The Bell-Boy (8 page)

Laki was sitting with Raju on the back doorstep of the kitchen. In one hand he held the clavicle of a monkey from which he every so often sucked shreds of meat and gravy, in the other a letter from home. The letter had been brought by a dried-fish merchant from Saramu Province and left at the hotel desk. It was not easy to decipher, having been written turn and turn about by his mother, his eldest sister and youngest brother Gunath. Reading it was likewise a joint effort. Between them Laki and Raju gathered that his mother had flu and Gunath had shot a
kululu,
the nearly extinct and extravagantly beautiful National Bird which figured so prominently on stamps and coins and banknotes. The
kululu,
known to Europeans as the Rainbow Yodeller, was the size of a large pheasant with long iridescent green tail-feathers. Having been catapulted out of the sky by Laki’s brother, it had wound up on a bed of rice dressed in a sauce of unripe guavas and had fed the entire family.

This piece of good news was not, however, the real point
of the letter, which was that the family was suffering hard times. For the past ten days the coastline of Saramu had been afflicted by a Red Tide more sluggish and extensive than any of recent years. This was an intermittent plague in which the sea turned red and soupy and made the fish poisonous to eat; it was apparently caused by a species of plankton which suddenly multiplied hugely; there was nothing to do but wait until the tides and currents had moved it away into the open ocean. Unscrupulous fishermen who could afford ice would send their catches to a distant province where news of the Red Tide had not yet arrived; they could generally dispose of twenty or thirty boxes before the first fatalities. Unscrupulous but poor fishermen without ice contented themselves with expressions of their own virtue. One way or another these tides were a disaster, and Laki’s family was not alone in feeling the pinch. Until such time as it was safe to resume fishing, the villagers up and down the coast got by on a diet of boiled cassava and the National Bird.

His mother ended her letter with the hope that life in the big city was pleasurable and profitable. She made no demands for money; she did not need to. Laki had never in his life received a letter which was merely a greeting. All letters were begging letters; that was why people sent them.

‘Bad, uncle,’ he said, tucking it away and tossing the clavicle to the goat.

‘Very bad,’ agreed Raju. ‘I remember a Red Tide when I was a boy which lasted a whole month.’

Laki wondered how his mother’s flu was. There probably wasn’t enough spare cash for her to buy her favourite antibiotics in the village shop. At the least sign of indisposition – from headache to arthritis in her ankles – she would go to the shop and search through the big glass sweet-jar containing a ragbag of medicaments. It was not always easy to make a choice because many of the tablets had long since fallen out of their foil wrappers and, grey with
handling, were indistinguishable one from another. But his mother was an optimist and had great faith that whatever she selected would work. Her most serendipitous choice to date had been when she put herself on a short course of steroids for toothache and the pain had vanished within minutes. It worried Laki that she might have to face her flu without recourse to the sweet-jar.

‘I suppose I could ask Mr Muffy for an advance,’ he said without much hope.

‘Listen, boy, each time the Muffys of this world pay you at all it’s a miracle. To expect them to pay before they have to – a week before, in your case – is like expecting a chicken to fly backwards. They’re just not designed for it. You’ll have to think of something else.’ From the blackened stewpot between them he picked out a tiny wrinkled hand and began nibbling the fingers. ‘Far too much cardamom,’ he remarked. ‘Monkey’s a delicate meat; it’s wrong to drown it in spices … So how are your great plans getting on for leaving this place and becoming Prime Minister?’

‘I haven’t exactly found anything else yet, uncle, it’s true.’

‘Ah, but you haven’t been wasting your time, have you?’ Raju shot him a knowing sideways look. ‘Worked your way into any Italian knickers yet, have you?’

‘I can’t think what you mean,’ Laki cried.

‘I do beg your pardon. Maybe they’re English.’ When the boy merely looked confounded the night porter jogged his shoulder. ‘I’m not blind,’ he said. ‘I may be on nights but my eyes and ears still work perfectly well in daylight. “Oho,” I say to myself. “Now there’s a forward lad showing enterprise beyond the call of his very limited duties, buying fresh
laran
each morning and carrying out structural repairs. But how’s he going to turn this beautiful friendship into ready cash?” That’s the sort of thing I’ve been saying to myself.’

