by Helen Garner
I tried to be the first stranger each day to step into the high, white space of Court Eleven. Its tranquil order moved and comforted me. Everything gently shone. Counsel’s chairs and microphones waited in rows down the long table. Cool air streamed in from some mysterious source. The tall flasks of water, each encircled by a cluster of polished glasses, stood ready on blue mats.
‘Nice in here, isn’t it,’ I said to the tipstaff.
‘Think so?’ He surveyed his handiwork with a pleased smile. ‘Yep. It’s nice. That is’—he threw out one hand towards the bar table—‘until all this starts.’
…
Morrissey fought to have the judge exile Gambino and her parents to the perspex-screened gallery upstairs, where Farquharson’s family now sat; he wanted to protect the jury from the ‘pageant’ of suffering he said she was likely to present. Justice Lasry was working like a Trojan not to load the dice against the accused, but he would not come at this. So, when the new jury filed in, pale with dismay that their lives were to be put on hold for at least eight weeks, Morrissey in his opening address gave them fair warning: in cross-examination, even if she was distraught, he was going to take Gambino on. The point was not to beat her up. It was to get answers that would help the jury in their deliberations. When he pressed her on certain questions, he said, they would need to be quite strong in their role. Only a wooden-hearted person would not feel sympathy for Gambino, and he did. But this was not the Oprah Winfrey show. His job was to ask questions, and that’s what he was going to do.
…
It was the Friday morning of the retrial’s first week when Cindy Gambino was called. As she passed me on her way to the witness stand I saw that she had run a purple rinse through her long brown hair, and that she was not the only person in the room wearing purple. Meaningful dabs of it shone here and there, scarves, jackets, blouses. Even the Homicide detective’s tie had a purple stripe. I whipped off my faded lavender cardigan and stuffed it into my bag.
The calm that Gambino showed seemed natural, not the effect of medication. Once or twice she flicked a glance at Farquharson. Asked if he was the natural father of the three boys, she bared her side teeth at him in a quick snarl. The unspoken things that had shadowed her original version of their relationship and his character she now brought to prominence in a most unflattering light.
Even at the time of their marriage, she said, when they already had two children, she knew in her heart that she did not really love him. She had to fight past his reluctance to have a third child. Farquharson was very protective, very possessive, but he never called her or their kids by their Christian names. His nicknames for the boys were Wobber, Bruiser, Bub. Cindy herself he addressed as Big Mama or Fat Mama; he would grab her by her private parts. As Jai and Tyler grew bigger, Farquharson used to get into play fights with them; he would stir them up till they got angry and lashed out at him. Yet he left the disciplining of the children to her. He would not smack them: he said that if he got really angry, he did not know how far he might go. He whinged and moaned a lot, she said, always complaining that he was tired. She was not physically attracted to him. Their intimacy faded and died. She was drawn to Stephen Moules, but despite Farquharson’s suspicions she was not having an affair with him. The marriage went downhill fast. She ended it in November 2004 and he went back to live with his father. During an argument at her house after their separation, Farquharson pushed her hard against a wall. She locked herself in her bedroom and called the police. Later he came over and apologised, but she did not forget it.
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 days 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 mur
der?’
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.’