In forty years of teaching, he had heard every excuse in all their variations and gradations. The parent before him – Harry, was it? – was a fluent and convincing liar. He saw where his son had got it from. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The child, though, sat there silently and avoided his gaze.
He smiled faintly at the memory of his first encounter with a parent such as this Harry. At the time, he was young and earnest, and fully ‘present’, as they liked to say these days. He wanted to show these parents that he wasn’t like the others, hard bitten and cynical, and ‘everything that is wrong’ with the profession.
His colleagues had smiled and called him ‘Burley’ as he marched into the meeting room. He didn’t get the reference, thinking that they were referring to Walter Burley-Griffen, the architect of his hometown Canberra.
It finally twigged when they had taken him fishing on the reef. Seasick and sunburnt he had vomited over the side of the boat.
‘Look fellas, he even brought his own burley,’ they had chuckled. The fish had swarmed and gobbled up the remains of his lunch and were then in turn gobbled up by a reef shark. When he finished emptying out his guts he had slumped down praying for the trip to end. Those were good days.
Harry took his softened expression as a good sign and grew more confident and wove a tale of misunderstanding, miscommunication even mistaken identity. He became conspiratorial: ‘Man to man, and all that. You know how kids are these days? They don’t mean nothing by it. It’s all those YouTube videos they watch.’
At the retirement party his old colleagues had a whole store of anecdotes and amusing stories. He had protested weakly and was appalled at his younger self.
‘Burley’ had stuck, but the nickname was now used with affection. It had been a long time, and he was now a stranger to that self-important young man who had come to the Far North with such reforming zeal. His Canberra friends had accused him of going ‘troppo’, but he couldn’t imagine leaving behind those green hills and the ferocious downpours that occasionally cut off the causeway to Redlynch during the wet season.
He was as good a fisherman as anyone now, and his fully kitted out Toyota Landcruiser – the ultimate status symbol in these parts – was the envy of every bushman.
He chuckled at the memory of that night when he settled the hotly contested question of ‘suspension set ups’ with an authority that seemed to decide the question for good. It was the day he had truly arrived.
His laughter had unnerved Harry who was now tying himself in knots trying to defend his obnoxious offspring.
He was in a good mood. The new bloke was due next week. With a surprising pang of regret, he realised that this was probably the last time he would have to deal with the Harrys of the world.
He sighed. In the old days he would have sparred with irate parents. He would have been called a liar, or worse. But those days seemed to have gone the way of duelling. The new camera system made things easy. He realised that he was the reef shark in this encounter and Harry so much burley. He turned round the laptop, cranked up the sound and pressed the space bar. The figure on the screen who was clearly identifiable as the young man seated quietly before him unleashed a torrent of abuse at the young female teacher. Harry went white. He recognised his own words in the mouth of his son. People like him rarely saw themselves for who they were, until they saw themselves reflected in their children.
He pulled out the boy’s file. All this material was digital, of course, but he had his secretary print out the information and place it in a manilla folder for dramatic effect. He was thoroughly familiar with its contents but pretended to study it.
It told a familiar story of divorce and split custody; a story of people under pressure.
It was the part of his idealistic younger self that he regretted losing the most. Problems were no longer there to be solved, only to be managed, and over the years he had become an effective manager of problems.
Harry had gone silent. He was played out.
‘A report has been made, and your son will be suspended for three days. The situation will be reassessed, and you will be notified of the outcome and any rights of appeal. In the meantime, I recommend he gets some counselling.’
He got up. This interview was over. It was somebody else’s problem now.
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