Children of the Street (11 page)

He logged off quickly and stood up. He knew there was something wrong with him. He was, after all, a psychologist. Then again, those in his profession were often the most psychologically flawed.

A
s Obi drove past the Tetteh Quarshie Interchange, he said to Dawson, “The doctor is a lovely man.”

“I understand you’ve worked for him about twelve years.”

“Yes, please. When I first came, I was poor. I didn’t know anything at all, at all. But I struggled to learn. Windows, doors, electricity, water—I can fix anything. That fountain in the doctor’s garden, I made it myself.”

“I think you need to come to
my
house then,” Dawson said with a laugh.

Obi chuckled. “Please, you just tell me, I will come.”

“Thank you. I’ll remember that.”

“But how the doctor treats me,” Obi continued, becoming serious again, “it’s like I’m his family. He is the one who bought me this truck three years ago, and even before that, he helped me get furniture and a new gas stove for my house.”

“He has a good heart, obviously.”

“Oh, yes. Every day I thank the Almighty for guiding me to the doctor.”

“The pictures of the woman and three kids in his office—that’s his family?”

“Yes, please. But four years ago, the wife died. He has been sad ever since that day. He loved her very much.”

“What happened—to the wife, I mean?”

“Accident. A terrible one like you’ve never seen. She was driving to Cape Coast.”

“And the children?”

“They are all in different places abroad, but the oldest one says she will come back to Ghana soon. I know the doctor wants her to stay in his house.”

“He’s lonesome.”

“Oh, yes—very lonesome. When his children come to see him, and the oldest one brings the grandchildren too, he is so happy.” Obi laughed, as though his boss’s joy was being channeled through him.

The expected rain began in earnest. Dawson asked Obi to drive his motorbike to a repair shop in Asylum Down. Once his bike had been dropped off, Dawson insisted on taking a taxi despite Obi’s repeated offers to give him a ride home.

“You’ve done more than enough, my friend. Thank you.”

He gave Obi a generous tip for his trouble.

19

Comfort Mahama was sixteen. She was copper-colored, a coveted hue, with a tiny waist that flared to those big, bouncy, round buttocks that drove men crazy. Starting late Monday afternoon, she loitered around the Timber Market waiting for customers.

Most of the time, she was a head porter at Agbogbloshie Market up the street, carrying neck-breaking loads of merchandise for people. It just didn’t pay enough. In her mind, Comfort was doing what she needed to do to survive. There was no right or wrong about being an
ashawo
, no good or bad.

She glanced at the gathering storm clouds. Rain ruined business. Her gaze shifted, roaming languidly across the crowded market scene—people haggling over plywood or paint, a woman selecting herbal preparations from the fetish section, porters lumbering through with planks of wood on carts. One of them, a ragged boy of about seventeen, came up to her after delivering his consignment and offered her fifty pesewas.

She shook her head. He must be joking.

He called her a nasty name and moved on. Comfort flicked her head with contempt and stuck her tongue out at his back.

A few meters away, down a row of timber, a fight had broken out between two porter boys over who was to get the job transporting a pile of plywood. No one seemed to want to stop the brawl. Quite the contrary, a small crowd was collecting to watch. One of the boys was much bigger than the other, who was getting thrashed. After a few minutes of being thoroughly beaten, he begged for mercy, picked himself up, and limped off swollen and battered.

Comfort looked away. These fights were entertainment only because there was nothing better to watch. She shifted her weight slightly, aware of a burning sensation in her loins. She was using some medicine from the fetish market, but it didn’t seem to be working. She still had a yellowish discharge.

Someone hissed at her and beckoned. She sauntered over. He was about nineteen, she guessed, not bad looking.

“I like you,” he said, smiling and showing a gap in his teeth that suited him.

“Four cedis.”

“Oh, it’s too much!”

“How much you want to pay?”

“One fifty.”

They haggled until they agreed on two fifty and then took a walk. The commercial area of the market thinned out. Standing outside a tent rigged up to a wall was a gaunt man. Flash, as people called him, might have been in his twenties, but he looked like forty. He was wearing orange trousers and a bright blue shirt open almost to his navel. Comfort wondered where he got his ridiculous clothes. No one dressed like that.

This turf belonged to a guy called Tedamm. Everyone knew Tedamm. Flash collected user fees from the ashawos and paid Tedamm the larger portion.

Comfort handed him seventy-five pesewas. He looked at it as if it wasn’t money.

“You short fifteen pesewas,” he said.

