This House of Grief

by Helen Garner

  ‘Maybe he thinks,’ whispered Louise, ‘that if he drags this out long enough the jury will forget that tape.’

  Indeed, the Emergency interview had made an impression so deeply disturbing that everything coming after it seemed to be beside the point. By now, close to the end of the third week of the trial, the very words ‘yellow paint marks’ provoked a Pavlovian response. The jurors glazed over and turned sullen. They rested their chins on their fists. Their eyelids drooped. Their necks grew loose with boredom; they were limp with it, barely able to hold themselves erect. Once I glanced over and saw four of them in a row, their heads dropped on the same protesting angle towards their left shoulders, like tulips dying in a vase.

  And hour after hour, as he laboured, Morrissey was tormented by terrific bouts of dry coughing. He barked, he croaked, he sweated and turned pale. Long pauses fell while he composed himself. Justice Cummins coddled him affectionately, offered to adjourn at lunchtime on Friday so he could rest his voice for two and a half days, threatened trouble if he saw him at the football at the MCG. Morrissey was embarrassed. He grinned and ducked his head and said that he would soldier on till the end of the week.

  Then, first thing on Friday morning, before the jury was called in, Morrissey told the judge that he had stayed up working half the night and would now be able to finish his cross-examination by lunchtime.

  Justice Cummins’ brow came down. Overnight, he said sharply, inquiries had come from the jury: how much longer was this trial likely to go on? Some of these jurors were going to work before court, or during the lunch break. They were serious people, applying themselves to their task. They had made arrangements to cancel this afternoon’s work, and now they were to be told they would be released by lunchtime. They were not rag dolls to be thrown aside for the convenience of counsel. They had lives to lead. They should be treated properly.

  Morrissey stood at the bar table staring down at his hands. He looked offended, even wounded. Why, yesterday the judge had practically tucked him up in bed with a hot-water bottle. Today, he was rapping Morrissey’s knuckles with a ruler.

  But Farquharson’s supporters gazed loyally at their wigged champion. They believed in him. They urged him on. When Louise’s mother slipped into court one day to see what her daughter had been raving about, she looked around in surprise and said, ‘It feels like a family in here.’ The cramped court had become an intimate space, intimate enough for Morrissey—this decent, warm and very endearing man, perhaps sentimental, perhaps a little vain—to identify with his client to the point where, in its paroxysms of coughing, his own body was acting out Farquharson’s story. A story that was becoming more fantastical with every passing day.

  …

  On the Monday of the trial’s fourth week, the Crown introduced a crucial witness.

  Hostility showed in the rigid shoulders of Farquharson’s sisters as the man climbed the steps to the stand. His dark hair was freshly cut. In his jeans, runners and striped short-sleeved shirt he affected a rockabilly jauntiness. But his crisp-featured face was expressionless, his posture tense and wary. His name was Greg King; he was a bus driver; and he was about to be dragged through the sort of public ordeal that most people face only in nightmares from which, gasping and sweating, they are grateful to wake.

  ‘Mr King,’ said Rapke. ‘Do you know a man by the name of Robert Farquharson?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘How do you know him?’

  ‘We grew up together. He’s a friend of mine, a mate, a family friend.’

  The two mates kept their faces turned in opposite directions. From my seat I could see them in profile, each resolutely avoiding the other’s eye.

  They were Winch boys. They went to the local primary school a few years apart, and then to Geelong Tech. They did not really become friends until King at twenty and Farquharson at seventeen found jobs with the local shire council. Outside work they played football together, and hung out at the pub or at King’s house. By the time Farquharson and Cindy Gambino got serious, King and his wife, Mary, had already started their family, and the men’s friendship began to dwindle.

  When Rapke asked him to describe the relationship between Farquharson and Gambino, King began to breathe audibly. His voice grew husky. They were always at each other, he said. He had urged them to see that as a couple you have to bond, but they kept on niggling and arguing. When they married, they already had two children. King went to their wedding. He and Mary would visit them for a barbecue, or the two couples would go down to the pub for tea. But, as the pressures of parenthood increased, Rob and Cindy argued all the time, particularly about money. Robbie was never happy in his job—not on the shire, not in the Jim’s Mowing franchise, not even at the Cumberland Resort. King seemed to be describing a pair of ill-matched malcontents: a grumbling husband, a demanding wife. In his opinion, they had got way ahead of themselves by trying to build a $300,000 house on one wage. They had a habit, he had said in his witness statement, of measuring themselves against what other people had. Farquharson complained to King that Cindy was always buying things they couldn’t afford.

  ‘Cindy always wanted the best of everything for the house,’ said King. ‘She wanted the best.’

