The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  And in that moment the sima hit her and she saw with extraordinary clarity the boy’s brown fingers around hers, heard the pounding drums behind them and pushing them away from the club, outwards into soft Malomban night. Exhilaration poured into the hole left by fear, filling her up with a skittish helium as she floated through the shrubbery behind her marvellous friend. An adventure was beginning. Away from the virtuous rigours of Valcognano, beyond the reach of gurus and healers and Elders, she was young at last in the company of the young.

  There began a singular journey in which she merrily fled a menace that grew ever more indistinct behind them. Following Laki through undergrowth whose coils and tangles seemed magically to melt, she found herself on a street where people and vehicles moved in slow motion to a low murmur of sound while a keen whistle of breeze sped by her ears. Merchants were putting up their shutters as if drowning in treacle, a viscid gold medium which parted to let her through and then closed behind her whizzing heels.

  ‘Oh Lucky!’ she cried, her hair flying. But he was pulling her to a halt at the corner of Justice.

  Laki had had some vague plan of spiriting her up to his eyrie on the hotel roof, but now as he looked along at the front entrance it struck him that the girl’s wretched mother might inconveniently take it into her head to make the same journey. The moment was resolved by Zoe herself saying, ‘Don’t let’s go back to that smelly old hotel yet. I want to do something mad.’

  ‘Mad, miss?’

  ‘Pretty mad.’

  ‘Okay miss. I take somewhere. But must to go behind Nirbana.’

  He led her along the street praying nobody would come out of the hotel, at last ducking down the strip of waste ground which ran at the side of the building. They squelched past the fallen sheet of corrugated iron which overflowing water bonged each dawn, over a wall of decaying hollow blocks, across the back yard and into the bananas. Once there Laki guided her along his toddy-gathering trail until they were standing hand in hand, breathless on the edge of the Redemptorist Fathers’ greensward with the little pagoda shimmering before them in the light of a full, tropic moon. Immediately there was a sharp hissing and a rocket rushed up the sky and burst into a crimson canopy of tumbling lights, then into a second and even larger blue umbrella above that, leaving a huge jellyfish drifting earthwards shedding filaments and sparks.

  ‘Ooh, is that for us?’

  ‘Of course,’ he told her opportunistically, squeezing her hand. In fact it merely meant it was ten thirty-five, the official Kalustrian midnight when at the full moon the tortured god Kalu begged for a firebrand with which to cauterise the ninety-nine wounds inflicted on him by an uncaring human race. This stark remedy his devotees sent him monthly was intended to keep him so occupied with self-surgery he would have no time for vengeance. Thus global doom was kept at bay for the mere cost of a dozen ‘Chrysanthemum’ brand Chinese rockets a year – according to the Kalustrian community, a pretty shrewd investment.

  ‘I know where this is,’ she was saying in surprise, for time was getting out of sequence and turning their flight into a directionless escapade. It was fun, though. ‘We’re in that garden.’

  ‘We safe here in case police to searching hotel.’

  This made good sense to Zoe, at least. By the light of the moon and with the blotches of the Kalustrians’ rocket still on her retinas, the Fathers’ garden seemed a magic haven, an enchanted playground. She ran about the lawn for a while trying to catch fireflies. Laki followed anxiously, urging her not to make too much noise. Whatever might be about to fall into his hands was too precious to risk. He recognised her symptoms and wondered how much sima she had really eaten. Impossible to estimate from the lump in his pocket, since Vippu would certainly have cheated her. She skipped over the little bridge and into the pagoda. Following, he found her sprawled on one of the benches.

  ‘Oh miss, we not to staying here.’

  ‘Why not? It’s a pretty little house. Let’s live here, just you and me. I’m afraid we can’t get married, of course; you’re just a child … Why do all the cracks here have sparks in them? It’s such a lovely idea.’

  Mildly slighted, he could hardly tell the missus’s own daughter how unjustified her accusation was. Just a child, indeed. The cohabitation theme, though, was far more what he wanted to hear. ‘We must to live upstairs, miss. The Fathers are using this room sometimes. We must to live in secret.’

  ‘Even better. But how do we get upstairs?’

  ‘Climbing, miss. I have room upstairs. I show if we climb.’

