The Lion Seeker by Kenneth Bonert Read Free Book Online Page B

Winterbourne’s expression seems to say). We gave them votes and there’s more of them than us. That is how the Afrikaner Mr. Hertzog came to be our Prime Minister. Up till recently, Mr. Hertzog’s National Party has been in charge and has been making a right mess of the economy, but now, touch wood, there has arrived back into power a gentleman called Jan Christiaan Smuts.
    Miss Winterbourne smiles and shows them a picture of this Jan Smuts who is bald as an ostrich egg except for a white fringe, has hard eyes, a sharp nose, and a long thin face. She explains how he is one of the good Afrikaners, just a wonderful man, who fought for Britain in the Great War and studied law at Cambridge where he scored the highest ever in exams, being a mental genius. He’s an Afrikaner who understands that South Africa needs to be part of the great British Empire and not, heaven forbid, against it. Now General Smuts and Mr. Hertzog have joined up to make one new government called the United Party and the first thing they did was follow Smuts’s sound advice and take the country off something called the Gold Standard. Straight away, the economy was fixed! . . . Meanwhile the bad Afrikaners have split away under Dr. Malan, to form the
Purified
National Party . . . 
    Isaac is amazed to find this woman is not only gorgeous as hell, she’s dincum interesting to listen to. Despite his throbbing crotch he can link in his mind what she’s saying to what he knows has been happening on Beit Street over the past year especially. Nowadays there aren’t so many men in crinkled suits loitering outside Cohen’s Café all day using rolled-up racing papers like blunt swords to impress points of vigorous debate on each other; the shop windows that were boarded have turned back into washed glass with clean new goods stacked up behind; ladies wear bright new hats and the beggars have all but evaporated; the wind has no more loose rubbish to tumble. At home they eat meat and fish again every week. The deadbeat accounts are paying up more easily and new repair jobs are coming into the workshop for Tutte all the time. It’s been like strangulation released: that dramatic. He never knew what was behind it before, exactly, never knew that this Jannie Smuts was so clever as to work all that. He pictures this Gold Standard as hillocks of ingots and lines of trucks coming to fetch the glittering bricks, feeding them back into the world so that things can move again, work and breath, the flow of money and life.
    In the night come other pictures: of Miss Winterbourne giving him special lessons after class. He grinds his hard shlong under him to these fancies, imagining what her behind would feel like in his hands, squeezing, spreading. This feel of want for her sometimes unbearable as thirst. He finds himself wanking all the time, even in the school bog in the daytime.
    He starts to hide things in her desk. A bottle of fancy perfume. A nice brooch. Lots of different kinds of flowers that he picks from the field at the far end of the cricket pitch. One Thursday after class she stays late, busy with papers at her desk, and he takes a long time to buckle up his satchel so that he’s the only one left. When he walks to the front she looks up with the line of her dark eyebrows kinked above the nose. —Isaac. He steps closer. The smell of the woman-musk off her skin dizzies him, his eyes this close drink up the liquescent colour of her thick hair, rich black curls of it that come down to the neat earlobes where they tuck behind. He can’t stop trembling and his heart like a trapped madman slams the cage of the ribs.
    â€”Ja miss.
    â€”Have you been leaving things in my drawers here?
    â€”Hey?
    â€”You heard me Isaac.
    He looks down. —Maybe.
    When he looks up she’s holding out a paper bag to him with the top angled so he can see it’s full of all the stuff he put there, even the