by John Boyne
‘I think anyone offered a chance to get away from all this madness would be a fool not to take it,’ said Homer Lee in a resigned tone.
‘It’s not that I’m afraid to stay,’ said Angel.
‘No one would think that,’ interrupted Bill, who liked Angel and had befriended him from the start. He was an admirer of Candice’s too – Angel’s intended fiancée – but he had never expressed his feelings, knowing that her heart belonged to only one man.
‘Some might say it though,’ said Angel. ‘And that worries me because I don’t want anyone to think I’d be running from a fight.’
‘There’s plenty of fights up north, I dare say,’ said another man chirpily. ‘Lots of opportunities to get yourself shot all over this damn country. Don’t think you’ll be escaping them anyway.’
Angel smiled. ‘It’s just a thought for now anyway,’ he said eventually. ‘I’d have to speak to Candice first. I have to ask her to marry me first,’ he added. ‘But that’s tonight’s job.’
‘Well then, we best get back to the fort,’ said Bill, standing up and brushing the dirt from the seat of his pants. ‘Never let it be said that Bill Cody stood in the way of true romance when he—’ He broke off and looked around him nervously. Something was stirring.
‘What’s up, Bill?’ asked Homer Lee, and Bill put a finger to his mouth quickly, urging the men to stay quiet for a moment. They all listened. No one could hear a thing.
‘You don’t hear that?’ asked Bill eventually, looking around at them as if he was going mad. They shook their heads one by one, looking at their friend as if he had lost his mind. There was silence for a moment and Bill was about to speak again, about to say they should head for home when Angel spoke.
‘I hear it,’ he said and the tone of his voice made the men shiver, for they heard it as well now and they knew what was coming. They looked over the edge of the mountain and in the distance they could hear the pounding hooves of the horses and could see, gradually becoming more and more visible in the darkening evening, the blue and red insignias of the confederate bushwhackers. Had they been closer to that army, they would have seen the thin, determined face of William Quantrill at their head, flanked by Bloody Bill Anderson, the terrifying mass murderer who had led the charge at Bunkport, and Frank James, brother of Jesse, who was there as a paid mercenary, bringing his band of loyal followers with him. In all, 450 men and their horses galloped across the prairie towards Fort Lawrence that evening, determined that by the end of the night, they would be dining there.
Bill and his friends cursed their luck and rushed to their horses but from their vantage point at the top of the mountains it was a difficult and dangerous ride back down the mountain and although they all made it safely, it took time as the horses were unsure of their footing and an error could have seen them toppling over the canyons to their death on the ground below.
The fort at Lawrence was merely the central focal point of a thriving town, and when the confederates arrived there, it was closing down for the night, the wives and children already asleep in their homes, most of the men there too, the others in the saloons drinking or playing cards. They heard the sounds of the horses and when they came to their windows, the town was already being overrun by bushwhackers. Jim Lane was asleep in his bed and being awoken by his wife when Patch Bellows took to the steps of the courthouse, not twenty feet from Quantrill and called out to him. The town went quiet as they waited for the brief exchange of words.
‘What do you want?’ shouted Bellows, feeling naked without his gun and his jacket, unaware that he even still held a glass of whisky in his right hand. ‘What are you doing here, Quantrill? We’ll rouse you out of it, I warn you.’
‘What’s your name?’ called Quantrill.
‘Patch Bellows,’ came the reply.
Quantrill nodded for a moment before signalling to his accomplice Bloody Bill Anderson who, without a moment’s hesitation, raised his gun and shot Bellows clean through his one good eye. He fell dead to the ground and, dramatic to the last, Anderson raised his gun aloft and blew the smoke away from his face. The people stared in shock at what had happened, and horror at the thought of what might come next.
‘Now,’ said Quantrill, his voice clear and ringing. ‘Cleanse this town.’
Within seconds, his army were shooting people at will, the townsfolk running and screaming back to their houses even as the confederates pulled them out, ripping at their limbs, shooting every man, woman and child they could see. Families were torn from their homes and the buildings set on fire.
