by John Boyne
‘And that’s what you want to speak to this Buntline fellow about, is it?’ asked Jack.
‘It will most likely come up,’ he replied diplomatically, before shushing his companion as the lights dimmed and the play began.
The stage had been designed to resemble a prairie, with tumbleweeds and cactus plants situated at different points along the set. The story involved the kidnapping of Bill’s sister by a group of renegade Cheyenne. Bill and his army set off in chase and got themselves involved in various scrapes before recapturing the woman and killing all the Indians in a dramatic finale. When J. B. Studley, the actor who had taken over from Buntline in the title role first appeared on stage the audience gave a cheer and, clearly not a method actor, Studley walked to the front of the stage and gave a ceremonial bow to all, milking the applause until he was sure that it had ended. Only then did he consent to return to character.
‘He doesn’t look a thing like you,’ whispered Texas Jack to Bill. ‘Why, he’s an old man! He must be thirty-five if he’s a day!’
‘Aye, and a drunkard. Look at the way he staggers across the stage,’ replied Bill, turning around to frown at an elderly lady who had kicked the back of his chair in order to silence him. ‘Apologies, madam,’ he added loudly.
In total the play lasted little more than an hour and it was clear from the reception which the audience gave it that it was a hit. Certainly, the action sequences had been exciting and the mass slaughter of the Indians at the end had proved enormously popular with the audience. Loud and rapturous applause greeted the cast as they took their bows at the end and some scattered cries of Author! Author! prompted Ned Buntline to appear on stage, an act which returned all to their seats and to silence.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said in a distinct voice, his words much better pronounced than they had been when they were in the room together earlier. His face also looked a little less engorged since Studley had managed to get through the entire performance without either throwing up or falling on his face. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he repeated, ‘you’re very kind and I want to thank you for the reception you have given us all here tonight. But may I tell you that you’ve chosen an auspicious evening to attend The King of Border Men, for the man for whom this play is named, Buffalo Bill Cody himself, is actually present in this theatre and, I hope, has enjoyed the production as much as you all have.’ There was a sharp intake of breath from the audience as everyone looked around and at their neighbours to see whether they could spot the celebrity in their midst. Bill swallowed nervously and sank down in his chair; for once, his love of the spotlight was deserting him.
‘Let’s have a look at ’im then!’ came a roar from the balcony and the audience cheered their approval of this idea, a few others calling out similar requests. Buntline silenced them all again with his hands and looked towards the third row, where Bill and Texas Jack were seated.
‘That’s exactly what I propose to do,’ he cried, gesturing to my great-grandfather to join him on stage. ‘Buffalo Bill, come on up here and let these good people show their appreciation to you.’
There was loud anticipatory applause and, prodded by his friend, Bill eventually stood up nervously and shuffled up the steps towards Ned Buntline.
‘Oh heavens,’ cried the woman in the seat behind. ‘To think I shushed him during the play! I shushed Buffalo Bill. He’ll shoot me afterwards! He’ll take me out and shoot me!’
More applause greeted him as he stood on the stage and Buntline placed an arm around his shoulders to silence the crowd. Bill was staring at the ground reluctantly, holding his hat in his hands, afraid to look out at his fans. ‘Buffalo Bill,’ said Buntline casually, as if this was the most normal thing in the world. ‘You’ll say a few words to these good people, won’t you?’
Bill finally looked up now and as he did so some of the spotlights were switched on, catching him unawares. Momentarily blinded, he shielded his eyes with his hand and tried to speak through a dry voice. ‘Thank you,’ he muttered quietly and the whole audience broke into a series of What-did-he-says? His speech beginning and ending with those two words, he retreated through the curtains into the safety of the backstage area, where he found himself sitting on a wagon wheel, gasping for air, the perspiration pouring down his forehead as the applause continued outside.
‘That was wonderful,’ said Buntline, when he appeared again, pulling Bill to his feet. ‘What a showman you are! They loved you.’
