The Ghosts & Jamal

by Bridget Blankley

  The first time Jamal saw them with their security guards and their pieces of paper he ran to find Mham.

  ‘Mham, quick! Men have come to close the dump. They’re at the gate, they say we must leave. Where will we go, Mham? What will we do?’

  Mham was searching for aluminium cans in the back of a truck, trying to get the best rubbish before anyone else arrived. He looked up when he heard Jamal shouting.

  ‘Look at this, Jamal. This lot must have come from a restaurant or something. It’s full of cans.’ He lifted up a plastic bag full of Coke cans. ‘There’s tons more. Come up and help me.’

  ‘It’s too late. We’ve got to go. The men … they’re going to send us all to jail. Mham, what will we do?’

  ‘Chill, friend. It’s nothing. Good job I found this though. We’ll need the extra cash. Now come up and help. We need to get all the cans before anyone else gets here.’

  ‘But the men … the gate … jail.’

  ‘It’s nothing, Jamal. Really, it’s nothing. They aren’t going to build a recycling centre because that would cost too much – and they’ve already spent all the money.’

  Jamal looked at his friend. He had definitely heard the men saying that they were going to close the dump. Close the dump and send everyone to jail.

  ‘They won’t close the dump either. Just think about it, Jamal. Where would all this rubbish go if they closed the dump? People won’t stop throwing stuff away. It has to go somewhere and nobody else wants it. Just us. So climb up here and help me get these tins. We’ll all club together and, if we’ve got enough, they’ll leave us alone.’

  ‘And if we haven’t got enough?’ Jamal was still worried.

  ‘Then someone will go to jail – and stay there till we raise the cash. But don’t worry. We all chip in. Everyone gives what they’ve got saved. Even the mean ones. We’re all family here, Jamal. We have to be.’

  Mham was right. The men didn’t really want to close the dump. They didn’t really want the bother of sending anyone to jail either. They just wanted some extra money. They got money from the men who drove the garbage trucks and money from the rubbish pickers and a salary from the government. It wasn’t fair, but it was what they did. And – because they expected life to be unfair – the people on the dump paid up every month.

  Mham was right about the dump being like a family, too. There were people who would give you a meal if you were hungry and people who were mean to everyone. The trick was to make yourself useful, to have a special skill that people needed.

  The rubbish pickers all knew that Jamal attracted evil spirits. That was his special skill. They would pay him to take the spirits from the sick, or to distract the spirits so they didn’t notice a wedding, or a new baby.

  Mham and Jamal had lots of ways to get by – and not all of them were strictly legal. Some weeks they made enough money and some weeks they didn’t. But they worked together and somehow they never quite starved. They often went to bed hungry, though.

  Jamal missed his home and his comfortable life, but that home felt a long way away. Often when he talked about home he wasn’t sure if he was talking about his old home or his new home with Mham. He felt safe with the rubbish pickers; he’d even stopped looking for the ghosts. Some days he almost forgot about them altogether, but they hadn’t forgotten about him. They still had plans for his future.

  The Return of the Ghosts

  Jamal got used to feeling hungry but he was never really used to being dirty. He would run his hand over his head and try to catch whatever was crawling there. He remembered when the nurse had taken him to the barber’s stall and how smooth and clean his head had felt. It made him wish that he’d stolen some soap when he left the hospital, but he knew it wouldn’t have helped much. Water was too expensive for the boys to waste it washing themselves. So most of the time Jamal had dirt under his nails and dirt between his toes and dirt just about anywhere that could be dirty. It made his skin itch and it made people avoid him when he left the dump.

  He was sitting on a box, picking at the scabs that formed whenever he cut himself on the broken glass that people threw away, when he remembered why he had come to the dump. He had been looking for clues to help him understand the pictures on the ghost cylinders but he’d almost forgotten about the ghosts since he had met Mham.

  ‘Hey, Jamal, any metal? Petey’s down there; he’s paying real cash today.’

  Jamal looked at his friend before getting up and pushing a pole into the ground. He listened for the sound of metal hitting metal.

  ‘Yup, come up and help. This sounds heavy.’

