Authors: Bill Rowe
“Your boyfriend, is he in the court today?”
“Yes, right behind you in the front seat. Thomas Sharpe.”
Dylan’s eyes bored into me before he turned away to make a note and resumed.
“Now Miss O’Dell, your real father, whose death, you say, led to the grief which
made you—a highly intelligent twelve-year-old girl, so vulnerable—that would be
the poet, the sex poet—it’s all right, Ms. Barrett, I withdraw the words sex
poet—the erotic poet, Mr. Joyce O’Dell?”
“My father was an award-winning poet, yes.”
“What kind of a relationship did you have with him?”
“I had a wonderful, close relationship with him. He and I—”
“And this wonderful relationship you believe in hindsight you had with your
real father, was it a real father-daughter relationship or—think about it
carefully now—was it a fantasy relationship too?”
Lucy Barrett shouted, “Objection, My Lady! First he interrupts instead of
letting her answer the question, and then he puts forward a disgraceful
innuendo.”
“It is a relevant question, My Lady. I wish to compare Miss O’Dell’s view of
her relationship with her father to other more objective views. It is relevant
to my theory that she tends to fabricate memories regarding her
relationships.”
“Overruled,” said the judge. “Proceed cautiously, Mr. Dylan, till I see
where you are going. And please allow the witness to answer
your questions without unnecessary interruptions.”
“You were saying, Miss O’Dell, that you and your father, the erotic poet, had a
real, close relationship.”
“It was a wonderful father-child relationship in which he challenged me to be
self-reliant. Then, the summer I was eleven years old, when we were on a
canoeing trip, he accidentally drowned in the river. His tragic death—”
“Let me stop you there for a moment in the interests of truth regarding your
father’s death. It was neither accidental nor tragic, I would suggest, but
negligent and farcical. He staggered drunk out of the tent you and he were
sleeping in together, and then, while having a bowel movement on the edge of the
bank in the dead of night, tumbled into the river and drowned, did he
not?”
Rosie glared at Dylan in pure contempt. He was getting to her, I thought. But
she went on calmly. “He was performing a perfectly natural function which, I
suspect, you yourself are forced to do rather frequently”—there were snorts from
around the courtroom, and even the judge controlled a grin— “and he fell
accidentally into the river, hitting his head on a rock.”
“I enjoy your sense of humour, in these grave and traumatic circumstances for
you, but do go on with your current recollections of the wonderful relationship
you say now you had with your father.”
“I was about to say my father’s tragic death shook me to my roots. I nearly
went crazy from shock and grief. I think I might have if I hadn’t had a good
friend, a childhood boyfriend, really, who helped me find my way again.” Rosie
looked down at me and smiled. “I was consumed—”
“Is that the childhood boyfriend you’re referring to?” Murray Dylan had looked
in the direction of her smile just as I was smiling back, making me feel as if
I’d been caught doing something wrong. “Not, surely, the same Thomas Sharpe who
is now your boyfriend years later, with months of alleged sexual activity at the
hands of another man in between?”
“It’s not as strange as you are trying to make it look. We’ve known each other
all our lives. I was in love with him when I was eleven years old, but I was too
stupid with grief and shock to know it. What I needed and wanted was right
before my eyes, as I realized years later, but I was too blinded by some
romantic notion of a Prince Charming who would come and make the hurt stop and
sweep me off my silly feet.”
Dylan eyed me and wrote on his pad, then mused upon me again
through narrowed eyes during several more seconds of silence, and wrote again.
What the hell was he doing, sizing me for the dimensions of my coffin? “Oh,
sorry,” he said, as if snapping out of it, “I was trying to make some sense of
all this. You say you were blinded by a romantic fantasy, Miss O’Dell?”
“At the time, yes, and Heathcliff fit that bill, as he himself knew and took
advantage of. Part of the pain of what he did to me is that he deprived me of
the possibility of first innocent love with the real love of my life.”
