The Bell-Boy

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Do come in,’ said a voice in the darkness.

  A lighter clicked. A flame appeared before him. It grew from a plump, hairy fist and danced in two mirrorlike lenses above it. Laki jumped back, but collided with a soft belly behind him which in turn backed the door shut.

  ‘No hurry,’ said the same voice. ‘We’ve the evening ahead of us. We were going to wait some time for you.’ The flame descended to the floor where it kindled the home-made oil-lamp. A familiar orange glow filled the chamber.

  There were two of them and they had already been busy with his toddy knife. His safe had been cracked. The vine was slashed and hacked to pieces. The floor was littered with leaves and flowers, slippery with squashed gourds. Tangled foliage had been wadded up into one corner. On the other side of their slotted mud wall the pigeons were silent. Maybe they had already flown up into the evening sky and were circling there in distress.

  ‘Sit,’ said the man, pointing to the floor. Laki sat against the wall, knees drawn up to chin. It seemed at first that they hadn’t brought their canes, but then he saw them propped in the shadows. From his pocket the man took the bundle of money and the bracelet. Gently he slapped the wad of notes in his palm as he spoke. ‘It’s really a very simple matter, so listen carefully. This whole thing can be settled between us here and now, or you can make a special appearance in the marketplace tomorrow where your case would be investigated with considerable rigour. Clear so far?’

  ‘Yes.’ He barely recognised his own voice.

  The man reached into the corner. ‘What was that again? You said?’

  ‘Yes.’ Louder this time.

  The sound of the cane came first, followed by a dense slamming across his arm and ribs. Then pain threw him sideways on to the floor.

  ‘Yes, what?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘We’ll proceed. This money and this bracelet. When did you steal them?’

  ‘I didn’t, sir. Some foreigners gave me them just now.’

  The cane sang again.

  ‘It’s true, sir! Mrs Hemony gave me them herself. Read the letter, sir.’

  ‘What letter?’

  ‘The letter in the envelope.’

  ‘I saw no letter; did you, Putnil?’

  ‘No letter.’ They were the first words the man by the door had spoken.

  ‘It sounds to me as if you’re inventing things, boy.’ Two swift cuts, one on either side of Laki’s thighs, which sent him into a tight ball. From within the ball came sounds like those of a rabbit in a gin-trap. ‘Let me ask you a straight question and you give me a straight answer … I do hope you’re listening to me in there, boy?’ The rabbit-noises diminished. ‘Now, is it likely that a foreign lady, a tourist, would make a present of all this money, plus a valuable piece of jewellery, to a scabby little boy from the provinces such as you? A snot-nosed bell-boy? Is it plausible?’

  ‘No, sir.’ A whisper choked on tears.

  ‘Ah, at least we agree on that, do we? So you admit you stole it all?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, well, Putnil. What a docile little thief we have here.’ The cane descended once more, glancing off the edge of his face. ‘On we go, then. It’s come to our notice that you’ve been making forays into the next-door garden. Would you like to offer a confession about those, too?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I was stealing toddy.’

  ‘Putnil! Did you ever hear such a thing? I hope you realise the seriousness of this crime you’re confessing to. Pointless sending out for a lawyer; there isn’t one in town capable of defending anything this grave. All toddy-making in this country is a Government monopoly. By infringing this you’ve been defrauding the legally constituted Government itself. His Majesty’s Government. I’m a bit vague about the law, but don’t you think this sounds perilously like high treason, Putnil?’

  ‘Very like, I should say.’

  ‘Very like,’ echoed the interrogator. The mirror lenses gave back orange flames and a hunched form squashed against the wall whose white cotton uniform now had seepings of crimson. ‘You aren’t by any chance a Communist?’

  ‘No, sir! Oh no, sir! I don’t understand any of that.’ And now he could see how heavier and heavier charges were massing, would always mass, like a wave system behind the mud brick walls. Worse than the pain was this despair of knowing however he answered was irrelevant. Whether he screamed, lied, begged or remained silent the waves were going to roll over him anyway.

  ‘Of course, Putnil, we may have here one of the MNLP’s juvenile recruits. Dangerous little vermin.’ Again the cane. ‘Boy! Listen to me! You can’t faint yet. Was anyone else in this subversive toddy-plot besides you?’