  Mham scrambled across the fresh pile of trash, happy to dig if it meant having real cash they could spend at real food stalls. The boys worked together, soon filling the sack that Mham had brought up the hill, but it was all small, light stuff. That made the sack easier to carry, though it was worth less to the boys. Petey paid by the pound so they really wanted to reach the heavy lump of metal that Jamal had heard. They wanted to get to it quickly too, before any of the other pickers noticed.

  ‘Got it!’ shouted Mham. ‘Don’t know what it is though. I’ve not seen anything like this before. What do you think, Jamal? Jamal?’ He looked round but Jamal had stopped digging.

  ‘They’re back,’ he said, very quietly. ‘They’ve found me. I was meant to be finding them, trying to put things right, but I’d forgotten.’ He stared, not at Mham but at the red cylinder he was holding.

  ‘Good! Keep forgetting about them and help me with this. We’ve got to get it down to Petey before he goes.’

  ‘No! No, Mham, we can’t take it to Petey. It’s like the one I left at Grandfather’s, like the ones the ghosts left when they killed everyone. Look at the pictures, Mham. Look at them. What do they mean?’

  Mham shook his head. He needed the canister to make up the weight in the sack, but he could see that Jamal wasn’t going to let him sell it, not yet. Maybe, he thought, we could sell the other stuff now and keep the cylinder till next time. Maybe Jamal would have got over whatever was bothering him by then.

  ‘Look, I’ve got to get this stuff to Petey before he goes. You take the cylinder back to the hut and wait there. Don’t tell anyone you’ve got it. They’ll take it if you do. We need the money, Jamal. Do you understand? Keep it a secret.’ He wrapped the cylinder in a shirt that he’d picked up and handed it to Jamal.

  ‘Keep it hidden, remember. I’ll be back – soon as I can. Hide it. We’ll decide what to do when I get back.’ Then he took the metal rod from Jamal and raced down to the gate where Petey was weighing sacks and arguing over prices.

  Jamal hurried to their hut. He needed to hurry: the canister had reminded him of the ghosts and remembering them had called the spirits. Already the smell of the dump was being hidden by the smell of nutmeg. He needed to be in the hut before the spirits breathed on him. Even if the other pickers were afraid of him, they would still try to steal the cylinder if he dropped it. So Jamal ran down the rubbish heap to Mham’s hut. He just had time to hide the cylinder under his bed before the world around him disappeared and he fell to the ground. But the spirits didn’t stay long. He was awake, but shaky when Mham came in, holding a handful of copper coins.

  ‘Hot food tonight.’ He grinned.

  Jamal grinned too; they hadn’t been to the market for ages.

  ‘We have to look at this first,’ he said. ‘Look at the marks. What story are they trying to tell?’

  They both looked hard at the patterns on the cylinder. They weren’t very clear – the cylinder was scratched and dented – but they could make out most of them.

  ‘The pictures definitely make a story,’ Mham said. ‘Look! I think it goes like this: one drop of water fell on a tree, but the tree was magic and it didn’t need water so the leaves fell off. The magic leaves fell on the fish and freed them from a net. Then the fish swam through the river to the graveyard and the magic made the bones smile. Finally, a man caught a drop of the water in his hand and it made
his eyes grow large and his nose grow long and he turned into a dog.’

  ‘It’s a very good story, Mham, but I don’t think it can be the right story. It doesn’t explain the ghosts or why they killed all the animals and all the people when they came. It doesn’t say what we have to do. All stories tell you something. Yours was a good story, but it didn’t tell us what to do.’

  ‘What about the rest of it? The writing, I mean. Can you read the writing, Jamal? I can’t. Mum couldn’t afford the uniform so I didn’t go to school. How about you, Jamal? Did you go to school?’

  Jamal shook his head.

  ‘Can anyone here read?’

  ‘Some, I guess, but they’ll want us to pay a dash before they do. If we pay them we won’t have enough left to go to Mama Green and get some chicken.’

  The boys looked at the words on the cylinder and the coins next to it.

  ‘Let’s get some chicken,’ said Jamal.

  ‘Yes, and we’ll take the story tube with us. Maybe we’ll think better when our bellies are full.’