Bill, Homer Lee and the others arrived at the height of the town’s destruction to see a band of laughing teenage boys on horses shooting small children who were standing on the porches in terror. Bill circled back towards the courthouse, where he saw Patch Bellows’s body lying out on the steps. The town was in flames and it became difficult for anyone to see who was union and who was confederate, the only giveaway being that the ones who lay dead on the ground tended to the former. My great-grandfather lost sight of his colleagues for a time as he broke into the mêlée and killed several confederates himself until, from a distance, he could see the man who he was sure was Quantrill himself. His picture, a daguerreotype, had been reproduced in the newspapers and on posters in the town and his was a familiar, nightmare face. He was riding his horse a little removed from the action, observing as his men plundered and killed, burned and shot. Bill reached for his reins, intending to ride towards the confederate leader and put a bullet in his head, aware that he would surely be killed himself within moments of that killing, but before he could move he was almost knocked off his horse by the force and speed of Angel Law, who had also spotted Quantrill and was making towards him with a fury unmatched by any there. Bill watched and saw Quantrill slowly turn his head, aware that something dangerous was coming his way, and Angel Law lifted his gun and aimed it squarely at the head of his father’s killer. Quantrill’s mouth opened in silent understanding. There was only a split second left to him and his hand was too far from his side to reach for his gun. In that moment, Bill thought he could see resignation on the face of the confederate leader and wondered how someone could be so immune to thoughts of death that he could stare it in the face and not so much as flinch. Perhaps he was aware that his time had not yet come, because before Angel Law’s finger could close on the trigger, he was shot in the head by an unknown confederate. Quantrill barely watched, merely grabbing the reins of his own horse and disappearing into the smoky haze which the fires and the gunshots had created. The Fort Lawrence massacre; a confederate victory.
I was nineteen years old when I fled England. Adam and I, in need of a break from our humdrum lives, had saved our money and with no particular destination in mind, had gone to a travel agency and scanned the brochures for ideas. Our plan was to travel somewhere remote and completely alien to us; that ruled out Europe or America. I had been determined anyway not to go anywhere near the areas of the American west where so much of my fantasy childhood had been spent. Although it interested me still and there was a part of me that wanted to see the places which I had only heard about, my life had been too dominated by those stories and I needed a change. In the end we chose Japan for no other reason than it was distant and exotic and spent six weeks engaged on a crash course to bring our language skills up to beginner level. The plan was to teach English to those Japanese children who had not already been snapped up by students on their gap years and travel from place to place, perhaps eventually moving on towards Thailand, Singapore or even New Zealand. We were in no hurry; neither of us had any meaningful employment, nor were we desirous of any, and we had little intentions at that point of going to college. We were both trying to get away, that was all.
Although my two friends and I had remained close throughout our youth, Justin decided not to join us on our travels, being more interested in a future career and college place than we were and in his own ambitions as a musician. He had been writing songs since
childhood and had a decent voice too and, like half the people of our age at the time, was trying to set up a band. Neither Adam nor I had any fixed ideas about our futures. I had vague notions towards writing and liked the idea of being a journalist on a London music paper, but notions were all they were. I did nothing to achieve that ambition but it was a stock answer whenever anyone quizzed me on my plans for the future. Adam’s mother had died earlier that year and he had gone through a difficult time, but he was slowly coming out of it and it had initially been his idea that we should buy a one-way ticket somewhere and see what happened. I jumped at the opportunity.
‘I don’t know what you think you’re going to achieve over there that you can’t achieve here,’ Isaac commented, unhappy about our plans but unable to do anything to stop me, now that I was officially an adult. ‘You should be starting to make a living rather than gallivanting around the world.’ He protested a lot and placed numerous objections in my way but I took each one with equal good humour, unwilling to start a fight, hoping that we could part on the best possible terms. In the end however, despite my best intentions, it was a chilly departure. He didn’t come to the airport to see me off, but insisted on carrying my rucksack to our waiting taxi, and shaking my hand rather than hugging me as I said goodbye. It would be some time before I would see him again.
