Chapter 65
SIXTY-FIVE
Nancy received a telephone call from Mr Whitman.
He informed her that Rosie and her mother had attended a meeting with himself and Miss Young, and that Rosie had been suspended until Monday.
She’d owned up, he’d said. When Nancy had asked: ‘Willingly?’ he hesitated long enough for Nancy to understand it was a ‘no’.
She briefly wondered how they’d prised it out of her, but that brought forth various imagined scenarios: Rosie denying it at first, squirming, showing absolutely zero regard for her daughter, and it angered her so much she had to stop thinking about it.
Mr Whitman had gone on to say that Rosie would be apologizing to Lara once both girls were back at school.
‘We will also be putting her on supervised play for a week. In case you’re not aware of what this means, she will be staying inside the classroom for all breaks, accompanied by a teaching assistant. ’
‘And then what?’ Nancy asked.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, sounding genuinely surprised at her question.
‘What happens when she decides to bully Lara again?’
‘Well, we don’t know she will,’ he stated firmly. ‘Hopefully she will have understood that it’s not something we tolerate here at Ripton Primary. Not under any circumstances.’
Except it had been going on for months, Nancy thought.
Months of torment before any real attention had been paid to it, and that was only because Lara had ended up in hospital.
And now Rosie had a mere week of sitting colouring in a classroom during breaks before she was let loose in the playground again to do whatever the hell she liked.
Nancy didn’t believe for a minute Rosie understood they didn’t tolerate bullying at Ripton Primary, because they turned a blind eye, or they followed some feeble process that was always weighted in favour of the bully.
Rosie had proved to herself again and again that she could get away with it.
She might have been caught this time but that was only going to make her a whole lot more sneaky in the future.
Nancy knew the school couldn’t ignore it if it happened right in front of their noses but actually relying on them to stop it, to suitably punish the perpetrator, to put Lara first and be angry on her behalf – as angry as she felt now – well, that was never going to happen.
Which was why she was going to take matters into her own hands.