The Bell-Boy (12 page)

They rounded the corner and there were the Hemonys at the unattended front desk. At once Mr Muffy's hand left Laki's ear-lobe and went around his shoulder as he switched to English.

‘Good evening, ladies,' he greeted them jovially. He gave Laki the simulacrum of an affectionate pat on the shoulder. ‘Poor boy,' he explained vaguely, as if to dismiss him.

‘We want to thank you for lending him to us this morning,' said Tessa. ‘Jason had a wonderful time, didn't you, Jay? and we're really grateful. Children don't always want to drag around after adults, do they? Especially boys. They're so bouncy and independent.'

Mr Muffy was smiling bleakly, hand apparently frozen to Laki's shoulder.

‘I'm sure you found you could spare him after all, didn't you?' Tessa went on. The proprietor was not certain whether she had seen him pulling the little maggot along by the ear but her next remark made him think she had. ‘Young people need their time off, Mr Muffy, especially when they're far from home and worried about their mothers being ill.' This made her glorious daughter shoot her a glance he couldn't begin to interpret. ‘Compassion is all, isn't it? To be harsh and lacking in sympathy is only another form of
grasping
, you know. We certainly hope to be seeing a lot more of our young friend while we're staying here in your excellent hotel.'

This sally, not least the protective phrase ‘our young friend', faced Muffy with the inevitable. He gave the bell-boy a final pat, his one concession to his feelings being to maintain the smile while lapsing out of English long enough to remark, ‘What a lucky turdlet it is to have this silly foreign cow on his side. But she'll be leaving soon
and
then
what
fun
there'll be
.'

Laki favoured him with a confident grin and with dazzling impertinence unhitched his bag from his employer's fingers. ‘Good night, sir,' he said in English. ‘Good night,
missus. Good night, miss.' He winked at Jason and walked jauntily off towards the back regions. On the way he met Raju coming from the kitchen wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and belching cardamom fumes. ‘I've been caught, uncle,' he explained softly in the passageway. ‘I'm afraid there's no toddy tonight. Muffy's at the desk and he's furious.'

‘Oh dear, I am a bit late, it's true,' admitted Raju. ‘There was such a lot to eat tonight. I'd better go at once.'

Laki watched him go, frowning at the old man's servile haste before turning back towards the kitchen to see if there was anything left. What scraps he could find he took straight up to his room, recognising the need to make himself scarce for the rest of the evening. Sitting beneath the pergola of vines chewing an end of sausage with a lump of stale
laran
bread, he reviewed recent events. Unfortunate, no doubt about that; but nothing like as disastrous as they would have been before the advent of the Hemonys. He thought of the two hundred
piku
the missus had so promptly given him and felt a half-erotic, half-sentimental swelling at her kindness and the circumstances which had provoked it.

He had passed the day in a cocoon of amazement at how easy it was after all to get on in this world. One simply wept a little at the right moment and in the right company. There had been more to it than that, he knew, but he was vaguer about the other magic component and settled for repeating to himself his insight that these were people who wanted something to happen. And maybe old Raju had been right, too:
Never
steal
a
watch
when
you
can
steal
a
heart.
He spat an intractable lump of gristle over the edge of the roof and then couldn't resist looking to see if it had hit anything interesting in the street below.

Even if something went badly wrong with these people – Laki resumed his seat and his chewing – there were all the other foreigners in town. Having refined one's technique, whatever it was, it could presumably be applied to anybody.
Suddenly he saw himself as a pioneer. He would no longer be a bell-boy or a washer-up, another of Malomba's shiftless band of skivvies and menials who barely managed to support themselves, let alone anybody else. No more would he send home irregular remittances to keep his family an inch above disaster. Instead he would be earning the sort of money to change their status once and for all. Architect of the family's fortune, he would himself buy the twelve-horsepower petrol engine which would transform his father's fishing. (He saw the hired jeep bouncing among the palms towards their house, the crated engine gleaming in the back; he saw his family's surprise at this unexpected vehicle as they ran up in the dust cloud of its halting; he saw his father's tears when he finally realised the motor was for him.)

