The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  And so it was that a few minutes later when Jason opened the door of Room 41 he found the bell-boy standing on the bedside table tearing handfuls of beard from the ceiling.

  ‘Make repair,’ Laki greeted him succinctly. But Jason threw himself on to his bed with the exhaustion of one embarking on a long illness. ‘You okay? Where missus and miss?’

  ‘Botanical Gardens. I’m thirsty.’ He reached for an empty glass on the floor at his bedside and going to the tap turned it on. It sighed.

  ‘No water now, five o’clock coming back. But not for drinking. Malomba water very bad.’ Laki jumped off the table. ‘I get you cold drink, anything you want. Coca Cola-Bolly-Pepsi-Mops-Fanta-Seven-Up.’

  ‘Mops?’

  ‘Local drink only. Moslems making. Too much sweet, too many gas.’ He went to the window and tossed out the netted tuft of roots and rot he had pulled from the wound in the ceiling. Through Jason’s mind came and went a terrifying image of his mother’s forthcoming operation. He fixed his eyes on Laki’s hands.

  ‘Where’s your catapult?’ He mimed pulling back elastic.

  ‘Ah, kancha.’ Laki drew the weapon half out of his pocket. Its pouch lolled. ‘Always here,’ he said. ‘I go now to fetching soft drinks, then I show my house upstairs. We make kancha.’

  For the ten minutes he was away Jason fell into a deep, imageless sleep. From beyond the window came faint sounds of the world through which he had just passed. It was so full of violent toxins and pungencies, so inescapable in its heat that one might almost have supposed the city had plans for him, for all his family, that a process of softening-up had already begun. Why else should belfry palms toll out their scent, the parakeets swarm in the cloud-tree in the Redemptorist Fathers’ garden? For what else the massed fairyland of temples, churches, mosques and synagogues? While somewhere behind it all were the healers, the therapists, the psychic surgeons maybe sharpening their thumbnails, maybe hiding slivers of razor-blade beneath them, maybe just honing their powers. The only certain thing was that they were waiting.

  Jason opened his eyes. Laki was softly bouncing the catapult’s dangling pouch on his chest. In his other hand the bell-boy held a pair of bottles by their necks. ‘Come,’ he said and Jason obeyed. He glided without feeling the floor, following Laki to the dark end of the corridor where they went through a door. This gave on to back stairs ascending from spicy gloom. A further flight led upwards, something of an afterthought maybe, since the treads were of hastily-laid soft brown bricks between which bulged unpointed mortar.

  They emerged from a hatchway into the blows of the sun. Jason stood stupefied by the encircling panorama, by the radiance of the Glass Minaret, by the thirty-nine temples and four cinemas with canopies of trees boiling up between them as if their veins were stuffed with pure hydrogen. Laki was unlocking the door of a tumbledown mud-brick shed and motioning him inside in a proprietorial way. It was a limewashed cell, surprisingly cool and lit mainly from a hole in the roof through which a dense vine was thrusting. This knotty plant came from low down one wall, filled half the room, went out through the ceiling and curved over again to hang a tangling freight of gourds and leaves over the edge of the hotel roof and form a shady pergola outside.

  ‘It’s really a good room,’ said Jason admiringly. He accepted a cold bottle and drank. From the dimness beyond the vine came the sound of pigeons; curved flakes of white down drifted through the sunbeams. But more than anything else he noticed the smell, that same smell he had thought characterised the town. But here it was concentrated, almost glandular. Surely this very room was the heart of Malomba? Like a tomato plant the vine bore fruit and flowers at the same time. It was as if it were simultaneously mature and immature. Its gourds were pale and warty, the flowers most brilliant cadmium yellow, each with a central dot of indigo. Jason went to it and held its branches and the scent of the flowers poured over him so that for an instant he was on the point of blissful anaesthesia.

  Laki stood watching his visitor with a look of pride. ‘Good house?’ he asked at length.

  ‘I’ve never seen a room with a tree in it before.’ He was reluctant or unable to let go of the branches.

  ‘National Plant: karesh. Karesh in English is “vine”.’

