Good Oil Read Online Free PDF

obsessed with her as ever, despite her atrocious treatment of him. Don’t we grow out of these things? She’s just married some total bastard, and Pip’s all cut up about it. I empathise with him a great deal because a big part of his misery in the whole affair is that he never felt he could properly compete for her. No matter how much of a gentleman he becomes, to her he’ll always be that poor, uneducated yob from across town. He gets to live in close proximity to her and is the recipient of a bit of offhand titillation when she feels like it, but he is never, ever in with a real chance.
    Like me with Chris. Will I always be theYoungster, who can’t shed her puppy fat, doesn’t know what a bong is and has no dress sense? This could go on for years. What if I can never free myself from it? What if I find myself forty years old and giving Chris marital advice with similar anguish?
    The title character from The Great Gatsby (on the reading list for next term, but I read it over the summer) was in love with this girl Daisy for years and years even though she married someone else. Maybe not really love, but obsessed with this version of her that he had created. Boy, did he cling to it. He just couldn’t see things for what they were. When he finally did, it was so painful that he killed himself. Sheesh.
    Penny has suggested to me a few times that I might like to get a grip on reality. You know, accept that getting together with Chris is unlikely in the extreme and stop torturing myself. I wish I could. It would make sense.
    Our group at school is just starting to talk to some of the boys from our year in the boys’ school. Not the real alpha males of course because our group is only in the middle third of the social ranking system. Sometimes they drift over towards us at lunchtime and brief words are exchanged, almost always with Penny. It’s looking like we might even start eating lunch with some of them, and if we eat lunch with them then that will logically lead to standing together at the bus stop after school. I might be able to find a more realistic target for my emotional energy.
    But it’s no use trying to stop loving Chris. That’s my virus.

    On the Friday before the party we have maths for the last period of the day. I tell Penny that I’m worried I might have an aneurism or something if I don’t get my lips onto Chris sometime soon.
    ‘ Man , my head hurts. It hurts; it hurts; it’s going to explode.’
    ‘Oh, sweetie-pie,’ says Penny.
    ‘If he would just kiss me once, just once, properly, on the lips, I think I could die happy. If God would give me that, I swear I will never ask Him for anything else ever again.’
    ‘You don’t believe in God,’ Penny points out. ‘And I guarantee that if you ever did get that, you’d want more.’
    I fold my arms and sulk.
    As the day of the party draws closer, Chris seems to be less and less concerned with Sveta’s thighs and more and more flushed with an apparent relapse of the Kathy-virus. I can see it coursing through his veins, dilating his capillaries and pupils. He’s hoping that this party might be the launching pad for a successful mission into ‘the Search for the Perfect Woman’, as he terms it during evening tea-break.
    ‘You should see Bianca’s place. Beautiful view of the harbour, the city lights. I can put my arm around Kathy and say “One day all this could be yours”. The sun will be setting. I’ll have plied her with alcohol. It will be magic, youngster. Magic will happen.’
    Magic. Kathy appears in the tearoom at that moment and starts to make herself a cup of International Roast.
    He eyes her as you would a big juicy steak after a six-day hike eating only dehydrated vegetables. I know the look.
    At the end of the shift, Chris and some of the other boys collect money to buy a few slabs of beer for the party. Bianca frowns and says we can just drink her dad’s liquor.
    I begin to agonise about what I’m going to wear. The