off.
Call-me-Christina smiles. ‘We all agree that expulsion would be an excessive response to these particular circumstances.’
Rosie is recalled to the room and informed that she will be suspended for two and a half weeks until the holidays. She may resume classes and make a fresh start in the new term. She sags with relief and her little face crumples into tears. Wendy hugs her and you rub her back as she sobs her gratitude to the headmistress.
You have no idea why, but on the way home your robust good humour withers. You feel like the drugs are no longer doing their trick. The rampart corrodes. Pain leaks in through the cracks and fissures. You stagger into bed and sleep. Time becomes liquid. Your mind and body float, absorbed in an orchestration of healing. You wake regularly—every hour or so—because of the Dream.
The Dream—with minor variations—goes like this: you’re running down a road, not the road, not Hastings Road, just some generic street. The ground cracks open at your feet. Sometimes some kind of furry little marsupial scurries out of the crack. Sometimes it’s not a road, it’s a forest path, or a beach track, or a city sidewalk. But the ground always cracks open and that’s when you leap. Sometimes you leap over the crack and/or marsupial and sometimes you leap backwards, stopping just before you plummet into the abyss.
But you always leap, jerking your legs in a reflex that sends hot spurs of pain spearing through your swollen left thigh. You wake in agony, writhing on the bed. After the initial horror, you almost like it. Your waking hours are unequivocally occupied; there is no room in your schedule to angst over your book or panic over your impending financial doom or worry about your children. There is only pain.
Four and a half days after you are run down by Frannie Prager’s blue Toyota and two days after the Victory at Boomerang, you wake from the Dream to realise that your sister Tess is sitting in the room. She frowns, says, ‘Hello,’ and lifts the sweaty fringe of hair plastered onto your forehead. She is right next to you, touching you, but so far away you cannot speak to her. Ingrid’s daughter, Mel, hovers in the doorway, frowning. You drift back into the darkness.
Across town, parents and pupils applaud as a burgundy velvet curtain lowers on the Boomerang school choir. The girls have completed another successful annual recital, centre stage of the city’s town hall, a late-nineteenth-century sandstone stab at colonial grandeur.
Rosie is not present, of course, because of her suspension. Also because she would ‘rather gargle cat vomit than join a choir’. Some of Rosie’s friends, however, are choristers and they huddle together to discuss the latest turn of events in the Eva–Rosie scandal. Later they report every detail of the evening to Rosie who reports it to Wendy who tells you.
Eva has made her first appearance since her big ordeal, sitting in the audience looking pale and brave, too weak to applaud with any vigour. The class is divided: half in support of Rosie and half in support of Eva.
Rosie’s little gang have discussed it and decided to be nice to Eva, but only to her face. Maddie Peacock has already been on a reconnaissance mission to check out Eva’s new diamond pendant (‘Hey Eva, hope you’re feeling better’) and is midway through a report on the number, size and shape of the diamonds when a young man approaches. He is impeccably groomed, with gold skin and floppy hair. The girls recognise him as Eva’s sixteen-year-old brother, Perry.
Perry pops his head into the circle of girls as if he has a special secret to share. ‘If any of you bitches does anything to my sister, you’ll pay. You might be standing on the station and a hand will push you in front of the train. Or waiting at the lights and end up under a truck. Or coming out of the movies and have your brains bashed in. You won’t see anyone coming but we’ll get you.’
A shaken Ursula O’Brien immediately reports the incident to her parents. Having experienced the full force of the Pessites’ displeasure during the photo frame debacle, the O’Briens barely raised a voice in protest over Mrs Pessites’ abortive attempt to exclude Ursula from the French tour. Back home over a cup of tea, they convince themselves that appalling Perry is merely making idle threats. They remind Ursula how painful things can get when blown out of proportion. Concluding that the best course of action is to do nothing, they pack Ursula off to bed. She brushes her teeth with her stomach churning, feeling like she wants to cry.
On her way to school, Maddie Peacock waits for the train with her friends. Chatting happily, she notices Eva Pessites standing on the opposite platform, surrounded by her acolytes. Eva is laughing and pointing in Maddie’s direction. Maddie looks around to see what the joke is. Then she looks down. She can’t believe it. She’s wearing her pyjama pants and suddenly everyone on the crowded platform notices. Maddie feels a hand shove her from behind. She stumbles forward, trips over her school bag and tumbles onto the cold steel tracks just as the train roars into the station.
Screaming in terror, Maddie wakes and writhes inconsolably in her stepmother’s arms. Maddie had decided to withhold the Perry Pessites story as a punishment for not being allowed to have a Big Mac before the recital, but now it spews out with terrifying velocity.
In the morning, Maddie’s stepmother calls Maddie’s father, who is on a business trip in New York. Maddie’s father briefs his lawyer. The lawyer fires off an email to the school.
The email arrives at 11pm and is opened the next morning by Christina Bowden’s devoted secretary, Judy, who prints it out and rushes it to the teachers’ lounge wearing her here’s trouble smile-frown. The headmistress has almost finished a touch-base breakfast with the science teachers when a hard copy of the email slips onto her lap. She scans it, finishes her gently risqué anecdote about frictionless pucks, and reschedules her morning. By recess she has questioned all the girls involved and by lunch George Pessites is sitting in her office, apoplectic with rage.
How dare they threaten him with legal action when it was his daughter who was beaten up! How dare they!
Christina Bowden allows him to spin around her office like an exploding Catherine wheel. When he is spent, the headmistress explains that the Peacocks are not threatening to sue Mr Pessites—they are threatening to sue the school for failing to protect their daughter from assault.
‘But Perry didn’t touch them. And anyway he’s just sticking up for his sister,’ he replies, abandoning rage to experiment with hurt and bewilderment.
Christina is about to launch into an exploration of the ethics of his son’s behaviour but thinks better of it. Instead she explains that Perry’s threats can indeed be legally interpreted as a form of assault but that, regardless of this, Mr Pessites must see that this atmosphere of hatred and revenge cannot be tolerated in a school professing to embrace Christian values. George Pessites is appropriately chastened by the mention of Our Lord and after inspecting a model of the new gymnasium he heads off, promising to ‘lay down the law’ to his kids.
On the way home George smiles to himself and says, ‘On ya Perry,’ to the luxury leather interior of his special edition Porsche, just as a Subaru hatchback stops dead in front of him. He slams on the brakes but it’s too late.
As air bags explode around him, George Pessites calculates that his three-hundred-thousand-dollar car will be off the road for at least two weeks. He’ll be driving around in some crap loaner all because Christina Bowden called him up to school. All because Perry put some little bitches in their place. All because the little bitches were giving Eva a hard time. All because one little bitch in particular punched his Eva and called her names. What was her name? Ruthie? Rosie?
The tow-truck driver drops George outside a row of expensively renovated neo-Federation shops where Mr Pessites enters his wife’s emporium—All Gifts Great and Small—to get the keys to her Audi when, as fortune would have it, he meets Constable Lance Johnstone.
Constable Johnstone is tall and thin with once-carrot hair that is fading to a dull brown. He has been a member of the police force for just over ten years. He joined in his late twenties after a number of unsuccessful attempts