It is a law of the universe that when something good happens to me, something bad is already on its way, wearing a hat.
This time, the hat was James.
I should have known. I should have seen it in the way he sat through the afternoon lessons, with his big hands folded on his desk and a look on his face like a man waiting for a pot to boil. I should have seen it in the way he muttered to himself, and counted something on his fingers. But I was busy. I was floating along on a small, warm cloud of rice and respect, and I did not look down.
By the time the last bell rang, the cloud was gone.
"JJ!"
I stopped at the school gate. The voice was loud and thin and female, and it was coming from the road. It was the kind of voice that cracks windows.
"JJ! You! Stop where you are!"
It was Mammy Ansah.
* * *
She was running.
I have never seen Mammy Ansah run. I did not know she could. She came barrelling down the road toward me like a wardrobe on wheels, with her wrapper bunched in one fist and her scarf flying, and behind her, strung out in a long, ragged, excited line, came half of Highway Road.
There was Mr. Kofi from the bread shop. There was the tall woman who sells charcoal. There were three small boys, and a man with a bicycle, and an old lady with a stick, and the two young policemen from the corner station, who looked as if they had been woken from a dream. They were all out of breath. They were all talking at once.
"There he is!"
"That's him!"
"I always said!"
"Catch him!"
I stood very still. My heart had dropped into my shoes, which was a long way, since I did not have any.
"What did I do?" I said. I tried to say it calmly. It came out as a squeak.
"What did you do?" Mammy Ansah reached me. She stopped. She planted both hands on her hips and glared at me with eyes like hot coals. "Don't you play innocent with me! My cash tin! My cash tin, you wicked boy! Forty thousand! Everything I've saved for James's school fees! It was in my wardrobe this morning, and now it's gone, and who has been creeping round my house? You!"
"I haven't been in your house."
"Liar!"
"I haven't! I've been at school all day!"
"You were seen!"
"By who?"
"By James!"
I turned my head.
James was standing behind his mother. He had arrived without a sound. He had a very large, very smooth, very innocent face, the face of a cow that has never once been near a gate. In one hand he held his school bag. The other was tucked behind his back.
And on the bottom of his trousers, I noticed, there was a long, dark, dried stripe of mud.
I looked at it.
I looked at it for a long time.
* * *
"I saw him," said James, in a shaking voice. "I came home at break to get my lunch, and I saw JJ running out of our back gate. He had something under his shirt. I called after him, but he ran."
"I was at school at break."
"You were not."
"I was in the market."
"Doing what?"
"Washing plates."
"Oh, plates," said James. "Very likely."
A ripple of laughter. I felt it like a hand on the back of my neck. The crowd was growing. The old lady with the stick had pushed to the front, and the policemen had unhooked their batons, and a very small boy near the back was whispering loudly to his brother, "Is that the one who turned off the electricity?"
"Search him," said Mammy Ansah.
"Madam—" said one of the policemen, uncertainly.
"Search him!"
They searched me.
They did it politely, in a flustered, embarrassed way, turning out my pockets one by one. They found a bottle cap. A piece of string. A very old bus ticket. A toffee wrapper, empty. A tiny, whittled wooden bird, the size of a thumbnail, which I had made on the road that morning and was keeping for luck.
They did not find a cash tin.
"He's hidden it," said Mammy Ansah, at once. "He's clever. He's wicked. He's put it somewhere." She turned to the crowd. "You all know it! You've all said it! That boy is a jinx! He's been bringing trouble to this road since the day he was born, and now he's a thief!"
"I'm not."
"Prove it!"
"How can I prove I didn't do something?" My voice shook. "It isn't possible. You can't prove a thing you didn't do. That is the whole point of not doing it!"
It was not the wisest thing to say.
I knew it as soon as it was out. The crowd stirred. A man at the back said, "He's a smart one." A woman said, "Too smart." Someone said, "Is he mad?" And I saw the faces turn, one by one, from curiosity to something harder, something I recognised from a hundred nightmares.
The ring.
