Children of the Street

by Kwei Quartey

  “Ask them if any of them saw the dead person back there or heard anything about it,” Dawson said to Sly.

  The boy obliged. His friends, intent on their task, replied briefly.

  “They didn’t see anything,” Sly said. “They haven’t heard anything.”

  Dawson nodded. He hadn’t expected much more than that. Fact was, if the dead person wasn’t a friend of theirs or otherwise important, it just wasn’t of that much interest to them. Someone died. So what?

  “Let’s go,” Dawson said to Sly. A little farther along he put his hand on the boy’s head like he was palming a soccer ball. “Burning that stuff is dangerous. There’s poison in the smoke and you’re breathing it inside your body. You understand?”

  Sly nodded, but uncertainly. Dawson wasn’t sure he really did get it. He ruffled his companion’s short, wiry hair. “You’re a good boy, Sly. Is your uncle at home?”

  Sly was hesitant about something.

  “You don’t like your uncle?” Darko asked.

  “Yes, I like him,” Sly said.

  But the changed tone of his voice, broken up like a bleat, told Dawson he wasn’t telling the truth.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Dawson said. “I only want to talk to him.”

  Roaming the open land bordered by the Ring Road on the west and the edge of the Odaw River on the east were a few grazing horses and a herd of placid, foraging cows, brought all the way from the northern territories by migrants who had lived as nomads. It was a bizarre mixing of rural lifestyle with the urban slum. Only in Accra, Dawson thought. Only in Accra.

  Deep within Agbogbloshie, Sly walked with easy assurance, as if floating over the rocky ground. He skipped nonchalantly across gutters filled to overflowing with garbage encased in opaque, grayish black glop. He ducked under laundry hung out to dry on clotheslines crisscrossing like railway tracks. He took narrow, abruptly swerving passages between rows of rickety homes constructed of wood that just begged for a conflagration.

  Life went on here with the same inevitability it does anywhere else. People worked and traded, children played, women got their nails done, men had their hair cut, and a group of shirtless teenage boys watched soccer on a communal TV.

  Here and there, Dawson caught a whiff of marijuana, or “wee,” as it was popularly known. From his nasal passages, it went like a blast to a pleasure spot inside his brain. He felt that tug of desire that told him he had not yet conquered his vice. Five months completely clean. One day at a time.

  People asked Sly who his companion was. He gave the same answer every time. “He’s Darko, my friend.” It was best that way. They didn’t take to policemen. If casual queries about the corpse in the lagoon yielded little to no useful information, it was still more than Dawson would get if people knew he was a detective.

  They passed a small mosque that stood out as one of the few brick buildings in Agbogbloshie. A man inside was prostrate on his prayer mat.

  “There is my house,” Sly said, slowing down and pointing. “Where those boys are playing.”

  Four teenagers were kicking and heading a soccer ball back and forth to one another without allowing it to touch the ground. A man sat in front of a windowless, eight-foot-square wooden shack raised off the ground on short stilts.

  “Is that your uncle?” Dawson asked.

  “Yes.”

  Sly’s uncle saw them approaching. For a moment he didn’t move, but he finally rose to his feet as they came closer. He was frowning—the puzzled kind of frown—and then he looked wary.

  “Good morning?” He was average height with squinting eyes. His hair was graying at the temples and retreating from his dome forehead. He had tribal marks on both cheeks.

  “Good morning, sir. My name is Darko Dawson.”

  “Yessah. I’m Gamel.” His voice was like gravel.

  Behind him, the door of his living quarters was ajar, and Dawson caught a glimpse of a thin foam floor mattress as holey as Swiss cheese.

  “Have he do someting wrong?” Gamel asked, gesturing at Sly.

  “No,” Dawson said. “This morning he reported a dead body to the police.”

  “A dead body?”

  Suddenly angry, Gamel began scolding Sly in Hausa. Without warning, he lunged at the boy, but Dawson blocked his move.

  “Hold on, my friend,” he said. “Come with me and let’s talk. Sly, wait here for us.”

  Dawson and Gamel ducked into a tight space between his shack and the next. It reeked of urine. The two men stood barely six inches apart.

  “What is your problem with Sly?” Dawson asked.

  “I tell him say, if you talk to policeman you go bring plenty trouble for house. But the boy never listen.”

  “He did the right thing,” Dawson said.

  Gamel grew wary as realization dawned. “You are policeman?”

  “Yes.”

  The whites of Gamel’s eyes flashed like those of a shying horse. He took a confined step back.

  “Relax,” Dawson said, “I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  Gamel breathed again.

  “Does Sly go to school?” Dawson asked.

  Gamel hesitated. “No, sah.”

  “Why not?”

  “I tell him say go to school, sah. He no like.”

  “How old are you, Gamel?” Dawson snapped.

  “Forty-two, sah.”

  “How old is Sly?”

  “Nine.”

  “Who do you think should be making sure he gets to school?”

  Gamel looked away without answering.

  “Is he even registered to attend school?” Dawson demanded.

  “No, sah,” Gamel said heavily.

  “Okay, listen to me,” Dawson said. “Sly should be in school. My wife is a teacher. Maybe we can help Sly register in a public school. We’ll come back and see you in a few days.”

