by Zizou Corder
Charlie smiled. This wasn’t Accra, but it was Ghana all right – somewhere west probably, on the coast, with a castle. He searched his memory. Cape Coast? Elmina?
He was steered away from the voices, then for a while he was left in a shaded spot, alone with the sailor still holding him by the arms. Charlie wondered whether this was the moment to run – but his sense of the man guarding him was that he was big. And the blindfold was tight. And so were the handcuffs. And so was the sailor’s grip.
While Capitaine Drutzel located a boatyard, Maccomo strode the seafront with Majid the Lioncatcher. This was not a big town, and it was dominated by its castle: a large, old, white building, with high, thick walls, and deep, shaded doorways. It was right on the beach, as long as a city block, surrounded by sand and rock, with a few palm trees waving their green fronds against the stark salty whiteness of the walls. Inside was a wide, bare courtyard, into which the tropical sun beat down. It was in many ways a handsome building. Or would have been if you didn’t know what it was.
Maccomo looked up at it and narrowed his eyes. The end of the building where he was standing was in good condition, but way down the end towards the rocks and the sea the white paint was stained and peeling off, and the window frames were warped. It looked like an old old shell worn down by salt and wind. There was rubbish blowing against the wall, and in contrast to the bustling crowd up here, there was nobody about.
Bad spirits, he thought to himself. Then: ‘Come, Majid,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a look. I think this might do for our delivery.’
Charlie sat. The heat sat on top of him. Sweat was trickling down his back and forehead. He wondered where Sergei was.
After a while, Maccomo returned.
‘Yalla,’ he said again shortly. He sounded pleased with himself.
Afterwards Charlie knew exactly when it was that he panicked and started to scream.
He remembered the sailor hoicking him to his feet. He remembered walking along the uneven sand and rocks, in and out of shade. He remembered nearly tripping over something tangly – an old plastic bag, he thought. He remembered moving into full shade, still warm, damp. Some rattling. The rusty sound of a bolt, metal on metal. The shove that pushed him from outside to inside. The tiny doorway, thick walls as he shouldered between them in the narrow space. The sailor’s body behind him. And in front of him …
A darker darkness. A high ceiling. A dankness. Dark, warm, damp.
And a smell.
A little like urine, a little like sweat, a little like metal. Not strong. Thin. Bitter. Animal. Damp. Old, old, old.
Charlie’s nostrils curled, his stomach heaved, his brain remembered, and he began to wail.
He wailed because he knew.
Charlie knew because his parents had told him; because he’d been taken to visit one as a kid. (It had been converted into a museum. He’d blocked his ears and thought resolutely instead about a pop star he liked.) There were twenty-one of them along the coast here. Once there had been eighty. They were forts – built by Europeans hundreds of years ago as storage places for the ivory and gold and spices they were buying, and to protect the lands they were claiming as their own. And later, the storage houses had become slave forts.
It was in these buildings – in this building – that the men and women and children captured or bought inland had been stored like goods, packed in until their owners were ready to ship them off to be sold in the New World. The captured people had been brought in on the land side, and they had been taken out directly on to the slave ships waiting for them in the sea. Millions of them. It was here that their freedom was destroyed, their past was lost, here that families were broken, sicknesses spread, hopes – and people – killed. Someone catches you, steals you, and suddenly you are a slave.
Charlie knew where he was. He knew what had happened here.
Even the stones of this building knew it. The smell of human pain and fear was in every shadow.
And Charlie wailed.
He wailed so loud, the sailor put his hand over his mouth. Charlie bit him like a mad dog, and wailed more. The sailor swore, stood on Charlie’s leg to secure him, and ripped the blindfold off him to wrap it over his mouth instead.
Suddenly struck dumb, with this foul-tasting cloth in his mouth, Charlie stood in the dark, panting and heaving. The smell seemed worse now that his eyes were free.
He swung round. Behind was the entrance they had come in through.
