The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ said Tessa. ‘Malomba’s an important spiritual place, isn’t it? There’ll be a lot to see.’

  ‘Oh, very much to seeing here,’ his voice came up behind her. ‘Malomba have thirty-nine temples, churches, moskies. The Glass …’

  ‘What about the healers?’ Zoe wanted to know. ‘This is the right place for psychic surgery, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, miss. Psychic surgeons we have. Very famous, very good men. You like? I know all of them. If you want I show. Special price because I am friend.’

  ‘We already have an introduction, thank you,’ Tessa told him from up ahead. ‘A gentleman named Tapranne.’

  ‘You to knowing hadlam Tapranne?’ Laki’s tone was of surprise and respect. All Malombans knew he was the best healer in town and therefore in the entire country. Assuredly most of the other surgeons, if not actual charlatans, were in it for the money. When hadlam Tapranne operated, however, money was never discussed. Even if he cured you completely no fee was asked or expected. Laki assumed he must be immensely rich because his patients were so grateful their generosity knew no bounds. Last year a famous Indian film star had come all the way from Delhi to see him. The man had been suffering from a malignancy which made movement agonising and he flew out his specially padded Rolls Royce so he could make his visit in comfort. After only one session with hadlam Tapranne he was completely cured. The hadlam had removed a black tumour the size of a pomegranate from near his spine. There were pictures of it in the next day’s press and ordinary doctors had declared it a miracle. There and then the Indian had given the hadlam his Rolls Royce and had walked all the way back to the capital. That had been the real proof that something unique had occurred: an Indian film star walking. It had taken him a fortnight and when he arrived he described himself as a ‘changed man’. In consequence of this and other miracles, people were coming from all over the world to consult Tapranne and he was by no means easy to see. If these Hemonys had access to him, they must be richer and better-connected than they looked.

  ‘We don’t yet know him personally but we shall be seeing him in a week or so,’ Tessa was saying. ‘How much further?’

  ‘Here, my lady.’ Laki juggled with the keys and opened a door in a dim passage. ‘This is my lady’s room. Special view of Redemptorist Fathers.’

  The room was exactly what everybody expected. They had all climbed many identical staircases before and seen rooms with a gnawed gap between floorboards and wainscoting, a cement bathroom with single tap and no shower-head, a seatless lavatory bowl. Two mosquito nets of grubby nylon holed by insomniacs’ cigarettes hung from the ceiling, tucked loosely into their hoops. The beds beneath them were made up with clean unironed sheets with the word ‘Nirvana’ printed on them in washed-out blue.

  ‘Look at view, my lady.’

  Tessa crossed to the window and was agreeably surprised to find herself looking into a tropical garden of great luxuriance. Between palms and mangoes the grass was cropped by wandering deer. Among the dapples of sunlight blossoms glowed. A magnificent cloud-tree floated its breezy sacks of opalescent bloom above a pavilion in the form of a miniature stone pagoda reached by a tiny hump of bridge over a stream. From this garden a scent of flowers poured in through the glassless window-frame.

  ‘Oh, it’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Do come and look at this, you two.’

  ‘This room suits my lady?’

  ‘It’s perfect.’

  ‘I to showing the other rooms. Come,’ he said to Zoe and Jason.

  ‘You’ve been very kind and helpful,’ Tessa thanked him. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Laki, my lady.’

  ‘Lucky?’ She studied him and then said earnestly, ‘Yes, you are. I feel it. And so are we to have met you, although of course it was meant. What happiness! I am in bliss.’

  Her children followed their guide and tramped dourly upstairs.

  Zoe surveyed her darkened room impassively. ‘It’ll do. At least I’ve got it to myself.’

  ‘Only please to keeping shutters closed, miss. So plenty air come in but no monkeys.’

  ‘Monkeys?’

  ‘Oh, yes, miss, many monkeys here in Malomba. Living in jungle and coming down for eating in early morning. Also living in Redemptorist Fathers because many trees. Stealing, stealing everything. And biting. To being careful, miss.’

