The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  On the other side of the vine a pigeon flapped its wings and settled them with a crackle of feathers. Laki, noticing Jason’s toes stretching and pointing, stopped. The forgotten catapult’s rubber dangled above the white T-shirt. His other fist was resting upright on Jason’s bare belly. A band of vine-filtered sunlight fell across it and glinted on the tip of a pale pink nut encircled by his fingers and protruding a scant half inch. Laki looked at it closely, curiously, from across the bewildering territory of difference. Slowly he resumed his movement; the pouch lowered. An immeasurable time passed in which Jason experienced his own fixed gaze, the jiggling ear, the sun-barred vine, the heat and the smell of pigeon-shit and perfume as running into one another, causing the acutest sensations to race and smart through him. By the time Laki’s fist had stilled his feet were relaxed and his chest trembled to his heartbeat. The bell-boy was again peering forward as if for information at the pink nut, now barely afloat on a milky rim.

  Soon Jason noticed the edge of Laki’s ear had started to jiggle again and came up on his elbows to ask, ‘What’s sima?’ The ear stopped.

  ‘Sima,’ said Laki with a sigh. ‘Oh, sima. Where you hear this name?’

  So Jason told him of the torso boy and the handful of brown lumps although without mentioning the singing.

  ‘I know him. That boy is Vippu. Everybody know him. Selling sima to tourists. Very bad boy. Sometimes the police they catch and beat to him.’

  ‘They beat a boy with no legs?’ cried Jason.

  ‘They beat to everyone,’ Laki told him with a certain glee.

  ‘Yes, but what is this sima?’

  ‘Sima is drug. In forest are many magic mushrooms. They are taking and putting in sun like on roof here,’ he pointed towards the door, ‘so are becoming dry. When become dry they make dust, then take juice of vine fruit and make like this.’ He flexed one hand as if moulding a lump of sima paste with sticky gourd sap. ‘Then it become dry again and are selling. Many tourist to smoking and eating sima. Very bad for brains. Very bad drug.’

  Jason fell silent thinking about this. Slowly the ear began its jiggling once more. At length he remarked. ‘We saw a dog run over by the train in the park today. Mum and Zoe cried.’

  This time there was no reply in the little mud room. Attention was narrowing. Whenever either of them swallowed it sounded very loud.

  One day a year or so previously, a neatly dressed young man had turned up at Valcognano. His short stay in the Community of Pure Light shed more gloom and caused more upset in that spiritual fastness than Zoe could ever remember.

  Ed, an American in his mid-twenties, bore a letter from Swami Bopi Gul himself, writing from Los Angeles on patchouli-scented paper. The letter was brief, extending the Teacher’s greetings and blessings to all disciples and beloved friends at his Valcognano temple and introducing Ed as a trusted pupil whose thoughts about the Swami’s mission were those of the Teacher himself … In other words they were to be paid respectful attention.

  Once this letter had been read, the simple ceremonies of welcome performed, the phials of oil (blessed by the Swami himself) distributed and meditation held, it quickly became apparent that there was to be a change of policy. Through Ed, the Swami was instructing that more energy be devoted to the growing of medical herbs, the extraction of essential oils and the writing of healing texts. For many years (said Ed) the Valcognano Community had been setting a remarkable example of a way of life full of health and bliss and light, shining out from the Apuan Alps like a spiritual pharos, its harmonious vibrations thrilling through Europe and constituting, however subtly, a force for good. Now it was time to take the Swami’s mission a stage further and give his healing secrets wider currency. For the world was sick (Ed said) and getting rapidly sicker. It was polluted by sundry varieties of evil, not least among which were the products of multinational pharmaceutical companies as well as the arrogant pragmatism of Western medicine …

  In short, Valcognano was to go commercial.

  Tessa and the other Elders were dumbstruck. Never in the dozen or so years of the Community’s existence could they have dreamed of receiving such a message from its Founder. It seemed a total reversal of his ideas, of everything he had promoted as spiritually beautiful. It caused them an acute crisis of faith. But little by little they argued themselves around, admitting that none of them – for perhaps they were a bit unworldly – could presume to question his wisdom nor claim to understand the arcane unknowables which informed his divine guidance. Was the world not changing? And therefore might not a spiritual strategy also need updating in order to remain effective? Under Ed’s careful mixture of cajolery and injunction their attitude changed from obstinacy to acquiescence, even enthusiasm.

