Bitter Chocolate (10 page)

‘They make us do all the work, but they don’t allow us anything,’ Olivier grumbled.

‘They feed us and give us clothes,’ Pascal argued.

‘Whoopydoo,’ said Olivier. ‘They feed us crap and give us lovely blue T-shirts. We’re so lucky.’

Soon, they were divided into two groups and told they were going out on special missions to capture rebels. Pascal was horrified when he was put into a different group from Olivier, but was relieved to find that Seb was going to lead his group. They sat round a fire, drinking and smoking, while Seb issued instructions and handed out AK-47s. Pascal cradled the rifle in his lap, delighted to have regained Seb’s trust. He was excited. This was his chance to prove his worth. This was the chance to avenge the devastation of his family. That was all he needed to focus on.

‘We’ll have a team name,’ said Seb. ‘We’ll all have names. We’ll be the Forest Lions. You, Pascal, will be our Little Lion. Our mascot. And my bodyguard.’

Pascal glowed with pride while Seb gave names to the rest of the group. He couldn’t wait for night to fall, which was when they were going on their first mission. He watched as the sun sank beneath the horizon and darkness swallowed all but the things that were closest to him. It was as if nothing else existed now. He was waiting for a signal. When the signal came, he would leap into action. The Little Lion was ready to pounce.

‘Let’s go.’ Seb’s voice. ‘Remember what you’ve been told, Forest Lions. Don’t let me down.’

A low murmur spread among the other boys. In the heightened silence it sounded too loud to Pascal. The shuffling of their feet could have echoed that of an elephant stampede. He wanted Seb to tell them to be quiet, but all Seb did was order them to get a move on. There were six in the group – three men and three boys. The other two boys were in front, while Pascal brought up the rear, just ahead of Seb.

‘Stick with me, Little Lion, and I’ll see you’re all right,’ Seb whispered to Pascal, as they pushed through low bushes and vines and skirted round palms and ancient trees. ‘Just keep your eyes peeled and listen out for anything unusual.’

Pascal nodded in the dark. He felt as though all his senses were on red alert. The further they walked, the more his excitement grew. And all he could think about was that they were going to capture the rebels who had killed his father and possibly Angeline too. Hadn’t Seb told him so? Seb had given him the ability to embrace the knowledge of his father’s death, simply by offering him the possibility of revenge. Revenge would come soon, and revenge would be sweet. He was his father’s son. He owed it to his father.

Word passed down the line that they were coming to a village. Seb gave the order for everyone to flatten themselves on the ground and crawl. Pascal imagined himself as a snake, ignoring the scrapes and scratches to his elbows and knees, and telling himself that he wasn’t scared. Seb was breathing heavily behind him, more like a warthog than a snake, Pascal thought. He wanted to tell his leader that he was making too much noise. Was that what a bodyguard should do?

‘Be ready to fire,’ Seb ordered.

Be ready to fire. Was that what he had to do? Capture the rebels. Fire at the rebels? Kill the rebels? Capture the rebels. Take the rebels back with them. Fire at the rebels?

Gunfire.

‘Run, now. Run in and shoot anything that moves. It’s them or you.’

A rough hand on his shoulder, dragging him to his feet, pushing him forward.

‘Go, Little Lion, go. Don’t fail me now.’

Don’t fail me now. Go. It’s them or you, Little Lion. Gunfire. Shoot anything. They killed your father. Gunfire. Where from? Shouts. Loud screams. Pascal raised his rifle. A woman, screaming. A woman. More gunfire. An explosion. His father’s face. More shouts. Something jolting his shoulder. A child’s voice. Pounding feet. Another explosion. A flash of white light. Screams. Pounding feet.

‘Time to go, Little Lion. Mission accomplished.’

Another explosion and a huge burst of gunfire. A tug at his T-shirt. Pascal dropped his rifle to his side, turned and ran as fast as he could. He could just make out the shapes of three men fleeing before him. Behind him, more feet were pounding. He hoped it was the other Forest Lions.