  She threw open the shutters. This room was at one side of the hotel and gave over the flat cement roof of the Bank of the Divine Lotus next door. Beneath an awning of fronds jury-rigged on bamboo poles she could see chickens penned in. Some rusted filing-cabinet drawers served as nesting boxes and were stuffed with hay. Leaning out and looking towards the hotel’s rear, she could see an edge of the massive greenery her mother’s room overlooked.

  ‘Well, thank you, Lucky. I’ll come and see yours later,’ she added to her brother.

  Room 41 was at its celebrated best. The laundrywomen on the roof overhead were busy. Water dripped into the shower stall from a black wound in the ceiling whose lips were mottled with moulds; at one end of this crack depended a tuft of green beard glistening with slime. Chatter came down with narrow clarity as through a cardboard tube, then a scraping as an aluminium washing bowl was upended. The dripping increased momentarily, became a stream of cloudy rinse-water, ebbed again.

  This room faced the street, but being only one floor lower than Laki’s pigeon-loft its view over Malomba was scarcely less panoramic. The Nirvana was built on a gentle slope which marked the beginning of the hills, and when new had stood peacefully apart from the rest of the little town in its own garden. With the steady increase in Malomba’s importance as a holy city, however, the outward creep of development had brought the place to the hotel’s front door and in doing so had swallowed up its grounds. Where the Bank of the Divine Lotus now stood, a centuries-old flamboyant had spread its shade and dripped its flames until a few years ago. The bank had paid fairly if not generously for the site. As Mr Muffy complained at the time with lowered voice, everyone knew the BDL’s tentacles spread over the whole country, sucking in revenue from impoverished peasants forced by drought and Chinese price-rigging to take out loans for such things as seed grain and fertiliser. At the least hint of opposition or resistance, though, the same tentacles would strangle the life out of you. Those damned Buddhistic Indians were worse even than the Islamic or Hindu varieties …

  Jason was standing at the door of the bathroom watching the surges and dwindles of grey water coming through the ceiling, hands on narrow hips in a gesture less truculent than resigned. ‘What’s upstairs?’ he asked.

  Laki glanced at him with something like sympathy. Most of the travellers he showed into No. 41 had reasons for not being able to protest.

  ‘Nothing. The roof. Where I live.’

  ‘You’ve got a leak.’

  ‘The women. They are washing in the morning only. Soon finish now. Look,’ and to distract his young guest from further contemplation of the room’s defects, which included the hot waft of cockroach from the darkness between the floorboards, he indicated the view. Generally speaking, Malomba’s architecture was two-storeyed; that and the eminence on which the Nirvana stood meant that little obstructed the prospect of the hills on the far side of town and practically any obtrusion was one of the thirty-nine religious edifices. Prominent in the middle distance was the famous Glass Minaret of the Ibn Ballur mosque. Sunlight winked off its seven hundred and seventy-seven thousand rhomboidal facets. Not far away, at the entrance to the Chinese quarter, rose a cream archway crowned with green up-curving ceramic shingles on whose ridge curveted a pair of golden lions. They sparkled like a dream of fortune. ‘You like?’

  ‘It’s all right. Why do you live on the roof?’

  ‘Very beautiful. Very fine view. Fresh air. Nobody come except the women to washing for one hour every day. So no disturb.’ Pleased to be asked about his domain, Laki said generously, ‘I show if you like. We shoot deers together.’

  ‘
Deers?’

  From a pocket in his cotton uniform the bell-boy fetched out a catapult. Its handle was carved shallowly with a design of tiny flowers and birds, the result of many hours’ whittling. From its arms dangled heavy straps of black rubber; its pouch was of oiled leather. It gave off an air of potency which the delicate decoration only enhanced.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Jason approvingly. He took it and half-tensed the rubber in an experimental fashion. ‘Can you hit anything?’

  ‘Of course. I am expert. The deers in the garden are easy. Not kill but make to jumping. Also one day I to hit Father McGoohan. He walking round and round and read little book so I shoot, ponk!, with areca nut. Ha! he is to jumping but not know it me.’ Sudden concern crossed Laki’s face. ‘You not tell Mr Muffy, please?’

