Everywhere I Look (24 page)

‘Did you see that Burmese asylum seeker on the news last night,' I shouted, ‘chucking a mental in a detention centre?'

‘Laying about him with a pool cue!' cried my friend. ‘TV sets exploded! Computers!'

To converse we had to shape our hands into trumpets, and yell straight into each other's faces. How did the cops find the Brunswick guy? That hoodie was an unusual colour. I bet someone dobbed him in. What was he doing, wandering around at that hour? Thank God they had CCTV in that bridal shop. Did you go to the march? I was worried that it would be too peaceful, not enough about how women aren't safe to walk home alone. I was more worried that people would start screeching about civil rights violations. How can the streets ever be made safe? There's evil in the world. The place where she was dumped is out near Vanessa's. Would you go there? No way. It looked beautiful on TV. Soft. Long grass blowing in the wind. And in the foreground you could see a disturbed patch. Imagine being a cop and walking towards that shallow grave. It was
shallow
. He must have just scraped some dirt over her and bolted. Do you think he thought it was worth it? Does a bloke like that
think?
Would he have been trying for years to keep a grip? Did you hear that on the CCTV tape he puts out his hand as if to touch her cheek? And she rears back? I heard that another woman came forward with a story from a year ago. Some guy had tried to persuade her to get into his car. She got away. But she said he had a pitch. A pitch? What's that mean? It's when they sound plausible enough to make you pause in your stride and pay attention. Just long enough for them to gain a psychological advantage. I nearly went down to the court. But I thought it would be too horrible. In the police car, when he was doubled over with his hands clasped behind his neck, you could see he was wearing a wedding ring. No, he had a ring on every finger. What about the poor guy, her workmate, who offered to walk her home? And she said no, she'd be all right? I feel so bad for him. All the women he's ever known would be feminists. He would have learnt not to patronise them with his protectiveness. God, how many times have I walked home feeling invincible. In the '60s Evie used to stroll across Fawkner Park at midnight. She said she was never scared. Yeah, but she was tall. So? I wish I'd gone to the march. Do you think the flowers and candles in Sydney Road were a bit melodramatic? I saw some women crossing themselves. As if it was a shrine. Well, it was, and at least the flowers were fresh, and not wrapped in horrible plastic like the ones people left in London for Princess Di. It's spring, I suppose, flowers everywhere. Princess Di happened in summer. I was on a train in France a few days after the crash. A Frenchwoman saw me reading about it in the paper. She said, ‘Can you explain to me this immoderate mourning?' Do you think the Jill Meagher demo was immoderate? That idea keeps coming to me, but I scotch it—I hate the way it makes me feel cynical and ironic. Why didn't you go? I tried. Someone said it was at noon on Saturday. I stuck some rosemary in my buttonhole and drove up to the corner of Moreland Road. I thought there'd be fifty or a hundred people but there was nobody. Only a few women in headscarves doing their shopping. There was a cold wind. Everything was grey and desolate. I hung around for a while, and went home. Then on Sunday night I saw it on the news. I couldn't believe it. Thirty thousand people. Sydney Road packed solid for miles. You should have gone on Facebook, idiot. I don't know how to—I'm stuck in a pre-Facebook world. Some people are saying the whole thing was only a social media phenomenon. Who cares? I was sad. I wanted to be around other people who were sad. Actually I howled. Me too. I've been sick about it all week. My guts were in a knot. I kept tripping over things and bumping into walls.

We gave up on the bar with its thundering men and parted on Bourke Street. On the platform at Parliament Station I read while I waited. A man sat down beside me. I glanced up. He was in his thirties, dark jaw, dark brow. Holding out his iPhone in cupped hands, he shuffled his bum along the bench until our sides touched. I leaned away.

‘Excuse me,' he said. His face was shining. ‘I hope you don't mind. I've come from the hospital. My wife's just had our first child, a few hours ago. Can I share it with you?'