All this Laki clearly saw, and much besides. He saw his mother with new pots and pans and her own private medicine cabinet of antibiotics. He saw his sisters in new dresses, his brothers with air rifles instead of catapults. He saw the plot of land behind their hut expanding and swallowing up the neighbours', stocked with ever-increasing herds of goats and pigs … What nothings were the Muffys of the world! Acidulous men in their fifties with their crummy businesses, just keeping afloat by dint of wearisome fiddles and sharp practice. That was no way forward for a boy – a young man, rather – with ambition and real earning potential. One day he would eat Mr Muffy alive. He would come back and simply buy him out. Then, scorning all attempts by the BDL next door to do a deal, he would tear down the Nirvana and … and … of course, put up the Auld Strait Kirk of Laki, Malomban Rite. Then he would really start making money as part of the city's religious establishment.

And punctually his mind skidded round to the tableful of virgins and his eyes lifted to the glowing ruby light of the Lingasumin, whence came so much imaginative strength.
He shifted his seat. It was an erotic business, glimpsing the future. The mere planning of it, the anticipation of power and the freedom to act was enough to make his fingertips unconsciously brush upwards at the corners of his mouth, to stray across his upper lip, chin and throat as he stared out across the holy city towards a morrow of his own creating.

Tonight the future collapsed before two obtrusive chunks of the present: this fresh trouble with Mr Muffy and his mother's illness. 'Flu was one thing, but he was superstitious about having wished scarlet fever on her for momentary effect. It might come true. He was glad he had tracked down the dried-fish merchant who was an old and trusted messenger for both Raju and himself, coming and going regularly between the east coast and Malomba. But the man had not been due to return to Saramu until this evening – might only just this minute be leaving – so the money wouldn't reach her until late tomorrow or even the day after. Not perfect, but it couldn't be helped.

Less perfect still was Mr Muffy's threat to call in the Beetles. These were the holy city's plain-clothes police, so named because in addition to black slacks they wore reflecting sunglasses for sinister effect, even at night. The Beetles had their own system of justice and were the lawless law; one did anything to avoid falling into their hands. They controlled most of the rackets in town while deciding for themselves who or what was undesirable. Of late they had prospered mightily from the tourist boom, especially from the appetite for
sima
displayed by what Tominy Bundash had described as ‘the hippy element'. But there appeared to be an imponderable line drawn between the encouragement of this trade and its suppression. Quite often the flogged bodies of pushers or ordinary vagrants were found on rubbish-dumps in Malomba's untouristed outskirts, reminders that the Beetles never shot or strangled or knifed but always caned their victims to death. Among the poor it was commonly held that anybody might be eligible for
‘tenderising'; enough that a squad of Beetles in one of their scarlet jeeps be bored or drunk and pick a quarrel with someone who answered back. They seldom interfered with foreigners, content merely to stare from a passing vehicle at anyone they thought sufficiently scruffily-dressed to be unwelcome on account of poverty. Insofar as the Beetles were ever pleased to see anyone, they were happiest with a rich, conventionally dressed foreigner who put up at a good Chinese hotel and sent out for quantities of
sima
and little massage-girls at night, while tottering out for some psychic surgery by day.

Laki, as he himself well knew, fell precisely into the category of the Beetles' preferred victim. He had no illusions about what would happen if Mr Muffy did send for them, but it was obviously just another of the man's empty threats, for what would he stand to gain? In the event Laki might not merit tenderising the first time, but he would certainly be meted out some exemplary treatment as a warning. Anyway, once you had claimed their attention you became trouble by association and no one in town would ever give you another job.

