The men who were chasing me did not look like the kind of men who stop for a snack.
There were about seven of them, all in dark coats, all with the same angry face, as if somebody had given them one face to share and they were taking turns. They ran in different directions on purpose, which I thought was very rude, because it meant I could not even pick the nicest direction to run in.
I am twelve. I want that on record. Whatever I had done, I had not had time to do much of it.
"Catch the boy!" shouted the one in front. He had a voice like a gate that hasn't been oiled. "Do not let him reach the road!"
I ran. My bare feet slapped the dust. My lungs burned. Somewhere behind me, a baton cracked against a wall, and I heard it the way you hear a bad word in a quiet room, all the way down in the stomach.
Then they were in front of me too.
I stopped. They closed in, a ring of black coats and angry faces, and I did what any brave twelve-year-old would do in such a moment. I shut my eyes and decided I would not cry.
I cried.
It ran down my face and made two clean stripes in the dirt, which I was sad to think would be the last clean thing about me. The nearest man lifted his baton so high it blocked out the sun. "I'm finished," I thought, very calmly. "I did not even finish my food yesterday. I was saving a little bit."
The baton came down.
And a cold hand slapped my cheek.
"Janah! Janah! JJ! Wake up! Your mum is calling you!"
* * *
I opened my eyes.
There was no ring of men. There was a mango tree with a branch that looked like a rude finger, a patch of sky the colour of a boiled egg and a boy bending over me with his mouth hanging open like a drawer.
That boy was Danny.
Danny Okoro is my best friend, my only friend and, as far as I can tell, the only person in County A who does not have to be paid to say hello to me. He is small, quick and round-cheeked, with a gap in his front teeth that whistles when he is worried. It was whistling now.
"You were shouting," he said.
"What did I say?"
"Mostly no. Then something about a snack."
"It was a very serious dream."
"You cried."
"Dust," I said, with dignity. "There is a lot of dust in dreams."
Danny gave me the look he gives teachers who say I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. Then he sat on the grass, pulled his knees up and whistled through his tooth gap for a while.
I should explain where we were. It was the empty plot behind the old pharmacy, where a mango tree grows out of what used to be a car park. The shade is good. Nobody comes, because the grown-ups say the place has bad luck. The grown-ups say the same about me, so we had a lot in common.
I had come there after school to rest my eyes. I did not mean to sleep. But if you have not eaten since the day before yesterday, sleep is not a thing you decide. It is a thing that tackles you.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" I asked.
"You haven't eaten today," said Danny. "Have you?"
It wasn't really a question. Danny talks about food the way my mother talks about church. He believes in it, he worries about other people's attendance and he gets upset when you skip.
"I had a little," I said.
"What little?"
"A thought of food. A very long one."
"JJ."
"I am conserving."
"You are conserving yourself into a stick." He stood up, brushed his shorts and held out a hand. "Come on. I have two biscuits at home. We can split them."
"You said they were your emergency biscuits."
"This is an emergency."
I took his hand and let him pull me up. He is not strong, and I am heavier than I look, because of my stomach, which is round and stubborn and the only part of me that has ever refused to give up. Danny tipped back, staggered, got a leg behind him, and stood us both upright with the grim concentration of a boy lifting a very small cow.
"There," he said, panting. "Now you owe me half a biscuit."
"Whole biscuit."
"Half."
"Whole, plus my eternal gratitude."
"Your gratitude doesn't have any crumbs in it."
I laughed. It came out as a cough, because I had not used it for a while.
* * *
Let me introduce myself properly, because I think you ought to know who you are following.
My name is Janah Jackson. Everyone calls me JJ. I am twelve years old, I live in a one-storey house at the end of the highway road in County A, and I am the most hated boy in the county.
I want to say that this is not an exaggeration. I have checked.
It started before I can remember. When I was small, a goat died in front of our gate, and somebody said, "That boy is a jinx," and the word stuck like gum. Then a roof leaked. Then somebody lost a phone. Then the electricity went out on the exact day I walked past the transformer, and by evening it was a fact that I could turn off power by looking at it.
I can't. I have tried. I stood in front of a bulb for twenty minutes once and the only thing that went out was my patience.
But it doesn't matter. Once a town decides who you are, it keeps the decision in a drawer and takes it out whenever it needs someone to blame. So when a tap runs dry, it is JJ. When a chicken goes missing, it is JJ. When a very small boy trips over his own foot and starts to wail, a mother pushes through the crowd, looks at me, and says, "What did you do to him?"
I used to explain. Now I just shrug. It saves time, and I need time. I have a lot of dishes to wash.
"Your face is dirty," said Danny, as we walked.
"My face has always been dirty."
"I mean more than usual. There's mud in your eyebrow."
"It's an eyebrow decoration."
"It's a garden."
I wiped it with my sleeve, which made it worse. My shirt used to be white. It had been white the way a promise is white, a long time ago and with no way of proving it. The armpit had torn down to my stomach, and my trousers had been ripped so many times at the knee that they were now technically shorts with a bad past.
I looked, I knew, like something that had lost an argument with a swamp.
But I had two things nobody could take, and I counted them as we walked alongside the highway. The first was my eyes, which are grey, which my mother says is rare, and which I think are the only handsome thing about me. The second was my mouth. It was the only clean part of my face, because I keep it busy, licking my lips whenever I'm hungry, which is always.
"If I were rich," I told Danny, "I would be very handsome."
"You would be a clean boy."
"Same thing."
"It isn't."
"It is in my head."
He laughed. And just then, a truck went by on the highway and blew dust over us both, and Danny coughed, and I thought: This is not a bad day.
That was the mistake. You should never think that. The day hears.
* * *
"JJ," said Danny, a little later, in his careful voice. We had reached the bend by the big park. "I have to tell you something. And you can't be upset."
"I am never upset. I am a rock."
"Your dad's motorbike is outside your gate."
My legs, which had been carrying me along very happily, stopped working like someone had cut a string.
"Today?" I said. "It's not even six."
"I saw it when I went to get you. He came back early. Mum said she heard your mother calling you from the road. She sounded—" Danny stopped, and swallowed. "She sounded the way she does."
I knew exactly which way that was.
I should say something about my father, but I find I have no good jokes about him. So I will only say that Donald Jackson is a big man with a loud voice and a hard hand, and that for as long as I can remember, he has looked at me as if I took something from him that he has never been able to name.
He doesn't always beat me. Sometimes he only shouts. Sometimes he doesn't speak at all, and that is worse, because it feels as though the whole house is holding its breath.
But the bike was at the gate. And he was home early. And my mother was calling.
I looked at Danny.
"Don't worry," I said. I tried to say it lightly. "If it gets bad, I'll only get beaten and starved again. That isn't new, right? That is just Tuesday."
"It's Monday."
"Then I'm ahead."
He didn't laugh. He looked at me with the face of a small and very worried grandmother, and he took one of the two emergency biscuits out of his pocket, where it had been all along, and pushed it into my hand.
"You said they were at home," I said.
"I lied," said Danny. "I lie when it's important."
I held that biscuit in my fist for a long time. It was warm from his pocket and a little bent. Under the highway lights, which had just started to flicker on, it was the most valuable thing I had ever owned.
I ate it in four bites, slowly, so it would last.
Then I put my chin up and walked toward the house at the end of the road, where, though I did not know it yet, every small, ugly, unfair thing that had ever happened to me had been quietly waiting to be explained.