  ‘No, sir. It was all my idea. I … I took it for myself. I’m an addict, sir. A toddy-head.’

  ‘Sometimes I despair,’ said the man. He tucked the cane under one arm and lit a cigarette. ‘What material is this on which to build the country’s future? Still a child and already an accomplished thief, a defrauder of the Government and an alcoholic.’

  It went on some little while.

  Towards the end Putnil joined in and between them they methodically beat him unconscious. Then they left, smoking and whistling, their shoes echoing in the cement stairwell. As they went through the hotel they saw not a soul. The lights were on, the front doors open, no one was about. It was as if everybody had suddenly decided at the same moment to slip out for a packet of cigarettes. Various priestly gongs and bells were sounding as the two men walked away, swinging their canes like walking-sticks: but for the glittering lenses, two old goats leaving their hotel for a night on the town. They went round the corner to where they had left the scarlet jeep ticking over.

  Night. Most of Malomba was asleep.

  The merchants slept, the pavement vendors slept, the public nose-pickers slept.

  Much of the priesthood slept, too, except for those whose duty it was to perform nocturnal observances or sound the watches with a variety of shawms and yodels. Towards midnight a select company of Left-Handed Shaktas arrived at the Lingasumin, each carrying a small fibre suitcase. They were met at the door of the blockhouse by temple maidens hand-picked for their unassuming ugliness and low birth. The girls were swathed from head to foot in purple muslin stuck with silver paper stars, so their plainness and inferiority would have to be inferred for the next two hours until the sacred moment of Punctual Divestiture. The copper-sheathed doors closed. Heavy bolts could be heard sinking deep into stone. Overhead the ruby phallus winked once.

  There was activity, too, over at the pro-cathedral where an act of symbolic cannibalism had just been celebrated. It was an important Friday in the participants’ calendar, for they were ritually grieving over a two thousand-year-old execution whose victim needed to be ingested spiritually from time to time. Eventually the last of the mourners went home. The great doors shut. Locks clicked. Overhead the statue of the victim’s mother blinked on and off with a faint fizzing sound.

  In the depths of Chinatown a game turned into a drunken bout of Kung Fu. Several toes were broken. Soon, though, the players were snoring with their heads together on the floor among puddles of brandy and scattered mah-jongg tiles. Downstairs in restaurant kitchens fat carp and snow-white puppies slept in their tanks and cages.

  The street-curs slept, the dray-nags slept. One by one the pigeons had returned to the dovecote in Laki’s loft and now they too were asleep.

  Mr Tominy Bundash slept, but not well. He was attending yet another Last Judgement. This god had grotesque ears and held a significant osier basket full of water on his lap from which not the least drop fell. Mr Bundash, in painful chains made of woven lightning, was in his usual rôle of respondent. He was having to give an account of his recent experience of being briefly alive.

  ‘I liked it,’ he said humbly. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Specify, that my ears and the water may hear,’ said the god, twitching an ear and shifting the basket on his lap. From the water came a soft trilling sound. />
  ‘I … I liked the fancy of it all, sir. Everyone was so sure he knew what it was about but actually there was no real version at all, was there?’ The trilling intensified and to his horror Mr Bundash observed a stain spreading across the robe which covered the sacred knees. He knew it was a direct consequence of what he was saying and he knew it was fatal. ‘I … I liked the way the Rimmonites knew their reality was realer than anyone else’s. As did the Shintoists and the Creationists and the followers of Dagon the Fish-God and Jesus the Carpenter. It made them happy. They all knew their version was right. Everyone was right: the healers and the gurus and the businessmen and the drug addicts and the freedom fighters and the police, down to the humblest guide in Malomba.’

  ‘You, I suppose,’ said the god. Water was now pouring down his robe and pooling around the holy feet. Mr Bundash, helpless in his agonising manacles, knew he had got it wrong and it was all up. He began to weep.

  ‘I can’t wipe my eyes,’ he said miserably. He badly wished to wipe his eyes but the lightnings held him fast.

  ‘Of course not. We have taken away your hands for ever.’