He shuddered a little, but phlegmatically. If the worst came to the worst, he always had his catapult and it was well known that the one thing the Beetles couldn't do was
run.
Free drinks and meals from prudent hoteliers and restaurateurs, to say nothing of driving endlessly about in jeeps, had rendered them quite unfit for running. ‘They should run on their hands,' went the stock Malomban joke. ‘God knows their arms get enough exercise.'

Tonight when Laki finally went into his hutch to sleep, he locked the door with especial care although more from caution than real anxiety. The Beetles were just something one lived with. Meanwhile, a morning's swimming with Jason in the water hole as well as his exertions in the Redemptorist Fathers' garden had left him with a pleasant weariness and he soon fell asleep on his straw mat.

An unknown time later he sat up abruptly on the floor, trying to remember what had woken him. Then the noise came again. Someone had opened the hatchway on to the roof and then closed it. At this very moment, maybe, fat men in slacks and sunglasses were surrounding the dovecote, canes tapping softly and expectantly against their legs.

When Tessa had said good night to the children and gone to her room, she found that despite the day’s wanderings through the Wednesday Market and the excitement of discovering all the unfamiliar essences in Mr Mokpin’s shop, she was not yet ready for sleep. She went to the window and leaned out, savouring the night air. The moon which had earlier lit Laki’s climb of the pagoda was now nearing its zenith and striking blue metallic gleams off blades of vegetation in the garden below. A thick whirr of frogs and lizards and crickets rose up as from a generator. Fancifully, she thought it was this machine which kept the night ticking over, the sheened leaves stirring, the moon pouring out its light and the fireflies aloft. Facing away from the city’s neon prodigality, she could almost believe herself miles from the nearest town and the mouldy hothouse fragrance that of virgin jungle.

On arriving, she remembered, she had thought Malomba was going to be playful and numinous. Nothing had yet happened to change that view, although the peculiar mix of these elements was not quite what she had expected. Her few days here had indeed been numinous to the point of overdose. Never before had she visited so many holy places, each with its own distinctive approach to the Other. This was unmistakably a place of the spirit, one in which people had always taken spiritual things seriously and lived their
lives accordingly. And yet she could not deny that the vibrations were a little weaker, perhaps, a little more elusive than she might have predicted.

Undoubtedly, too, she had encountered much that was playful. Their guide, Mr Bundash: was he not sweet with his theological nightmares and pompous rote-learning? His dismay at being overheard and corrected by the Spodist High Priest was particularly touching; for a moment the timid, bewildered-child look on his face had made her want to take him in her arms and comfort him. That would never have done, she smiled at the cloud-tree’s glimmering outline. As for the boy, Lucky, he was playfulness incarnate. But underneath his coltish comings and goings, could she not glimpse elements of disquiet? She had clearly seen Mr Muffy tugging the child along by the ear with a look of venom which bespoke imminent punishment, whether merited or not. What trivial crime had he committed? Or was he simply the virtual slave of a cruel and sadistic employer? What was going on below?

That was it, thought Tessa, as she let her eyes drift out of focus so her retinas bacame mere blackboards for the fireflies’ scribbles. Behind this lush and exotic town were constant intimations of menace. Vertiginous pits kept opening up beneath the most innocent things. A scarlet jeep passing in the street; fish dying in the market; a fruit with deadly seeds. Even a ride on a children’s train led to bloodshed. And behind Lucky’s tearful story about his mother’s illness what narratives of peasant misery, of hardship and separation might not be read?

Leaving the window for a moment, she fetched from the bedside the Master’s greatest work,
The
Fragrant
Mirror.
This book contained his distilled wisdom and countless million copies of it in one hundred and thirty-eight different languages were abroad in the world. These were mostly cheerful paperbacks whose covers depicted Swami Bopi Gul himself seated in a meadow deep with flowers and
holding up a mirror in which was reflected a single lotus bloom. Her own copy, though, was one of a special autographed edition limited to favoured disciples, and had black leather binding embossed with a yellow mandala. Opening it she turned to a chapter entitled ‘The Mirror Speaks’ and re-read the following, heavily underlined, passage:

These familiar words generally brought tears to her eyes. It was one of the Teacher’s own preferred passages and whenever she read it she could hear his slow, resonant delivery during which he never looked at the page but always at a spot on the ground about eighteen inches beyond as if at an invisible autocue. It was thus, in a semi-trance, he would quietly declaim whole chapters at a time, a faculty which merely reinforced the fame of the astonishing circumstances in which the book had been written.

