The Great Gatenby (3 page)

Three weeks down the road much of the fun and frolicking had gone out of daily life at Linley for me. It was getting just like any other school and it seemed like I'd been there for ever. Where were the innocent thrills of yesteryear? How quickly had I forgotten the first slimy taste of cold lamb's fry! How the sound of Gilligan's musical voice, that once fell so sweetly on my ear, grated now! What had become of the rush of feverish excitement that set the dandruff tingling on the scalp, when I walked into those early detentions and sat watching the dew glisten on the discarded ice-cream wrappers on the grass outside? There was a staleness about it all — even Crewcut's daily insults were losing their sting. And as for Mr Swenson's regular litany — ‘Where's your Prep, Gatenby? Deeee-tenshun' — it had become about as welcome as a bee in a nostril. I was smoking ten a day, which was costing a fortune, and had been busted twice, for a three hour detention the first time and a six hour one the second. I wondered if they doubled it each time or merely added three hours — I hoped it was the latter, otherwise I'd be doing a ninety-six hour detention before very much longer.

You know how you blow bubbles and they're all pretty and beautiful and have rainbows in them and all kind of stuff like that? And then they burst and there's just an oily slick lying limply on the ground? That's the way life is sometimes, and even though Linley had never exactly been any kind of bubble, in that first week or so it did have the sense of romance that comes with anything new. ‘A magic dwells in each new beginning', Miss Strezlecki had quoted to me at Gleeson High one time. Geez, I even missed her, that's how serious this was getting.

Melanie saved my life. Like I said earlier, the back of the Science labs and some corners of the school library were the places to go. Those teachers patrolled the school armed with crowbars, I swear to God. To get five minutes on your own together you had to make a booking weeks in advance. But we managed. And we got to know each other pretty well. She wasn't exactly a great student when it came to schoolwork; more the kind of kid whose best subjects were PE and Art, you know what I mean? She kept calling herself a ‘veg' and saying she was in ‘Vegie Maths', because she was in the bottom class. But she didn't need to do that; she had so much going for her. For one thing, she was so good-looking that even the year twelves kept chatting her up. For another, she wasn't dumb at all — just talking to her, you could tell she was really smart — every once in a while she'd come out with these great comments that'd leave you gasping for breath. I don't know why she didn't do well in school.

Another thing, she was just excellent at sport, not only diving, where she made the others look like whales in marmalade, but she was a good swimmer too. And in PE, where we did all different sports, she was truly pretty to watch. They say people look like poetry in motion but the only poetry most of those girls looked like was limericks. But Melanie, when she moved, she looked like Venus de Milo had grown arms and was playing netball. I told her she should do Gymnastics; it turned out she already had for a few years but had gotten sick of it and given it up. She still moved like a gymnast though — you can tell.

Maybe one of the reasons she didn't do well in school was the way her face turned to broken glass when those teachers came near. God, she could bring their skin out in scratches just by looking at them. She gave greasies better than Castrol.

‘Why do you give them so much aggro?' I asked her.

‘I don't,' she said, looking embarrassed.

‘Yes you do.'

‘Well, they're always picking on me.'

‘Yeah, but which came first, them picking on you or you picking on them?' She was blushing and looking away and smiling, like she was pleased in a way, like she was pleased at the power she had with some of the teachers.

‘I dunno,' she said. ‘Some of them are OK. But people like Swenson, he's just a bastard. He hates my guts.'

With me though — and this was one of the things I liked most about her — she wasn't tough at all. I mean, she wasn't a wimp or anything either. She was . . . I suppose the only way to describe it, is to say that she was herself. She didn't put on any acts. And she did let me see her soft side. She laughed and fooled around a lot with me and, apart from with a couple of her girlfriends, she didn't do that with anyone else. For instance, she wrote me at least one note a day, sometimes two or three, and these notes were amazing — you know the way girls write letters sometimes? The envelopes all colourful and decorated, the letters themselves filled with all kinds of funny little drawings and cute ideas? She had such an original mind — I liked that a lot. Some of the letters were serious. Some were violent, when she'd had a fight with a teacher or someone. Some were crazy and funny, written for no particular reason — something she'd scribbled down in a spare minute between classes or written while she was bored during Prep.