“Go on, Miss O’Dell. You were saying you thought you might have gone crazy
after your real father’s death. Did you read any of his poetry before or during
your teenage years?”
“Yes, I believe I read every poem he wrote.”
“We’ll have some samples of his poetry later, but for the moment, would you say
it was written for adults or children?”
“I would say it was adult in nature.”
“Did you have your parents’ permission to read it?”
“I didn’t have their permission as such, no.”
“I am not surprised, having read some myself, as much as I could stomach. Now,
Miss O’Dell, besides reading your real father’s passionate erotic poetry,
frankly sexual in content, did you read many romantic novels as a
teenager?”
“I’ve always read a lot of novels of all kinds.”
“Yes, your familiarity with fiction is apparent. The words you put into Dr.
Rothesay’s mouth in that hotel room in San Francisco on what you called ‘our
honeymoon’ seem to be words from a character in a preadolescent, romantic novel
rather than from a mature and brilliant professional doctor in his
mid-thirties.”
“I would guess that if a brilliant professional man in his mid-thirties is
endeavouring to seduce a twelve-year-old girl he would use language that would
appeal to the emotional level of a twelve-year-old girl. In
his
case”—
she pointed at Rothesay— “I don’t need to guess. I
know
he did.”
“You have very cleverly worked all this out in your own mind, haven’t you, Miss
O’Dell? I venture to say you have never been at the emotional level of a
twelve-year-old girl. I suggest to you that a normal twelve-year-old girl would
have a normal twelve-year-old’s crush on an older person. Nothing extraordinary
about that. We’ve all experienced that. But what you’ve done is taken your
normal twelve-year-old feelings and expanded
them in your mind,
in your fantasies, into a mature love affair between two consenting
adults.”
“I have not. That is amateur psychology at its most absurd.”
“Oh, come, come, young lady, you are maintaining in the face of common sense
that not once over a five-month period did your mother or your sister in their
bedrooms a few feet away in the quietness of night hear anything or get
suspicious and come into your room when Dr. Rothesay was allegedly there?”
“I never said my mother didn’t come into my room when he was there. She did
come into my room when he was there, not once but twice.”
“Miss O’Dell, Miss O’Dell, please, which is it? She did come to your room or
she did not? Kindly stick to one story or we’ll never finish this.”
“What I said was that she was never attracted to my room by noise or suspicion.
I didn’t mention this before, Mr. Dylan, because my memories of the two times my
mother did come to my room are so painful to talk about.” Rosie stopped and
looked at me, but she did not smile as before. She closed her eyes for a moment,
breathed in deeply, and continued. “The first time she came to my room was after
he had put his penis in my mouth and thrust it against the back of my throat and
ejaculated his semen down my throat and made me gag and choke, and I threw up
all over the bed. He calmly bundled up the bedclothes and got tissues and towels
from the bathroom and wiped me off, and then he went out and woke up my mother.
I could hear him calling her name a half-dozen times. He brought her into my
room and told her I had the flu and was stomach sick and that he would stay with
me and watch me in case meningitis developed. She started to come over to me,
and he told her not to come too close for fear of getting the bug herself. He
was already exposed to it, so he would clean up and wash the sheets and
everything, and she should go to Pagan, my sister, who was now in the hall, and
put her back to bed and go back to bed herself and not worry, everything was in
the doctor’s capable hands.
“The second time my mother came into my room when he was there with me happened
a few nights later. He had put the lubricant on his penis and in my rectum and
had anal sex with me for the first time, and my sphincter muscles must have
relaxed too much, he told me later, and I had diarrhea all over my bed. He got
my mother up again and said it was a resurgence of my flu and he was keeping a
close eye on it to make sure it wasn’t something worse. Both times I lay there
in my bed wanting to die
from the physical reaction and the fear
and guilt over what I’d done, and hoping my mother didn’t find out what was
going on. Later he told me he’d be more careful to keep those reactions from
happening again when, as he put it, we were enjoying oral and anal sex together.