  ‘It’s not like any vine I’ve ever seen,’ said Jason doubtfully, thinking of the vines of Valcognano which rampaged like weeds along the brinks of abandoned terraces and in autumn hung their pounds of grapes over the abyss. Italy was suddenly very far off, rugged and prosaic. Simple though his own room at home was, it had none of the bareness of this cell with its straw mat on the floor in one corner. On the other hand there was an extreme richness here which his own room lacked, an exotic self-containment that amounted to luxury. A few articles were lodged here and there among the leaves: a piece of mirror, a coconut shell of soap ends, a clean shirt, a short knife acutely curved as if for pruning.

  ‘Knife for making toddy,’ explained Laki. ‘Each time to fetching must to cut again very thin piece.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the boy, understanding not at all.

  As if he had suddenly remembered it was wiser to be discreet about his tapping activities, even in front of a foreigner who plainly hadn’t a clue, Laki sidetracked the conversation abruptly by stabbing a gourd. Instantly a bleb of clear liquid gathered at the wound and descended in a long, swinging drool towards the floor. ‘Sticky,’ he said, touching the filament and making threads between his fingertips.

  ‘Can you eat them?’ Jason asked.

  ‘No, not to eating.’ Laki produced his catapult once more. ‘We try kancha outside now?’

  As Tessa had discovered, the Nirvana backed on to the lush and largely unfrequented garden of the Redemptorist Fathers. Laki led the way across the roof, pointing out the shallow cement trough by the tap where the women did their washing to the discomfort of Room 41’s occupants. The area was crisscrossed with wires from which hung threadbare sheets stamped with the hotel’s name. After stopping to pick some pebbles from the mud of the dovecote’s walls, Laki squatted by the low parapet and pointed. Far below, one of the Fathers’ deer was grazing near the pagoda, a buck whose antlers shone in the sun. He fitted a stone into the pouch, drew a bead, and let fly. The deer leaped and bolted. There came the distant rattle of stone off antler.

  ‘Golly,’ breathed Jason, the hum of the pebble through the air still in his ears.

  There followed some ten minutes of tuition, at the end of which he could hit the pagoda with pieces of gravel four times out of ten.

  ‘One year to practising,’ Laki told him with pleasure at his pupil’s progress. ‘You be good hunter.’

  ‘I don’t think my mother would like that.’

  On his next try a strand of elastic came loose from the pouch and snapped back, stinging his outstretched thumb, so they went back into Laki’s house for repairs. The bell-boy produced scissors and an old motorcycle inner tube from deep within the vine and sat down on the pallet. Jason wondered what else the vine concealed. It was like an open-textured safe, for unless one knew where to thrust one’s hands among its leaves and flowers and fruit there would be little chance of finding any particular thing. In response to a patting gesture of the hand he went and sat by Laki, who busied himself trimming a thin length of rubber from the opened-out tube.

  ‘How is your house?’ Laki asked as he worked.

  ‘Quite big. Old. We live up a mountain.’

  ‘How many rooms you have?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jason counted to himself. ‘Twelve, including the stables downstairs. Oh, thirteen with the bathroom.’

  ‘Thirteen rooms? You have many brothers and sisters? Grandfathers?’

  ‘No, just the three of us.’

  ‘Thirteen rooms and three people?’ Laki’s estimation of the Hemonys’ wealth, which had been slightly dented by the description of the house as ‘old’, went considerably higher. It would need confirming, however. ‘You have TV?’

  ‘We’ve got one, but sometime
s if there’s no petrol for the generator it won’t work.’

  This was inconclusive, although the generator sounded hopeful. ‘How many animals?’

  ‘We’ve got two dogs and four cats. But the cats are nearly wild. They live in the stables.’

  ‘No pigs, cows, goats?’

  ‘Oh, I see. We’ve got twelve goats and twenty-one sheep.’