I wrote back all the time but I don't think my letters had the style hers did. Hers came with all kinds of little trimmings; like, one time there'd be a flower in there that she'd seen in a garden somewhere and really liked, or there'd be a piece of chocolate, or a whole assortment of stickers. Another time there were two deformed Jaffas, extremely warped ones that she'd found in the bottom of a Jaffa bag. Another time — this was amazing — she sent me this tiny little teddy bear that she'd had since she was a kid; a cute little fawn guy with black eyes and a red ribbon around his neck. I couldn't believe that she'd given him to me, so I took particular care of him, and from then on, wherever I went, he went too. I called him Brad. He was a lot smaller than my fist so he was easy enough to fit into my pocket, and he became special, like a friend who brought me good luck. Um, what else? All kinds of crazy stuff — a plastic bag full of hundreds of coloured stars, a stone, some sparklers, a Bacardi label, one of her baby photos, a photo of herself on the high tower, taken by Georgie. Typically, Melanie hated the photo and said she looked off and fat and gross in it, but I think secretly she was proud, and I tell you, she had every right to be, because she looked smooth as fibreglass, and from then on the photo was stuck on the second shelf of my desk in the Prep room, where I gazed at it at night to make myself feel bad.

The letters came written on everything from the inside of a Mars Bar wrapper to the back of an envelope, from a page torn out of a hymn book in Chapel to a Science test paper where she'd got three out of forty. These letters became like the highlights of my life, especially on days when we hadn't had a chance to talk much.

You could tell we were close in all kinds of funny ways too. When she got letters from friends or her parents — or anyone really — she'd let me read them, and I'd let her read my mail. If one of us was chewing gum and the other one wanted some, then we'd just take it out of our mouths and pass it over, and it'd keep going backwards and forwards till it was sucked into oblivion. I liked that a lot: I knew it meant that we totally trusted each other. I mean you can't get much closer than that to another human being, can you? We swapped clothes a lot too, and jewellery. There was a red and white Rugby jumper of mine that she especially liked, and she'd keep it for weeks on end.

Another way you could tell that it had got quite serious was that the other students stopped knocking us and cracking stupid jokes and being immature about it. I mean, let's face it, half the kids our age only go with each other because they think it'll give them status — the girls want something they can go into big huddles with their girlfriends about, and the boys want something to talk about in the dorm after Lights Out. So it's like it's always more a sideshow than something deep and wide and carved out of mountains. But sometimes people recognise that it's gone beyond popcorn and comic strips, that it's not temporary but real. Then the jokes kind of dry up, and your relationship becomes a nice part of the landscape. That's what happened to us after a time, and I liked that.

Of course it wasn't the same with the teachers, who got more and more frenzied the longer we kept going with each other, until the mere sight of us together would drive some of them into a sad state closely resembling uncoolness. I mean, by talking about it like that I make it sound like a joke, but of course it wasn't: these guys got heavy man, heavy. And Melanie would get really depressed by their actions and nasty little comments. She'd never give them the satisfaction of seeing what they were doing to her, but she'd go away and cry about it and some days she wouldn't want to talk to me or have too much to do with me because of the pressure these guys were putting on her. It wasn't too good for me, either.

I mean, Gilligan, for example, had us into his study every few days in those first three weeks, to try out all his different techniques from the
Teachers' Textbook of Messing Up Students' Lives
. He used a new approach each time, so you gotta give the man points for variety; but the basic idea was always the same: ‘Split, separate, go your own ways, don't have nothing to do with each other.' I mean, what right do these people have? I mean,
what right?
What the hell business is it of theirs who my friends are?

One time Gilligan gave us the ‘You'll screw up your studies and you won't get any homework done — I've seen it all before' approach.

Another time he had us in separately and told us we were a ‘bad influence' on each other — whatever the hell that means — then threw Georgie Stenning's name in as another bad influence, which was true but what the hell, she was fun, and a lot better influence than Gilligan, and besides she didn't have too many other friends anyway. Then he had a line about how spending so much time in each other's company meant that we were antisocial and were isolating ourselves from ‘the group', which seemed to me to be a good enough idea when I looked at who ‘the group' were. But it was like he wasn't going to rest till he had us the same as everyone else in that damn place.