When, finally, they arrived back at their village camp, daylight was breaking and it had started to rain. Pascal threw down his rifle and rushed to the pokey to be sick.

‘Too much excitement?’ Seb chuckled when he reappeared.

Pascal looked around. He could only see two of the other boys, and Olivier’s group had not yet returned.

‘Where’s Raoul?’ he asked.

‘Let’s just say he stayed behind,’ said Seb.

Pascal tried to force the meaning of what Seb was telling him to sink in, but he couldn’t make sense of it. ‘We didn’t capture any rebels,’ he muttered instead.

‘They didn’t seem to want to be captured,’ Seb replied casually. ‘But they won’t trouble us again.’ He handed Pascal a cigarette. ‘You did well today,’ he said. ‘I’m proud of you.’

Chapter 22

Screams. Screams, tearing the air to shreds with their desperation. Words, loud but incoherent. Worthless words. Then panic, stripping away sense and smothering senses. Flames, licking at the dryness of grass. Lapping at the vulnerability of straw. Legs, pumping hard but going nowhere. Going nowhere and going everywhere. Heart, beating against the confines of a heaving ribcage. Beating so loudly that it confuses itself with the rampant
rat-a-tat
that had broken the night. The ground, rising up to meet the sky, then falling down under a sunken sea.

Then there were people, so many people, thousands of people, people for as far as the eye could see, their own eyes blank and fathomless. A rigid silence enveloped them. They were waiting and waiting, drowning in the rain that fell and soaked their souls. They had waited for so long already, hearing distant promises pass them by, one after the other after the other.

‘Where is home?’ a child wailed. ‘I was never there.’

‘Where is home?’ some people moaned, a sound so low and muttered that it spread and mutated like a Chinese whisper, until every single person called out, ‘Let us home! We can’t stay here!’

Bicycle chains crashed against the ground, slashing the bare earth, which billowed, red and angry, hovered, then settled to dust again, a bleak and failed attempt at rebellion. Nobody dared move when the chains rattled for a second time. Blood drained from petrified faces. In an instant they turned into ghosts that were doomed to wander for ever.

And then the screaming began again. Pascal turned and heard his father’s voice telling him to run, telling him to run, telling him to run, before a loud explosion devoured his words and a wall of flame engulfed his ashen face.

‘Pascal. Wake up, Pascal.’

‘Papa?’ Pascal wrenched himself from his sleep. His father was calling. He had to save him.

‘Are you all right, Pascal?’

‘Yes, Papa, I’m all right. I can’t see you, though.’ Pascal felt around in the dark until his hands fell on warm shoulders.

‘It’s me, Kojo,’ he heard. ‘You were having a nightmare, Pascal.’

Pascal held on tight while he fought with the realisation that this wasn’t his father. It took him a moment to remember who Kojo was.

‘You were shouting and screaming,’ his friend said. ‘You scared the life out of me.’

‘You’re not the only one,’ several other voices joined in.

‘Sorry,’ Pascal mumbled.

‘That was a bad one, eh?’ whispered Kojo. ‘I haven’t heard you shout out like that for a long time.’

Pascal nodded. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and lay back down. He felt exhausted. He settled his thoughts and remembered that he had to stay strong. The nightmare convinced him more than ever that he had to go home and find out what had happened to his family.

‘Are we still going?’ Kojo whispered again.

‘Yes,’ said Pascal. ‘And very soon. You’d better be ready.’

‘I will be,’ Kojo replied. ‘You need me.’

Pascal smiled briefly at the suggestion that he should need someone so much younger than himself, but as he lay there in the dark he had to admit that he didn’t want to go on his own. He was scared. Scared, not of being caught, but of the demons that might return and swallow him up. He had come to rely on Kojo more than he could have imagined, just as Kojo relied on him. He had to make sure that he didn’t let his friend down. He had to plan their escape so meticulously that there was no chance of it failing.

‘Will you be scared?’ Pascal asked.

‘You bet. I’ll be pooing my pants. But anything’s better than staying here.’

