Prospects

Day 1

She arrived at LAX five days ago, four days before her forty-third birthday and three days before the planned kidney transplant. She reassembled herself after being flat-packed into an economy seat for eleven tedious hours, tucked a fresh blouse into a loose, cotton skirt and discarded scruffy Chelsea boots in exchange for new, nude Chloe flats, in a nod to the fine weather and anticipated fine company. She was collected at Arrivals by a driver with her name misspelled on a card and She asked to take Sepulveda Boulevard to Westwood, an inauspicious beginning to a landmark trip.

She had always preferred the through roads to the 405. She was acutely familiar with these particular polluting veins on the back of the hand of Los Angeles, once her pathways from the airport to various University apartments in Westwood. Not wishing away the ride, she revelled in the thoracic yank of catching a green light, the arrest of the red, the taste of carbon monoxide on the back of her tongue and the hum of the right-wing radio station the driver believed only he could hear. After all, She thought, what is LA if not sitting in traffic, people-watching through tinted windows into the hazy interiors of Cadillacs, Ford mustangs, Ferraris and, still, the odd Humvee, four miles to the galloon to collect a brussel sprout salad at Erewhon and a blow-dried cockapoo from the groomers.

The cerulean sky was cloudless and the boulevard was treeless, lined instead with billboards offering the award season's favourites For Your Consideration, "For my consideration?" She had seen some of the year's film crop, but not all, and had used the surfeit of hours on her flight to dip in and out of A Star is Born, the remake of the remake, on an unedifying ten inch screen.

The town car's oxblood leather seats clung to the back of her legs, audibly peeling from her skin as She shifted her weight from one side to the other in an effort to get comfortable. The driver turned up the air conditioning and thrust a bottle of Calistoga Spring Water in her direction.

"Traffic bad," he said, offering L.A.'s most redundant phrase in broken English, barely audible above the competing sounds of the radio and cars congesting the lanes on either side, "for football."

"Ah, I see. The football with the hands, not the football with the feet, you mean?"

"What, please, miss?"

"Nothing."

The San Francisco 49ers were in town to take on the Los Angeles Rams.

The Northern team immortalises those intrepid mid-nineteenth century pioneers who travelled across the country and sought their fortunes in the California Gold Rush, selling everything they owned for money to spend on sluice boxes, panning kits and gold magnets, all in consideration for the gambler's chance to replace everything they had sold, and buy more. In the years after the New York Herald first published news of the nuggets of gold found in the Sierra Nevada hills, more than three hundred thousand people poured into California, such was the strength of the klaxon announcing the discovery of inestimable riches and wealth, and the response of those prepared to risk it all to participate in the winnings.

They arrived in covered wagons, pushed by encroaching poverty, hardship and illness, pulled by vivid dreams of future wealth, success and good health, encouraged by the billboards hastily erected on the Westbound trails that read, "A day without Gold is like a day without sunshine!" They were not wealthy, but they were not destitute, able to raise the funds and gather the resources or the credit required to take that life-changing bet on themselves, moving their families West to be united with the fortune they believed was waiting for them, as if the gold was doing the discovering. "You're the one!"

It was not long before the more easily identifiable placer gold deposits had been claimed and mined, and unseen property purchases made no promise of a strike. Land deeds were no more reliable than lottery tickets, and most of the 49ers went home or travelled elsewhere with fewer pennies and possessions than they had to their name on arrival. Fortunes were not shared or allotted according to merit or perseverance. There was no correlation between hard work and reward, one man raising a gold nugget on his first day out West and shouting the State's motto, "Eureka!" while another was still adding to the slag heap on his one thousandth, telling himself, "Perhaps tomorrow will be my day, my time."