Well, we used to sit there and ask him searching questions, like Melanie'd say: ‘Sir, I don't understand why you won't allow us to choose our own friends' and ‘Don't you trust us sir?' (that was an oldie but a goodie). One time I asked him if he'd be happier if I was gay, and that got him a bit mad. Melanie said to him: ‘Sir, I'm sure my parents would be happy for me to be going out with Erle. Do you want me to ask them?' But that didn't work. Then another time she said: ‘I know this'll sound cheeky sir, but I don't think that it's any of your business.' Gilligan didn't like that too much.

Through it all, however, we fought onwards, bloody but unbowed. The Librarian was reasonably cool and let us get away with a fair bit, so we got to know some corners of the library quite well; though if we got too passionate for those vicarious volumes she'd throw us out. We used the carpet storeshed quite often, but God it was dangerous.

The only other guys in the dorm who were actually going with anyone were James Kramer, who was going with a very very cool girl called Michelle O'Byrne, and Steven ‘Punk' Nimmo, who was going with a really funny kid in year nine named Charlotte Morgan. In fact James said he'd gone with Georgina Stenning for quite a while in year eight, which surprised me, although I don't know how serious those year eight relationships are. But he and Georgie were still on good terms.

It did create a bond between the three of us though, James and Punk and me I mean, like we were sort of different from the other guys in the dorm. And to tell you the truth and at the risk of sounding like I've got a real head, I think we were a bit more mature than a lot of them. I mean, Clune's idea of a good time was to take a crap on the bathroom floor when Ringworm was on bathroom duty, so that he'd have to clean it up. And Matt Roxborough got his biggest laugh for the year out of this joke: ‘What do you do with a sick budgie? Give him tweetment.' I mean, sure it's funny, at the same time as it's incredibly sad, but not so funny that you have to go and lie down for half an hour after hearing it, like good ole Matt practically did. I mean, what can you say? I mean, I've got this really funny joke about two nude statues in a park that are allowed to come to life for one hour and do anything they want, but I didn't dare tell it in there or they would have had to take Roxborough to hospital for a week, I swear to God.

One of the good things about life with Melanie was that when things did get bad, and the dorm started to resemble a cross between the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the closing minutes of the Blues Brothers, then I could think of her and some good thing that she might have said or written to me that day, and I'd feel more peaceful straight away. It worked better than a cup of hot cocoa. I owed her a lot for that.

But the dorm was far out too often, and getting further out every day. Night-time saw scenes of madness. Sometimes it was like every night was a pyjama party, other times everyone was tired and their eyes went out as fast as the lights. Ringworm sure came in for a lot of attention, none of it of the kind his grandmother would have wanted to know about. James Kramer protected him, so did Steven ‘Punk' Nimmo, but there were times when no-one could do anything to help a man who kept setting himself up for it with such style and such perfect timing. What can you do with someone who for supper carefully spreads himself a piece of bread with butter and jam and then comes to ask you how to toast it? I mean, lend this man your electric shaver and he uses it to give his teddy bear a mohawk. One morning he was in the bathroom when James Kramer came in, and there he was fully dressed in front of the mirror, rubbing shampoo through his scalp. ‘Ringworm! What are you doing?!' ‘Shampooing my hair, what do you think I'm doing?' ‘But you've got to wet your hair first!' ‘Not with this shampoo I don't. Look, it's written right here on the bottle: “For Dry Hair”.'

Through it all David O'Toole kept playing his xylophone; Adam Marava pored over his Penthouse magazines; Rob Hanley-White wandered around scabbing food off anyone he could; and I, I lay on my bed watching the moon and stars and dreaming of Melanie.

Every night we had homework — two hours of it — supervised by a year twelve kid, some of whom were slack and some strict. Then it was supper and time to hang around and talk, or go and annoy the year twelves, or make phone calls, or have a quiet smoke in the dunnies before we got shoved off to bed at a quarter to ten.

After lights out we were allowed to talk for a quarter of an hour, then we were on silence, which meant either silence or anarchy, depending on who was on duty. Anarchy included things like dorm-raiding the year nines, being dorm-raided by the year elevens, having a stacks-on on some poor guy in the dorm — usually Rob Hanley-White, because he was such a little rat — or just talking and mucking around till eleven or twelve o'clock at night. If things got too bad though Mr Gilligan would appear on the scene and then it was a case of Silent Night, Holy Night, because he cancelled town leave for anyone he suspected of talking, and that was a pretty radical punishment.

