This House of Grief
Page 28
Lasry rocked back in his throne. He remained speechless for several seconds, with the expression that greets a manifestation of unusual gall. Ten minutes from the Westgate Bridge, he said, was not a realistic estimate. The sentencing was likely to take about half an hour. They would probably get there for the end of it. Morrissey said he did not object to the wait. The judge agreed to leave the bench for a short period, to give them a chance to make it.
Farquharson’s family sat massed in the side seats from which I had observed the majority of the trial. A hum of talk arose in the room. A journalist told me that Gambino and Moules had married five days ago, on the auspicious date 10/10/2010. While we waited, my eye accidentally caught that of Kerri Huntington. We held each other’s gaze for a second, without acknowledgment or expression, then looked away. I dashed a glance at Farquharson in the dock behind me. His hair was longer, his face puffier and older, his skin a creamy grey. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes passed. Then I heard a woman’s voice, low, with an edge on it: ‘Roll out the red carpet. The red carpet.’ Along the row of policemen’s backs I saw Gambino and Moules slide into the room. As they took their seats behind the bar table, Gambino whipped out a yellow comb and ran it through her purple hair from scalp to shoulders. I glanced at Huntington. Again our eyes met. Motionless under the springy perm, her face radiated hostility and disbelief.
Justice Lasry strode back to the bench. He read out his remarks in a vigorous, expressive tone. He deplored the crime, but said he did not accept the ‘extreme version’ of Greg King’s evidence and was not sentencing Farquharson on the basis of it. He said that Farquharson was not a risk to the public, and that before the murders of the children he had been of good character. He gave him three life sentences, with a minimum term of thirty-three years.
Before the crying could start I grabbed my things and bolted. Outside, the heavens had opened. I ran into a sandwich shop and gulped down a hot pie. Back in Lonsdale Street, I encountered Bob and Bev Gambino charging away from the TV cameras under a big umbrella, hurrying towards shelter. They saw me and waved. Their faces looked more open and free than I had ever seen them. We called goodbye and kept going in opposite directions. I stumped home, my umbrella blown inside out, my trousers soaked to the knee.
…
Nobody knew, that day, how much longer this story would drag on.
A year and a half later, in May 2012, still represented by Mr Morrissey, Farquharson appealed again in the Victorian Supreme Court, and was rejected.
On 16 August 2013 he made application, in Melbourne, for special leave to take his case to the High Court in Canberra. This would be his last chance. Louise, my long-gone gap-year girl, turned up at the hearing without warning and slid into the seat beside me. She was a young woman now. It was six years since she had seen any of the story’s people. She was shocked by how much older and wearier they looked.
Before a trio of august High Court judges from the nation’s capital—a woman and two men—Morrissey was permitted twenty minutes on his feet. When he rose, his black robe flapped loose on a torso that had lost an alarming amount of its bulk. Justice Lasry, he argued, had failed to tell the jury that they could find Farquharson guilty of manslaughter rather than murder: Farquharson had known he suffered from a respiratory condition that could make him black out at short notice, thus he was a negligent driver who knowingly imperilled other road users, and risked the lives of his own children. The judges listened and questioned, cool, dry, polite. The twenty-minute limit was rigorously enforced: ‘Sunset time, Mr Morrissey,’ said the judge in the middle, with a regretful smile. The three of them got up and left the bench. In their absence three solemn young officials, like figures in a fairytale, stood motionless behind their empty chairs, holding the backs of them with formally placed hands. No one dared to speak. Four minutes later the judges surged back in and took their seats.
The answer was no. The High Court would not hear Robert Farquharson’s appeal.
On the TV news that evening Cindy Gambino and Stephen Moules faced the cameras outside the court.
‘This has taken nearly a decade of my life,’ she said quietly. ‘My boys are at peace.’
The couple turned to walk away. From the back they looked forlorn, diminished somehow, as they stepped out of the limelight and down into the bluestone gutter to cross the road.
CHAPTER 19
If there is any doubt that Robert Farquharson drove into the dam on purpose, it is a doubt no more substantial than a cigarette paper shivering in the wind, no more reasonable than the unanswered prayer that shot through my mind when I first saw the photo of the car being dragged from the black water.
I come back and back to the old Commodore in the Kmart car park. When Farquharson pulls in, he finds that the youngest child, Bailey, has nodded off in his baby seat. Farquharson has forgotten to bring the stroller, so, to pass the time until the toddler wakes, he turns on the radio. The sad father sits with his boys in the shit car, listening to the football. This clapped-out bubble of steel and glass is the only home he has to offer them.
I was born and brought up in Geelong. I remember winter Sunday afternoons in that part of the country, their heavy melancholy. The Barwon flows between its neat banks. Cars glide in silence through the colourless streets. Along the bottoms of fences dank weeds sprout. The air is still and chilly. The steely cloud-cover will never break. Time stalls. There is no future. One’s own desolation is manifest in the worn-down volcanic landscape. The life force burns low in its secret cage.
By nightfall the shit car would become a weapon, and then a coffin.
When I let myself think of Jai, Tyler and Bailey lying in their quiet cemetery, watched over by the golden emblems of Bob the Builder and the Bombers, I imagine the possessive rage of their families: ‘You never knew them. You never even saw them. How dare you talk about your “grief ”?’
But no other word will do. Every stranger grieves for them. Every stranger’s heart is broken. The children’s fate is our legitimate concern. They are ours to mourn. They belong to all of us now.