As he had thought: the Door of No Return. A strong gate of metal bars, set in a hefty stone wall, hundreds of years old. Outside, through the bars, a shining hot day, a blue rolling sea, huge birds wheeling, the beach blinding, hot, hot sunshine. This side, a tiny, horrible, acrid stone room.
And through that door the slaves left, and never saw Africa again.
I have returned through the Door of No Return, he thought.
I am being taken away by people I do not belong to. As my parents were.
He couldn’t even struggle and shout again. It was useless, hopeless.
After a while the sailor came over to him. Without looking Charlie in the eye, he removed the gag and hooked the handcuffs to a bar in the wall. There was a piece of sacking cloth nailed up over the gate, rolled back like a blind. He let it down, and went over to the other side of the cell, where he sat with his back to the wall and stared at Charlie through the sudden, almost complete darkness.
Charlie coughed and sucked saliva back into his mouth so he could spit out the dirty taste. Then he closed his eyes and, uncomfortably half hanging from the bar, attempted to achieve something related to a doze, or a trance, or any other way of mentally not being where he was, because where he was was unbearable.
Outside the prison, Sergei, salt-encrusted and battered from his marine crossing on board Madame Baleine, curled up in a patch of shade. It was small, but it was all he could find. Yet again, he was waiting for Charlie bliddy Ashanti, in an unlikely place. It was hard work being loyal – why on earth was he doing it? He thought for a bit, and couldn’t quite remember. Oh well.
He fell asleep.
Far out in the Atlantic, the two ships bearing Charlie’s friends and relations continued to pursue him – in the wrong direction. Suleiman’s Joy led the way west, with Magdalen and Aneba aboard, followed by El Baraka, carrying the Lions, King Boris and Claudio. Their prey, Old Yeller, was way behind, way south, waiting.
Not that any of the people aboard any of those ships knew this, of course.
Magdalen and Aneba spent the weeks of the voyage staring out over the endless waves, their stupor broken only by Suleiman’s five-times-a-day prayers.
The Young Lion and Elsina were having more fun. Their hiding place in Claudio’s cabin had lasted for about half an hour. King Boris spotted them, but, unlike Claudio, he was delighted to see them.
‘My dears!’ he had shouted. ‘How magnificent! Let us pass the time of this wearisome voyage by learning each other’s language. Tell me, what do you call this, in Lion?’ and he pointed to the porthole.
The Young Lion gave him such a look that Elsina got the giggles.
‘We call it strange round thing through which mighty man looks out over the dreadful sea when riding in his sea chariot,’ she said. ‘What do you call it?’
King Boris was still gazing keenly at them. Of course he had not heard or picked up what she had said, for Cat is spoken as much with the ears and the whiskers as with noises.
‘Port, hole,’ said King Boris patiently. ‘Port. Hole.’
The Young Lion rolled over (as best he could in the small cabin) and put his paws over his face. ‘It’s going to be a long journey,’ he murmured.
Younus, not surprisingly, practically had hysterics when King Boris announced before dinner that there were two Lions aboard who needed feeding too. But hysterical or not, there is very little you can do if you are on a ship with two Lions and two men who want to protect them. Younus’s first urge may have been a natural self-protective desire to t
hrow them overboard, but that wasn’t going to happen. So he had to be satisfied with trotting nervously around the boat, jumping at every noise, refusing to enter any part without Claudio going in first, and muttering that James Bond never had to deal with Lions.
Elsina and the Young Lion ignored him, mostly. It seemed the kindest thing to do.
Between ignoring Younus, laughing at King Boris and scrapping with each other, they had plenty to do. Only Claudio worried them, because he was looking worried. As well he might – he was in limbo, stuck in the middle of the ocean, with nothing to do but wait and imagine what was waiting for them at the other end of this crossing.
Oh, and on board Old Yeller, Rafi sat in his old place in the hold, chained up, surveyed by a bored sailor, and wondered why on earth Charlie had helped him.
Charlie was woken by murmuring voices, and looked up to see four dark eyes, the whites shining in the dimness, staring at him.
‘What the –?’ he said.
