by Bill Rowe
Suzy stopped and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she turned to the window, stared out at the glowering sky, and remained silent. I looked at Rosie. Her hands were folded so tightly on the table her fingers were going purple. Her eyes were riveted on her friend’s face. Suzy stayed quiet so long, I wondered if she was finished. But there had to be more. How did Rosie fit into the picture as—what? Keeping each other from destroying themselves? I shifted in my chair and my hand went to my face of its own accord and covered it. An ugly feeling, an emotional nausea over what was to come, had risen in me.
My movements seemed to bring Suzy out of her trance. She looked at Rosie and began again. “Neither my name nor his was ever released publicly, in order to protect my identity. But of course, because of the investigation and his court appearance and the news coverage of the case, word of who it was got around. Everyone knew in school, girl guides, church. The worst of it was how I felt about myself under the constant staring of everyone else. I felt I was on the same par as a piece of used toilet paper. I got some counselling from a well-meaning social worker, but as time went on I felt worse, not better, about myself. I got so low—skipped school, ran away from home a couple of times, attracted boys who thought they could do anything to me they wanted, a suicide attempt—that my mother decided to move to St. John’s for, quote, unquote, a fresh start. My father had already up and left with my brothers. I don’t believe he ever quite lost the idea I had somehow implicated him and my brother and caused the false suspicions.”
Suzy got up and went to the shelf where a pack of du Maurier Light cigarettes and matches lay. She lit up another one. “This is really stupid, I know, to start this smoking crap again, but just because you’re a survivor of sexual abuse doesn’t mean you’re perfect.” Rosie made a silent little chuckle at her friend, forcing me into a grin that felt pretty wan.
Suzy sat down. “At Smearies I was pretty popular among the older boys. I always had the smokes, never put up much resistance if one of them wanted to cop a feel behind the curtain in the auditorium. Mom tried to be supportive, but by the time I was thirteen I was only looking for the least excuse to take off for Toronto or Vancouver and end up, without a doubt, on the street turning tricks and mainlining heroin. Looking back now, I simply wanted to destroy this sack of shit that I knew I was composed of. I also knew that all the top girl students in the school thought I was a worthless slut. And the top student of all was the ice maiden, her highness Rosie Gudrid O’Dell, the all-Canadian virgin queen. Gudrid. Goodie. Goody-goody.
“The first time I set eyes on her, I loathed the sight of this proper, straight-A’s, precious, tennis champ, volleyball and basketball star bitch, and my admiration went down from there. She was the complete opposite of me in every respect: she was admired, I was despised. I always had the feeling she was looking at me behind my back—in disgust, I thought. Whenever I tried to catch her at it so that I could go over and beat the face off her, she always managed to look away in time. I was the one who put all the names on her, and mocked her and made fun of her: ‘That’s not boobs on the Bitch of Buckingham Mews, that’s bergy bits.’ And remember the wall in the girls’ washroom, Rosie? ‘The guy who finally takes R. O’D’s cherry will need an icicle for a tool.’”
“Mm,” said Rosie.
“Then, one day that year, Tom, Rosie O’Dell saved my worthless life.” Suzy stopped and got up for another smoke. I noticed that she used this break to commune with Rosie, raising her eyebrows at her and staring straight at her as she lit her cigarette. Rosie put her head down and closed her eyes. There was an aura of anxiety about her. Suzy stayed by the stove saying nothing. Rosie raised her head and gazed at me for a few seconds. Fear welled up in me. I didn’t want to hear any more of this. I reached out and took her hand. She squeezed mine and turned to Suzy and gave another little nod.
Suzy came back to the table and sat down. “One day after school,” she said from a pillar of smoke, “I was in the washroom by myself. I’d just come out of a half-hour of detention and there wasn’t another soul around, so I decided to grab a quick smoke before going outside in the rain. I no sooner had my fag lit when the door opens, and in waltzes Rosie the goody-goody herself, the head prefect. ‘The head perfect, ’ I used to call her. It was all over for me now. She would have to report me, even if she didn’t have it in for me. This would be the fourth time since school started that I’d been caught smoking in the john. I’d already been suspended for two days after the third time. Could expulsion be far behind? I remember resigning myself to it: ‘Great, I’m out of here finally.’