We landed, exhausted but eager, in Narita, Tokyo’s International Airport, twelve hours after leaving London on a hot, clammy evening in late May. Naturally, most of the signs were written in Japanese characters and I was seized with a sudden fear upon landing, the recognition that for the first time in my life I was in a foreign land with a language and alphabet I could not recognise. The sense of isolation terrified me at first. The faces of the people were unfamiliar to me, the sounds and smells of the airport separate to those of Heathrow Airport, or the tube, or the South-West train line which took me to and from my home, not far from Clapham Junction. I swallowed nervously and looked across at Adam whose face betrayed the same instant feeling of terror as my own.
‘What do we do now?’ I asked quietly, grateful that it was he and not I who held the guidebook; it implied that he was obliged to take charge. ‘How do we get out of here?’
‘We need to get into the centre of Tokyo,’ he said in as confident a voice as he could muster. ‘We can figure things out from there.’ We had already arranged a stay for three nights in a cheap hotel in the centre of the city, having decided that it would be best if we had somewhere comfortable to stay during our first few days of relocation and adjustment. ‘So we just need to find a train …’ We stared around us with a certain feeling of impotence. The airport terminal was crowded, and the people were rushing back and forth as if their very lives depended on it. After a few moments of staring around blindly, I tapped his arm and pointed at a sign which had a picture of a train drawn helpfully beside the word densha. It pointed towards an escalator and we stepped on board, allowing it to take us to the lower terminal where, by following the signs, we arrived at a platform and bought a ticket for the Keisei tokkyu service for Tokyo Station. The trip took just over an hour and I enjoyed it, knowing that this was the last time we could let responsibility slip from our shoulders for the foreseeable future.
The hot air had turned to drizzle by the time we reached the central train station and – although I would have thought it impossible – it was even more crowded than the airport terminal we had left. What seemed like millions of people charged through, shoulder to shoulder, a shifting snake of bodies carrying the Japanese people, all dressed alike in business suits, from the entrances to the trains and back again. We managed to force our way through however, our rucksacks weighing us down inconveniently, and I felt an urge to close my eyes and sleep.
‘We’ll get a taxi when we get out of here,’ shouted Adam, looking back to check that I was still behind him. ‘This is madness.’
I was pleased that he had said this, and looked forward to arriving at a hotel where I might relax away from all these people and this noise. I wondered why we hadn’t chosen New York or Sydney, Milan or Paris, rather than this insane city but kept repeating in my head that I had only just arrived and that it would take time to adjust. Once out on the street, a number of takushii passed us by and we attempted to wave them down, but it was only from consulting our guidebook that we realised that those with the red lights on were free, while the green meant occupied, quite the opposite of what one might have expected. The Daimaru department store opposite us had music blaring from it and heavily laden shoppers with varying looks of stress or panic on their faces poured from its doors like water through a broken dam.
‘Do you know where we’re going?’ I asked Adam, hoping for reassurance, and he nodded quickly, pulling a piece of paper from his back pocket.
‘I wrote it down,’ he said, showing me the name of the hotel we had booked written in both Western lettering and Japanese script. I nodded and thrust my arm out just as a red-lighted takushii approached us and he pulled up abruptly throwing open the door for us and we climbed inside eagerly ‘Domo arigato,’ said Adam immediately – thank you – practising one of the phrases we had both acquired from our Berlitz tapes over the previous month and a half. The taxi driver responded quickly, whatever he said taking the best part of thirty seconds to end, and we both blinked and swallowed nervously. He spun around then, a small, thin man of about thirty, with a gold medallion around his neck and a dirty white cap on his head, and reached back for the piece of paper Adam was holding, grabbing it off him, glancing at it briefly, and pulling away from the kerb. Tourists were obviously nothing new to him.