  None of these principled wrestlings made much impact on Zoe. She was alive to the turmoil going on around her but the issues themselves scarcely touched her. It was Ed himself who had the greatest effect on her. The Elders, including her mother, saw him (somewhat jealously) as a messenger, a necessary harbinger. Zoe saw him as very good-looking. He wore tailored tan slacks and an Italian cowboy-boulevardier’s shirt in heavy linen. He had a discreet wristwatch and once when he chanced to open his wallet to find an address (a wallet!) she saw a small gold card which said American Express. She had no idea what such appurtenances were, exactly, but what they meant was that Ed was completely different from all the other visitors to Valcognano, and the whiffs of power he exuded were equally of an alien kind.

  More marvellous still, he evidently took a real interest in her as a person and made a point of asking Zoe herself to guide him round the Community’s properties and messuages. Sometimes he held her hand, and she could have fainted with pleasure that this dazzling envoy from another world was treating her not as some grubby peasant girl but as a young lady privy to certain information which he needed.

  ‘Strange horses you have here,’ he remarked. ‘I thought I knew horseback riding but I’ve never seen these before.’

  ‘They’re not horses,’ Zoe told him. ‘They’re mostly mules.’

  ‘Oh. That thing there’s a mule?’

  ‘Well, actually that particular one’s a hinny. Mules come from a male donkey mated with an ordinary mare, you know. A hinny’s from a female donkey mated with a stallion.’

  ‘My,’ said Ed. ‘You know a lot.’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ cried Zoe, ‘not compared with you. There’s not much to know here and you soon learn that. But you must know a million things.’ She couldn’t bring herself to begin listing them. ‘And you know the Teacher, too.’

  ‘Sure I know him.’ He did not, perhaps, sound quite as overawed as did most people who had experienced the Presentness of Swami Bopi Gul; but to Zoe this was merely further proof of Ed’s exoticism, of his moving easily and naturally on a rarefied plane. ‘And these are the fields where you grow the herbal stuff?’

  ‘These are the Healing Acres, yes.’

  ‘Just this? I wouldn’t have said it was even a single acre.’

  ‘We don’t need very much.’

  ‘From now on we’re going to need a helluva lot more, dear heart.’

  Dear heart! ‘How much more?’

  ‘We reckon six or eight acres, to start with.’

  ‘Acres? You mean real acres?’ Zoe thought of all the hours she must have spent since she was old enough to wield a hoe going up and down the three little plots of comfrey, camomile, marjoram, dill, clary sage and so on. Who on earth would have the time to nurse eight acres of herbs?’

  ‘Sure, acres. We’re talking expansion. We’re talking about injecting some real productivity into this outfit. It’s so pretty here: high up, wild, unpolluted. Traditional. Natural. We can capitalise on all that. Proper packaging, proper labelling. Handwritten guarantees of purity.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound …’ began Zoe doubtfully, ‘… I mean, it doesn’t sound quite as spiritual, that way.’

  A little edge of irritation sharpened Ed’s voice. ‘Quite as
spiritual, quite as spiritual,’ he gently mimicked her English accent. ‘It’ll be one hundred per cent as spiritual, dear heart. What’s the difference? You’ve always grown comfrey; okay, so now you grow ten times as much fucking comfrey, excuse me, what’s the difference? Right, you always pick monk’s benison on the night of the new moon. So now you pick a whole lot more monk’s benison on the night of the new moon because you’ve got more fields and more labour. But it’s still the right stuff at the right time, isn’t it? Nothing faked. No corners cut. You’re just upping production, is all. The real thing but more of it.’

  There was a pause while Zoe thought about this. ‘What’s monk’s benison?’ she enquired timidly. ‘I’ve never heard of that.’

