The Great Gatenby Read Online Free PDF

we were a bit more mature than a lot of them. I mean, Clune’s idea of a good time was to take a crap on the bathroom floor when Ringworm was on bathroom duty, so that he’d have to clean it up. And Matt Roxborough got his biggest laugh for the year out of this joke: ‘What do you do with a sick budgie? Give him tweetment.’ I mean, sure it’s funny, at the same time as it’s incredibly sad, but not so funny that you have to go and lie down for half an hour after hearing it, like good ole Matt practically did. I mean, what can you say? I mean, I’ve got this really funny joke about two nude statues in a park that are allowed to come to life for one hour and do anything they want, but I didn’t dare tell it in there or they would have had to take Roxborough to hospital for a week, I swear to God.
    One of the good things about life with Melanie was that when things did get bad, and the dorm started to resemble a cross between the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the closing minutes of the Blues Brothers, then I could think of her and some good thing that she might have said or written to me that day, and I’d feel more peaceful straight away. It worked better than a cup of hot cocoa. I owed her a lot for that.

Chapter Five
    But the dorm was far out too often, and getting further out every day. Night-time saw scenes of madness. Sometimes it was like every night was a pyjama party, other times everyone was tired and their eyes went out as fast as the lights. Ringworm sure came in for a lot of attention, none of it of the kind his grandmother would have wanted to know about. James Kramer protected him, so did Steven ‘Punk’ Nimmo, but there were times when no-one could do anything to help a man who kept setting himself up for it with such style and such perfect timing. What can you do with someone who for supper carefully spreads himself a piece of bread with butter and jam and then comes to ask you how to toast it? I mean, lend this man your electric shaver and he uses it to give his teddy bear a mohawk. One morning he was in the bathroom when James Kramer came in, and there he was fully dressed in front of the mirror, rubbing shampoo through his scalp. ‘Ringworm! What are you doing?!’ ‘Shampooing my hair, what do you think I’m doing?’ ‘But you’ve got to wet your hair first!’ ‘Not with this shampoo I don’t. Look, it’s written right here on the bottle: “For Dry Hair”.’
    Through it all David O’Toole kept playing his xylophone; Adam Marava pored over his Penthouse magazines; Rob Hanley-White wandered around scabbing food off anyone he could; and I, I lay on my bed watching the moon and stars and dreaming of Melanie.
    Every night we had homework — two hours of it — supervised by a year twelve kid, some of whom were slack and some strict. Then it was supper and time to hang around and talk, or go and annoy the year twelves, or make phone calls, or have a quiet smoke in the dunnies before we got shoved off to bed at a quarter to ten.
    After lights out we were allowed to talk for a quarter of an hour, then we were on silence, which meant either silence or anarchy, depending on who was on duty. Anarchy included things like dorm-raiding the year nines, being dorm-raided by the year elevens, having a stacks-on on some poor guy in the dorm — usually Rob Hanley-White, because he was such a little rat — or just talking and mucking around till eleven or twelve o’clock at night. If things got too bad though Mr Gilligan would appear on the scene and then it was a case of Silent Night, Holy Night, because he cancelled town leave for anyone he suspected of talking, and that was a pretty radical punishment.
    It was an OK life in some ways I guess, though not exactly what my parents had in mind when they enrolled me in these hallowed halls of learning. One thing they sure didn’t have in mind was the