The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

Tessa allowed herself to be shepherded beneath the leafy canopy and invited to sit on a decayed rattan settee with her feet on the parapet. The bell-boy sat by her ankles with his back to the neon fairyland and gazed up at her face as if trying to puzzle out her heart.

  ‘You like view?’ he asked presently. His eyes never left hers.

  ‘Stupendous. You have the most romantic house.’ Half a mile away the Glass Minaret stood knee-deep in the profane hues of Chinatown, its lower facets stained with freakish wattages. The Virgin on the pro-cathedral gave Tessa a knowing wink. For a moment she sat awkwardly, unable to think of anything to say. What had she got herself into now? It was too silly. The night air stirred enough to carry a fresh drench of perfume. She reached up and touched a gourd. ‘Karesh.’

  ‘Oh missus, where you hear that? You to learn speaking our language, I think.’ The boy looked pleased. ‘This National Plant.’

  ‘I never knew there was such a thing … The smell’s amazing. I’ve been making arrangements with a man in the Wednesday Market to buy some karesh oil to take back with us.’

  ‘How much the price from Mr Mokpin?’

  There it was again, she thought: that sense of everybody here knowing better than yourself what you were up to. ‘I can’t remember.’ She added airily, ‘Of course I may decide not to buy from Divine Essence at all,’ aware how hollow this piece of spurious canniness sounded. ‘At any rate I’m not leaving without karesh oil.’

  ‘For what you using that, missus?’ the boy asked guilelessly.

  ‘Oh, you know, for my work. I need to have as many oils and essences as I can get. I’ve never come across karesh before. It’s such a strange smell I want to discover what its properties are … Do you understand “properties”? You know, its effects. What it does.’

  The boy was looking at her intently. ‘We have song here about karesh, missus.’

  ‘Sing it for me, go on.’

  With no trace of self-consciousness he raised a soft, husky alto in a little tune. To her ignorant ears the words she heard were as follows:

  Naswal karesh,

  sus lil-han;

  Gantal karesh,

  ān lil-hun.

  ‘How beautiful,’ she said when he had finished. ‘That’s lovely, Lucky. But what does it mean?’

  The translation took some time, fraught as it was with problems of syntax and grammar. Eventually, though, they reached a satisfactory rendering in English:

  Vine in bloom,

  boyish dreams;

  Vine in fruit,

  men are born.

  ‘But,’ she objected, ‘it doesn’t seem to make sense that way. I mean, you’d expect one thing to happen and then the other. Look here, though,’ she brushed her hand through the leaves above. ‘It flowers and fruits at the same time.’

  ‘Oh yes, my missus.’

  Again that look from beneath long eyelashes, powerfully evoking the night of his distress. ‘Have you heard from your mother yet, Lucky?’ she asked.

  ‘Not yet, missus. It very too soon. But I giving your kind money to special friend who will taking to my mother. For sure she has antibiotic now.’

  ‘I know here that she’s already better.’ Tessa tapped the left side of her chest with a serious expression. ‘Tell me about your parents, then.’

  So he told her, giving much the same account as to Jason, only maybe stressing the tragedy of his exile a little more, rounding out the picture of his family’s penniless grind. She found it temporarily subduing, a glimpse of waste on an endless scale; of how for want of trivial sums people were worn away, their children exported, their illnesses uncured. Nothing she didn’t know, of course. Had she not visited the slums of Bombay with the Swami? Nor was it something she hadn’t made a truce with. Things were as they were. Acceptance in its true sense did not mean indifference, after all. It meant: Who could presume to second-guess the infinite cycle of being? or, Who dared judge from this single lifetime the worth of a soul in progress? Come to that, who could assert that Lucky’s fisherman father was poised any more perilously on the lip of extinction than was some bloated capitalist back home? Her own father had had a stroke in the lavatory of an American company jet between Galveston and St Louis. He had died at nine o’clock in the morning at twenty-one thousand feet, freshly shaved and breakfasted and not yet turned fifty, on his way to some vital meeting or other. He was found with his trousers down and his head in the washbasin, the agenda for the meeting still clutched in one hand as though in a last attempt to convince the Reaper that his visit was quite unscheduled and there was no way he could be fitted in that morning.