  ‘I just invented it.’ A great, intimate, flashing white smile, his beautiful brown hand meanwhile languidly indicating their maize field. ‘Anyone ever thought of growing marijuana in the middle of that?’

  ‘I think so. But sometimes the police fly over here in helicopters.’

  ‘Sneaky. It’ll just be a matter of finding the right guy to pay so the choppers always check Valcognano out in the winter. I’ll get on to that.’

  If such remarks brought an alien world closer to the sacred boundaries of the Community, others seemed to consign the Pure Lighters to another place and time.

  ‘My,’ he kept saying, not without admiration. ‘I guess it’s how they used to live in the Sixties. It’s kind of quaint to think of those old guys having once been hippies.’

  ‘Those old guys’ were Elder Bob and Elder Tessa – her own mother, in fact, who happened at that moment to be wearing a ratty pair of corduroy trousers and a hat Bruce had left behind. Zoe experienced a pang of pity for her mother, consigned thus to some sociological oubliette. Yet somewhere inside her, however unwillingly, Zoe had known Ed was right. There was something time-warped about Tessa, about them all. Much as the Pure Lighters kept to themselves – and even when travelling about the world they managed to preserve a cordon sanitaire of herbalist naïvety between themselves and whatever they encountered – Zoe had long since deduced that most girls her own age lived very different lives. They knew different things, too, and pursued their interests with what appeared to be scant regard for the opinions of adults and parents. Often when the Hemonys returned to Valcognano they had to change trains in Milan, Bologna or Florence, and having an hour or two to kill would look around town or sit at an open-air café and watch the vivid parade. If the café happened to be in fashion, there would usually be a glittery mass of motor-scooters nearby with youths hitched over black squidgy rubber and chrome talking to girls perched more daintily on chairs at the edge of the pavement. All were dressed like peacocks; the sun shone on combs and teeth and hair and calfskin and rings and studs … especially studs.

  ‘Bliss,’ her mother would murmur. It did not escape Zoe’s attention that many of the boys were rather attractive but she told herself they seemed a bit juvenile (too much laughter, too-casual gestures, too-boisterous hands). She noticed that Tessa’s eyes also missed nothing, even as her work-roughened hands spooned ice cream or lifted coffee. It was at such moments that Zoe felt most disloyal. It would, she thought, be quite nice to be preened at by some young man. Every so often a couple would leave and the sudden whizzing and moaning of the little exhausts seemed oddly valedictory and excluding. Where were they off to, leaving her behind in a cloud of sweetish gas with her mother and brother and empty ice-cream cup? All one needed in order to keep cheerful was a bit of attention every now and again. Not necessarily to be praised, nor even to be courted; but for somebody to ask how she felt and acknowledge that she, too, was in the running for … for … well, for being considered.

  And now here was Ed who, if ever he had once as a teenager lounged outside cafés, had long since smoothed out and become powerful and was actually asking her to explain things about life in Valcognano. It was beyond daydreams. She thought he could only ever ruin it all by calling her ‘kid’; but he never once did, only ‘dear heart’.

  ‘You’re really something, you know that?’ They were drinking fennel tea together in the Swami’s house. To Zoe’s disappointment, Ed was staying not in her own house but in the one reserved exclusively for the Teacher, sleeping with appalling nonchalance in his actual bed. ‘You’d be a sensation in California; they just don’t make girls like you any more. Kind of unspoilt, you know? You are unspoilt, aren’t you, dear heart?’

  She had blushed, so unused was she to any kind of notice, still less to compliments, and said she didn’t know. According to her impression Ed had found this reply unsatisfactory at the time; but each day for the remainder of his stay he invited her to ramble with him through the chestnut woods and rocky uplands which overhung the village. By the time he came to leave he could doubtless answer his own question. As her mother would later remark, Zoe’s heart was warm. She was reduced to sullen misery by Ed’s departure, a tragic gloom she nursed for weeks. When the expected letter did not come, not even in answer to several of hers, she began to emerge once more with a passable display of not caring.

