The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Hadlam Punjee world’s most expertest to psychic lumpectomy, madam. You come. No charge.’

  Tessa gave him a look in which she tried to compress her own status: as a healer, as a student of the Way with years of meditation behind her and as someone who lived rough up a mountain. But mostly she tried to radiate serenity at being affiliated to Swami Bopi Gul.

  ‘Womb, madam? Hadlam Punjee also very good to womb.’

  Behind her she heard Jason giggle. ‘I have,’ she said, enunciating as clearly as she once had when called upon to read the lesson on Parents’ Day, ‘an appointment with hadlam Tapranne. Tapranne. An appointment. Not Banerjee or whatever his name is. Also, for your unmerited information, my womb is in excellent health.’

  The little tout turned, one indifferent hand indicating the rear of the nearest villa, and walked off. Tessa led the way and they came upon a crowd of people clustered around the door of a conservatory.

  ‘Hadlam Tapranne?’ she asked a face in the crowd.

  ‘Yes, yes, to going inside, madam!’

  They were pushed into the conservatory which was full of plants and yet more people waiting. Many of these were obviously ill; several were in wheelchairs, while still others had stained bandages wrapped about them. They seemed to be local people, poorly dressed and gap-toothed, whose sticks and crutches had been cut in the forest. Most contrived to look quite cheerful. One middle-aged man wearing a straw sombrero smiled deferentially on catching sight of Tessa and the children. He half rose and raised his hat enough to reveal two inches of stout iron nail sticking out of the top of his skull before resuming his seat by a clump of cannas.

  ‘Did you see that, Zo?’ came Jason’s awed whisper. His sister pretended to ignore him. ‘Madonna cacona.’

  Tessa herded him apart and said in a quiet, fierce voice, ‘You are never to use that sort of language in a place like this, Jason. Never. Is that clear? The right vibrations are critical when someone’s healing as you perfectly well know, and that sort of thought is dangerously negative. No, really: I’m not joking, Jay. Sometimes a healer can lose his power in the middle of an operation if there’s cynicism around him. Okay?’

  At this moment there was a general stir in the room as through a bead-curtained doorway surmounted by a Lions Club plaque filed some large, pale foreigners. Many looked radiant, others were in tears and smiles, a few stared at the ground and shook their heads as they walked. Several had sticks and a couple carried video cameras perched on their shoulders. As they made their way through the waiting patients and out towards the buses, Tessa glimpsed two copies of The Fragrant Mirror. She smiled. It was a good omen. All would be well.

  Bringing up the rear was a fat man wearing a short-sleeved dentist’s smock, puce trousers and a flimsy hay biretta. He stood in the doorway and beamed generally at his departing patients as at those still waiting. Every eye in the conservatory was expectant upon him. His teeth encompassed the Hemonys and passed on. He let fall the heavy strands and disappeared. An Indian lady with a bead in one nostril and a white and gold sari emerged in his stead and spoke to half a dozen of the crowd, including the man in the sombrero. They got up and went through the curtain. She approached Tessa.

  ‘Sister Hemony?’ They pranamed. ‘I’m Sister Savitri. You’re so very welcome.’ Her smile warmly included Zoe and a rebelliously sulky Jason. ‘Our Swami sends his greetings.’

  ‘Oh! You’ve spoken to him? Is he here in Malomba?’

  ‘No, no. He must be still in America. I think you didn’t receive his letter?’ From the folds of her sari she produced a familiar, patchouli-scented envelope. It was addressed to Tessa at the Golden Fortune Hotel. ‘Because you’re at the wrong place you didn’t receive it,’ this lady said chidingly. ‘It arrived yesterday too late to take round to your Nirvana Hotel.’

  She opened the letter eagerly. Inside was a sheet of onionskin paper and one unsigned sentence: ‘Dearest Tessa – We are with you.’ Her eyes filled. ‘He thinks of everything. He never lets you go, does he?’ The Indian lady smiled on. ‘He knows everything.’

  ‘He didn’t know where we were staying,’ pointed out Jason from behind.

  ‘Come,’ said Sister Savitri. ‘The hadlam is waiting.’

