Angel Boy Read online

  Angel Boy

  For Esi

  Angel Boy copyright © Frances Lincoln Limited 2008

  Text copyright © Bernard Ashley 2008

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 and in the USA in 2009 by

  Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 4 Torriano Mews,

  Torriano Avenue, London NW5 2RZ

  www.franceslincoln.com

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electrical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available on request

  ISBN 978-1-84507-814-0

  Set in Baskerville

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United Kingdom

  Angel Boy

  Bernard Ashley

  Chapter One

  He was definitely going to do it. Only a week of the school holiday gone and the rest of it stretching into the distance like an empty sea that would take forever to cross. Thirty-five days to go, eight hundred and forty hours: and how sad was it to be longing for the start of term?

  Life was on heavy time for Leonard Boameh. Nana was no fun, sweeping his feet off with her broom, elbowing him away from her hot pots, reaching her long fingers at him for yesterday’s shirt off his back, too busy for a tickle these days – all the while singing the same old hymns in her high church voice: What a friend we have in Jesus…! Well, a friend like Jesus could do Leonard a favour right now – by turning up for a game of something. Any friend would have been fun, but Leonard’s house was too far from Blessed Wisdom Primary for him to invite his school mates, and the Cantonment District Elementary School kids who lived nearby didn’t want to know him.

  So he was going to do it. He’d made up his mind.

  His dad was great. When his dad was home they kicked a ball around outside, and argued about Manchester United and Accra Hearts of Oak in the Ghana Premiership, and looked over each other’s shoulders at the news from the Graphic Sports. They jaunted out in the car and brought back pizza and McDonalds, they squeezed together in an armchair and watched the English football beamed up from South Africa, and they had sessions on the internet. But his dad wasn’t home that much, and Nana was no substitute. Even if Leonard could get her outside, she couldn’t head a ball, she never dived for a low shot when she was in goal, and the internet made her flap her hands at the computer and go rattling on about the superiority of books.

  So he had to do it, he just had to.

  He’d tried to get himself out of the place another way, but he couldn’t. He’d had a go at persuading his dad to let him go to work with him. But his dad worked out of the Nile Hotel and didn’t want him around. No, he would have liked him around, he said, but it wasn’t appropriate.

  What was appropriate was for his dad to polish his car and clean the cracked windscreen and vacuum the red dust off the floor mats – and then most days he’d be doing a job for one of the hotel clients. He’d take them into town, to Makola Market, or to the National Cultural Centre, or the Nkruma Museum; or, with his overnight holdall in the boot, he’d take them off on a trip. Without warning to Nana, except for a message from his mobile, he’d go up-country to the Mole National Park, or to the weaving sheds where Kente cloth was made, or along the coast to the slave forts. But even if there was a spare seat in the car, Leonard couldn’t sit in it – the clients wouldn’t want it, his dad said.

  And his dad would be away for days. Leonard would get his nightly phone call, and be told to be good for Nana, night-night, God bless. But Leonard didn’t think Nana was good for him. She was getting to be a really old person.

  So he was definitely going to make his break, just for a few hours. And today was the day.

  When he’d washed to Nana’s satisfaction, he put on his second-best school shirt, the redness slightly faded by the pummel of Nana’s tub. It was a careful choice, because he could wear it with his shorts and still look serious, with the holy cross on the pocket badge giving off a look of piety. At school all the boys had to wear shorts, and Leonard’s dad insisted that he wear them in the holidays, too. ‘Relish your childhood!’ he’d say. ‘Kids grow up too fast!’ Of course, Nana went along with that, and Leonard had no mother to appeal to – she had died when he was born.

  He emptied his wooden pot of the ten thousand-cedie notes he’d saved, and tucked them in his pocket. He put a bottle of water and some fruit into his school slipper-bag and pulled the drawstring tight. It was ten o’clock and at this hour the minibuses everyone called tro-tros wouldn’t be too full of people going to work. And, not wanting to tell any lies to Nana, he drifted out to the yard as if he was going to play a game – and slipped out through the gate at the side.

  Leonard Boameh was away on his own day trip.

  He walked through the back alleys to Nsawam Road, the best place in Accra to find a tro-tro. They stopped wherever you stood waving at them, with a driver’s mate hanging out shouting for business and taking the money. Everyone shifted up along the seats to let new people in, mostly going into the town – but tro-tros went up-country and east and west, too – it all depended which roadside you stood on. They were cheaper than state-run buses, and the railways were hopeless.

  But Leonard had got it wrong. Crowds of people were standing waiting for tro-tros on Nsawam Road. It was a busy day for Makola Market. Women and boys were still walking there, bowls balanced on their heads with fruit and iced water and stacked-up toilet rolls. The sight of the iced water reminded Leonard how hot and sweaty he felt, and wearing shorts suddenly didn’t seem a bad idea at all.

  Head held high, balancing his secret, he walked with the people going to market as far as the Cathedral roundabout and turned right on to Castle Road – where, although the tro-tros were fewer and further between, there were fewer people, too. And he didn’t mind where he went, so long as it was away from Cantonment District for a few hours.

