I picked up my car from the parking lot and drove along the coast to Santa Monica. My head was all over the place as I made my way into the city. I felt I was cruising aimlessly through Inglewood, onto Van Ness and down Vermont Avenue, before realising that some invisible force had guided me back to where I grew up.
I parked the convertible near the plant tubs, which, for as long as I could remember, had never contained anything other than cigarette butts and empty bottles.
In the shadow of the high rises, everything and nothing had changed. There were still the same guys shooting hoops on the basketball court and others leaning against the walls, waiting for something to happen. For a second, I was sure one of them was going to shout out, ‘Hey, freak!’ But I was a stranger here now and no one bothered me.
I walked past the wire-fenced court to the parking lot. ‘My’ tree was still there. It looked even scrawnier now, with even fewer leaves, but it was still standing. I sat down on the dry grass and leaned back against the trunk, just like I always used to.
Just then, a Mini Cooper screeched to a halt, right across two parking spaces. Carole got out of the car, still in her wedding dress. She walked toward me, a large sports bag in her right hand, the beautiful white train of her dress in her left to keep it from getting dirty.
‘Check this out, there’s a wedding in the parking lot!’ hollered one of the players from the court.
They all stopped to take a look, before getting back to business.
Carole joined me under the tree.
‘Hey, Tom.’
‘Hey. I think you’ve got your dates mixed up though; today’s not my birthday.’
She smiled, a tear running silently down her face.
‘Milo told me everything a week ago. I swear that’s the first I heard of it,’ she told me, sitting down on the low wall.
‘Sorry I ruined your wedding.’
‘It’s OK. How are you feeling?’
‘Like someone who’s been taken for a ride.’
She took out a pack of cigarettes, but I held her back.
‘Are you crazy or something? You’re pregnant, remember.’
‘Well, don’t talk like that then! That’s not the way you should look at it.’
‘How else do you expect me to look at it? I’ve been treated like a fool, by my best friend of all people.’
‘Look, I saw the way she was with you, Tom. I saw the way she looked at you and I’m telling you she wasn’t faking it.’
‘No, just raking it in to the tune of $15,000!’
‘Now hold on. Milo never asked her to sleep with you!’
‘Well, she couldn’t wait to get out of here as soon as her contract was finished, could she!’
‘Just put yourself in her shoes for a second. You think it was easy for her to untangle it all? As far as she knew, you’d fallen in love with a character – a character that wasn’t really her.’
There was something in what Carole was saying. Who had I really fallen for? A character I’d created, which Milo manipulated like a puppet on a string? Or a failed actress playing the biggest role of her life?
Neither. I’d fallen in love with a girl in the middle of the Mexican desert, when she made me see that everything was richer, more flavoursome, more colourful when she was with me.
‘You’ve got to find her, Tom, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s impossible. We’ve got nothing to go on, not even a name.’
‘You’ll have to do better than that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You see, I could never be happy knowing you weren’t happy too.’
I could hear in her voice that she really meant it.
‘So I brought you this.’
She reached over to her bag and handed me a bloodstained shirt.
‘It’s a lovely gift, but I think I preferred the computer,’ I joked, to ease the tension.
She couldn’t help smiling, before explaining the reason behind it.
‘You remember the morning I turned up at your place with Milo and you first told us about Billie? Your apartment was a mess and the terrace had been turned upside down. There was blood on the window and all over your clothes.’
‘Yes, that’s when “Billie” gashed open her hand.’
‘Seeing the blood really worried me. All kinds of thoughts were going through my mind, like maybe you’d killed or hurt someone. So, the next day I came back to clean up all the traces of blood. I found this shirt in the bathroom and took it away to remove the evidence. I held on to it, and when Milo told me the truth, I took it to the lab for a DNA test. I checked it against the database and…’
She produced a folder from her bag.
‘… and I found out your lady friend has form.’
I opened the wallet to find a photocopy of the FBI file, which Carole summarised for me.
‘Her name’s Lilly Austin, born 1984 in Oakland. Arrested twice in the last five years. Nothing too serious: once for failure to comply at a pro-choice march in 2006, and again in 2009 for smoking pot in a park.’
‘Is that all you need to do to get a record?’
‘I’m guessing you don’t watch CSI then? California state police routinely take DNA from people who’ve been arrested for or suspected of committing certain offences. If it makes you feel better, you’re part of the club too.’
‘Do you have her new address?’
‘No, but I put her name into our database and came up with this.’
She handed me a sheet of paper. It was an enrolment form for Brown University, for the current academic year.
‘Lilly’s studying literature and dramatic arts,’ explained Carole.