“Ho!”
she exclaimed. “But you charged seventy-five last time.”

“Price go up.”

Sullenly, she topped off the fee.

“Wait small,” Flash told her.

She ignored him while he stared at her without blinking the whole time they stood there. She hated the man. They waited for the muffled groans from inside the tent to die down. The girl came out first, her face dispassionate, then the man, zipping himself up.

Flash nodded permission to Comfort, and his eyes followed her as she went in with her customer.

A
fterward, Comfort reflected she would have to do better than this. Two fifty minus the tent user fee didn’t leave her with much. The first drops of rain began, which promised even more misery. She started out to Nkrumah Circle to pick up some more customers. It was a long walk, but she could charge more there than at the Timber Market.

By the time darkness fell, the downpour was in full force. She took partial shelter under the roof of a vendor’s kiosk. After a while, a van sidled up to her. She looked in through the passenger window. The man inside nodded at her. She got in, they pulled off. Soaked, she was grateful to be out of the rain.

“How much?” he asked her.

“Fifteen.”

“Ten.”

“Twelve.”

The man nodded. “Okay.”

As he drove through the industrial area, he gave her a towel to wipe her face and neck. He turned in to a deserted alley behind a school near Awudome Circle.

“Get in the back,” he told her.

He joined her, lying down with her on a cloth he had spread on the floor. The rain drummed on the roof. There was a little light through the front window from a lamp on the side of a building. As he hovered over her and pushed her legs back, she saw he had a curious scar. It ran from the front of his scalp down into his forehead. His eyes were unfocused and cold. She shuddered.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Juaso. Volta Region.”

He was putting on a condom, which surprised her.

“Why did you come to Accra?”

“To make money.”

“Your father used to beat you in Juaso?”

Second surprise.
How did he know?

“Yes,” she whispered. She adjusted her position for his access.

“He beat you very badly.”

“Yes,” she whimpered.

“Because you’re a bad girl?”

She didn’t understand what he was talking about.

“Say it. ‘I’m a bad girl.’ ”

“I’m a bad girl.”

As his pace increased, he told her to repeat it over and over again. He grabbed her wrist with a grip of steel, pulling her hand up to his forehead, where his scar was.

“Touch it,” he gasped.
“Touch it.”

The scar felt firm, yet gelatinous and mobile, like worms in a bag. Comfort snatched her hand away as the man let out a hoarse groan of climax.

“W
here do you sleep?” he asked her as they drove away.

“At the railway station.”

“I’ll take you there,” he said. “I don’t want you to sell your body to anyone else.”

It was the strangest thing any man had ever said to her.

When he dropped her off, he said, “I’ll come back for you.”

She wasn’t sure what he meant.

S
even o’clock Monday night, Ebenezer trudged the final wet mile to the railway station area off Kwame Nkrumah Avenue. Like everyone else who lived on the streets, he hated the rain and the mess it caused. His shoeshine box was slung over his right shoulder. The brushes and tins of shoe polish made a comforting clattering noise against one another. Over a year ago, when he was fourteen and he had finally saved enough money as a refuse carrier, he bought a shoeshine box and supplies. Two weeks later, another street boy stole it all while Ebenezer was asleep. It was so painful and infuriating that he had wept. Not in front of the other kids. He did it when he visited the pit latrine, crying as he crouched in position.

That experience had toughened him. Wiry, Ebenezer didn’t take abuse from anyone. Another thief had once tried to snatch his second shoeshine box, the one he had now. Ebenezer beat him with such heavy blows that he begged for his life.

Now, things were looking up. Ebenezer was the leader on his shoeshine corner in Lartebiokorshie. He was in charge of three other guys. To use his supplies, they paid him a percentage of their earnings.

His feet ached. Dusty during the day, they were now caked in red mud. Walking was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other while pretending the pain wasn’t there. Not even a week of toil on the farm in Jakwa, his home village in the Western Region, would have made his feet hurt so much. Accra’s streets were hard and unyielding.

By the time he got to the railway, the rain had stopped. He crossed Kwame Nkrumah Avenue to Station Road. There was barely a streetlight, except for the odd fluorescent lighting outside a storefront or warehouse. Darkness shrouded the crumbling old UTC building, which had been one of Accra’s best department stores long before Ebenezer was even born. People were still milling around the streets or talking, eating or playing cards, but later, as people slept on the pavements in front of the stores, everything would become as quiet as it was dark.