This, of course, was the very question uppermost in Laki’s mind. With his mother’s letter fresh in his pocket the need for cash was acquiring new urgency. And if the session
with
hodlam
Tapranne were a success, the Hemonys would not be staying in Malomba much longer. ‘There’s something about them, uncle,’ he said. ‘They’re different.’

‘Really? They seem pretty much the same to me. Quite nice, dim foreigners. But then I’ve scarcely seen much of them.’

‘No, there’s something,’ insisted Laki. ‘It’s not just that they’re ignorant – all foreigners are ignorant when they come here, aren’t they, uncle? Actually, these ones know quite a bit about religion and healing and things. I just think they … I think they want something to happen.’

‘Well. And what are you talking yourself into, boy?’

‘The daughter’s very beautiful,’ Laki said to the goat as it crunched away. ‘Maybe she’s the one who’s ill. Perhaps she’s a … a princess in disguise, or something.’

Raju put a finger to one side of the boy’s jaw and gently pushed his head into profile against the light from the kitchen. ‘No beard,’ he said. ‘I see no beard. And in any case, what kind of foolishness is this? You don’t stand a chance, boy, take it from me. No pretty young European girl is going to look twice at an under-age bell-boy with dark skin in some scruffy provincial hotel. I’m sorry to ruin your dreams, but it’s so.’ And because Laki looked so crestfallen he added, ‘Any more than she’d look at an over-age night porter. They’re not here for that sort of thing. The woman’s here for psychic surgery. They’re serious; they’re the wrong sort of people.’

Yet now it was out in the open, even if only to be dismissed, there was something satisfying about hearing it put into words. If the possibility existed as an idea, the possibility existed. Each time he said ‘uncle’ to Raju, Laki knew he was young and inexperienced, that the milk was still wet on his lips. Yet for the first time he had had an intuition he could not easily dismiss. He still thought the Hemonys were people who wanted something to happen and that there must be a way of converting this unfocused desire into
advantage, into preferment, into cash. The heretical notion crossed his mind that the venerable Raju might be wrong; that anything could be made to happen with anyone, foreign or not. And chasing this idea came another, glimpsed in triumphant outline against an inner skyline: if Raju were so wise, why was he still a night porter at fifty-six?

He made his way up the back stairs, stopping at Zoe’s floor to walk softly along the passageway and pause outside her door. Not a sound came from within, nor any light from crack or keyhole. Laki pictured her lying on her bed in an attitude of the utmost chastity, dressed in a voluminous white silk nightgown and with her blonde tresses spread on her pillow, a vision drawn largely from the film
Sleeping
Beauty
which had recently been playing in town. Sadly he tiptoed away and paused on the floor above outside her brother’s door. But again there was no sign of life within and he recalled it was only nine o’clock in the evening and the family was doubtless dining out.

He went on up to the roof and, catapult in hand, sat on the edge beneath the hanging brow of vine to gaze out across Malomba as if for inspiration. The holy city was quite as impressive at night as by day. There were lights everywhere. The shops remained open until late and a thousand bulbs, pressure lamps, candles and kerosene flares poured their luminance from doorway and window, from booth and bazaar. Spires and temples were outlined with strings of coloured lights. A madonna with a faulty neon halo winked coquettishly from above the façade of the pro-cathedral. Chinatown was a mass of green and red strip lighting. In the centre of town it seemed that only the Glass Minaret was unlit: not for the Ibn Ballur mosque the vulgar displays of artifice. Its great architect had planned that only the pure radiance of stars and moon would dash itself against his vision into seven hundred and seventy-seven thousand fragments. Unfortunately he had not foreseen twentieth-century technology. For hundreds of years his minaret had
glittered austerely to the lunar phases like a column of mercury droplets stilled. Nowadays, though, its lower facets gave off haphazard sparks of pink neon, crude limes and raw oranges, as if at last an acidic pollution were seeping upwards from its base.

Near the Chinatown gateway Laki could pick out a single point of deep ruby. This was the glans of the phallus atop the Lingasumin, otherwise an unlit squat bulk full of suggestive possibilities. At night his eyes were drawn to it as much as his feet by day. How was he ever to get a glimpse inside? Given the intimate and restricted nature of the congregation, it was surely impossible to infiltrate it in disguise, particularly as sooner or later every last stitch would have to be removed. A simple turban would clearly not suffice. In any case the only people he had ever seen going into the Lingasumin had been dressed as ordinary businessmen in shiny Indian suits, some carrying small fibre suitcases about whose contents he could only speculate.

