At break time, I did what I do every day, which is vanish.
I am quite good at it. It is a skill, like whistling or holding your breath. You wait for the bell. You slide out of your seat before the crowd. You pass along the back wall of the classroom block, behind the water tank and the line of dusty flame trees, and by the time anybody notices that the jinx has left, you are already through the gap in the fence and running down the road toward the market.
Because I had a problem, and the problem was my stomach.
You will remember that I am the owner of an extremely loyal stomach. It does not complain. It does not sulk. It simply waits, with the patient trust of a dog at a door. But that day, as I ran, I could feel a hollow in the middle of me, large and echoing, like an empty hall. And I knew that if I did not find food by the end of the afternoon, I would be too weak to do the thing I had planned for supper, which was to be very quiet at the table.
The plan was simple. There is a woman in the market called Seller. I will tell you about her in a moment. She runs the best food stall in County A, and she has a bad habit of leaving dirty dishes in great piles. I wash them. She gives me a plate of whatever is left.
It is not a bad arrangement. It is not a good one. It is a working one, which in County A is better than most.
I was running along the main road, past the pharmacy, past the bus stop, past a man selling roasted corn from a wheelbarrow, when I saw it.
It lay in the gutter just ahead of me, small, dark and glossy.
A wallet.
* * *
I should say that I have found things before. A coin once. A button. Half a very old biscuit, which I did not eat, but kept in my pocket for three days for luck. Once, behind the bank, I found a tooth, and I do not like to talk about that.
But I had never found a wallet.
It was a long, flat, leather wallet, the colour of dark chocolate, with a tiny gold clasp. It was warm, as though it had just been in somebody's pocket. And as I stooped over it, I could not help noticing that it was fat.
You must understand how this felt. I was twelve years old, and hungry, and I had been hungry for as long as I could remember. In my mind, a very small voice began to speak. It was not a bad voice. It was a reasonable one.
It's only a wallet, said the voice. Nobody saw. You could open it. You could take a little. Just enough for a pie. Or two.
I stood with it in my hand.
I could hear the traffic, the corn seller's whistle, the distant bell of the school. I could feel the sun on the back of my neck. The wallet lay in my palm, heavy and sleek and silent, like a small animal that has not yet decided whether to bite.
Just a pie, said the voice.
And then I thought of my mother's face on the porch. The look she gave me when Mammy Ansah called me a jinx. That small, bright flicker of something that wasn't shame.
Somebody great.
I closed my eyes. I breathed out.
"No," I said, aloud, to nobody. "I would rather be hungry and boring."
I looked up. A little way down the road, two men were walking away from me, deep in conversation. One was a young man, thin and anxious, in a worn grey shirt that did not look as if it belonged to him. The other was older. He wore a plain white shirt and dark trousers, and his hands were clasped behind his back. They walked slowly, close together, like two people trying very hard to look like they were not important.
I ran after them.
* * *
"Sir!" I called. "Excuse me, sir!"
The older man did not turn. He was talking, in a low, easy voice, about something that sounded like drainage.
I tapped his back. "Sir. Your wallet has fallen."
He turned.
I will tell you something strange. I have thought about it many times since. When he turned, and I looked up into his face, I felt something go through me like a draught through a door. It was not fear. It was not surprise. It was a very odd kind of recognition, as though I had walked into a room in my own house that I had somehow never been in before.
He was a tall man, broad-shouldered and straight-backed, about my father's age. His face was square, with a strong, clean jaw and a straight nose. His hair was short and dark, silvering at the sides, and his skin was the warm brown of a man who spends his days outdoors. But it was his eyes that held me.
He wore a pair of dark glasses, and for the first moment I could not see them. Then he lifted one hand and pushed them up onto his forehead, and I saw that they were grey.
They were exactly the colour of mine.
I stopped breathing.
"Is that mine?" said the man.
He had a low voice, even and warm, with a faint trace of amusement, as though he found most things slightly funny and had learned not to say so.
"Yes, sir. I think so. It was in the gutter."
I held it out. I cleaned the dust off the leather with my sleeve first, because it seemed rude to hand a stranger something dirty. He took it. His fingers brushed mine, and I noticed that his hand was big and warm and very steady.
"Thank you," he said.
"You're welcome, sir. I'm late. Goodbye."
I turned and ran.
* * *
I heard the younger man's voice behind me, thin and urgent, rising over the traffic.
"Master, please. Check the wallet. See if something is missing. That boy is running away."
I did not slow down. I had heard that sentence many times in my life, and I knew the tune. But I heard the other voice too, the low, easy one, saying something that made the younger man go quiet.
I only caught half of it, because I was already round the corner and my ears were full of wind.
"…Steven, it's all right. Perhaps he's in a hurry. If I were him, and I had taken something, I would rather not return the wallet at all. But he did. So he took nothing."
"But Master—"
"Look at him," said the low voice, and I thought it sounded oddly gentle. "Not every child nowadays would do that. He did not even wait to be thanked. He did not ask for a single coin."
A pause.
"It means he comes from a humble and a prestigious family."
I tripped over a stone.
Humble and prestigious?
I caught myself on a lamp post. I nearly laughed. It was the funniest thing I had ever heard. Humble, yes. I would have signed a paper for humble. But prestigious? I looked down at my feet, bare, brown, and cracked like old paving. I looked at my shirt, with its long torn armpit. I looked at the bag I carried, which was held together mostly by stubbornness.
Prestigious, I thought. I'm so prestigious I don't own shoes.
But as I ran, a very strange, small glow began to spread in my chest. It was not a big feeling. It was only the feeling you get when a person you do not know has said something kind, and you have no idea where to put it.
A prestigious family.
I did not have a family like that. I had a father with a basket and a mother with a secret and a brother who taped notes to mirrors. We were not prestigious. We were barely Jackson.
And yet, for the whole length of the road, until I reached the market, I could not stop turning the word over in my head, like a coin I had no idea how to spend.
* * *
I had only gone a few streets when I realised I had left something behind.
It was not a physical thing. It was an odd, hollow sense, as though I had put down a bag I'd been carrying and not noticed until my arm felt light. I slowed. I looked back.
The two men were standing exactly where I had left them, in the middle of the road. The younger one was shaking his head. The older one had not moved.
He was watching me.
He had taken off his glasses altogether. Even from that distance, I could feel the grey weight of his stare, level and thoughtful and a little puzzled, as though he were looking at a map he had seen before and could not remember where.
I raised my hand. It was a stupid thing to do. I did not know why. It just seemed polite.
After a second, he raised his.
Then I turned and ran, round the last corner and into the cool, loud, steaming dark of the market, and left the two strangers behind me in the sun.