  Looking down he discovered that his hands had indeed vanished and his arms were melting and running away. The basket on the god’s lap was now one-third empty. It suddenly became very important that his legs shouldn’t melt too, otherwise how was he to cross that blade-thin bridge to Paradise? He was sure he had to do that sooner or later without toppling off into the abyss, but he couldn’t remember where this notion came from. And then he realised he couldn’t remember who this god was, either. Now that he was finally face to face with the one true Lord of the Universe, he couldn’t even recall his name. He tried hard to think. There had been a god of mercy and a god of vengeance, one of merriment and several of despair; of wine, of abstinence, of spring, of war, of peace, of love, of hate; a harvest-god and a famine-god and a hundred others besides. Which one was this? How could one tell? The ebbing water in the basket was trilling continuously now.

  ‘You are nothing,’ the god told him in a voice which filled Creation. ‘You never were. And you shall be still less.’

  ‘Oh no, please, Your Majesty,’ cried Tominy Bundash, melting and hurting. ‘Oh, why is all this necessary?’

  The puddle on the floor around the god’s throne had become a lake and turned quickly into a sea which spread on every side to limitless cerulean horizons. Its waters gave off a sound of harsh lament. From the empty osier basket came a dry, reptilian hiss. Slowly the god turned it upside down on his lap.

  ‘Your Judgement is come,’ he announced. ‘It is that you will be emptied for a thousand aeons. Pray that at the end something may be found in you which is more than a matter of fancy. Fancy, indeed. Remove this Bundash.’

  Thus Mr Bundash writhed in his sleep, pummelled senseless by deities: deities from Mesopotamia and Judaea, from Egypt and Arabia, from the Indus Valley and the Andes. Great tears rolled down his cheeks which he blew out with syllables of torment and sadness. On either side of him his wives watched in alarm.

  ‘Oh, he suffers. It’s dreadful, Laksha.’

  ‘It’s the cheese you gave him, Jineen. Always you give him cheese and always he has nightmares. Let’s wake him.’

  ‘We must be careful how we do it. When the soul’s out of the body it may snap its thread and wander for ever trying to get back in.’

  ‘You are a superstitious creature, Jineen. Sometimes I’m wondering if you’re the best sort of wife for a Moslem gentleman like Tominy-da. I at any rate know how to do it without breaking anything,’ and her hand went out full of skill and affection.

  And bit by bit Mr Bundash’s tears ceased and his features smoothed and at last rearranged themselves into those familiar as dutiful husband, fond father and official guide to Malomba.

  Somewhere far off, meanwhile, the Hemonys were doing their best to sleep on the bus. They jolted along through the dark enjoying the tourist’s feckless luxury of getting away scot-free. If so, it was their only enjoyment. Back at the bus stand in Malomba they had experienced a moment of total recall for the outward journey and opted to spend extra on a rival company’s air-conditioned vehicle. It was called a HiWay Kruser and had a small lavatory at the back which particularly commended itself to Zoe. They even, for a further consideration, managed to obtain seats conveniently located at the rear.

  Thirty miles into the journey it was apparent that this had been a strategic error. Because of the air-conditioning none of the windows could be opened and the refrigeration system soon broke down. The small lavatory at the back began, subtly at first and then with increasing assertiveness, to dominate the entire bus. Whenever its door was opened it exhaled ammoniac stench. Quite quickly Zoe came to hate each person who used it and began longing for a breakdown in order to escape, however briefly, into fresh air. Towards midnight her prayer was answered. The fan-belt snapped and vendors appeared from nowhere, shoving aboard with trays of oilcakes and fish sauce. The Hemonys wandered about with the other passengers in the dark, slightly stunned, kicking at loose pebbles and yawning at the thick screen of gibbet-trees on either side of the road. In a while the journey got under way again, the other passengers firmly resuming their previous seats.

  Four a.m. found them in a provincial town only thirty-eight miles from the capital. There was an unaccountable change of driver and a wait of half an hour. ‘Breakfast time, madams and sir,’ said a man who had a seat at the front of the bus. A holy book bound in ivory had been chained to his right wrist at his coming-of-age; the silver manacle had worn thin. The Hemonys sat at a formica-topped table in a canteen ablaze with strip lighting. They stared at each other, at unwanted bottles of soft drinks and the geckos scurrying about the warped plywood ceiling. They had been decanted into an un-world on an altogether alien planet. They were mute with shock.

