The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘I see I see. Your problem is an over-abundance.’ Sister Savitri passed on this news to the audience. ‘One tiny part too many which throws the whole body out of that perfect balance we aim for. Yes. Look at the blackboard, my young man. What does it say?’

  It took Jason a moment to realise he was being addressed. He could feel himself blushing as he turned and read off the sentence in English.

  ‘Exactly,’ the fat man said. ‘We must heal ourselves but sometimes we need help. A paradox, yes?’

  Jason found himself watching a loose wisp of hay on the man’s cap and only then knew he was averting his eyes from the bunched fingers to all appearance now deep in a scarlet pit in his mother’s back. The clasp of her hand and his was in marble.

  ‘Do you like paradox, my young man?’ He thought he could smell her blood now and once more hear a distinct and miniature splashing. ‘I see I see. Swami Gul does, too. He has a playfulness which is the mark of the divine. You too are in the grip of a paradox. I can feel you. Yes. You do not really believe this is happening, yet you can see what you can see. Also smell and hear. So, do you wish to put your hand here? Well? Do you not want evidence?’ And the hay cap rotated backwards and the hadlam’s great round face came up into his. Bloody fingers were held before the teeth, in their tips a roughly circular piece of pinkish gristle. For an atrocious moment Jason thought Tapranne was going to reach out and force his fingers into the wound below, but the expression in the healer’s eyes was mischievous, not sadistic.

  ‘So it’s all in the mind, is it, my young man? After all?’ The assistant with the lavatory paper was swabbing away at Tessa’s back. There was no wound. Jason knew his attention had been distracted by the lump of gristle, so he had not seen what the other hand was doing. Two vivid minutes stood revealed as having been smudged with talk. ‘Strange how the brain controls the brain,’ Tapranne was babbling on. ‘Who said that, my young man?’

  ‘The Teacher,’ Jason replied mechanically.

  ‘Wrong!’ cried the hadlam. ‘Not Gul at all but Sherlock Holmes.’

  The gristle was in the soup-plate, his mother was doing up her blouse, her eyes never leaving Tapranne’s face. Jason was suddenly in vast disgust and let go of her hand. The smell, the fat man’s sweat, the blood and gristle, the audience, the muddle of it. Nothing was clear, nor ever would be – the enhancement on his mother’s face least of all. He made for the door, forcing the others to follow. In the passageway outside he caught Sister Savitri’s voice behind saying, ‘A contribution, Sister? Though only if you want,’ and heard his mother rustling in her Tibetan bag. Through the conservatory, elbowing aside the halt and the maimed and the blind, the goitred, tumoured, ulcerated, leaking, prolapsed throng, the handful of dilettante sick and the unabashed groupies, and out into raw Malombian sunshine where bored drivers tossed coins in the dust.

  When Tessa and Zoe caught up with him he expected his mother to say, ‘But Jay, it was you who insisted on coming,’ and was angry when she failed to give him this chance to be angry. Instead he said, ‘Now can we go home? Are you happy now?’

  Suppertime again.

  Sweet intestine, Laki’s favourite. He reached into the pot with paint-stained fingers and hooked out a pale, springy length. Putting one end in his mouth, he sucked out the contents until the pipe whistled thinly.

  ‘They’ll be leaving soon.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m painting the passage outside her room, uncle. I heard them talking. Also the boy came up to the roof this afternoon.’

  ‘No guests allowed on the roof, boy. You’re playing with fire.’

  ‘What if the fire comes to be played with, uncle?’ Laki snapped off a piece of tubing and thought of Jason’s kancha practice. The boy had been oblivious to all implorings to be careful, wandering the roof in broad daylight and sending down a manic hail of projectiles in all directions. He had hit a deer and given a shout of triumph as the beast had bolted into the shrubbery. Finally he had loosed a chunk of mud down into the street, hitting a cart and sending a spray of stinging particles among the crowds in front of the BDL. Faint cries had come up; Laki had dragged Jason below the parapet and snatched away the catapult. The boy had collapsed on the mat in the hutch, almost tearful but falling instead into a familar evacuated drowse. Heat, karesh flowers; adrift in a mud room. Once again Jason had given himself up to a secret no longer secret, a way of wrenching a small piece of time out of gear until he could coast in silence, gradually losing speed.