‘Once, after we escaped from the rebels who took our village, we were on our own in the woods: me, Olivier – the cousin I’ve told you about – and my other cousin – Kamil, he was called. We needed to keep running, but Kamil sat down on a stump and froze. He was too petrified to move. When the rebels caught up, he screamed and cried and begged, and we told him to run, but he didn’t and . . . and yet he was a bully. He was always telling everyone else what to do, me especially.’

‘What happened to him?’ Kojo asked.

Pascal shook his head. ‘They took him. I don’t know. We legged it into the bushes and got away – that time. I never saw him again.’

‘Do you think . . . ?’ Kojo hesitated to ask.

Pascal closed his eyes. ‘One day I’ll find out, not just about him, but about Olivier and the rest of my family too.’

They had talked before about their families, Kojo much more than Pascal. For Pascal it was too painful to speak about anything in detail, other than his childhood days with his mother and father, Angeline and Bijou. Kojo had had to piece together what had happened to him since then through little snippets of information that Pascal dropped into conversations during unguarded moments, most of which came to an abrupt halt or change of subject.

‘I felt guilty, leaving him. We both felt guilty. But what could we do? We thought they were going to kill us. They had guns and knives. I was ten . . .’ Pascal’s voice trailed away again.

‘You had no choice,’ whispered Kojo.

‘I still feel guilty now,’ Pascal murmured. ‘I’ll always feel guilty. And not just about that.’

Kojo waited, scarcely daring to breathe.

‘There are things I’ve done, been forced to do . . . I try not to think about them. I don’t want to think about them.’ Pascal angrily turned in his bed, hissing this last sentence, and didn’t say another word.

Chapter 23

There were more missions. Olivier didn’t return from one. Seb said he had run away, but Pascal wasn’t sure he believed him. He didn’t think Olivier would have gone without him, even though Olivier had changed since they left home. Anything was possible.

Pascal was aware that he too had changed. He had needed to. He had become reliant upon the cigarettes and the drinks that Seb and his friends plied them with. They made him bold and dulled his sensibilities. They allowed him to cope with the boredom of daily life in the village camp and the constant hunger. They helped him to muffle the pain that random memories brought when they slipped through the barriers he had built. When he took part in a mission, they allowed him to embrace the character of Little Lion and disregard the quiet little boy who had failed to live up to his father’s expectations.

Pascal didn’t believe much of what Seb told him. During his more lucid moments, he doubted the purpose of the missions they were carrying out. He had heard women screaming. He had heard children crying. Were they the families of rebels? Did rebels put their cause before the lives of their children? What cause were Seb and his followers serving?

Pascal began to have nightmares. In them, Seb became inextricably linked with the death of his father. Sometimes the nightmares continued well into the day, leaving Pascal consumed with anger and hatred for the men who were controlling his life.

‘You’d better watch yourself,’ Seb had said to him one day, when Pascal refused to clean his rifle. ‘You’re not here to do as you please.’

‘Why
am
I here?’ Pascal demanded to know. ‘Why shouldn’t I just walk out and go home?’

‘Nobody’s stopping you,’ Seb said, leering. ‘But if you try, you might just get shot down by one of those nasty men who are prowling the woods in search of boys like you.’

‘You’re making that up, and anyway why would they shoot me?’ Pascal retorted. ‘I haven’t done anyone any harm.’

‘Haven’t you?’ Seb smirked again. He held up Pascal’s rifle and pointed it at him. ‘This gun says you have.’

‘Don’t point guns at people,’ Pascal said irritably, realising at the same time how ridiculous he sounded. He stormed away in an effort to prevent the demons Seb had conjured up from taking a grip on him.

Pascal’s thoughts turned more and more often to escaping. He no longer felt any excitement at going on a mission. The excitement had turned to dread. The only way he could cope at all was by drinking and smoking until he was numb. When the effects wore off, he didn’t much like what he was left with.

Little Lion is growing up fast and is desperate to leave the pride
, he thought grimly, turning the word ‘pride’ over in his mind and knowing that it was a false pride he had felt when he wore his lion badge.