The Bell-Boy (7 page)

‘I don’t know. Why, should I be?’

‘But mother sad. Very sad and cold at night.’

‘My mother’s not …’ began Jason distantly. ‘She’s a different sort of person. You’d have to know her to understand what I mean. She’s interested in the Community, in spiritual things, in the Teacher. He’s the Swami, you know.’

‘Swami in Italy too you have? Here in Malomba are many swamis.’ But another matter about this peculiar family urgently needed clearing up. ‘Your sister, she is marry?’

‘Zoe?’ asked Jason in amazement. ‘No, she’s only just
fifteen. Anyway, I can’t imgaine anyone wanting to marry her.’

This news greatly cheered Laki, who had long since stopped cutting rubber. ‘Your sister very beautiful girl,’ he said fervently. ‘She the beautifullest girl I am seeing always.’

‘Zoe
is?’ Though, considering it while Laki returned to his snipping, he supposed she might be. It was always so hard to separate how people looked from what one knew about them. Surely when one thought about people it was their words one remembered best, the things they said and the tone they used and the expression in their eyes, not whether their hair was blonde or their tits stuck out. It was especially difficult when talking about a member of the family to say, yes, probably she wasn’t bad-looking. Instead he asked, ‘Where’s your family?’

So Laki told him about the village by the sea in Saramu Province eighty miles away; about the fisherman father, the siblings, his own banishment in order to earn enough to send money home. The bell-boy was not unsubtle; he never mentioned the word ‘poor’. Instead he described how when he lived at home his
kancha
had played its part in the family economy, how his skill enabled them to eat morsels of meat.

‘Don’t you want to go home?’ Jason asked.

‘Sometimes I go. Very nice place, very quiet. I am happy to seeing my family. But here in Malomba is better. I want to making progress. I’ – he lowered his voice and glanced at the closed door – ‘I want to leaving this hotel, find better job. But please please, you not tell Mr Muffy.’ He just avoided urging the boy to be sure and mention it to his mother. To his slight disappointment Jason swore with great solemnity never to tell a soul. He seemed to relish being given a secret for safe-keeping. ‘You and me the same. We both boys long way from home.’ A sadness came into his voice. ‘But you to going home soon, I guess. You go home very happy. I stay here Malomba very lonely.’

But once more Jason slithered away. ‘I don’t particularly
want to go home, as it happens. Actually I hate it there. It’s so boring. I’m sick of goats and sheep and gurus and
healing.
I want to go to school like the other boys down in the valley. In three years I’ll be fifteen. No education, no exam certificates, no job. In Italy they always want to know your school record, even if it’s only for a job as a street cleaner. I’ll be stuck in Valcognano for the rest of my life making cheese for the Community and getting milk for the groupies who swan in to learn about magic plants and oils and meditation. I’m not allowed one of those,’ he flicked at the catapult Laki had nearly mended. ‘Mum’d have a fit if I killed anything. Look at all the things you can do. No wonder you’re called Lucky.’

Laki, noting the rush and distress of these words while not by any means understanding everything, was not to be outdone.

‘But to travelling is good. Very nice, going to everywhere in the world. All my life I am to two places, my home and here.’

‘At least you don’t have to drag around behind your sister and your mother.’

Jason had lain back on the pallet in exhaustion, blinking at the riven ceiling. In the fragments of blue sky between the vine tendrils he could see the flicker of birds high and far off, swifts dining off the midges carried aloft by the sun’s convections.

‘How long you stay here?’ asked Laki anxiously.

‘Oh God, at least until next Thursday. That’s when she’s seeing this surgeon guy. Her back’s bad. Then perhaps he’ll need to see her again. We could be stuck here ages.’

The bell-boy was still unclear who ‘she’ was. The notion of Zoe as a nobly suffering princess was one to which he was increasingly attached. At the moment, though, there was manifest upset closer to hand and the urge to console came over him, for he was a kindly boy. ‘I show you things in Malomba,’ he promised. ‘I show you place to swimming in
river, near to town but very clean. Only boys use for swimming. No washing cows or animals.’

