Later, in the shower, it occurs to you that in many societies, extended families play this role in the raising of children. Aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents all muck in to share the load with parents. You make a mental note to tell Felipe that he is pigeonholing you as the patriarch of a nuclear family when really you are engaged in a much broader family structure. You’re imagining the defeated look on Felipe’s face as you tell him this when you realise that Felipe won’t actually give a flying fig. Felipe will, in fact, have completely forgotten the conversation. Felipe pretended to be excited by your hospital ceilings epiphany but had no clue what you were talking about when you raised it during the crazy cop crisis.
What a sad little man you have become, financed by your wife and big sister, gloating over non-existent victories in the bathroom mirror.
20
Despite the veil of medication—or possibly because of it—you are able to write again. You don’t care whether it’s good or bad; you’re glad to be writing again.
Actually that’s not true. You care deeply whether it’s good or bad but you know that it’s important to let the words pour out. The words have come just when you thought they might never come again. If you continually ask yourself the dreaded question, But is this good enough? you will stem the flow. So you write. You just write.
The local paper, Village Voice, takes two of your reviews for recent movies and asks you to do a regular column on the art-house-ish movies run by the independent cinema a few suburbs from your home. The money isn’t great but it helps with some of the bills. Wendy is relieved and, not that Ingrid asks, but it feels good to tell your sister that you are generating income. It also gives you the confidence boost you need to return to ‘serious’ writing—your book.
Or so you think.
You decide to begin work on your chapter about Australian movie stars. You have interviewed most of them before and have all the relevant contact details for their publicists and managers, so you start to write emails requesting interviews. As part of the request, you try to paint a picture of what your book is about in broad brushstrokes.
And this is where you come undone.
Every time you attempt to do this, you sound like a self-important wanker. Again and again you try to strike an engaging tone but it all ends in a horrible road accident of not-quite-the-right adjectives colliding in overly elaborate sentences.
You ask yourself whether this is a symptom of a larger disease; maybe you can’t construct a strong paragraph about your book because you don’t really know what your book is about. Or maybe you know what your book is about but you don’t have clear enough vision to write it. Or maybe you have no talent and should just go back to bed.
Ah, yes, that’s it.
You have no talent. You did once but it’s gone. It was run over by a car and died.
You take your worn copy of Zorba the Greek from the shelf. It’s a touchstone book for you; every couple of years you re-read it for inspiration. You love the vivid language but most of all you love the character of Zorba. With his joyful, irrepressible lust for life, he is, in your opinion, one of the great characters of literature. And cinema; you loved the movie too.
Once Felipe asked to borrow Zorba and you handed it over reluctantly. Felipe didn’t read it but his wife Jools did. She told Felipe it was a load of misogynistic twaddle. You can see where she’s coming from but you think she missed the point. You prefer to think of it as a celebration of spiritedness. And a window into a pre-feminist world. As far as you’re concerned, Zorba is the man.
You open to one of your favorite passages, hoping to vanish into the glorious prose, but it doesn’t do the trick. You decide to clean your keyboard instead.
Days later you try to describe your writing crisis to your psychiatrist, Doctor Maurice, but even as you hear yourself crapping on about it, you are disgusted by its lack of importance in the grand scheme of things. You confess how embarrassed you are to be making such a fuss when far worse things are happening to people every day—to the war-torn, the sick, the poor (to mention a few billion). And most of them just get on with it. Why can’t you?
Doctor Maurice asks you to stop comparing yourself to everybody else—you can do that eventually but right now it is important for your recovery that you focus on yourself. You need to ‘observe’ what is happening to you and accept it. You don’t need to ‘attach’ to the bad things that have happened; they don’t have to ‘define’ you. But you need to ‘walk around’ the bad events in your life and say, ‘This happened to me.’
Acknowledgement, he tells you, is the best way to move forward. Currently you are so busy shouting ‘Why aren’t I better? I should be better!’ that you are impeding your own recovery.
This makes sense, you suppose, so you decide to give it a whirl.
Rosie comes home, white and weepy. It takes you ages to coax any information out of her but it turns out that Eva Pessites has also applied to go to Mount Karver. Just when Rosie is about to make a fresh start at a new school, the very reason she needs to make a fresh start will be coming with her. Eva will poison this new well too.
‘Well, if she goes to Mount Karver maybe you could stay at Boomerang.’
As soon as you say it, you know it’s a dumb idea. Rosie groans and heads off to her room. You follow her down the hall with a second offering. ‘Maybe she won’t be accepted.’
Rosie looks at you in disbelief. ‘Dad. It’s Eva. She gets accepted into everything.’
21
Elsie Schmetterling (the German word for ‘butterfly’, she explains to practically everyone she meets) is the personal assistant to Mount Karver’s headmaster, Doctor Ignatius Quinn. One very hot summer day three years ago, Elsie and Wendy engineered the canteen rosters together (Wendy as representative of the mothers committee) and they have been chummy ever since. She hugs Wendy warmly and appears to be thrilled to meet you and Rosie.
