Everywhere I Look (25 page)

Back in 2000 I was still living in Sydney. My third and last marriage had crashed and burned eighteen months before. I was in a very poor state, emotionally and psychologically. I lived by myself on the fifth floor of an apartment block on top of a hill. Its windows had so much air and light outside them that I was constantly drawn to lean my elbows on the sill. I would look out across the golf course with its lines of massive dark green trees, and its hoses sprinkling bridal veils of spray, and further east, the ruled blue-grey line of the sea beyond Bondi. Some days, though, I couldn't help looking straight down to the well-placed concrete retaining wall directly beneath me, five storeys below. There were days when it seemed wiser not to go near the windows.

Even work was no use to me; I was paralysed. I had spent months in Canberra at the trials of the two women who had been charged with the murder of a young civil engineer called Joe Cinque. One had got ten years (she served four) for manslaughter; the other had been found to have no case to answer. The families of the two young women, and the women themselves, had politely but firmly refused my approaches. I had already conducted long and painful interviews with Joe Cinque's parents, and in doing so had entered into a dangerous relationship of trust with these two suffering people. I had a mass of material to work with but it was all one-sided, hopelessly unbalanced. I was drowning in it. I had no idea how to write the book. I didn't have a commanding place to stand; I didn't yet have the right voice to tell the story of what had been done to Joe Cinque.

Around that time I heard there was a place in Sydney, down near Circular Quay, called the Justice and Police Museum. I read in the paper that a curious new curator had gone up into the roof or down into a cellar and come upon a forgotten cache of old black-and-white photographic negatives. A series of crime-scene photos from the 1940s, '50s and '60s had been developed and presented in a small exhibition. I could not get there fast enough.

Since that first public opening of the archive, many more photos from its fabulous trove have been resurrected and displayed. Certain mug shots have become famous, even hip: there are books of them, you can buy them on postcards. They are striking evocations of period, and of class—precious historical documents. The most popular ones are full-length portraits, unceremoniously shot and unintentionally very beautiful, of men and women who have just been taken into police custody. They front the camera, unsmiling—racy, sinister types, alarmingly worldly or damaged, with a Weimar Republic sort of loucheness in their demeanour. They stand defiantly, chins high, in their pointed strappy shoes and felt hats and unbuttoned wool coats, in the bare stone courtyard of a police station.

At the turn of the millennium, though, when I first slunk into the Justice and Police Museum, there was something discreet, almost tentative about the show. Many of the pictures were free-floating; they had been unearthed minus any identifying material. Some of the most dramatic images contained no human figures at all. A blighted street corner; the scarred door of a warehouse; an overgrown track curving down towards a river; a bedroom of grim poverty, with a candlewick bedspread on a sagging mattress and cracked lino on the floor; a dingy hotel room whose open window, its cheap lacy curtain lifting on an invisible breeze, looks straight on to a brick wall. Where are the people? What has happened here? The photos don't say. The police photographers didn't fancy themselves as artists. Their job was to record what was in front of them, and they did it with a fidelity to duty that sometimes, in its utter lack of rhetorical ornament or self-importance, can reach us, lifetimes later, as an impersonal, manly tenderness.

The photo that haunts me most, though, from the show I saw in 2000, did have a plaque beside it: it stated that a young woman had committed suicide in a cave, in the Blue Mountains. As a viewer, you stand at the cave's mouth looking in. On a rock shelf just inside, the woman has placed her handbag and an ominous-looking black bottle. Her dropped shoes lie on their sides. But where is
she
? You scan the surface of the photo in vain. Then you spot her face, tiny as a coin, far from you in the depths of the cave. She's taken all her clothes off, to die. She's lying on the ground as if asleep, her hair drawn back off her brow and her head turned to the light. She's a figure from a timeless mythological world—a strange, slender, naked little cave-dwelling nymph.

I treasure the memory of this photo because of the purity of the recording eye: its respect for the deep calm of a place where a person has died, or been murdered, or has killed herself; its reverence for what I would even call the holiness of a place where something unthinkable and final has happened. Such a place, if you can bear to stand there, is imbued with a rich and sacred meaning.

I see now that for some years already I had been trying to turn myself into the sort of person who could look steadily at such things, without flinching or turning away. I remember how my friends reacted when I begged them to come with me and look at the photos at the Justice and Police Museum: most of them really did not want to see them; they couldn't understand why I thought they were beautiful. But I knew I could learn from them. So I went back, again and again, usually on my own. I longed to mimic in my own work the brutal simplicity of the police photographs.

I belong to a reading group. We wanted to get real about mighty works of literature. We started with
Paradise Lost
. Then we tackled Homer. This year we're working our way into Virgil's
Aeneid
. Whenever the story explodes into bloodshed, one of the women in the group, an experienced and respected journalist, is assailed by fits of laughter that she can't muffle or control. The rest of us have learnt to pay no attention. We calmly go on reading, taking it in turns around the ring, and in a while she gets a grip, returns to herself and takes her part again. It's actually quite endearing. We don't even comment on it any more. It's her defence against the wild, ancient darkness of what we're reading.