‘Really?’ Jason’s voice was still weary but there was interest in it as well. ‘What else?’

‘One thing I am wanting,’ confided Laki recklessly, reclining on an elbow beside him. ‘I am always wanting to go inside Lingasumin. Maybe we are trying.’

The name was familiar. ‘Isn’t that one of the temples closed to visitors?’

‘Yes, closed. Very closed. Because they not wanting people to seeing what they do. They doing like this,’ and delightedly inserted a brown forefinger into a circle made by the fingers of his left hand.

Jason raised his head. ‘Fucking, you mean? Actual screwing?’

‘Oh yes. Very many people doing like that together in temple.’

‘What, inside a
temple?
I don’t believe that.’

But Laki proved a fund of information, quoting all that Mr Tominy Bundash had told him in the kitchen and adding much else besides from his own head. ‘They have special medicine to making the man very big,’ he finished. Not knowing the word for caterpillar in English, he talked vaguely about secret extracts from plants picked by the light of a new moon. In his experience foreigners like to hear about herbs picked by moonlight. Sometimes they preferred the pickers to be virgins, sometimes wise old hermits, but the moonlight was essential.

‘What a strange place Malomba is!’ Jason was saying. ‘This is the strangest place I’ve ever been.’ For the scent of the vine seemed to have redoubled its strength, the fragments of sky to be infinitely far away and then just inside the ceiling. In the drowsy late afternoon heat the cooing of the pigeons likewise receded and approached. ‘A bit like sleepiness, but it’s not,’ he murmured, stretching.

‘Karesh,’
said Laki knowingly. ‘Vine. It makes to sleeping
and to waking at same time. We have many stories here about this vine so strong, so power. Many times,’ he said, still up on an elbow and dangling the repaired catapult above Jason so that its pouch barely touched his stomach, ‘I do like you now. I am lying on bed and looking, only looking at vine. Sometimes I to thinking of everything. Sometimes I to thinking of nothing and sleeping so Mr Muffy ringing the bell and ringing the bell and become very angry to me. Other time I am lying and get very waking, very strong.’

Jason was thrilled by a peculiar pang of being at the centre of something where at last he was not looking on. There was a mesmerism in Laki’s hand idly bouncing the pouch on his stomach, then lower down. For the second time that afternoon he found he could not move and wondered vaguely whether the bell-boy would suddenly burst into song. But he didn’t. The bouncing rhythm extended itself and began to take in more and more of the room and his eyes gazed past Laki’s ear to become snared in the vine’s traceries. It was true about Malomba, he thought. It definitely was the strangest place he’d ever been. He kept on falling asleep here. Everything seemed to take place in a dream, while being realer than anything he could remember. The smell of this vine …! The yellow flowers swelled and glowed as he looked at them, pulsing out their languorous scent. In one corner of his fixed vision the edge of Laki’s ear was gently shaking.

On the other side of the vine a pigeon flapped its wings and settled them with a crackle of feathers. Laki, noticing Jason’s toes stretching and pointing, stopped. The forgotten catapult’s rubber dangled above the white T-shirt. His other fist was resting upright on Jason’s bare belly. A band of vine-filtered sunlight fell across it and glinted on the tip of a pale pink nut encircled by his fingers and protruding a scant half inch. Laki looked at it closely, curiously, from across the bewildering territory of difference. Slowly he resumed his movement; the pouch lowered. An immeasurable time
passed in which Jason experienced his own fixed gaze, the jiggling ear, the sun-barred vine, the heat and the smell of pigeon-shit and perfume as running into one another, causing the acutest sensations to race and smart through him. By the time Laki’s fist had stilled his feet were relaxed and his chest trembled to his heartbeat. The bell-boy was again peering forward as if for information at the pink nut, now barely afloat on a milky rim.

