The Bell-Boy (6 page)

Jason made his own way back to the hotel, leaving his mother and sister to recover among the diverse balms offered by the Botanical Gardens. The streets were hot and drowsy. At times he was sure he fell asleep as he walked; whenever he tripped over a pothole it was as if he woke up to recover his balance. Some way off the Glass Minaret winked and blazed above the slums and boulevards, a celestial conductor down which a tithe of the abounding light and energy of the solar system might pucker and pass to this dark earth. On it Jason fixed his lethargic eye and navigated in a trance.

The air of Malomba was saturated with odours. Fragrances of fruit rotting in the Wednesday Market mingled with those of a thousand balsam oaks, orchid sapodillas, belfry palms. From the clustered violet bells of these last trees tolled heavy notes of scent, rolling out of merchants’ gardens and temple grounds. To Jason, reeling with perfumes, there was one single smell behind all the others which in a few short days had become for him that of Malomba itself. He had no idea what it was.

He entered Chinatown. In stenching alleys behind the restaurants dogs were fighting over the lunchtime crop of puppy bones and fish heads. Gradually he became aware of a voice calling him, together with a hollow grinding noise. Looking down he found himself addressed by the torso of a boy mounted on castors. Of much the same age, this young fellow had a pair of muscular arms and hands wrapped in filthy cloths with which he rowed himself along. To each corner of his wood pallet were nailed steel bearings, worn ball-races discarded by mechanical workshops. In stopping he had slewed himself with a burst of sparks and blocked the path so Jason somehow lacked the energy to walk round him. Then in a high voice the boy-torso began to sing.

Thought flew out of Jason’s head, his feet would not stir. He watched the white, glittering teeth, the two grubby lumps of hand held out towards him, was fixed by the eyes
which never left his face. The song climbed the hot walls of the alley and floated towards the pigeons slicing the blue air overhead. There was in it none of the shocking nakedness which singing on a street ordinarily had when upraised against the din of traffic, the indifference of passers-by. On the contrary, the boy’s voice blotted out all background noise so that he became cocooned in its sweetness.

How hot it was! It seemed there was nothing but this immense heat and the singing, interdependent in some way.
Sima.
The knot of mongrels foraging and brawling at the alley’s end were balletic in their movements.
Sima.
Not a sound came from them, only their feet raised whirlpools of dust, their fangs gleamed mutely.
Sima
sima
sima.

Jason found the singing had stopped and the boy was addressing him.

‘Sima?
’ The wrapped hands were still extended and now he saw they held several small brown lumps.

‘I don’t speak … I don’t know …’ he stumbled and suddenly his feet were free and he could walk away. A last
sima
behind him and then silence in which he heard only his own footsteps. At the mouth of the alley he looked back and the boy-torso had not moved. Then with an abrupt thrust of his knuckles he spun on his trolley with a screech of steel and rowed away at a great pace, dusty thatch of hair flapping, the sound of his wheels fading into the snarling of dogs.

Laki had been alternately dozing and plotting beneath the vine’s shade on the very edge of the roof. Fresh bread, fumigations and repairs were a good start, but minor services needed to become favours, obligation turn into intimacy. How did one insinuate oneself into the closed circle of a family’s affections? It was precisely this delicate insertion he had been pondering when suddenly he caught sight of the son down below in the street. Thoughtfully he watched the boy enter the hotel alone.

And so it was that a few minutes later when Jason opened
the door of Room 41 he found the bell-boy standing on the bedside table tearing handfuls of beard from the ceiling.

‘Make repair,’ Laki greeted him succinctly. But Jason threw himself on to his bed with the exhaustion of one embarking on a long illness. ‘You okay? Where missus and miss?’

‘Botanical Gardens. I’m thirsty.’ He reached for an empty glass on the floor at his bedside and going to the tap turned it on. It sighed.

‘No water now, five o’clock coming back. But not for drinking. Malomba water very bad.’ Laki jumped off the table. ‘I get you cold drink, anything you want. Coca Cola-Bolly-Pepsi-Mops-Fanta-Seven-Up.’

‘Mops?’

‘Local drink only. Moslems making. Too much sweet, too many gas.’ He went to the window and tossed out the netted tuft of roots and rot he had pulled from the wound in the ceiling. Through Jason’s mind came and went a terrifying image of his mother’s forthcoming operation. He fixed his eyes on Laki’s hands.

