Angel Boy

by Bernard Ashley

  Desperately, Leonard tried to catch someone’s eyes or ears. But the tro-tro had driven off without waiting and there were no more cars in the fort car park, although the streets of Elmina were bustling with business. A smelly hand quickly clamped over Leonard’s mouth, the other kids closed in around him, and he was held as tightly as a pig for slaughter. His feet didn’t touch the ground as he was hustled past the boats and canoes to the rubbish grounds.

  The kids kept him surrounded when they got there. Between two walls of nailed-together crate sides, under a holey corrugated roof, they let Leonard go, and pushed him about.

  ‘Not on the ground! Don’ mess his clothes!’

  The raggedy band stood in a tight ring. Their mouths fouled him with their insults. Their eyes pierced him like rusty nails. Their hands clawed the air with violent threats. He was at their mercy, crying, shaking, his legs as weak as wheat.

  ‘Let me go! I’ve got no money! Please! You can have my stuff !’ He tugged at his school shirt, pointed to his trainers. ‘I want my dad…!’

  ‘Listen!’ The main boy came over to him. Up close, Leonard could smell the breath that comes from an empty stomach. ‘You ain’t not got this dad person! Not no more. You ain’t not got no one ’cepting this boy –’ he thumped his own hollow chest – ‘an’ this boy, an’ this boy, an’ this boy’ an’ this boy!’ He went round the circle as each of them sullenly closed his eyes or thrust his crutch out or spat on the ground for the roll call. ‘This place is where you live –’

  ‘I live in Accra!’ Leonard cried.

  ‘You live here, you’re always livin’ here, you’re growin’ old an’ dyin’ here! You get that in your skull, an’ you trust it for God’s truth! I’m your daddy, he’s your mammy, this lot’s your uncles an’ aunties, we’s all your fam’ly. An’ we’s your bosses!’

  The tribal cuts on this daddy’s cheek showed that he didn’t come from here. The ‘mammy’, who was the tallest, sniggered and blew Leonard a disgusting kiss. And the most forward of the ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’ growled, ‘An’ we’s your teachers – we surely are gonna learn you!’ And they all laughed.

  Leonard let out the loudest wail in the world, and his legs finally gave way: his legs, and his consciousness. In a heap on the ground, he didn’t hear the final words. ‘You been sold to us by Big Fat Chance, pretty little smart boy!’

  Stephen Boameh was getting cross in his small hotel room up-country in Bonwire. He’d let his mobile phone run down, and the weak call he’d managed to get through received a ‘call failed’ message as if the line was busy – and Stephen Boameh’s home phone line was never busy, except when he was there, or ringing in.

  Who was on the line? Doctor? Hospital? The hotel wanting to tell him about some new job? While his mobile phone charged, he lay on his bed and watched a football match on a blinky television screen; but his mind wouldn’t settle. He was finished with work for the day. The car had diesel in the tank, oil in the engine, air in the tyres, and water and screen wash all ready for the morning. But if anyone had asked him the score in the match playing up there on a bracket near the ceiling, he couldn’t tell them. He couldn’t even have said which teams they were.

  That morning at the hotel, a photographer and her husband from Scotland had asked about hiring a car to go north. Euros, pounds or American dollars make visitors seem like millionaires in Ghana. So Mr and Mrs Paterson had hired Stephen and his car to take them north to the Kente weaving villages, where the woman wanted to photograph the patterns and the process. This was why Stephen kept his car bright and shiny. With his holdall in the boot he was ready for however many days and nights he might be away. Nana and Leonard understood this. It was his job. The one certain thing, though, was that Stephen would phone every night to talk to Leonard. He never missed. He might be early, he might be late, but some time before Leonard went to sleep he always heard his father’s voice.

  Tonight was going to be one of those late times. Stephen never used expensive hotel phones, so tonight he had to wait until his mobile charged. But Leonard was on holiday, so a late call wouldn’t be the problem it would be in term time.

  He fretted, though. He fretted.