Soon Jason noticed the edge of Laki’s ear had started to jiggle again and came up on his elbows to ask, ‘What’s
sima?’
The ear stopped.

‘Sima,’
said Laki with a sigh. ‘Oh,
sima.
Where you hear this name?’

So Jason told him of the torso boy and the handful of brown lumps although without mentioning the singing.

‘I know him. That boy is Vippu. Everybody know him. Selling
sima
to tourists. Very bad boy. Sometimes the police they catch and beat to him.’

‘They beat a boy with no legs?’ cried Jason.

‘They beat to everyone,’ Laki told him with a certain glee.

‘Yes, but what
is
this
sima
?’

‘Sima
is drug. In forest are many magic mushrooms. They are taking and putting in sun like on roof here,’ he pointed towards the door, ‘so are becoming dry. When become dry they make dust, then take juice of vine fruit and make like this.’ He flexed one hand as if moulding a lump of
sima
paste with sticky gourd sap. ‘Then it become dry again and are selling. Many tourist to smoking and eating
sima.
Very bad for brains. Very bad drug.’

Jason fell silent thinking about this. Slowly the ear began its jiggling once more. At length he remarked. ‘We saw a dog run over by the train in the park today. Mum and Zoe cried.’

This time there was no reply in the little mud room. Attention was narrowing. Whenever either of them swallowed it sounded very loud.

One day a year or so previously, a neatly dressed young man had turned up at Valcognano. His short stay in the Community of Pure Light shed more gloom and caused more upset in that spiritual fastness than Zoe could ever remember.

Ed, an American in his mid-twenties, bore a letter from Swami Bopi Gul himself, writing from Los Angeles on patchouli-scented paper. The letter was brief, extending the Teacher’s greetings and blessings to all disciples and beloved friends at his Valcognano temple and introducing Ed as a trusted pupil whose thoughts about the Swami’s mission were those of the Teacher himself … In other words they were to be paid respectful attention.

Once this letter had been read, the simple ceremonies of welcome performed, the phials of oil (blessed by the Swami himself) distributed and meditation held, it quickly became apparent that there was to be a change of policy. Through Ed, the Swami was instructing that more energy be devoted to the growing of medical herbs, the extraction of essential oils and the writing of healing texts. For many years (said Ed) the Valcognano Community had been setting a remarkable example of a way of life full of health and bliss and light, shining out from the Apuan Alps like a spiritual pharos, its harmonious vibrations thrilling through Europe and constituting, however subtly, a force for good. Now it was time to take the Swami’s mission a stage further and give his healing secrets wider currency. For the world was sick (Ed said) and getting rapidly sicker. It was polluted by sundry varieties of evil, not least among which were the products of multinational pharmaceutical companies as well as the arrogant pragmatism of Western medicine …

In short, Valcognano was to go commercial.

Tessa and the other Elders were dumbstruck. Never in the dozen or so years of the Community’s existence could they have dreamed of receiving such a message from its
Founder. It seemed a total reversal of his ideas, of everything he had promoted as spiritually beautiful. It caused them an acute crisis of faith. But little by little they argued themselves around, admitting that none of them – for perhaps they
were
a bit unworldly – could presume to question his wisdom nor claim to understand the arcane unknowables which informed his divine guidance. Was the world not changing? And therefore might not a spiritual strategy also need updating in order to remain effective? Under Ed’s careful mixture of cajolery and injunction their attitude changed from obstinacy to acquiescence, even enthusiasm.

None of these principled wrestlings made much impact on Zoe. She was alive to the turmoil going on around her but the issues themselves scarcely touched her. It was Ed himself who had the greatest effect on her. The Elders, including her mother, saw him (somewhat jealously) as a messenger, a necessary harbinger. Zoe saw him as very good-looking. He wore tailored tan slacks and an Italian cowboy-boulevardier’s shirt in heavy linen. He had a discreet wristwatch and once when he chanced to open his wallet to find an address (a wallet!) she saw a small gold card which said American Express. She had no idea what such appurtenances were, exactly, but what they meant was that Ed was completely different from all the other visitors to Valcognano, and the whiffs of power he exuded were equally of an alien kind.

