The Great Gatenby

by John Marsden

  ‘You have more determination in the water than any swimmer I’ve coached. The way you swam in that Open team at the District meet showed that. Win, lose or draw Saturday, you’ve done well.’

  I was standing on a block while he was saying all this. As he finished I closed my eyes and with my hands held stiffly at my sides did a mock faint into the water. Always the joker, folks, that’s me.

  There were no girls’ events at the CCS; it was a pompous old collection of schools for boys, all founded in the days when girls had to send their servants out to do their swimming for them. But a week after the CCS Melanie had the Metropolitan diving titles to go for, so she was putting in the hours, mostly in the gym on trampolines. It was lucky we had so many dets together — it was getting to be the only time we saw each other. We did three hours on Saturday morning. As soon as we finished, it was time to get our stuff and make for the big one.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Mel, ‘I’ve got my fingers crossed.’ Fingers, hell. I had my toes, knees, teeth and eyes crossed.

  The school ran a bus to Pelham that would get us there in plenty of time.

  ‘God, I’m dying for a smoke,’ I said, as we rode along.

  ‘Just what I was thinking,’ said Melanie.

  ‘I’ve got stacks,’ said the ever helpful Georgie Stenning, who was with us.

  ‘Shut up Stenning,’ we both yelled, beating her savagely about the head with bags, towels and a year seven kid. The bus driver started pulling into the kerb to abuse us so we had to quit before Stenning really got her just deserts. Then she lit up in the back seat, which didn’t help. When we got to Pelham College we had this amazing scene while the bus driver checked through the vehicle to make sure we hadn’t stolen the ashtrays and curtains. But we hadn’t, so finally we were allowed to get off. The first person I saw was the dreaded Phillip Savvas from St Jude’s. Hell, I knew him. I remembered him from the Talent Squad days. He was nothing, no problem. And he didn’t have a shaved head. God, he was ugly though. Talk about the Mean Machine — this guy was the Limp Wimp.

  The early events had already started. It was pretty evident that this was the big league compared to the other carnivals we’d had. The crowd was enormous. There was a big grandstand that was full, and it was standing room only on all four banks. There were banners and cheer squads and war-cries. I mean, it was a whole big scene there. I saw a guy I knew called Andrew Paltos, from Gleeson, who was a boarder at Pelham, but Melanie and I found a quiet corner near the hot dog stand and settled in there. You could hardly see the pool, but that was no concern.

  It was amazing, though. I mean, these were the rah-rah boys, the upper crust, and I was expecting them to sit there fanning themselves and uttering occasional cries of ‘Well done’ or ‘Jolly good’ or words to that effect. But they were animals. They didn’t seem to care what was good swimming, they just wanted to see their school get the points, no matter what. It was sick stuff. Actually, the Linley kids had a pretty good attitude, but the boys from St Jude’s and from Pelham College were frothing at the mouth. When a little Pelham kid ripped a muscle or got a cramp or something and had to be lifted from the pool in the middle of his race the St Jude’s kids went wild with joy. When a St Jude’s guy set a backstroke record the Pelham guys all started chanting: ‘Blood test! Blood test!’

  Melanie and I just looked at each other. This definitely wasn’t our scene. There was still a bit of time before I needed to start warming up, so we went for a walk.

  ‘How come,’ I asked her, ‘we keep getting into green slime with teachers and being told that we’re the boils on the backside of life, when those guys can act like that and win prizes for being so brave and honest? Something’s wrong. When I dial it on the telephone I keep getting wrong numbers.’

  ‘Well,’ said Melanie after quite a silence, ‘I dunno.’ She was good like that.

  My first event was once again the hundred metres. I went into it feeling cold somehow, not physically but mentally. To tell you the truth I didn’t care much about getting points for Linley or winning it for the ole school, or even winning it for myself. I don’t know what I was feeling. I wanted to win it, just to get it over and done with, and I also wanted to have these other guys eating my dust all the way down the pool and all the way back to the finish. Well, not dust. I wanted them to swallow so much water that they’d be dragged out by the hair and carried away on stretchers. Savvas was in the lane next to me. We had a moment’s conversation in the marshalling area and agreed that we remembered each other from the Juniors, but that was the end of that.