  Gamel nodded. “Yessah. Thank you.”

  “One other thing,” Dawson added, moving in close. He put his hand on the other man’s oily neck and brought his thumb around to rest on the larynx.

  “If you beat the boy, I will hear about it and you’ll be sorry you did it. You understand?”

  Gamel nodded stiffly. “Yes, sah.”

  Dawson kept his hand on Gamel’s neck for a moment longer before releasing him. “Good.”

  Dawson hurried back across the littered wasteland to the crime scene. Bright and his men were rolling the body onto a board rigged with a long rope at one edge. They returned to the bank and grabbed hold of the rope tug-o’-war style. With Bright chanting, “One, two, three, pull!” they brought the body out of the muck and onto the bank.

  For a moment, Dawson and the others stood staring at the corpse. It was hideously inflated with gases of putrefaction and coated with a patina of glistening lagoon slime. The face was puffed up three times normal, the chest and belly balloon-like. The smell was dizzying. Dawson choked and swallowed down nausea rising in his throat like a fountain.

  Gritting his teeth, he crouched by the body, determined not to throw up. The person had no shoes, his clothes were blackened and soiled—a T-shirt, long shorts that guys in Accra wore—nothing out of the ordinary. Difficult to say how old he was, and so far, there was no indication of what exactly had killed him.

  Dawson stood up, feeling ill. He looked at Bright. “Anything else, sir?”

  Bright shook his head. “If you are done, we will transport the body to the Police Hospital Mortuary.”

  3

  It was afternoon when Dawson headed home. Canvassing the Agbogbloshie neighborhood had been fruitless. If anyone had seen the dead body being dumped, they weren’t saying.

  Dawson turned onto the slight incline of Nim Tree Avenue. Lined on either side with fortunately clean gutters, the street ran in an east-west direction. At this time of day, Darko was riding into the sun. The sky, a pale, clean blue overhead, was bright and almost white at the horizon, making the street appear luminous.

  Dawson’s house at No.
10 Nim Tree was cream-colored with olive trim. The mango tree on one side had just begun to fruit. It was a tiny dwelling, yet it was still a million times better than the sorry GPS barracks where even a chief inspector could often afford only a single room. Policemen were not a rich bunch, and detectives were possibly the least well paid. Dawson and Christine could afford No. 10 only because their landlord was a member of her extended family. He gave them a generous discount and made up for it with his other property. That their low rent depended on family ties made Dawson a little nervous. Family and money could be a dangerous mix.

  Every time he came home, Dawson felt a surge of thankfulness, like the swell of a wave. The little house was a sanctuary, armor against the wickedness of the crime he dealt with every day. A bit of a fortress too. His police sense had led him to burglarproof the house to the extreme.

  Christine’s red Opel, which was so small Dawson felt he could pick it up and carry it under his arm, was parked in front of the house, meaning she and Hosiah were home from the regular Sunday visit to her mother after church and Sunday school.

  “I’m home!” he called out as he came in through the rear kitchen door.

  “Hi, Dark.”

  Christine was in the sitting room on the sofa as she read the paper.

  “Hi, sweetie.” He kissed her on the forehead.

  “Tough case?”

  “Horrible. Dead man in Korle Lagoon.”

  Christine winced, barely a ripple on the fine sheen of her complexion.

  “I need some help on something,” Dawson said, sitting down beside her. Before he could get any further, Hosiah came running in and dived onto Dawson’s lap.

  “Hi, Daddy!”

  “Hey, champ!” Darko sat his son up straight and snuggled him against his chest.

  “Guess what I made,” Hosiah said.

  “A sports car?”

  “No.”

  “A truck?”

  “No,” Hosiah said, laughing. “Come with me and I’ll show you. But you have to close your eyes first and I’ll tell you when you can open them.”

  At his bedroom door, he said, “You can open your eyes now.”

  In the middle of the floor of the small bedroom was one of Hosiah’s increasingly complex creations. A genius with his hands, he adroitly crafted model cars, trucks, and motorbikes out of empy cans and milk cartons, old matchboxes, bottle caps, rubber bands, and bits of cardboard. The end products were surprisingly fine toys, considering the crudity of the raw materials Hosiah worked with.

  “Wow,” Dawson said. “Is that a spaceship?”

  “Yes.” The boy held it proudly up to his father. “Look, Daddy. Here are the jets for takeoff. The pilot goes in here and he can see out of this window.”

  The window was a square of plastic cut out from a water bottle. Recently, Hosiah had been expanding his repertoire from land vehicles to airplanes, and now, for the first time, a spacecraft.

  “So, how far can the spaceship travel?”

  “Um. To the moon, I think. No, to the sun.”

  “Really? You know it’s going to be very hot there.”

  Hosiah thought about that for a moment. “I’ll put something on it so it doesn’t burn.”

  Dawson watched as Hosiah constructed a “heat shield,” his little round head bent in concentration. Dawson rubbed it gently. His son was seven now, suffering from congenital heart disease, yet full of a spirit that uplifted Dawson’s every day.

  Christine appeared at the door. “Are we still going to the park?”