Rounding the corner to Knutsford Avenue, Ebenezer collided with someone, making him take half a step back. He stiffened, ready to do battle as he saw who it was. Tedamm was eighteen. He had been around for a long time. He was taller than everyone else. Angular and muscular, he looked as if he had been carved from rock. His eyes took on a hard glint as he saw Ebenezer.

“Hey, small boy, how are you?” Tedamm said with contempt. He took a mock swing at Ebenezer, who brought up his fists defensively in front of his face.

As usual, Tedamm’s boys, Antwi and Ofosu, were following him around like stray dogs hoping for scraps. They had no minds of their own. They did whatever he told them.

“What were you doing shoeshining on my corner today?” Tedamm asked Ebenezer.

“It’s not your corner.”

“It was mine long before you came to Accra from your village.”

“You weren’t at that corner when I came to Accra.”

“It’s still my corner.”

Ebenezer shook his head. “No.”

“You think you’re tough? I can pick you up by your head and break your neck in two.”

His boys smirked.

Ebenezer started to leave, but Tedamm stepped in his way. “Get off my street corner. You hear me?”

“Try and stop me if you like,” Ebenezer said.

Tedamm and his boys watched him as he went past. Ebenezer set his jaw. Now it was war. Him against Tedamm.

Ebenezer’s home base was on the front veranda of the Prince Line Travel Agency on Knutsford Avenue. Every evening, street kids moved in as businesses closed for the day. Ebenezer shared his base with four good friends. They loved one another like brothers and had nicknamed themselves the Brooklyn Gang.

Besides Ebenezer, three of the boys were already back for the night. He slapped their palms in greeting and sat down next to tiny Mawusi, who was listening to music on a radio not much bigger than his hand. All of them had pitched in to buy the radio. They guarded it with their lives.

It was Mosquito, the fifth in the group, who was missing. Ebenezer asked where he was. Issa, a truck pusher and the official leader of the group, didn’t know. Issa was almost eighteen, getting to be an “old man” now.

They talked and ate, sharing one small bowl of rice. That was all there was. They knew how to pace themselves so that they ate equal portions. No one cheated. They left some for Mosquito.

“Eben, you’re first watchman tonight,” Issa told him.

Every night it was the same routine. They took three equal shifts to keep watch over one another until daybreak. You couldn’t just happily go to sleep without someone keeping guard. That was exactly how Eben had allowed his shoeshine box to be stolen.

The four stretched out on the bare pavement. Mosquito would pick out his own spot when he arrived. Eben stayed seated for a while to rest his feet, but then he got up to pace back and forth so he could stay awake. He wondered where Mosquito was.

Eben needed to relieve himself. He would make it quick, even though the chance was small that someone would come along and attack the sleeping boys while he was away for only a few minutes. With a few strips of newspaper in his pocket, Eben trotted to the end of Knutsford Avenue, where it dead-ended at a chain-link fence on Kojo Thompson Road. Next to the fence was a broken-down
bola
truck that hadn’t been moved in more than a year, its rear loader collecting garbage that was going nowhere. Eben slipped behind the vehicle, pulled down his pants, and crouched.

When he was done, he threw the soiled newspaper in the truck.

“Ssss!”

Eben turned to see who was hissing at him to attract his attention. He saw someone standing in the shadows at the opposite corner of the street.

M
osquito limped back to the base. He had hurt his ankle today while running after a tro-tro as it pulled into the Novotel Lorry Park. One had to fight to be the first to offer to carry passengers’ luggage for a fee. Mosquito was hungry and exhausted. He was looking forward to seeing his mates, having something to eat, and getting some sleep.

I
ssa started awake as Mosquito touched his shoulder. He sat up quickly.

“Where Eben dey?” Mosquito asked.

“I don’t know,” Issa said, voice thick with sleep. “He was on guard. Maybe he went to the toilet.”

Mosquito walked to the end of the street to check near the bola truck.

“Eben,” he called out softly. There was no answer. He went around the other side of the truck. Eben wasn’t there. Mosquito returned to Issa, who was propped up on one elbow waiting.

“He no dey?”

“No,” Mosquito replied. It was almost ten-thirty, ninety minutes into Eben’s shift from nine to midnight.

Mawusi stirred. “What wrong?” he mumbled.

“Where Eben dey?” Issa asked him.

“I don’ know,” he muttered and went back to sleep.

“Maybe he pass to the other side,” Issa said to Mosquito.

They started off in the other direction, toward Kwame Nkrumah Avenue and the UTC building. It was pitch black, but they could make out the shadows of scores of street kids sleeping along the sidewalk.