Free Angel Boy by Bernard Ashley

Chapter One

    H e 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 herhigh 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 nosubstitute. 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 fora 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