We were drawing up to grand, Gothic-looking buildings, boys jostling like a corduroy army through the spired courtyards, wearing woollen scarves in different coloured stripes, and the same blue uniforms as Kojo’s.
Their fathers and mothers, tall thin and expensive, in blazers and Barbours, were moving slower, almost still.
I wanted my mother to keep driving, but she had already stopped.
‘Kojo…’ I held on to his arm.
‘What?’ He had his hand on the door handle.
‘Be good. Don’t get into trouble.’
He opened the door. ‘What are you even talking about?’
‘That sometimes you are a hundred … and sometimes ten.’
He lunged and pushed against me with his full weight, then left the car.
I closed my eyes, felt the cold window against my cheek, the imprint of his body against my side, and knew I would feel it, still, even after he was gone.
‘Oh-ho, wo pɛ saa dodo,’ my mother was shouting at me from outside the car.
I opened the door and got out quickly to make her stop.
‘You wait for me by the car,’ she said, and began to run, as if for an audience, throwing smiles at the tall blonde neat parents as she went, her scarf flying behind her, her handbag open in her hand.
‘Come on,’ Kojo said.
‘Where are we going?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
We walked through the quadrangle filled with boys, past pillars, a large wooden door.
‘What do you think is in here?’ I said.
‘Look!’ He was pointing at boys clutching handfuls of sweets. They were coming from an archway to the right of the courtyard. Inside, there was a chalkboard over a counter with the words ‘Tuck Shop’ written on it. Behind the counter were jars of labelled sweets, with names and colours I did not know.
Hard aniseed Black Jacks in black and white wrappers, caramel-brown Highland toffee, large chunks of golden, airy honeycomb, acrid-pink Wham bars with bursts of green and yellow.
‘What shall we have?’ Kojo’s eyes were moving back and forth.
‘Do you have any money?’
‘Of course I do.’ He pulled back his shoulders and pushed into the crowd of boys, pointing at different sweets as if he had been buying these for years, and not Violetten and Weisse Mäuse, all these years.
We went to the end of the quadrangle, past a long steepled chapel with painted windows, and sat at the edge of a vast white-paint-marked lawn.
Kojo poured the sweets into our hands.
Sherbet powder-filled flying saucers melted in our mouths like thin paper.
We dipped liquorice sticks in white sherbet dust and licked the dust off our hands.
Gobstoppers stopped us from talking until we had sucked the colourings far into the recesses of our mouths.
I laughed at Kojo’s concentrated face.
‘Shh, do you hear that?’ he asked, the gobstopper extending his cheek.
‘What?’ I listened to the noise of the boys in the quadrangle, quieter now. Beneath them was the voice of an organ and a single thin high voice. I stood up. ‘Let’s go and listen.’
We went up the steps of the chapel. ‘Don’t go in,’ Kojo said.
‘“I vow to thee, my country…”’ the voice sang.
‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ I asked, then remembered there were no girls.
Kojo said nothing.
‘“…all earthly things above, entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love…”’
The boy’s voice was clear and strong, and I thought of Dr Lartey’s son in his red and white choir gown.
‘“I heard my country calling, away across the sea, across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me.”’
‘Did you hear that?’ Kojo asked, pulling me down the steps. ‘“My country calling” … it’s a sign. I told you we have to get close to him now, before he ascends the stool.’
I stopped myself from saying what I thought of Attobrah, and followed him back through the quadrangle, emptier now. ‘We should get back to the car.’
He opened the large wooden door we had passed earlier, and went in.
I followed. It was the single biggest room I had ever been in, the ceilings stretching far up, wooden beams running across them, meeting at the centre.
Kojo sat down at one of the long benches next to the tables that lined the length of the hall. ‘It’s not the history we were looking for,’ he said. ‘He speaks only of his own life.’
I waited. ‘So what’s missing?’
‘Everything,’ Kojo said. ‘And at the end—’
‘At the end, what?’
‘I don’t know what happened – he gave up.’
‘So what now?’
‘We change it.’
‘What do you mean, change it? What happens once we have?’
‘We show them.’
‘Haven’t they read it already?’
Kojo looked at me. ‘Have you not learnt anything? We just tell them what is true, and they will believe it.’
‘How will we tell them we got the book?’
‘We tell them the truth. We tell them we were looking through the books in London, that we found it, and took it.’
‘When will we do it?’
He shrugged. ‘Your handwriting is better than mine, and you’re better at copying.’
‘What do you mean? Better at copying what?’
‘Everything. Their accents. Their ways.’
‘That’s what we were supposed to be doing. That’s what you said.’
He was looking up at the walls, covered in wood rather than paper, lined with the portraits of old men, each one lit by hallowed light. ‘One day, it will be our faces we see.’
‘Here?’
‘Everywhere.’
‘We should go.’
He nodded, but did not move.
Behind him a man appeared below an arch at the back of the hall. ‘What … are you doing here?’ He moved quietly, but his voice was sharp.