  I swam the race in a cold fury, I don’t even know why, or what I was angry about, but when, as usual, I looked for something at the turn to bring me home, it was teachers like Swenson and Gilligan who came to mind. I got mad enough about them to come down the pool like a flying avalanche. Somewhere on my way back I passed Savvas who was ploughing grimly towards the wall, but that was the only time I was conscious of him. He came third, in well over a minute. I clocked 56.8, CCS record and personal best. The crowd on the hill was pretty quiet, except for the Linley year sevens, who were screaming around the place like idiots. If I’d heard anyone yell ‘Blood test!’ I swear to God I would have been up that hill to rearrange his dental work in a lot less than 56.8.

  That was like the climax of the meet for me I guess, even though I still had three events to go. They came and went with me swimming kind of mechanically, but still doing the job I was meant to do. I wasn’t going to pull any stunts like that kid in the baseball film who deliberately puts his hands behind his back and refuses to take the all-important catch when the batter hits a fly-ball right to him. I wanted to win too badly for that. But I felt like I’d gotten a lot out of my system in that hundred. I scored in the two hundred with 2.16.4, about the same as at Linley, and we won both relays, which was nice. At one point it looked as if we could take out the whole meet if we did well in the Relays, and we did do well, but whenever we won one, St Jude’s, who were a mile in front on the point score, came second or third. So we never had them in a state of terror or anything like that. Still, everyone said that was the best Linley had done since the Napoleonic Wars, and Crewcut was looking like he had Park Lane and Mayfair with hotels on each.

  What really counted for me though was the next twenty-four hours. Melanie and I had a weekend together with no teachers, no prefects, no swimming — this was called freedom and I can’t tell you how good it tasted. We didn’t hang around for the presentations and stuff; we grabbed our bags and moved on out. Melanie’s place was within walking distance so we cruised along, talking and fooling around and playing dumb games, hiding behind trees and offering gum to people we passed on the street. It was a brain-blowing feeling. We were so light we could have floated away.

  Melanie’s place was the biggest shock of my day, my life. I didn’t know that all this year I’d been going with the biggest capo in the south. I mean, when her parents turned up for the Linley swimming meet they were in a little Toyota runabout. We got to these huge gates and Melanie, to my horror, turned into them.

  ‘Jesus, come out of there, don’t play games,’ I said, ‘those kind of places always have Dobermanns and Rambos and stuff.’

  ‘No, we live here,’ she said, more embarrassed than I’d ever seen her, but kind of tickled as well.

  ‘What, is your father the butler?’ I asked as we started up the drive, but I knew that wasn’t the way it was going to be. I should have guessed. I mean, living in Pelham took a cool million or so for a start. And she had occasionally dropped the odd hint. I knew she’d been overseas a couple of times, plus she did a lot of skiing. You don’t pay for that kind of stuff by collecting aluminium cans.

  What got me was that here we were in the middle of a city, and we could have been on a country estate. To get from the gates to the house you needed to take a cut lunch. I was exhausted before we were even in sight of the house.

  ‘Can’t we stop for the night and rest, and go on in the morning
?’ I asked her, but she was still too embarrassed to laugh much. The gardens stretched away from us on all sides and it was a different design in each direction. There were terraces and stuff like that. But not a garden gnome in sight. Well, guess they couldn’t have everything. Maybe they couldn’t afford them. I was going to ask her about that but she was still looking a little sensitive, so I held off.

  The house was what you’d expect, something like a cross between Windsor Castle and the Taj Mahal, with a white terrace all around it. The drive swept around some truly beautiful tree — I don’t know what kind it was but it sure was beautiful — and came to rest by the front door. I felt like we should knock or ring — I still couldn’t get used to the idea that Melanie lived here — but she just opened it up and went right on in. There was a vestibule and then we were in this massive entrance hall with a floor of tiles or something, I don’t know, and stretching away to the right and left were reception rooms that looked like they were out of a museum, because they were filled with antique furniture and paintings and big tapestries hanging on the walls. In front of us was a huge staircase that split in two different directions half way up. But Melanie went straight ahead, through a little door beside the staircase.

  ‘I think this is where you’ll be,’ she said. ‘It looks like it’s all made up.’