  These street kids were too poor for drugs. Cheap drink was what they went to sleep on, if they could get it – and tonight they couldn’t. While two of them held Leonard down on a stuffed-out mattress, the others scavenged the rubbish tip for food. And when they came back with stale bread, and chicken bones with meagre meat still on them, they shared what there was between them. They were an outlaw band, but disciplined in their own hard way.

  Terrified, Leonard took nothing – he would have thrown up. His body was numbed with the loss of all hope. His eyes stared emptily, his mouth dried out. What those boys had said! No more Dad! No more Nana! No more home! He shivered and cringed, wept and snivelled, as he tried to imagine what they planned to do with him.

  He’d heard about the sort of things people did. It was men with girls, mostly, but it could be with boys. He blanked it from his mind. He just had to watch every move, listen to everything that was said, make himself as small as possible – and run if he could.

  Except that the mammy and the uncle were holding him down, with no chance of even getting up. And they were looking at him with eyes like killer wolves.

  Stephen Boameh shot off the bed and cracked his head when his mobile phone rang. The call was from his mother, Leonard’s nana. Her voice was high and shrill.

  ‘Stephen – you didn’t take Leonard with you?’ she screeched down the phone. ‘Is that boy with you?’

  ‘No! Why? What?’ Stephen kicked his feet free from the mosquito net.

  ‘He’s not come in! He went out this morning some time when I was cleaning, and he’s not come home…’

  ‘It’s eleven o’clock!’

  ‘I’ve been trying to get you! I never know where you are till you phone us!’

  Stephen Boameh would probably remember the curtains in this hotel bedroom for ever, marked all over with the hotel name. He stared at them, unblinking, as he took in this gut-punch news.

  ‘No friends came round for him, no … people… about?’

  ‘None that I saw. Stephen, son, you’ve got to come home!’

  ‘I’m coming! Look for his Day Book, see if there are phone numbers there for school friends – and you ring them, don’t mind the time.’

  ‘And the police?’

  ‘When I get there. But ring the Korle-Bu hospital, ask about… road accidents…’

  ‘I’ve done that. And the Trust hospital, and the Ridge. None with children, they’re saying…’

  ‘I’m getting home, fast as I can.’

  ‘Yes, son – really fast! And keep that mobile on!’

  Quickly, Stephen telephoned the town’s posher hotel where his passengers were staying – nice people who fully understood why he was leaving them. He threw some cedies at the night desk and ran out with his holdall to the car – to drive south as he’d never driven before in his life.

  Chapter Four

  Leonard would never let himself go to sleep again. When whatever was going to happen happened, he was going to be awake to fight it; on this he was determined. He wasn’t a tough boy, he was more like his father. If people said to Leonard Boameh, Do you want a fight? he’d say No! and he’d back off. But he wasn’t a coward: he didn’t think of himself as chicken: he just wasn’t aggressive. If he had to fight for something, he would. And if he had to fight for his life tonight – or for anything else – he’d fight until his last breath and the last drop of his blood.

  Unless he could escape first. But he had no plan. He wasn’t tied up, and no one was sitting on him any more, but when the street kids had finished swearing and smoking and making their backside noises, he was pushed away in a corner furthest away from the curtain of old sacks in the doorway. To get out, he would have to fly like a mosquito over their bodies – unless every one of these kids was asleep; and whenever he lifted hi
s head to look around, there were always night eyes glinting back at him, wide open.

  And the uncle had changed his message. Now he sort of smiled, ‘C’n jus’ kill you!’

  ‘You get yourself to sleep, boy!’ the daddy kid croaked, then gave him a kick when Leonard looked around once too often. ‘You gotta look real angel boy tomorrow.’ And Leonard’s numbness came back to cover him like an icy shroud. So, why would he have to look the angel boy tomorrow? Were these kids going to sell him off as a nice-looking little house-boy for someone? Were they going to trade him to someone for cedies or dollars? Were they heading over the border with him to Ivory Coast, to sell him off to another people? He’d never get back from that – no one ever did.

  He lay there with his eyes staring up, one small tight body in this huddle of tight bodies, except that these others were free…

  On the road south there seemed to be more stretches of pothole and broken surface than good tarmac, but at this time of night there were no lorries and no street vendors standing at the roadsides holding out their fruit or small meat, so Stephen pushed his old Vauxhall to the limits in his race home. Normally, with passengers poking their cameras out of his windows, or asking this or that about people’s lives, and the state of the country, and the flash floods, and the road-building programme, this journey would take him over three hours. Tonight he did it in two; and at just after one o’clock in the morning he yanked on his brake and ran into the house.