  ‘What are you doing to us?’ he had asked finally, up on one elbow.

  ‘I only bell-boy.’

  ‘You’re doing something, I know you are.’ The T-shirt trembled to his heart. The rest of his clothes were moulted on the floor like fragments of an epidermis now outgrown.

  And just then Laki had seen how it was with people who secretly wanted things to happen. They knew themselves immune and had to live in a permanent state of bafflement. Everything came as a surprise. Nothing had a shape until afterwards. Belatedly he glimpsed how difficult it truly might be to forge links of obligation with people so far removed from the hard-edged world he knew. What was the equivalent in the Hemonys’ life of the engine which would transform his father’s fishing overnight? What recurrent calamity might force them to eat badly for a month? Nothing was clear about them. But that was not to say they were shifty. One could spot shiftiness at a thousand paces by the way it smiled. The Hemonys were quite the reverse: they seemed to live entirely in the open, naked and undefended to the point of embarrassment. Yet they managed to be wholly visible without the least clarity. How did they do it? And thinking of the marine engine pushed his mind into that circle which led to foreigners with wealth to spare, which in turn led him back to the Hemonys and how inscrutable they were, how impossibly other, how hopeless his plans. Still, one would persevere.

  ‘All the same it’s playing with fire, boy. Muffy’s got it in for you.’

  ‘Oh? Of course, the toddy. It’s a pity about that, uncle. Getting caught was sheer bad luck. How was I to know the old bugger would be hanging about the yard at that time of evening? He ought to have been long since at home with that crone of his.’

  Raju winced and looked nervously behind him. The kitchen at his back held nothing more menacing than a cook, sooty cobwebs, clouds of grease and some sleepy hens in the rafters. ‘Your tongue, boy; you must learn to hold it. It’ll be the death of you. Remember the mouse which slept in the cat’s ear? A nice comfortable billet demands subtlety and discretion, especially when the cat’s got its claws out. It’s not just the toddy. He hates everything about you just now; he’s jealous.’

  ‘Of me, uncle?’

  ‘Certainly, boy. I’ve seen his face. You get on too well with these foreigners. The girl smiles at you.’

  ‘What’s a smile, uncle?’ (But the excitement of hearing it!)

  ‘There are smiles and smiles … How dense you are. But how very young, I suppose. You can’t know what it would mean to a man Muffy’s age if a beautiful blonde foreign girl smiled at him like that. Believe me, I know,’ said Raju sadly, ‘only too well. He and I are the same age. Just never let him see you doing your grinning capers. No need to keep poking the bruise. They’ll have gone in a day or two. That’s my advice, boy. Stick to your duties. Answer bells. Paint. Plenty of other foreign fish for your net.’

  ‘Until there’s a Red Tide, uncle. Any more troubles, any more freedom fighters, any more MNLP or whatever it’s called, and there’ll be a shortage.’

  ‘Sooner or later they’ll come back, boy. Red Tides always move on. Malomba’s a holy city …’

  ‘I’d better take some pictures of it now I’m here. I s’pose,’ Jason had said before going back down, and produced a small Canon. He pointed it all over the townscape, especially at the Glass Minaret and the surly, stepped pile of the Lingasumin. ‘My friends in Italy won’t believe there’s a church where they actually screw during services.’ In between pictures the
camera whirred and wheezed.

  They had taken pictures of each other, Laki posed against the vine rather self-consciously holding his kancha.

  ‘Very beautiful camera.’

  ‘’s all right.’

  ‘You make pictures to the hadlam?’

  ‘No, I forgot to take it. Anyway I wouldn’t have.’

  ‘He to healing your sister?’

  ‘It was my mother,’ Jason had rounded on him. ‘Can’t you understand that? Don’t you ever listen? It was my mother’s back. He pretended to take something out. Or maybe he really did. I don’t know anything about it. Probably it was all just a trick. Conjuring. Magic. It’s a mess. It’s all a mess.’

  ‘I’m not believing, I think,’ ventured Laki. Maybe this boy actually shared some of his own surprise at the incoherence of their lives. At least his sister hadn’t been the patient. The golden princess was no invalid after all.

