The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Sometimes Tessa could not prevent such rhetorical exchanges from popping into her mind. Although she had long learned to deal with them and was sure she was not wrong, they did trail a fleeting disquiet. She had never liked arguments; they reminded her of fallings-out with her father. It was perfectly reasonable, then, that such things in bubbling up and evaporating should leave behind their residues. And that was not in itself bad. Such sadnesses as one did feel – and only the greatest guru or half-wit would maintain that spiritual exercise rendered one immune to shadows – were proper and could be used. They had energies of their own.

  Thus she thought, leaning at the window and suddenly prey to the melancholy which comes of arriving exhausted in a strange tropical town early in the morning and lacking the energy to do more than doze fitfully throughout the day. For all her years of travel, and knowing that it was fatal even to think of going to bed, she had once again found herself at eleven in the morning and at three in the afternoon heavy on damp sheets, watching the strips of light between the shutters blaze with white glare and hearing from a remote outer place the cries of children, the creak of carts, the din of people living their lives. She hovered in her darkened room, disengaged, as it might have been without further purchase on her own life and lacking lien on any other.

  At this moment her attention was distracted to the little pagoda in the garden beneath. There seemed to be two children playing just inside its darkened doorway. Well, not playing exactly, so much as … She leaned further out, a chunk of rot breaking from the sill and floating away trailing dust like cinnamon powder. In this twilight it was hard to see but there really did appear to be two children copulating inside the Fathers’ pavilion. And why not too? she thought with a small pang. Bliss. She suspected these people had very clear minds. With such an uncomplicated attitude towards pleasure, there would be no reason to grow up muddied with taboo. That boy Lucky, for example, who had befriended them this morning. He gave off an unmistakable aura of cleanliness, of healthy young human animal. Just then a trumpet sounded from up in the sky somewhere to her left, setting off all kinds of bells and gongs and cries. The sudden noise must have startled the children or else it coincided with the end of their lovemaking, for they came hopping out of the pagoda’s window and loped across the lawn with their tails in the air.

  It was her laughter which chased away the last of Tessa’s doldrums and, since she was supporting herself on shaking arms, provoked the final collapse of the entire window-ledge which broke off in a cloud of termite-casts and fell like balsa wood. This made her laugh even more. Malomba was to be playful after all. Suddenly the vibrations were good. It was going to be numinous and playful. After a shower, during which she sang in her cement stall beneath a weak stream of rusty water, she felt ready for anything.

  Morning. Laki was returning from an unsuccessful raid on the bus station. Another overnight bus from the capital had arrived, but although there were several foreigners aboard none had guest-potential so far as the Nirvana was concerned. There was a group of Buddhist monks from Burma wearing orange robes and carrying yellow umbrellas who stood equably around on the packed-down vegetable waste. Suddenly a black Mercedes had nosed its way through the crowds, driven by a monk wearing smoked glasses and tailored robes. Inside the rear window two stickers in elegant script were legible through the tinted screen. One read ‘Support Your Local Temple’ and the other ‘Remember The Five Precepts’. The monks climbed in with smiles and were whisked away. This left a large and sinister-looking negro with a pockmarked face whose hands shook. Laki overheard him asking for ‘Vudusumin’; and since sumin was the word for ‘temple’, and the commonest suffix of any destination in Malomba, he drew his own conclusions.

  Nothing daunted he dawdled in the general direction of the hotel, sniffing the breeze. In a town where a section of the populace forever wore expressions of pious dignity he stood out like a tiger in a garden. His hair shone in the early sun, he walked with a spring, his eyes gleamed. Shopkeepers busy rolling down the mouths of sacks the better to display their different qualities of rice and chick-peas and mulva meal would glance up as he passed, alerted as if by the flashing of a mirror.

  ‘Morning there, Laki-boy. No catch today?’

  ‘Not yet, Mr Hussein. I don’t know where the tourists have all gone.’

  ‘Thailand, I heard. Or was it India?’

  ‘It’s the Troubles.’

  ‘Stupid things. They’re perfectly safe in Malomba if they only knew it. The worst that ever happens to tourists here is getting fleeced by holy men.’

  ‘Or being cursed, Mr Hussein.’