  ‘Why should I?’ Interest was displacing Jason’s fatigue. At that moment a bell pealed faintly in the recesses of the hotel.

  ‘That Mr Muffy. I go now. One day I bring you there and you to trying if also can hit the Fathers.’ Laki pocketed the catapult and left. Jason could hear the soft flopping of his rubber sandals echoing down successive flights of the dusty stairs.

  Every night at eight o’clock Laki, coming off duty, ate in the kitchen with Raju, who was going on. More accurately, they ate sitting on the threshold of the back door, facing the last greens and madders of sunset. In the sooty cavern at their backs was the bustle of cooking and dishing up. Laki always looked forward to the evening meal, and not merely because he could stuff himself with as much rice and lamb-and-cardamom sausage as he could hold. He liked the gentle philosophical tenor of their conversations, the satisfaction of his own enquiries being met by Raju’s considered opinion. Raju clearly enjoyed them, too, for much the same reason.

  Finding Raju here at the Hotel Nirvana had been a stroke of fortune indeed. Laki had taken it as a good omen the day he started his apprenticeship. For although they had not known each other, Raju at once recognised the boy’s accent and they soon discovered they were from neighbouring villages on the eastern coast and had acquaintances in common. Without a doubt they were distantly related and, as the custom is, where a blood relationship is plausible it is taken as definite. The eighty miles of unspeakable road which separated them from their home province represented exile, further strengthening the bond. What made alliance absolute was their awareness of being self-reliant country-folk at the mercy of scheming townees skilled at nothing but racketeering.

  ‘It’s us against that lot out there, my boy,’ Raju had told him early on, shying a woody stump of cassava at the kitchen goat and picking fibres from his teeth.

  ‘I know it, uncle.’

  ‘Listen to them. Did you ever hear such a racket?’ For as the sun set, most of the thirty-nine assorted temples were passing on the news of this event.

  ‘It’s not like this in Saramu, uncle.’

  They had both fallen silent, each in his mind’s eye seeing the dark coast he had left, with the line of palms along the beach and the huts among them whose oil-lamps and candles outlined in soft orange the rectangles of door and window frames. In the phosphorescent surf boats would be putting out, a pressure lamp lashed to the prow, outriggers smacking and boys wet to the waist dragging themselves aboard like porpoises. Laki could see each familiar detail of his father’s face craning over the side of the boat above the reef, the coral heads and outcrops a shadowy green as the light passed above, his elder brother ready with spear or knife while little Gunath paddled gently to keep the bows into the swell. At such moments home-sickness would wring him through and through until his whole being was possessed by the craving to see his mother and sisters again, to go fishing once more with the men. That was what he wanted; that was what he was good at. Wherefore this banishment to a city maddened by traffic and conflicting creeds, whose people couldn’t even speak properly?

  ‘I know, boy,’ Raju had said as Laki turned his head aside on the doorpost to hide his tears. ‘But you’ll be going home. We’ll save up the bus fare, you and I, then we’ll go back with all our hard-earned wealth. And then what parties, what carryings-on! This November, you’ll see.’

  ‘It’s only March now, uncle.’

  ‘Time passes quickly if you’re making money.’

  And impossible as it had seemed, the time had passed, they had gone back to Saramu Province. There had been embraces and parties and cries of admiration at his new shoes, the presents he had brought, the lighter he had given his father which worked without a flint. They all said how he’d grown, how handsome he was becoming. ‘Still looks like a goat’s hole to me,’ his elder brother remarked. ‘And I bet this little city gent has forgotten how to fish. He’ll be too proud now to go out with the likes of us bumpkins,’ which was all that was needed to prove him wrong in the best night’s fishing Laki had ever had.