  ‘A mess,’ Jason was repeating. He blinked angrily at the foothills in the afternoon light. Already shadows were beginning to form in their folds. ‘She’s been up here, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Never come here,’ said Laki.

  ‘Yes, she has. I’ve heard her voice in the night. I’m in that shitty room right below here, remember?’ He stamped a foot near the crack through which the laundry water ran. Only then did Laki realise this foreign boy was still not talking about his beautiful blonde sister. ‘So what are you doing to us?’

  ‘You’ll help me though, uncle, won’t you?’ Laki asked, licking at a skein of mesentery wrapped around his fingers.

  ‘Help you cut your own throat? I suppose so. But I shan’t go out of my way.’

  ‘Just keep me informed, uncle. That’s all.’

  But there was little for Raju to pass on an hour or so later when Laki went out to play the pinball machines with his friend from the bakery. The Hemonys had apparently returned from an early supper, the woman and the boy looking especially tired. Laki put them out of his mind in the search for his friend, who was not at home. Doubling back towards the squalid amusement hall, he crossed the road near the Nirvana just in time to see Zoe leave it. She had changed out of her T-shirt and grubby jeans and was wearing a blouse and an airy cotton skirt long enough to appease Malomba’s sensibilities and short enough to tighten his chest. Friend and slot machines instantly forgotten, he followed at a careful distance the ingot of her hair which flashed as she passed the doorways of shops and merchants.

  He knew where she was heading even before she left Justice and turned into Sobriety. This was no evening stroll. Her walk was purposeful and she didn’t hesitate when she reached the junction with Awareness. From the end of that street could be heard the steady thudding of rock music, and it seemed to him the blackened windows of The Punk Panther were themselves like drumskins, alternately denting and bulging to the concussions within. Her hair caught violet fire as she opened its door and vanished inside. A waft of decibels rolled up the street.

  One reached the rear of The Punk Panther – if one were a bell-boy accustomed to climbing palm trees daily – by squeezing down a urine-sodden passage several doors away. This was less an alley than an eighteen-inch error in surveying, left over between an ice merchant’s and the Mother Lily Mission. Laki had once done some moonlighting at the Mission’s ramshackle premises, stacking cardboard boxes of exhortatory booklets. He knew little enough about Mother Lily herself except that she would never allow the phrase ‘sinner’ to be used, referring only to ‘persons of restricted moral growth’. He knew rather more about her back yard and the disposition of its heaps of junk, the rusting bedsteads and piles of donated clothing bursting out of rotten crates. This knowledge now served him well, enabling him once over the wall to make a series of athletic moves. He scaled a sodden alp of jerseys, slipping on a crop of toadstools near the summit but finding his balance enough to take off from one foot and reach an overhanging branch.

  In this manner he neared the area ahead which pulsed din and flashes of light up into the sky. The Punk Panther’s back premises were known generically as a Beer Garden, as if an enchanted offspring might come of the union of two unassuming nouns. It remained a back yard, although filled with potted ferns between high walls covered in creepers. Its far end resembled the Nirvana’s rear, in that behind thick shrubbery was a fence of bamboo staves. Beyond that lay a pocket wilderness. Laki made his way around this end and in through the fence, sidling up between bushes. As an under-age Malombian he was not allowed into any sort of night club: even kitchen staff were supposed by statute to be over eighteen. This being Malomba, however, a ten-year leeway was observed where menials were concerned and Laki had several friends here who worked as washers-up, beer-crate heavers and assorted touts crouched in the shadows looking for prey. Tonight, in any case, he could approach the club with the inward swagger of one who had proved himself with a woman, and a blonde foreign woman at that. He definitely felt entitled to put on a casual air in a den of international vice, though he knew it was no guarantee against detection by the proprietor, a violent Australian.

  For all the noise and frenzied strobe lights, there were only fifteen or twenty foreigners sitting inside at fibreglass tables moulded to represent mushrooms. In between blazes of colour the room reverted to its basic pitch dark lit only by a handful of candles and the console lights of the sound system. Any activity was frozen into a series of movie frames. Violet hands jerked through the air. The only still object seemed to be the cat, Snort, whose intermittent outline Laki could see in his favourite place on top of the stack of amplifiers. Snort was famous, not just in Malomba but among travellers and backpackers from Sydney to San Francisco. He was stone-deaf after years of The Punk Panther’s night life and had frequently had his furry wits scrambled by sima which the unscrupulous fed him in rolled anchovies. At such moments he would dash about outside, banging into trees. Now he was aloof in his electronic high-rise; his earring winked as he dozed.