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t say more,’ explained Bill apologetically. ‘I’ve never been much of a one for public speaking.’
‘Nonsense, you’re a natural,’ came the reply, brushing away Bill’s mutterings to the contrary. ‘I’ve seen actors and I’ve seen showmen and I’ve seen the way different men can and can’t interact with an audience and I’m telling you now, Buffalo Bill Cody, you’re a natural. You may have said nothing but they loved you anyway. Didn’t you see the look on their faces when they realised that it really was you standing up there? I’m telling you now, I’m going to make an actor of you if it’s the last thing I do.’
‘You’re what?’ asked Bill loudly. ‘You’ve got to be—’
‘Listen to me,’ said Buntline firmly. ‘Studley comes in here every day dead drunk. He’s ruining the part. Oh sure, it gets a good reception but that’s because it’s a great play. I wrote it, for heaven’s sake! Of course it’s great! Imagine what it would be like with a man like you in the lead.’
‘But Ned,’ protested Bill, laughing at the very idea. ‘I’ve never acted in my life. You saw me out there. I could barely get two words out. In fact I only got two words out.’
‘But such words! Such words!’
‘Ned—’
‘No protests, my friend. Who else can play Buffalo Bill like Buffalo Bill? Do you want your name and reputation sullied by Studley and his like? Do you want to be remembered through that idiot’s performance? Do you want to make a lot of money?’ he added after a pause, leaning forward and smiling gently. Bill looked at him and thought about it.
‘How much money exactly?’ he asked.
I began my search for Hitomi in an obvious place: I looked her up in the phone book. She wasn’t listed although there was an ‘S. Naoyuki’ living in the quatrième arrondissement who I called, just in case the initial had been written incorrectly. The voice on the other end of the line however belonged to an old Japanese man who shouted down the phone in an inexplicable rage when I began speaking.
Luc introduced me to a friend of his, Pierre Guillet, who was one of the commissioning editors on a weekly news magazine in the city. I submitted my portfolio to him and he appeared to enjoy the Tokyo columns I had written and, spurred on by their success in a dozen different newspapers around that region, employed me to write for his magazine too. The combination of that job and my continuing publication in the east gave me a sufficient income for my needs and I found that the life of a Parisian writer was not a bad one at all. I lived the stereotype for a while, eating at sidewalk cafés, strolling along the Champs Élysées with a copy of Sartre in my inside pocket. I even tried to take up smoking as I thought the look would be conducive to my new position in life, but failed abysmally.
In the meantime I visited the few Japanese-French societies in the city, hoping to meet Hitomi but without success. The people who gathered in these places tended to be awkward social types who had arrived in France without knowing what they were doing there and were simply clinging to people with a similar background for fear of being washed away in the Seine.
‘You should put an ad in the paper,’ Annette advised me as we sat drinking coffee in my apartment one evening, waiting for Luc to return with dinner. ‘Take a full-page ad in Le Monde some day. It’ll cost you a fortune but she’s bound to see it.’
‘She’s never been much of a newspaper buyer,’ I said, shaking my head sadly. ‘I don’t think she’d see it.’
‘Somebody who knows her might.’
‘I don’t kn
ow …’ I muttered, unconvinced.
‘You want me to set you up with a friend of mine instead?’
I laughed and shook my head. ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘No, I don’t want you to set me up with a friend of yours! I’m not cheating on her just because I can’t find her. I’m not just looking to get laid here.’
‘William, how can you cheat on someone who you’re not even seeing?’
‘We are seeing each other,’ I protested. ‘We’re just not seeing each other, that’s all.’
‘Right,’ said Annette. Luc arrived with food at that moment. He set straight to work on the vegetables, barely acknowledging our presence, and didn’t even bother to take the cigarette out of his mouth as he chopped the food up. ‘William wants me to set him up with a friend of mine,’ said Annette mischievously. ‘I thought maybe Claudia, what do you think?’
‘I don’t want anything of the sort,’ I said quickly as Luc looked at me with some amusement. ‘She’s just trying to wind me up.’