  ‘Oh golly. Now?’ She and the children were marshalled through the beaded doorway, down a short passage and into a room rigged as either a church or a theatre. It was largely filled with rows of chairs. At one end on a dias stood a table topped with a hospital mattress covered in white rubber. On the wall behind the table was a blackboard bearing a line of chalk curlicues. Underneath was written in English: ‘We can only ever heal ourselves, but sometimes we need to borrow another’s hands – Swami Bopi Gul.’ The other walls were hung with banners and devices with lamps burning beneath them. Some were holy pictures while others bore arcane symbols. One had a device of a white dove with outspread wings above a triangle containing an eye, with underneath the tag ‘In Hoc Signo Vinci’. The first few rows of seats were mostly occupied. Altogether there were perhaps twenty-five people in the room. The Indian lady motioned for the Hemonys to sit.

  The fat man was standing with his back to the room, facing what seemed to be a small shrine in one corner by the blackboard. Jason had the impression of a seated figurine lit by votive flames, surrounded by crimson silk embroidered with gold thread and flanked by smouldering joss-sticks. At the moment the hadlam appeared deep in prayer, holding in one hand a yellow tassel attached to the shrine in some way. The room settled into a long silence. Then the fat man turned and, still holding onto the tassel, began addressing his audience in dialect. It seemed to Tessa that he was speaking deliberately slowly to allow Sister Savitri time to translate for them.

  ‘The hadlam is saying that he welcomes everyone, especially his foreign visitors who have come from so far. He says that Malomba is not the only place in the world having psychic healing. There are healers at all times and in every country. There are surgeons in other places, too, especially in the Philippines and South America. But Malomba is now the world centre for all the different healing disciplines gathered together.

  ‘The hadlam says there is no reason for fear or embarrassment. A healer needs to have around him people who can give support to him and the patient. Healing concentration is very powerful. Everyone must to join hands and thinking of the colour blue, willing the sickness gone with all the love in your hearts. The greatest medicine is love.

  ‘The hadlam adds that photography is allowed provided you ask the Spirit’s permission first. Otherwise your camera may not work.’

  Tapranne was now addressing the man in the sombrero who was sitting in the front row.

  ‘He has been here before,’ Sister Savitri told them. ‘He must to take off his hat and telling us what is the matter.’

  The man got to his feet. Twenty-five pairs of eyes focused on the nail which gleamed in the strip-lighting.

  ‘Always there is this pain in my head,’ he explained. ‘But sometimes it gets so bad I think it will explode like a bomb. I came two years ago and the hadlam used his powers. The headaches went away. Now they are as before and I am forced to put this nail in my head so when the pressure is too great I can take it out and let my brain breathe.’

  There was a short buzz of conversation as the audience discussed these interesting symptoms.

  ‘We didn’t operate before,’ Sister Savitri had Tapranne replying. ‘I remember now, my friend. We used only magnetism to draw out this pressure. You are racing correspondent of the Times of Malomba, are you not? Known as the Golden Tipster? An intellectual gentleman. And there’s the source of your trouble. Your work requires very rapid thinking, holding a lot of facts in your head. It’s the pressure of your thought we’re dealing with. Please come.’ He motioned the man forward. ‘Sit.’ The Golden Tipster, still clutching his sombrero, walked his rump awkwardly up on to the edge of the mattress so that he was facing the audience. ‘Join hands, please.’ Sister Savitri exten
ded a hand ostentatiously to Tessa on one side and to her neighbour on the other. From behind the hadlam two assistants approached. They looked like anyone at a stall in the Wednesday Market: a thirtyish man in T-shirt and rubber slippers and a woman holding a roll of lavatory paper.

  The fat man adjusted his grass biretta and stared at the head of the nail. Slowly he reached out his hands, fingers outspread, until they hovered about an inch above it. Zoe and Jason watched, absorbed. Jason’s sullenness had seemingly evaporated, to be replaced by fear as well as fascination. He held his sister’s hand very tightly.

  Still without touching the nail the hadlam asked, ‘What do you feel, friend?’

  ‘Cold, hadlam. The top of my head is cold.’

  Tapranne lightly held the nail between the finger and thumb of one hand and gently withdrew it. Its tip glistened red. A sigh was heard in the room, as it might be of escaping air or maybe of an audience’s indrawn breath. ‘What do you feel, friend?’

  ‘Still cold, hadlam.’