The eyes were scared. Their murmuring rose like alarmed birds and then settled again.
‘Who are you?’ said Charlie quietly. He said it in Twi. The sailor wouldn’t speak Twi – he was Moroccan.
‘Seventeen,’ came a murmured reply – a low, young, female, African voice.
‘Twenty-One,’ murmured another – or was it the same one?
Then: ‘Who are you?’ said the first – or was it the other?
‘Charlie,’ he said.
One of them laughed. ‘Hey, Charlie, we know you are Charlie. But who are you?’
For a moment Charlie smiled too. In Ghana everyone is called Charlie – it’s like ‘you there’ or ‘mate’ or ‘man’ or ‘you guys’.
‘I really am Charlie,’ he said. ‘It’s my name. Who are you?’
‘Seventeen,’ came the reply.
‘Twenty-One,’ came the other.
‘Hey, I don’t need to know how old you are,’ Charlie said, though actually they sounded about his own age.
‘We really are Seventeen and Twenty-One,’ one of them said. ‘Those are our names.’
‘Why?’ said Charlie, interested.
‘Because when we were born that is how many plaits we each had on our heads,’ said one of them.
Charlie was stumped. ‘What do you mean?’
‘We came out of our mother ready-plaited! We are twins – we did it ourselves inside.’
‘What!’ cried Charlie.
‘It was boring in there!’ said the other – Seventeen, Charlie thought it was. He could tell she was smiling. ‘Nothing to do, so we plaited.’
Charlie tried to picture two unborn babies happily plaiting each other’s hair inside their mother’s belly. For a second, a small second, he laughed.
‘Shut up!’ yelled the sailor suddenly, in Arabic.
They all three turned his way nervously, and shut up.
Much later, Charlie asked quietly, ‘Why are you here?’
There was a pause before the sad response. Charlie thought perhaps they had fallen asleep. But then a small voice came out of the darkness: ‘We were stolen, we think. Only a few days ago. We live near Kumasi, but we don’t know where we are now. Only that we are on the coast.’
Charlie breathed out softly. Stolen. Well, this was turning out to be a regular business.
‘Why were you stolen?’ he asked, but as he asked, he thought he knew.
‘The boys were brought from somewhere else,’ Seventeen was continuing.
Charlie looked up.
‘What boys?’
‘Them,’ she said, and he could sense a movement, gesturing behind her. ‘They are still sleeping. They have been asleep too long.’
Charlie glanced at the sailor. He was just sitting, his eyes shut. He looked half asleep but ready to wake, relaxed but prepared. He knew Charlie wasn’t going anywhere.
Charlie craned to see beyond the dark shapes of the girls. He could make out nothing. No, hang on – was that a doorway?
‘Is there another … room?’ he asked into the darkness.
‘Another dungeon,’ said the voice of Twenty-One. ‘We know what it is here. We have been praying.’ There was a trace of tears in her voice. Just a trace. ‘There is an altar,’ she said. ‘From before.’
Charlie was struck dumb for a moment by the idea of the slaves of long ago, packed in, sick and stolen, praying to the ancient spirits for release from this hole, trying to make their forest rites in this dungeon …
‘We put some buttons there before they came to chain us up,’ said Seventeen. ‘It’s all we had.’
They were all silent. The darkness sat around them.
The sailor sighed deeply and shifted position.
Later, Twenty-One asked, ‘Have you been stolen too?’
‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘And those boys …?’
‘We think so. They were just pushed in on top of us …’
All of them were still thinking about the past. About long-ago people, long dead now, being stolen and pushed.
‘What is going to happen to us?’ asked Twenty-One quietly. Her accent reminded Charlie of his grandma. He felt a surge of warmth towards these girls. He didn’t know what was going to happen, and he didn’t know if two girls and an extra gang of boys were going to make things better or worse … but he was beginning to understand that his enemies had no shame.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘But I think we are in it together,’ said Seventeen.
‘Yes,’ said Charlie. ‘I think we are.’