  Laki looked up. This was a good answer. The richest person in his village had four goats and a huge sow that had to be taken to a neighbour’s for mating. One year after a particularly good fishing season when he had lost no nets his father had spent his tiny reserve of cash on a kid which, although it had grown into a plump nanny, proved barren. For a season it had wandered up and down the beach, in and out of the drawn-up boats, browsing on fish entrails and banana peels and whatever daily ration of the villagers’ excrement had not already gone to crabs, pigs and dogs. No billy had approached it with more than cousinly interest, so even they had known. In exasperation his father had cut her throat and they and their friends had eaten well for several days. It had always been Laki’s dream to have his own goat, let alone a flock of twelve. The twenty-one sheep sounded additionally attractive but to tell the truth he had never seen a sheep and was a little hazy as to what they looked like. He remembered seeing a book once – there had been one at the elementary school up the coast – and in this book had been pictures of various animals, some of which he recognised. He rather thought that sheep had been quite like goats. Presumably this boy’s father would be back in Italy, looking after them on the mountain. Then he recalled his saying there were only the three of them. ‘Your father is dead?’

  ‘No,’ said Jason. ‘Not as far as I know. He went off with a woman.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Laki wisely. Where he came from it would have been thought most dishonourable for a man to desert his family. By one means or another most men accommodated themselves, combining fun with honour. Laki presumed this to be merely a basic living skill for any man, but it was evidently one this boy’s father had not acquired. What a passive creature his mother must be to have allowed such a thing, content to accept disgrace for herself and comparative poverty for her children! If she had only taken a knife to him! But maybe she had. At any rate she did have golden hair and a kind face as well as smelling nice. The most extraordinary fantasy came to him then: no, not exactly a fantasy since that implied a clear imagined picture. This was more a sense that here a slot opened up, a space into which somebody might fit himself, though he stopped short of giving that person either a name or a role. ‘You are sad without father?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why, should I be?’

  ‘But mother sad. Very sad and cold at night.’

  ‘My mother’s not …’ began Jason distantly. ‘She’s a different sort of person. You’d have to know her to understand what I mean. She’s interested in the Community, in spiritual things, in the Teacher. He’s the Swami, you know.’

  ‘Swami in Italy too you have? Here in Malomba are many swamis.’ But another matter about this peculiar family urgently needed clearing up. ‘Your sister, she is marry?’

  ‘Zoe?’ asked Jason in amazement. ‘No, she’s only just fifteen. Anyway, I can’t imgaine anyone wanting to marry her.’

  This news greatly cheered Laki, who had long since stopped cutting rubber. ‘Your sister very beautiful girl,’ he said fervently. ‘She the beautifullest girl I am seeing always.’

  ‘Zoe is?’ Though, considering it while Laki returned to his snipping, he supposed she might be. It was always so hard to separate how people looked from what one knew about them. Surely when one thought about people it was their words one remembered best, the things they said and the tone they used and the expression in their eyes, not whether their hair was blonde or their tits stuck out. It was especially difficult when talking about a member of the family to say, yes, probably she wasn’t bad-looking. Instead he asked, ‘Where’s your family?’

  So Laki told him about the village by the sea in Saramu Province eighty miles away; about the fisherman father, the siblings, his own banishment in order to earn enough to send money home. The bell-boy was not unsubtle; he never mentioned the word ‘poor’. Instead he described how when he lived at home his kancha had played its part in the family economy, how his skill enabled them to eat morsels of meat.

  ‘Don’t you want to go home?’ Jason asked.

  ‘Sometimes I go. Very nice place, very quiet. I am happy to seeing my family. But here in Malomba is better. I want to making progress. I’ – he lowered his voice and glanced at the closed door – ‘I want to leaving this hotel, find better job. But please please, you not tell Mr Muffy.’ He just avoided urging the boy to be sure and mention it to his mother. To his slight disappointment Jason swore with great solemnity never to tell a soul. He seemed to relish being given a secret for safe-keeping. ‘You and me the same. We both boys long way from home.’ A sadness came into his voice. ‘But you to going home soon, I guess. You go home very happy. I stay here Malomba very lonely.’

  But once more Jason slithered away. ‘I don’t particularly want to go home, as it happens. Actually I hate it there. It’s so boring. I’m sick of goats and sheep and gurus and healing. I want to go to school like the other boys down in the valley. In three years I’ll be fifteen. No education, no exam certificates, no job. In Italy they always want to know your school record, even if it’s only for a job as a street cleaner. I’ll be stuck in Valcognano for the rest of my life making cheese for the Community and getting milk for the groupies who swan in to learn about magic plants and oils and meditation. I’m not allowed one of those,’ he flicked at the catapult Laki had nearly mended. ‘Mum’d have a fit if I killed anything. Look at all the things you can do. No wonder you’re called Lucky.’

