The Girl on Paper (18 page)

She had just turned thirty-seven. For years she had looked younger than her age, and then all of a sudden it was as if a
vampire had sucked out all her freshness. Since losing her job, she had resorted to eating rubbish, which meant she had put on at least twenty pounds. It had all gone on her ass and face, giving her the appearance of a giant hamster. She tried to smile, but hated what she saw.

She was all at sea, the signs of shipwreck writ large across her ugly face.

Get moving, you’re gonna be late!

She put on a pair of pale-blue jeans, trainers and a hoodie.

That’ll do, it’s not like you’re going to a club. No point getting all dressed up to go and wipe up old guys’ shit!

No sooner had she thought this than she was ashamed of being so cynical. She felt so utterly lost. What did she have to cling on to in her darkest moments? There was no one who could help her, no one at all to turn to. No real friends, no man in her life – the last had left the scene several months ago. As for family, she hadn’t told either of her parents about her problems, for fear of losing face. And you had to admit they weren’t exactly hanging around the phone waiting for her news. Some days, she almost wished she had stayed in Detroit like her sister, who still lived five minutes away from the family home. Lucy had never had an ounce of ambition. She’d married a big fat hillbilly who worked in insurance and had a little brat of a child with him, but at least she didn’t have to worry about whether she’d have enough to eat from one day to the next.

Anna went to open the door, but couldn’t bring herself to walk through it. Like everyone else, she was on medication: painkillers for her back and extra strong ibuprofen tablets that she gobbled up like sweets to get rid of chronic migraines. But today she could have done with a powerful sedative to boot. As the weeks went by, she suffered increasingly from panic attacks, living in constant fear and with the unshakeable
feeling that, no matter what she did, no matter how hard she tried, she had no control over her life. Sometimes, the precariousness of her situation affected her mind and she thought she might do something crazy, like the unemployed finance executive who nine months ago had killed five members of his family before turning the gun on himself, just round the corner from here. He had left a letter for the police, putting it all down to his desperate financial situation. He’d been out of work for a number of months and had just lost the sum total of his savings in the stock market crash.

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

She tried to pull herself together. She couldn’t let herself give in. She knew full well that if she stopped swimming she could only sink. She had to fight with all her strength to keep her apartment. She sometimes felt like a creature hiding in its burrow, but at least she could wash and sleep safely here.

She put her iPod headphones in, walked downstairs and took a bus to the retirement home. She cleaned for three hours and spent her lunch hour browsing the internet from the staff-room computer. She had a buyer for the book she’d put up for sale who was willing to pay the asking price. Anna worked until 3 p.m. then went to the post office to send the book to its new owner: Bonnie Del Amico, Berkeley Campus, University of California.

She slid the book inside the envelope, without noticing that half its pages were blank.

‘Hey, fellas, hurry it up a little!’

The instruction crackled from the radios of each of the eight articulated lorries crossing the industrial zone of Brooklyn. As with money transfers, the duration and route of the journey
between the New Jersey depot and the recycling plant near Coney Island were strictly regulated to avoid stock being stolen on the way. Each truck was loaded with thirty pallets, carrying almost 13,000 books packed in boxes.

It was almost 10 p.m. and raining when the enormous cargo entered the pulping station inside a vast compound surrounded by high fences, reminiscent of a military training camp.

One by one, each lorry was emptied and tons of books still in their plastic wrapping were piled up on the concrete floor.

A representative of the publishing company supervised the operation, accompanied by an auditor. It wasn’t every day you had to have 100,000 copies pulped because of a fault in the manufacturing process. The two men scrupulously checked the entire cargo to ensure everything was as it should be. Each time a pallet was unloaded, the auditor would take a book out of its box to check it contained the same printing error. Every one of them had the same thing missing: of the novel’s 500 pages, only half had been printed. The story came to an abrupt end halfway down page 266, right in the middle of a sentence.

Three bulldozers swarmed around the sea of books, shovelling them like so much worthless rubble onto conveyor belts that sped towards the metal monster’s open jaws. The pulping could now begin.

The two crushers greedily swallowed tens of thousands of books. The mechanical beast violently tore them apart and chewed them up. Ripped pages whirled around in a blizzard of paper dust.

Once they had passed through the digestive system, a pile of gutted, skinned and slashed books emerged from the beast’s bowels. Then they were squashed by a press and excreted in big wire-bound bundles. Afterwards, these compressed
cubes were piled up at the back of the warehouse. The next day, it would be their turn to be loaded onto more lorries. The recycled paper pulp would be reincarnated as newspapers, magazines, tissues or shoeboxes.

Within a few hours, it was all over. Once the entire stock had been destroyed, the factory owner, publisher and official signed a document recording the number of books that had been pulped in each batch.

The total came to 99,999 copies.

‘Well, you’re doing a great job of watching over me, snoring like a pig!’

I opened my eyes with a start. I was slumped over the arm of a wooden chair and my back was killing me, my throat was tight and I had pins and needles in my legs.

Billie was sitting up in bed. Her face was beginning to get some colour back, but her hair was still white. She seemed to have a spark about her again though, which had to be a good sign.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’ve felt better,’ she admitted, sticking out her tongue, which was back to its usual pink. ‘Could you pass me a mirror?’

‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.’

But she wouldn’t take no for an answer. I handed her the small mirror from the bathroom. She looked at herself in horror, lifting up clumps of hair, brushing it aside, ruffling it
and inspecting the roots, appalled to see that in the course of a night her lustrous golden mane had turned into an old lady’s hair.

‘But… but how could this happen?’ she asked, wiping away a tear.

I put my hand on her shoulder. I couldn’t give her any explanations. I was trying to think of something comforting to say when the door opened and Milo and Dr Philipson walked in.

Holding a folder under his arm and looking preoccupied, the doctor muttered a swift greeting then stood for several minutes at the foot of the bed, studying the patient’s charts.

‘We’ve had most of the test results back,’ he announced eventually, looking both excited and confused.

He took a felt-tip pen out of his coat and set up the little board he had brought with him.

‘First of all,’ he began, scribbling down a few words as he spoke, ‘the thick black substance you threw up was indeed an oil-based ink. We found traces of its characteristic pigments, polymers, additives and solvents …’

He let his sentence trail off, then came straight out and asked, ‘Did you try to poison yourself, young lady?’

‘No, I did not!’ Billie protested.

‘The reason I ask is, to be frank, I can’t see how you could throw up such a substance without first having consumed it. It doesn’t fit with any known pathology.’

‘What else did you find?’ I asked to move things along.

Mortimer Philipson handed each of us a sheet of paper filled with figures and terms I had heard on
ER
or
Grey’s Anatomy
, but whose precise meaning I wasn’t sure of: blood count, electrolytes, urea, creatinine, blood-sugar level, liver function, haemostasis and so on.

‘As I suspected, the blood test confirmed a diagnosis of
anaemia,’ he explained, adding another item to the board. ‘With nine grams of haemoglobin per decilitre, you’re well below normal levels. This explains your paleness, extreme tiredness, headaches, palpitations and dizzy spells.’

‘So what’s behind the anaemia?’ I asked.

‘We’ll need to do more tests to work that out,’ explained Philipson, ‘but that’s not what’s worrying me most.’

I was staring at the blood-test results and, despite knowing nothing on the subject, I could see straight away that one of the figures looked odd.

‘It’s the blood-sugar level that’s out, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right,’ Mortimer agreed. ‘We’re looking at a severe form of hypoglycaemia, to an unheard of degree.’

‘How can it be “unheard of”?’ Billie asked anxiously.

‘Hypoglycaemia occurs when the level of sugar in the blood is too low,’ the doctor explained in simple terms. ‘When the brain is unable to obtain sufficient amounts of glucose, it leads to dizzy spells and fatigue. But your glucose level is off the scale.’

‘Which means what?’

‘Which means that while I’m talking to you right now, you should in fact be dead, or at least in a deep coma.’

Milo and I spoke in unison. ‘That can’t be right!’

Philipson shook his head. ‘We’ve repeated the tests three times. It’s incomprehensible, and yet there’s something even more mysterious going on here.’

He took the lid off his pen again and held it in mid-air.

‘Last night, one of my interns had the idea of doing a spectrograph. It’s a technique which allows you to identify molecules by mass and to characterise their chemical stru—’

I cut him off. ‘Could you just get to the point?’

‘It showed the presence of abnormal carbohydrates. To be clear, you have cellulose in your blood.’

He wrote the word ‘cellulose’ on his board.

‘As you are no doubt aware,’ he went on, ‘cellulose is the main component of wood. Cotton and paper also contain a substantial amount of it.’

I couldn’t see where he was going with all this. It became clearer when he asked us a question.

‘Imagine you swallowed a bunch of cotton swabs. What do you think would happen?’

‘Not much,’ said Milo. ‘They’d pass right through you when you did a number two.’

‘That’s right,’ agreed Philipson. ‘Cellulose is indigestible to humans. It’s what marks us out from herbivores like cows and goats.’

‘So if I understand this right,’ said Billie, ‘the human body doesn’t normally contain cellulose, and so—’

‘And so,’ the doctor finished her sentence, ‘your biological composition is not consistent with that of a human being. It’s as though a part of you were becoming “vegetal”.’

There was a long silence, as though Philipson himself were struggling to accept the conclusions of his tests.

There was still one more piece of paper in his folder: the results of the analysis of the girl’s white hair.

‘Your hair contains a very high concentration of sodium dithionite and hydrogen peroxide, a substance naturally secreted by the human body. When we get old, it’s hydrogen peroxide that causes our hair to go white, by inhibiting the synthesis of the pigments that give it its colour. But this is usually a very gradual process; I’ve never seen a girl of twenty-six whose hair turned white overnight before.’

‘Is it permanent?’ asked Billie.

‘Um,’ mumbled Mortimer, ‘colour can sometimes be partially regained when certain diseases are cured or aggressive treatments are stopped, but I’m afraid that’s only happened in a few isolated cases.’