  ‘The whole thing’s so inscrutable, isn’t it, Master?’ she had blurted once in a momentary lapse. ‘The whole thing.’

  ‘So give up scruting,’ he had said with his astounding smile. ‘Just be.’

  Tessa now supposed this was her Teacher’s version of Zoe’s ‘So fucking what?’ She became aware of pressure against the side of her calf and looking down at the boy found he had allowed his thigh to loll against her. They were a healthily tactile people, she thought, although in the present instance it was presumably the casualness of a child who had not yet learned the language of proximity. Then he slipped a hand over her kneecap and she became even more unsure.

  ‘Oh missus, you so kind to me. So very kind to helping poor bell-boy. Already you good mother to beautiful girl and boy. Already you better mother than my mother because to helping me also.’

  ‘You mustn’t say that, Lucky. Your mother loves you very much, I know she does. It’s just that because I have a bit more money it’s easier for me to look like a better mother, perhaps.’

  ‘No no, you better for sure, missus. My mother she sending me here to Malomba when I am little, little boy, maybe eleven years old. You to helping me, even I not your son.’ He was embracing her knee now, resting his cheek on it and looking up at her with eyes in whose inky gaze gleamed splinters of reflected neon from Chinatown. He appeared somewhat huddled over his own lap. ‘You to helping me, missus.’

  ‘Oh.’ She managed a laugh which came out faultily. ‘You oughtn’t to be sitting down there at my feet, you know. We’re equals.’ She patted the cane seat beside her. ‘Come and sit here.’ For she had just remembered that because of the heat she had left off her underwear before dinner, and having an adoring and backlit bell-boy at knee level raised issues of delicacy. He got up, oddly crouched, and sat with much crackling of decrepit wicker. ‘That’s better. Look, I’m sure I can help you a bit more. I mean, we’re not rich or anything and I know we aren’t here for very long, but we can certainly do something.’

  He met this vagueness by gripping her hand fervently and saying, ‘There is something, my missus. But I cannot to asking. No, no.’

  ‘Of course you can, Lucky. You can ask me anything. What is it?’ She was already braced for a request for more money.

  ‘I wanting you to … No. I …’ He was shaking his head in the scented night, hair flashing dully in the light of mosques and churches and temples.

  ‘Please, Lucky. We’re friends. Anything.’

  ‘I … I wanting you to kissing me, missus, like mother. I very lonely boy in this place.’

  A vision came to her of this outcast child being led along the corridor by one ear earlier this evening. This evening? It seemed an age ago. Mr Muffy’s savage expression rose again in her mind. They had been just in time to protect the poor boy. She slipped an arm comfortingly around his shoulders. Looking down – for his head was indeed lower than hers – she thought to see the glint of tears? sweat? on his face. She bent and gave him a maternal peck on the cheek and tasted salt. The smell of the vine grew stronger; his skin seemed perfumed with it and she wondered whether he actually used karesh oil himself. And then she realised that by some mysterious topological shift the cheek beneath her lips had turned into mouth, that she could feel his tongue on hers and could scarcely believe it. At the same time he was gently nudging her spare hand so it, too, settled
on altered terrain. She had an absurd flashback image of a grid-patterned tablecloth spread out to dry on the grass behind the house in Valcognano, various tufts and sprigs thrusting it up into damp mountains exactly like those illustrations of geographical relief in school textbooks.

  ‘Oh my missus,’ he breathed fragrantly into her mouth. ‘You to helping me. Oh so kind. Oh. Yes.’

  There was a pause in their speech. Then wicker creaked and a machine in her head came to life and counted One-two-three; four, five. Six. Sev-en. A much longer pause.

  ‘Oh missus.’ He rested his head against her bicep and she watched the lights glisten on his chest and stomach as he breathed. ‘You to helping me.’

  ‘But is it helping your mother?’ she asked facetiously, half-incredulous.

  He was also laughing. ‘I her boy. You to helping me, you also to helping her.’

  ‘Some boy … I think you’re like this karesh vine, Lucky.’

  ‘You to helping me become man.’