  Laki, noting the rush and distress of these words while not by any means understanding everything, was not to be outdone.

  ‘But to travelling is good. Very nice, going to everywhere in the world. All my life I am to two places, my home and here.’

  ‘At least you don’t have to drag around behind your sister and your mother.’

  Jason had lain back on the pallet in exhaustion, blinking at the riven ceiling. In the fragments of blue sky between the vine tendrils he could see the flicker of birds high and far off, swifts dining off the midges carried aloft by the sun’s convections.

  ‘How long you stay here?’ asked Laki anxiously.

  ‘Oh God, at least until next Thursday. That’s when she’s seeing this surgeon guy. Her back’s bad. Then perhaps he’ll need to see her again. We could be stuck here ages.’

  The bell-boy was still unclear who ‘she’ was. The notion of Zoe as a nobly suffering princess was one to which he was increasingly attached. At the moment, though, there was manifest upset closer to hand and the urge to console came over him, for he was a kindly boy. ‘I show you things in Malomba,’ he promised. ‘I show you place to swimming in river, near to town but very clean. Only boys use for swimming. No washing cows or animals.’

  ‘Really?’ Jason’s voice was still weary but there was interest in it as well. ‘What else?’

  ‘One thing I am wanting,’ confided Laki recklessly, reclining on an elbow beside him. ‘I am always wanting to go inside Lingasumin. Maybe we are trying.’

  The name was familiar. ‘Isn’t that one of the temples closed to visitors?’

  ‘Yes, closed. Very closed. Because they not wanting people to seeing what they do. They doing like this,’ and delightedly inserted a brown forefinger into a circle made by the fingers of his left hand.

  Jason raised his head. ‘Fucking, you mean? Actual screwing?’

  ‘Oh yes. Very many people doing like that together in temple.’

  ‘What, inside a temple? I don’t believe that.’

  But Laki proved a fund of information, quoting all that Mr Tominy Bundash had told him in the kitchen and adding much else besides from his own head. ‘They have special medicine to making
the man very big,’ he finished. Not knowing the word for caterpillar in English, he talked vaguely about secret extracts from plants picked by the light of a new moon. In his experience foreigners like to hear about herbs picked by moonlight. Sometimes they preferred the pickers to be virgins, sometimes wise old hermits, but the moonlight was essential.

  ‘What a strange place Malomba is!’ Jason was saying. ‘This is the strangest place I’ve ever been.’ For the scent of the vine seemed to have redoubled its strength, the fragments of sky to be infinitely far away and then just inside the ceiling. In the drowsy late afternoon heat the cooing of the pigeons likewise receded and approached. ‘A bit like sleepiness, but it’s not,’ he murmured, stretching.

  ‘Karesh,’ said Laki knowingly. ‘Vine. It makes to sleeping and to waking at same time. We have many stories here about this vine so strong, so power. Many times,’ he said, still up on an elbow and dangling the repaired catapult above Jason so that its pouch barely touched his stomach, ‘I do like you now. I am lying on bed and looking, only looking at vine. Sometimes I to thinking of everything. Sometimes I to thinking of nothing and sleeping so Mr Muffy ringing the bell and ringing the bell and become very angry to me. Other time I am lying and get very waking, very strong.’

  Jason was thrilled by a peculiar pang of being at the centre of something where at last he was not looking on. There was a mesmerism in Laki’s hand idly bouncing the pouch on his stomach, then lower down. For the second time that afternoon he found he could not move and wondered vaguely whether the bell-boy would suddenly burst into song. But he didn’t. The bouncing rhythm extended itself and began to take in more and more of the room and his eyes gazed past Laki’s ear to become snared in the vine’s traceries. It was true about Malomba, he thought. It definitely was the strangest place he’d ever been. He kept on falling asleep here. Everything seemed to take place in a dream, while being realer than anything he could remember. The smell of this vine …! The yellow flowers swelled and glowed as he looked at them, pulsing out their languorous scent. In one corner of his fixed vision the edge of Laki’s ear was gently shaking.