She had rung him at work. Come home! Quick! She was going into labour! He jumped into the car and floored it from Glenroy to Broadmeadows. He was nearly home when a paramedic called. The ambulance was stationary on the corner of Camp Road and the highway. She was about to give birth. He burst into the back of the ambulance just in time to see the baby crowning. It was a girl. Her name was Poppy.

He thrust the phone into my hand and we bowed our heads over the screen. There she was, in the hospital with her white-toothed mother: a stunned scrap of creamy brown in a jaunty cotton cap. I had to pull out my hanky. He was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. We both started laughing. Thank you for telling me! Thank you for listening!

The Craigieburn train slid in. For three stations, heading out of the city, we hunched over his photos and talked wildly about parents and children and migration, and marriage and work and houses. When the train reached my stop we shook hands, and kissed each other on both cheeks. I stepped out into the spring dusk, and away he went, a stranger whose life had just been blown wide open, going to look for his car where he'd left it on the side of the road, way out north in Broadie.

2012

The Man in the Dock

THE man in the dock looks like someone you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. His hair is cropped to the skull. He has a pale, bony face, with long cheeks, still eyes, and sculpted lips that from time to time he purses. His name, let's say, is John Kennedy. He is twenty-seven. He has spent the last two years on remand waiting to be tried for manslaughter, but he has agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge: reckless conduct endangering life. The most he can get for this is ten years. By forgoing a jury trial, Kennedy is throwing himself on the mercy of a judge.

One winter evening in 2010, he was drifting round Melbourne's CBD with a bunch of street kids known to the Department of Human Services and to the police. They wandered down to the Yarra, to drink and horse about on a concrete pontoon under the pedestrian bridge that links Flinders Street Station with Southbank. One of the girls went behind a pylon with a sixteen-year-old African refugee who had been removed from his parents' care, against their wishes, by the DHS. While they were having sex, the girl let out a scream. Kennedy ran to them. ‘I'm gonna push this cunt,' he said, and gave the boy a one-handed shove in the chest. There was no railing. The boy fell backwards into the river. He could not swim. Several hours later, divers found his body lying on the riverbed, in two metres of murky water.

A sentencing hearing is a quiet, careful process, a conversation between judge and counsel that offers little drama to a casual observer. Yesterday the judge, a woman of famously unbending will, expelled Kennedy's female friends for taking photos of him on their phones. Today the body of the court is empty but for four male lawyers, three women journalists, a dozen students upstairs, and a solidly built young woman with long, unwashed hair and a pugnacious expression, who is seated directly below the dock, with her arms folded and her back to the prisoner. Glances of curiosity she repels with a bulldog glare.

The death of the young refugee, says the judge, is tragic. Judge and counsel deplore the awful irony that the boy should have fled a war-torn country and perished here as he did. His death is certainly relevant to the sentencing. But the prisoner is not charged with that. He is charged with conduct endangering life. There is no evidence that he knew the teenager couldn't swim. He is not to be punished for the death.

The unfenced pontoon was a disaster waiting to happen, but there's a limit, says the judge tartly, to how much people can be protected; and anyway, going by the documents before her, Kennedy himself is a travelling disaster. His father bolted before he was born. His mother died of septicaemia. He is intellectually slow and has been a client of Disability Services since 1989. At eighteen he had a fifteen-year-old girlfriend and was registered as a sexual offender. In 2008 he fell from a roof and was in intensive care for three weeks. Since his brain injury, his mental function has dropped ‘from a pretty low base' into the bottom one per cent of the population. He has a long criminal history of violence, and a tendency to become aggressive with very little provocation.

Kennedy sits quietly in the dock, making occasional grimaces with his lips, seemingly unaffected by this alarming description. The long-haired woman sitting in front of him keeps her scowling gaze on the judge's face.

What, asks the judge, is the court to
do
with this man? She is obliged to think about the protection of the community. Locking him up is no solution. But his violence is ongoing and escalating. He needs something other than just prison, something that will help him. But he breaches community orders. He breaches parole.

