The Great Gatenby Read online

  John Marsden’s Grade Three school report read: ‘He should do very well when he overcomes the tendency towards daydreaming.’

  He never did.

  Also by John Marsden

  So Much to Tell You

  The Journey

  The Great Gatenby

  Staying Alive in Year 5

  Out of Time

  Letters from the Inside

  Take My Word for It

  Looking for Trouble

  Tomorrow . . . (Ed.)

  Cool School

  Creep Street

  Checkers

  For Weddings and a Funeral (Ed.)

  This I Believe (Ed.)

  Dear Miffy

  Prayer for the 21st Century

  Everything I Know About Writing

  Secret Men’s Business

  The Tomorrow Series 1999 Diary

  The Rabbits

  Norton’s Hut

  Marsden on Marsden

  Winter

  The Head Book

  The Boy You Brought Home

  The Magic Rainforest

  Millie

  A Roomful of Magic

  The Tomorrow Series

  Tomorrow, When the War Began

  The Dead of the Night

  The Third Day, the Frost

  Darkness, Be My Friend

  Burning for Revenge

  The Night is for Hunting

  The Other Side of Dawn

  The Ellie Chronicles

  While I Live

  Incurable

  Circle of Flight

  First published 1989 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Publishers Australia

  This edition published by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Reprinted 1989, 1991, 1993 (twice), 1994, 1995, 1996 (twice), 1997 (twice), 1999 (twice), 2000, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2011

  Copyright © John Marsden 1989

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia cataloguing-in-publication data:

  Marsden, John.

  The great Gatenby

  ISBN: 978-1-74334-617-4

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  Copyright © John Marsden 1989

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

  Marsden, John.

  The great gatenby.

  EPUB format 978-1-74334-617-4

  Macmillan Digital Australia www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  To the students with whom I’ve worked at A.S.C. and G.G.S., in appreciation of their good humour

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by John Marsden

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter One

  From the first I knew it mightn’t necessarily be my kind of school. We came whamming up the drive at about ninety K and nearly ran over a small round object that I later found out was the Headmaster’s dog. It looked like a hairy speed bump. When I eventually met the Headmaster I could see the connection, except he was bald. We stopped to ask a group of girls for directions but they just giggled and hid behind each other and got us muddled with contradictory answers. My father drove on, swearing.

  ‘They don’t seem like private school girls,’ my mother said.

  By the time we eventually found the boarding house we were late. It was called Crapp House, which I thought was a bit odd. We struggled inside with all the cases, sweat dripping off us. My mother was trying to keep the vinyl one out of sight. Before we could find my dorm a woman came hurrying past.

  ‘There’s a meeting of new parents,’ she said, ‘in the Senior Common Room.’ We dropped everything and started after her.

  ‘Do you think it’s safe to leave them there?’ my mother asked, looking back at the abandoned bags.

  ‘Heavens above, yes,’ my father said irritably. ‘This isn’t Gleeson High School.’

  The meeting had already started and we tried to slip in unobtrusively at the back. The Housemaster was in full flight: he was a little man who looked like a zucchini. It was all sadly predictable: ‘. . . a real family atmosphere . . .’; ‘. . . only get out of it what you put in . . .’; ‘. . . my door’s always open . . .’ Then he got onto the tough stuff: ‘I must ask you not to leave any aerosol sprays with your children. There was some silliness last year and to avoid temptation we’ve resolved to ban them altogether.’

  My mother looked mystified. I felt a flicker of interest; this place might have some life in it after all.

  ‘Secondly,’ he went on, ‘I notice one of the girls has different colour nail-polish on each of her fingers. That is not the way we do things here at Linley.’

  Everyone gazed at the girl, who was sitting on the arm of a chair in the middle of the room. Her parents were red with humiliation. The girl stared right back at the Housemaster. I fell in love with her on the spot.

  ‘What’s wrong with different coloured nail-polish?’ she asked aggressively. The room trembled. I was too scared to be in love with her anymore. The Housemaster, whose normal colour was green, turned a sort of volcanic grey. It was a crucial moment for him — lose it now and he’d lost it forever.

  ‘That’s one of the rules we have here,’ he said at last.

  He’d lost it.

  After the meeting we headed back to my suitcases. ‘You’d better give me that can of Mortein,’ my mother said.

  ‘Jesus Mavis,’ I said, ‘nobody sniffs Mortein’.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Is that what they were talking about?’

  We got back to the entrance where we’d dropped the bags. My tennis racquet, eight months old and worth $180 had gone. I never saw it again.

  We found the dorm and my bed. The Matron was hovering around. ‘Would you like to unpack his things?’ she asked my mother.

  ‘No thanks,’ she answered. ‘We’ve sent him here so that he can learn to do that himself.’ The Matron went off in a huff and I felt a snicker of affection for my old cookie-monster.

  There were about twelve beds in the dorm, but only one kid there, a thin dark guy who looked interesting but didn’t speak to us. We headed back out to the car. ‘Any parting advice?’ I aske
d. ‘Any words of wisdom to help me navigate through the year?’

  ‘Yes,’ said my father firmly. ‘Don’t wear different coloured nail-polish on your fingers.’

  My mother wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to be maudlin. ‘Don’t be silly, Robin,’ she said to him. ‘I thought that girl was dreadful.’ Right away I fell in love again with the mysterious nail-painter. ‘Now Erle,’ she went on, ‘Make sure you write to us every week. And don’t be rude to the teachers. Work hard . . . you’ve got so much ability, if only you’d use it. Get involved in everything you can. Brush your teeth every night.’