  ‘You want towards Cape Coast, Elmina?’ a tro-tro mate shouted at him, as a dusty minibus swerved into the kerb.

  ‘How long does it take?’ Leonard asked.

  The mate cracked his fingers as if his arm was a whip. ‘All the way – two hours, about.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Tell you when we get there. Come on, abarima!’ He held the door open, and people moved along. The tro-tro was half-full, with a white backpacking couple as well as local people. Leonard knew that the more people there were in the bus, the cheaper the fare: but time was important, too. He had to get back by tea-time. He was sure he could afford about four hours away, though – so he got in.

  As he settled on the hot seat, he planned his day. He’d be there and back well before the telephone call from his dad that evening. His dad was up-country until Friday, and although Leonard knew Nana would scold him, he wouldn’t have to see his dad’s disappointed look down the phone. And wouldn’t his teacher approve of him going to Elmina?

  Elmina was one of the places where the Europeans had built their forts for imprisoning slaves before they were shipped off in shackles to be sold in America. Children studied it in school, and if Leonard could say that he had seen with his own eyes ‘the Door of No Return’, then he would definitely get house points for putting his holidays to good use. He could take a quick look at the place while the driver and the mate got their dinner, and come back in the same tro-tro.

  So his adventure would be useful, as well as getting him out of Accra for the day.

  He sett
led into his seat and enjoyed the breeze through the open window as the tro-tro picked up speed on the coast road heading west. The other Africans in the tro-tro sounded as if they were going to Elmina to see their families, but the backpackers next to Leonard had a guide book between them. They were holidaymakers, the same as him, so Leonard offered them water from the bottle in his bag.

  And, having made friends with them, Leonard told them a made-up tale about going to Elmina for holiday homework – doing what he hadn’t done to Nana, telling lies… But going off on an adventure called for a little bending of the truth, didn’t it?

  Chapter Two

  The backpackers’ names were Chris and Vicky, and they were from England. They were younger than his dad, but a bit older than Leonard’s teacher at Blessed Wisdom. They were serious people, but they smiled a lot and agreed with each other in quiet voices – unlike the noisy people in the seats behind.

  ‘Are you going to see the fort at Elmina?’ Chris asked Leonard.

  ‘Yes, I’m going to see the fort at Elmina,’ Leonard told him – saying it loudly enough for everyone else in the tro-tro to hear.

  ‘You learn about it at school?’

  Leonard nodded, his head dangerously near to coming off his shoulders.

  ‘Then would you come round with us? Tell us what you think…?’

  ‘I surely will,’ Leonard said, sagely.

  ‘It would be good to get your impressions…’

  In about the time the tro-tro mate had said, the bus arrived in Elmina. It dropped the gossipy women off in the town, near a knot of mean-looking street kids, their stares at Leonard through the glass making him turn his head in the other direction. It went on up to the fort with the three remaining passengers, where Leonard counted out his fare. It used up just about half of what he had.

  ‘What time, here?’ he wanted to know from the mate, needing to be sure that he’d get back home in time.

  ‘You go around,’ the mate said to Leonard and the backpackers, flicking his fingers at the fort. ‘We come back…’ And he nodded his head in the general direction of the small car park, as time to go was when things happened, not what numbers the hands of a clock pointed to. He banged on the roof for the driver to be off before they got embroiled in the commotion running up the track – a crowd of older kids chasing up from the car park and immediately surrounding the two backpackers.

  ‘What’s your name, Boss?’

  ‘What’s yours, Missus?’

  ‘Where you from?’

  ‘You got an e-mail address?’

  Vicky walked on. ‘He’s Chris and I’m Vicky, from London.’

  ‘London! England! We love England!’ the boys called after them as Leonard hurried with his new friends up the slope to the fort entrance. ‘Give England our love!’

  Leonard kept his shirt well tucked in. He’d looked at the boys. For school holiday kids they were far too neat in their clean shirts and jeans: they looked more like students on a Sunday outing. By contrast, beyond the fort, down by the beach, men and boys were stripped off and sweating, hacking at big tree trunks to make dug-out fishing canoes. On a nearby stretch of land set up with goal posts other youths were playing football, everyone hot and scruffy. No one around Elmina looked as neatly turned out as these boys at the fort entrance – quite different from the raggedy boys Leonard had seen in the town, those kids with mean, hungry-looking faces. That scruffy lot had seemed threatening, but these tidy ones were puzzling. What was their game? Suddenly Leonard suddenly didn’t feel so comfortable far away from home, and he hurried to keep up with the backpackers going into the fort.

  But how was he going to go inside? His pocket money didn’t take account of entrance fees. He just about had enough for the tro-tro back home. What should he do? Could he skulk just inside the entrance until Chris and Vicky came out? He didn’t fancy being alone with either set of the Elmina kids.

  ‘Will you be our guest?’ Vicky suddenly asked him, turning from the pay box.

  ‘Sure, do us the honour of coming round with us?’ Chris said.

  To which Leonard was happy to say ‘thank you’.

