Free The Great Gatenby by John Marsden

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.
    â€˜Jesus, come out of there, don’t play games,’ I said, ‘those kind of places always have Dobermanns and Rambos and stuff.’
    â€˜No, we live here,’ she said, more embarrassed than I’d ever seen her, but kind of tickled as well.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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