More marvellous still, he evidently took a real interest in her
as
a
person
and made a point of asking Zoe herself to guide him round the Community’s properties and messuages. Sometimes he held her hand, and she could have fainted with pleasure that this dazzling envoy from another world was treating her not as some grubby peasant girl but as a young lady privy to certain information which he needed.

‘Strange horses you have here,’ he remarked. ‘I thought I knew horseback riding but I’ve never seen these before.’

‘They’re not horses,’ Zoe told him. ‘They’re mostly mules.’

‘Oh. That thing there’s a mule?’

‘Well, actually that particular one’s a hinny. Mules come from a male donkey mated with an ordinary mare, you know. A hinny’s from a female donkey mated with a stallion.’

‘My,’ said Ed. ‘You know a lot.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ cried Zoe, ‘not compared with you. There’s not much to know here and you soon learn that. But you must know a million things.’ She couldn’t bring herself to begin listing them. ‘And you know the Teacher, too.’

‘Sure I know him.’ He did not, perhaps, sound quite as overawed as did most people who had experienced the
Presentness
of Swami Bopi Gul; but to Zoe this was merely further proof of Ed’s exoticism, of his moving easily and naturally on a rarefied plane. ‘And these are the fields where you grow the herbal stuff?’

‘These are the Healing Acres, yes.’

‘Just this? I wouldn’t have said it was even a single acre.’

‘We don’t need very much.’

‘From now on we’re going to need a helluva lot more, dear heart.’

Dear
heart!
‘How much more?’

‘We reckon six or eight acres, to start with.’

‘Acres? You mean
real
acres?’ Zoe thought of all the hours she must have spent since she was old enough to wield a hoe going up and down the three little plots of comfrey, camomile, marjoram, dill, clary sage and so on. Who on earth would have the time to nurse eight acres of herbs?’

‘Sure, acres. We’re talking expansion. We’re talking about injecting some real productivity into this outfit. It’s so pretty here: high up, wild, unpolluted. Traditional. Natural.
We can capitalise on all that. Proper packaging, proper labelling. Handwritten guarantees of purity.’

‘It doesn’t sound …’ began Zoe doubtfully, ‘… I mean, it doesn’t sound quite as
spiritual,
that way.’

A little edge of irritation sharpened Ed’s voice. ‘Quite as
spiritual,
quite as
spiritual
,’
he gently mimicked her English accent. ‘It’ll be one hundred per cent as spiritual, dear heart. What’s the difference? You’ve always grown comfrey; okay, so now you grow ten times as much fucking comfrey, excuse me, what’s the difference? Right, you always pick monk’s benison on the night of the new moon. So now you pick a whole lot more monk’s benison on the night of the new moon because you’ve got more fields and more labour. But it’s still the right stuff at the right time, isn’t it? Nothing faked. No corners cut. You’re just upping production, is all. The real thing but more of it.’

There was a pause while Zoe thought about this. ‘What’s monk’s benison?’ she enquired timidly. ‘I’ve never heard of that.’

‘I just invented it.’ A great, intimate, flashing white smile, his beautiful brown hand meanwhile languidly indicating their maize field. ‘Anyone ever thought of growing marijuana in the middle of that?’

‘I think so. But sometimes the police fly over here in helicopters.’

‘Sneaky. It’ll just be a matter of finding the right guy to pay so the choppers always check Valcognano out in the winter. I’ll get on to that.’

If such remarks brought an alien world closer to the sacred boundaries of the Community, others seemed to consign the Pure Lighters to another place and time.

‘My,’ he kept saying, not without admiration. ‘I guess it’s how they used to live in the Sixties. It’s kind of quaint to think of those old guys having once been hippies.’