  On all sides the commercials of Malomba were opening their shutters. The scent of freshly baked laran bread drifted along the street like a wraith over the dust and dung and amber puddles of donkey stale. Laki stopped and bought four of the feathery, conical loaves dusted with crushed sesame. In the bakery’s dark interior he glimpsed another boy in a white apron and waved, but the boy was too busy raking embers out of the clay oven to notice.

  He reached the gateway to Chinatown, whose pillars bore an inscription proclaiming that it was a symbol of the eternal friendship, esteem and co-operation between Malomba City Council and the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. Overhead the golden lions pranced and snarled at the swallows. Laki remained puzzled by their teeth. Whoever saw a lion with teeth like dowels? How could you rend flesh with a mouthful of pegs? In the blue sky beneath each upraised paw, between the curling red tongues, through the arch of each belly, birds flickered and darted. Beyond the gateway itself was a vista of dim sum restaurants and dry goods merchants, the signs with their vertical strings of characters receding in a jumble of red and gold. But Laki’s attention was fixed elsewhere, on a strange building standing apart in its own grounds just outside the Chinese quarter.

  This was a temple, he knew, one of the handful in which tourists or any other visitors were not welcome. It was in the form of a squat, whitewashed ziggurat peaking in a suggestive little tower capped in vermilion. The whole building was quite small and had about it the air of being designed to prevent anything from leaking out. The successive blocks of diminishing size reminded him of the piles of weights on top of the pressure-cookers on sale in Chinatown. This temple stood back from the road behind heavy iron gates he had seldom seen open. There was a low wall surmounted by more iron fencing high enough to lose itself in the lower leaves of several lettuce trees whose drizzling gums and resins turned the pavement beneath them black and tacky before the monsoon. The grounds visible within were heavily overgrown, dark with foliage and tangled with vines. Among it all, gourds and blooms burned like sultry flames. There was no notice on the gate, no inscription over the blockhouse’s narrow doorway, nothing to tell the curious passer-by that this was indeed a house of worship rather than a ponderous tomb.

  Thanks to his friendship with Mr Tominy Bundash, an official guide who carried a plastic ID card in a leather wallet to prove it, Laki knew something of this mysterious place although he quite badly wanted to know more. One memorable afternoon eighteen months ago in the Nirvana’s kitchen, he had questioned the guide and learned it was known as the Lingasumin, its full title being ‘First Tantric Temple of the Left-Handed Shaktas, Malomban Rite’.

  ‘As you are doubtless aware,’ Mr Tominy Bundash had said in his official voice, ‘Tantrism or Tantric Buddhism originated in mediaeval India. Its adherents strive to attain liberation through two principal means: firstly by the repetition of sacred phrases culled from the Tantric scriptures known as dharani, and secondly by the yogic practice of sexual intercourse. The Malomban Rite here, due to migratory patterns over the last century, is more Hindu than Buddhist and characterised by “left-handedness” or the antinomian doctrine that a human being is beyond such petty matters as good and evil and –’

  ‘Sexual intercourse?’ Laki interrupted incredulously. ‘Did you say sexual intercourse?’

  ‘I did, boy. They believe that the height of religious exper
ience is the utter bliss of ritual sexuality.’

  ‘You mean it’s a religion? Can anyone join?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said the guide loftily. ‘However, I’m assured by my good friend the Mayor’s brother, Mr Botiphar, that they’re a sect of considerable austerity and self-control. For example, they completely abjure drinking and smoking. But I digress. One of the classic Tantric practices involves union with a shakti or spiritual wife, but in the Malomban Rite it is considered an act of greater devotion to the deity to have union promiscuously with social inferiors – one cites for scriptural precedent the love of Lord Krishna for the milkmaid, Radha – or with others of the same sex. Practices include the so-called black ritual in which a corpse is induced to ejaculate, rarefied techniques of self-stimulation and ways of greatly enlarging the male member of regeneration.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  His informant descended with some exasperation. ‘That’s your cock, you stupid boy.’

  ‘No, I mean, what’s the technique?’ Although it was a fact that the very conversation was proving efficacious with Laki.