It was an OK life in some ways I guess, though not exactly what my parents had in mind when they enrolled me in these hallowed halls of learning. One thing they sure didn't have in mind was the conversations that went on in the dorm after Lights Out. I mean these guys were pretty crude! In fact some of them were definitely rank! The one who stood out, needless to say, was ole Rockhead Clune. But the competition was keen and there were times when even he was eclipsed, Evan Simpson being one who had an interestingly dirty mind. He claimed to have read a story in some medical magazine about a guy who had gained such control over his body that he could actually defecate through his mouth. I mean, can you believe that? Through his mouth? Imagine the job he'd have brushing his teeth. Anyway, it started up a whole big discussion in the dorm about whether he'd have to sit on his food to eat it. That topic raged for four consecutive nights. Is it any wonder that I sometimes thought I was going crazy, living in there?

I asked Melanie what the girls talked about in their dorms, and she said, ‘Mainly boys', so maybe things weren't that different. We didn't see the girls after supper each night — well, not legally anyway — so I wouldn't know. But one thing I remember, within twenty-four hours of Melanie and I starting to go together, every girl in the place knew about it. I hate the way girls do that.

After about a week of life at Linley I'd had my first phone call from my parents, checking up on how things were going. I told them all the stuff they wanted to hear, and not necessarily the stuff that was really happening; but I don't even know why I wasn't more truthful. Maybe deep down every kid knows his parents want him to be the Pride of the School, the Captain of Cricket and Tennis and Rowing and Darts and Knitting and anything else that's going down. They don't want to know about the fact that you've had more dets than any other new student in the history of the school (which is what Gilligan told me), that you're going with a girl who doesn't wear a bra to PE, that the Head Swimming Coach is some kind of Nazi, whose last job was training the shark in ‘Jaws'. They don't want to hear that! Even though they tell you they're proud of you no matter what you do, and just to do your best and that will be good enough, you know that secretly they want you to be the biggest star that ever was, so that you'll be walking around everywhere in a kind of golden glow.

‘How's your swimming going?' my father wanted to know. ‘What kind of times are you getting for a hundred?' That stuff was really important to him. He'd been a star footballer and my swimming had always been a big deal in his life. When I was little he'd done all the organising and driving and even coaching when Mr Ho couldn't make it. There were plenty of times I'd got sick of it, especially the last twelve months, but Dad was one of the main reasons I kept going.

‘Keeping away from those girls are you?' my mother said, kind of joking, but I knew she really meant it. She'd never been too impressed with the girls I'd brought home from Gleeson High, especially Janine, who'd had a tattoo of a penguin on her shoulder — God knows why a penguin. And in fact they'd tried to get me into an all-boys' school, but they were full and besides, I wouldn't have gone anyway.

So I told them how I'd been burning up the pool, how I'd been training at 6.30 every morning, how I was doing triple the school work I'd been doing last year (though triple nothing is still nothing), and how the Headmaster was calling me in every other day to consult me on school policy. By the time they got off the phone I guarantee the only question left would have been which magazine they were going to sell their story to: ‘We were Erle Gatenby's Parents'. Well maybe. Maybe they knew me a little better than I thought; that was another possibility.

The call did make me feel bad though: I guess this was the feeling people call homesickness. I wrote a note to Melanie and asked one of the year twelve girls to deliver it, then took the risk and sleazed off outside for a while. It was a hell of a risk — it was after nine o'clock already — but I wanted a little peace, and the dorm was no place for that. At Linley they thought you were sick if you spent any time on your own. But I sat under a tree in the darkness, pondering the meaning of life and wondering what Gilligan would do if he busted me out of the House. That was the trouble with this school — after a while they started to control you even when they weren't there. The dorm was like
Lord of the Flies
but the teachers were like 1984.

One of the prefects actually caught me as I was slipping back inside, but he was a cool dude named Joe Ciccione. I told him I'd been feeling bad and had just gone for a little walk, and he took that well. Sometimes that stuff works and sometimes it doesn't.

