The Great Gatenby (2 page)

There are times when it's hard to keep a little dignity. Those first few days were like a carousel where the horses keep turning into ice-cream, just as you jump on them. It was a kind of breathless feeling, the feeling you get when you sit down and wonder for a split-second if someone's pulled the chair out from under you. I didn't really have time to get homesick. Apart from the school classes there was homework (lots of it, as the teachers vied with each other to show us how tough they were), there was sports training, there was the dorm, there was the religious stuff, there was the Activities Programme . . .

I kept wondering how life would be going back at good ole Gleeson High, where sports training consisted of Mr Weatherby standing by the pool with a cigarette in one hand and a stop-watch in the other, while he listened to the first leg of the double on his Walkman. At Linley we were all very, very serious about sport. I elected to do swimming, needless to say, and the first day I wandered along — a little late it's true — with my bottle of suntan oil and a pair of sunglasses. I was greeted in a most uncool way by a little crewcut teacher, who led with his chin. ‘That's OK, my man,' I thought, as he went through his routine, screaming abuse at my Melted Zebras T-shirt, my board shorts, my punctuality, and even my haircut. ‘Just wait until we get in the pool and I'll swim the Speedos off anyone in your squad.'

But when we did get in the pool they turned out to be pretty quick, and I found myself having to work up a little steam to stay in front of the boys in the light blue and white. Obviously a vacation spent in the smoky atmosphere of Alby's Pinnie Parlour was no preparation for the rigours of the Combined Church Schools' swimming season. These boys had indentations in their thumbs from pressing their stop watches so hard. The only consolation for me was the sight of Melanie Tozer, looking lithe and lovely in her official Linley one-piece, doing her triple backward inside-out somersaults as a member of the diving squad in the next pool. Holy steaming salami, she looked like something out of a Coca-Cola commercial. It was enough to make a man miss his tumble turns.

After practice we had what Crewcut called a ‘debriefing', like this was the Marines or something, where we all stood around shivering while he went through our errors. It was amazing! On their clipboards the coaches had written down more numbers than a telephone directory. While I had been lazing up and down the pool enjoying visions of Melanie, some guy had been making his brain sweat, keeping tabs on me. And these were grown men! Didn't they have anything better to do with their time? By the time they'd finished, all the divers had disappeared, my teeth were making noises like Fred Astaire on a wooden stage, and I was beginning to think I'd need a torch to find my way home. Crewcut ended with a nice parting shot. ‘Gatenby, you'd better remember you're in a team now — we haven't got time for individuals around here.' I had actually started to figure that out all by myself, though I was grateful to Crewcut for laying it down so clean and so neat.

On the way back from the pool a swimmer named James Kramer caught up with me and started talking. He was in my dorm, three beds along, and seemed a well-respected man about this town. Even Clune, the one with the granite head, was more interested in sucking up to Kramer than in shovelling heaps on him like he did with other, sadder members of the dorm.

Anyway, the conversation that we had on this particular occasion was just about swimming and detentions, and housemasters who looked like gherkins, and stuff like that. But it was decent of the guy to take the trouble and it was a relief to know there might be some real people here. I walked into the dorm feeling better, not quite as fazed by the sights and sounds of the twelve-man jungle that I was living in during these, my golden schooldays.

That night, round about midnight, I awoke to see the dark figure of the guy called Ringworm standing at the foot of my bed.

‘What are you doing, man?' I asked softly, feeling a little nervous at this eerie sight.

‘I can't sleep,' he complained.

‘Well don't not sleep around my bed, man,' I told him. But he continued as though he hadn't heard me.

‘I've been lying there listening to my brain,' he whispered. My mind went into a frenzy of fear. I could picture myself being chopped up into little pieces and found in the morning, dangling from the light fittings. Here I was, trapped in the dark with a raving lunatic. When they did find me tomorrow, would anyone know the terror I'd been through, these last moments of my life? I sat up and reached for my torch, as much for a weapon as for illumination.

‘Listen Ringworm — I mean Jerry,' I said, ‘why don't you see the Matron?'