  She sat up. ‘Climb? That’s a great idea. You any good at climbing?’

  ‘I to climbing palm trees. Very quick.’

  ‘Where I live in Italy there’s a lot of wet chestnut trees and a sort of mountain. There isn’t anything worth climbing. But here …’ She sprang up and went outside. The pagoda sparkled in the moonlight like a tiered wedding-cake. ‘It’s so romantic. It’s perfect. Bit thirsty, though, that’s the only thing.’ And before he could stop her she threw herself down by the bridge like some Pre-Raphaelite shepherd boy and drank deeply from the midge-mantled sump. ‘Wow! That’s good … If,’ she stood back, hands on hips, looking up at the pagoda, ‘if at last I’m going to do something crazy, we’re going to do it in style. Take off your clothes.’

  So intent had Laki been on playing rescuer and guide that he hadn’t seen how imperceptibly their roles were switching. This bizarre command made him abruptly aware of how much – now that she was on his ground – he wanted to do her bidding. Her gold ingot of hair hung down in the moonlight as earnest of a vast treasure which might be possessed in its entirety if only one knew the map or the password or had the right key. With infinite luck a lifetime’s bullion lay to hand.

  ‘To taking off clothes, miss?’

  ‘Sure. I’ve had an idea, dear heart.’ (Dear heart!) ‘It’s bliss. You and I are going to swap clothes.’

  ‘Miss?’

  ‘Don’t you see? I’ll wear your clothes and you’ll wear mine. Just for fun, while we’re climbing. That way, if anybody comes they’ll never know it’s us. I’ll be you and you’ll be me. No Father’s going to be bright enough to see through that. Come on.’ She pulled off her blouse. ‘You shy or something? It’s only for a laugh. We’re like brother and sister, you and me.’

  Confused by this casual enactment of his wildest fantasy, Laki could only pluck feebly at his own T-shirt. She held out her hand imperiously for it, offering her blouse in the other. Lowering his eyes shyly from her breasts, he slowly pulled it over his head.

  ‘Now your shorts,’ she said relentlessly. ‘It’s a good job we’re the same size. I may as well tell you I’m not wearing anything underneath this dress. Girls often don’t on really hot evenings. There: you’ve learned something about women I bet you didn’t know. Don’t just stand … Oh, I’ve got it. You’re embarrassed to wear girls’ clothes. Your precious manhood and all that. Too bad. Either we’re properly mad or I’m going back to the hotel’ She jumped lightly on to the flimsy stone balustrade of the bridge and walked along it dressed simply in his T-shirt, her arms held out on either side and very white. Within a minute or two she was wearing his shorts and examining him critically as he stood there in her blouse and skirt. She walked all around him.

  ‘You’re perfect,’ she told him. ‘Seriously perfect.’ But he was still too abashed to say anything, so she took his hand and pulled him towards the pagoda. ‘Come on, now, show me. What’s the best way of getting up this thing?’

  ‘Here, miss.’ He indicated a gnarled stirrup of vine stem.

  ‘You can’t call me miss. You must call me mister. Okay, miss?’

  ‘Yes, mister,’ came a reluctant voice.

  She giggled a bit, but soon became intent on following his swaying skirts as he went from handhold to handhold with practised agility.

  ‘This my room,’ he called down.

  ‘Higher. I want to go right to the top.’

  As they climbed, fragm
ents of decaying concrete broke off like icing sugar and pattered down through the leaves below. Soon they reached the point where the pagoda was so slender that Zoe could put her arms right round it. She stood with her feet in one of the window embrasures of the topmost cell and looked about her with dizzy pleasure.

  ‘What are those lights, miss?’ she asked.

  ‘That our Nirbana Hotel.’

  She thought of her mother and brother sleeping or reading behind their respective lit windows. They seemed as remote as if she were watching the rows of lighted portholes in a liner’s side as it passed and wondering who the unknown passengers were. People on a journey. Soon she would herself be going to California; she had just decided. ‘What about those others?’

  ‘Redemptorist Fathers, miss … er, mister.’ Through the gauzy billows of the cloud-tree shone yellowish lamplight at an indeterminate distance. ‘I think we to come down. It very danger here. No good this cement.’