  And there was plenty going on in the Community to engage interest. Swami Bopi Gul’s edicts, as relayed by Ed, were being faithfully carried out. Already Elder Bob, who had once trained as a graphic designer, had sketched out labels and letterheads for Valcognano products. There was a logo and house typography. The logo was a seated Buddha holding a pestle and mortar; the typography a virtuous italic hand. A printer was contacted in Lucca. A small tractor was to be bought from a dealer in Carrara. Curious seeds were written for.

  Yet Zoe’s interest was not quite engaged. A spell had been broken: that of childhood, maybe, or of authority. Somewhere at the foot of the eight hundred and ninety-four mule steps, down beyond the valley’s misty distances, an entire world was busy happening without her. ‘You’d be a sensation in California …’

  Tessa plied her with valerian.

  Laki was sitting with Raju on the back doorstep of the kitchen. In one hand he held the clavicle of a monkey from which he every so often sucked shreds of meat and gravy, in the other a letter from home. The letter had been brought by a dried-fish merchant from Saramu Province and left at the hotel desk. It was not easy to decipher, having been written turn and turn about by his mother, his eldest sister and youngest brother Gunath. Reading it was likewise a joint effort. Between them Laki and Raju gathered that his mother had flu and Gunath had shot a kululu, the nearly extinct and extravagantly beautiful National Bird which figured so prominently on stamps and coins and banknotes. The kululu, known to Europeans as the Rainbow Yodeller, was the size of a large pheasant with long iridescent green tail-feathers. Having been catapulted out of the sky by Laki’s brother, it had wound up on a bed of rice dressed in a sauce of unripe guavas and had fed the entire family.

  This piece of good news was not, however, the real point of the letter, which was that the family was suffering hard times. For the past ten days the coastline of Saramu had been afflicted by a Red Tide more sluggish and extensive than any of recent years. This was an intermittent plague in which the sea turned red and soupy and made the fish poisonous to eat; it was apparently caused by a species of plankton which suddenly multiplied hugely; there was nothing to do but wait until the tides and currents had moved it away into the open ocean. Unscrupulous fishermen who could afford ice would send their catches to a distant province where news of the Red Tide had not yet arrived; they could generally dispose of twenty or thirty boxes before the first fatalities. Unscrupulous but poor fishermen without ice contented themselves with expressions of their own virtue. One way or another these tides were a disaster, and Laki’s family was not alone in feeling the pinch. Until such time as it was safe to resume fishing, the villagers up and down the coast got by on a diet of boiled cassava and the National Bird.

  His mother ended her letter with the hope that life in the big city was pleasurable and profitable. She made no demands for money; she did not need to. Laki had never in h
is life received a letter which was merely a greeting. All letters were begging letters; that was why people sent them.

  ‘Bad, uncle,’ he said, tucking it away and tossing the clavicle to the goat.

  ‘Very bad,’ agreed Raju. ‘I remember a Red Tide when I was a boy which lasted a whole month.’

  Laki wondered how his mother’s flu was. There probably wasn’t enough spare cash for her to buy her favourite antibiotics in the village shop. At the least sign of indisposition – from headache to arthritis in her ankles – she would go to the shop and search through the big glass sweet-jar containing a ragbag of medicaments. It was not always easy to make a choice because many of the tablets had long since fallen out of their foil wrappers and, grey with handling, were indistinguishable one from another. But his mother was an optimist and had great faith that whatever she selected would work. Her most serendipitous choice to date had been when she put herself on a short course of steroids for toothache and the pain had vanished within minutes. It worried Laki that she might have to face her flu without recourse to the sweet-jar.

  ‘I suppose I could ask Mr Muffy for an advance,’ he said without much hope.

  ‘Listen, boy, each time the Muffys of this world pay you at all it’s a miracle. To expect them to pay before they have to – a week before, in your case – is like expecting a chicken to fly backwards. They’re just not designed for it. You’ll have to think of something else.’ From the blackened stewpot between them he picked out a tiny wrinkled hand and began nibbling the fingers. ‘Far too much cardamom,’ he remarked. ‘Monkey’s a delicate meat; it’s wrong to drown it in spices … So how are your great plans getting on for leaving this place and becoming Prime Minister?’