  By this stage I had her in the front seat of the car and was gently closing the door. ‘Try your very very best,’ she added. ‘You know how much this is costing us. And remember you have to buy a new pair of shoes when you’re allowed into town.’

  My father started the car and she was distracted; torn between giving him advice on how to drive — a temptation she always found irresistible — and continuing on my case. ‘Try turning left at that tree, Robin,’ she instructed. ‘I think it might be a quicker way out. Now, write to your grandmother.’ This was directed at me. ‘And remember you’re allergic to strawberries.’

  The car was in gear and moving. I leaned in the window and gave her a peck on the cheek. ‘Don’t you go talking to strange men while I’m away,’ I warned her. ‘And keep off hard liquor. Don’t answer the telephone unless it’s ringing.’

  After they’d gone I went back to do the unpacking. I didn’t feel sad but I did feel nervous. The dark guy was still in the dorm. He strolled over as I was putting stuff away. ‘Did you know that with one giant quantum leap we could be a million miles and a million years away from here?’ he asked, and beamed at me.

  ‘I bet he plays Dungeons and Dragons,’ I thought.

  Another boy, with a head like granite, strolled in. ‘Shut up Ringworm, you nerd,’ he said. ‘What are you doing back here so early anyway? Who are you?’ he said to me. His hair was cut really short and he looked like a tough little boxer from the backstreets.

  ‘My name is Gatenby,’ I said, adding under my breath, ‘and I think I’m in love with you.’ Ringworm heard, and reeled, then gave a nervous laugh. A few more kids came into the dorm. Somewhere in the distance a bell rang.

  Tea was a tense affair. Most of the students there were new, like me, but the food appeared to be very very old. The main course was a plate of black, evil-looking stew. ‘Have they done the post-mortem yet?’ I asked, looking curiously at the lumps of meat sitting there like dark icebergs. Someone laughed. ‘Crawler,’ I thought to myself. Come to that, there was no-one else to think to. A fly flew into the stew and drowned. I pushed the plate away and headed into the familiar ole bread-and-butter territory. Conversation at the table, spasmodic even at the start, had now died completely. One kid up the end was crying. I wondered if the fly was symbolic.

  The girls were sitting across the other side of the dining room. That had been their choice. They all seemed pretty happy, and there were lots of nervous jokes and stuff. Girls are better at talking to each other when they first meet than guys are. They have a kind of set routine that they go through: they never remind me of their parents so much as they do then. As we left the dining room, the Housemaster, whose name was Gilligan, called me over. ‘Now who are you again?’ he asked, still looking like a zucchini.

  ‘Um, Erle Gatenby,’ I told him, acting cooler than a naked polar bear.

  ‘Right, well now Erle, we have a rule here, and that is that boys aren’t allowed to dye their hair, nor are they allowed to wear jewellery. Now what about your hair? How long will that colour take to come out?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, just a few days I guess,’ I said, annoyed with myself that I couldn’t think of anything cooler to say.

  ‘Well, don’t put any more in, will you? Good. Now, have you finished unpacking?’ These creative geniuses didn’t seem able to think of anything for the afternoon programme but unpacking suitcases. I could see this was going to be a long hot summer.

  ‘Any chance of a swim?’ I asked, showing independence, assertiveness and imagination, all in one sentence. Gilligan reeled. He’ll say: ‘We’ll see about it,’ I promised myself.

  ‘We’ll see about it,’ he said, and moved away, no doubt wishing for the good old days when students were like little lumps of hamster.

  The next twenty-four hours were chaos, my man, chaos. Most of the new students were younger than me. When the old ones turned up next day they were too fascinated by each other to take notice of their studious new colleague from Gleeson High. But I made contact with the Wild One, the girl with all the fingernails. She sat next to me in the morning, when we had a Maths test in a classroom. I think she chose me deliberately, but we were a small group, the new year tens, so it was hard to tell. Twenty minutes into the test I realised she was trying to copy my answers. This is true love, I thought, moving my elbow to give her a better view. After the test we talked a bit. Her name was Melanie Tozer and she lived in Pelham and last year she’d gone to Ainsworth, which is a pretty exclusive girls’ school, a cut or two above Gleeson High.

  ‘They were all such snobs there,’ she said, which seemed funny, coming from someone who lived in Pelham, where the streets were paved with Mercs and the night howled with burglar alarms.

  It wasn’t till the next morning that the business of school really started. The Headmaster delivered a speech about giving it our best shot and all that jazz. Then it was off to class for the usual tortured few days of trying to learn the idiosyncracies of seven or eight different teachers. Which one liked you to wait outside until he arrived? Which one hated people to lean back on their chairs? Which one had a fetish for margins and headings and dates? Ah yes, it was a worrying time for the bright-eyed student, anxious to impress with his thirst for knowledge and zeal for learning. The worst moment was in German. I had trouble finding the room, groped my way through the desks for an empty chair, sat down in a hot fuddle to listen, and couldn’t decipher a single word.

  ‘Holy hundekuchen,’ I thought, ‘these guys must be a million years ahead of me.’ It was half way through the lesson before I was able to pick up a few phrases: ‘heure du coucher . . . ?’; ‘de toute facon . . . ?’; ‘s’il vous plait . . . ?’ I rose gracefully to my feet. ‘Um, excuse me sir . . . I think I’m in the wrong class . . . this isn’t German is it?’

  Chapter Two

  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.