Kojo turned, then stood up straight. ‘Sorry, sir. We were just looking.’
‘And who are you?’ He wore a green tweed jacket and had a whistle around his neck, his brown hair combed into a stiff side-parting.
‘Sorry, sir?’
‘Name. House.’ His voice drew my ribs together.
‘Kojo Agyata. Hallows.’
‘My patch.’ He stood and looked at Kojo, then turned to walk away.
‘Sir, sir, before you go…’ Kojo walked towards him and stopped. ‘I was wondering, sir. I know the rules say we have to ask if we want to have exeats, I know it’s soon, sir, but I was wondering if I could ask for one for next weekend.’
The man smiled before he turned to walk back out of the hall, and I knew, even though Kojo did not, that his smile meant Kojo would not be coming home that weekend, and I hoped, even though the smile said otherwise, that it was the worst he would take away from us.
‘Let’s go back to the car, Kojo.’ I went towards the door.
Kojo was still standing in the middle of the hall. ‘You know it’ll be all right, don’t you?’
I shook my head. ‘No.’
‘When my father left, we knew he would not come back, but we did not know my mother would give up too, that my sisters…’ He looked again like a little boy and not the commander of a vast invisible army. I knew it was not the end, that things would be better even than before, but I could not tell him.
‘Come on.’ I took his hand. ‘It’s getting late.’
11
At assembly in my new school, the headmistress told us in her Margaret Thatcher voice how fortunate we were, not only to be the top minds of the country, but to be sharing our quality with one another.
The older girls showed us the tennis courts, netball courts, hockey fields, swimming pool, science blocks, art block, and auditorium.
They touched my hair and stroked my skin and passed me round on their laps
like a doll.
I watched them for the codes they did not pass on, and saw that the girls that were good at games were the most popular.
I watched their studied insouciance, the girls they laughed at, the way they wore their uniforms with their buttons open, ties loose, skirts hemmed up.
I could not feign their passion for pushing a ball round a field with a hooded stick, or getting a bigger one into a net, or for beating a rival school, and yet I was picked first for every team.
I longed to be invisible, but was too conspicuous not to stand out, now by curiosity; later, perhaps, by ridicule, or by regard.
After lunch, the boarders in our class showed us the boarding houses.
I looked in the kitchen for signs of midnight feasts, but saw only vast grills, blackened from centuries of girls making cheese on toast. The upstairs rooms had slanted roofs with two single beds, desks, an orderliness that spoke of comfort. The downstairs dormitories had twelve narrow beds, some bare, some housing families of stuffed animals.
The girls took us out onto the fire escape.
I looked down at the grounds.
I closed my eyes.
What if I fell? What would catch me?
The other girls were chatting and laughing.
I felt the edge of panic, put my hand against the wall, held on to a hook.
There was a chain on it that was attached to the escape.
My back pressed against one of the other’s.
I looked around; it was Lucinda.
She was small and thin and not especially good at sports, but still somehow commandeered the power to bestow the less popular girls with titles like ‘scrubber’ and ‘minge’.
She turned to look at me. ‘Careful,’ she said, pointing at my hand.
I looked into her eyes. They were clear and blue and hard and steady.
‘Careful,’ she said again.
I began to ease the chain off the hook. Something in her uncertainty was making the panic subside.
‘What are you doing?’ She looked at my hand, then back at me.
There was a crash as the iron ladder reached the ground.
The chattering of the girls gave way to intakes of breath. ‘Oh my God. Why did you do that?’
I turned to look down.
An arm pulled me off the fire escape and back through the window. ‘Here, put this under your eyes.’ It was Lucinda’s voice, something in it that was either camaraderie or mirth. She held a small jar in her hand.
‘What is it?’ It smelt of Vicks Rub.
‘Tiger balm, quick. It will make you cry.’
Flat, heavy footsteps neared the door.
I put my finger into the red container and rubbed the ointment under my eyes.
They smarted.
I rubbed it into the skin around my cheekbones; stood, blinking, to face the door.
Miss Hunter, fat-ankled, limp-haired, entered. ‘Who is responsible for this?’
The girls watched me.
I had almost missed my cue.
I rubbed the greasy tears from my face. ‘I don’t know what happened, we were just standing on the… And then … then …’
‘You had better come with me.’ The door shut behind her.
I looked around.
Most of the girls covered their mouths with their hands. Only Lucinda did not smile.
I followed Miss Hunter down to her study.
She closed the door hard behind me. ‘Well?’
I opened my mouth.
‘There’s no use in lying. I can smell the Tiger balm from here.’
I wanted to laugh at her policeman stance, tell her that she should give up teaching English, because she murdered words and sentences and paragraphs just by reading them out loud, but I said nothing.
She came close to my face, and told me that she knew what I was up to.
I crossed my arms.
There was nothing she could do. However much she shouted, however much she goaded, however red her dry-skinned face became, I would not shout back.
She opened the door, and looked back before she slammed it.
I sat down.