  Jamal fetched his book – he never forgot it when he left the dump. Then they wrapped the cylinder in a cloth and set out for the market. The chicken was good and they would have liked more, but Mama Green didn’t give her food away for free and they had spent most of their money.

  ‘Just enough left for a Fanta,’ Mham said, and they headed to a row of stalls where someone had a cooler full of drinks. Mham handed over the last of their money and offered the bottle to his friend. Jamal shook his head. Suddenly he thought of the people at the bottom of the mountain and the drinks he’d taken from the icebox. He didn’t want the sweet drink after all.

  A heavy hand landed on Jamal’s shoulder.

  ‘You don’t like orange drinks, boy?’ the man said. ‘That’s very strange.’

  Jamal tried to run – Mham had already disappeared. They both thought the same thing. They thought the man was going to say they were thieves.

  ‘I see your friend has left you. What will you do now?’

  Jamal wanted to say that he would go home, but the man was pushing him away from the market and he felt frightened. He tried to wriggle free and nearly got away, but he dropped his book and had to stop. He couldn’t leave his book. He bent to pick it up but the old man was already holding it. He’s very quick for such an old man, Jamal thought.

  ‘Where did you get this from, boy? Who did you steal it from? Tell me now, don’t lie. This is an expensive book. Who did you steal it from?’ The old man sounded even more unfriendly now. He sounded scary. Like the voice of God, thought Jamal. It was a voice you had to listen to.

  ‘No, sir. I didn’t steal it. It’s my book, sir. I brought it with me, from home. The Imam gave it to me. He said I should always keep it, sir. Please give it back, sir. It is my book, sir.’

  ‘Do you know what this book is, boy?’

  ‘No, sir. But it is a beautiful book, sir. Full of beautiful patterns, sir. I like to look at it. It is my book, sir. Please may I have it back?’

  ‘It is a beautiful book, boy, and you ought to learn the words. Would you like to learn the words, boy? To study the words in the book and to have plenty to eat and a bed to sleep in? Would you like that, boy? I’m sure you would like a bath, wouldn’t you? Come on, this way. Let us get you clean and washed and you can start your lessons with the other boys in the morning.’

  Jamal wished that Mham was still with him. Mham would have known what to do. He would know if they should trust this man. But Mham wasn’t there and the man did not seem so bad after all and Jamal really, really wanted a bath. The man also had Jamal’s book and he didn’t want to lose it.

  ‘Come on now, boy. Don’t worry about your clothes, we’ll get you new ones when we get to the school.’

  Jamal wondered what clothes the man was talking about – then he realised. He was carrying the cylinder – still wrapped in the old shirt – under his arm.

  The man must think I’ve got a change of clothes! Jamal laughed to himself. If I had a spare set of clothes, he thought, I’d sell them and buy some more chicken.

  Jamal decided to follow the man. Mham was left hiding in the market.

  School

  Jamal kept looking around for Mham but the man pushed him forwards, away from the market and the places he knew. They turned left then right then left again, until Jamal had no idea where he was. Eventually they reached a black metal gate set into a high white wall. Had it taken them fifteen minutes to get there or was it fifty? Jamal couldn’t be sure. The man had talked so much and walked so fast and turned so often that they might be in the next town or they might have doubled back to the market. Jamal was too confused to think.

  ‘Here we are, boy. Now you can stop being an urchin and learn to be a man of God. Come, let’s get you clean.’

  Jamal said nothing. He didn’t know what he was expected to say. The compound was enormous: his uncles’ compound, all the huts and the animal pens, the thorn fence and even his own hut and the meeting tree, they would all have fitted inside this compound. But there were no animals, no huts, no meeting tree, just a plain swept yard surrounded by long, low buildings. Jamal couldn’t think why so many buildings would be in one compound. He couldn’t think how they could feed all the people who must live here if there were no animals. He couldn’t think how they settled arguments if there was no meeting tree. He couldn’t think at all.

  ‘Ahmed, over here. Take young … What’s your name, boy? Take him to the showers and get him clean and find him some clean clothes.’