  ‘What time’s Inspection?’ I asked, cracking jokes to cover how nervous I really felt. The thing was, this wasn’t a bedroom I was sleeping in, this was a suite. There was a bedroom, sure, but there was also a little sitting room and a bathroom. The shower, for some reason, was off the bedroom, separate from the bathroom. ‘Where do I ring for Room Service?’ I asked her. I wouldn’t have been surprised to be shown a bell above the bed.

  ‘Come on, leave your stuff here,’ Mel said, ‘and come and see my room.’

  ‘Oh good, yeah, I’ll need to know where that is,’ I smirked.

  ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ she said, wrinkling her nose at me.

  We went up the main staircase and along a corridor. What got me was that everything was so perfect. You just knew that every room was going to be laid out like it was a work of art — there wasn’t going to be some old junk room, filled with rubbish, or a rumpus room with toys and pyjamas scattered all over it. ‘How can you actually live in a place like this?’ I wondered, but not out loud. I was beginning to understand Melanie a bit better. Mel’s room was good though, the only one in the place that I would have felt comfortable with. It wasn’t anything special, I mean, not something out of Vogue Living; it was just a messy kind of kid’s room, with stuff stuck on the walls and a patchwork quilt and a big black stuffed gorilla and a fantastic view across the gardens to the city.

  ‘I’ll bet they shut the door when they bring visitors through this part of the house,’ I said, trying to flop down in an armchair that wasn’t really made for flopping down in.

  ‘You better believe it,’ said Mel.

  I jumped up and started looking at what she had on the walls. There were some pictures of wind-surfers, a drawing of a ‘Smile’ face, a banner with a statement on it that she’d written out from somewhere: ‘WHATEVER YOU CAN DO, OR DREAM YOU CAN, BEGIN IT. BOLDNESS HAS GENIUS, POWER AND MAGIC IN IT.’ There was a newspaper picture of some sleeping bats, a photo of a woman rock-climber hanging out over nothing, a calendar, a Do Not Disturb sign, a cartoon of a man trying to hide a hole in a wall by putting a bigger hole over the top of it, another saying: ‘ALWAYS BE TRUE TO YOUR TEETH AND THEY’LL NEVER BE FALSE TO YOU’, and a whole lot of photos.

  I took a good long look at the photos, despite Melanie getting all embarrassed. There were a couple of old ones from her last school, Ainsworth — class photos and sports teams. It was easy to pick Mel; she was the only kid in year three with a punk haircut. Then there were some family shots, and some taken of her and her friends up at the snow, and finally a stunning large photo of her diving: a beautiful colour shot that caught her in mid-air.

  ‘Who took that?’

  ‘My mother . . . she’s a photographer.’

  ‘What does your father do?’

  ‘Uh, runs department stores or something . . . ’

  ‘Oh, right, yeah, should have guessed.’

  ‘They’ll be back in about an hour,’ she added, looking out the window.

  ‘What are we going to do tonight?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, get a video maybe, go to a movie, just rage around town, find a party, go to a disco, what do you wanna do?’

  ‘How slack are your parents?’ I asked. ‘Like, will they want you back at a certain time, or what? Will they care if we go out?’

  ‘They’re slack,’ she said, and her voice sounded kind of bitter to me. ‘They’ll probably say midnight, but it won’t matter.’

  We eventually figured out that a party was definitely the way to go, and Melanie got on the phone and sleazed an invitation, after a few false starts. Seemed like an ole school pal from Ainsworth was opening up her mansion for a pool party.

  ‘Great,’ I said, ‘I’ll be able to do a few more laps.’

  By then Mr and Mrs Tozer were home. I saw them from the window arriving in a car and this time they definitely weren’t in no Toyota hatchback. We went down the grand staircase to meet them. By then I’d been in Melanie’s room long enough to forget what the rest of the house was like, so it struck me with a new sense of shock. But Mr and Mrs Tozer gushed away, asking about the CCS Carnival and all that. They were friendly enough. There was a housekeeper there too, whom they all called ‘Lil’. Melanie gave her a big hug, which was more than she did for her parents. It seemed like Mel really liked her, and Lil sure struck me as being warmer and more sincere than the people who paid her salary.