‘My brain hurts,' he complained.

‘Well take it easy, man,' I told him, always ready to slip into the role of friendly neighbourhood druggie. ‘I got some Panadol here. You wanna run a few of those through the bloodstream?'

‘You think they'd help?' he asked doubtfully.

‘Well sure, man, these are the wonder drug, you know? I mean, they do liver transplants with these things. Listen, I'll give you a handful, I'll give you the whole bottle. But don't take them all at once, OK?'

‘Thanks, Erle,' Ringworm said gratefully, and I couldn't be sure in the dark but there may well have been tears of gratitude in his eyes. ‘I don't care what the others say about you, I don't think you're weird.'

‘Well, gee, thanks . . . er . . . Jerry,' I said as he stumbled away to his bed. ‘That's a real compliment.' I lay back down and tried to compose myself to sleep again — not an easy thing after a nasty shock like that. ‘Boy this is some strange school,' I remember thinking as I drifted away into that cloudy, confusing, technicoloured world of dreams. ‘Some strange school.'

It's truly amazing what lessons the young student can learn if he's bursting with all the right qualities, like enthusiasm. For instance, it seems like there's this time in the morning called six-thirty a.m. Now if I hadn't come to Linley I might never have found out this extraordinary fact. I might have spent the rest of my life believing the day began round about 8.30 or 9.00, assuming that the sun somehow found its own way back into the sky at night while I was asleep. But no, the year twelves of Crapp House took it upon themselves to teach me about this 6.30 a.m. stuff by scheduling House swimming training at that time every morning and, what's more, by pouring cold water on my head the first morning when I forgot and lay in bed still sleeping.

‘Wassamatter, you want these people to think I wet my bed?' I asked, thinking the whole procedure was significantly uncool, but at the same time not altogether confident of my ability to make much impression upon these guys, who seemed slightly too big to mess with. Still, I was not the only one, finding myself in company with James Kramer and another guy from the dorm, Paul Watson, a little fellow from the country who had been looking at me all week like I was a camel on crutches.

‘C'mon, let's go make waves in their damn pool,' I said to them, letting them see that I was a candidate for House Captain already, even if a trifle young.

That water! Man, it brought up goose pimples the like of which would have sent any adolescent goose rushing for the Clearasil. It was cold! Gradually our skin started to match the school colours, till you couldn't tell where the swimming costumes ended and the bodies began. Still, I guess it was an OK way to start the day, even if in the showers afterwards I found I'd shrunk about five centimetres where it mattered most. But, only temporary, my man, only temporary. And being up and about so early meant we did at least get hot showers, something I'd already learnt was a rare privilege in the bathrooms of Crapp House.

Now that I'd been in the place a few days and the dust was starting to settle I was getting a sharper picture on my screen: not so many wavy lines or blurred colours. I didn't always like the programme but at least the set was working. It was pretty obvious that the dorm was the place — if you didn't cut it in there, you didn't cut it anywhere. James Kramer cut it, and with style; Ringworm didn't. Clune, who looked like a cross between Ayers Rock and a bowling ball, tried to be the neighbourhood bully and was strong enough to make an impression, but was regarded as a dork behind his back, and sometimes to his face. The Man though, the Man who killed flies just by looking at them — I swear to God they went white and fell out of the air — was a guy named Adam Marava, from Nauru. He was so big they had to widen the doorways to let him through. I never knew what a sonic boom was till the day he had baked beans for breakfast. When he flexed his muscles we had to move the beds. He could hang five towels from his . . . but no, that's another story. Anyway, he was a big boy, though he was gentle enough most of the time, just so long as we called him ‘Sir', gave him at least half our tuckshop supplies and did his maths homework for him at night. I first found out what fear meant the day I told him all the wrong answers for his quadratic equations. But he forgave me, which made me a lucky man compared to the year twelve kid he'd supposedly beaten up last year for drawing a moustache on his favourite pin-up.

