The Great Gatenby (7 page)

It was hard to settle back to life in the ole schoolyard. The night I got back, Sunday night, Rob Hanley-White ate two entire packets of Chocolate Mint Slice biscuits. I mean, two whole packets! I guess I can eat one if I really work at it but God, it takes some effort. I think he only did it so he wouldn't have to share them with anyone. Sure enough, about ten o'clock he started vomiting, and every five minutes from then on he brought up another instalment, and the stuff he was vomiting was just the purest chocolate syrup you've ever seen in your life. I mean, McDonald's would have used it right away on their sundaes, that's how pure it looked, even if it did smell a bit funny.

But then we had this, like, ping-pong match with the relieving Matron who was on duty. We took Rob around to her and said, more or less, ‘The guy's sick; you gotta give him a bed.'

‘What's he sick from?' she said.

‘He ate two whole packets of Chocolate Mint Slice biscuits about an hour ago.'

‘Well he's a greedy little boy,' she said ‘and he's certainly not getting any sympathy from me. He can go back to the dorm and suffer, and maybe next time he'll think twice before he makes a pig of himself.' So we took him back to the dorm, where he kept on being sick. After a while James Kramer and I decided this was ridiculous, so we took him to the Sick Bay again.

‘Matron, we realise it's his fault he's sick, but we're the ones being punished, because he's keeping the whole dorm awake, and we want to get some sleep.'

‘We've got exams coming up,' added James, piously.

‘Look,' said Matron, getting really crabby, ‘I'm not having him in here and that's that.'

I could see her problem. The Sick Bay was empty and through her sitting room door you could see a ballet or opera or something she was watching on TV. What's the one where everyone sings in loud voices all the time? Opera, I think. So only Rob the Rat was standing between her and a slack night. But we gave in without much of a fight and took him back again. He seemed to have got over it by then, and we all drifted off to sleep, but round about midnight he started in on another round. By now everyone was really angry.

‘Leave him in a basket on her doorstep, with a note attached,' suggested David O'Toole. But we decided to try the direct approach once more.

‘Matron, he's really sick, I mean it might be serious. We don't know for sure that it was the chocolate biscuits.'

‘Could be Ratsack,' Punk volunteered.

‘Matron, we don't want to see you getting sued or something like that if he dies in the middle of the night. We're really thinking of you here.'

Matron knew when she was beaten, and took him in at last, but it was with a bad grace. I mean, what was she employed for, for Chrissake? I felt sorry for the Rat. As we walked back down the corridor we could hear her voice: ‘Now don't think you're going to be missing any classes tomorrow. You'll be out of here before morning Inspection, and I don't care how sick you're feeling.'

I remembered Gilligan's words from the start of the term: ‘You'll often hear me speak of the Crapp House family. It's a family, and the boarding house is a home away from home. We don't expect you to do things that you wouldn't do in your own home, and by the same token you'll find that you can always approach us in the same way that you would your own parents. My door is always open . . .' Actually I really didn't remember all that. He sent a copy of it out in a letter to parents. Shows how impressed he was with his own speech.

The exams seemed to inject an extra note of madness into the place. These boys sure went for the marks. Well, some of them anyway. David O'Toole was recognised as the dorm Brain, and the guy to see when you needed help with homework. But now he started getting aggro with people like me when we politely asked for a smidgin of assistance. Only Adam Marava got instant answers, which showed that even a brain like O'Toole was smart enough to realise that you can't write an exam paper with broken arms. My trouble was a bit different. I spent more time thinking about Melanie than I did about schoolwork.

One night I spent the entire homework session writing her name on my pencil case, in a really ornate design. Melanie liked it a whole lot but I didn't know any more about Science or History or Maths at the end of that night than I had at the start of it.

I didn't tell anyone about my night at the Tozers', though I did say we'd been to a party. I read some smart comment by someone once who said that guys don't have their real orgasms till the next day, when they tell their friends about it. I was determined not to fall into that trap. I don't think Melanie told anyone either, except maybe Georgie, who was making some pretty dumb jokes for a while after that weekend, and every time she did, Melanie would get mad and tell her to shut up.

