he arrived at the dam: ‘Where’s your smokes?’ He described his helpless diving into the bitterly cold water, his repeated requests to Farquharson to tell him where the car had gone in, and Farquharson’s answer: ‘I don’t know. I had a coughing fit and blacked out.’ Two young men—they must have been Shane Atkinson and Tony McClelland—shouted guidance to him from the bank: ‘I think I see bubbles. Try there. Try there.’ Moules tried to dive in the direction of any movement he thought he could sense in the water. But it was too dark and too cold, and he was shuddering too much and swallowing too much water. It got to the point where he said to himself, ‘This is ridiculous.’ One of the men yelled to him, ‘Come on, mate. Get out or you’ll be next.’

  Moules’ teenage cousin, who shared his house, drove him home to get dry clothes. Mistakenly believing Gambino to have been taken to Geelong Hospital, Moules set out with a friend at the wheel to find her there. On the way past the dam he asked the driver to stop so he could let the police know he had been, as he put it in his witness statement two days later, ‘first at the scene’. In that statement, Moules said he had been asked whether he had told an officer or anyone else that night that Farquharson had killed his kids. He was very angry on the night, he said, and he might have said something like it, but he did not remember it.

  …

  Kerri Huntington, the younger of Farquharson’s big sisters, took the stand, her flamboyant blonde hair massing on her shoulders. Although at times she wept, she looked like the extrovert of the family, someone who would know how to throw a party, a warm person with laugh-crinkles radiating from her small, deep-set Farquharson eyes.

  When Rob’s marriage had crashed, Kerri and her husband, Gary, opened their home to him and his sons. The Huntingtons’ house was kid-friendly. They had a pool. Their two daughters loved Rob’s boys, who would often come to stay with them on his access weekends. The Huntingtons would even have asked Rob to move in with them, but their house lacked an extra bedroom, and anyway they lived at Mount Moriac, halfway to Geelong; what Rob needed was a house in Winchelsea, so the boys could come to him off their own bat.

  Kerri, who worked part-time at Kmart in the Geelong suburb of Belmont, kept an eye on real estate. She spotted the perfect house, right across the road from the Winch footy oval. But the Daintree Drive house still wasn’t sold; Rob couldn’t afford to buy. The Huntingtons offered to lend him what they could, and to help him get a better car. He didn’t want to be in debt to them. He said no.

  Around six on the evening of Father’s Day, Kerri was about to go on her break at Kmart when Rob and his kids wandered in. She was surprised. His normal fortnightly access date had been the previous weekend; she remembered it because he had been so sick, with his lingering chest cold, that he had rung and asked her for help with the boys. When they had got to her place, Rob was lethargic with a nasty cough. It didn’t make him pass out, but it took his breath away. She had made him lie on the couch and sleep, while she looked after the boys.

  Now, on the wrong weekend, here they were in her store, pestering Rob to buy them a cricket ball and some DVDs. They told her they were going to stop off at her place on their way home to collect a football that Tyler had lost in her garden the weekend before. Kerri and Rob made a plan to get their kids together the following Saturday, and away the four Farquharsons went.

  Gary Huntington testified that boys and father did rock through the Mount Moriac house half an hour later. They picked up the footy, and towards seven, all correctly buckled into their seats, they set off for Winchelsea.

  …

  Outside on Lonsdale Street at lunchtime, while Louise and I were standing in a patch of sun against the Supreme Court’s honey-coloured stone wall, Bob Gambino drifted up to us.

  ‘You girls still here?’

  ‘Oh yes. We’ll be here till the end.’

  He looked pleased, and stuck his hands into his coat pockets. His natural expression seemed to be a small, lopsided smile. ‘Some of those jurors,’ he said, without apparent animus, ‘aren’t even there. That dark one. She’s just eatin’ chewy and lookin’ round. She’s in a dream.’

  I burst out, ‘Cindy was incredible. I couldn’t believe how she kept going.’