Elsie ushers you into a vast office where Doctor Quinn waits to greet you, standing at attention. Unlike Christina Bowden’s room at Boomerang, this place is designed to impress. Where her office is cramped and practical, his is gleaming and cavernous; unless you are a sultan or an emperor or a curator of antiquities you are not important enough to be here.
Doctor Quinn settles you into a cluster of wingback chairs overlooking the immaculately manicured front lawn, where a flagpole sprouts from a bed of riotous pansies. An Australian flag flutters majestically in just the right amount of wind. The three of you watch in silence while the headmaster checks some papers on the mahogany acreage of his desk. Scanning the collection of period Australian art on the oak-panelled walls, you calculate that if you sold just half of them you could live like a king for the rest of your life.
Rosie takes a breath to calm her nerves. You wink reassuringly at her. Wendy clears her throat and the headmaster sinks into the wingback chair next to you. He moves quickly from the sound of the mower on the front lawn, to the smell of freshly cut grass, to the gun incident outside the canteen. You try to make light of it without sounding flippant but he unnerves you by revealing that the police are ‘still making inquiries’.
‘About what?’ asks Wendy. ‘Are they questioning students?’
They’re not questioning students but they are talking to teachers, trying to determine the various procedures and permissions that allowed Declan to stage a fake robbery in the canteen. Apparently they are ‘put out’ because they weren’t given the ‘appropriate warning’.
‘Appropriate warning?’ you ask, feeling your hackles rise.
The headmaster is sympathetic, apologetic even, but wonders whether you may not have inflamed police interest by not allowing them to interview you directly. You didn’t know he knew this. The police must have told him about your refusal to go into the station for questioning.
Wendy steps in to explain that the hysterical performance of the cop that day convinced you that you could not count on fair or rational treatment and that you therefore felt
it wise to remove yourselves from the equation and place matters in the hands of legal counsel. She does not elaborate about your dealings with Constable Lance Johnstone and Rosie prior to the gun incident, or add that he is the last person on earth you would trust.
Doctor Quinn listens, nodding empathetically, before he expertly wraps up the conversation and moves on to the real reason for this meeting: Rosie’s application for admission to Mount Karver.
As he turns his benign attention to your daughter, it strikes you that he is one of those people with a gift for making you feel like you are the only person in the room. He asks a couple of questions about Rosie’s interest in drama and her prowess on the soccer field. (This is encouraging because you know that Mount Karver is keen to win the interschool girls soccer comp.)
Rosie answers in a forthright but modest way that neither seeks to impress nor downplays her achievements. You feel proud of your daughter, of how she is handling herself in these challenging circumstances. It’s time for her to step up to the plate and that is exactly what she is doing.
Then, from out of nowhere, ‘Do you get angry very much, Rose?’ he asks.
You and Wendy exchange a look that says Huh?
‘Do you ever get into fights?’
You and Wendy exchange a look that says Uh-huh!
Wendy stops the interview. She asks Rosie to go outside while you talk privately to Doctor Quinn. Rosie looks startled and even the headmaster looks a little rattled. As Rosie leaves the room, traversing three thick Persian carpets, you once again sit in silence until the huge oak door clicks shut behind her.
Wendy turns from the door to the headmaster and asks why he is pursuing this line of questioning. Doctor Quinn pauses and in that moment you know for certain that he knows about the fight with Eva Pessites and that he knows that you know that he knows.
Wendy asks whether anyone from Boomerang has spoken to him about Rosie.
This guy is no dummy. He’s had years of managing tricky parents and you can’t help but be a little awed by the way he ducks and weaves through Wendy’s barrage of questions without giving any solid answers. You are left with three certainties:
(1) He will not admit that Christina Bowden or anyone from Boomerang has told him about the Eva altercation.
(2) He will not admit that Eva or anyone from her family has told him about the altercation.
(3) He knows all about the altercation.
Wendy is in an icy fury that she tries to conceal from Rosie as you drive home. Rosie sits in the back seat clinging to an optimistic view that, even though Doctor Quinn knows about the fight, she may still be admitted to Mount Karver. Although you sense that she hasn’t got a hope in hell, you jolly her along because there is a remote possibility that she may be right.
Back at home, Rosie goes downstairs to debrief with Juan, and Wendy calls Christina Bowden, who assures her that no one from Boomerang has given details about the fight to anyone at Mount Karver. ‘It would be prejudicial and unethical,’ says Christina when Wendy presses her. ‘We just wouldn’t do it.’ You both trust this woman, and conclude that either the police or the Pessites must have told the headmaster about the fight.
Constable Lance Johnstone is dumb, mean and unethical enough to snitch on Rosie but it’s unlikely that he would have any idea about her application to Mount Karver and therefore would not know that information about the fight would be relevant to Doctor Quinn.
The most likely scenario is that the Pessites have described their version of events during Eva’s interview. You can see Eva’s mother looking askance and lowering her voice as she refers to Rosie as a ‘girl of low morals’. She begins reluctantly at first, ‘…so glad Eva would be getting away from certain elements…girls can be worse than boys sometimes…you think boys are the violent ones but that’s not always the case, is it?’ She offers crafted fragments of information, forcing the headmaster to tease out all the details if only to make sense of what she is saying.
It wasn’t her idea, she can say later. The headmaster forced her to tell.