Gul had not been a swami then, but just any young man of twenty born in a village a few miles from Bombay who had gone to the city in search of work. He had found employment in a warehouse, but was always on the point of being sacked for his dissolute lifestyle. One day – stupefied with drink and
bhang
– he fell asleep in a huge crate, was nailed up for a prank and transported to the goods yard. There he was loaded into a freight waggon together with seven similar crates containing equipment and stationery for blind schools in Gujarat state. He came round in pitch darkness and from the muffled sounds and motion deduced what had happened. Realising that nobody would hear him if he shouted, he conserved his energy and what little air there was until the train stopped. When it did, he shouted for hours but nobody came.

What Gul could not know was that the train had been uncoupled and his waggon was now standing with a dozen others, padlocked and deserted, in a siding on the outskirts of Bannapur. His legend began with the unloading of the waggon three weeks later. If the navvies were puzzled by the powerful scent of flowers which rolled out as they opened the doors, they were astonished by what they found in a lidless crate. A young man was sitting in deep meditation.
Before him was a Braille typewriter, beside him a stack of blank pages. Then someone noticed that the pages were not, after all, blank. During those eighteen days Gul, without knowing how to type in any language, still less in Braille, had seemingly composed
The
Fragrant
Mirror
in pitch darkness and without any food or water. From that moment he became a swami. For all those who cried ‘humbug!’ and ‘stunt!’ there were others who had not the slightest doubt of his authenticity.

Tessa herself had never questioned his divinity. Over the years she had, she considered, experienced ample evidence of his powers. He was a wonderful healer: there was no lack of witnesses who could testify to that. Why, then, couldn’t he heal her backache the way he healed others? He had taken her hand and she experienced a shock as of electricity strong enough to make her snatch it away with a cry.

‘We’re too close, sister,’ the Teacher said. ‘You see? Our magnetism is not right. I probably couldn’t heal a member of my own family, either.’ He gave a deprecatory laugh. ‘I can’t always heal myself, even. You remember the wound on my foot? It was you who healed that.’

She well remembered the occasion early on in her discipleship. They had been climbing the path up to Valcognano with two mules laden with supplies, the Teacher walking barefoot beside her. It was November and the stone steps were partly hidden beneath drifts of golden leaves through which they rustled. Suddenly he had stopped and brought a foot out into a shaft of sunlight. Stuck at an angle in its sole was a curved piece of iron which she had taken for an old mule shoe, but which she later found was the reinforcement from the heel of a boot. At any rate his foot was impaled by a pair of rusty nails. She had looked helplessly at it with a cry almost of fear, for she had never touched any part of his body, had only ever felt the energy in his hands.

‘Why not remove it, sister?’ he had asked with a smile. ‘If you would be so kind?’

And she had knelt in the leaves and tugged the iron out and at once two streams of blood came from the punctures. She would never forget that extraordinary instant: his smiling down with a kind of mischievous serenity, the spots of his blood on the leaves which sparkled in the sun’s rays like spinels, the autumnal smell of leaf-mould.

‘Now stop the bleeding, sister.’

‘I … I don’t know how, Master.’ She looked about her for recognisable herbs, but could see only brambles.

‘Just touch it with your hand and mind.’

And when nervously she had passed her fingertips beneath his sole, they came away with no trace of blood on them. She was amazed, but before she could look under his foot at the wounds themselves he had set it firmly down.

