The Great Gatenby (9 page)

Melanie dropped me. On the third last day of the term, the day after the hike. The first time I saw her was at breakfast, and she seemed funny right from the start. I tried to see her after the meal but she said she had to go and see Matron, and rushed off. Then I got a note from her — that really hurt me, that she wouldn't tell me face to face. And to make matters worse she even put the all-time great cliché in the letter — the one about wanting to stay good friends. God, that was smearing ketchup onto the open wound. At lunchtime Georgie Stenning grabbed me for the big conference — of course she was loving it — and said Melanie still liked me but she didn't want to be tied to anyone. I'd heard it all before and I wasn't too impressed, I can tell you.

I was pretty upset though. I just loved her so much it hurt. I kind of crawled off, didn't speak to anyone, and went through the day doing things automatically. I didn't go to swimming like I was meant to. Then things got slightly worse. I knew Steven Nimmo, ‘Winnie', had a bottle of Southern Comfort he'd been keeping for an end-of-term celebration and it was on this very night that he chose to launch it. He asked Adam Marava, Rob Hanley-White and me to share it with him. I don't know whether I would have agreed normally but on this night I practically embraced him. About an hour after lights out we met in the Drying Room to make a little action. It was a dumb scene, if you want to know the truth. We were all so tired after the hike that we could barely stay awake. Anyway, warm Southern Comfort out of a bottle on its own, nothing to go with it, no food or anything, in that dark airless little room, was about as good as skiing on margarine. It wasn't a cool way to spend the evening.

After about half an hour we gave up and staggered off to bed, having wiped out most of the bottle. Next morning I had the usual headache but without any good memories to compensate for it. I ran into Crewcut during the morning break and he asked me why I hadn't turned up to swimming. I was feeling lower and lower with every passing hour, and I suppose I'd gotten to trust him fairly well, so I told him I was having a bad time.

‘What's been happening?' he asked, and he sounded so sympathetic I nearly burst out crying on the spot. Sympathy was more than I could handle right then. We only talked for a minute. I told him my love life had got complicated, then the bell rang for classes.

‘Come and see me after school,' he said, and I thought I probably would, but as it turned out I was otherwise engaged.

At lunchtime I noticed Nimmo was missing from our table. ‘Where is he?' I asked, and Brian Bell said, ‘I saw him in the Headmaster's Office.' I looked at Rat and he looked at me and we both started packing darkies. We told Adam after lunch but he hadn't heard anything. The suspense didn't last for long however. I got called to the Head's just before afternoon classes started, and it was no surprise to find Rob and Adam standing in the corridor with me. We got called in one by one for the grilling. My first interrogation didn't take long.

‘Were you drinking last night, Gatenby?'

‘Yes sir.'

‘With Nimmo, Marava and Hanley-White?'

‘I'm not sure if they had any sir.'

‘In the Crapp house drying room?'

‘Yes sir.'

‘Whose alcohol was it?'

‘I'm not sure sir.'

‘Do you have any alcohol yourself, at this moment, anywhere in the School?'

‘No sir.'

‘Right, wait outside again, thank you Gatenby.'

The second time was a bit more prolonged. In the meantime I'd had a few chances to talk to Adam and Rob. There was still no sign of Steve. We three spent most of the waiting time under the eagle eye of the Headmaster's secretary, but occasionally she stepped out of the room. Somehow the Rat had found out the full story. He was amazing. It seemed like Punk was so wiped out by the amount that he'd drunk that he didn't hide the bottle properly and one of the cleaners saw it in his locker. Once he was busted he threw our names into the ring. I didn't blame him for that. I know what pressure they can put on you. When I was called in I was prepared for anything. The normal punishment for drinking was a week's suspension, but three of us at least were facing possible worse hassles: Adam, because he'd been suspended in year eight for drinking, and when they'd suspended him he had such a good time he didn't come back for a fortnight and even then they had to ring his embassy and practically beg him to return; Punk, because it was his grog; and me, because it was my first term and already I'd been in so much trouble and had so many warnings.