Anyway, I was getting over it all, and after Lights Out I slipped over to James Kramer's bed and talked to him for a few hours, and that put me back in an even better frame of mind. ‘Why do these people get down on me so much?' I asked him.

‘'Cos you're different,' he said, ‘and because you hang it on them so blatantly. I mean, wearing your Walkman to swimming training? What did you expect? Taking photos of the food in the Dining Room, right in front of the cook? Mate, you're like a tank full of petrol looking for a match.'

‘How come you get on with everyone?' I asked.

‘God, I don't,' he said in surprise. ‘Walker hates me, Mrs Murray chucked me out of English yesterday, Clune tried to put a dart through my hand last week. But I try to get on with people. I hate it when I do something that hurts someone. I always feel bad that I don't do more to help Ringworm, 'cos he takes so much. But it's pretty hard to help him. I mean, you get mad at him because he brings so much of it on himself, but then you realise that he can't help it — that's just the way he is; he doesn't know any better. You know, this is my fourth year in this place, my fourth year with Ringworm, and I don't think he's made the slightest progress in all that time; matter of fact, I think he's probably got worse.'

‘You've been here four years? Man, how can you stand it?'

‘Uh, it's not so bad. Why, what do you think of it?'

‘Man, I think it sucks. Well, most of the time. Like, it's not as bad as I thought it would be. I thought all you guys would be the biggest snobs out, all walking around with your noses in the air, sticking your arses out to be kissed, but it hasn't been like that. But the teaching's not as good as I thought it would be — it's not that much better than Gleeson High — although they are much stricter here and they make you do more work.'

‘Yeah, I'd like to go to a high school, just to check it out,' James said. ‘You feel like you're cut off from the real world here most of the time. Last year we wanted to get football matches with the local high school but they wouldn't let us — must have thought they'd be too rough. When I go home now, half the kids won't speak to me because I go to a snob school.'

‘Where do you live?' I asked him.

‘Walforth.'

‘Where's that?'

‘Near South Walforth.'

‘Oh yeah, great. Where's that, to the south of West Walforth, huh?'

‘Yeah, wow, how'd you guess? No, it's near Bromley, about four hours from here, on the Evelyn River.'

‘What do you do there, you got a farm or something?'

‘Yeah, we run cattle, and my father works in town too — he's got a business making irrigation equipment. And my mother's a Nurse Educator at Bromley Hospital.'

‘What are you going to do when you leave here — take over the family farm?'

‘Yeah, maybe, I don't know. My sister's more interested in it than I am, I think. Whatever happens, I'd probably go to Uni first. My father says the only way you can go on the land if you don't have an education, is as manure.'

‘Do you get on with your parents? I mean, do you mind my asking?'

‘Yeah, sure, it's fine. Yeah, I get on with them really well. We've got a good family. Like, we can talk about anything. Sometimes I listen to the stories these guys tell about their life at home, and the way their parents fight and get divorced and stuff, and I think, “How lucky I am”. I mean, my parents never fight or anything. They're more like friends to me than parents. I'm pretty well off, that way. How about you? You get on with yours?'

‘Yeah, I guess. My parents run a newsagency in Gleeson so they work long hours and they work hard, but they're good people. They put up with the dumb things I do and the way I have my hair and all that, although sometimes my father tries to have these serious talks about it, but I just laugh it off. They take it OK.'

There was a pause while someone went past the door of the dorm, but, luckily, didn't come in. Brian ‘Sog' Bell rolled around in his sleep and cried out, something about ‘they're not plums, they're not plums'. Matt Roxborough was snoring, like he did every night. Down the other end a glow from under a doona showed that David O'Toole was reading in bed again. I stood up. ‘Better get some sleep I guess. These 6.30 appointments are killing me. It's been good talking to you.'

‘Yeah, you too. See you on the starting blocks.'

I headed down the dorm but passing the bathroom door nearly ran into Clune, who was coming back from the toilet.

‘Look out,' he mumbled, in his poetic whining voice.

‘Hey, watch it my man,' I said. ‘One of these days I'm gonna squash you so small you'll have to pull your socks down to take a shit.' He stood gaping after me, his mouth stupidly open. I went to bed.