He gave Billie a look of genuine compassion before admitting, ‘Your condition falls well outside the bounds of my expertise and those of this little clinic. We’ll keep you under observation here today, but I can’t recommend strongly enough that you be taken back home.’

The three of us remained in the room. Having wept until she had no more tears to cry, Billie had eventually fallen asleep. Slumped on a chair, Milo was polishing off the meal tray that Billie hadn’t touched, all the while keeping his eye on the board the doctor had left behind:

‘I think I might have something,’ he said, leaping to his feet. He took up position in front of the board, grabbed hold of the felt pen and put a curly bracket around the first two lines.

‘This greasy, sticky ink stuff that your girlfriend threw up, that’s what goes on printing presses, like the ones they use for your books.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘And cellulose, it’s the main ingredient of wood, right? And wood’s used to make—’

‘Er, furniture?’

‘Paper pulp,’ he corrected me, fleshing out Dr Philipson’s notes. ‘As for the hydrogen peroxide and sodium dithionite, well, both of those are used to bleach—’

‘Paper, right?’

After every answer, he turned the board to me: 

‘I didn’t believe it at first, Tom, the whole story of the heroine falling out of the book, but the facts are staring us right in the face. Your girlfriend is turning back into a character on paper.’

He stood staring into space for a moment, then finished his scribblings:

‘The fictional world is taking back what it rightfully owns,’ he concluded.

He was wandering around the room, waving his arms about wildly. I’d never seen him so worked up.

‘Calm down!’ I urged him. ‘What exactly are you trying to say?’

‘It’s obvious, Tom. If Billie is a fictional character, there’s just no way she can thrive in the real world!’

‘Like a fish out of water…’

‘Exactly! Think of the films we watched when we were kids. Why does ET get ill?’

‘Because he needs to get back to his planet.’

‘Why can’t the mermaid in
Splash
stay on dry land, and the guy live underwater? Because every creature is different and can’t just adapt to every environment.’

His argument held water, with just one exception.

‘I’ve just spent three days with Billie and she was a total riot. Real life seemed to suit her pretty damn well. So how come she went downhill so fast?’

‘It’s true, that doesn’t make a lot of sense,’ he admitted. Milo liked things to be logical and rational. He sat back down, frowning, and crossed his legs before carrying on with his train of thought.

‘We have to think of the “doorway in”,’ he muttered, ‘the hole the fictional character came through to wind up in our reality.’

‘How many times do I have to tell you? Billie “fell from a line, in the middle of an unfinished sentence”,’ I explained, using the very same words she had spoken when we first met.

‘Ah, of course! The hundred thousand books with half the pages left blank. That’s it, that’s the “doorway in”. Speaking
of which, I’d better check that they’ve all been—’

He stopped halfway through the sentence, his mouth hanging open, before pouncing on his cell phone. I saw him scroll through dozens of emails before finding the one he was looking for.

‘What time did Billie’s symptoms start?’ he asked without lifting his eyes from the screen.

‘I’d say some time around midnight, when I went back to the room.’

‘So that would be 2 a.m., New York time, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Then I know what set it all off,’ he declared, handing me his iPhone.

I scanned over the email my publisher had sent Milo.

‘Did you see what time the email came through?’

‘Yes,’ I nodded, ‘exactly the same time she became ill.’

‘Billie is
physically linked
to the defective copies,’ he hammered out.

‘And by getting rid of them, we’re killing her!’

We were both overexcited and terrified at the implications of what we had discovered. Above all, we felt helpless, faced with a situation that was way beyond us.

‘If we do nothing, she’s going to die.’

‘But what can we do?’ he asked. ‘They’ve already destroyed all the stock!’

‘No, if that were true, she’d already be dead. There’s at least one book left that they didn’t manage to pulp.’

‘The copy the publishers sent me and I gave to you!’ he cried. ‘But what did you do with it?’

I had to rack my brains. I remembered looking at it the night Billie had turned up, soaked to the skin, in my kitchen. Then again the next morning, just before she showed me her tattoo. And then…

I couldn’t concentrate. Images were flashing through my head. And then… and then… we’d argued and, in my anger, I’d thrown the book into the kitchen trash.

‘We’re really in the shit now!’ whistled Milo when I told him where the last copy was. I rubbed my eyes. I had a fever too. It was my sprained ankle, which was becoming unbearably sore; it was the army of Mexicans who had laid into me at the bar near the motel; it was my medication-starved body; that crazy bastard’s surprise right hook; and that unexpected kiss that changed everything.

My head ached so much I imagined it filled with bubbling lava. Out of the tangle of my thoughts a sudden realisation came to me.

‘I need to call my cleaner and make sure she doesn’t throw out the book,’ I told Milo.

He held out his phone and I managed to get through to Tereza, only to learn that she had put the trash out two days earlier.

Milo read the look on my face and winced. Where was the book now? Had it wound up in landfill? Was it about to be incinerated or recycled? Might someone have picked it up in the street? We needed to get on its trail, but we knew it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

One thing was certain: we didn’t have any time to lose.

Because Billie’s life depended on finding that book.