The day before the first exam a massive epidemic of gastro went through the year ten boarders, the boys anyway. I don't know why. Matron said we weren't keeping our supper area clean enough, but I wouldn't say it was any worse than the others. But I and most of the others from Dorm Six ended up in Sick Bay, and we weren't the only ones. Rob Hanley-White, having barely finished purging his system of chocolate biscuits, went right back in again. James Kramer, Punk, Paul Watson, even Sog Bell. At one stage it looked like Ringworm would be the only one to come through unscathed. I'd always suspected he was kind of magical and this seemed to prove it. In a lot of countries I'm sure he would have made Chief Witch-Doctor. In our country he made Chief Turkey.

It wasn't too funny having gastro, to tell you the truth. We weren't allowed to eat much and we didn't feel like eating anyway. The worst thing was the diarrhoea. Man, I sure splattered that toilet bowl. It got so that you couldn't even fart with any confidence. In fact, we ended up having a competition: the one who could fart the most times without poohing his pants was the winner. We were laughing so much that we put ourselves at a disadvantage right away. I got eliminated in the first round — ‘eliminated', what a choice of words. James did a shocker. He had to change not just his pyjama pants but the sheet as well. Brian Bell, Adam Marava and Punk survived until the fourth round — talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. I don't think their gastro could have been too bad. Finally, however, Punk was declared the winner. It wasn't until later that he admitted he'd cheated . . . and he had the evidence to prove it. By then we were all paralytic anyway and Matron was looking like she'd been in a nuclear meltdown. We were nearly chucked out of Sick Bay. We were threatened with Gilligan, the Headmaster, the doctor, Sylvester Stallone. So we eventually settled down. But Punk was forever afterwards known by a new nickname, ‘Winnie'.

A couple of people got kicked out the next morning but most of us had to do our first exam, Science, while still in bed. Matron was meant to supervise but she didn't do too good a job. The cheating that went on was unbelievable. Holy mashed monkeys, these guys could cheat! If they were the future of the nation then the nation was in worse shape than I thought. Rob the wonder-rat had his textbook under the sheets. I mean, you had to hand it to him, the guy had a certain style. I must admit I too got by with a little help from my friends. What else could a man do? The stakes were high.

At lunchtime, to everyone's astonishment, Ringworm came in to visit us.

‘You all wank too much, that's why you're sick and I'm not,' was his helpful contribution.

‘Oh God, Ringworm,' groaned James.

‘Ringworm, why are you such a nerd?' asked Adam Marava, in his unique, clipped accent.

‘Hey, Ringworm, when your mother gets married, can I come to the service?' Evan yelled out.

‘Has anyone seen my red jumper?' Ringworm asked, not quite making the connection with all of this.

‘Yeah, I used it last night when I had diarrhoea and couldn't make the toilet in time,' Matt Roxborough told him.

‘You better not have,' Ringworm said, fairly sure that this was a joke.

‘It's on top of the book lockers in the Prep room,' Sog Bell told him. Trust Soggy to know.

‘Thanks,' said Ringworm, making his exit with a final shot. ‘Anyway, at least I know what I'm thinking about, and none of you do.' God knows what that was supposed to mean.

By teatime I was feeling better and getting violently hungry, having not eaten in twenty-four hours. One of the women from the kitchen brought our meals over on a trolley.

‘It's no wonder you've all got gastro,' she said, ‘the way you leave those supper areas so filthy. Flies all over them. For all that you complain about the food, you'll never find a fly in our kitchen.'

‘No self-respecting fly'd come into your kitchen,' answered Hanley-White.

After tea Melanie was allowed to visit. She was depressed about the exams. ‘I know I failed Science already. I thought a joule was like a diamond or ruby or something. And there's no way I'll pass History. God I feel like the biggest meathead in exams. I hate the way the teachers sit there and stare at you all the time, like they know you're cheating and they just can't wait to catch you.' She switched direction. ‘You want to come stay in the holidays? You've got that hike next week . . . I'll hardly see you for the rest of this term.' Well, I can tell you, it was a nice feeling to lie there and listen to her talk like that, even if she was depressed. I was more rapt in her every day.

‘You ought to come and stay up at Gleeson,' I told her. ‘We've got things there that you never saw before — like a kitchen sink.'

‘Oh very funny. I hate it when you give me a hard time about that stuff. It's not my fault. God I wish I wasn't in such a bad mood.'

‘Why are you? Because of the exams?'