  Feeling herself skating foolishly around the edge of a pit of infantilism, Tessa tried for a note of mature practicality. ‘Be sure that before we leave I’ll give you some money. Promise. Don’t worry about anything. We’re not the sort of people who break our promises.’

  Out in the city various clocks and gongs chimed midnight. A loudspeaker on the Temple of Ra cleared its throat and intoned a short prayer for the safe passage of the sun in its boat crossing the treacherous waters of Hades. From a far suburb a disturbed rooster added its voice.

  ‘Can I just see your room again?’ she asked at length. ‘I’ve honestly never seen a room with a tree in it before.’

  This time he took her hand and led her round to the door. Inside, the home-made lamp cast its steady orange glow, adding a sooty perfume to the scent of flowers. An observer at the door would have seen them standing in front of the plant as before an altar, the boy a good head shorter than the woman. At first sight this observer might have thought of a mother and her child, for all that her hair was dusty blonde and his as black as the night sky. But then he might have noticed something not quite expected in the form of their intimacy; have guessed this was no rite but merely a pause in unfinished business. Thus the woman made no move when the boy crossed to the door and shut it. As he did, and just before the crack of light disappeared with the sound of a bolt being shot, his voice could be heard saying softly: ‘Now I think I am to loving you, my missus.’

  It was the day of her appointment with hadlam Tapranne and Tessa awoke with a pang of apprehension. While she knew there would be no pain, she had nevertheless seen a good many photographs of psychic surgery in progress and they all seemed to show the first inch of a healer’s fingers buried in a bloody hole, generally in somebody’s abdomen. A further disquieting image was that of a patient with one eye peacefully closed, the other removed from its socket while a Filipino in T-shirt and jeans pulled what looked like a clump of wet hemp from behind it.

  Another worry, though, was rather different. She was all too aware that the Master himself had used his influence to get her an appointment with the most famous healer of all; that with considerable trouble she had been fitted into a long list of patients from all over the world, assuredly with ailments far graver than hers. The fact was that after two nights’ visits to the hotel roof Tessa’s backache had vanished absolutely. She got out of bed without a twinge, could stretch her arms in the shower to meet the brown trickle of water, as limber as she had been at twenty. She dressed, realising the pain had completely left her for the first time in ten years, half moved with gratitude for this unexpected miracle and half panicked that within a couple of hours she could be exposed as a malingerer.

  She went to the window. The early sun fell slantingly on the Redemptorist Fathers’ garden, sparkling off the last of the dew. Monkeys were dropping like ripe fruit from the trees on to the pagoda’s tip, rolling and tumbling down its widening eaves. On the lawn a pair of deer grazed, practically motionless save for a whirring of little tails. Glancing down she could see the splintery, half-moon dents which an unskilful hammer had left around the nailheads in the sill. She gave a fond smile. She had no idea what she was up to, cradle-snatching briefly in this unreal city. Whatever it was, though, she could hardly recall an experience so pungent in its straightforward intensity, so puppyish in its lack of artifice. And the energy of the child … Tessa smiled again and stretched. She had never imagined there might be something erotic in tuition, still less that it would make her feel young to recall her own learning.

  There was a knock on the door. ‘Mum?’

  Guiltily she turned from the window. She hadn’t even dared imagine how awful it would be if the children found out. It was one thing to be bohemian, something else to be a mother. At a pinch Zoe might be induced to understand, but Jason … And here he was, more sullen than ever and not meeting her eyes.

  ‘We’ve decided we’re coming with you,’ Zoe said.

  ‘Are you quite sure?’ Tessa looked more at Jason. ‘What about you, Jay? I know it’s completely different from watching an operation in hospital and anyway it’ll be over in a jiffy, but even so. You might feel a bit queasy, mightn’t you? Don’t you think it’d be better if—’

  ‘No, I’m coming,’ he said, adding quietly, ‘I shan’t mind if you scream.’

  ‘Oh, Jay. Is that nice?’ She laughed brightly. ‘What a ghoul you are. Sorry to disappoint you but there’ll be no screaming. There won’t be any pain at all.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt. That’s one of the extraordinary things about psychic surgery. You don’t imagine all those people would cheerfully submit to pure torture, do you? Film stars and businessmen?’

