Towards ten o’clock on the night of the crash, two police officers from Major Collision carried a handheld tape recorder through Emergency at Geelong Hospital and into a cubicle where Farquharson lay under a sheet, taking the occasional suck of oxygen through a mask. They introduced themselves—Senior Sergeant Jeffrey Smith, who was head of Major Collision, and Senior Constable Rohan Courtis—and pressed the record button.
At last we were to hear Farquharson speak.
The voice of the bereaved father is dull and muffled at first, but grows firmer as he begins to answer the bite-sized questions: who he is, where he lives and works. Then, when the officers ask him what happened on the road, his voice fills with energy, gains clarity and strength. He sounds surprisingly young and eager, almost boyish in his speech patterns.
‘I think I just went up the overpass, and I started coughing…then, I don’t remember anything, and then all of a sudden I was in this water, and me son screamed at me—he opened up the door, and we nose-dived. I shut the door on him, and I tried to get them out—I tried to get out and get help, thinking I was only just in off the road, not realising I was…I was trying to get up near the road, get people to hear me, to help, and people just drove past, I don’t know exactly whereabouts it was, and it’s just a big blur, like, you know—it happened so quick.’
‘Mate.’ Smith, the senior officer, lays it down gently. ‘Do you realise that the children didn’t—make it? Out of the car?’
Farquharson expels a short breath, and says in a low, flat tone, ‘I gathered that.’
His questioners do not pause. What speed was he doing?
‘Oh, it was under a hundred.’ His voice brightens again and becomes emphatic. He offers his credentials as a father, poignantly still in the present tense: he never drinks with the kids, he never goes over a hundred with them, he’s always very cautious, he’s never had an accident before.
Once the policemen twig that Farquharson and his wife have parted, and that he was bringing the boys home from an access outing, their antennae begin to quiver. How long has this been going on? Twelve months. What’s his ex-wife’s full name? He gets it out—Cindy Louise Gambino—but with a heavy sigh. He produces her address and date of birth, then, like a sick person reminding a visitor he has good reason to be horizontal, he emits a muffled grunt of discomfort.
‘You realise we have to ask these questions,’ says Courtis, the younger officer, politely, in his light, rapid voice. ‘Is everything sort of okay with you and your wife? Any dramas?’
‘We’re building the house,’ says Farquharson, in a conversational tone. ‘There’s a few hassles selling it, but other than that, I mean, look, how good does a divorce go, so to speak? Of course you have your disagreements and arguments, but the kids have always been put first, and everything like that.’
Pressed for details of the drop-off of the boys that afternoon, Farquharson complains that his arm is sore. Give it a move, mate, says the cop. No, it really is sore, there, just in one spot. He relates the Father’s Day arrival and the arrangement to have tea in Geelong and visit Kmart in Belmont. On the road the little one, who was only two and a half, fell asleep in his car seat. So father and sons sat a while in the Kmart car park and listened to the footy on the radio. When the toddler stirred they roused him and went up to Kentucky to eat. Farquharson always had to deliver them back to their mother by 7.30, so, after a look around in Kmart and a quick stop at his sister’s place in Mount Moriac, they got back on the road.
He trails off. Courtis nudges him forward. ‘Just getting back to the crash. Was there anyone else in the traffic, or…?’
Again Farquharson’s voice firms up. ‘No. I can’t remember nothing.’ With growing vehemence, his volume rising and falling with the drama of it, he tells the story a second time: the coughing, the waking up in a lot of water, Jai in the front passenger seat opening the door. He adds that, when he leaned across to slam Jai’s door, all the kids were screaming. He tried to unbuckle Jai’s seatbelt and to get the other two out of the back, but because Jai had opened the door, the car nosedived. ‘Just a nightmare,’ he says. ‘I’m gettin’ distressed.’ His voice goes dull again, without expression.
This is the moment the officers choose to caution him. Yeah, he knows he doesn’t have to say anything, and that anything he says could be given in evidence.
They surge on. Did he go under the water at all? He falters. ‘Yeah, we sort of did, as I—I tried to get up—thinking I was in foot-deep, to try and get round and open the doors and drag ’em out. I’m getting really distressed.’ He sounds like a child calling for respite in a game that is getting too much for him. A pause. Then, out of a jumble of hospital white noise, his voice rises again.