I looked round. There were people on every side. There was no gap. There was no way through. The batons gleamed. The faces pressed in, large and red and glaring, a circle of closing mouths.
I did what I had done in the dream.
I closed my eyes.
* * *
"JJ."
It was a whisper. It was very small, and it came from behind me, and it was not a voice I had expected.
"JJ. Run."
I opened my eyes. There was a hand on my elbow. It was damp and small and very firm. It belonged to a girl of nine in a school uniform with a neat white collar, who had pushed through a forest of legs to reach me, with the stern, outraged expression of a person who has found a thief in her kitchen.
"Jesse?"
"There's a gap by the pharmacy fence," she said. She did not look at me. She was watching the crowd. "Behind the water tank. Go through it. I'll talk to them."
"What will you say?"
"That you can't have done it, because you have an alibi."
"What alibi?"
"Me." She turned and gave me a very cold stare. "You were in my bathroom at six this morning, scrubbing my drain, and I was timing you. If you'd been at Mammy Ansah's, I would have noticed."
"That was last night."
"Details," said Jesse.
"Jesse—"
"Go."
I went.
I did not want to. I want you to know that. Every part of me wanted to stay and stand beside her, a small clean girl in a white collar, in front of a pack of angry adults. But she had set her jaw in a way I recognised, and I knew that if I stayed it would only make her fight harder.
I slipped through the gap by the fence. I ducked behind the water tank. I heard her voice rise behind me, clear and precise and perfectly cold, like a bell: "Excuse me. I would like to see your evidence."
And then, Danny, appearing from nowhere, grabbing my sleeve and hauling me into a tangle of overgrown bushes with the dazed, ecstatic expression of a boy in a spy film.
"This way," he panted. "I've a secret route."
"Since when?"
"Since now."
* * *
We hid in the empty plot behind the pharmacy, beneath the mango tree.
I sat with my back against the trunk and my knees pulled up, breathing hard, while Danny peered through the leaves and whistled through his tooth gap.
"They're searching the road," he reported. "The policemen are talking to Mama. Jesse's still shouting. Elvis has arrived, and he's saying something, and everybody is nodding. Oh, no. He's pointing at the market."
"Let him."
"JJ. They think you did it."
"I know."
"What are we going to do?"
I did not answer. I was staring at the little wooden bird in my hand. I had found it in the dust when the policemen dropped it, and I had picked it up without thinking. I turned it over, and rolled it between my fingers, and I did what I always did when I was frightened.
I thought about how things fit.
Where did the tin go?
If James took it, where would he hide it?
He has mud on his trousers.
I sat up.
"Danny," I said slowly.
"Yes?"
"James said he saw me running out of his back gate. At break."
"That's what he said."
"But yesterday, at the corner of the road, I told him there was a goat in the goat compound."
"There isn't a goat in the goat compound."
"There's Mabel. That's the point. She is very old. And she eats paper." I felt something warm begin to move inside my chest. "And yesterday morning, James fell in the mud in the shortcut by the compound. I heard him. He landed in the one puddle that never dries."
"Yes. And?"
"And he's got dried mud on his trousers today. The same colour. But he hasn't been in the shortcut since then. He told me. He said he walked round the road."
Danny frowned. "So?"
"So when did he get more mud?"
There was a pause.
"Oh," said Danny.
"If he had stolen the tin at break," I said, "and wanted to hide it, where would he go?"
"Somewhere nobody looks."
"Somewhere nobody goes."
"The goat compound."
"With Mabel."
"Who eats paper," said Danny, in a tone of dawning wonder.
I stood up.
I do not know what came over me. I think it was a kind of cold, clear anger, the sort that does not shout. I looked through the leaves at the road, at the crowd, at the wide pink face of Mammy Ansah, red with fury, and I felt, for the very first time in my life, something that was not fear.
It was clarity.
"Danny," I said. "I need you to run to the market. Find the tall man in the plain white shirt. Tell him that JJ asked if he'd like to see a goat."
"A goat?"
"Tell him exactly that."
"Why?"
"Because I'm going to the goat compound," I said, "and I would very much like a witness."