physical violence.
(h) Rosie in deep shit.
The phone rings. No one in your household likes talking on the phone (even Rosie, who rarely engages in the typical adolescent telephonic marathon) but, for some inexplicable reason, Wendy answers it.
It’s the headmistress. Principal is too benign a word for the woman in charge of an institution like Boomerang. Christina Bowden, however, isn’t exactly the scary Margaret Thatcher protégé one might expect. Holding degrees from three European universities, she’s an accomplished academic with the aura of someone both absorbed and completed by her vocation.
She tells Wendy she’s heard about your accident and apologises for burdening the family with further troubles. She asks if Rosie has briefed you on the day’s events. You hear Wendy straining to keep things light, using expressions like ‘spirited conflict’ and ‘colourful vernacular’ but Christina Bowden isn’t buying it.
She tells Wendy that she is still investigating the incident but that she is shocked by the reports she is receiving. In all her years at Boomerang she has never heard such accounts of physical assault. She reminds Wendy that Boomerang does not tolerate violence, that assault is an expellable offence. She feels it’s only fair to warn us that things are not looking good for Rosie. She calls a meeting for the following afternoon but Wendy begs a day’s reprieve, citing your lack of mobility.
Wendy hangs up, dumps the handset on the bed next to you and debriefs. Rosie retreats downstairs in floods of tears. You can hear Juan murmuring condolences as Wendy paces the room, white-faced.
‘What are we going to do?’ she says to the window.
You know exactly what to do. You have all the answers because you are Mr Indestructible. ‘Write a letter,’ you say. Wendy is the best letter writer this side of the equator. ‘I’ll help,’ you add, knowing she won’t need it.
The phone rings again and you answer it because you have all the answers.
‘Is Rosie there?’ a female voice asks.
‘Yes, who can I say is calling?’
Then the person hangs up. Which is irritating because it’s rude, and unsettling because the voice belonged to an adult, not a bad-mannered contemporary of Rosie’s.
The phone rings again and you scoop it up.
‘Is Rosie there?’ the woman asks again.
‘Yes, who can I say is calling?’ you repeat without letting the chill you are feeling enter your voice.
‘I’m sorry I hung up before. There was someone on my other line.’
It’s Mrs Pessites, Eva’s mother, and there’s no way you’re going to let her speak to Rosie because:
(a) Although you can’t prove it, you know she just lied to you.
(b) She is already attempting to transgress law 2a of teen conflict resolution—parent addresses parent, child addresses child.
(c) She has already proved herself capable of extreme vindictiveness by having her daughter’s ex-best friend excluded from the French tour.
(d) Even in the dim, distant world of daddyhood you have heard of Eva Pessites’ mastery of manipulation. She must have learned this from someone, quite possibly her mummy.
You know you are facing a deadly foe at a critical moment. You race through a catalogue of strategies and decide on empathetic engagement followed by unreserved apology.
‘You must be feeling very upset,’ you say and the floodgates open. Mrs Pessites launches into a tirade on the outrageousness of Rosie’s behaviour, peppered with non-sequiturs about the manners of young people these days. It’s hard to believe this woman is of your own generation.
You put on your jolly-hockey-sticks voice. Your architect friend, Felipe, once told you that if he met you at a party using this voice, he would think you were a pretentious fuckwit. Nevertheless, you have a hunch that it may make Mrs Pessites feel that you belong to some sort of club that she might wish to join some day and that therefore it would be prudent to behave prudently with you.
You feel your empathy disarming your opponent. Brilliantly, you do not mention the fact that this whole incident is her own stupid fucking fault in the first place. She wanders into this territory of her own accord, offering a précis of the photo frame incident and referring to Ursula O’Brien as a ‘girl of low morals’.
A girl of low morals. You tell yourself not to be seduced by the archaic absurdity of this statement; this woman is stupid but not harmless. She is capable of causing great damage.
Damage to Rosie. Who is no position to sustain further damage.
Months earlier, Rosie and the rest of her class took part in a study called Understanding Body Image Concerns and Eating Problems run by the psychology department of a local university. You were shocked when the school contacted you because the researchers had felt it necessary to pass on the following report:
Rose Marie O’Dell: elevated scores on scales measuring unhealthy body image concerns and dieting behaviours; elevated scores in measures of negative affect, depression and anxiety; low score on the self-esteem scale indicating poor self-esteem.
Brief but devastating. You knew Rosie wasn’t the happiest banana in the bunch but she had a boyfriend and a barbed retort on hand when needed, so you didn’t really worry about her. Teenagers are supposed to be miserable, aren’t they?
Every week you take Rosie to one of the clinics nominated by the psychology department. After each hour-long session Rosie appears with a pretty young psychologist who smiles bravely and says ‘she’s doing fine’ with no conviction whatsoever.
You’ve lost your way down this train of thought when you realise there is a pause in the conversation. You’re supposed to respond to a pearl from Mrs Pessites but you have no idea what she was rabbiting on about. This pisses her off. So to make sure she has your full attention, she says that her husband wants to report the assault to the police and take out an Apprehended Violence Order against Rosie.
In that instant you channel all your psychic energy down the line, hoping to smite her dead. But it doesn’t work; you can hear her breathing. You assure her that Eva is perfectly safe and that Rosie is deeply remorseful. This last bit is, of course, a lie but lying to liars doesn’t count. Then you tell her that Rosie is being treated for depression; she is extremely fragile right now, and although that is no excuse for violence, it may partly explain why she behaved inappropriately.
You conclude by begging for mercy. You actually say, ‘I beg you to have mercy on Rosie.’
There is a pause before Mrs Pessites answers.
‘We’re all good Christian people here,’ she says.
Dear Ms Bowden,
We felt it was important to write to you about this matter concerning our daughter Rose prior to our meeting tomorrow, essentially because there are things we want to say to you that we would prefer not to discuss in front of her.