‘But sir. Can I ask one question?’
‘You can ask any question you like.’
‘I’ve never been in trouble before. So what’s the likely scenario, for me?’ On the word likely he gives a tiny, matey breath of a laugh.
Startled, I glanced at the uniformed Courtis sitting behind the bar table. A document dangled from his right hand. The stapled sheets were quivering.
‘Well, mate,’ says Courtis on the tape, his voice tuneful with surprise, ‘at this stage all we know is that you’ve been in an accident, where you’ve driven off the road, and your kids have been in the car.’
Farquharson pushes it. ‘So what sort of scena—’
Courtis cuts across him. He seems to be controlling himself. ‘Mate, it’s so early, we’re not looking at you for doing anything wrong.’
‘It’s something I’ve got to live with for the rest of me life,’ protests Farquharson. The stress he lays on the word life, the complex intonation he gives it, makes him sound plaintive, even petulant—a person with a legitimate grievance that is not being taken seriously. ‘What I’m trying to say, you can go through and check that I’ve got no record—’
Courtis picks up on his anxiety. ‘Is there anything you want to tell us?’
‘No! That’s exactly as it happened. I’ve got no reason to lie, or anything of that nature.’
His coughing fit, he says, must have been triggered by the car heater, which he had turned on when the kids said they were cold. He has recently been off work for eight days with this cough, one of those colds that linger on. Has he been smoking dope? He gives a gasp of laughter: he doesn’t do that sort of thing! He’s a normal, average guy, trying to make a living and do the best by his family—and look what he’s done now.
‘Mate, it’s a tragic thing. Your children in the car—what are their names?’
Jai. Tyler. Bailey. Farquharson intones them, spacing them out in a solemn hush.
Courtis breaks it. His voice is soft. ‘Did the car just go away from under you? How far under the water did your car go? Did you have to put your head under water? How many times did you have to duck under the water?’
‘Oh, several. Several times, probably about three or four or something.’ Stammering and chattering, Farquharson tells the story for the third time. Then he lets out a hard panting sound, and puts again his urgent question: ‘I mean, I mean, what sort of thing’s going to happen to me, now?’
‘Well,’ says one of the cops.
‘You don’t know, do you.’ Again the little nasal out-breath of laughter, the striving for a casual tone, making light of his need to know.
‘We haven’t even been to the crash site yet. We’re on our way down there now.’
Farquharson tries once more. ‘What’s the scenario? Got no idea?’
Courtis answers vaguely, dreamily. ‘We’ll go to the scene and have a look, and we’ll come back and let you know what’s going on.’
…
I took a quick look at Farquharson. He was sitting quite still, staring straight ahead. Were his sisters’ hearts in their boots? I remembered Cindy Gambino’s account of the way he had stood in front of the car at the dam while would-be rescuers desperately rushed about. ‘There was no movement. He wasn’t doing anything. He was like in a trance.’
He didn’t sound entranced on that tape. He sounded…something else, something not quite right. Too quick to answer? Too eager to please? A nose dive, in foot-deep water? And when they pulled the car out of the dam, wasn’t the heater off? My head was full of a very loud clanging. Nothing expert, nothing trained or intellectual. Just a shit-detector going off, that was all. The alarm bells of a woman who had been in the world for more than sixty years, knowing men, sometimes hearing them say true things, sometimes being told lies.
What had passed through Farquharson’s mind, that night, on the dark country road where there was nothing to distract a driver from his wild thoughts? Were the boys squabbling? Was there a painful mention of their mother’s new man? Or did they just sit quietly in their harnesses as the old car rolled along, making their father’s heart ache that once more he had to give them back and say goodbye? Did a casual word, a rush of despair cause everything that he had shored up against his ruins to buckle and give way?
And could it be that, underneath it all, naked on that hospital gurney, he was not yet grieving, but seething instead with incredulous vitality? Was a fresh force surging through this dull, lonely, broken-hearted man, deafening him, obliterating without shame or mercy everything but the astonishing fact that he was still alive?