A little later, a bent-over wrinkled woman with a hairless dog, dragging its testicles across the floor, came in. ‘You’d better go now,’ she said.
I nodded, got up and walked past her, not smiling, as she held open the door.
12
At home, I dialled Kojo’s number. ‘How are things going with the book?’
‘They’re going.’
‘Have you made the changes yet?’
‘Not yet, I’m preparing.’
‘Do you need my help?’
‘You know what all of this means?’
‘What does it mean?’
‘That we have to listen and look closer than before. These people are the masters of the story.’
‘Which people?’
‘Look. This is nothing but a small shitty island that doesn’t even work properly. It’s a cold wet Third World country, but they made us think they were all powerful. We have to see how they did it.’
‘When do you think we’ll go home?’
‘When we’ve learnt enough,’ he said.
I wondered which home he thought I had meant.
‘Veni, vidi, vici. Remember that. I came, I saw, I conquered.’
‘You’re shouting,’ I said quietly. ‘How is it there?’
‘They call me Master Kojo and I’m a fag.’
‘Translate?’
‘We have to run around for the older boys. The ones that don’t move fast enough get their heads dunked in the toilet or get showered down with a fire extinguisher.’
‘Sounds like a really nice place.’
‘It’s all right. They like me. I’m good at things. They want me on their teams. I’ll be king of this place in no time.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Nice, is it? What’s happened to your vocabulary? Have you even read any books since we arrived? You should get out of bed more often, you lazy coon.’
‘You know that’s a racist term, don’t you?’
‘That’s more like it, my pedantic little worm.’
‘Coon? Really? Did you learn that there?’
‘No, it comes straight from the mother country, colonial hang-up.’
‘I thought this was the mother country.’
‘Depends where you’re standing, Maya. We’ll be fine. We have to keep what we’re doing at the front of our minds at all times. They were messed up, our parents, they’ve internalised a lot of crap. Once we put things in order, it will fall back into place.’
‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’
‘If you keep staying in bed, you’re going to get meaner, as well as dumber and uglier.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You don’t have to like it, though you might. We came to bury Caesar, not to praise him.’
‘What does that even mean?’
‘Why don’t you figure it out when you’re smart again?’
‘I got invited to Lucinda’s birthday party… It’s next weekend.’
‘Eureka. When you get to her house, watch everything. Especially their rituals. If you can, take notes.’
‘What am I supposed to be looking out for – the code to some secret safe?’
‘Lucinda is the one whose mother’s a Lady? And her father’s a politician in the House of Lords?’
‘And?’
‘These are the people we have to watch and learn from. They understand how it works.’
‘You mean you want me to learn to colonise others?’
‘No, it’s sorcery I want you to learn. How to make people believe you have something when really you have nothing.’
‘And then?’
‘Then you’re protected, then people can’t take away from you any more.’
‘And how do you take away from nothing?’
‘It’s not us that have nothing, it’s them.’
‘So
if we become takers, we’ll have nothing too, but at least we can pretend we have something, to the others?’
‘Stop being so obtuse. You know what I mean.’
‘I’m not sure I do. Aren’t we already trying to be like them too much? Can’t we just stop and get on with our own path?’
Kojo started shouting. ‘Maya! That’s what we were doing when they came.’
I held the receiver away from my ear.
‘That’s what we were doing. This is not that kind of world. Things don’t work that way. It’s not a world where I can play with my toys in peace, and you with yours. You want my toys, and if I’m not prepared, then I will lose them, and be left with nothing, whilst you tell me that you taking them was the best thing that ever happened to me. Nothing’s over, Maya. We will go on losing our toys again and again and again, if we don’t learn to protect them, do you understand? Do you understand that, to protect ourselves, we have to learn how the toy-takers operate?’
I wanted to drop the receiver, but instead put it back to my ear. ‘Tell me more… Are you happy?’
‘It’s OK. The boys are good sports. I’m closest with a boy called Peregrine and one of the Kennedy clan. We play rugby, get all the girls at parties.’
‘What girls?’
‘Pretty English schoolgirls. They’re mad as hell about me, which Sergeant doesn’t like much.’
‘Your housemaster? What does he have to do with it?’
‘He’s scared I’ve come to steal their wives and daughters, sit at the head of the table, put my feet in their slippers, warm them by the hearth.’
‘And haven’t you?’
‘Only temporarily.’ He laughed, but his laugh was not real.
‘Are you OK, Kojo?’
‘Yeah. I miss home. It was easier. I didn’t feel like I had to be on my guard all the time like I do here.’
‘I know what you mean.’ I thought of Saint Martin hiding alone in the pen with the geese. ‘At least we have each other.’
‘And Ma. She understands too, in a different way. That’s why she makes us do tennis and piano lessons, and buys all those clothes. She understands.’
‘And Pa?’
‘He’s more afraid. I think they’ll get to him.’
I said nothing.
‘Kid? You OK? I’ve got to go. Don’t let them get to you.’
‘I won’t. I’m much stronger than you anyhow.’
The God Child Page 6