  ‘Nah,’ he said, looking into the stream of traffic. ‘You never expect to have to sit through this. I’ll certainly never forget that night. This arvo it’ll be the divers.’

  Louise turned a whiter shade of pale.

  ‘They asked us if we wanted not to be here for that,’ said Bob. ‘But we know i
t already. We know it all.’

  We stood there, keeping him company, in the bent rectangle of sun.

  …

  Before the jury was called in that afternoon, Mr Morrissey asked the judge for permission to show them two photographs.

  The first was of Jai and Tyler jumping into the Huntingtons’ swimming pool. This, he said, would demonstrate that the two older boys were so confident and enthusiastic in water, so ‘not hopeless’, that it would have been ‘a risky proposition’ to try to drown them.

  I was too embarrassed to look at Morrissey. Could he really believe that there was a meaningful connection between a joyful daylight leap and a violent plunge into the dark?

  The second photo showed two-year-old Bailey on his father’s lap in an armchair, both of them sound asleep. Morrissey particularly wanted the jury to see the poignant shot of the slumbering father and son: it would counter what he said was the Crown’s suggestion that Bailey had been, to his father, an unwanted child.

  The Crown declared it had made no such suggestion. Justice Cummins jibbed at the sleeping picture. ‘Naked sympathy is just as inappropriate as naked prejudice. Are you going to introduce a family album? Why pick this one out?’

  ‘I’m seeking,’ said Morrissey doggedly, ‘to demonstrate that he loved that child.’

  There it was again, the sentimental fantasy of love as a condition of simple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit region in which we are safe from our own destructive urges. Surely, I thought, Freud was closer to the mark when he said, ‘We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.’

  A pause. Justice Cummins shook his head. He gave Morrissey leave to tender the swimming pool picture, but he would not admit the second photo. So little Bailey was left to dream on, forever unregarded, curled in his sleeping father’s lap.

  …

  It was a woman who finally got deep enough into the dam, that night, to find the car.

  Crop-haired and wiry in her dark blue uniform, a huge diver’s watch on her wrist, Senior Constable Rebecca Caskey of the Search and Rescue Squad stood in the witness stand with her hands clasped loosely behind her. Something in her easy posture reminded me of nurses I had seen at work: women of few words, unflappable, alert and calm.

  Search and Rescue figured out, from the scattered debris their torch beams located near the dam, the car’s likely departure point from the bank. By 10.30 p.m. that night, Caskey was fully kitted up, with an attendant on the bank holding her lifeline.

  In she went, all the way down. Compared with a farm dam, it was clean: there was no entangling vegetation. But the bottom was pure mud. The water was black and very cold. She could not see at all. A torch would have been useless in water so full of sediment. They used an arc search pattern: the man on the bank let out a length of line, and Caskey, keeping it tight between them, searched the available curve. He let out another arm-length and swept her back the other way.

  She started feeling bits of metal and plastic on the bottom. Then she bumped into something with her head, something that moved. She touched it with her hand. It spun freely. A wheel. On the witness stand she squeezed her eyes shut, put her long-fingered hands out in front of her, and mimed blind groping gestures up and down an imaginary wall. ‘What was facing me,’ she said, ‘was the underside of the car. It was vertical.’

  She backed away, and surfaced. They calculated the car’s position: wedged nose down in the mud, twenty-eight metres from the bank, in seven and a half metres of water. Standard procedure for Search and Rescue is to remove bodies from a submerged vehicle before they haul it out. But they agreed with Major Collision that Farquharson’s car should be sealed and brought up intact.

  Oh God. This could only get worse. I sneaked a look at Farquharson. His lips were white, his mouth very low on his face. Like a child he ground his knuckles into his eyes.

  Caskey dived again. In the mud at the bottom, working blind, she felt her way to what she guessed was the driver’s side of the vertical car.

  ‘The first thing I noticed on the driver’s side was an open door, just above the level of my head. Its window was closed. I felt around the edge of the door.’

  Again, eyes shut and palms exposed, she mimed her fumbling search.