  ‘I can’t possibly say,’ said Mr Bundash. It was not clear as to whether he spoke out of discretion or ignorance. ‘I am emphatically not a member of this sect; I am a good Moslem. It is merely part of my profession to know facts about the buildings and customs of Malomba which would be of interest to a visitor. I’m hardly an expert on the finer points of very alien religious doctrines. But since you ask, I believe it involves caterpillar hair.’

  Thereafter whenever Laki passed the building he felt a certain quickening of the blood. Indeed, on mornings like this full of sunlight and irradiating energy, he felt positively drawn to it so that later it would seem his steps had turned of their own accord to make the detour which enabled him to loiter past on the sticky pavement, eyes trying to pierce the heavy stonework and glimpse esoteric rituals inside. Say what you like about Malomba, he agreed with himself as he finally headed for home with his loaves, it was full of interest and strange things.

  ‘How slow I am this morning,’ Mr Muffy greeted him from behind the desk where he was reading his stars. ‘I had some silly idea you’d gone off looking for guests, but all along it was bread you were after.’

  ‘No tourists, Mr Muffy. Good morning, Mr Muffy. No tourists at all. So I bought something to make our own guests happy so they will stay here longer and bring in more money.’

  Behind him he heard the proprietor’s newspaper rattle sourly as he turned into the dining room. He had surmised correctly: the Hemonys were at table, tackling large slices of papaya.

  ‘Good morning, my lady, miss,’ he inclined his head cheerfully. ‘Good sleeping, I hope?’

  ‘Oh, Lucky, good morning to you. Yes, thank you; we all had a wonderful sleep. I’m afraid we slept most of yesterday too.’

  But Laki had spotted something amiss.

  ‘What is this?’ he cried, dumping his bread on an adjacent table and picking up their toast with horror. ‘This no good. Very old. No, no, is not for eating. Look, I take,’ and he removed the entire supply in handfuls, replacing it with his fresh loaves. ‘I buy this now,’ he explained. ‘Very new. Still hot, you feel. Special Malomba bread, we call laran. I buy to you, my lady, because you guest.’

  ‘How lovely. What did you say it was called? Laran?’

  This dining room gave on to a small verandah. Not so many years ago it had overlooked a lawn dotted with magnolia trees, but nowadays it mostly backed on to the BDL’s yard. Still, being open to the air it was moderately cool and tumbling finches flew in and out, pecking up crumbs and clinging upside down to the fly-spotted blades of the motionless ceiling fan. One of these birds was now perched on top of a cracked mirror advertising a soft drink and was fervently attacking its own image. Laki left the room with a deferential smile as the Hemonys started their loaves, flakes of crust splitting like shrapnel on to the floor to the interest of the finches whose shrill cries brought still others swooping in.

  Leaving behind him the sound of an aviary, he went to the kitchen where he prepared a small brazier shaped like a round-bottomed saucepan with holes in it. Then, starting at the top of the building, he fumigated the occupied rooms one by one, shaking powdered incense on to the coals from a beer tin. Wreathed in fragrant smoke he paid special attention to No. 41 where the smell of mould was strongest. On the floor beneath he knocked on Zoe’s door before letting himself in. He walked all round the room with the brazier at arm’s length describing a thick smoke-ring, while his eyes took in the rumpled bed, the T-shirt and underwear hung up to dry. Through the open window came the comfortable sound of broody hens clucking on the bank’s roof.

  With a last stare at the underwear Laki sighed and gave the brazier a valedictory waft, shutting the door softly behind him. She certainly was beautiful. Seeing them all together at breakfast just now had given him quite a lurch. Maybe it was just the morning sunlight, but it seemed to him their blond heads had lit up the room, so bright was their hair. The lady’s of course, was not quite so fine and lustrous, having – as he noticed when standing over her with the loaves – somewhat browner roots, as well as strands of grey which veiled it in a certain mistiness. The boy’s was, if anything, fairest of all. Laki was much intrigued by fair hair. Since his own was the uniform jet-black of all his countrymen, anything different had about it a touch of exoticism, while blondness like the Hemonys’ carried with it the golden air of purest Hollywood fantasyland. Maybe Zoe was after all a princess travelling incognita. Perhaps – an awful thought – perhaps it was she who had to visit hadlam Tapranne for psychic surgery? Maybe the publicity which would otherwise surround her made it necessary to travel disguised as an ordinary person?