We swept along the streets of Tokyo, narrowly avoiding killing half the natives, as Adam and I gripped the edges of our seats nervously. Our driver negotiated the roads with only one hand on the steering wheel, the other stretched across the back of the passenger seat as if his wife or sweetheart was sitting there, but seemed able to drive at sixty miles an hour through narrow streets without either causing an accident or breaking into a sweat. About five minutes later we pulled up outside the Yaesu Terminal Hotel – we could have easily walked the distance had we known our way around the city – and paid our fare before stepping inside.
‘Konbanwa,’ said Adam, bowing formally at the desk, his forehead almost touching the small golden bell which was used to attract the bellboys. The action produced a look of astonishment on the face of the receptionist, who looked about twelve years old but was probably twice that. I suspected his performance was slightly over the top.
‘Konbanwa,’ she replied, not returning his bow. Good evening.
‘Yoyaku shimashita,’ he continued – I have a reservation – another stock phrase committed to memory at an earlier date.
‘Hai, shitsurei desu ga o-namae wa?’ inquired the girl, tapping away at her computer while barely looking at either of us. Yes, what is your name, please? Adam stared at her and smiled and I was pleased that the question had been directed towards him and not me. ‘Shitsurei desu ga o-namae wa?’ she repeated, looking at him now suspiciously and he turned and looked at me in confusion, already beaten by the first piece of conversation that had come our way. I shrugged and bit my lip; I felt like laughing, the situation seemed so ridiculous. I looked back at the girl who was looking me up and down now with a frown and opened my mouth to speak, before realising I had nothing whatsoever to say and closing it again.
‘Your names?’ she said with a sigh, knowing that we could be there all night if she did not give in to us a little. ‘What are your names?’
‘Oh, our names,’ said Adam, relieved that she could speak English, his voice sounding as if he had merely misheard her the first two times. ‘Adam Spears,’ he said, raising a finger to indicate that that was he, ‘and William Cody,’ he continued, pointing over at me. The receptionist tapped away busily at her computer, making a few notes on a pad of paper, before disappearing into a back room for a few minutes without a word. We hovered from foot to foot nervously; I think
we were both terrified to admit our fear that our reservation had been lost and didn’t want to say it out loud in case it would be tempting fate. I noticed an old Japanese man sitting by the window staring at us. He wore a pair of glasses with lime-green lenses, which struck me as somewhat unusual. He was nodding his head quickly up and down as if agreeing with some internal conversation. Although he appeared to be looking directly at Adam and me, I felt he didn’t even see us and wondered whether this was the way he passed his days now, an old man in a hotel lobby, nodding for something to do. Eventually the receptionist reappeared, and now she had a key in her hand which had a room number printed in several scripts – 124 – and she pointed down the hallway towards the elevators before turning away from us dismissively.
Assuming that our work there was done we walked away and were shortly inside the small room which would be our home for the next five nights. It was cramped and had two short, thin beds separated only by a bedside table with a lamp on it, but they looked inviting and I could hardly wait to crawl inside one of them and get some sleep. The window opened on to the street and the sounds of the people and the cars carried up noisily but I didn’t mind, as such things rarely bother me. We had a small bathroom with a shower stall and I debated whether I would take a hot shower before sleeping but decided against.
‘I’m going to take one anyway,’ said Adam opening his rucksack and pulling out a towel. ‘I think I’m into my second wind and it might knock me out.’
‘What time should we get up at?’ I asked him, looking at my watch and wondering what time it was back in London.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he replied. ‘Let’s not set any alarms. Sleep as long as we sleep. We probably need it.’
I nodded in agreement and took off my runners, my T-shirt and jeans and stroked my chin casually to see whether I would need a shave when I did wake up. I brushed my teeth carefully at the sink and looked in the mirror at the dark bags forming under my eyes. ‘I look like death,’ I said, yawning even as I hit the end of the sentence.