‘Shut up,’ said the sailor.
They shut up.
Chapter Ten
The first thing Aneba and Magdalen noticed, apart from endless waves, endless sky, and more endless waves, was that one morning there was reception again on their telephones.
‘We must be nearing land,’ said Magdalen, up on deck, holding her cup of coffee and staring determinedly to the west, as if by staring she could bring the land into view.
‘Hey – I’ve got messages,’ said Aneba.
Magdalen immediately flicked round to him.
‘It’s Mabel,’ he said. Then smiled. It was like dawn after a long and restless night.
He passed his phone to Magdalen. ‘We were right,’ he said. ‘There is no official Corporacy Community in the Caribbean, but there is, apparently, listed under the international land ownership regulations, a Corporacy warehouse on the island of San Antonio. It’s north-east of Cuba, very small.’
‘San Antonio, eh?’ said Magdalen. Their spirits lifted for the first time in weeks. ‘San Antonio, here we come.’
It turned out to be not such a long way away.
‘Beautiful,’ said Suleiman as they approached, and indeed it was. Their first view was a wild coastline of cliffs and rocks, high and fierce, with mountains behind and waves crashing at its feet. Heavy greenery festooned the higher clifftops, thick and lustrous, swamped regularly by the salt spray from the crashing Atlantic waves surging in against them. Rainbows sparkled and danced in the flying spume. It was magnificent.
‘I will not land here,’ said Suleiman.
They continued round to the south side of the island, at a fair distance.
‘With cliffs like that you don’t really need security,’ observed Aneba. ‘But there will be a way in, and it will be protected.’
The island’s harbour appeared soon enough. It was a smallish cove, on the south-western end of the island. It was immediately recognizable because on the spit of land that protected it from the Atlantic surf, there was a tall metal mast, and from the mast bristled cameras, wires, chip boxes and lord knows what other state-of-the-art security paraphernalia. The cove within looked like paradise – palms, jetties and a shady beach – but the mast was not letting anyone through.
As Suleiman’s Joy moved west, one of the cameras was following her progress.
‘They already know we’re here,’ said Magdalen.
‘Oh, we’re not here,’ said Aneba. ‘We’re just passing b
y, going about our business … Best get below – we don’t want to be recorded.’
‘Tum ti tum ti tum,’ hummed Magdalen.
Suddenly Aneba twitched his nostrils. ‘Did you get that?’ he said.
‘What?’ said Magdalen.
‘That smell.’
Magdalen turned her head in the breeze, trying to catch the scent that had made Aneba jump. And then she did. A sweet, cool scent, very attractive, refreshing, mmm, it made you want to keep breathing it …
‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘It’s the – it’s that sedative thing that they used in Vence. Ugh, I’d recognize it anywhere. Ugh.’ She held her nose swiftly, and turned away to the other side of the ship.
‘Well, we’re definitely in the right place then, aren’t we?’
‘Sure, but how can we go there? That stuff had both of us stupefied before …’
Aneba thought. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the rose petals I used on you at Vence helped a lot, even though they were weak … If we could find a stronger rose – Canina titularium, or La Belle Sultane, or the White Queen Elizabeth – and a staple respiratory preventer …’
‘Suleiman,’ said Magdalen. ‘Where’s the best market round here? Fruit and veg, herbs and spices and flowers?’
Suleiman pored over his charts.
‘For eating,’ he said, ‘Santiago de Cuba. For … other purposes …’ He fell silent.
Aneba looked over Suleiman’s shoulder at the chart. ‘Ah,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ Magdalen asked. She too peered at the chart. ‘Oh,’ she said. Then she laughed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘in a way, it’s perfect. I mean …’
What they had all seen on the chart was the island of Hispaniola, not so far out of their way. On Hispaniola is the dead land formerly known as Haiti. In Haiti, when it existed as a nation, was Port-au-Prince. In Port-au-Prince was voodoo. And in voodoo circles, you could buy any herb or spice or other peculiar ingredient known – or unknown – to man.