‘Never go on a blind date,’ he counselled. ‘They spell disaster. You’re not that desperate anyway, are you?’
Well yes,’ I admitted. ‘I bloody am. But I’m still not doing it. Hitomi has got to be in the city somewhere and I’ll find her.’
‘But I want to double date,’ protested Annette in a childlike whine, as if I had spoiled her fun on purpose.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Listen to me, William,’ said Luc, coming around to my side of the table and sitting down beside me, stubbing his cigarette out now in an empty cup. ‘Don’t you think you’re becoming a little … obsessive about this? You don’t even know for sure that this girl is in Paris.’
‘I don’t even want to think about that,’ I said, shaking my head furiously for that thought had been occurring to me increasingly in recent times. ‘She has to be here. Mayu said she was here.’
‘You know,’ he continued, ignoring me. ‘When I was in university I took a summer away and went to Athens at one point to see the Parthenon. When I got there, I bought a guidebook and found out how to get there and I went to see it and spent a couple of days in that area, soaking up the atmosphere. Then I took the bus back where I had come from. Stupid, eh?’
I stared at him blankly and then looked across at Annette, who was squinting her eyes as if she wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at either.
‘I don’t follow you,’ I said.
‘William, there’s a lot more to Athens than the Parthenon. I went there because I wanted to see it, I’d always wanted to see it. So I saw it and left. I didn’t do anything else. If you said to me have I been to Athens, I’d say sure and you’d say how did you like it and what could I say to you? I don’t know, I never saw Athens. I missed it because I was only interested in one thing.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘You’re saying I should stop obsessing about Hitomi and get a life basically.’
‘You have it now,’ he said, smiling and resuming his cooking. There was silence for a few minutes as I thought about this.
‘That was a bit convoluted, Luc, wasn’t it?’ asked Annette after a while and he shrugged and muttered something inaudible.
‘Do you think I’m obsessed?’ I asked in a quiet voice, looking across at Annette. For a moment, she seemed reluctant to answer.
‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually. ‘Obsession’s kind of a creepy word. It suggests stalkers and the like and I know that’s not who you are. You just love the girl, I guess. I mean you are a bit stalker-like, but I don’t think there’s much you can do about that. We all have our faults.’
‘I do love her,’ I agreed. ‘She’s the only girl I’ve ever said “I love you” to, you know.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Luc. ‘We all say it when we need to. You must have done.’
I shook my head. ‘I never have. I swear it,’ I said. ‘I’ve made a point of it. She’s the only one. They’re the three greatest words in the English language. I never wanted to waste them.’
‘No they’re not,’ said Annette. ‘They’re not the three greatest words in the English language at all. You’re kidding yourself.’
I stared at her. ‘Sure they are,’ I said, surprised by her lack of romance. ‘Tell me three better.’
She squinted her eyes and looked away. Luc and I watched her, waiting for an answer. After a moment she smirked and turned back to us triumphantly. ‘Robert Downey Jr,’ she said and I burst out laughing, even as her husband sighed in frustration.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘How could I have been so stupid.’
Luc was making crazy signs at the side of his head and pointing at Annette. ‘She’s mad,’ he said, smiling despite himself. ‘You want to talk obsessions? You want to talk stalkers? Well he’s her one obsession. You want to see her little face when one of his movies comes on the TV. She’d leave me for him, I swear it.’
‘Damn right I would,’ said Annette.
I shrugged. ‘Well I probably can’t compete with that,’ I said. ‘But the point is that I love Hitomi. So there. And I just want to make things right. I don’t want to seem obsessed. It’s obsessions that have got me into this mess in the first place.’ She looked at me and waited for me to explain. ‘I’ve told you about my father,’ I said, for since our first discussion about American heroes I had revealed to Annette the history of my family and told her some of the stories about my great-grandfather. ‘About Isaac. His obsession with family history, his need to have a celebrated ancestor who actually did something with his life has just coloured every moment of his own life, not to mention mine.’
