The Girl on Paper Page 19

  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 microw
ave 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.

  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.

  26

  The girl who came from nowhere

  Those who fall often bring down with them those who come to their aid

  Stefan Zweig

  Hotel clinic

  8 a.m.

  ‘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 mutte
red 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.