‘Oh I don't know. Everything. I'm not looking forward to these holidays. They'll be so boring. And I've had the biggest fight with Georgie.'

‘What about?'

‘Oh, I said something to her about Michelle O'Byrne and she went and told Michelle. I told her not to! God I hate it when you can't trust someone. She's a two-faced bitch. You know who she likes? David O'Toole, that's who. Can you believe it? They've got nothing in common.'

Round about then Matron arrived and threw her out. But before she went she wrote a message in texta on my stomach. It took about three days to wash out, but it made me the object of some interest in the showers. God, she could be outrageous sometimes.

The hike which had been lurking vaguely in the background for a long time, just a word which had no real meaning or power, suddenly had almost arrived. There were twenty of us going, all our dorm, plus eight day-boys. All the year ten kids did a hike, but we took it in turns, and the boys were kept separate from the girls, which took a lot of interest out of it for me. As well as the students, we had Crewcut and Mr Walker, the German teacher, and an Outdoors Instructor named Derryk Dunne, who was meant to be a good guy. I hadn't seen him much, as he was always away doing another hike or climbing Everest or something.

It was just our luck to have it scheduled for after the exams, when all the serious schoolwork was over and everyone else would be having a slack time. I'd survived the exams, and maybe even passed a few. I'd survived gastro, and I'd survived a couple of weeks without a cigarette. And so had Melanie. The Metropolitan Diving Titles had come and gone, and because it was a Friday afternoon I was allowed to watch, so I'd been able to see Mel. They put her in the Opens, two age-groups above what she could have gone in, because Linley had a good year nine diver named Eva Weinkamer, and there wasn't anyone in the Seniors. Anyway, Melanie had been brilliant, and had come second by about .0000001 of a point, or something like that. We celebrated at McDonald's and got back to school late and got clean away with it because everyone was so rapt in Mel's result. That was good. But her parents hadn't even been there to see it, which pissed me off in a big way, but Melanie said she thought they were overseas. I figured they were probably buying Hawaii.

My parents had called up a few times and were quite happy to have Melanie come and stay with us in the holidays, though they weren't so happy about my staying with her. ‘Not when you've been away at school for so long already,' my mother said, which I guess was fair enough. They hadn't been able to make it to the CCS, but they were excited about how well I'd done, and they'd seen my name in the papers and all, so that was a big thrill.

Crewcut wanted me to keep training and go for the State titles during the holidays. I just didn't know. I felt I'd been through that scene already — when I was too young to handle it, if you want to know the truth. But I was still doing a million kilometres every other day, in case I got enthused. And I didn't like to let Crewcut down — he was so damn keen. Funny, we were getting on well these days, like ole buddies. Most afternoons when I finished training we'd sit around and talk. Melanie would come over too when she didn't have sport or detentions. I'd never have thought the day would come when Crewcut and I would talk like regular people. Life's strange sometimes. Even the door marked ‘Exit' goes somewhere. At least on the hike there'd be no pool to swim in. I wondered if by about the third day I'd be flapping around on the grass, gasping like a fish pulled out of the water.

The night before the hike, everyone was a little crazy. We'd been given rucksacks and sleeping bags and stuff like that, and we'd done all of our packing, except for food, which we were getting in the morning. Our packs seemed so full, we couldn't figure out how we'd get any more than a couple of sultanas in them. Then about ten o'clock everyone started fooling around. We'd short-sheeted Hanley-White's bed, but the little rat was so small that he'd got in and curled up ready to go to sleep without even noticing. So we threw him and his bed out into the corridor. Then we dared him to do a streak around the outside of the girls' wing. Only Rob the Rat would even consider a dare like that, but in his case it took all of thirty seconds to talk him into it. I swear to God, he had as much sense as a dead tonsil. Anyway, he put a pillowcase over his head and off he went, his little legs pumping away at a K a minute, two white cheeks gleaming back in the darkness. The only people who saw him were a couple of year twelve kids, out for their evening smoke; they just told him how sad he was.