‘Go on!’ he shouted, pointing towards the mules’ retreating rumps as they plodded upward. ‘When in doubt,
go on
! See – even mules know that!’

They had resumed their journey, but when they arrived in Valcognano he said, ‘You are troubled, my dear Tessa?’

‘Forgive me, Teacher. I didn’t know a great swami could tread on a nail. I never thought of you as being … well, vulnerable.’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me if there were much you didn’t know,’ he said. ‘For example, you never knew you were a healer, did you?’

‘Oh, I’m not, Teacher. I’m just a student of herbs. I know a bit about what not to do, that’s all. Maybe we should put something on your wound now in case it infects?’

‘If you think it necessary,’ he laughed. ‘I’m in your hands, doctor.’

And he had raised his foot so that she could see the sole: pale, unmarked, without a trace of blood or puncture and with not even so much as a stain of leaf-mould.

‘You were looking at the wrong foot,’ Jason told her in one of his moods when she was recounting this story, not for the first time. What had upset her was not the crotchety
cynicism of the suggestion, the childish scoffing, but that her son had so unerringly placed in her mind a simple alternative explanation for an incident which held for her nothing but sacred significance. The worst of it was not that it made her doubt, but that she couldn’t put it out of her head.

Since then it had been Zoe, strangely enough, who had contributed most to Tessa’s disquiet. She had gone to England to spend a fortnight with her father. Bruce now had another family with whom she seemed to get on well, to her mother’s concealed regret. Zoe had returned looking thoughtful. One day she said to no one in an exasperated voice, ‘So fucking what?’ She was standing in the open doorway of their house in Valcognano, staring out across the blue panorama of adjacent mountains. Behind her at the kitchen table Tessa was wrapping bundles of dried comfrey.

‘What do you mean, Zo?’

Zoe gave herself a shake, surprised at being caught speaking aloud.

‘Just thinking.’ There was a long silence. ‘But so fucking what, all the same. It’s a cultural thing, that’s all, isn’t it? All this Indian stuff. I don’t mean the healing: I suppose that’s good and useful in any language. But why are we expected to go along with all the other crap about reincarnation? You don’t believe in the Christian version of heaven, why should you believe in cycles of re-birth? You’re not an Indian. Anyway, I’m not an Indian and I don’t believe a word of it. But the point is, even if it was true I’d still say so fucking what? It’s crazy to live your whole life just trying to avoid being born as a woodlouse the next time around. If there
is
a next time; which there won’t be.’

This naked barrage had caught Tessa unprepared. She had floundered and continued to do so. Her children were growing up. Old alliances were shaky. An emptiness was in the air.

Now she leaned on the window-sill of her room in the
Nirvana with
The
Fragrant
Mirror
closed on one thumb.
That
was the unease which Malomba diffused stealthily behind its thick scents and lavish spectacle. Never before had she been in a place so quick to take root in the mind. A difficult, significant place where she had arrived with last-ditch punctuality: in her forties, not a moment too soon. She might pretend to rejoice in whatever gave a salutary poke to one’s spiritual complacency, but she had not bargained for Malomba’s hidden glands. The holy city itself was an organism, an edifice of rich and eclectic design. It was an imaginative, aspiring structure; but one around the galleries of whose dome an insidious whisper clearly carried:
So
fucking what
? Oh, poison incense … The only certainty was backache. And with it something as banal as being lonely.

Suddenly she became aware of what she was doing. She was leaning on a sill which ought not to have been there. Examining, she found that it had been replaced inexpertly but sturdily at a slight angle. She smiled, imagining Lucky at work with a borrowed hammer. Or stolen? She had the urge to find out whether it was really he who had mended the window, whether she had thanked him enough for giving Jason such a lovely time, why that villainous-looking hotel proprietor seemed to have it in for him. She glanced at her clock. Only just past eleven. In any case, she was wide awake and really did want to look at Malomba from the roof. Honestly, really did.