The Ghosts & Jamal by Bridget Blankley

Author:Bridget Blankley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HopeRoad

Another Plan

Jamal woke up very early the next morning, before it was even light. Too early to go down for breakfast, too early even to have a shower. Instead he went for a walk outside to think about what the nurse had said. He wanted to work out if tea really did keep the ghosts away. Jamal sat under his favourite tree and considered. It was true that he had drunk tea more often since he had been in the hospital. It was also true that he couldn’t remember seeing any trace of the ghosts since he’d been there. So maybe the tea was keeping the ghosts away.

The problem, Jamal thought, was that lots of other things had changed since he’d been at the hospital. There was enough food to have breakfast every day, so maybe it was breakfast that kept the ghosts at bay. Plus he had drunk the medicine that made him sleepy. Therefore it could have been the medicine which saw them off. Or maybe they simply didn’t come when he was asleep.

Jamal sat going over everything that had happened. He remembered that the first time the ghosts had appeared he had been asleep in his hut. And so it wasn’t sleep which stopped them coming.

He stopped thinking then and went outside. It wasn’t quite dawn but the early animals had started to wake and there were parrots streaming across the sky. Outside, the town was waking up as well. The cars and the horns and the shouts of people in a hurry were all getting louder as the sky was becoming lighter. The watchman unlocked the small gate, then he fetched his mat and left the hut for his morning prayers.

‘This is the time to go,’ said Jamal. ‘Not in the night when people are on the lookout for thieves but early in the morning when everyone’s busy.’ He said it out loud, but, of course, no one heard him. Everyone was busy getting ready for the rest of the day and no one had time to notice what other people were doing. Jamal went back inside and had a nice long shower before anyone else was up. He got dressed then went out for breakfast.

‘You got the weight of the world on your shoulders this morning? Or isn’t my cooking up to scratch?’

Jamal smiled at the cook’s joke and took an extra couple of bean fritters to go with his bowl of Koko. It was a perfect breakfast.

‘No complaints, Uncle,’ he said. ‘See, I’m taking extra just to prove it.’

Afiba winked at him from behind the cook.

‘The akara are good,’ he whispered. ‘I made them myself.’

It was true. Jamal had no complaints about the breakfast, or about any of the meals. In fact, Jamal thought that the cook was probably the best cook in the world, or maybe the second best if Afiba had made the bean cakes. That was part of the reason he had felt so miserable when he came out for breakfast: Jamal knew how much he’d miss all this food when he left.

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