The Great Gatenby Read Free Page A

impression, but was regarded as a dork behind his back, and sometimes to his face. The Man though, the Man who killed flies just by looking at them — I swear to God they went white and fell out of the air — was a guy named Adam Marava, from Nauru. He was so big they had to widen the doorways to let him through. I never knew what a sonic boom was till the day he had baked beans for breakfast. When he flexed his muscles we had to move the beds. He could hang five towels from his . . . but no, that’s another story. Anyway, he was a big boy, though he was gentle enough most of the time, just so long as we called him ‘Sir’, gave him at least half our tuckshop supplies and did his maths homework for him at night. I first found out what fear meant the day I told him all the wrong answers for his quadratic equations. But he forgave me, which made me a lucky man compared to the year twelve kid he’d supposedly beaten up last year for drawing a moustache on his favourite pin-up.
    Another guy who stood out in the dorm was David O’Toole who was tall and thin and intelligent and played the xylophone. I mean the xylophone for Chrissakes! As a matter of fact he was really pretty good, but still, the xylophone? I tell you, you haven’t lived till you’ve heard a twelve-minute, head-banging version of some heavy metal epic played on the xylophone.
    Then there was Rob Hanley-White, known as ‘Rat’, who was little and cheeky but funny, mainly because of the way he hung it on the teachers. And Brian Bell, known as ‘Sog’ because he was always fussing around and generally being wet. And Steven Nimmo, a cool dude, and maybe the one I was most likely to get on with, seeing he liked the same kind of music and was the only person with a half-way interesting hair-style, not that that necessarily means anything. But he had a quiet sense of dignity that I really liked. They called him ‘Punk’, even though these guys wouldn’t know a punk if he came at them in broad daylight with a two metre haircut and a Sex Pistols T-shirt.
    And finally on this guided tour we have Evan Simpson and Matt Roxborough or some name like that; I don’t know how you spell it. They were OK and pretty funny, although they hung round together like they were married all the time. So that’s the dorm, that’s the roll-call, these are the guys I was trapped with for a twelve month sentence and no time off for good behaviour.
    But just metres away from me was the all-singing, all-dancing, stunningly beautiful Melanie Tozer, her little painted fingernails shyly reflecting the moonlight as she lay asleep in her perfumed bed, in the girls’ wing of the boarding house. Every day, in every way, we were getting closer and closer. We soon figured out that there were a few good places to meet, the back of the Science labs being one and the Quarto section of the library being another. But it took us a while to get to that stage. First we had to go through the usual rituals — you know how it is, starting off with the ‘friend’ coming up with the ‘message’ . . . This time around it was a girl called Georgina Stenning, who was so wild that sparks flew from her mouth when she cleaned her teeth. She came sashaying up, ever so casual, on the first Friday night at the tuckshop: ‘How’s the swimming going?’; ‘Where were you last year?’; ‘Want a freckle?’; ‘Melanie said she was talking to you a few times’; ‘Do you like her? She really likes you’; ‘She’s a hot kid, don’t you think?’
    Ah, it was a grand old game. And refreshing to find that some things at Linley were the same as at Gleeson High. So it was a green light, a green, green light, and I was hot to trot.
    First weekend of term was when we started getting serious. It was a buzz to wake up Saturday expecting to find that the pace we operated at —