“With the cigarette hanging out of my mouth, I casually washed my hands in the sink, ignoring her. She came over to the sink next to me and started to wash her own hands without saying a word. I could feel her eyes on me in the mirror, and every now and then she’d look to the side at me, but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of noticing her. Then Rosie said in a low voice but very clear, ‘It’s never going to wash away.’ I didn’t even know if she was talking to me or to herself, but after hearing that I couldn’t help looking at her in the mirror. Her eyes were boring right into me, into my filthy secret soul. She moved closer—I could feel her arm touching mine— and she spoke those two little words that saved my life. ‘You too, ’ she said.”
Suzy stayed silent so long I gargled out, “What did she mean by that?”
“I had no idea, but I thought, Jesus Christ, this broad is a dyke like everyone says, and she thinks I’m one too.” At that, giggles came out of both girls, and they reached for each other’s hands across the table. I forced a grin to show my fellow-feeling here, but then when their eyes immediately filled and overflowed with tears, I knew I was really an alien among them. “Oh God,” sniffed Suzy, wiping her eyes with a tissue.
“Well, what did you say, then?” I squeaked.
“What I always said when I didn’t understand something. I said, ‘Fuck off.’ And I fired my cigarette into the sink in front of her and walked out.”
“How did that save your life, Suzy?”
“It was not long after that that Rosie got sick, got depressed. Do you remember that, Tom—when Rosie went from little Miss Perfect to an adolescent wreck, skulking and slinking and sidling around the school?”
Did I? “Yeah, sort of. She seemed to be a bit down for a while.”
Rosie looked at me askance and smiled a little. Suzy went on: “I used to size her up in class, and suddenly, one day, I understood. I chased after her on one of those long walks she took after school. Nearly killed me. The girl could move.”
“Tom followed me sometimes, too,” said Rosie. “He never caught up with me, but the fact that he did that made me love him a lot when I was thinking straight again.” I’d followed her once.
Suzy said, “Well, finally, I caught up with her and croaked out, ‘Rosie, stop.’ She turned around and stood there, arms by her sides—she looked like she thought I intended to beat her up and she was just going to stand there and take it. I said, ‘Rosie, I know.’ And she stared at me as if she was trying to figure out if I was mocking her again. I put my arms around her, and said, ‘Yes, me too.’”
Chapter 9
HOW I GOT HOME alive that evening, crossing intersections in a trance, I had no idea. I only remember leaving Suzy’s house and arriving at my own, with no memory of the walk in between. My thoughts were welded to Suzy’s and Rosie’s narrative.
“No no no, my love,” I’d protested when Rosie wondered if she’d made a mistake in telling me. “You did the right thing. I love you, and we will decide what you should do and we’ll get through this together.” Rosie had looked at me with sad but smiling eyes, showing she knew her faith in my strength was justified.
But now, walking home alone I felt weak and useless and absolutely bereft. When poor little beautiful Pagan had been found dead, my shock and grief had been less painful than the sense of shock and grief and loss that now invaded me. I couldn’t have felt more hurt if Rosie ha
d been killed in an accident. At that thought, I told myself to grow up. It was because I’d professed to love her and given the impression of manly strength that she’d told me in the first place, and here I was now, staggering away, wallowing in childish self-pity.
I made myself rehear the words. “Our friendship,” said Suzy, “changed me from a self-despising piece of garbage to a self-respecting human female. I found Rosie with the same inner torment and self-hatred and guilt I had suffered, and together we were able to gain some of the strength and self-respect I’d never had but which Rosie used to have before.”
“But why didn’t you go to the police,” I asked Rosie, “and nail the bastard?”