  ‘Oh, you’re no fun.’ But she began backing down the vertiginous spire. On the first storey she found him already inside his chamber. He had lit a candle and a mosquito coil was smouldering beside an open box. ‘What a sweet place,’ she said, squeezing in through a window. ‘Only the ceiling’s a bit low.’ She dropped to all fours. ‘Golly, a carpet, no less. You’ve got yourself really set up, haven’t you? And flowers coming in the window, too.’

  Crouched opposite her almost knee to knee, he smiled doubtfully. Things had got a little beyond him. Eyes and teeth twinkled in the candlelight. She reached out and touched the tip of his nose.

  ‘Poor Miss Lucky. You look so baffled and pretty; you should just see yourself.’ For as he knelt the dress came down around him in the most demure way. Only the brown arms emerging from the narrow blouse seemed too sinewy. ‘But you’re not quite complete.’ She slipped a bracelet from her wrist on to his. It was of twined copper and silver, hammered flat and set with peridot and zircon. Swami Bopi Gul himself had given it her and it had some magical or curative significance. The design was striking, but she always thought it lay on an uneasy borderline between adornment and therapeutics. The boy was evidently pleased with the effect, though, turning it round and round so the candlelight flared the stones. ‘There,’ said Zoe. ‘Now you’re perfect. You look quite unspoilt.’

  To her eyes the entire room was now glittering as if sequins had been mixed in with the mortar. The drug’s manic effects had peaked. Unknown to her, she was entering a phase where mild visual disturbance would turn into acute tactile sensitivity and then to drowsiness. Later would come the headache. She lay full length on the carpet and rolled experimentally on its mildewed softness. The scent of karesh blossom was heavy in the night air.

  ‘What on earth have you got in your pockets?’ She pulled out handfuls of black sweets. ‘I’m going to tell you the story of my life,’ she said, crunching blackcurrant while holding up the wrapper so that its crinkles sent out prismatic flares which hurt her eyes. ‘I was born and years and years passed and my father ran off and I took a lover from California. He was American of course, incredibly rich and handsome. I used to visit him in LA – that’s Los Angeles – and we’d drive around Hollywood in this Cadillac of his which had a bar and a telephone and everything. Ed – that’s this American – told me I was quite unspoilt and that I had to get away from my family if only because my mother’s a bit loopy. We would live in … in Bel Air, in a huge mansion he had with Mexican maids and an English butler. The butler’s name was Ponkerton, actually. Marriage was discussed, of course, but it was decided he was still a little immature and we agreed on a trial period.

  ‘And then one day he came back from the studios and poured himself a big drink and lit a Chesterfield and walked round and round the room. The poor darling looked so upset I asked him what the matter was, and he said it was the most terrible news and I must brace myself for a shock. The doctor had told him he had an incurable disease. He meant cancer, of course, not AIDS. It was like a knife in my heart, as you can imagine. It didn’t seem possible. He was so young and handsome and our lives were before us.

  ‘Of course we tried everything. We must have gone to every doctor in Hollywood, but the diagnosis was always the same: Ed would die in months. So then I thought of this man I know – he’s a famous guru called Swami Bopi Gul. If anyone could heal Ed surely he could. So the Swami tried all he knew, but it made no difference. If anything it actually made him worse. Finally we took him for radium therapy and all his beautiful hair fell out. You should have seen him, he looked ghastly. Just bones, really, and this waxy yellow skin.

  ‘Well naturally he died, right there in his Bel Air mansion, and Ponkerton came out into the garden where I was cutting flowers for his bedside and said, “The master has left us, Miss Zoe. It was better this way.” I rushed upstairs and there he was and I threw myself on to the bed and wept and kissed his lifeless face and laid the flowers on his breast. Later we buried him in Mount … Monterey, in a quiet churchyard overlooking the sea. And ever since then I suppose I’ve been trying to put him out of my mind. It’s been hard, but I think now at last I’m free of his memory.’