  ‘And then,’ she said, ‘I felt, slightly protruding from the car, a small person’s head.’

  On the witness stand she cupped both hands before her face, and delicately moved an imaginary object sideways.

  ‘I pushed it back in. And I shut the door.’

  She swam up the driver’s side of the car and down the passenger side, checking the windows and doors. All were closed.

  Soon after midnight Caskey clambered out of the water for the last time. A police 4WD winched the Commodore to the edge of the dam, and a commercial tow-truck dragged it, still full of water, up on to the bank. Caskey had been in the water for several hours. She was cold. She was keen to get changed and go home.

  Before she left, she took a quick look into the car. She saw three children. Two were in the back. Lying in the front was the one whose head she had touched and, for a moment, held in her hands.

  …

  The men from Major Collision looked into the recovered car before they opened it to drain the water out. Ten-year-old Jai was lying face down across the front seats with his head towards the driver’s door. When he was taken out of the car he showed signs of rigor mortis. Seven-year-old Tyler lay on his right side behind the driver’s seat. His head was near the door and his legs were between the two front seats. Two-year-old Bailey was lying across the top of the baby seat, facing rearwards and still tangled in his safety harness.

  The police took careful note of the positions of the car’s controls. The key was in the ignition, off and locked. The automatic gearshift was in drive. The handbrake was off, as were the headlights and parking lights. The heater was off: its knob was at ten o’clock, in the blue part of the dial. All three seatbelts were unbuckled. The windows were all shut. The two rear doors were locked. When Sergeant Exton tried to open the driver’s side rear door, the exterior handle snapped off in his hand.

  At two in the morning, the children’s bodies were formally identified by Stephen Moules.

  …

  Dr Michael Burke, a small, grey-haired, bespectacled forensic pathologist, was taken through his evidence fast and light, as if in mercy, but Farquharson’s face as he listened was contorted with anguish. He gasped and sobbed in silence, wiping at his eyes again and again. His sisters’ faces were flushed. They too wept without sound.

  Apart from the surrounding circumstances, there is no definitive test to show that a person has died of drowning. A particular kind of foam, however, a plume of white matter, is often seen in drowned people, and this was found around the children’s mouths and noses. Toxicology tests revealed no evidence of alcohol, carbon monoxide, or other drugs or poisons. All three bodies showed minor abrasions and bruises here and there, marks that could have been caused either by the impact of the crash or by ordinary childhood play. Jai, who had been riding in the front beside his father, was marked above his left eyebrow; the left side of his face was discoloured; the soft tissue at the back of his neck was bruised in a way that suggeste
d whiplash. A tiny flap of skin had been scraped from one of Tyler’s fingers. As for Bailey, the pathologist had found only a scratch on his elbow, with a bandaid on it.

  …

  At the end of the gruelling day the jury looked older, weary and sad. The men’s brows were furrowed, the women were stowing sodden handkerchiefs. Out in the courtyard we passed Bev Gambino. She gave us a small, shaky smile. Her face was thin, her eyes hollow behind the pretty spectacles. A puff of wind would have carried her away. Louise and I were beyond speech. We parted in Lonsdale Street. On the long escalator down to Flagstaff station I could not block out of my mind those small bodies, the tender reverse-midwifery of the diver. The only way I could bear it was to picture the boys as water creatures: three silvery, naked little sprites, muscular as fish, who slithered through a crack in the car’s rear window and, with a flip of their sinuous feet, sped away together into their new element.

  …

  At the coffee cart, early next morning, Louise rushed up to me in a fluster.

  ‘One of the jurors was on my train. That tall one with the nerdy fringe. He spoke to me.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘He said “Are you Zach?” I had no idea what he was talking about and I couldn’t believe he’d spoken to me. I said no, coldly, and walked away. What did he mean?’

  ‘Zach. Isn’t that Stephen Moules’ son? The one who was in Cindy’s car when she drove to the dam—remember? Who begged her to slow down?’

  We looked around nervously. No one was in earshot.