“Our feelings may have been much the same,” said Rosie, “but our experiences were very different. When Suzy and I first started talking, the hatred and rage she was directing at herself was all based on a mistaken idea of her own guilt. What we were able to make her realize and believe was that she was not in fact guilty of anything at all, even though she strongly felt the guilt. He was the only guilty person and she was not responsible for what had happened to her as a child any more than if she’d been injured in an earthquake. I didn’t feel I had that option.”
“Why do you say that, my love?”
“Because I believed my guilt was real, that I was in fact responsible for what happened to me, that I brought it on myself.”
“But you were a child. My God, twelve years old!”
Rosie didn’t answer. Suzy turned to me and said, “When I caught up with her that day after school and said that I knew, she burst into tears and said that her heart was broken and she was guilty of betraying her own mother because she never said no and she never said stop. She actually believed she had encouraged him and that she was therefore responsible herself for his rapes.”
“If he was prepared to abuse a child in his care,” I said, “he wouldn’t have stopped just because you said no.”
“Till Pagan’s death, I believed he would have. Once, after it was all over between him and me, I asked Pagan, just to be sure he wasn’t doing the same thing with her, if he’d ever happened to touch her in an intimate way when they were roughhousing, say, and she said yes, one time when they were playing he’d touched her accidentally between the legs, and she told him it made her feel uncomfortable, and would he please be more careful. He apologized for his carelessness and he never touched her again. So yes, I believed he would have stopped if I’d just said no at the beginning. I knew that if I told anyone, the police or a teacher, say, afterwards, it would come out that I had really encouraged him and that I actually wanted him to do it.”
This had left me unable to speak. A wretched self-pity rose in me at my naïveté. The period she was talking about was when I’d still been constantly loving her and waiting for her interest in me to revive, when I’d believed, despite her callous neglect of me, that really we were sweethearts destined to be married someday. She’d said she’d betrayed her mother. It was me— that was who she’d fucking well betrayed.
Suzy must have sensed my emotional turbulence and jumped in. “But, Rosie, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Yes or no doesn’t enter into it at the age you were. Consent or encouragement was absolutely irrelevant. That’s why it’s automatically rape under the law. You see now that he was a charming opportunist who used your infatuation with him to victimize you.”
“Now I do see that as the true situation. I did not think for one moment back then that he preyed on me as a child. I thought he was acting completely under the sway of love, our love, hopelessly, desperately in love as I was, and that it was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence for him that would never have happened at all if I hadn’t initiated it and encouraged it. In my egotism, my vanity, I thought that the reality of the situation was that his love for me and mine for him had brought it on and that I knew exactly what I was doing then as well as I would today with someone I loved.”
As the girls spoke, I deflected my negative thoughts from what Rosie said she’d initiated, to the man himself, to the odiousness of the man’s actions, and I managed to find my tongue. “But you didn’t know what the consequences of it would be on you. Look at what it did to you. In grade seven, when you went into that awful slump Suzy mentioned—that was when all this was happening, right?”
“No, it was already all over by then. He had already ended it because he was afraid people were becoming suspicious. What you saw was when my heart was broken and I realized my guilt and I was so depressed I just wanted to die.”
“But when you bounced back from that bad period, did you and Suzy do that by yourselves?”
“Mostly. But he told me that, because of my behaviour, some teachers and friends of the family were talking and that I’d better gain control of myself or there’d be charges laid and a big court case, and everything I’d done would come out in public, and my mother would know her daughter had stabbed her in the back, everyone would despise me, and he’d end up in prison where the other inmates murdered men who’d done what he’d done.”
“Crafty, sleazy son of a bitch,” said Suzy.
My memory flashed back to the air of mystery in my own house at the time, the constant whispering between Mom and Dad, the rupture of the long friendship between Mom and Nina, my father’s rage and anxiety and bellowing behind closed doors. I mentioned some of that now.