  Hearing this, Farquharson glanced at his sisters and executed a veritable dance of grinning and squinting and shoulder-squirming. Kerri Huntington returned a sardonic nod.

  When the marriage ended, King went to see Farquharson at his dad’s place once a week or so, ‘to comfort him, because we were mates. He was down. He was gloomy. He was angry and upset of what had happened.’ One night Farquharson said to him, ‘Cindy’s seeing someone else, the bitch.’ King did not tell him that he already knew this from talk around town. Once, in a dark mood about the break-up, Farquharson spoke to King about driving off a cliff or running his car into a tree.

  Again Farquharson swung his head towards his family in the public benches. He rolled his eyes and twisted his mouth into a bitter smile, as if at an outrageous lie.

  ‘What did you say to that?’ asked Rapke.

  ‘I said,’ muttered King between hard lips, ‘“Don’t be stupid.”’

  A month or so after the Farquharsons parted, King was driving out of his street on to the highway, heading west to the Winchelsea shops, when he saw Robbie sitting in his white Commodore under a tree on the other side. He was looking straight ahead in an easterly direction, down the road to Geelong. King made eye contact on his way past, but kept going. Farquharson started his car and took off in the opposite direction.

  When they ran into each other later that week, King asked him, ‘Was that you sitting under a tree? What were you doing?’

  ‘I was thinking,’ replied Farquharson, ‘about lining a truck up.’

  King went home and reported this to his wife. They agreed that it was Robbie ‘talking shit again’, and swept it under the carpet.

  …

  One Friday evening in the winter of 2005, a few months before Father’s Day, Mary King asked her husband to drive to the fish-and-chip shop and bring home some hot chips for tea. Lucy and Lachlan, their two youngest kids, went along for the ride. King sent them into the shop to order, while he waited outside in the car.

  As it happened, Farquharson was in th
e shop with his three boys. He wandered out and stood by King’s open window to chat. He seemed tired and down in the dumps. His mood did not improve when Cindy Gambino drove up and parked. She walked past and greeted the men by name. King spoke to her, but Farquharson would not. When Gambino disappeared into the shop, King rebuked him for his rudeness.

  ‘You have to say hello. Come on, Robbie. You have to move on a bit.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ said Farquharson. He was very angry. ‘Nobody does that to me and gets away with it. That fucking car she’s driving, I paid $30,000 for it. She wanted it, and they’re fucking driving it. Look what I’m driving—the fucking shit one. And now it looks like she wants to marry that fucking dickhead. There’s no way I’m going to let him and her and the kids live together in my house, and I have to fucking pay for it and also pay maintenance for the kids—no way.’

  ‘You have to move on,’ insisted King.

  Farquharson said, ‘How?’

  In the court, a tense pause. Rapke waited, squinting, face upturned. King shifted from foot to foot. He stammered. With an effort of will, he kept going: ‘And then he said, “I’m going to take away the most important things that mean to her.” I asked him what that would be, and he nodded his head towards the fish-and-chip shop window.

  ‘I said, “What—the kids?”

  ‘He said, “Yes.”

  ‘I said, “What would you do? Take them away or something?”

  ‘He just stared at me in my eyes and said, “Kill them.”’

  From the dock Farquharson looked across at his sisters and violently shook his head. He kept squinching up his eyes and tucking his chin into his collar, in a pantomime of incensed denial.

  King stopped to collect himself. He picked up the glass with a shaking hand and took a great swig of water.

  ‘I said, “Bullshit. It’s your own flesh and blood, Robbie.”’

  His voice was barely audible. Farquharson strained to hear, his eyebrows high in his forehead.

  ‘He said, “So? I hate them.”

  ‘I said, “You’d go to gaol.”

  ‘He said, “No I won’t. I’ll kill myself before it gets to that.”

  ‘I asked him how. He said it would be close by. I said, “What?”

  ‘He said, “There’d be an accident involved where I survive and the kids don’t. It’d be on a special day.”

  ‘I said, “What kind of day?”

  ‘He said, “Something like Father’s Day, so everyone would remember it. Father’s Day, and I was the one to have them for the last time—not her. Then she suffers for the rest of her life every Father’s Day.”

  ‘I said, “You don’t even dream of that stuff, Robbie!”’

  At that moment Lucy and Lachlan ran out of the shop with the chips. King drove them home. His wife was busy cooking the evening meal. She was cross with him for having taken so long. The TV was on, the family room full of the teatime racket of four young children. King told Mary about the conversation. They disregarded it as another bout of Robbie’s shit. For several months they thought no more about it.

  Then came Father’s Day. At eleven o’clock that night the Kings got a phone call from some friends in the town. Robbie had had an accident and the boys had drowned in a dam.

