by John Boyne
Bill nodded slowly. He was tired and weary and unable to maintain conversation for long. He wanted to sleep. Recent weeks had not been as entertaining as he wished his life to be. The prospecting for gold had been a worthless endeavour. He had spent a good portion of each day standing in one position of a stream, his feet growing steadily more numb with the coldness of the water, a small pan in his hands which he would fill with water, stone and mud, before slowly sieving through it and carefully discarding every element of non-gold material back into the water until his bowl was empty and he would have to begin again. Each evening at the campfire, both men and women would sit around and tell tales of the men they had known who had struck it rich doing that very thing. No one present ever seemed to have discovered very much but every one of them had known a man who did. It was only that that kept them going, the hope of a sudden rush of gold pebbles rolling into their bowl. The possibility of a better life.
A week had passed, and then another, and Bill had still not made his fortune. He tried different parts of the river each day, but was irritated by the fact that there was almost always another prospector standing not ten feet away from him. They stood, about fifty of them in a line along the river, wishing each other luck but praying that it would be they and no one else who would find the precious objects. On one afternoon the man next in line to him had found a piece of pure gold the size of his thumb and had been surrounded so quickly by the others that he had run immediately to his horse and galloped away to the nearest town to redeem it before an accident befell him. Bill hadn’t seen him again. Had he been standing about three or four feet to his left, he thought, that would have been him.
The morning after that incident he had risen a full hour before anyone else and walked far away from their camp, down towards a turning in the river from where he could not be seen by his fellow prospectors. He walked for about an hour until he was sure that there was no chance of anyone catching him up or trying their luck that far down, took off his shoes and stepped gingerly into the water. He made his way carefully over the sharp rocks at the side, for the last thing he needed was to cut himself this early in the day, and stood about fifteen feet in from the shore, at the point where the water was just below knee level. Without thinking he crouched down with his bowl to dig in for his first supply, forgetting that he was deeper than usual and immediately soaked his trousers in the rear. Cursing loudly – there was no one to hear him – he took them off and stood there in his underwear, leaving his trousers stretched out along the rocks in order for the sun to dry them. This is water, he reasoned to himself. You have to expect to get a little wet if you’re standing in a river.
A couple of hours later he was shaking out his bowl, carefully separating the silt of the river’s base from the pebbles which were held within it, when his eye was taken by an unfamiliar yellow object lodged within. He gasped and pressed his fingers into the soft mess and pulled it out, holding it up to the sky as he squinted to get a better look. He had found a piece. It wasn’t big, no bigger than the nail on his thumb, no wider either, but it was hope at least. It was the first piece he had found and suggested that there might be more. He laughed in excitement and looked around but there was no one there so he placed it inside his shirt pocket and continued to dig in the water for more where that had come from. Within about thirty minutes, no richer but still excited by his find, he realised that he could barely feel his feet any more. The sun had risen and grown warmer and the water had grown more icy as it gushed down his legs. He turned back for the shore and eventually collapsed there, climbing up on a small hillock and lying back to rest for a moment, before sitting up and massaging his frozen feet, a difficult task considering his hands were almost numb from the cold too. It was while he was trying to encourage the blood to return to them that she appeared.
‘You’re a long way from the others,’ she said, a girl a few years older than he, perhaps about twenty, who he had seen around the camp over the last few weeks but given little notice to. He thought perhaps she was the daughter of one of the older prospectors. ‘You lost or something?’
Bill looked at her cautiously and shook his head, aware that he was sitting there in just his shirt and underwear but not feeling sufficiently self-conscious to pull his trousers back on. He leaned over to see whether there was anyone else following a few steps behind but she was alone. ‘I’m not lost,’ he said. ‘Just thought I’d try my luck a little further down river, that’s all. Get tired working in the same place all the time. Nothing to find down there anyway, if you ask me.’
She sat down on the hill a little below him and watched him carefully. ‘What’s wrong with your feet?’ she asked, watching as he kneaded them carefully. ‘They’re practically blue.’
Bill flushed and felt a little naked before her. ‘I think I spent too much time in the water,’ he said. ‘They need to get the warmth back into them.’
The girl nodded and thought about it for a moment before seeming to come to a decision and reached over and removed his hands. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Let me try. Your hands are probably cold as well.’
Bill swallowed and leaned back, allowing his hands to support him as he stretched out on the grass. The moment she touched him he felt both tired and alert at once; her hands were warm, her skin soft against his, his feet flinched at the gentle pressure of her fingers. ‘So?’ she asked eventually, her voice lowering a little. ‘Did it work?’
‘Did what work?’ he asked, looking at her carefully as she concentrated on his toes. She had a pale face and dark hair and a small mole just below her right ear. She was no beauty but she was not unattractive either. Her body was what might be called plenteous, even though there did not seem to be an ounce of fat on her. He stared at her and although she had never quite entered his attentions before, he felt their solitude and intimacy begin to make him alert to opportunity.
‘Moving down river. Did you find anything?’