  Zoe lay chewing stoically, the tears her own story had induced running back into her hairline. Beside her, eyes wide on hers, Laki was also crunching away. The carpet around them was littered with wrappers. Much of the story’s detail had been lost on him, but he was left with an absolute conviction of the princess-like quality of the girl on the floor. California … servants … doctors … death: more than enough to suggest a tragic fairytale life of elsewhere. That world really did exist, far, far from Malomba, where everyone did what they felt like and money was never mentioned. This lovely high blonde girl now wearing his own tatty shorts was herself a denizen of that life, a mysterious fragment broken off a distant slab of glamour and washed up on to his doorstep. He ran his hands wonderingly over the blouse and the dress, examined the bracelet on his own wrist, then looked down at her. His T-shirt had never appeared so unfamiliar, for all that he knew every hole. Ordinarily its faded slogan in green Gothic lettering – ‘The Bank of the Divine Lotus. Where Purity Meets Security’ – lay flat across his chest. Now the letters were distorted and a stretch-wrinkle ran through the logo of a padlocked lotus.

  ‘I can feel your eyes.’

  He put out a fingertip and touched the lotus. It was suspended in air. ‘I want to coming with you to Italy. Possible?’

  ‘Of course you must come. But I warn you it’s quite mad and boring. You must come dressed as you are. Little Miss Lucky.’ She reached up and sank her fingers into his hair. ‘Asian hair. Glossy wire. Full of … you’re full of electricity, you know that? I can see your sparkles.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Zoe.’

  ‘Mister. Mister. Mister,’ and the third time jerked his head downwards so abruptly that he was dragged off balance and had to kneel across her to remain upright. Straightening against her pull, he hit the back of his head on the ceiling. One of his bare feet kicked the candle over; hot wax spilled across it. In the darkness something began moving beneath the dress. ‘Rotten cheat,’ she said. ‘You left your underpants on. I don’t call that fair … Oh, the smell of these flowers. They do something to your brain, you know that?’

  ‘Wait, mister, I to lighting candle.’ Laki tried to lever himself away from her hands, the whole delicious indignity of it. All was confused. Not one single thing was clear, least of all with nothing but silvery moonlight leaking in through the six thin windows. He himself no longer knew what he wanted. These people had the power to whirl things about until something happened, it semed not to matter what. Her hands were running like mice at play, meanwhile. ‘Wait, mister,’ he began again, then fell suddenly dumb. From the garden below came the sound of a voice, two voices, above the racket of frogs.

  ‘Lucky …’

  ‘Ssh, miss, Father McGoohan to coming here.’ He was still trying to pull free. ‘Oh please miss, no noise. Very bad if he to catching us.’

  The voices ne
ared and Zoe became silent but didn’t relax her grip. The bell-boy was left kneeling over her, a leg on either side, while she pulled more and more of his weight downwards on to her stomach. As her eyes adjusted she began to see his face above her, washed in moonlight, balanced like a flower on the ruffed collar of her blouse. The vine exhaled.

  ‘… have ears,’ came Father McGoohan’s voice from downstairs, ‘which is why some things are better said far from the madding crowd. Twenty years in this country have convinced me that you can’t be too careful. We’re here on sufferance. There’s almost nothing you can say which won’t be construed as a political statement. You’ll have to be on your guard up-country.’

  ‘Ssh,’ said Zoe, and giggled softly.

  ‘… may have told you that in Dublin but believe me, things are pretty different on the ground here.’ The smell of a freshly-lit pipe.

  Laki tried to catch her hands beneath the cotton, to grip them imploringly.

  ‘… find Malomba itself genially antinomian. So many books of scripture there’s no room left for ordinary moral law. “Right” and “wrong” don’t seem to mean much unless you cite an authority, and since there are at least thirty different religious authorities here it puts one in an interesting position, theologically. Especially now, in Holy Week.’

  On her back Zoe was drawing her bare feet towards her over the carpet, pushing up her knees.

  ‘… to live up to our famous austere standards. You’ll find one of our major problems is distribution. Simply no infrastructure to speak of.’

  The pressure of her thighs was forcing Laki to shuffle forward on his knees.

  ‘The Palace is absolutely paranoid. The whole horrible charade will have to be played out, of course, heaps of bodies and all. The usual vile escalation. More repression, more MNLP, more special forces, more people’s retribution squads, more gangs of police in mufti licensed to shoot on sight …’