  It took Laki a minute to spot Zoe, sitting by herself at a table in the corner. Expressions were unreadable in the flickering gloom, but her arm jerked towards her face from time to time as she looked at her watch. It was a nervous gesture, touchingly out of place. Time was meaningless in The Punk Panther. Sooner or later, Laki knew, she would be approached and drawn into the main body of zonked expatriates. Already she had been spotted by the club’s hospitality machine; a tall glass stood before her. In a momentary respite between two soundtracks, a hollow grinding squeak could be heard and a sawn-off creature scuttered toward her mushroom. It nodded and rowed like a toy in a tin boat, its head scooting between legs and stalks. Zoe’s face jerked down to the sinister whirl at the hem of her skirt. Twin appendages reached up to her from nether darkness.

  Laki slid unobserved into the kitchen. ‘There’s a girl sitting alone in the corner by the beer ad.,’ he said to Gusa. ‘Vippu’s just getting his claws into her. Five piku to bring her out to the garden. Tell her it’s … no, just tell her it’s a friend and it’s very urgent.’

  The girl – whose job description was variously hostess, waitress and burlesque dancer – bared the gap left by an eye-tooth. ‘Now what are we up to, Laki-boy?’ she asked without much curiosity, tucking the coin into a pocket. ‘Wait outside. Don’t let the owner see you here; he’s pissed-off enough as it is. This place is becoming a morgue.’

  On his way out to the verandah Laki passed an unoccupied mushroom. In its red domed top were irregular white recesses: maggot-holes for standing drinks, ashtrays and so on. Into the centre, as into that of all the others, was let a plastic bowl. This contained the black boiled sweets which were as widely famed as old Snort himself. Distributed free to the club’s customers, they were available only in blackcurrant flavour and were supposed to offset the side-effects of something or other. Laki helped himself liberally from the bowl, cramming the sweets into his pockets as he went outside to lurk in the bushes. After quite a wait Zoe came out, looking apprehensively around. He met her briskly, for he had a
lready worked out his story.

  ‘Lucky!’ she exclaimed. To his fond ears, at least, she sounded relieved to see him.

  ‘Oh miss. Very bad. You must to come now.’

  ‘What’s happened? It’s not my mother?’

  ‘No, no, miss. Not that. But you know I have many friends in Malomba, hear many things. Tonight, now!, are coming police to this club. Many drug here, many bad criminal. Police to arresting all foreigners maybe and to beating perhaps. Or to raping,’ he added judiciously, watching her face for effect.

  ‘But I’ve not done—’

  He stabbed a finger at her fist, surprising her by the violence of the gesture. It was the first time he had touched her. ‘You are to buying sima from Vippu. Very bad boy, police catch many times. Maybe this time they to killing him. I watch you buy,’ he said slyly.

  Bewildered as intended by this revelation of raw Third World menace behind what had been for her a daring attempt at time off, Zoe became almost paralysed with ordinary fear. No one knew she was here; anything might happen to her. All notions of divine protection evaporated. She was fifteen and alone on the edges of the underworld in a remote part of the planet – alone, that is, but for a single familiar face turned earnestly up into hers.

  ‘You are to eating sima?’

  ‘No, no.’ This was untrue. Spellbound by its seller’s beautiful malignity, Zoe had in fact taken a cautious nibble at Vippu’s urging in the hope that it might make her more relaxed and open to enjoyment. She had been startled at first by the drug’s bitterness, then intrigued enough by its aromatic, fudgelike texture to try another sample. Now she squeezed the pellet she held so as to obliterate her teeth-marks.

  ‘Come, you give,’ Laki thrust out his hand. ‘So police not find to you.’ She gave it up. Instead of throwing it away he slipped it into his own pocket with a capable gesture which said he would take care of everything. Next he had taken her hand and was tugging it towards the bushes. Sensing her resistance, he urged: ‘Quick. Police they come in front. We to go out back, miss.’