‘Where’s your catapult?’ He mimed pulling back elastic.

‘Ah,
kancha.’
Laki drew the weapon half out of his pocket. Its pouch lolled. ‘Always here,’ he said. ‘I go now to fetching soft drinks, then I show my house upstairs. We make
kancha.
’

For the ten minutes he was away Jason fell into a deep, imageless sleep. From beyond the window came faint sounds of the world through which he had just passed. It was so full of violent toxins and pungencies, so inescapable in its heat that one might almost have supposed the city had plans for him, for all his family, that a process of softening-up had already begun. Why else should belfry palms toll out their scent, the parakeets swarm in the cloud-tree in the Redemptorist Fathers’ garden? For what else the massed fairyland of temples, churches, mosques and synagogues? While somewhere behind it all were the healers, the
therapists, the psychic surgeons maybe sharpening their thumbnails, maybe hiding slivers of razor-blade beneath them, maybe just honing their powers. The only certain thing was that they were waiting.

Jason opened his eyes. Laki was softly bouncing the catapult’s dangling pouch on his chest. In his other hand the bell-boy held a pair of bottles by their necks. ‘Come,’ he said and Jason obeyed. He glided without feeling the floor, following Laki to the dark end of the corridor where they went through a door. This gave on to back stairs ascending from spicy gloom. A further flight led upwards, something of an afterthought maybe, since the treads were of hastily-laid soft brown bricks between which bulged unpointed mortar.

They emerged from a hatchway into the blows of the sun. Jason stood stupefied by the encircling panorama, by the radiance of the Glass Minaret, by the thirty-nine temples and four cinemas with canopies of trees boiling up between them as if their veins were stuffed with pure hydrogen. Laki was unlocking the door of a tumbledown mud-brick shed and motioning him inside in a proprietorial way. It was a limewashed cell, surprisingly cool and lit mainly from a hole in the roof through which a dense vine was thrusting. This knotty plant came from low down one wall, filled half the room, went out through the ceiling and curved over again to hang a tangling freight of gourds and leaves over the edge of the hotel roof and form a shady pergola outside.

‘It’s really a good room,’ said Jason admiringly. He accepted a cold bottle and drank. From the dimness beyond the vine came the sound of pigeons; curved flakes of white down drifted through the sunbeams. But more than anything else he noticed the smell, that same smell he had thought characterised the town. But here it was concentrated, almost glandular. Surely this very room was the heart of Malomba? Like a tomato plant the vine bore fruit and flowers at the same time. It was as if it were simultaneously
mature and immature. Its gourds were pale and warty, the flowers most brilliant cadmium yellow, each with a central dot of indigo. Jason went to it and held its branches and the scent of the flowers poured over him so that for an instant he was on the point of blissful anaesthesia.

Laki stood watching his visitor with a look of pride. ‘Good house?’ he asked at length.

‘I’ve never seen a room with a tree in it before.’ He was reluctant or unable to let go of the branches.

‘National Plant:
karesh.
Karesh
in English is “vine”.’

‘It’s not like any vine I’ve ever seen,’ said Jason doubtfully, thinking of the vines of Valcognano which rampaged like weeds along the brinks of abandoned terraces and in autumn hung their pounds of grapes over the abyss. Italy was suddenly very far off, rugged and prosaic. Simple though his own room at home was, it had none of the bareness of this cell with its straw mat on the floor in one corner. On the other hand there was an extreme richness here which his own room lacked, an exotic self-containment that amounted to luxury. A few articles were lodged here and there among the leaves: a piece of mirror, a coconut shell of soap ends, a clean shirt, a short knife acutely curved as if for pruning.

‘Knife for making toddy,’ explained Laki. ‘Each time to fetching must to cut again very thin piece.’

‘Oh,’ said the boy, understanding not at all.

As if he had suddenly remembered it was wiser to be discreet about his tapping activities, even in front of a foreigner who plainly hadn’t a clue, Laki sidetracked the conversation abruptly by stabbing a gourd. Instantly a bleb of clear liquid gathered at the wound and descended in a long, swinging drool towards the floor. ‘Sticky,’ he said, touching the filament and making threads between his fingertips.

‘Can you eat them?’ Jason asked.

‘No, not to eating.’ Laki produced his catapult once more. ‘We try
kancha
outside now?’