  They were in the company of a guide – a young woman who took them all over the fort, and didn’t spare the horrors of the place. First, she stopped them at a plaque on the wall, and in a quiet voice read aloud the words on it.

  IN EVERLASTING MEMORY OF

  THE ANGUISH OF OUR ANCESTORS.

  MAY THOSE WHO DIED REST IN PEACE.

  MAY THOSE WHO RETURN FIND THEIR ROOTS.

  MAY HUMANITY NEVER AGAIN PERPETRATE

  SUCH INJUSTICE AGAINST HUMANITY.

  WE, THE LIVING, VOW TO UPHOLD THIS.

  She then asked the three of them to join her in their own silent prayers, and after shutting his eyes – and a sudden feeling of the rightness of coming here, standing where he was and praying for his forebears who had been treated so cruelly – Leonard took his cue from the others, and followed the guide, who had walked discreetly on.

  Leonard knew from his history lessons what had happened in this place – but that didn’t stop a swirling anger from burning inside him as he saw for himself the scenes of those terrible things. He found himself in those same dark, arched dungeons where there was no light, no sanitation. His breath seemed to leave him as he pressed his hands against the unforgiving walls of the dungeon where the women had been kept, some of them taken out to be abused by the slave traders and thrown back again.

  He went down more steep steps, the same steps where the men had been pushed, shackled at the ankles in spiteful chains. He stood beneath the sculptured skull above a dark doorway and his stomach rolled with fear as he looked into the condemned cell where they had thrown men and women who disobeyed and locked the heavy door, until they died of thirst and hunger.

  Leonard ran his hands down the walls, felt the rusted shackle-rings. And tears came to his eyes as he counted back in time the way his teacher had done in the history lesson. He was overcome by the feeling that he could almost touch his great-great-great-great Nana, who could almost have been sold as a slave. He pictured the anguish on such a sweet face, and he felt helplessness and horror and anger.

  Finally he stood at the Door of No Return, that terrible, gate-like aperture, a sort of long, barred window in the thick wall. Through here the slaves were taken out and down to the canoes on the beach: this was the door through which no one who left was ever to come back to their homeland. It would be generations, Leonard knew, before their descendants would see this dreadful place.

  He stood looking at the bright light coming in through the door, so bright against the dark inside that it was hard to see his backpacker friends in the shadows. And he heard the sound of quiet crying, at first imagining it was the ghost of one of those slaves. But it was Chris, and the guide, too – who came to this door many times a day, and was still so upset at times that she couldn’t keep back the tears.

  The beginning of wisdom is knowing who you are. Draw near and listen.

  She quoted the Swahili proverb to Leonard, and put a hand on his shoulder. And she told quietly of those who had gone through this door: mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and children – stripped, branded and separated from each other for all time. She unlocked the door for them, to let them see down the steps to the canoes below.

  Vicky took a photograph, and apologised for doing so. And they left, passing one of the churches within the fort where the slave traffickers had worshipped, thinking there was nothing un-Christian about doing what they did.

  So affected was Leonard by what he’d seen that he no longer felt that he was in the real-life world of today: it was like leaving a cinema wearing some other, imaginary, skin.

  As soon as they came out of the fort, Chris and Vicky were surrounded by the smart boys who had met them going in, but now they had conch shells in their hands, painted with the names of their new English friends, the names that they’d eased out of them.

  Chris was being given one. I
t was painted with the words:

  TO OUR BRITISH BROTHER MR CHRIS.

  FROM YOUR BROTHERS ISAAC,

  TIM AND FREDERICK.

  HAVE A NICE TRIP.

  [email protected] AT ELMINA CASTLE.

  And Vicky had the same, except that she was an honorary sister.

  Suddenly Leonard realised what these boys were up to: now they were hounding the backpackers all the way down the slope, demanding American dollars for their conch shell gifts. It was what Leonard’s father called ‘a scam’.

  It was while the backpackers were busy finding dollars as they hurried back to the tro-tro, arguing and shaking their heads when whatever they offered was not enough, that their attention went off their young friend from Accra.

  As the group moved on, Leonard was suddenly surrounded by three of the scruffy street kids from the town. They grabbed him, mean and menacing.

  ‘You come with us!’ their leader said – a kid with a tribal-cut face and a twisted mouth. ‘We got you!’

  And all at once Leonard was off his feet and being carried, squirming and shouting, down to the teeming town, unheard by anyone who mattered.

  What sort of a terrible adventure was this?

  Chapter Three

  The back ends of most poor towns are tips. People live in shacks, if they’re lucky, or else they sleep wherever their hungry bodies fall down. The have-nots are left to scavenge in the town’s rubbish amid the sickly smell of burning in empty oil drums, where fires blacken the food cans and beer tins that might be sold for scrap. Here, under rusted corrugated sheeting, was where the street kids lived – the place to which they frog-marched Leonard. The three who had captured him were joined by others as he was taken struggling over the harbour bridge and past the huts and fishing boats. No one paid this group of homeless kids much attention. Homeless kids and beggars were everywhere around towns like Elmina.