Rosie replied, “That’s who he must have meant by friends of the family talking. ‘So you have to buck up, my darling, ’ he said, ‘for both our sakes.’ So I bucked up. I buried it all inside and I bucked up. Anything to avoid having what I had done come out. I would rather have been tortured than have anyone find out. Right up to the time of Pagan’s death I could not stand the thought of anyone else but Suzy knowing. Even now, telling you, Tom, the person I love, is the most painful thing I’ve ever done. But what I’m hoping is that our love, my love for you and your love for me, emotionally and physically, will, over time, supersede the awful feelings you must have and that I have again now about that nightmare. I mean, everyone has nightmarish love affairs in their lives, don’t they, for heaven’s sake, and still manage to get on with other loves, relegating the past horrible ones to the trash can? That’s what I’m hoping for, if you are willing, and no one but us three, and perhaps a police officer, will ever know.”
“What do you mean—perhaps a police officer? Surely you are going to expose the bastard and have him sent to jail where, if there’s any justice, he’ll be murdered just like he fears.”
“I’m going to do something, that’s for sure. I wasn’t going to until Pagan died, when it became clear, at least to me, that he was doing the same to her as he did to me. And when I got wind of his secret plan to move to BC, I became more determined than ever to make sure that police forces everywhere are alerted to him, so that they can keep him under surveillance. That’s why I decided to tell you about it now, so that you wouldn’t learn about it from rumours, and also to get your advice, as well as Suzy’s, on how to tell the police. But laying charges against him and going to court and having a big trial and all that, I don’t think so. In fact, at this point, I know so. It would be my word against his. The police are pretty clear that there’s absolutely no evidence he was doing anything to Pagan. So it would be a case of he said–she said. Suzy was telling me what an ordeal she had before her grandfather pleaded guilty, and even afterwards. I don’t want to ruin my life and everyone’s around me.”
“But, if not for yourself, don’t you feel that you have to do something for the sake of Pagan? And what about if he is a real child molester as he seems to be, a peddo…”
“A pedophile,” said Suzy.
“Right. Rosie, you can’t just set him loose on unsuspecting children thousands of miles away. Would just telling the police do the trick?”
“I don’t think he’s a pedophile,” said Rosie. “I did some research, and he seems to be just an opportunistic sexual predator who, in the absence of satisfactory sexual relat
ions with his partner, in this case, his wife, he used his wiles to prey on the nearest available females at hand, me and Pagan. My God, he’s a doctor. How could he have become that, if he was stalking little girls the whole time he was in university? And he’s so busy practising medicine and running for office and investing in this, that, and the other thing and making a ton of money, he doesn’t have the time to put in to set up his victims like the true pedophiles I read about in the literature.”
I looked at Suzy. She shrugged. “Well, I’ve already told Rosie that she’s still in denial. But what the hell do I know? I don’t have much experience with pedophiles—I was only acquainted with one—but I do have this gut-feeling that I would recognize one if I knew he’s been screwing children. But actually laying charges? That’s another kettle of fish.”
I looked at Rosie, expecting her to be a bit offended by Suzy’s harshness, but she seemed to accept her criticism even if she didn’t agree with it. She said, “We’ve kept you at this dismal stuff long enough, Tom. Will you think over what you believe my next step should be?”
My mind in turmoil, my eyes smarting as I kept back tears, I forced myself home along the sidewalk. I focused my thoughts on Dr. Heathcliff Godolphin Rothesay, the adult in a position of power and trust who had preyed upon Rosie and Pagan, the vulnerable child victims. All the rest of the way home I allowed my loathing for Dr. Rothesay to grow more immense and, to keep my rage from feeling as impotent as it was, I visualized ways, each more gruesome than the last, of killing the child rapist.
Entering my house, I called out hi, replied I wasn’t hungry when my mother said my supper was in the oven, and double-stepped the stairs to my bedroom, where I closed the door and lay on the bed. Less than a minute later, she knocked. When I said, “Yes?” she didn’t answer but opened the door.
“Mind if I come in?” She came in. “Are you feeling ill?”