As Tessa had discovered, the Nirvana backed on to the lush and largely unfrequented garden of the Redemptorist Fathers. Laki led the way across the roof, pointing out the shallow cement trough by the tap where the women did their washing to the discomfort of Room 41’s occupants. The area was crisscrossed with wires from which hung threadbare sheets stamped with the hotel’s name. After stopping to pick some pebbles from the mud of the dovecote’s walls, Laki squatted by the low parapet and pointed. Far below, one of the Fathers’ deer was grazing near the pagoda, a buck whose antlers shone in the sun. He fitted a stone into the pouch, drew a bead, and let fly. The deer leaped and bolted. There came the distant rattle of stone off antler.

‘Golly,’ breathed Jason, the hum of the pebble through the air still in his ears.

There followed some ten minutes of tuition, at the end of which he could hit the pagoda with pieces of gravel four times out of ten.

‘One year to practising,’ Laki told him with pleasure at his pupil’s progress. ‘You be good hunter.’

‘I don’t think my mother would like that.’

On his next try a strand of elastic came loose from the pouch and snapped back, stinging his outstretched thumb, so they went back into Laki’s house for repairs. The bell-boy produced scissors and an old motorcycle inner tube from deep within the vine and sat down on the pallet. Jason wondered what else the vine concealed. It was like an open-textured safe, for unless one knew where to thrust one’s hands among its leaves and flowers and fruit there would be little chance of finding any particular thing. In response to a patting gesture of the hand he went and sat by Laki, who busied himself trimming a thin length of rubber from the opened-out tube.

‘How is your house?’ Laki asked as he worked.

‘Quite big. Old. We live up a mountain.’

‘How many rooms you have?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jason counted to himself. ‘Twelve, including the stables downstairs. Oh, thirteen with the bathroom.’

‘Thirteen rooms? You have many brothers and sisters? Grandfathers?’

‘No, just the three of us.’

‘Thirteen rooms and three people?’ Laki’s estimation of the Hemonys’ wealth, which had been slightly dented by the description of the house as ‘old’, went considerably higher. It would need confirming, however. ‘You have TV?’

‘We’ve got one, but sometimes if there’s no petrol for the generator it won’t work.’

This was inconclusive, although the generator sounded hopeful. ‘How many animals?’

‘We’ve got two dogs and four cats. But the cats are nearly wild. They live in the stables.’

‘No pigs, cows, goats?’

‘Oh, I see. We’ve got twelve goats and twenty-one sheep.’

Laki looked up. This was a good answer. The richest person in his village had four goats and a huge sow that had to be taken to a neighbour’s for mating. One year after a particularly good fishing season when he had lost no nets his father had spent his tiny reserve of cash on a kid which, although it had grown into a plump nanny, proved barren. For a season it had wandered up and down the beach, in and out of the drawn-up boats, browsing on fish entrails and banana peels and whatever daily ration of the villagers’ excrement had not already gone to crabs, pigs and dogs. No billy had approached it with more than cousinly interest, so even they had known. In exasperation his father had cut her throat and they and their friends had eaten well for several days. It had always been Laki’s dream to have his own goat, let alone a flock of twelve. The twenty-one sheep sounded additionally attractive but to tell the truth he had never seen a sheep and was a little hazy as to what they looked like. He remembered seeing a book once – there had been one at the
elementary school up the coast – and in this book had been pictures of various animals, some of which he recognised. He rather thought that sheep had been quite like goats. Presumably this boy’s father would be back in Italy, looking after them on the mountain. Then he recalled his saying there were only the three of them. ‘Your father is dead?’

‘No,’ said Jason. ‘Not as far as I know. He went off with a woman.’

‘Ah,’ said Laki wisely. Where he came from it would have been thought most dishonourable for a man to desert his family. By one means or another most men accommodated themselves, combining fun with honour. Laki presumed this to be merely a basic living skill for any man, but it was evidently one this boy’s father had not acquired. What a passive creature his mother must be to have allowed such a thing, content to accept disgrace for herself and comparative poverty for her children! If she had only taken a knife to him! But maybe she had. At any rate she did have golden hair and a kind face as well as smelling nice. The most extraordinary fantasy came to him then: no, not exactly a fantasy since that implied a clear imagined picture. This was more a sense that here a slot opened up, a space into which somebody might fit himself, though he stopped short of giving that person either a name or a role. ‘You are sad without father?’