The Girl on Paper (5 page)

EXPLOSION!

A WOMAN SCREAMS!

A CRY FOR HELP!

The sound of breaking glass wrenched me out of my nightmare. I opened my eyes with a start. The room was plunged in darkness and rain was lashing against the windows.

I sat up, slowly and painfully, my throat dry. I felt feverish and I was soaked with sweat. I was having difficulty breathing, but I was still alive.

I looked over at the alarm clock:

03:16

I heard noises coming from the ground floor, and I could make out the sound of the shutters slamming against the wall.

I tried to turn on the bedside lamp, but, as was often the case, the storm had cut the power in Malibu Colony.

I forced myself to get out of bed. I felt nauseous and my head was heavy. My heart was thumping in my chest as if I had just run a marathon.

Feeling dizzy, I had to lean against the wall for support. The sleeping pills might not have killed me, but they had thrown me into a kind of limbo that I was struggling to climb out of. My eyes were what worried me the most: it was as though someone had peeled them, and they felt so raw that I was having difficulty just keeping them open.

Tortured by my headache, I dragged myself down the stairs, clutching the banister for support. With each step I took, I felt my stomach churning, as though I might throw up at any moment.

Outside, the storm raged. Whenever lightning flashed, the house resembled a lighthouse in the middle of a tempest.

When I finally reached the bottom of the stairs, I took stock of the damage. The wind had rushed in through the bay window, which had been left wide open, knocking over a crystal vase which had smashed on the floor. The torrential rain had started a small flood in my living room.

Damn it!

I hurried over to shut the window and then went to the kitchen to dig out a box of matches. It was only when I went back into the living room that I suddenly became aware that someone else was in the room with me.

I turned round.

The slim, graceful outline of a woman stood out against the bluish light from outside.

I jumped with fright, then peered closer into the darkness. As far as I could tell, the young woman was naked, covering her modesty with her hands.

Well, this is all I need!

‘Who are you?’ I asked, moving closer to see her more clearly.

‘Oh! Don’t worry about that,’ she replied, grabbing hold of a tartan rug to wrap around herself.

‘What do you mean, “Don’t worry about that”? What on earth’s going on? Can I just point out that you’re in my house?’

‘Maybe so, but that’s no reason to—’

‘Who are you?’ I asked for the second time.

‘I would have thought you’d recognise me.’

I was having difficulty making her out in the darkness, but in any case I didn’t recognise the voice, and I was in no mood for guessing games. I struck a match to light an old Chinese hurricane lamp that I had found in a flea market in Pasadena.

The soft light illuminated the face of my intruder. A young woman of around twenty-five stared back at me with an expression that was half alarmed and half defiant. Water streamed from her honey-coloured hair.

‘I don’t see how I’m supposed to recognise you; we’ve never met.’

She let out a mocking laugh, but I refused to play her game.

‘Right, that’s enough, miss! Tell me what you’re doing here!’

‘It’s me, Billie!’ she said, as if this were perfectly obvious, pulling the rug around her shoulders.

I saw that she was shivering and that her teeth were chattering. It was hardly surprising: she was soaked to the bone and the room was freezing cold.

‘I don’t know anyone called Billie,’ I replied, turning to the large walnut cupboard which held all kinds of junk.

I slid open the door and rummaged around in a sports bag until I found a beach towel patterned with Hawaiian palm trees.

‘Take this,’ I said, throwing the towel across the room to her.

She caught it and dried her face and hair, still fixing me with that defiant stare.

‘Billie Donelly,’ she said, watching me carefully for my reaction.

I stood motionless for a few moments, not really understanding what she was saying to me. Billie Donelly was one of the secondary characters in my novels. She was appealing but something of a lost soul. She worked as a nurse in a hospital in Boston. I knew that a lot of my female readers identified with her ‘girl next door’ personality, and her string of failed relationships.

Taken aback, I stepped toward her and shone the light at her. Like Billie she was slim, energetic but sensual-looking, with a perfect heart-shaped face and slightly angular features, scattered with a few discreet freckles.

But who was this girl? An obsessive fan? A reader who identified a little too much with my character? An
attention-seeking
admirer?