The Headmaster sure sold that part of it to me in a big way when I finally got in there. It took a solid ten minutes and his voice was raised for most of it. Then we spent another ten minutes on the evils of drinking and the sheer sacred beauty of every school rule at Linley. Then we dwelt briefly on my general personality and character. I won't go into that in any detail here, but while the man was talking I was mentally shaking my head and thinking, ‘This goes close to the bone, my man, close to the bone.'

Finally we got on to the good points and although that didn't take long he did have a few surprises for me. He knew I'd given up smoking. He knew something had gone wrong between me and Melanie the day before. Then he said, ‘Mr Scott has spoken to me strongly on your behalf', and it became obvious where he was getting his information. He said Crewcut had praised my attitude at swimming recently, and on the hike. Quite decent of the little gorilla, I thought.

Anyway, it turned out that this had saved my life, assuming I wanted it saved. He said I would have been expelled if not for Crewcut. Then he was in a bit of a quandary. Like I said before, the normal punishment was suspension. But with the holidays about to break, they could hardly suspend us for a week. So they did the opposite. We had to stay back at school till the following Monday, doing hard labour around the grounds. We all got the same punishment, which made Adam Marava even luckier than me, I thought. But I was spitting when I realised what it meant. I couldn't believe it! Another four days in this dump! I wanted to tell him to take his school and shove it. For a moment back there I'd been sucked into thinking that I actually owed Crewcut one. How wrong I was!

Only the thought of my parents stopped me from blowing it right then and there, forever. I was going to have enough problems with them as it was. So I slunk out politely, bowing and nodding and thanking him for being such a kind and generous person. ‘Yes, Mr Teacher', ‘No, Mr Teacher', that was me. I guess if you gotta eat coleslaw it's worth making friends with the cabbage.

I tried to talk with Melanie that afternoon. It went OK but not great. She was really upset about us getting busted and all. She blamed herself, but I said it was nothing to do with that: I would have gone for it regardless, though I'm not sure that was true. That was the last real conversation we had before the holidays. It wasn't much of a way to end the term.

We crims stood and watched everyone else disappear down the drive for their vacation on the Friday morning before we shouldered crow-bars and shovels and went to work. In the end the whole thing turned out to be pretty slack — the work I mean — but it was a poor situation, being there for those four days. At night we watched TV and smoked a little dope . . . no, just kidding. We did watch a lot of TV though.

Finally the magic moment came. I'd survived one term: bloody, battered but unbowed. Mavis picked me up. She and Dad had been pretty mad when they rang, but I hadn't been able to explain much on the phone. Mavis was OK though, especially when I started in on my troubled love life. I still had hopes of putting it back together but I wasn't too confident. Mel was pretty screwed up in some ways, thanks to her parents, but I'd known that all along and I still loved her. Anyway, I went through all that, or most of it, with my mother and that helped overshadow the drinking situation. Things were a little tense with Dad though when I got home and they stayed that way for a few days. Once I started working in the shop it got better.

One of the biggest things was deciding about Linley: the bottom line was whether I should go back there for second term or not. My father just said, ‘I don't want you going back to Gleeson High', as if that settled it. My mother said to him, ‘But dear, there's no point in his going back if he gets in trouble all the time.' For me it was more complicated. I guess it all came down to whether I liked Linley or not. I was ripping petals off flowers: ‘I like it, I like it not'. Linley and Melanie were the only two things I thought about as I stacked newspapers and dusted shelves of toys and swam laps and mowed lawns and watched TV. I liked the boarding life, I liked the kids in the dorm, I was doing more schoolwork than I'd ever done before. But I didn't like the discipline, the rules, the constant routine: ‘do this, do that'. And I missed home, even though I think I was getting on better with my parents since I'd been boarding. The decision would have been a lot easier if I'd still been going with Melanie.

