The Great Gatenby Read Free

Jerry,’ I said, ‘why don’t you see the Matron?’
    â€˜My brain hurts,’ he complained.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜You think they’d help?’ he asked doubtfully.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.’

Chapter Three
    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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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