You can imagine Eva’s blow-by-blow description of the fight playing out as if she hasn’t rehearsed it with her mother. For some reason you can’t picture the father or his role but you are certain that these people would have said and done everything in their considerable power to make Rosie sound like a monster.
Shit.
Four days later a letter from Mount Karver arrives. Still clinging to hope, Rosie dances inside with it, rips open the envelope and scans the letter. Her face falls. She hands the letter to Wendy who scans it and hands it to you.
Rosie has not been accepted in the first round of applications but may be considered in the second round.
You wonder if this is, in fact, true.
Ignatius Quinn is canny enough to realise that if he refused entry to Rosie outright, you would respond with an open declaration of war, bombarding the school board with letters of protest outlining how you have become part of the Mount Karver ‘family’ via fundraisers, fetes and sporting events—you deserve greater consideration than this.
Ignatius Quinn is cunning enough to dull the pain by turning the rejection into a two-step process. There can be no howls of protest if Rosie still has a chance of being accepted in a second round. Then, once you are acclimatised to the possibility that Rosie may not be offered a place, he deals the final blow.
Wendy takes the letter from your hands and draws your attention to Rosie, who hunches at the kitchen table, staring out the window. There are no histrionics, not even a little weeping.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ Rosie eventually asks.
‘Write a letter,’ says Wendy.
Rosie bustles into her room and returns with a pad and paper. You privately wonder whether it isn’t cruel to offer your daughter hope. But you don’t have the heart to stop her as she starts a letter to Doctor Quinn outlining why she would be a valuable asset to the school and telling him how much she would like to attend. She finishes it in her lovely clean handwriting and passes it to Wendy for proofing.
Rosie has her mother’s gift for letter writing. Her plea is passionate and genuine. Despite the fact that it has a few spelling mistakes and some grammatical deviations, Wendy doesn’t change a word.
22
When Wendy takes a call from Elsie Schmetterling, she guesses she’s getting the inside lowdown on Rosie’s letter to Ignatius Quinn. But the call is not about Rosie at all—it’s about the gun incident. You overhear enough of Wendy’s conversation to be suppressing a wave of panic by the time she hangs up. You discover that the police have requested a meeting in Ignatius Quinn’s office with both O’Dell parents, Constable Lance Johnstone, the area commander, and the superintendent in charge of weapons licensing.
Eek. And shit.
According to Elsie, the headmaster has no clue as to their agenda but wants you to attend. Wendy tells Elsie that she’ll get back to her.
Wendy calls Shelley Mainwaring but you are interrupting with so many questions that she hands over the receiver. Shelley recommends that Wendy attend the meeting but not you. This makes you relieved and alarmed.
Relieved because you are a coward and have no wish to attend and now you have a legitimate excuse because you are following legal advice. Alarmed because you thought the whole thing had blown over but now your lawyer is advising you not to attend, which indicates that you are still in jeopardy.
You ask whether you are still in jeopardy. Shelley knows you are a headcase so is careful not to inflame you with her answer. Because the police have still not formally responded to the written statement that you submitted shortly after Constable Johnstone threatened to arrest you, Shelley is not satisfied that the matter has been resolved. There is a remote chance (she emphasises remote) that the meeting could be some kind of ambush.
‘What kind of ambush?’
‘They might arrest you.’
A lava of stuttering gibberish erupts out of you so Wendy takes the phone. We
ndy can’t believe that the cops would try to arrest you when you have done nothing wrong. Shelley reminds Wendy that Constable Lance Johnstone is a loose cannon. Who knows what kind of scenario he has created in the minds of his superiors?
Every time you visit your psychiatrist, he asks you to fill in a form with the same questions:
Do you have nightmares?
Do you try not to think about your accident?
Are you always on guard?
Are you easily startled?
Do you feel detached from others?
Are you interested in reading books or magazines?
There’s a couple of pages of questions like these. You are supposed to answer yes or no and then rate the intensity of your feeling out of 10. Today it goes:
Nightmares, yes, 8 (down from 9 last week)
Think of accident, yes, 7 (up from 5)
On guard, yes, 10 (always)
Easily startled, yes, 10 (always)
Detached from others, yes, 9 (same as last week)
Interested in reading, no, 2 (same as last week)
You suppose Doctor Maurice tracks your scores to monitor your progress. It seems awfully simple. Can you really be summed up with a series of scores? Maybe you can. On the inside you feel like a complex mass of intertwining disasters but maybe from the outside you’re just a Fuck-up Grade B with a degree of difficulty of zero point seven.
Anyway, you like Doctor Maurice (it’s only in your head that you call him ‘Doctor Maurice’; in real life you call him ‘Maurice’ mostly but sometimes ‘Doctor O’Connell’). You like Doctor Maurice because he makes you feel like you are not alone. And because he is kind.
‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’ You are suddenly transported back to school where you hear your curly-headed friend, Chris Sepak, quoting Blanche DuBois from some Tennessee Williams play. Which one? Doesn’t matter. It’s a routine Chris does for the gang. He raises his voice to a girlish pitch and nails a perfect Southern accent. ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’ You all laugh uproariously.
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