  Dawson looked at his watch. They would have gone earlier had he not been called out. “Yes, we can still go. Hosiah, tidy your room and then we’ll go, okay?”

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  Back in the sitting room, Dawson asked Christine, “How was he today?”

  “Actually, he’s done very well,” she said.

  “Good. So we’ll play a little ball at the park but we’ll take it easy.”

  “Right. What was it you were going to ask me?”

  He told Christine about Sly and his uncle. “I want to get the boy into school.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, “but you realize, even if we get him registered, he might never go.”

  “I’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  She smiled slightly.

  “What’s that look?” Dawson asked.

  “You can’t stand Uncle Gamel getting away with not sending the boy to school.”

  “You’re right. I can’t.”

  That night Dawson, a confirmed insomniac, lay on his back, with the blackness pressing against his eyes as he thought about their earlier excursion to the Efua Sutherland Park. It hadn’t been too bad. He and Christine had played catch with Hosiah, throwing the ball as directly to his waiting hands as possible. That was better than playing soccer, where dribbling and running after the ball was more strenuous. They were walking a fine line between letting Hosiah be as active as a boy his age should be and limiting his exertions to what his heart, with its ventricular septal defect, could handle. His symptoms varied from day to day. He rationalized it as the defect changing in size. “The hole in my heart is small today, Daddy,” he would say.

  So far, Hosiah had never given an indication that he felt something was wrong with him as a whole. That was a relief for Christine and Dawson, but they knew their son’s healthy adaptations, both physical and psychological, might not last forever.

  His prescribed medications only patched the problem. The real solution, cardiac surgery, was staggeringly expensive. There was now a National Health Insurance Scheme, NHIS, but the very basic medical care it covered most certainly did not include heart surgery. For years, Dawson and Christine had been saving up, adding a generous contribution from an uncle of Christine’s, but the target was still practically unattainable. They had applied for a personal loan at Standard Bank, Ecobank, and Barclays, but hadn’t qualified at any of them. Besides, the interest rate was a horrible 21 percent.

  Then, nine months ago, wonderful news had arrived. The GPS announced an official policy that it would pay all medical and surgical fees for its employees and their dependents. For a moment, Dawson’s and Christine’s hearts soared with the fantasy of submitting Hosiah’s medical report to the police service employee financial office, which would approve the surgery. But then reality struck like a sledgehammer.

  It turned out that the GPS would not prepay employees’ medical or surgical expenses under any circumstances of illness, major or minor. All payments would be strictly on a reimbursement basis. That put Dawson and Christine right back at square one: they would have to finance Hosiah’s operation at the Korle Bu Hospital Cardiothoracic Center and then present the receipt to the GPS. After that, there would be a long process of validating, cross-checking, and obtaining successive levels of approval, including the director general of GPS. And then, if they were lucky, they would receive the reimbursement after several months.

  Another idea had come along about half a year ago. Edith Kingson, a senior clerk in the financial office at Korle Bu, had met Hosiah when Dawson once took him along to render a payment for a hospital visit. So delighted was she with the boy that she took Dawson aside and suggested he fill out a special “financial clemency petition” with an attached letter detailing Hosiah’s circumstances. She would personally try to push it through, but Edith was at pains to warn Dawson she could not guarantee that anything would come of it.

  She was right to have tried to keep Dawson’s expectations low. In the six months since submitting the petition, he had periodically called Edith, but she had had no news for him.

  Beside him, Christine normally slept so heavily that a thunderstorm would not wake her, but Dawson could tell from her breathing pattern that she wasn’t in deep sleep right now. She stirred and turned over.

  “Dark?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t sleep either.”

  “Surprising. For you.”

  Chris
tine moved in closer, tucking her head into the hollow of his shoulder. Her skin smelled of sweet and spice. He felt the tension in her body slowly dissipate, and she drifted back to sleep long before he did.

  He woke at five-thirty. Christine would surface soon. He showered and was getting dressed when his mobile rang from the bed stand. He went out to the sitting room to take the call. He knew who it was from the caller ID.

  “Dr. Biney, good morning!”

  “Good morning, Inspector Dawson! How are you?”

  “I’m doing well. And yourself?”

  “No complaints, my good man. Forgive me for calling this early, but I wanted to catch you before you start your day.”

  “No problem at all.”

  Asum Biney was a superb doctor and now one of the best of the very few forensic pathologists in the country. He was the director of the Volta River Authority Hospital in the Eastern Region, where Dawson had first met him. He gave several days of his time every month to hospitals in Accra and elsewhere, routinely starting at dawn and heading home late at night.

  “To what do I owe the honor, Doctor?”

  “I’m doing a few days at the Police Hospital Mortuary because one of the docs is out on sick leave. I noticed this new case you have—the fellow discovered in the Korle Lagoon?”

  “Yes. It’s very bad.”

  “Indeed, and even with refrigeration, the decay will continue. We should get to it today as soon as possible.”

  “Bless you, Dr. Biney. I was preparing for a nasty fight to get the case on before the end of this week, never mind today.”

  “Well, I’m glad I could save you the agony. I’ll have the staff put it on for eight this morning.”

  “I’ll be there.”