Another guy who stood out in the dorm was David O'Toole who was tall and thin and intelligent and played the xylophone. I mean the xylophone for Chrissakes! As a matter of fact he was really pretty good, but still, the xylophone? I tell you, you haven't lived till you've heard a twelve-minute, head-banging version of some heavy metal epic played on the xylophone.

Then there was Rob Hanley-White, known as ‘Rat', who was little and cheeky but funny, mainly because of the way he hung it on the teachers. And Brian Bell, known as ‘Sog' because he was always fussing around and generally being wet. And Steven Nimmo, a cool dude, and maybe the one I was most likely to get on with, seeing he liked the same kind of music and was the only person with a half-way interesting hair-style, not that that necessarily means anything. But he had a quiet sense of dignity that I really liked. They called him ‘Punk', even though these guys wouldn't know a punk if he came at them in broad daylight with a two metre haircut and a Sex Pistols T-shirt.

And finally on this guided tour we have Evan Simpson and Matt Roxborough or some name like that; I don't know how you spell it. They were OK and pretty funny, although they hung round together like they were married all the time. So that's the dorm, that's the roll-call, these are the guys I was trapped with for a twelve month sentence and no time off for good behaviour.

But just metres away from me was the all-singing, all-dancing, stunningly beautiful Melanie Tozer, her little painted fingernails shyly reflecting the moonlight as she lay asleep in her perfumed bed, in the girls' wing of the boarding house. Every day, in every way, we were getting closer and closer. We soon figured out that there were a few good places to meet, the back of the Science labs being one and the Quarto section of the library being another. But it took us a while to get to that stage. First we had to go through the usual rituals — you know how it is, starting off with the ‘friend' coming up with the ‘message' . . . This time around it was a girl called Georgina Stenning, who was so wild that sparks flew from her mouth when she cleaned her teeth. She came sashaying up, ever so casual, on the first Friday night at the tuckshop: ‘How's the swimming going?'; ‘Where were you last year?'; ‘Want a freckle?'; ‘Melanie said she was talking to you a few times'; ‘Do you like her? She really likes you'; ‘She's a hot kid, don't you think?'

Ah, it was a grand old game. And refreshing to find that some things at Linley were the same as at Gleeson High. So it was a green light, a green, green light, and I was hot to trot.

First weekend of term was when we started getting serious. It was a buzz to wake up Saturday expecting to find that the pace we operated at — something like an epileptic ant-nest — would slow down with the dawning of the traditional days of leisure. Needless to say, this was about as realistic as expecting to find fish in your fish fingers. At 6.30 came the appointment at the pool, already getting to be such a regular deal that I was scared it would grow into a habit I'd be unable to break. By the time we'd melted the ice and chased away the penguins it was nearly breakfast. That was fifteen kernels of corn each and a slice of toast so hard I could have taken a bite out of the plate by mistake.

After breakfast came a major clean-up of the dorm, carried out to the accompaniment of endless complaints and arguments. Then a lot of guys had Sport, a couple had detentions, and I actually had three hours free before school swimming trials after lunch. Despite my exhaustion I fought off the temptation to crawl straight back into bed, and instead went on the Great White Search for the star of the Linley diving squad, Miss Melanie Tozer herself. When we finally made contact, it was with a flitter-flutter of the ole faithful three hundred grams of muscle inside my chest, and a sleazy dampening of the palms of my hand. She was with Georgina Stenning and they were sitting by the tennis courts, looking lovely in their whites, watching the tennis team diligently lobbing and smashing. God, this school was so sports crazy it made me nervous — sometimes I worried that the grounds would be so flooded with sweat we'd all be walking around ankle deep in it.

‘Hi Erle,' said Georgie, in this sweeter-than-sweet voice, smirking away. You know I really think girls would rather matchmake for their friends than go with a guy themselves. They just love it. She was beaming like she was Tarzan and I was a banana.

‘Hi George,' I said. ‘Um, hi Mel'.

‘Hi Erle.'

Don't you just love this dialogue? It was a hell of a conversation. Made Mr Ed look like Oscar Wilde. And the level didn't rise for quite some time, as we talked about tennis and Science Prep and diving, and stuff like that.