  And there was Nana’s crying face, her head shaking a great big ‘No!’

  ‘He’s not –?’

  ‘He’s not anywhere! Nothing to tell.’

  ‘Not anywhere?’ Stephen was rushing into his son’s bedroom, looking for some clue, some hope – perhaps a naughty boy’s note saying he was going for a sleepover somewhere. But Nana was right: there was nothing; the bed was made up and the cupboard tops tidy.

  Stephen pulled the sheet off the bed. Was there a note under there, perhaps?

  ‘I’ve looked there! I’ve looked every blessed where. I’ve telephoned people, telephoned the hospitals…’ But Nana threw open cupboards again, rather than standing idle.

  Stephen ran out of the room and telephoned 191; and, because of the time of the night, it wasn’t long before a police motorcycle came revving up to his door. And within three minutes of hearing about the missing boy, the policeman was on his radio getting a negative response from police headquarters; and within two minutes of that, he was asking the questions every policeman asks: the one that Stephen and Nana had not asked themselves.

  ‘Any money missing?’

  They checked. The household money was where it should be.

  ‘What about the boy? Any pocket money?’ The policeman’s face was hard. He was used to situations such as this.

  Stephen ran back into Leonard’s bedroom and reached for the wooden pot sitting on a top shelf among a line of small football trophies. His fingers felt in it, around its empty sides. And his look said everything. The boy had taken his money and gone off somewhere.

  ‘Then it looks to me like he’s gone of his own free will,’ the policeman said. ‘You been beatin’ him, or there’s some other bitterness in him?’

  ‘No!’ cried Stephen.

  ‘I swear by our sweet Lord Jesus, that boy gets all the loving any boy could get, from his daddy, and from me…’ Nana fell to her knees and started praying: ‘Loving Jesus, bring us back our boy…’

  ‘We got no problems,’ Stephen assured the policeman. ‘I’m away a lot – I was tonight, driven down from Bonwire; but the boy an’ me, we’re…’ And only now did Stephen Boameh start to cry, pointing at a recent photograph of the pair of them laughing in Kakum National Park.

  ‘Relatives?’ the policeman asked, impassive. ‘Aunts, uncles … mother?’ He eyed Stephen hard. ‘Has he run off to his mother?’

  Stephen’s face came out of his hands. ‘She passed on some years back…’

  The policeman was unmoved. ‘No favourite friends?’ Stephen shook his head.

  ‘Then I’ll log this. But I guess you better start lookin’ round your own circle, man. He has not been abducted.’

  ‘You want a photograph?’ Stephen asked, going off to find a recent school portrait in Nana’s bedroom.

  ‘Can, if you like.’

  With fumbling fingers, Stephen took the photograph out of its frame, deliberately not looking at his smiling boy in school uniform.

  Now the policeman unbent a fraction. ‘Nice-looking kid!’ he said. He tucked the photograph carefully into his pocket book, but he wrote down the details of Leonard’s name, date of birth and the school shirt he was wearing just as a matter of routine. As far as he was concerned, the kid had run away from home.

  Leonard thought they were all asleep. He must have drifted off himself for a bit, because he was suddenly woken up by a mosquito whining round his head. But he didn’t dare open his eyes straight off; he gave it a few moments, then opened them as if his eyelids might make a noise. He hooded his stare so that his eyes wouldn’t glint, but the stubs of candles stuck on nails had gone out and the place was dark, except for the glow of an oil drum fire flickering through the weave of the sack curtain. He listened intently. Surrounding him was snoring, and muttering, and the grinding of teeth; and in the distance he could hear the never-ending roar of the sea. Elmina was deep in its night.

  Leonard knew what he was going to do. It must have come to him in whatever sleep he’d had, because the plan was there, complete in his mind, when he woke. He knew it would be no good wriggling up and trying to tiptoe his trainers between these sleeping bodies – everyone was too tightly packed together. Softly-softly was the wrong approach.