  The man didn’t wait for Jamal to answer; he just wandered off and left Jamal with Ahmed, a tall boy, or maybe a young man who hadn’t worked hard enough to build his muscles. Jamal felt lost. It didn’t seem very long ago that every day had been the same, and now everything kept changing. He wanted his old life back, but he didn’t seem to be getting any closer to finding the ghosts.

  ‘Come on. The showers will be hot now. Not like in the morning – they’re cold then. What’s your name? Where are your parents? Mine sent me here – did yours? How old are you?’

  Jamal decided that Ahmed was definitely still a boy. He didn’t talk like a man. Men saved words like water, only asking what needed answers, but Ahmed couldn’t stop asking questions.

  ‘I’ll leave you. There’s soap – do you like the smell? I do. I’ll get a towel and some clothes. How big are you? Smaller than me, definitely, but bigger than Jo. I’ll find something. I’ll be back. See you!’

  Jamal undressed, leaving his clothes on a bench with the cylinder. Then he stood under the shower until the smell from the dump ran from him and his skin stopped itching. He thought he’d found the only place in the city that was quiet. Then Ahmed bounced back into the room with the clean clothes.

  ‘I’ve got your towel. It’s a bit thin but it’s OK, really. They’re all a bit thin to be honest, but you get used to them. Here’s the clothes – same as mine. We all wear the same here. Hope they’re the right size.’

  How did he do it? Jamal felt short of breath just listening.

  ‘Wow! What’s this? Where did you get it? Look what it says! Did you read it?’

  Jamal was about to say that he couldn’t read when Ahmed started to sound out the letters:

  ung corp. item 174568. RICIN formula 74. US nufacture.

  Danger to life.

  Safe we must be worn. Respirators must be worn.

  Avoid contact with sin wash im ly.

  Envir m tl pollutant.

  Ahmed looked confused.

  ‘These words don’t make sense – well, not all of them. Why have you got this? It looks dangerous. Don’t touch it – I’ll get help.’

  Ahmed dashed from the shower room, shouting as he went.

  Jamal didn’t understand what the fuss was about. It wasn’t dangerous – not now, not now the ghosts had gone. He finished drying himself then pulled on the clothes that Ahmed had left. They felt strange and heavy on his shoulders, but they were clean and
it was good not to be dirty any more.

  The man from the market pushed through the shower room door. Sweat dripped down his nose and he was panting as he leant against the wall.

  ‘Where did you get this? Why have you brought it here?’

  Jamal had never seen anyone look so angry.

  ‘We found it in the dump, sir. We wanted to know what it said. No one at the dump could read it, sir. We just wanted to know what it said.’ Jamal was about to explain about the ghosts but the man from the market had already started to calm down and was suddenly talking in a soothing voice.

  ‘Ah, you found it, did you? You didn’t know what it was? Well, I’m pleased you brought it to me. I will get rid of it, safely. It is good that you brought it here.’ He held out his hand towards Jamal. ‘Come, boys, let us talk.’

  Jamal was confused; the man’s voice sounded reassuring now, but would he shout again if Jamal said the wrong thing?

  Ahmed pushed him slightly. ‘We’d better go,’ he said.

  That worried Jamal even more. Ahmed had become quieter, almost normal. The man kept smiling as he led them to his office. Jamal didn’t like his smile; it didn’t look quite right. It wasn’t a happy smile, or a kind smile. It was the sort of smile that said ‘I wish you hadn’t come to visit today as we have no food to give you,’ when your voice was saying, ‘Uncle, it is good that you and your family have come to see us.’

  But no one was visiting, so Jamal wondered what the man was trying to hide.

  ‘Now, boys, I will tell you about that thing that you brought here. It is a wicked thing. The soldiers use it to kill people. It comes from the Americans. This thing you have found is very wicked and it is the soldiers who own it and it is very bad.’

  Jamal knew it was bad – he had seen the ghosts snaking out of the cylinders in his compound and he had seen what they had done to the people on the mountain. But he had never seen any soldiers near the cylinders, only ghosts. He had seen soldiers in the hospital, but there had been no ghosts there. There had been the strange drink that had made him sleepy, but definitely no ghosts. He hadn’t seen any Americans either, or any government officials. Why was the man from the market saying these things?