But as time went on the mood 'melted bit by bit and a little magic started to happen. We went wandering around the grounds, talking away, all funny and laughing like we were the slickest act going down in this part of town. We agreed that we weren't exactly in love with Linley; nor were we ever likely to be shouting the school song from the rooftops, or sending our grandchildren there. We found we liked a lot of the same music — though not all — and we'd seen the same movies over Christmas and we'd been at the same Reckless Drummers concert, just two weeks before school started.

‘Where were you sitting?' I asked.

‘Over to the left — near the guys in wheelchairs, behind the engineers or whatever they are. Where were you sitting?'

‘Wow,' I said, ‘I must have been just behind you. Wow, that's amazing. Wait, I remember you! You were the girl who started stripping off and the security took her away and everyone was booing.'

‘Yeah sure, sure, that was me alright, yeah definitely.'

We got to some old buildings over on the edge of the campus — seemed like they were storerooms or something. ‘This is a good place for a smoke,' said Georgie, looking around in a manner that could only be described as furtive, before she dived through a hole in the fibro. This was good news and bad news to me, hanging out as I was for a healthy blend of nicotine, tar and tobacco.

‘What happens if we get busted?' I asked, forgetting to be cool for a moment.

‘If it's your first offence, you get a det,' said Georgie, oracle on all things illegal, immoral and downright dangerous. ‘If it's me, one hundred and twenty-ninth offence, I dunno, probably get kicked out of this dump, at least that's what Gilligan told me last term. But I doubt it, my mother's on the school council, so I think they're scared to do too much.'

The building was filled with rolls and rolls of old carpet, so it took but a moment to find a comfortable piece of shaggy pile and settle down to a relaxing drag on the semi-crushed Marlboros that Melanie produced from some deeply personal part of her spicy little body. Funny how they'd both known I'd be a smoker. Must have been the haircut.

‘What'd your parents do if you got kicked out?' Melanie asked Georgina, making polite conversation.

‘God, they'd crack the biggest darkest one of all time, what do you think?'

I leaned back on the shag pile, breathing smoke into the air, listening to them chatter. These were my kind of people. Pity there weren't more of them around. Through a crack in the walls of the old storeshed I could see the tennis players in the distance, the steam from their hot bodies clouding the courts. ‘Why them, why not me?' I wondered, not for the first time. After all, I'd had a normal upbringing, more or less, didn't have too small a brain, got on OK with my parents, straight though they were . . . We hadn't had a major disturbance since Christmas day, when the Queen's message was on and I made some smart comment while my parents were sitting there all respectful and deferential, my mother taking notes. My father had risen up in wrath and ordered me from the house. It had been a dramatic scene. I slunk out muttering something about going and finding a stable to stay in, and that comment didn't help matters any. Still it blew over, and, like I said, most of the time we were pretty good friends with each other.

‘If I had to choose between chocolates and cigarettes, I'd take chocolates every time,' said Melanie dreamily, interrupting my profound meditations. I realised then that I really did like her, she really did have something special about her. I don't know why. It was just the way she said that, like she didn't care if it was a cool thing to say or not. She wasn't trying to be cool, she just was cool.

‘Yeah, me too,' said Georgie giggling. ‘Especially if it's a Cherry Ripe.' We were rolling around laughing so much it's a miracle we didn't set fire to the carpets.

Well, time marched on, in its usual dainty way, leaving another mark in the sand with every step it took, until we had to go to lunch. All the meals at Linley were compulsory, so we joined the queue. But that morning spent in among those dusty, hot woollen rolls was something of a landmark in my earnest young life. By the time we left the shed, I guess Melanie and I were going with each other.

The experience must have done something good for me. At swimming training that afternoon I moved so fast I left skid marks on the water. Even Crewcut was impressed.

‘Glad to see your reputation wasn't all hot air,' he muttered, between gritted teeth. ‘You're in the team for the first meet.' In the team! Hell! With times like that I should have been Captain!