‘I'm not saying that's flash,' says his counsel morosely. He asks permission to call the day's sole witness. Everyone looks at the door. But instead, the scowling woman seated near the dock leaps to her feet and charges eagerly along the carpeted aisle to the witness stand. Up the steps she bounds, seizes the Bible and takes the oath in a clear, ringing voice.

She is the prisoner's penpal, his future partner. She has almost completed a Bachelor of Education at Victoria University. She began to correspond with Kennedy at the suggestion of a friend whose boyfriend was also in prison. ‘I had just come out of a three-year relationship,' she gabbles, panting, tripping over her words.

The judge props both elbows on the bench. ‘No hurry,' she says. ‘Take a deep breath.'

The young woman smiles up at her. She grips the edge of the witness stand, draws in and releases a huge, audible breath.

‘I was reluctant at first,' she says, ‘because I didn't want to get hurt again.'

First they wrote letters. She got herself on to the list of people he was allowed to telephone. She started to visit him at Port Phillip on Thursdays, when people can see prisoners in protective custody. ‘And now,' she says, with a proud little laugh, ‘he calls me five or six times a day!'

No, he has never behaved towards her with aggression, let alone violence. Well, yes, of course they have never actually been together; we're talking supervised prison visits here—but no, she has never been afraid of him. Yes, she has met his ‘family unit', the suburban household into which he will be accepted when he is released, and she has found it ‘appropriate: as far as I'm aware, she's his auntie. She's supposed to be his mother's sister.' The young woman is determined to maintain contact with her own ‘family unit', though; she is not stupid.

‘And,' she declares, squaring her shoulders and straightening her spine, ‘I have made it abundantly clear that I have a clean criminal record, and that I will not tolerate living in the presence of someone who's going to continue to break the law.'

Kennedy sits there, working his lips. He has certainly had ‘an unfortunate life'. He has badly hurt people, and now someone has died because of him. The judge will not sentence him today; she will go away and think about it. But for now she listens, chin on palm, with a genial, patient attention, her wig low on her brow, the corners of her scarlet mouth curving upwards. Like her, every person here trembles for the witness, this brave, foolish, big-bosomed girl in her white blouse and chipped nail polish, the girl who wants to love and to be needed, and who is offering to go in, carrying all our hope and dread, where justice fears to tread.

2012

On Darkness

LAST year I published
This House of Grief,
a book about the trials of a Victorian man Robert Farquharson, who was found guilty of drowning his three young sons in revenge against his former wife. When the book came out I was struck by the number of interviewers whose opening question was ‘What made you interested in this case?' It always sounded to me like a coded reproach: was there something weird or peculiar about me, that I would spend seven years thinking about a story like this?

I would slave away in these interviews, trying to come up with sophisticated explanations for my curiosity, but after a while I got tired of being defensive. A man, I thought, loves his three sons. His heart is broken when his wife falls in love with another man and ends their marriage. A year later he's driving the boys home to their mother after a Father's Day outing. His car swerves into a deep dam. He fights his way out of the sunken car, hitches a ride to his ex-wife's place and announces to her that he's killed the kids. He tells everyone that he had a coughing fit and blacked out at the wheel. His ex-wife flatly refuses to believe he drove into the water on purpose. She passionately asserts his innocence at the trial. He is found guilty and gets three life sentences with no parole. He appeals his conviction. The appeal is successful, and he is given a retrial. But by the time he faces court again, his ex-wife has turned against him. She is the volatile witness from hell, so wild and fearless that she makes the court quake.

What's not interesting about that?

People seem more prepared to contemplate a book about a story as dark as this if the writer comes galloping out with all moral guns blazing. A friend of mine told me that the woman who runs his local bookshop had declared she would under no circumstances read my book. Surprised, he asked why. ‘Because,' she replied, ‘I know that nowhere in the book does she say that Robert Farquharson is a monster.' If he
had
been a monster, I wouldn't have been interested in writing about him. The sorts of crimes that interest me are not the ones committed by psychopaths. I'm interested in apparently ordinary people who, under life's unbearable pressure, burst through the very fine membrane that separates our daylight selves from the secret darkness that lives in every one of us.