‘Not really,’ he said.
‘Not really?’
‘Not much.’
‘Not much, what does that mean?’ she asked, glancing at him briefly with a quick smile before turning away again. ‘Does that mean nothing at all or something, but just a little something?’ Her hands moved carefully from his left foot to his right and he curled the toes of the former in and out. He was unsure whether he should tell the truth or not but when her fingers brushed the hairs on his leg as she began to manipulate the right foot, he felt himself unable to disappoint her.
‘Just a little something,’ he admitted and reached into his top pocket, removing the small golden nugget and holding it in the air. The girl looked at it and drew in her breath. To him it remained nothing spectacular, a sign of hope and nothing more, but to her it was still gold. It was what they were all looking for. It was beautiful. And it was his. She had difficulty taking her eyes away from it, but she did so eventually, also taking her hands from his feet. Bill swallowed nervously, disappointed that her attentions had ended, and replaced the nugget in his pocket as she altered her position from beside him to the grass between his feet.
‘So,’ she said. ‘How does that feel? Any better?’
‘Much,’ he said, nodding enthusiastically. ‘I think the feeling’s coming back.’
‘That’s good,’ she said carelessly, resting her hands on either ankle and staring him in the eye. ‘So do you want to go back in the water and look for more?’
He paused. He imagined for a moment that if he answered too quickly his voice might crack and, not wanting that to happen, he shrugged first and then shook his head, clearing his throat before daring to speak. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘Not just now, I think. Maybe later.’
‘Good,’ said the girl, stretching forward, her body moving slowly up his until he was forced to lean further and further back on the grass. ‘Let me see it again,’ she said, reaching into his pocket and removing the nugget before holding it up to the light. He did nothing to stop her. After a moment she looked dow
n at his face and gave him a wide smile. ‘Can I have it?’ she asked quickly, her voice sharp, her words grasping for the object. Bill said nothing for a moment. He didn’t want to give it to her but he also didn’t want to do anything to displease her lest she move her body off his for even a moment. ‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘If you can find it, you can have it back.’ She dropped the nugget down the front of her dress between her breasts and Bill’s eyes opened wide, staring at them within her dress before looking back up at her face. ‘Go on,’ she said with a laugh. ‘Try.’ He quickly reached up and undid the strings at the front of her dress, and within a moment she had slipped out of her clothing and was helping him out of his. Immediately his mind was no longer on the piece of gold, it was elsewhere, and he made love for the first time without quite realising its cost to him. When it was over she sat up and dressed quickly, running her hand along his chest before she stood up.
‘That was nice,’ she said. ‘But we won’t speak of it back at the camp, all right?’ Her voice was firm. He felt embarrassed suddenly to be lying there, so exposed before her.
‘All right,’ he said and within a few minutes, as if she had been a mirage all along, she disappeared. It was some time later, when he was dressed and putting his shoes back on, that he realised he never had retrieved the gold nugget from wherever she had hidden it. Embarrassed and angry with himself for his stupidity, he decided not to go back to join the others at the camp but waited instead until nightfall, when he took a small raft and made his way instead along the river, eventually landing at a shore which appeared to have a town in the distance. A town which turned out to be Julesberg, where he found himself now.
‘So, Mr Cody,’ said George Chrisman. ‘You want to be a Pony Express rider, yes?’
‘Yes,’ said Bill with a sigh, unwilling to give the man the satisfaction of a long drawn-out begging speech. Chrisman seemed disappointed by this but it was obvious he wasn’t going to get anything more out of the lad and he hadn’t exactly been inundated with applications.
‘All right,’ he said abruptly. ‘The job’s yours if you want it. But it’s hard work, mind. You sure you’re up to it?’
‘I’d say I am. I’ve worked hard all my life.’
‘You’ll be riding over a land of forty-five miles, between stations fifteen miles apart and you’ll need to get to each one within an hour of leaving them. That’s a recipe for saddle-sores if ever I heard one, so you better have the seat for it. Pay’s all right though. You still up for it?’
‘Still up for it.’
‘Then like I say, the job’s yours if you want it.’ And so it was that my great-grandfather Bill Cody began his first paid employment as a rider for the United States Pony Express, and had his first experience of having to pay for love, all in the same week.
Isaac frequently told me tales about our ancestor, but the one person he almost never spoke of was my mother. She left when I was only four years old, yet I’ve never resented her for that. As a child I was preoccupied enough with the fact that Isaac was twenty years older than all my friends’ parents without wondering why I was almost the only child in my class without a mother either. Sometimes I felt as if both my parents had died and I was being brought up by an elderly grandfather, so fitting to that role did Isaac seem. But considering how obsessive my father became about his family tree and my part in it, it’s worth mentioning the roles of the two people in his life who contributed the most towards his loneliness, and his drinking, namely my mother and his father.