  Dinner was around a grand table in a grand dining room but the food was just average. We had soup, then some kind of fish in some kind of sauce. I didn’t like to ask but I figured there was a cook hidden away in the bowels of the building, as no-one seemed to have to do anything. Lil served the meal and Mrs Tozer waved a few things around like she was being helpful, but she didn’t work up a sweat. Mr Tozer didn’t say too much — he was probably thinking about how striped socks were moving in the Menswear Department. Melanie popped the question about the party. For slack parents, the Tozers managed to put her through quite an interrogation.

  ‘I don’t know dear,’ Mrs Tozer said. ‘We’re going over to the Robertsons’ later — I’m not sure what time we’ll be home. We’re only going for a drink but these things do tend to go on and on.’ Melanie started her flashing eyes routine but Lil saved the day.

  ‘I’ll be in tonight, Mrs Tozer,’ she said, as she served the pudding: ice-cream, with plums that tasted like they’d been soaked in brandy for a week. ‘I’ll be happy to wait up, if that would help.’

  ‘Well, that’s very good of you, Lil,’ said Mrs Tozer.

  ‘Thanks Lil, you’re a dude,’ said Melanie.

  ‘Now Erle, do your parents let you go to parties? You’re sure they won’t mind?’ Great question. As if I was going to say ‘No, Mrs Tozer, I’d better stay here and do some homework while Melanie goes on her own.’ These people might have been rich but they didn’t seem like they had too many smarts.

  The meal was a bit of an ordeal, and I was glad when it was finished. Nobody seemed interested in hanging around to say grace and Melanie was keen to crack the track. So we split for our separate rooms to get changed, agreeing to meet up in Melanie’s room in twenty minutes. I just hoped I’d be able to find it again.

  Chapter Ten

  We took a cab to the party. (I paid, Mum, in case you’re reading this.) It was raging away in good style by the time we arrived. Although it was a pool party lots of people were inside, but the night was warm and we were young, so we headed out to the lawn as soon as I’d been introduced to the girl whose party it was, and her parents. To this day I can’t remember any of their names. The choice of drinks was light beer or wine or punch; we both went for the wine.

&
nbsp; The guys all seemed to be from Pelham College and they mostly looked older than me. The girls were mainly Ainsworth. Melanie knew everybody. And then it turned out that they sort of knew me. This might seem unlikely, but I’d more or less forgotten about the afternoon’s swimming — too much culture shock since maybe — but some of the Pelham guys recognised me, so for five minutes I was the flavour of the night. Most of them just wanted a chance to get a few one-liners off their sad little chests, but a few guys were genuinely interested, and nice and all. Melanie stood off to the side, watching with a funny smile. I was embarrassed. I was more used to being a black hole than a star.

  After a time it got a bit more relaxed. We found ourselves sitting in quite a big group at one end of the pool, drinking and talking. People wandered in and out of the house, joining and leaving our group. A few people were swimming. Inside the house there was dancing, so most of the people who came out were hot and sweaty. Occasionally plates of food were offered around. As people drank more — some of them had smuggled in Southern Comfort — the noise began to build up. The dancing got wilder and a few people got pushed into the pool. Some guy was vomiting behind a tree by the tennis court. It was the usual scene, but not a bad party when it was all said and done.

  Mel and I went in and danced for quite a while. God, I saw something then. She was the hottest girl I’d ever danced with. I hate girls who just shuffle their feet and look embarrassed when you try anything different. I like to cut loose when I’m dancing, and so did Melanie, so between us we were sizzling. I mean, I’m not saying it was like one of those old movies where everyone else stops and moves to the edge and watches in admiration, before they all clap at the end. We weren’t quite that good. But we whipped up a little action.

  And after a while it worked out the way I’d hoped. Some slow songs came along on the tape, starting with an old Presley song that I really liked: ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ God I loved that old song. I got them to play it over again when it finished the first time. And during all these slow songs Melanie and I danced, but it was like the other extreme from the way it had been before. We held each other very close and hardly moved, kissing a lot of the time, just lost in each other, loving the warm feeling of being so close. Sure, I was turned on; we both were; but more than that I felt caring and loving towards this wild, radical kid, the only person around who saw me as more than a loud-mouthed punk.