‘Well if my grandfather was Wild Bill Hickok, I’d probably be excited about it too.’
‘It’s Buffalo Bill, for Christ’s sake,’ I said irritably. ‘Jesus.’
‘All right, keep your wig on,’ she said, laughing.
‘Well people always say Wild Bill Hickok. Why can’t they just remember it was Buffalo Bill? Hickok had nothing on my great-grandfather. He was just a drunk, he couldn’t shoot straight, he was … he was impotent, you know,’ I added, spluttering out the words. ‘My great-grandfather was the first true scout of the plains. He practically invented the west. Before he came along it was just a place with a lot of land problems. He gave it a mythology, he created its history. Isn’t that something to remember his name for?’ I could feel my face grow red as my diatribe continued and by the end of it, I knew that Luc and Annette were staring at me with tight smiles on their faces.
‘Is that what this Isaac is like?’ asked Luc after a pause and I laughed, realising just how much like him I had sounded.
‘Worse,’ I said. ‘He’s infinitely worse. I don’t even care that much. These are his stories, not mine.’
‘You must be a lot alike,’ said Annette and I looked at her inquisitively. ‘Think about it,’ she continued. ‘You talk about these things all the time too. You’ve told us lots of stories about your great-grandfather and you’ve only known us a few weeks. You like to talk about him.’
‘Well you seemed interested,’ I said defensively.
‘We are,’ she replied quickly. ‘Believe me, if you were boring us we’d have told you to stop it a long time ago. But they’re interesting stories. I like to hear them. But it’s you who’s telling them, not your father. We don’t even know your father. So you must be like him in some way if you feel the need to tell them.’
I frowned. I had never thought of it that way. I had told all the stories to Adam and Justin too, not to mention Hitomi and Tak, on many occasions throughout my life, but I had always presented them as things that Isaac had told me and not as my own. Perhaps by telling them in my own voice I was carrying on Isaac’s tradition; the idea chilled me.
‘And these columns you write,’ said Annette, continuing with her amateur psychology now. ‘You write about things that have happened to you but a lot of them haven’t. They’re things you’ve heard have happened to other people. All those Japanese columns you showed me. You couldn’t have
had that many things happen to you.’
‘No, of course I didn’t,’ I said. ‘But with something like that you just create a persona and let the stories come through it. It’s not factual journalism. There’s more licence in it than that.’
‘And yet you still sign these columns as William Cody.’
‘Well that’s my name!’
‘Which you use as a character in your columns. That’s all he is, right? A character? He’s not actually a real person.’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I guess …’ I said in a slow drawl, unwilling to agree, knowing where it might lead.
‘Well how is that different from this self-perpetuating myth you talk about Buffalo Bill creating that you seem so critical about? You say he invented his own character to mythologise the west and make money from it. Isn’t that what you’re doing too?’
‘Yes, but on a much smaller scale,’ I protested.
‘Well then,’ she said with a flourish, sitting back in her chair with a smile as if she had just conclusively proved her point. ‘Maybe then you just have to start thinking a little bigger, my friend. It’s like Luc said. There’s a lot more in Athens than just the Parthenon. I’m going to set you up with someone.’
‘No,’ I said firmly.
‘Oh be nice.’
‘No!’ I repeated. I’m going to find Hitomi. That’s what I’m going to do. She’s here somewhere, I know it. I just have to think, that’s all. I feel that if I just think about it, I’ll figure it out. I’ll find her. I know I will. We’re meant to be together, you see.’
Luc and Annette exchanged a look which in a second changed from concern about me to a shrugging acceptance that if that was what I believed, then perhaps it was true.
Ellen Rose proved a more successful circus performer than her father Russell could ever have predicted. Her skill on the tightrope, across which she could practically perform ballet routines, not to mention her talents on the trapeze itself, drew such inhalations of appreciation from audiences that Russell and Bessie were forced to shake their heads and acknowledge that their daughter was a natural.