  That was more than two years ago. He had been home twice since then, yet for some reason the last time had not been quite so enjoyable. He had done all the old skilful things: had shinned up palms to bring down the toddy morning and evening; had gone fishing; had set off with friends for a day’s catapulting and arrived back with a string of small birds at his waist to prove that his competence had not yet rusted away. Hand and eye were still attuned, but behind it all was alteration. He didn’t feel much different in himself but could detect a change in others’ attitudes. It was less noticeable in the adults, quite marked in the children, in his contemporaries, his old friends. He felt … not excluded, exactly – certainly not that; but as if a lot had happened in his absence to which he was no longer privy. He was left with the sad conviction that he could never quite catch up now, no matter how much he listened to stories of events. Life at home, he discovered, was maybe not so much a question of knowing who was marrying whom, whose boat had been repossessed by the rural bank for defaulting on a loan, who had been caught giving short measure. It was more a matter of habitual mornings with catapults, nightly fishing, daily choppings of firewood: the constant renewing of bonds, the shared uneventfulness. Once an activity as ordinary as hunting became an occasion, something went out of it which was never to be recaptured save by returning home for good.

  He was saddened to perceive that he was looked on as different, as if he were subtly changing his species. To them, evidently, the big bad holy city had him in thrall. Sometimes he let slip words they couldn’t understand: perfectly ordinary everyday words for traffic lights or fuse-boxes or similar urban furniture, as well as expressions and oaths which to their ears sounded acrid and vicious instead of meaty. He was asked questions which suggested he might be an alien rather than a brother returned. Little Gunath had said, ‘I suppose you’ll be considering marriage soon?’; whereas a year ago he would have essayed something a good deal cheekier, a traditional taunt such as: ‘Isn’t it about time your voice was breaking? I’d be getting worried if I were you,’ followed by a squealing chase among the palm trees with additional ribaldries thrown over one shoulder: ‘Better try some vine potion’ or ‘Go and sleep with the Dwarf Princess. They say she brings young boys on.’

  But worst of all for Laki was that his very success as a remitter drove an uneasy wedge into affections and friendships. He had been sent away to earn money. Very well, then, he was earning money. He earned more as a bell-boy at the Nirvana than his father did from fishing, itself a source of feelings too complex to be spoken about. Yet although he was being the model dutiful son, sending money home to his needy family and thereby deserving the highest approbation, he could not but wonder now and again whether they didn’t think more of the money than they did about him. No; that was impossible; of course they wouldn’t. But all the same …

  Finally, he was going to have to do something about the Nirvana. It all boiled down to that. It had been a good job for a boy of eleven or twelve – outstandingly good, even, considering it was his first. But at fourteen or fifteen Laki could see that Mr Mufiy was never going to pay him much more than at present. And there was no hope of promotion sinc
e there was nothing he could be promoted to. All of a sudden he determined that the upheaval he had undergone should at least be made to pay well. However fondly he had been cut off at the roots, he wanted real compensation. Accordingly he began considering how to set about bettering his lot.

  Now, tonight, he said softly to Raju with his mouth full, ‘I’m going to leave.’

  ‘Ah. Found something better, then?’

  ‘Not exactly, uncle.’

  ‘Well, boy, do you want the advice of an old man?’

  ‘Of course, uncle. That’s exactly what I want.’

  ‘Don’t get out of the boat until you’ve reached land. Easy enough to hand in your notice, but damn silly to do it before you’ve got somewhere else to go. You can’t live on air and if you think Muffy’ll give you a month’s pay just so’s you can bugger off with a pocketful of cash, you’ve another think coming.’

  ‘Of course not, uncle,’ said Laki hastily. It was the very fantasy he’d had.

  ‘Where would you live? You’re used to your own room and it costs you nothing. As does this food,’ and Raju speared a saffron ball of semolina and popped it into his mouth to make the point. ‘You’ve eaten well here, boy. Grown, too. Skinny little waif you used to be and now look at you, practically a man. Any day now. Well, well; it all goes on. New shoots become old sticks.’

  At other times it had been soothing to listen to the familiar proverbs in Raju’s mouth but now Laki felt a respectful impatience, a mood further pricked by the old man having confirmed what he had secretly known all along, which was that it would be a mistake to leave his present job for sheer restlessness.

  ‘It needs thinking through,’ Raju continued as he chewed. ‘You’ve got a lot in your favour. You know this town well, how it works, and it seems to me you’ve picked up a good deal of English on the quiet.’ He shot the boy a shrewd sidelong look. ‘And that was smart. You speak better than I do.’