Annabel Reid was a Blitz child, born in London at the height of the Second World War. Her mother was a seamstress and before that had acted on the stage, although she had no great successes that I know of. Her father was an officer in the army and was home on leave when she was conceived. After her birth, when the bombing of the capital became more and more frequent, mother and daughter, and Annabel’s older brother Howard, moved to the south coast to stay with cousins and they saw out the war there in relative comfort. Sadly, her father – my grandfather – was killed in the war, although my mother was not left fatherless for long, for my grandmother remarried within a year to a local butcher and never returned to London. The speed of her marriage scandalised some, but their union was apparently happy and little more was heard from them.
My mother, on the other hand, waited until she was eighteen, at which point she climbed on board a bus which took her to a train station which then took her to London. She arrived in the city just as the sixties were blooming and took a flat with another girl in Battersea, on a quiet road shaded by the nearby park. Eighteen years in the quiet of the countryside had made her ready for adventure and she threw herself into city life with the air of one who had been in solitary confinement all her life and then suddenly released. Initially she worked in a fashionable clothes shop but she found that her lifestyle demanded more money than a shop assistant was paid and since she was spending so much of her time in nightclubs anyway, she began to work in one, sleeping by day and living by night. She had – according to Isaac – a string of relationships before she met him, and ran with a cultured crowd, the artists of the day, the photographers, the pop-stars.
‘She claimed she could have married a Beatle,’ Isaac told me in one of our rare discussions about Annabel. ‘She claimed he was chasing her for months and that she didn’t go for it because she just didn’t fancy him.’ He shook his head in disdain. ‘I never believed her on that one. Unless it was Pete Best. Knowing her luck, he’d have been the kind of Beatle she’d have hooked up with. The one who got kicked out. Said she met Princess Margaret a few times in the clubs and that they were fast and furious. I took it with a pinch of salt. Liked to make herself sound big, you see. Liked to think she was worth more than other folk. That’s why it never could have worked out with us, you see. She didn’t want a painter and decorator for a husband. She wanted Lord Bloody Snowdon.’
My parents met at a nightclub and although Isaac was almost thirty years older than her, she was drawn to him. He told her stories, not of Buffalo Bill Cody, but of life inside the prison where he had spent a good portion of his thirties and these were the kinds of stories that the girls of London nightlife at the time admired and responded to. Isaac kept his regular daytime existence to himself and impressed her by spending his money frivolously, keeping her in whatever jewels and gifts he could afford. Having obviously decided not to marry a Beatle, she settled for Isaac and they were married in 1969, the year of Abbey Road, when she moved down the road from Battersea Park to Clapham, where Isaac had his home. I was born seven months later and by 1974, when the Beatles had long since split, so did she. She had been attending a local clinic for high blood pressure and her doctor there obviously caused it to increase even further because she left Isaac shortly afterwards and emigrated with him to Canada.
It’s hard for me to remember her as I was only a very small child when she left but from what I do recall, life in a small house in Clapham with a painter and decorator was never going to be enough for her. I’m not sure that Canada proved to be much better, but she was unhappy with her marriage to Isaac from the start and was not afraid to show it.
For his part, the adjustment to married life was even more of a struggle. A bachelor for fifty-one years, set in his ways, accustomed to his own company, the introduction of a restless young woman into his household was a disruption he could never have truly expected to work. They were of different generations, and Isaac expected things of his wife which she had no intentions of giving. For him, having found her husband she should have been content to stay at home and look after him. He was wrong. She would regularly disappear in the evenings and he was powerless to control her. Instead he was left with a crying baby and a bottle of whisky when I had finally drifted off to sleep. After she left him, he was never particularly bitter. He felt angry, of course. His pride was hurt, not least because the doctor who had replaced him was not much younger than he himself – perhaps he could have understood it better if sh
e had fallen for a man her own age. But he got over her quickly and there was never any question on either of their parts of me going to Canada with her. Isaac was a mistake, she told me once, and while she never said quite the same about me, it felt like the obvious rejoinder. She was there and then she wasn’t; all three of us survived.
Isaac’s father, on the other hand, was not a nice man. Like his son, Sam spent a portion of his life behind bars but his crimes were more serious. Sitting in a bar in the 1920s he spotted a young man on the other side of the room eyeing up his wife. This went on for some time and my grandmother was oblivious to it as she had her back to the man, but Sam was aware of it and he waited until the young man stood up to use the bathroom, at which time he followed him inside and, holding him against the wall, cut out one of his eyes with a penknife. He probably would have cut out the other one too had the screams of the young man not alerted the people in the bar, several of whom rushed in and pulled Sam off him. He was sentenced to seven years in jail, and during the sixth he was responsible for a fight which left another man in a wheelchair. It was a further five years before he saw freedom, by which time he was in his forties and unable to adjust to living in society. Returning to life with his wife and growing son, he demonstrated his position as head of the household by regularly beating them both, but only to the point where he would not be convicted of any serious crime even if either of them had the courage to report him, which of course they never did. My father left the house as soon as he could, and shortly afterwards my grandmother died. Isaac broke off all contact with Sam, never speaking to him again during his lifetime, although he did suffer the cost of his funeral.