‘Those old guys’ were Elder Bob and Elder Tessa – her
own mother, in fact, who happened at that moment to be wearing a ratty pair of corduroy trousers and a hat Bruce had left behind. Zoe experienced a pang of pity for her mother, consigned thus to some sociological
oubliette.
Yet somewhere inside her, however unwillingly, Zoe had known Ed was right. There
was
something time-warped about Tessa, about them all. Much as the Pure Lighters kept to themselves – and even when travelling about the world they managed to preserve a
cordon
sanitaire
of herbalist naïvety between themselves and whatever they encountered – Zoe had long since deduced that most girls her own age lived very different lives. They knew different things, too, and pursued their interests with what appeared to be scant regard for the opinions of adults and parents. Often when the Hemonys returned to Valcognano they had to change trains in Milan, Bologna or Florence, and having an hour or two to kill would look around town or sit at an open-air café and watch the vivid parade. If the café happened to be in fashion, there would usually be a glittery mass of motor-scooters nearby with youths hitched over black squidgy rubber and chrome talking to girls perched more daintily on chairs at the edge of the pavement. All were dressed like peacocks; the sun shone on combs and teeth and hair and calfskin and rings and studs … especially studs.

‘Bliss,’ her mother would murmur. It did not escape Zoe’s attention that many of the boys were rather attractive but she told herself they seemed a bit juvenile (too much laughter, too-casual gestures, too-boisterous hands). She noticed that Tessa’s eyes also missed nothing, even as her work-roughened hands spooned ice cream or lifted coffee. It was at such moments that Zoe felt most disloyal. It would, she thought, be quite nice to be preened at by some young man. Every so often a couple would leave and the sudden whizzing and moaning of the little exhausts seemed oddly valedictory and excluding. Where were they off to, leaving her behind in a cloud of sweetish gas with her mother and
brother and empty ice-cream cup? All one needed in order to keep cheerful was a bit of attention every now and again. Not necessarily to be praised, nor even to be courted; but for somebody to ask how she felt and acknowledge that she, too, was in the running for … for … well, for being
considered.

And now here was Ed who, if ever he had once as a teenager lounged outside cafés, had long since smoothed out and become powerful and was actually asking her to explain things about life in Valcognano. It was beyond daydreams. She thought he could only ever ruin it all by calling her ‘kid’; but he never once did, only ‘dear heart’.

‘You’re really something, you know that?’ They were drinking fennel tea together in the Swami’s house. To Zoe’s disappointment, Ed was staying not in her own house but in the one reserved exclusively for the Teacher, sleeping with appalling nonchalance in his actual bed. ‘You’d be a sensation in California; they just don’t make girls like you any more. Kind of unspoilt, you know? You
are
unspoilt, aren’t you, dear heart?’

She had blushed, so unused was she to any kind of notice, still less to compliments, and said she didn’t know. According to her impression Ed had found this reply unsatisfactory at the time; but each day for the remainder of his stay he invited her to ramble with him through the chestnut woods and rocky uplands which overhung the village. By the time he came to leave he could doubtless answer his own question. As her mother would later remark, Zoe’s heart was warm. She was reduced to sullen misery by Ed’s departure, a tragic gloom she nursed for weeks. When the expected letter did not come, not even in answer to several of hers, she began to emerge once more with a passable display of not caring.

And there was plenty going on in the Community to engage interest. Swami Bopi Gul’s edicts, as relayed by Ed, were being faithfully carried out. Already Elder Bob, who had once trained as a graphic designer, had sketched out
labels and letterheads for Valcognano products. There was a logo and house typography. The logo was a seated Buddha holding a pestle and mortar; the typography a virtuous italic hand. A printer was contacted in Lucca. A small tractor was to be bought from a dealer in Carrara. Curious seeds were written for.

Yet Zoe’s interest was not quite engaged. A spell had been broken: that of childhood, maybe, or of authority. Somewhere at the foot of the eight hundred and ninety-four mule steps, down beyond the valley’s misty distances, an entire world was busy happening without her. ‘You’d be a sensation in California …’

Tessa plied her with valerian.