  But here they were, coming up from breakfast and catching him with the brazier in one hand and the pass-key in the lock of Mrs Hemony’s door. So convinced had he become by his own tale that Laki noticed with surprise how extraordinarily well Zoe looked and thought how bravely she dissembled.

  ‘Excuse please, my lady. I am for incensing your room.’

  ‘What a lovely smell. It’s all over the hotel.’

  ‘At least it couldn’t make my room smell any worse,’ said Jason.

  ‘Jay! Don’t be so ungrateful to our friend. You ought to say thank you to Lucky.’

  Laki opened the door for them and followed them in with his brazier. He blew on the coals and sprinkled the pinkish powder. Smoke billowed up. Tessa wafted a little towards her nose with one hand.

  ‘Frankincense,’ she said. ‘Yes, definitely olibanum. Camphor and sandalwood. A trace of myrrh, perhaps. But there are citrus tones as well, don’t you think?’ Her children remained silent. ‘Neroli? No, I know. It’s like that one in Kuala Lumpur, you remember? Where you had the nosebleed, Jason? The man burned it for you to inhale and it worked at once. That had dried pomelo rind ground up in it. The burnt marmalade smell? This is the same. Oh, and of course, benzoin – or some sort of styrax. All right, Lucky; you tell us what it’s got in it.’

  ‘I don’t know, my lady. I buy in market only. Quality three because Mr Muffy not like to spending.’

  ‘Honestly, Mum, you take everything so seriously,’ said Zoe.

  ‘Well, I like to know,’ Tessa told her stoutly. ‘Such things are important. Every day you do like this, Lucky?’

  ‘Oh yes, my lady. Every morning. Bring good fortune, make all bad spirits go away.’

  ‘Very proper too. Make sure you do it thoroughly around my bed, please.’ Laki pulled the bed away from the wall and sandwiched himself behind the wormeaten headboard, dutifully asperging smoke. ‘Oh – and Lucky? You mustn’t keep calling me “my lady”. My name is Tessa. I’m not a peeress; just plain Mrs Hemony.’

  ‘Yes, missus.’

  ‘And Lucky – I’m afraid I’ve a little confession to make. Here,’ she beckoned him over to the window. ‘Last night I broke the sill.’

  ‘No, missus. You not break; it fall by himself. Very old and bad
wood. I tell Mr Muffy make new.’

  ‘You tell Mr Muffy I don’t mind whether he mends it or not, but that I shall of course pay him for the damage.’

  Jason, who had been idly rolling his mother’s little brown bottles of essential oil up and down the bed, asked, ‘Is there a swimming pool anywhere?’

  ‘Of course there isn’t,’ said Zoe. ‘This is a Third World country. Where do you think we are, Italy?’

  ‘We’ll go to the coast just as soon as we’ve finished here, Jay. Promise. Anyway, it’s time we went exploring Malomba. I’m so excited. Yesterday was rather a write-off. Lucky, can we get a map here in the hotel?’

  ‘Mr Muffy have map. Also have names of guides. You be careful, missus. Many evil fellows in Malomba, fake guides have no ID – take you to bad place, then to robbing you. Camera, passport, watch, shoeses. Steal all money then leave. Careful-careful.’

  If this warning did not exactly accord with Tessa’s preconceptions of life in a holy city, then neither did it come as much of a surprise. She had done a lot of travelling.

  ‘I very good guide,’ Laki was suggesting shyly. ‘Only I have duty here.’

  ‘Yes, Mum, why don’t we borrow Lucky?’ asked Zoe, causing him an electric shock of pleasure which made the handle of the still-smouldering brazier tingle. ‘At least we know he’s honest.’

  Laki flashed his glance on her. ‘I honest, miss. I am trusting your life. But not always free. When I not free I give you name of very good Moslem man, my friend Mr Tominy Bundash. He official guide to Malomba. Have ID. He show temples, fire-walking, spirit healing, everything.’

  As Laki went out Jason looked expectantly up at him from his bottles and caused the bell-boy to think that his, at any rate, was a boredom which might be exploited. Things were looking promising. Had not the missus already called him ‘our friend’? And had not the beautiful Zoe asked for him personally – personally! – as their guide?