Human beings have many shields against the darkness. A woman is raped, or murdered, and the old cry goes up. What was she doing out on the street alone in the middle of the night? Women shouldn't take short cuts through parks on their way to work, or go running along the riverbank with headphones on. These official warnings drive women crazy because they seem to proceed from an enraging assumption that the public space belongs to men, and that women have no claim on it: we broach it at our peril. But I've come to think that the subtext of what the politicians and police chiefs are saying, in their clumsy, poker-faced way, is this: no matter what the political rhetoric is, please do not assume that because you
should
be safe in public spaces you
will
be safe. There is no way that we can police the world and guarantee your safety. We are as helpless as you against the darkness.

Why are we ever surprised by the scorched earth around a broken family? Our laws and strictures and conventions have no purchase on the dark regions of the soul into which we venture when we love. In the Farquharson trials, people would passionately protest, ‘But he loved those boys!' Again and again it surfaced, the sentimental fantasy that love is a condition of simple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit region in which we are safe from our own destructive urges. But everybody knows that love is brutal. A thousand songs tell the story. Love tears right through to the centre of us, into our secret self, and lays it wide open. Surely Sigmund Freud was right when he said, ‘We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.'

What people find really hard to bear is the suggestion that they themselves might contain their share of human darkness, hidden inside their souls. I believe this refusal lies behind the strange hostility I encountered, many times, when I was trying to write about Robert Farquharson's trials. Friends would ask me what I was working on. When I told them, they would be at first quite curious—what's he like? What sort of man is he? I would be barely three sentences into an account of his family background, his broken marriage and his broken heart, when my questioner's mouth would harden into a straight line and she would make a sharp stabbing movement at my chest with a straight forefinger and say, angrily, ‘You're making excuses!'

There's a term that would often come up at this point in the conversation. A man like Farquharson, some people declared, is evil. That's all he is. He is no longer a person. Neither he nor his crime deserves our attention. ‘He was found guilty by two juries,' one woman said to me. ‘What else is there to say? I don't want to hear any more about him.' Sometimes I tried to argue. More often I backed away with my tail between my legs. But I kept thinking, and I still think, that there are thousands of men like Farquharson out there—hard-working, tongue-tied Australian blokes who don't understand why their wives got sick of them and turfed them out; dull men whose hearts are broken by rejection and by the loss of their children, and who can't even begin to articulate their pain and rage. Men like these can be dangerous. Isn't that worth thinking about?

Over the seven years of the Farquharson trials I was obliged to develop my own set of defences against the darkness. I had thought of myself as mature and thick-skinned enough to handle it. I never did what I saw some of the more battle-hardened journalists do while witnesses wept and writhed under cross-examination—they would fill out a crossword under the desk, or read the footy pages, or furtively clip their fingernails, or doodle a page full of graves. Like everyone else in the court I allowed myself at certain moments to shed tears or to put my head down on my arms for a moment's relief. But at times I found my reasoning powers cracking under the strain. It wasn't till the trials were over and I started to write the book that I could acknowledge these states:

It seemed fitting, and in a bizarre way almost consoling, that it was a woman who finally got deep enough into the dam, that night, to find the sunken car. She was Senior Constable Rebecca Caskey of the Search and Rescue Squad. The vehicle, they had calculated, was wedged nose-down in the mud, twenty-eight metres from the bank, in seven and a half metres of water. Testimony so terrible demands a simple telling:

At this point, in an earlier draft of the book, there was another paragraph and it went like this:

I cut that paragraph. A writer friend of mine made me do it. I remember it hurt me to cut it; my own urge to utter such a howl was almost beyond my control. But in the spirit of the diver, and of those police photographers who disciplined themselves in the face of death and plainly, purely recorded the facts as they saw them, I scribbled out my fancy flourish, and now I'm glad I did.

I saw what the police went through in the course of these trials, and I wanted to emulate what was calm and shrewd and decent in them. Last month I turned on the TV news and saw that a Sudanese woman in an outer western suburb of Melbourne had driven her four kids under six into a lake; three of them had drowned. I confess that my first thought was for the furious, exhausted cops in the Major Collision Investigation Unit, the ones who barrel out at all hours of the day or night to road smashes where people have died or suffered life-threatening injuries. I longed to get in touch with them, I don't know why—what on earth could I say to them? All the ones I got to know around the court are gone now, anyway, transferred or promoted or burnt out; and the detective with the silver buzz cut, who sat with me under the plane trees up the top of Bourke Street one day and gossiped quietly and gently—what would I say to
him
? I admire you? I pity you? I respect you? No—I
envy
you—because your job is to get into your car and drag yourself out to the scene and try to
do something about it
—while all I can do is sit here on the couch in front of the TV with stupid tears running off my cheeks, unable to form a coherent thought or even to locate in myself an emotion with a name.