  ‘It all come back to me, the conversation,’ said King. He swallowed hard. ‘I asked how Robbie was. They said “Robbie’s well. He’s in hospital.” I was speechless. I was—shattered.’ Muscles stood out in his jaw and neck. He gripped the rail of the witness stand.

  Rapke peered up at him from the bar table. For the next chapter of the story he needed his witness to stay in one piece.

  ‘We’ll do this,’ he said, ‘step by step.’

  King’s boss at the bus company noticed the wrecked state his employee was in, and started asking questions. King broke down and spilt the beans. The boss, who was a former member of the police force, made some calls. Eleven days later, on the morning after Jai, Tyler and Bailey were buried, two detectives from the Homicide Squad drove from Melbourne to King’s house in Winchelsea. When they had listened to his story, they asked King if he would go to visit Farquharson at his father’s place, raise the subject of the fish-and-chip-shop conversation and tape his mate’s responses on a hidden recorder.

  That same evening, after dark, the devastated King met the detectives at the Modewarre boat ramp, a drought-stricken launching place at the end of an unsealed road a few kilometres east of Winchelsea. In this obscure and tree-sheltered spot, the detectives set him up with a wire. King drove away from the shrunken lake and headed back to the town, with microphones stuck to his torso and a recorder down the front of his pants.

  …

  The tape that King came away with that night, which the Crown now proposed to play to the jury, was an hour and forty minutes long. The subject of the fish-and-chip-shop conversation was not raised until forty-seven pages into the transcript. Rapke, the prosecutor, had little interest in what he called ‘banter between men about football’. He asked Justice Cummins’ leave to edit the tape down to the ten pages that he considered relevant—a mere twenty minutes’ worth. But Morrissey leapt to his feet. No! The whole tape must be played, for what it revealed about Farquharson’s mental state, and about the relationship between the two friends.

  Justice Cummins ruled in Morrissey’s favour. While everyone moved and stretched, preparing for another bout of intense concentration, Cummins reminded the jury that the evidence was not the typed transcript they had been given to follow. The transcript was only a guide. The evidence was the sounds on the tape. He urged them to pay attention to pauses, to emphasis and tone.

  …

  The King we hear greet his friends—he is taken aback to find another mate, Mick Stocks, already ensconced with Farquharson—is at first hardly recognisable as the choked figure on the witness stand. His voice is expressive to the point of being musical. We, he says, like a social worker or a doctor. How are we? How are we going, mate? All right? He apologises for ‘yesterday’ but says he has been ‘up there’ this morning, to pay respect.

  ‘Yesterday=funeral,’ scrawled Louise. ‘He didn’t go?’ We sat forward.

  But after these awkward greetings, the three men subside into an hour of rambling, murmuring talk. Football, cars, more football. Is it cheaper to drive or fly to Queensland? Football again. The beauty of Las Vegas rising out of the desert: they dream of seeing it. A new cure for snoring, the price of firewood, King’s damaged knee and imminent arthroscopy, yet more football. Somehow Farquharson keeps his end up while the others tactlessly compare notes on the sporting and educational progress of local children. On and on it winds, the droning of nasal voices, this visit by men helpless to address the reason for their call: their mate’s appalling loss. And all the while in the background, faithful to its task of relieving social anxiety, the television pours out manic energy: screeching tyres, a gunshot, a woman’s scream, a police siren, a booming American voice-over.

  Farquharson, like the jury, had been provided with headphones, which made him look oddly more adult. The transcript lay open on the chair beside him and he stooped over it, his only expression one of distant scepticism. Some of the journalis
ts seemed to be already writing their pieces. In the family seats the women held themselves erect. Kerri Huntington played a little private game with the cuffs of her cardigan, making them dance and do silent claps. But the dark-jacketed shoulders of Farquharson’s brothers-in-law were bowed forward, their elbows braced against their knees and their hands clasped in the churchgoer’s posture: the endurance of tedium. I noticed a small, silky brown head between Stephen Moules and Bev Gambino. It was Cindy. She was rocking gently back and forth in her seat.

  After a hundred minutes of laborious talk, the good-humoured Mick takes his leave. King and Farquharson are at last alone.

  ‘Hey,’ says King in a hoarse whisper. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know.’ Farquharson’s voice is drab, distant. He sounds weary, forcing himself to be hostly. The TV for a moment goes silent. ‘A lot of people didn’t come. I understand that. It’s a million times harder for me, so you don’t have to say nothing. I know.’

  The hidden microphone is picking up King’s nervous breathing. He seizes the nettle. ‘But something’s been bugging me, though. Remember? Down at the fish shop? Out the front? That discussion.’

  ‘Discussion? About what?’