Somehow, without my even noticing it, I'd been building up for the State swimming titles. There hadn't ever been a definite decision that I'd go for it. I hadn't thought about it much, consciously anyway. But I'd been doing the Ks, and now that the holidays were rolling, Mr Scott started ringing up every other day to check on how I was going. So it looked as though I was a contender, whether I liked it or not. It was something else to get nervous about.

The days ticked away, too, like the second hand on a stopwatch. Nothing was resolved. There were no highlights. I went to a few movies, went to the beach a couple of times, hung out for a while with some of the Gleeson kids, like Jesse and Rob. But it wasn't the same. They kept cracking jokes about my ‘capo' school, and they were talking about stuff that had happened while I was away, so that all the private jokes had become private even from me. There was a big party at Grant's place. I went, cracked onto Tracey Sullivan, wiped myself out nicely with a mixture of Jack Daniels and vermouth — not in the same glass though, I'd better explain. I linked up with my old coach, Mr Ho, again and trained with him most mornings. Life was about as exciting as warm pineapple juice.

Funny how things can change though. That guy Bell, who invented the telephone — at least I think it was him — I owe him a big one. It was near the end of the holidays — three days before the State titles, five days before Linley started back. I was easing up on the training, in readiness for the main event. I went down to the beach at about seven for a quick surf before starting work at the shop. It was good down there at that time of day. There weren't many people around, except for a few and they were always interesting, kind of eccentric, I thought. The shop was quiet. I spent twenty minutes helping some nice old lady pick a birthday card, and an hour moving the childrens books to a new section and arranging them so that they were half organised. At about eleven my father said I could go home if I was back at four o'clock, so I figured I'd do that and watch the midday movie. No-one was home but there was a note from my mother in the kitchen: ‘Erle, a girl rang for you but didn't leave her name.'

‘Hmmm, uh huh,' I thought, and got myself a snack and turned on the movie. Wouldn't you know, it was
The Great Gatsby
, about this guy who gets dumped by a girl when he's young and then fritters away the rest of his life brooding about her till he more or less wipes himself out. Some choice for a movie. I wondered how
The Great Gatenby
was going to sound in twenty years. Still, I watched it through to the bitter end, then put on some music. The mail came and there was a letter from James Kramer, saying he and Michelle O'Byrne had broken up after a party that they'd gone to at McLean Smith's. ‘Must be infectious,' I thought. But there was a paragraph near the end of the letter that got me going some.

‘Melanie was there and asking if I'd heard from you. She wasn't with anyone; in fact I think she went home early. She didn't look too happy — maybe it's not as over as you think it is.'

I read that last sentence about four times, wondering if it meant anything, then wandered back to the shop. Although I was trying to choke it down I did feel just a touch of excitement. I wished my mother had been home so I could have pumped her a bit about the phone call. For one thing, I'd like to have known if it was long-distance. In the middle of all this thinking I nearly had my foot broken by the parcel of afternoon papers being chucked out of the delivery truck, as it did its usual demolition derby routine. That woke me up and for a couple of hours I was too busy to do anything sophisticated like thinking.

When we shut the shop up at last and headed home I had a strange feeling that there was going to be something from Melanie waiting for me. I mean, I'm the least psychic person I ever met — I'd go fishing in the Bermuda Triangle any day — but I had a totally definite knowledge that Mel had been thinking of me in her castle in the heart of Pelham.

Well, there's not much more to tell. I walked in that front door to the biggest shock I've had since toilet training.

‘Any messages for me?' I asked my mother, trying to sound as casual as possible.

‘Yes, one,' she answered, poking around the bench near the telephone. ‘I wrote it down, word for word. Here it is.' She handed me the piece of paper, giving me a strange look as she did so.

I took the note and read it. It said: ‘Melanie Tozer rang, said she hopes you don't go back to Linley next term.' I felt like a great weight had suddenly formed in my stomach, like I was a pregnant elephant or something. This was it? This hurtful insulting message? What had I done to deserve this? I felt my face redden, my eyes fill with tears. Then, luckily, I turned the sheet of paper over and read the other side: ‘Otherwise she won't be able to keep her hands off you.'