  But what if he jumped up as fast as he could and ran across the bodies to the doorway, throwing himself out of it before anyone knew what was happening? Surprise – the direct way! The only way – he knew that. Some people slept soundly, like Nana, others lightly, like his dad, who would shoot up in bed the second Leonard approached his door. And there would be light sleepers in this hell-band of kids too.

  Yes, that’s what he would do… He lay there and his muscles rehearsed the escape. He tensed his elbows for the first lift-up, and his thighs for the knee-bend, and his legs for the straightening as he stood up; and in his mind he pumped his arms as he ran over the kids’ bodies to that glow behind the sacking. He relaxed his muscles, then found that he’d held his breath too long, and had to let it out slowly so as not to make a loud sighing noise. He kept his mouth shut, breathed in through his nostrils, and built up his lungs again, like an athlete going for the high jump. He was still lying flat, but now with the smallest wriggle he lifted his body for action, tensed his muscles again.

  He listened for the final time. It was still all snoring, and muttering, and grinding – and distant sea beckoning him with the sound of freedom.

  He counted in his head. One, two, three! And suddenly his muscles did what they’d rehearsed. He elbowed, he pushed, he stood, and he ran ducking for the sack doorway, over the bodies of the street kids…

  …To fall flat on his front as he trod on the first body, landing with a thump across the sleeping forms – which weren’t sleeping any more, but roused, and shouting, and cursing and hitting out at this object that had crashed across them.

  But it was the uncle who was widest awake. ‘One more time – an’ we kill you!’ And because he’d been hurt, he kicked up angrily at Leonard. Leonard was pushed back to his place, buffeted there, and left crying and calling for his dad.

  But it was his new daddy who answered him. ‘We tied your shoe laces, Angel Boy! We ain’t chicken brains!’

  In a new snivel of fear, Leonard lay flat, exhausted, not even able to defeat the mosquito that had been plaguing him all night.

  Chapter Five

  Before dawn, Stephen Boameh was at the quarries north of Accra. Whenever he drove visitors out of the capital, he did his best to avoid this area, where child labour was at its worst. Here in
fants as young as three could be seen breaking up stone for the roads and for concrete. Sometimes it was their parents, the adults, breaking up the large stones, stacked in piles for the youngsters to break into medium stones, with the really young children sitting on top of the piles to hammer them into small pieces.

  But sometimes – and everyone knew this – the children were abducted from poor neighbourhoods to do the work. Children who go missing in Ghana don’t take up any newspaper space, they’re not part of any story that sells.

  When the sight of a toddler breaking stones at the roadside couldn’t be avoided, Stephen told his passengers that Children in Need Ghana was doing something about the problem, but with a rub of his fingers he’d bemoan the fact that commerce and money are always more powerful than charity work.

  Early that morning, the quarries were the first places that he searched. But as the sun rose and the dust-covered families and the children on their own arrived in flaps and tatters of grey, there was no sign of Leonard. In his red school shirt he would have stood out like a bright flag – unless, of course, it had been ripped off his back.

  Stephen drove along all the roadworks where he knew that re-surfacing was going on. He parked time after time, was shouted and sworn at by overseers. He drove and drove, his eyes lighting up with any flash of red; he went back into Makola Market, where a jostle of buyers threaded through tight streets of shops and stalls, and he walked on to the shanty town beside the sea. But nowhere was there any sign of Leonard Boameh. He telephoned Nana every fifteen minutes, but the moment she answered him, the tone of her voice told him what he dreaded to hear. No word. It was as if his son had vanished off the face off the earth.

  In Elmina’s shanty town, the boys were getting Leonard ready. One of his aunties brought a chipped enamel bowl of sea water. What was this? He soon found out. Two of them forced him to kneel, and another two grabbed his head and ducked him under the water. He fought, but he was held tightly, and quickly brought out. This was to wash the soot and cinders out of his hair. He was made to stand up, and the uncle rubbed the grey off his knees with an old rag. Others pulled the creases out of his Blessed Wisdom top while his shorts had the dust smacked out of them, back and front, which hurt badly.