I said earlier that he had sex with me nearly every night for five months. To be
accurate, I would have to say he had oral or vaginal or anal intercourse with me
every night. And whenever we were alone in the house he would do all three, one
after the other.
“Later, after it had stopped, I tried to blank it all out my mind as if it had
not happened to me but to some other person. But of course it had happened to
me, and my stepfather, the man whom I had loved with all my heart, had done it
to me as his child sex slave, and for a long while it corrupted every good
feeling in me. It wasn’t till later that I could see that Dr. Rothesay, he and
he alone, had exploited me and made me his slave for his own perverted sexual
purposes, all in the name of love. But it wasn’t love, it was sick sex and I was
the victim of it and I was slave to it. He took advantage of my pathetic little
girl’s feelings to enslave me with his sick, pathological sex and nearly ruined
my life forever.” Tears were running down Rosie’s cheeks, but as she talked, she
was oblivious to them until she felt them drop onto her breast. She pulled some
tissues out of her jacket pocket and quickly wiped her eyes, murmuring,
“Sorry.”
The courtroom was soundless. Jurors looked dazed. Wetness shone in the eyes of
some. Murray Dylan tried to maintain professional confidence, but Rosie’s words
had undermined his poise. Rothesay’s erect posture had also sagged. I tried to
tell myself that this was absolutely fabulous: her testimony had clobbered the
fancy, self-assured defence lawyer. But the truth was that it had shattered me.
I would have preferred it a thousand times over if Dylan had proved that the
acts committed by Rosie and Rothesay had never actually taken place, that
everything she’d sworn to was a pack of lies.
“Miss O’Dell,” Murray Dylan began again, amazingly unruffled once more, “I put
it to you that your main emotions and feelings towards Dr. Rothesay soon after
he came into your mother’s life were not as you have described them under oath
but were, in fact, bitterness and resentment because he would not respond to
your infatuation in the manner you wanted him to.”
“That is simply not true.”
“Miss O’Dell,” Murray Dylan thundered, “I put it to you squarely that
none, not one, not a single one, of the sexual acts you have
alleged, in fact, took place.”
Rosie’s voice rose. “And I tell you they did, all of them.”
“Moreover, I put it to you that all your allegations are a fabrication of your
imagination, your feverish, overactive imagination spurred on at the time by
your grief, your love, your actual love of Dr. Rothesay—I don’t deny
your
love was real—and that the sexual acts and all the emotional upheaval you have
related in court are fantasies of your imagination.”
“Perhaps, Mr. Dylan, you can tell me if this is also a fantasy of my
imagination.” Rosie’s voice was low and calm again. “After he stopped sexually
assaulting me, something horrifying began to happen in my genital region. I
started to have spasms, and seizures and contractions down there, unexpectedly
and spontaneously, completely against my will. They would happen any time of the
day or night, sometimes when I was asleep, sometimes when I was awake, perhaps
just sitting at my desk in school. I was having what I can only describe as some
twisted and warped form of orgasm, always extremely unpleasant, but with an echo
of love and pleasure mixed up in it somewhere. It was a sick and horrible
feeling. Can a person
imagine
that? Dream it up? Fabricate it? As a
thirteen-year-old girl going through puberty, I would long to become an adult so
that I could go to a hospital somewhere and have my genitals surgically removed
and never, ever have to feel anything there again for the rest of my
life.”
“Do you have those alleged sensations currently, or did they stop as you got on
with your life?”
“I gradually controlled them myself and with the help of my friend Suzy and by
concentrating on other things in my life: studies, tennis, basketball, student
activities. But my memory of them is very acute and added for a long time to my
fear of intimacy with anyone of the opposite sex.”
“A long-time fear of intimacy with anyone of the opposite sex—how old are you
now?”
“Sixteen.”
“And at the age of sixteen, are you saying you have been trying for a long time
to be intimate with others of the opposite sex?”