How anguishing it was to be so full of pressing needs of one sort or another while having to sit and stare out over a city crammed with potential! Nobody understood a boy’s dilemma, Laki thought, least of all old people like Raju. To be full of energy and yet to be constantly frustrated! Thanks to friends like Mr Bundash, he understood much of what went on in Malomba; yet whenever he sat beneath his vine and breathed its perfume, his mind seemed to drowse and skid off among possible projects as numerous as the streets and alleys below him which fumed them up. His mother, now: he really had to get some money to the family within the week. But how? Theft? That was the most obviously straightforward way of getting things in this world, but Laki had witnessed the public flogging in the market-place of many thieves, real or alleged, and it was not a risk he cared to run. The last victim had expired of heart failure beneath the rod, for all that a sympathetic crowd had exercised its prerogative of pelting his lacerated buttocks with rotten fruit
in between strokes in order to soothe and cool them. So if not theft, what? Wherein lay money?

The answer staring him in the face was, of course, religion. It was Malomba’s number one industry and, despite Raju’s warning, he still thought it had possibilities. For twenty minutes or so he turned over various ideas for founding a religion. Most of them quickly degenerated into outlines of rites involving virgins and several times he had to force himself back on to strictly practical lines of thought. Probably the best plan would be to found one with a few friends and build some kind of simple chapel somewhere. Then they would be added to Malomba’s list as its fortieth temple. They could charge admission to tourists and visiting anthropologists and give expensive interviews for their hand-held videos. Laki began to warm to his idea. They would need a unique selling point: a new kind of deity, certainly, since the old ones were all spoken for; or a system of worship so arcane that people would pay or do anything to watch it. (The ruby light glowed steadily some way off below him.)

No, that was too unoriginal. He could never hope to beat the Left-Handed Shaktas at that game. All right then, what about something so flamboyant it was a spectacle no one would want to miss? But the trouble with robes and lace and cloths of gold was that they were hopelessly outside his budget. Maybe he ought to settle for building up a reputation as a very
spiritual
sect. Laki was not at all sure what this meant, but he had heard it said that a people’s true spirituality could be measured by the austerity of their worship, and wasn’t austerity another word for cheapness? For example, he had also heard it said that the Chinese were the least spiritual people in town, and certainly the carryings-on in their quarter seemed to bear this out. They were forever holding dragon parades with all manner of fireworks and colourful bedlam which obviously cost a fortune. Then at night the narrow streets of Chinatown
echoed to the crash and the rattle of mah-jongg tiles in upper rooms where slow-bladed fans stirred thick air beneath the actinic glare of strip lighting. Rumour had it that still further fortunes were nightly won and lost. Terrible fights broke out, and he remembered once seeing somebody’s entrails hanging from a window-box. Worship of any kind seemed to have slipped unnoticed from the Chinese calendar, squeezed out by a busy round of festivals, opening new hotels, moneymaking and the more fanciful kinds of divination.

At the opposite extreme, Laki guessed, lay something called Anglicanism, whose adherents were so austere and restrained their church had stood completely unattended for thirty-one years. Mr Bundash was his only source of information about this religion, since the building itself had been pulled down well before he arrived in Malomba. It was indeed the only example of a religious edifice so redundant as to have merited demolition. On its site now stood the Vudusumin from which screaming could occasionally be heard.

Laki presumed that ranking next in austerity to this defunct church was the grey stone building on the outskirts of town known as the Auld Strait Kirk. This was something of a memorial to a small band of Scotsmen who had come to the area in the last century to start the tea plantations with which they intended to rival Ceylon. They had not easily relinquished this plan. One by one they were carried off by disease, drink and despair, but not before they had built a church to invoke God’s blessing on their enterprise and his mercy on their souls. Scotsmen had long since died out in Malomba, but the church was still patronised by a handful of locals led by their Elder, Hamish Patel. Laki had once passed the open door during a service and had glimpsed a bare room with a tableful of hats and people chanting lugubriously. One could hardly get more austere than that, he decided; and since that moment this church had come to represent for him the apogee of spirituality.