This House of Grief

by Helen Garner

  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 arranged 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?

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ she snapped. ‘He’d just drowned my kids.’

  And how come she didn’t jump into the water? Did anyone attack her on the night? Tick her off for not jumping in? Tell her she was weak for not diving down after her kids? Rob was attacked for having left the accident and gone straight to her—but who was the first person she called? Her new partner, Stephen Moules! And Moules’ parents!

  He ranged more widely. Was she not the boss of the marriage?

  ‘The boss? Huh. If I didn’t do a lot of what I did in our relationship there wouldn’t be much done. Controlling the bills, controlling the groceries, controlling the children.’

  Who got their way?

  ‘I did.’

  When she said Farquharson had left the disciplining of the kids to her, why didn’t she say what her techniques of discipline were? Didn’t she ever go over the top? Did she not hit them with the wooden spoon? Did she ever slap any of the boys to the head?

  ‘My children had respect for me,’ she said sharply. ‘I would count to three, and if I got to three then consequences would happen. I would be lucky to get to two.’ In a couple of vivid sentences that made me look at her with fresh regard, she described a clash with a rebellious and destructive Jai, and demonstrated the three-fingered slap to the cheek she had given him to jolt him out of his insolence.

  Morrissey wheeled in the heavy artillery. What did she have to say about her role, if any, in the chiselling of Farquharson’s name off the children’s granite headstone?

  She exploded in a passion of sobs: ‘You disgust me. My children’s resting place! I paid for that headstone! He owes me money for that headstone! How dare you!’

  He showed her a press photo of herself and Farquharson at the church door, weeping in each other’s arms as the pallbearers carried the three white coffins out to the hearse. She hissed like a snake, made as if to hurl the photo at Morrissey, then screwed it up and dashed it to the floor. He held it up to the judge, a trophy. When Lasry told her she must identify it, she refused to touch it. Later, in the absence of the jury, Morrissey insisted on tendering the crumpled page as an exhibit. Lasry ruled against him: it would only remind the jurors of her emotional outburst.

  The battle swept this way and that. The court air thrummed with the trauma of it, as if people longed to shout, or even to barrack, but sat wincing, tight-lipped, swinging their heads in unison.

  And in the end, exhausted, backed into a corner, Gambino flung at Morrissey the reason she had turned against Farquharson. It was because he had refused to let her visit him in prison. It was the ‘pathetic letter’ she had received in response to her pleas. It was the promise he made two years ago, to see her after Jai’s fourteenth birthday—the promise he broke when, once again, he changed his mind.

  ‘And that,’ she said, her lips stiff with loathing, ‘was when I decided I was no longer supporting him.’

  It was exactly what Morrissey was after: a deeply ‘feminine’ shift, inspired not by reason but by wifely grievance and the bitter desire to settle a score. He stood and let it radiate its static. Then he thanked her for her patience, and sat down.

  …

  Out on Lonsdale Street I bumped into another barrister I had known in the Carlton pubs of our youth. I sketched the day’s wild carnage. He let out a little moan of commiseration.

  ‘That sounds disastrous. Disastrous. I hesitate to take on a woman. Especially one as wounded as she is. Three kids! Beyond comprehension. When
a wounded man’s in the box, he’ll cower. But a woman’—he bared his teeth and clawed with one hand—‘a woman’ll come back at you.’

  …

  I texted my old barrister friend. ‘Does it matter what Cindy feels towards Farquharson? In the end it doesn’t prove anything, does it?’

  ‘My very thought,’ he replied, ‘at first. But I see the wisdom in Mr Morrissey’s approach. The strongest evidence that would put paid to the coughing fit theory would be that of MOTIVE. Gambino’s new slant provides motive loosely defined, id est, reasons consistent with wanting to offend. Mr Morrissey has no option but to meet it head on.’

  …

  In the third week a new witness, a woman in her forties, entered the court, wearing very high heels and a chic black skirt-suit that showed discreet cleavage. In her hand she pressed a neatly folded pad of tissues. Her face was broad and pleasant, ready to smile. When she spoke she revealed a clear New Zealand accent. This was Dawn Waite, an accounts manager and dairy farmer from the Western District, down Warrnambool way. She had an important story to tell and some hard explaining to do about why she had only now, at the retrial, come forward to tell it.

  She had spent the weekend of Father’s Day 2005 in Melbourne, shopping with her teenage daughter and the daughter’s friend. Soon after dark on the Sunday evening, carrying gifts for the girls’ respective fathers, they were flying along the Princes Highway west of Geelong, sitting on a hundred, nearly halfway home. There was hardly any traffic on the road, and Waite had the lights of her Falcon on high beam.

  Just before they approached the long run-up to the railway overpass, a few kilometres short of Winchelsea, Waite became aware of a car some distance ahead of her that was behaving oddly—moving slowly, its brake lights going on and off, and wandering from side to side in the left lane.

  She came up behind the car, a light-coloured Commodore, and had to slow right down to about sixty. She disengaged her cruise control and for a few moments rolled along about a car’s length behind the Commodore, trying to figure out what it was doing. She flicked her headlights a few times, to let the driver know she needed to pass. No response. She did not want to pull out—what if it swerved towards the centre again and pushed her across the white lines? Once more she flicked her lights. Still it crawled along at sixty, moving vaguely to left and right.

  Now she was getting cranky. Next time the Commodore moved to the left she put her indicator on, pulled out, and drove alongside it for several seconds, looking into the car.

  The driver was a man, dark-haired, clean-shaven. He was facing straight ahead, ignoring her, except that every now and then he would slightly turn his head and glance out to the right. She did not know this stretch of road well, or the landscape it crossed. She thought he must have been looking for a turn-off, or a gate. She could see several children in the back seat—three, she thought, and squashed in, since one of them, a fair-headed boy of seven or eight, was leaning right up against the driver’s-side window, with his face against the glass.

