Helen Garner: Joe Cinque's Consolation

There are frustrations aplenty in Helen Garner's investigation of the death of Joe Cinque, a young engineer who died in bizarre circumstances in 1997 in Canberra.

The first, and most enduring, comes by way of a sort of warning in Garner's preface. She writes: "The first time I saw Joe Cinque, the first time I ever heard his voice, was in the living room of his parents' house in Newcastle, in the winter of 1999. By then, of course, he had already been dead for nearly two years. This is the story of how I got to know him."

Cinque had been killed by his law-student girlfriend, Anu Singh, who remains a murderous riddle never solved. She killed Cinque by sedating him with the date-rape drug Rohypnol then injecting him with heroin. She was beautiful and bulimic; depressed and quite probably deranged. All of which may have been factors in the reduced charge of manslaughter which meant she spent four years in prison. "... She was going for diminished responsibility."

Garner never met Anu Singh who declined to speak to her, even after she had been paroled. This is a difficulty, a large but not insurmountable one. After all, Joe Cinque, and the story of "how I got to know him," is the story of a man who had already been dead for two years.

Anu Singh, who remains silent, unknowable, is still alive and so are many of those who had known her at the time of Cinque's murder.

Alas for Garner, it is (almost always) those still alive who are the most interesting characters in such a case.

If there ever has been such a case. Singh, a bright girl, a law student, had decided she had an incurable and fatal muscle-wasting ailment. No doctor, and she consulted many, would agree with her self-diagnosis. So she investigated her "condition" and decided that what had caused this ailment was "the fact that, in her endless quest for thinness, she had swallowed large doses of a vomit-inducing syrup called ipecac." She blamed this on Cinque who had, according to her, told her that models used this syrup to effectively control their weight.

She also told a university counsellor that Cinque had been hitting her. And that she felt trapped "financially and emotionally dependent on him by her medical condition."

She was, by these accounts, a woman mentally at the end of her tether.

On page 13 the author enters the story to tell how "... I was a woman at the end of my tether." Garner was 55, her third marriage had just collapsed, she had no job "and lacked the heart to look for one."

The story of Joe Cinque was given to her by another journalist. She asked why he wasn't doing it and "he didn't spell it out — you're interested in women at the end of their tether."

Here Garner writes about her book, The First Stone, about two women law students and the charges of assault they brought against their head of department. She
"questioned the kind of feminism that had driven the story. I opened myself to long months of ferocious public attack. No way was I going back there."

By page 25 she says she has little choice: "A story lies in wait for a writer. It flashes silent signals. Without knowing she is doing it, the writer receives the message, drops everything, and turns to follow."

In the event, it turns out to be Joe Cinque whose story Garner follows. "Whatever the reason I sided with Joe Cinque. He is forever upstaged by Anu Singh."

Is this the consolation of the title? That in Garner's book Singh will be upstaged at last by Joe?

Garner speaks to Joe's mother on the phone after Singh is paroled. "I heard myself saying, dully, like somebody in a bad movie: 'Why? Why? Why?"'

Good question. You don't have to ask, however, why Garner persevered with this story. She asks herself that all the way through. It is a hard story to find: Singh, at the heart of it, remains missing. Joe, for all that Garner says she got to know him, remains dead. We see him on the video tape "just standing there alone ... smiling benignly and looking around him with a calm, bright curiosity. He looked like a man who was lightly poised on the very rim of the world he came from."

Garner remains poised on the rim of her story — often tempted to jump. She thinks about the attraction of fiction. She writes about herself. She wants to give up.

She writes about Joe: "How much of this was I projecting, with the knowledge I had of his horrible fate? It was magic thinking, sentimental. I tried to pull myself into line."

She never manages this. Despite some magic writing Garner fails to tell anything other than the story of the frustration of telling stories.

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* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer.