The Girl on Paper (17 page)

‘You her husband?’ asked Dr Philipson, closing the door of the room where Billie was now sleeping.

‘Um, no, it’s not like that,’ I replied.

‘We’re her cousins,’ claimed Milo. ‘We’re the only family she’s got.’

‘Often take baths with your “cousin”, do you?’ the doctor asked, looking at me with irony.

An hour and a half earlier, just as he was preparing to make a difficult putt, he’d had to throw a white coat on over his golf clothes and rush to Billie’s bedside. He immediately saw that the situation was serious and put all his effort into reviving her, getting her admitted to the clinic and carrying out first aid.

Since his question didn’t require a response, we followed him silently into his office. It was a corridor-like room which looked out over a sunny lawn, as smooth as a putting green, with a little flag flying in the middle. As you got closer to the
window, you could make out a golf ball eight or nine yards from the hole.

‘I’m not going to lie to you,’ he began, gesturing to us to sit down. ‘I have absolutely no idea what’s wrong with your friend, nor what brought on the attack.’

He took off his coat and hung it up, before settling down in front of us to list her symptoms.

‘She has a very high temperature, her body is abnormally stiff and she’s brought up the entire contents of her stomach. She’s also suffering from headaches, she’s having trouble breathing and she can’t stand upright.’

‘Which means what?’ I pressed him, anxious to hear some kind of diagnosis.

Philipson opened the top drawer of his desk and took out a cigar, still in its metal tube.

‘She’s showing clear signs of anaemia,’ he added, ‘but what I’m really concerned about is this black substance she’s regurgitated in some quantity.’

‘It looks like ink, doesn’t it?’

‘Could be…’

He took the Cohiba cigar out of its tube and stroked it, as if hoping that contact with the tobacco would offer some revelation.

‘I’ve requested a blood test, as well as an analysis of the black paste and one of her hairs which, you say, suddenly turned white.’

‘It happens, doesn’t it? They say that when you’ve suffered some kind of trauma your hair can go white overnight. It happened to Marie Antoinette the night before her execution.’

‘Bullshit,’ the doctor scoffed. ‘The only way to take all the pigment out of the hair that fast is by pouring bleach on it.’

‘Do you really have the facilities to investigate all this?’ Milo asked.

The doctor cut the tip off his Havana cigar. ‘As you’ll have seen, our equipment is cutting edge. Five years ago, the eldest son of an oil baron sheikh was staying at the hotel when he had a jet-ski accident. He crashed into a speedboat and was in a coma for several days. His father promised to make a substantial donation to the hospital if we managed to get him out of danger. More by chance than anything, he pulled through without any lasting damage. The sheikh kept his word, and that’s why we’re so well set up.’

As Mortimer Philipson stood up to usher us out, I asked if I could spend the night by Billie’s bedside.

‘No point,’ he said abruptly. ‘We’ve got a nurse on call and two medical students who’ll be working all night. Your “cousin” is our only patient. She’ll be monitored 24-7.’

‘Really, Doctor, I insist.’

Philipson shrugged and returned to his office, muttering, ‘If you want to break your back sleeping in a chair, that’s your funeral, but don’t come running to me tomorrow morning when that sprained ankle and cracked rib of yours are giving you hell.’

Milo left me outside Billie’s room. I could tell he was on edge.

‘I’m worried about Carole. I’ve left dozens of messages on her voicemail, but I still haven’t heard anything. I’ve got to find her.’

‘OK, good luck, bro.’

‘G’night, Tom.’

I watched him walk off down the corridor, but after a few yards he stopped in his tracks and turned back toward me.

‘You know, I wanted to say… to say I’m sorry,’ he admitted, looking me right in the eye.

His eyes were red and shining, his face haggard, but he had an air of determination about him.

‘I really screwed up, taking risks with my investments,’ he went on. ‘I thought I was smarter than the rest. I let you down and now you’ve lost everything. I don’t know if you’ll ever be able to forgive—’

His voice cracked. He screwed up his eyes and a tear ran down his cheek. Seeing him cry for the first time in my life made me uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to react.

‘It’s just so dumb,’ he added, rubbing his eyes. ‘You know, I thought we’d done the hard part, but I was wrong. The hardest thing isn’t getting what you want; it’s keeping hold of it once you have it.’

‘Milo, I don’t give a shit about the money. It never filled a void; it never solved anything. You know that.’

‘We’ll get out of this mess, the same way we’ve always done, you’ll see,’ he promised, trying to pump himself up again. ‘Our luck won’t run out now.’

Before leaving to look for Carole, he slapped me on the back and assured me, ‘I’ll sort this out, I swear. Maybe it’ll take some time, but I’ll do it.’

I turned the handle quietly and peered round the door. Billie’s room was enveloped in bluish shadow. I walked over to her bed, making as little noise as I could.

Her sleep was fitful and feverish. A thick sheet covered her body, with only her pale face peeking out above it. The sparky vivacious blonde, who just this morning had been playing havoc with my life, had aged ten years in the space of a few hours. I sat beside her for some time, choked up, before laying my hand gingerly on her forehead.

‘You’re one hell of a girl, Billie Donelly,’ I whispered, leaning toward her.

She wriggled and, without opening her eyes, murmured, ‘I thought you were going to say “one hell of a pain in the ass”.’

‘That too,’ I said, trying to hide my emotion.

I stroked her face and told her, ‘You’ve pulled me out of a black depression. Because of you, all the feelings that have nagged away at me are fading. You’ve filled the silence with your laughter and wisecracks.’

She tried to say something, but her breath was so short that she couldn’t get it out.

‘I won’t give up on you, Billie. I swear to you,’ I promised, taking hold of her hand.

Mortimer Philipson struck a match and lit his cigar, then walked out onto the green holding his putter. The golf ball was a little over eight yards away, on a slight slope. Mortimer took a long drag on his cigar, then crouched down to get a better feel for the shot. It would be a tricky putt, but he’d got hundreds in from this distance. He got into position and focused. ‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity,’ Seneca had said. Mortimer played the shot as if his life depended on it. The ball rolled over the green and seemed to hesitate before skirting round the hole, without actually falling into it.

Opportunity was thin on the ground tonight.

Milo rushed out to the hotel forecourt and asked the valet to fetch the Bugatti from the underground car park. He headed towards La Paz, using the satnav to find the spot where he’d left Carole. That afternoon on the beach, he’d seen just how
raw her wounds were, wounds he hadn’t known even existed before.

How often we fail to notice the suffering of those we love most
, he thought to himself sadly.

The broad-brushed portrait she’d painted of him had got to him too. She’d always thought of him as a low-down,
good-for-
nothing, tacky, trailer-trash male chauvinist pig, just like everyone else did. He had to admit he hadn’t done much to set her straight. It suited him to hide behind this image, which protected a sensitive side he was scared to acknowledge. He would have done anything to get Carole to love him, yet he didn’t feel able to reveal his true self to her.

He drove for half an hour through the bright night. The shadow of the mountains loomed out of the clear sky, so unlike the sky above our polluted cities. He turned down a wooded track to park the car, shoved a blanket and a bottle of water into his bag and took the stony path down towards the beach.

‘Carole! Carole!’ he shouted as loud as he could. But his cries were carried off by the capricious warm wind, which blew over the sea, moaning sadly.

He found the cove where they had argued that afternoon. The air was mild and the pale full moon was admiring its own reflection on the surface of the water. Milo had never seen so many stars in the sky, but there was no sign of Carole. With a torch to light his way, he carried on, clambering over the craggy rocks that lined the shore. About 500 yards further on, he slipped down a narrow path which opened out into a small bay.

‘Carole!’ he shouted again as he stepped onto the beach. His voice carried better this time. The cove was sheltered from the wind by granite cliffs which softened the sound of waves breaking on the shore.

‘Carole!’

With all his senses primed, Milo walked the length of the cove until he caught sight of something moving at the far end. As he approached the cliff face, he saw that the rock was split almost from the top by a long fault line, which opened out into a cave. There he found Carole curled up on the sand with her legs tucked under her and her head hanging down, shivering. She looked utterly crushed. She was still clutching her pistol tightly.

Milo knelt down beside her. He was nervous approaching her, but his anxiety quickly gave way to real concern for his friend. He wrapped her up in the blanket he had brought with him and lifted her up to carry her back to the car.

‘I’m sorry about what I said earlier,’ she mumbled. ‘I didn’t mean it.’

‘It’s all forgotten,’ he reassured her. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’

The wind blew colder and stronger. Carole ran her hand through Milo’s hair and looked up at him, her eyes brimming with tears.

‘I’ll never do anything to hurt you,’ she whispered in his ear.

‘I know,’ he said, holding her tightly to him.

Keep going, Anna. Don’t give up. Keep going!

On the same day, some hours earlier, in a blue-collar district of Los Angeles, a young woman by the name of Anna Borowski was hurrying up the road. If you’d seen her running along in her fleece-lined hoodie, you’d probably have thought she was out for a morning jog. But Anna wasn’t going jogging. She was going through trash.

Just a year before, life had been good for Anna. She ate
out several times a week and didn’t bat an eyelid at spending a thousand dollars on shopping trips with her girlfriends. But when the economic crisis came everything changed. One day she had a job, the next her firm was laying off half its staff and her management role no longer existed.

For a few months, she had told herself she was just going through a bad patch, and stayed upbeat. She was prepared to take any job she was qualified for, spending her days on job sites, sending out thousands of CVs, going to careers fairs and even spending a sizeable sum on careers coaching. But all her attempts came to nothing. In six months, she hadn’t even managed to land a proper interview. To get by, she’d had to take a cleaning job at a retirement home in Montebello, but the few measly dollars she earned weren’t nearly enough to cover her rent.

Anna slowed down as she reached Purple Street. It wasn’t yet 7 a.m. The road was beginning to come to life, but it was still quiet. Nevertheless, she waited for the school bus to go by before delving into the garbage can. The more she did it, the better she became at putting aside her dignity and pride. Anyway, she didn’t really have a choice. Thanks to her former spend-now-think-later mentality and a few debts that had seemed insignificant in the days when she was earning $35,000 a year, she was now in danger of losing the roof over her head.

At the beginning, she had merely rummaged in the dumpsters out the back of the supermarket below her apartment, looking for food that had gone past its sell-by date. But she was far from the only one to have had that idea. Each evening, an ever-growing crowd of homeless people, casual workers, students and hard-up pensioners swarmed around the metal containers, until the management put an end to it by spraying all the food with detergent. So Anna
had been forced to look further afield. To begin with, she had been traumatised by the experience, but the human being was an animal, able to adapt to all kinds of humiliation.

The first garbage can she came across was full to the brim, and her explorations bore fruit: a half-eaten box of chicken nuggets, a Starbucks cup with a fair amount of black coffee left in it, and another containing a cappuccino. In the second, she found a torn Abercrombie shirt which could easily be washed and mended and, in the third, a nearly new book with an attractive imitation-leather cover. She put the meagre hoard in her rucksack and carried on.

Half an hour later, Anna Borowski returned home to her little apartment in a modern, well-kept block, which now contained only the bare minimum of furniture. She washed her hands and poured the two coffees into a mug which she put in the microwave along with the nuggets. While she waited for her breakfast to be ready, she spread out the day’s haul on the kitchen table. The elegant Gothic-lettered book cover leapt out at her. A sticker in the left-hand corner told the reader, ‘by the author of
In the Company of Angels
’.

Tom Boyd? She remembered the girls at the office talking about him. They couldn’t get enough of his books, but she’d never read anything by him. As she wiped a blob of milkshake off the cover, it occurred to her she might be able to get a good price for this. She logged on to the internet by hacking into her neighbour’s Wi-Fi once again. The book cost $17 to buy new on Amazon. She went into her eBay account and put it on sale for $14 to buy now. Worth a shot.

Then she washed the shirt, took a shower to scrub herself clean and got dressed, pausing in front of the mirror to look at herself.