‘So you don’t believe me then?’ she asked, sitting herself down on a stool at the breakfast bar in the kitchen and picking up an apple from the fruit bowl, which she began to devour greedily.

I put my lamp down on the wooden counter. Even though my head was still throbbing, I was trying to remain calm. Intruders breaking and entering into celebrity homes had become commonplace in Los Angeles. I had heard that one morning Stephen King had found a man armed with a knife in his bathroom; that an aspiring screenwriter had broken into Spielberg’s house just to get the director to read his script; and that one of Madonna’s more unbalanced fans had threatened to cut her throat if she refused to marry him.

For a long time I had been spared this unfortunate phenomenon. I shied away from television studios, turned down most interviews and, much to Milo’s despair, rarely appeared in public to promote my books. It was a source of personal pride that my readers enjoyed my books and my characters for what they were, rather than for me as a
celebrity. Recently, however, the media attention that my relationship with Aurore had attracted had turned me, against my will, from a respected author into a less respected ‘star’.

‘Hello? Anybody there?’ Billie interrupted my train of thought, waving her arms around in front of my face. ‘God, I thought you’d died for a second there, with your eyes like a cat’s butt.’

That sounds exactly like something Billie would say
.

‘OK, that’s enough now. You’re going to put some clothes on and go back to where you came from.’

‘I think it would be a little difficult for me to go back there.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I come from the pages of your books. For someone who’s meant to be a literary genius, you’re a little slow on the uptake.’

I sighed, trying not to give in to my growing exasperation. I attempted to reason with her. ‘Look, as you well know, Billie Donelly is a fictional character.’

‘Yeah, she certainly is.’

That’s something at least
.

‘But this is the real world.’

‘I would have thought that was obvious.’

Now we’re getting somewhere
.

‘So, if you really were a character out of my novels, you couldn’t be standing here now.’

‘Oh yes, I could.’

This girl was really something
.

‘Explain to me how that’s possible, and explain fast, so I can go back to bed.’

‘I fell.’

‘Where from?’

‘From a book. From your book, to be precise!’

I looked at her disbelievingly. I did not have the first clue what she meant.

‘I fell from a line, in the middle of an unfinished sentence,’ she added, pointing to the book Milo had given me at lunch, as if this proved her point.

She got up and brought me the copy, which she opened at page 266. For the second time that day, I read the passage where the story came to an abrupt end:

‘You see, it’s written right there: “she cried, falling”. So I fell into your world.’

The more she spoke, the more shell-shocked I felt. Why did these things always fall (literally this time) on me? What had I done to deserve this? True, I was probably a little out of it, but not enough to have made all of this up. I’d only taken a few sleeping pills, not LSD! Whatever it was that I was seeing, this girl was nothing more than a figment of my imagination. She was probably just an unpleasant physical manifestation of the overdose I had taken a few hours earlier.

I tried to hang on to this idea, eager to convince myself that all this was just a hallucination that had lodged in my mind, but I couldn’t stop myself from replying, ‘You’re crazy, and that’s putting it mildly. I’m guessing this isn’t the first time someone’s told you this?’

‘Well, you should probably just go back to bed, because you clearly have your head stuck up your ass, and that’s not putting it mildly.’

‘I will go back to bed, because I don’t want to waste any
more of my time with a lunatic like you!’

‘That’s fine – I’ve had enough of your insults!’

‘Well, I’ve had enough of dealing with a madwoman who’s dropped out of bloody nowhere into my house at three in the morning!’

I wiped the beads of sweat off my forehead. I was finding it difficult to breathe again, and spasms brought on by anxiety were making the muscles in my neck tense up.

My cell phone was still in my pocket. I took it out to punch in the number of the security guards who protected the Colony.

‘Oh, that’s great, chuck me out!’ she shouted angrily. ‘Much easier than actually helping me!’

I was not going to get involved in her games. Still, there was something touching about her: her comic-book features, her cheerful freshness, that slight tomboyishness, which was softened by her deep blue eyes and endless legs. But what she was suggesting was so incomprehensible that I didn’t think I could help her.

I typed in the number and waited.