  ‘Then it’s a fake. Of course it’s a fake.’

  ‘Fine, Jay, come and see for yourself.’

  ‘I said I was going to, didn’t I?’

  Had she any lingering idea that it might still be possible to ‘borrow’ Laki again to entertain Jason in some alternative, boyish pursuit, she was disabused at breakfast. The bell-boy was nowhere in evidence. Nobody bustled up with fresh laran loaves or luscious soursops to replace the hotel’s regulation fare of cheesy papaya slices. Instead, a young girl with a harelip brought them the usual leathery toast tasting faintly of paraffin. Suddenly Mr Muffy himself came in with a proprietor’s empty smile.

  ‘Good morning ladies, gentleman. Is everything to your satisfactions? And what is your itinerary today?’

  ‘This morning we’re going to see hadlam Tapranne.’

  ‘Ah, the hadlam’, Mr Muffy said, something approaching respect in his voice. ‘Very good man, very famous. You have appointment?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Tessa sharply. Then, ‘Maybe your bell-boy might show us the way.’

  ‘Alas, no. That is quite impossible. He is not in Malomba.’

  Tessa was taken aback by the pang this caused but said, carefully offhand: ‘Has he gone to visit his mother, then?’

  ‘He has not. I’ve sent him to Banji to fetch paint. Can you credit how much it is cheaper to buy to the paint factory than in the shops here in Malomba? Wicked, wicked, the way these Chinese merchants put the prices up. Banji is only six kilometres away and yet a can of paint costing forty-eight piku there costs fifty-seven here. Imagine! Are we to believe?’ Mr Muffy demanded of his breakfast room, the flabby slices of uneaten toast, the walls spattered with birdshit, ‘are we to believe that the transportation of a single can of paint six kilometres costs eight piku?’

  ‘Nine,’ said Jason.

  ‘Exactly, nine,’ agreed Mr Muffy with the impartiality of one for whom figures seldom coincided. ‘The Moslems are worse still. The price is the same but when you open the tin it’s old, with a skin that thick,’ he held finger and thumb half an inch apart, ‘and anyway it’s never the same colour as on the top. But worst of all are the Hindus. With a great smile they sell you an empty tin. But don’t worry,’ he said in an unexpected shift, ‘hadlam Tapranne’s n
ot like that. No cheating. He’s a genuine Malomban like I am. He is our National Healer. I will show you the postage stamp with his picture.’

  Ten minutes later the Hemonys caught a motor tricycle flying a yellow pennant which read in English ‘Malomba – City of the Gods’. They were taken out to the edge of town, just beyond the park with the miniature railway. There on a quiet avenue running beside the Botanical Gardens a residential quarter with large bungalows was set back in deep plots. It was fronted by practically continuous walls, high and whitewashed, broken by wrought-iron gates and wooden sentry-boxes in which soldiers sat holding ancient rifles across their knees in white-gloved hands.

  ‘Healers’ Village,’ said the tricycle driver and buzzed off in a cloud of blue smoke.

  A succession of guards directed them around several hundred yards of wall and into a humbler entrance in a side road. They soon realised that this was a cantonment of houses rather than a street of individual lots. Directed in at yet another gate, they found themselves in a tyre-worn garden evidently used as a car park. Here several taxis and tricycles stood, drivers squatting beside them playing a game with tossed coins. Nearby was a long-distance coach with smoked windows and a notice on the rear proclaiming its ‘AirCon Luxury’. On the sides additional lettering called it ‘The Healing Express’ with underneath a line of smaller capitals: ‘National Spiritist Tours Company’. There was also a minibus which simply bore the name of the Golden Fortune Hotel.

  ‘It’s an industry!’ exclaimed Zoe.

  ‘Proof that it works,’ said her mother uneasily. She, too, had misgivings at these signs of package tourism, which were scarcely lessened by notice boards standing beside various paths leading off through the shrubbery towards half-concealed villas. ‘Hadlam Mollyko’, she read. ‘Hadlam Punjee’. Another sign said ‘Jesus Bontoc. Original Filipino Healing’.

  ‘Cancer-cancer-cancer,’ sang out a little man trotting towards them. ‘You have tumour, madam?’