The majority of millionaires emerging from the Gold Rush were not the hard-working people buying the sluice boxes and panning kits, but those selling them. Samuel Brannan acquired a single gold nugget from John Sutter's first haul of California gold and, as both the owner of a supply store and a publisher, he took it upon himself to collect every spade, shovel and pick on the West side of the great American continent before sharing Sutter's news and sitting back while demand and prices rose exponentially. He offered all the kit that a prospector might need and had a natural flair for sales, encouraging the 49ers to think big and to invest in themselves, convincing them, "You are special. You are worthy. You will be the one." The original purveyor of the California Dream.

In the few years after 1849, entire towns were erected in days and weeks to accommodate the deluge of gold diggers making the pilgrimage from the East. She had once driven through these quasi-abandoned communities with the Director on their way to see a filming location, stopping for a cool drink at the lodgings built to give prospectors somewhere to spend their money the moment they heard word they had some. The hotel sat above the fog and below the snow, boasting pull-chain Victorian toilets, a one armed bandit guarding the front door, a saloon straight from a Western, and a rugged cowboy nursing Firewater at the end of the dark mahogany bar, tipping his stetson as a gesture of 'welcome' to all who crossed the threshold. "Do you think he's real?" She had asked the Director, tipping her fedora back at him.

These half-ghost-towns had taken a page from Sam Brannan's book, selling branded, plastic panning kits stamped with the El Dorado County Seal: a handsome woman in an auric robe, the rich river bed depicted behind her and a cornucopia of fresh fruits overspilling in the foreground. "Look at this abundance," she appears to say, eyes cast whimsically into the distance, "I have it all. And more." She had bought two of the kits and slipped off her shoes to step into freezing water at the river's edge, summoning her divining powers, scanning for any hint of gold in the alluvial deposits. She kicked icy droplets at the Director who had left his kit untouched, taking a phone call from his agent with one hand, smoking a Camel Light with the other, and watching her with an air of surly derision as if to ask, "Who needs luck?"

"Did you know," She had enquired of the Director or any curious eavesdropper, reading from the back of an El Dorado County map unfolded a dozen times and laid across her lap, "that gold is a siderophile? No? .A siderophile is a lover of iron. The word is from the Goldschmidt Geochemical classification system, which divides each of the elements into one of four categories, of which the siderophiles are one and the others," counting them off on her fingers, "are lithophiles, chalcophiles and atmophiles, lovers of rock, copper or sulphur, and the atmosphere. Gold is a siderophile."

She paused for a response and received none. "It says, 'a siderophile is an element with an affinity for iron and a tendency to partition into the metallic sphere at the earth's core as opposed to the hydrosphere or the atmosphere.' But, it's here, right here in this river bed, not at the core at all, and so they think the gold and precious metals must have come here after the earth was formed." She kept reading, enthralled by the concept of gold denying its intrinsic iron-loving nature, presenting inauthentically as a rock-loving lithophile having travelled to the planet by way of meteor or other such celestial courier, "Alien gold."

The otherworldly metal may be prized for its breathtaking beauty, but it is valued by its scarcity, outclassing occidental sunsets and meadows of wild Douglas Irises and flutters of Red Admirals, a finite commodity and tradable asset with a worth measured and fixed across international markets. Since many centuries before the California gold rush, when the metal was first unearthed in Brazil, the price has been controlled from the London Gold Market, responsible for the publication of the universally recognised price of gold, the Gold Fix. For forty years this function has been delivered by the London Bullion Market Association out of the Rothschilds offices, and more recently it has been governed by trading data amassed from an electronic auction that recurs every forty-five seconds, the price per gram fluctuating with the rise or fall in supply or demand, calculated and presented to the world's markets thanks to technology developed in Silicon Valley, another basin of fortunes won or lost in the whimsical state of California. The 49ers had known nothing of electronic auctions and little of the Rothschilds or banking, aspiring to riches altogether more tangible and pragmatic: the security of a home and a future for their families.

After the unsuccessful detour to pan for gold on the river bed, the Director and some of his film crew gathered to cross the State line into Nevada to drink and gamble at the Nugget Casino and Resort. She had disappeared into the crowd, reestablishing a...