Before he got back we did the old ‘bucket of water on the door' trick, to be ready for him. I mean, this stuff is so unoriginal that I'm embarrassed, but that's what we did. We figured on his coming through the door so fast that he wouldn't even be thinking about booby traps. What we didn't figure on was Mr Gilligan coming through the door a full minute before the Rat, to check up on what the noise was about. And that wasn't all. Instead of the bucket tipping over and dropping a load of fresh cold water on him, the whole thing dropped like a rock and hit him square on the head. I mean, can you imagine what a bucket of water weighs? So there was Gilligan, staggering around the dorm white-faced and moaning, holding onto his head with both hands, and in the middle of all this, Hanley-White comes screaming in naked at the speed of light, his pillowcase over his head, yelling, ‘Rape! Rape!' When he took the pillowcase off I saw something I've never seen before — a human being go green with fright. It was quite something. They made an odd contrast really, especially as Gilligan's normal colour was green. It was at that moment that Ringworm chose to ask a question he had probably been pondering for weeks. ‘Mr Gilligan, sir, have you ever wondered what happens to your tongue when you go to sleep?'

It was a miracle that any of us actually got to go on this hike, after all that. They probably realised that we weren't exactly in a frenzy of delight about the whole deal anyway, so it wouldn't be much of a punishment to stop us. We left early the next day in a mini-bus and a Landrover. Mr Gilligan wasn't out the front waving us goodbye.

We drove for hours and hours, sleeping most of the way, as we hadn't had much rest the night before. We stopped every once in a while to swap seats or buy food or take a leak. It was the kind of trip that made you feel like going and watching a cricket match instead. The most exciting thing that happened was when Mr Dunne went through an orange light. But by lunchtime we were up in the mountains, the roads got rougher, there was less and less traffic, more squishes of red dead animals on the road, and the air was like a menthol cigarette. We reached our jumping off point at about three o'clock. We unloaded the vehicles, ate a couple of oranges and listened to a lecture from Mr Dunne about how we shouldn't tear down the trees, set fire to the tents or strangle the wildlife. That seemed fair enough. Then we were off, slinging our massive packs on our backs and trudging up a faint track towards a rocky point called Mt Willis. After we'd gone only a couple of hundred metres Evan Simpson turned to Ringworm and said, ‘Ring, shouldn't you have a rucksack?'

‘Oh yes,' said the Worm, looking about him in a sudden flustered anxiety. ‘Where is it? I must have left it back at the car.' We waited patiently while he trotted back to get it, fairly confident that this wouldn't be the last delay he would cause on this trip.

It was a nice feeling being up there in the high country. It was enough to make a man start singing John Denver songs. It didn't take us too long to get to the campsite, in a saddle just below Mt Willis. But before we got there we had to cross a river that was belting away quite strongly. It was too much for Rob Hanley-White — about half-way across he got off-balance and the weight of his pack pulled him over backwards. He lay there in the water, kicking his legs and arms like a beetle flipped on its back. We rescued him, but not for a little while. He squelched up to the campsite muttering grimly under his breath.

The first thing we had to do was collect firewood. Mr Walker came with James and me, and for some stupid reason we decided to pick up a huge dead log and carry that in.

‘Now boys,' said Mr Walker, squatting down on his haunches at one end of the log. ‘I'll show you how to lift without breaking your back. You might split your trousers but you won't break your back.' With dazzling grace he began to lift, while James and I watched in admiration. Suddenly there was a terrible ripping sound as his trousers split right down his backside.

‘Gee sir,' said James, as we struggled, with tears in our eyes, to hold each other upright, ‘How's your back?'

But one thing about Mr Walker, he could laugh at himself. We staggered back with the log, passing Crewcut on the way, who had an armful of kindling.

‘Oh sir,' I said, ‘is that the best you can do? I've got toothpicks at home that are bigger than those bits.'

‘Yes,' said Crewcut without the slightest pause, ‘but then you've got such a big mouth.'

The fire was flickering into life already, so we dumped our log and went to put our tents up, which didn't take too long, considering that Adam Marava had left his pegs at school and a day-boy named McLean Smith had brought two flies instead of a fly and a tent.

