Karoo Boy Read Online Free Page A

drive you home.
    – To Muizenberg? It’s far.
    – We’ll go via Hout Bay. I love the climb over Chapman’s Peak.
    – I don’t have my cricket togs along.
    – You could catch up with Gatsby in the library, or watch the practice.
    – Okay, I nod.
    – Good lad. Give your mother a bell, so she knows you’re with me.

blue grass
    T HE LIBRARY IS HAUNTED by Old Shuttlecock, who stocks it up with books on Hitler and submarines. He is forever scuttling to the boys’ john, keys a-jingle, to run the keys under a tap. Then he swings them on their string till they dry. He scares the hell out of schoolboys with his jangling keys, and he resents lending out books to savages like us. Still, I risk running into the war-crazed Old Shuttlecock rather than have the boys gawk at me through the nets.
    From a dark corner of the library I hear the distant crack of cricket balls against wood.
    I open The Great Gatsby at random. Lines underlined in a wavy freehand catch my eye. I read of blue grass and yellow cocktail music and the earth lurching away from the sun.
    When the ball stoned Marsden’s head, just in front of his ear-hole, I had the feeling the earth jerked away from the sun.
    Now the earth floats unanchored in space.
    – Come on then, Skin calls.
    He is in his cricket whites. His hair is ruffled and his pants are stained red from rubbing the ball.
    I pack the book into my rucksack and follow him out into the schoolyard. Oliver stands by a tap with a cluster of other boys who are splashing their faces and laughing. The laughter fades out as Skin and I go by. They look at their shoes and murmur to the teacher: ’noon, sir.
    – Afternoon, boys, says Skin.
    I can tell by the jaunty skip of his walk that he loves being the schoolmaster, being called sir.
    – So, how’d you get on with Gatsby ? Skin wants to know.
    – I just dipped into the story, I tell him, conscious of the boys’ eyes on us as we follow the curve of the cricket pitch to where his sky-blue Peugeot convertible is parked under the stone pines.
    A flicker of feeling, maybe hurt, crosses his face.
    – You need to give it time, he says.
    For a moment, I am not sure if he means Gatsby or Marsden. But he goes on:
    – His writing is magic, you know. You really get a sense of the time, the jazzy, feathered flamboyance of it all.
    – I felt it a bit, I say, knowing teachers get wound up about the things they teach.
    I recall a line about girls gliding through a sea-change of faces and I want to say something about the gliding but I am not sure I understand it. Instead, I remark:
    – I liked the yellow music.
    – Oh. You picked up on that? That’s one of the magic things Fitzgerald does. Mixes the senses, so you hear colours and see sound.
    It makes sense to me, as the sea smells turquoise, and red is the sound of a tomtom drummed by blurred hands.
    Skin is happy about the yellow music, and he begins to whistle as he fishes for keys in his red-stained pocket. Behind me I hear the laughter of the boys pick up again.
    Just as my father would, he spits in his handkerchief and wipes insect flecks from the windshield. Yellow flecks like flicks of a paintbrush. Then he draws the hood back and we climb inside.
    We drive along De Waal Drive under Table Mountain, the distant cablecar house on the flat top like a tickbird riding a hippo’s back. I look down on the scar of District Six, the skysigns of the city, and the cranes and masts of the harbour beyond.
    Skin scratches through a cubbyhole full of boxless tapes.
    – Ever heard of Miles Davis?
    I know he is the jazzgod. My father would sometimes listen to jazz at night when he was writing: the tapping of his typewriter blending with the tinny tunes and the zinging of crickets and the far, fuzzy hiss of the surf. But I say no to Skin, as I sense he wants to feel he is initiating me into jazz. He fiddles with the dials and the music comes like a wave. I imagine the seals in the harbour far below tossing their heads