  Once the bus had started again, the realisation of their journey’s approaching end brought them slowly back to speech and consciousness.

  ‘Porco Dio, what a trip,’ said Jason, his eyes gummy with sleep secretions. ‘I feel filthy.’

  Both Tessa and Zoe were experiencing the same sensation of being thoroughly contaminated. It was not just that the breath of the lavatory had built up into a kind of sticky lacquer which seemed to coat them from hair to feet. There was the sense also of an absent grubbiness, of there being something behind them which would be less easy to think about in full daylight.

  ‘Actually,’ Tessa told Zoe after a long pause, ‘I left the kid rather a lot of money.’

  ‘Who, that bell-boy? Honestly, Mum. You’re so … He’ll only fritter it. I got to speak to him a bit, you know. I’ve a pretty good idea what he was like.’

  ‘Maybe. Though you mightn’t have understood his predicament, quite. He was very young and far from home, and whatever else I am a mother.’

  ‘And I’m probably a better judge of character, Mum. You’re bound to be a bit out of touch with people my age.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ conceded Tessa with a secret smile. ‘Even so, I’m not sure it was right to leave him your bracelet. The Teacher himself gave you that.’

  ‘I’d got sick of it, hadn’t I? And the kid took a fancy to it, like I told you. I expect he’ll pawn it. Come to that, I’m not sure it was right leaving him a lot of money.’

  ‘It’ll be a help,’ said her mother chidingly. ‘A sum like that could completely change someone’s life. It’ll go straight to his family, if I know him. Anyway, it’s only money.’

  Jason listened to this while trying out expressions of disgust in the window. ‘I just wish I’d got his catapult. You two never saw it, but it was all carved with flowers and things. I think he would have given it to me. I probably knew him better than either of you. Except Mum, perhaps,’ giving her a vitriolic glance.

  ‘He was a good friend to us all,’ said Tessa diplomatically.

  And in this desultory fashion they bumped along without ever once mentioning their friend by the name they had believed was his
.

  Presently they entered the capital’s sprawling outskirts. Dawn was in the air. As if by consent the whole subject of Malomba was dropped. That was yesterday, somewhere else entirely and now separated from them by a night of such unreality that a curtain – hectically embroidered with fleeting glimpses of numberless miles and hours – had dropped between that and this.

  Nevertheless, each was no doubt condemned for ever to retain a private version, even one unrecognisable to the others, as if bearing away a farewell-fruit for cautious consumption over the years. Something luscious, full of the tristesse of Afterwards, which concealed a lethality all had sensed but none known how to see. That time in Malomba.

  But now it was today. Right here, right now. It had been a successful trip: backache cured and new essences bought. Mission accomplished. Soon the bus would stop. Soon a shower and a cup of coffee.

  Bliss.

  Far behind in the holy city dawn was also in the air. Early rays caught the crescent moon fixed atop the Glass Minaret. Carved from a single quartz crystal, faceted and mounted in silver, it flamed and sparkled some minutes before the sun edged over the hills to light the rest of Malomba. The muezzin cleared his throat over the Tannoy system and phlegm crackled to the outskirts. At this hour there was about the Ibn Ballur mosque an austere smugness appropriate to one invariably up first, eagerly setting about the business of a new day while benighted neighbours were still sodden in sleep. Yet things were beginning to stir elsewhere. With a clap of wings the pigeons on the Nirvana’s roof pulled themselves into the turquoise sky, white breasts catching fire on the eastward quadrant of their circlings. Somewhere a trumpet squealed like a rooster.

  Also on the hotel roof Laki opened his eyes in a growing puddle of light beneath the hole in the ceiling of his den. He frowned. At first he thought he was paralysed but by small, willed movements found he lay securely trussed in bonds of pain. Little by little he worked some slack into these bindings, enough to raise his head an inch off the floor. Remembering everything at once from the previous night, his next thought was of being alive. Not this time, then … It called for an inventory. He dragged himself slowly to the dovecote wall and leaned.