The temperature was dropping fast and it was a good feeling to chuck a few sausages on the fire and get on with the job of cooking the evening meal. Mr Dunne divided us into groups of five, and we had to concoct a meal between the five of us. My group was James, Ringworm, Evan Simpson, a guy called Sam Downey, and me. To our amazement Ringworm turned out to be quite a good cook. We ate well, a kind of sausage stew, then some chocolate instant pudding. God it was great, sitting there with full stomachs, watching the moon rise among twenty million or so stars, and seeing dark trees silhouetted against the sky. The wind was getting up and the branches of the trees started kicking around wildly. Sparks from the fire went showering in the air. I was hoping that we'd all sit by the fire and tell ghost stories, but it seemed like everyone was too tired, so most people were heading off to bed by nine o'clock. I was sharing a tent with James Kramer; we talked for a while but eventually the tiredness crept up on us too and we both passed out.

Next morning was quite a sweat. We'd climbed Mt Willis by about ten but it was a hell of an effort. The wind had picked up even more and it was a battle to stay on the spur.

‘Trouble is, if you want to get to the top you gotta go up,' said David O'Toole. I thought that was pretty deep.

We got to the top, and despite the gale the view was something else. It was, like, hypnotising. In every direction all you could see was mountains, stretching away, calm and vast and high and each one different. They were big and they were beautiful and they sat there the way they'd sat for a billion or so years. They were pretty serious mountains. And somehow that sobered everyone up. Before, they'd been laughing and kidding around — that is, when they weren't gasping for breath — but now they were very quiet, just looking out over that view. No-one could bring himself to break the silence. Finally however Rob Hanley-White spoke. ‘This wind's so strong it blows the snot out of your nose.'

Rob always did have a feeling for words. It seemed like he'd said it all. Mr Walker gave a kind of deep sigh but without anything else being said we gathered up our packs and moved on to the next target, Mt Austin.

Now Mr Dunne started throwing in a few complications. ‘Get your maps out boys. I'm going to give out a few compasses and we'll have a lesson in navigation.'

‘But sir, if we navigate with compasses, won't we just go round in circles?' asked Ringworm.

There was generous applause: that was considered pretty good for Ringworm. I only hope he had intended it for a joke. Anyway, we had our lesson, and then we had to work out a bearing for a saddle on the way to Mt Austin. Then we had to track off on the bearing and hope we made it. That set the pattern for the rest of the hike. The teachers kind of followed us as we worked out the bearings and routes and tried to get to our next point without getting disastrously lost. Every so often Mr Dunne would pull us up for another lesson, so we got taught to do stuff like resections. It wasn't a bad way to learn actually, and I enjoyed the navigation. It made it more interesting. But we sure spent a lot of time going off the wrong way. Sometimes the teachers would let us go quite a distance before pulling us up; sometimes they'd stop us right away and ask deep and meaningful questions, like: ‘How do you know if you're on a spur?'

‘The ground falls away from us on both sides.'

‘Right. Is the ground falling away from you on both sides now?'

‘Oh . . . no. What happened to the spur?'

Quite often Mr Dunne would make us stop and show him where we were on the map by using the compasses and landmarks and stuff. That was really hard. About lunchtime we arrived at a high point that looked like it could have been the summit of Mt Austin, but it was hard to tell, because there were a few high points all close together.

‘Well, where are we?' asked Mr Dunne. ‘Is this the summit?'

‘Nah,' said Clune contemptuously, ‘they wouldn't put the top of a mountain here.' Turned out he was right, so we kept going. Two knolls later Mr Dunne stopped us again. ‘Where are we this time?' he asked.

‘Well sir,' said David O'Toole, ‘the big hand's on the twelve and the little hand's on the one, so I'd say we're at our lunch spot.'

This style of navigation suited me OK, and everyone else too it seemed, so we dropped off our packs and pigged out on biscuits and cheese and salami and oranges. The best part came after lunch though: we stretched out for an hour or so, using our packs as pillows, and dozed in the sun. I could have stayed there quite happily, but this Dunne guy was some slave-driver and by about 2.30 we were on the move again, chucking away all the height we'd worked so hard to gain, as we followed a faint track down a spur towards our second night's campsite, near a place called The Pimple.

‘Named after your face, Clune,' said Winnie the Punk.

‘Yeah, matter of fact most of these mountains remind me of you,' I threw in, never liking to pass up a chance to have a go at Rockhead. But he was too tired to give much cheek.

Before we got to The Pimple however we got hopelessly lost in a big clearing with tracks leading off in all directions. We were milling round trying to figure it out, except for a few people like Clune, who sat on a rock looking sulky, and Ringworm who chatted to the teachers about UFOs.