  The fat man handed the nail to a helper and then placed both hands in a cupped gesture above his patient’s head as if over a boil from which he was squeezing pus. Still he had not even touched the man’s hair. Tapranne closed his eyes and flexed his knuckles as if kneading. From his patient’s scalp appeared to rise a shiny black string like a wick or worm. The hadlam went on flexing. His watchers had the impression that his cupped palms were filling gradually with a wadded skein of this material, but the fingertips pointing down towards them hid any clear view. ‘What do you feel, friend?’

  ‘The top of my head’s getting sort of light. It’s like a cloud lifting. When will you take out the nail, hadlam?’

  With a showman’s gesture and still with his eyes closed, the fat man held up to his audience an indistinct tangle the size of a golf ball before dropping it in a plastic soup-plate his assistant extended. He made a gesture and the woman stepped forward, tearing off a handful of lavatory paper with which she dabbed at the patient’s skull. Tapranne opened his eyes and gave off his beam. The whole process had taken barely three minutes.

  ‘There, my friend. You’ve no more to worry about.’ He put a hand on the man’s shoulder and he looked nervously up, uncertain whether to smile. Tentatively he felt at his hair.

  ‘Hadlam-da, hadlam-da!’ he cried, face breaking into pleasure and relief. Needing no translation, this exclamation also marked a small catharsis for the audience, who smiled at each other and adjusted their fingers in one another’s grip.

  ‘There,’ said Tessa. ‘That wasn’t very terrible, was it? As simple as that.’

  ‘He’s impressive,’ said Zoe. ‘You can feel his energy from here.’

  ‘Can’t you though? Great waves of it.’

  Only Jason seemed less than wholly amazed. ‘You can’t see enough of what he’s doing,’ he objected. ‘His hands weren’t clear.’

  ‘Oh come on, Jay,’ said Tessa. ‘How much more do you need to see? At the very least, a man came in with a headache and a nail and now he has neither.’

  ‘I’m not surprised he had a headache with a piece of iron sticking in his brain. Probably the nail was quite loose anyway. I mean he’s pretty good, though,’ he said appeasingly, as if remembering that in a little while his own mother was going to be lying on the plastic mattress up front.

  The Golden Tipster hopped down off the table and went out. His place was taken by a neatly dressed woman of about thirty-five who looked Chinese. A silence fell. Tapranne was back in the corner, stroking the yellow tassel as if milking it of power.

  ‘Your name, my friend?’ he asked briskly, returning centre-stage.

  ‘I am Mrs Ling. I’m a businesswoman here in Malomba. The problem is in my stomach. Ever since my son died I’m head of the family company and the pains started. My doctor can find nothing wrong. The X-rays are negative. I suspect I’m being poisoned by a rival.’

  The hadlam sidled around the edge of the table and caught up one of her hands. He peered closely into the woman’s eyes, had her swing her legs up, examined the backs of both knees.

  ‘It’s much more serious than poison,’ he announced. ‘But don’t be afraid. We can help you.’

  ‘Is it cancer then, hadlam?’

  ‘No, worse.’ He turned to face the audience once more. ‘My friends, I need all your help now. This lady is a victim of witchcraft. An evil has been put into her which we must remove. Don’t imagine’ – and here he seemed to be speaking more to his foreign guests – ‘that because a spell is put on it doesn’t have a real and actual counterpart. Evil can take a physical form, of course.’

  Meanwhile his helpers were inducing Mrs Ling to lie full length on the plastic mattress. Her blouse was pulled up so that the lower part of her breasts was visible, while her skirt was opened to reveal the elastic waistband of severe black lingerie; this was pushed lower until her entire midriff lay pale and bare under the light. Tapranne moved behind the table and gazed earnestly at a point on the ceiling. The woman closed her eyes. Meanwhile the male helper had himself gone to the corner and milked the tassel, now returning to hover behind Tapranne, rubbing his hands together constantly and flicking invisible drops of spiritual energy at the healer’s back.

  The fat man momentarily spread all his fingers very wide, then tented each hand so that the tips of his fingers came together in two separate bunches. He then seemed to push these bunches with some difficulty through the skin of Mrs Ling’s stomach. Crimson liquid gleamed between his fingers. The patient maintained an expression of unwitting serenity while the fat man’s lips parted in a kind of snarl. There was a faint but distinct splashing sound. He grunted some words with effort. His assistant behind him rubbed and flicked, rubbed and flicked.