  She made an irritable gesture at the driver, the sort that means What are you doing? He paid her no attention, and gave her no eye contact. Finally she planted her foot and surged past him. She sailed up and over the long rise and down the Winchelsea side. Just as she reached the flat, having regained highway speed, she took a quick look in her rear-vision mirror and saw a set of headlights pop over the crest behind them. The lights headed down the slope, then suddenly veered across the road to the right, and were lost to her view.

  ‘Well,’ she said to the girls, ‘I guess that guy found what he was looking for.’

  The following evening, Monday, just after she had finished the milking, she came inside to cook the tea. The TV news was on. While she worked, she looked up briefly at the screen and saw a pale Commodore being pulled out of what looked like a lake. She called to her daughter, ‘That’s the car! That’s the car!’ Sleepless during the night that followed, she got up at 2 a.m. and made a few notes of what she remembered of the incident.

  Astonishingly, Dawn Waite did not report to any authority her troubling encounter with the Commodore and its driver. She simply went about her business. For four years neither the prosecution nor the defence had any idea that someone had observed Farquharson on the road that night.

  During Preliminary Argument, before the jury for the retrial was empanelled, Waite had been closely questioned before Justice Lasry about her long delay in approaching the police. She had tried earnestly to explain her failure to act. She knew that she should have come forward; she felt strongly that she ought to have. She had always been the sort of person who wanted to do the right thing. But she had a number of reasons.

  She and her family had migrated to Australia only six months before the Father’s Day crash. She was dealing every day with a three-hundred-strong dairy herd as well as holding down a job.

  In New Zealand, she said, if you saw someone driving dangerously, it was the done thing to take down the offender’s numberplate and give it to the police. She and her husband had done it plenty of times. Back in the nineties a young man ran a stoplight and cut them off. They reported him and charges were laid. But before they were called to give evidence in court, the poor lad killed himself. This deeply shocked the couple, for Waite’s brother-in-law had also taken his own life. They had never got over the horrible sense of being partly responsible for the young driver’s death.

  For a good year before Father’s Day 2005, Waite said, she had been mysteriously unwell, fatigued, lacking in energy. No doctor could find out what was wrong with her. It was not until 2008 that she was at last diagnosed with a lymphoma, well advanced, and had to undergo chemotherapy. During the nausea and weakness of her treatment a friend had come over to do some housework for her, and in clearing out her office she had inadvertently thrown away the note pad on which Waite had scribbled down her memories of the incident near the overpass.

  The two years leading up to 2005 had been traumatic for the Waite family in other ways: in quick succession her father, her father-in-law, and her beloved mother-in-law had passed away. Here her voice weakened and she wept. The day after the third funeral they had tried to have a little birthday party for their daughter Jessica. The very next day, Jessica’s close friend was killed in a car crash.

  ‘We buried her, and then we moved countries. I just couldn’t, I could not put my daughter through something like that again. I wasn’t strong enough.

  ‘So,’ she said in a trembling voice, ‘forgive me for not coming forward at that time.’

  But, on 17 December 2009, when the success of Farquharson’s appeal was reported on the news, Waite’s husband said to her, ‘Really, now, you must go forward.’ On 23 December 2009, Dawn Waite walked into the Warrnambool police station.

  …

  Morrissey came down like a wolf on the fold.

  Waite was quite a newcomer to this case, wasn’t she? She would hardly deny, would she, that by not coming forward for five years she had failed to help the accused man through his trial, his imprisonment, his appeal? And that, when she finally did come forward, it was with the aim not of helping the accused but of assisting the police? He insinuated that she was a prim-lipped, officious Kiwi who enjoyed jotting down numberplates and dobbing in other drivers. And wasn’t she exaggeratin
g her unwellness? She can’t have been feeling all that bad if she could drive from Warrnambool to Melbourne to shop, go out to dinner, stay a night somewhere and then drive home, a three-hour drive each way, on top of working, so she said, seven days a week, twelve hours a day, on her farm, trying to make a quid? As a driver, even if she had had an unblemished licence since the age of fifteen, she did not set much of an example for her young daughter, did she? Didn’t she pass that Commodore in a bad temper, at a very fast clip? Yelling at the driver? Calling him a lunatic and a dickhead and giving him two fingers as she went by? Putting her daughter and her daughter’s friend in the lane with a weaving lunatic? Oh, so she went past slowly? It took two seconds? She drove beside him for two whole seconds with her left-hand wheels crammed into the lunatic’s lane? Wasn’t that a ridiculously negligent and dangerous thing to do? And to pass with her lights on full beam—wouldn’t that risk dazzling the other driver in his mirror? If there was a word of truth in what she was saying, wasn’t that insanely dangerous driving? She was making all this up, wasn’t she?

  Waite fought to keep a clear head. At every mention of her bad temper at the wheel she would smile. Sometimes she deflected Morrissey’s salvos with a soft, disarming laugh. When he pressed her for precise distances she would shrug and calmly stonewall him, taking the old-fashioned female prerogative. Women jurors registered with visible pleasure her firm replies. She did not strain to persuade. She acknowledged that, though she believed there had been three children in the back seat, she might have been mistaken. Perhaps there had been bags in the back and that was why the boy she had clearly seen with his face against the window had looked so tightly ‘squished’. But Morrissey suggested that she had transposed on to her idea of the car’s back seat the photo of the kids she had seen on the TV news: the famous shot of the three Farquharson boys lined up on a couch with the little one in the middle.