Angel Boy (4 page)

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.

B
efore 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 infants 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.

‘Yeah!' His tall mammy looked down at him. ‘A real angel boy!'

Leonard's insides churned with the fear of the condemned. He tried to be brave, he tried to stand up tall, the way he would for the stick at school, he thought of his dad and his nana and the Lord Jesus, and he tried to say a prayer – but he couldn't find any holy words, just ‘Help me!' His mouth was as dry as the ever-drifting smoke, his eyes smarted, but they wouldn't clear because he was cried out.

‘What you gotta do…' – the tribal-cut leader was up close again – ‘you gotta be polite, an' the laughing-boy, an' more nicer than the student kids…' Leonard frowned, concentrating. Even in his fear, he had to learn what might keep him alive.

‘The conch-shell boys, the college kids…'

Suddenly Leonard realised what he meant. The smart-looking boys he'd seen were students. Now he knew why they'd been so much cleaner than these street kids: hadn't his dad told him about the Accra boys who, like them, were looking for sponsors to pay for their education?

‘We don' get to take nothin' when them college kids is at the fort. But
you
can. You stand up by the entrance above them, an' you smile in your smart school shirt, an' you ask people all polite for dollars. You got me?'

Leonard nodded, while inside he heaved a great sigh of relief. He wasn't going to be killed, or sold across the border to another country. He wasn't going to be taken off and have nasty stuff done to him.

He was going to have to beg.

‘We kill you!' the uncle reminded him. ‘We're near, an' you say one word or you try to run…' and he kicked Leonard hard in the groin. The kick doubled Leonard over, made him want to vomit, the empty pain rolling deep down.

‘You got that?' The mammy pulled him up by his hair.

Leonard managed a nod.

‘We're nice as your ol' mammy when you know us. An' we're your family now.' The daddy rubbed his fingers together. ‘So you get lots o' dollars, right? We eat top tonight.' And his belly rumbled.

Everyone stared at Leonard.

Leonard nodded again.

‘What's your name?'

‘Leonard. Leonard Boameh.'

The daddy grinned at him. ‘You
was
Leonard Boameh!' He made it sound like Ashanti royalty. ‘Now you “Angel Boy”. You got that?'

Leonard stared at the ground. Even his name was being stolen from him.

‘
What
your name?' the mammy asked.

It took Leonard a few seconds to say it, beating another groin-kick by just a vowel. ‘Angel Boy,' he said.

They whooped and cheered, and spat, and
punched the air as if they'd won some prize.

‘Right, Angel Boy, we's goin' to work!' And in the same tight formation that had brought him there, Leonard was hustled off the rubbish tip, past the boats and the harbour, through the fort car park, and up beyond the staring conch students to the gate of the fort – where the uncle hid beyond him in a small hollow in the ground.

The other street kids slouched down the slope towards the car park, trading insults with the conch students, and as the sun rose higher everyone waited for the tourists to come, with Leonard standing there like a tethered goat.