The first ring
.

My face was flushed and my head felt heavier than ever. Then my vision blurred and I started seeing double of everything.

Second ring
.

I needed to splash my face with water, I needed to—

But everything around me grew hazy and the room started to swim. I heard the phone ring a third time as though the sound were coming from very far away. Then I lost consciousness completely and collapsed on the floor.

The rain was still beating down incessantly, lashing the window panes, which shook in the howling wind. The power had finally come back on, although the lamps were still flickering precariously.

Bundled up in a quilt, Tom had fallen into a deep sleep on the sofa.

‘Billie’ had turned the heating on and donned a dressing gown that was far too big for her. With her hair wrapped in a towel, she looked around the house, holding a cup of tea. She opened all the wardrobes and drawers, setting out on a meticulous inspection of the contents of every cupboard, right down to the food in the fridge.

In spite of the mess in the kitchen and living room, she liked the edgy, bohemian decor: the surfboard that hung from the ceiling, the coral lamp, the antique brass telescope, the vintage jukebox.

She spent half an hour examining the shelves of the bookcase, plucking books here and there whenever one
caught her attention. She found Tom’s laptop on a desk and turned it on without any hesitation, but discovered she needed a password to log on. She tried a few words from his books, but none of these granted her access to his files.

In one of the drawers, she found a bundle of letters addressed to Tom, with postmarks from all over the world. Some envelopes contained drawings, pressed flowers and lucky charms. For an hour she pored over each of the letters and noticed with some surprise that a large number of them mentioned her.

On the desk itself, more mail lay in heaps, mail that Tom had not even got around to opening yet: receipts, bank statements, invitations to premieres, press clippings that had been sent to him by the publicity department at Doubleday. Without pausing to think about what she was doing, she opened most of the envelopes, leafing through the writer’s bank statements and immersing herself in the story of his break-up with Aurore, which had been carefully chronicled by several newspapers.

Occasionally, she glanced over at the sofa as she read, to make sure that Tom was still asleep. Twice, she got up from her seat to cover him properly with the quilt, as if he were a sick child.

She also studied with great interest the slideshow of photos of Aurore that were displayed in the digital photo frame on the mantelpiece. There was something extraordinarily calm and graceful about the pianist. Something intense, yet pure. Looking at the photos, Billie couldn’t help wondering why some women were so blessed at birth – with beauty, talent, education and wealth – while others had to start life with so little.

She sat herself down on a windowsill and watched the rain as it drummed on the glass. She looked at her reflection in the
window and felt dissatisfied with what she saw. She had always been ambivalent about her looks: she thought her features were too pointy, and her forehead too high. Her lanky,
long-limbed
frame made her look like a grasshopper. She certainly didn’t find herself attractive, with her modest bust, narrow hips, awkward posture and freckles, which she particularly disliked. Of course, her legs, which went on for ever, weren’t too bad. They were her ‘deadly weapon’, to use an expression from Tom’s novels. They were legs that drove men wild, but they weren’t always the nicest men. She banished these thoughts from her mind, abandoning the ‘enemy in the mirror’ to continue her investigation of the house.

In the dressing room of the guest suite, she discovered an impeccably ordered walk-in closet. These were probably clothes that had been left behind by Aurore and were an indication of how quickly the relationship had ended. She walked around this Aladdin’s cave in amazement, eyes wide like a child in a sweet shop. It held some of fashion’s most prized treasures: a Balmain jacket, a beige Burberry trench coat, a Birkin bag – a real one! – a pair of Notify jeans …

In the shoe section, which slid out, she found the Holy Grail: a handmade pair of Christian Louboutin stilettos. Miraculously, they fitted her perfectly. She couldn’t resist trying them on in front of the mirror, allowing herself to play Cinderella for fifteen minutes, with a pair of pale denim jeans and a satin blouse.

She ended her tour of the house in Tom’s bedroom. She was surprised to find the room bathed in a bluish light, even though there were no lights on. She turned to face the canvas on the wall and stood fascinated in front of the lovers’ embrace.

In the half-light, the Chagall had an otherworldly quality and seemed almost phosphorescent in the shadows.