  ‘It’s fighting us,’ whispered Sister Savitri. ‘Think of blue. Think of healing. Think of the Master’s words, that we are in Bliss where such things can have no power. Men may misuse the power of the mind for their own gain, but such stupidities and dross must eventually yield and fall away before the power of love.’ Zoe recognised the quotation and tightened her grip.

  ‘Yes!’ cried Tapranne suddenly, his hay cap askew. ‘Yes!’ His hands were now covered in scarlet and the lady with the lavatory paper was swabbing at Mrs Ling’s white flank. ‘Its power is dead. Its power is dead! Its power is DEAD!’ and with a flourish which matched his shout he held triumphantly up in one hand a curly object a couple of inches long. There was a gasp of horror from the front rows.

  ‘Oh, what is it?’ cried Jason. ‘I can’t see.’

  The hadlam tossed the thing into the plastic soup-plate and his fingers returned to the apparent deep wound in Mrs Ling’s stomach. Then he stepped back. His male helper handed him a cloth while the woman with the lavatory roll cleaned off the site of the operation.

  ‘That was not easy,’ the healer told his audience, wiping his hands and still breathing hard. ‘I felt opposition from some of you out there. A few negative vibrations.’ Jason shrank in his seat and swallowed. ‘Come, see for yourselves.’ He raised a hand and beckoned.

  They all rose and pressed forward to the dais. The first thing Jason noticed when he got close to the table was the smell of blood, thick and tinny. Fearfully he glanced at Mrs Ling, then looked properly. Apart from a faint redness on her skin as after a light punch, together with a certain puckering, there was not the least sign of a wound. On the plastic dish lay a dying scorpion in a red puddle. Even as he watched, its legs ticked into their last folding. He looked back at the stomach and didn’t know what to think. Instead, he noticed a few uppermost strands of pubic hair disappearing beneath her waistband. He glanced away in embarrassment for her exactly at the moment when hadlam Tapranne put his hand lightly on her forehead and said a few words. She opened her eyes and sat up, examining her own flesh with satisfied awe as if it were an expensive new acquisition. Then, realising it was also being goggled at by many pairs of strange eyes gathered around, she at once tugged down her blouse. That was when she caug
ht sight of the scorpion. Her cry was part hiss, part yelp.

  But the hadlam had turned and was already greeting Tessa in English. He had removed his biretta, which looked to be woven of hay so fresh it was still pale green.

  ‘And your children too. Swami Gul told me all, of course. The beautiful daughter. Charming.’ Sweat twinkled at his hair roots. The teeth again. ‘Our backache has been with us for years, yes? On and off, on and off. I see I see.’

  ‘Never completely off. Until the last two or three days, hadlam.’

  ‘I see I see. As of this moment you have no pain?’ He rested a fingertip on the nape of her neck. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing, hadlam.’

  ‘Interesting. I detect a definite imbalance. We must look at your soles; they will infallibly tell the rest of the story. Up on the table, please. Your children will stay and hold your hands. Innocence and love are most potent forces for healing.’

  The fat man’s eye briefly met Jason’s and at that moment the boy saw how he had been enmeshed. He couldn’t refuse. On the other hand, if despite his best intentions his influence turned out to be ‘negative’ he would be endangering his mother’s chances of recovery. Glumly he recognised he would have to take the responsibility if her cure failed, since it was clear the people in this room would rather die than think of blaming the hadlam. Sister Savitri had meanwhile waved the others back to their seats while remaining on the stage as interpreter. Tapranne passed his hand over Tessa’s naked soles, never closer to them than half an inch. From time to time he made flicking motions with his fingers as if to shake off drops of some invisible ichor.

  ‘I see I see. Strange indeed you should be experiencing no discomfort in your spine as of these days. There is a long-standing defect and a blockage which has recently grown acute. The last half-year it has become worse? Yes. Your soles cannot lie. The beautiful blouse off please, Mrs Hemony.’

  Jason stared at Sister Savitri’s nose bead until his mother was lying naked to the waist, face down on the pudgy plastic. There was a mole on one shoulder-blade which was both familiar and poignant. He watched the hadlam’s hands move slowly over her skin. They stopped like dog muzzles on her lower spine.