‘How did she get into Brown? That’s one of the best schools in the country.’
‘I called them. She won a place on the basis of her written application, skipping the usual process. I guess she must have spent the last few months studying.’
I looked at the two documents, fascinated by Lilly Austin, the stranger whose picture was slowly forming before my eyes.
‘I’d better get back to my guests,’ said Carole, looking at her watch. ‘And you’ve got someone to see too.’
*
I took the first flight to Boston the following Monday. I arrived in the capital of Massachusetts at 4 p.m., hired a car at the airport and headed toward Providence.
The Brown University campus was made up of impressive redbrick buildings surrounded by lush green lawns. It was the end of the day for many of the students. Before setting off, I’d looked up the timetable for Lilly’s courses online, and I was waiting outside the doors of the hall where her lecture was about to finish, my heart thumping.
I was standing far enough back so that she didn’t see me when she came out with a crowd of other students. I didn’t quite recognise her at first; she’d cut her hair and dyed it darker. She was wearing a tweed cap and an outfit – short grey skirt over black tights, fitted jacket over turtleneck sweater – that gave her the look of a London girl.
I’d made up my mind to go over, but I wanted to wait until she was on her own. I followed the group of two guys and another girl until they got to a café not far off campus. Drinking her tea, Lilly launched into a passionate debate with one of the male students – an intellectual type with Latin good looks. The more I watched her, the happier and calmer she seemed to me. Moving far away from LA to continue her studies seemed to have restored her sense of balance. Some people were good at that, starting over; all I could ever do was carry on.
I left the café without approaching her and got back in the car. Dipping back into college life had left me feeling low. Sure, I was glad to see her looking happy, but the girl I’d seen today wasn’t ‘my’ Billie any more. She’d clearly turned a page, and seeing her chatting to that twenty-year-old made me feel old. Maybe the ten-year age gap wasn’t so easily bridged after all.
As I drove back to the airport, I kicked myself for
a wasted journey. And, worse, I felt like a photographer failing to capture that once-in-a-lifetime image; I had let the crucial moment pass, when my life could have swung from darkness into laughter and light.
*
On the plane back to LA, I switched on my laptop. Though I was maybe only halfway through my life, I knew I’d never meet a girl like Billie again. A girl who, in the space of a few weeks, had got me to believe in the impossible, and had led me away from that dangerous place where I had been on the edge of despair.
My adventure with Billie was over, but I didn’t want to forget a single moment of it. I needed to tell our story. It would be a story for everyone who has been in love, is still in love, or looking out for love. So I opened a new document and gave it the title of my next novel: The Girl on Paper.
During the five-hour flight, I wrote the whole first chapter in one go. It began:
Chapter 1
The house by the ocean
‘Tom, open the door!’
The shout was drowned out by the wind and there was no reply.
‘Tom! It’s me, Milo. I know you’re in there. Come out of your hole for crying out loud!’
Malibu
Los Angeles County
A beach house
For the last five minutes, Milo Lombardo had been hammering incessantly on the wooden shutters overlooking the terrace of his best friend’s house.
‘Tom! Open up or I’ll kick the door down. You know I’m strong enough!’
39
Nine months later …
The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel
Milan Kundera
A light spring breeze was blowing over Boston Old Town. Lilly Austin was wandering through the steep narrow streets of Beacon Hill. With its blossom-covered trees, gas lamps and brick houses with heavy wooden doors, the area oozed charm.
She stopped outside the window of an antique dealer on the corner of River Street and Byron Street, before heading into a bookstore. Inside, space was tight, with novels snugly lined up alongside essays. A pile of books caught her eye: Tom had written a new novel.
For a year and a half, she had made a conscious effort to avoid the fiction shelf, so she wouldn’t come across him. Because every time she did come across him on the subway, on buses, on billboards or outside a café, she was overwhelmed with sadness and felt like crying.
Whenever any of her college friends talked about him (or, rather, his books), she had to bite her lip to stop herself saying, ‘I drove a Bugatti with him; I crossed the Mexican desert with him; I lived in Paris with him; I’ve slept with him.’
Sometimes, when she saw readers immersed in the third volume of the trilogy, she couldn’t help feeling a bit smug and wanted to call out, ‘It’s because of me that you’re reading that book! He wrote it for me!’
She read the title of the new book: The Girl on Paper. She scanned the first few pages, eager to know more. It was her story! It was their story! Her heart thumping, she rushed to the till, paid for the book then carried on reading on a bench in the Public Garden, a large park in the centre of the city.
*
Lilly nervously turned the pages, not knowing how the tale would end. She was reliving the whole adventure through Tom’s eyes, amazed to discover how his feelings had developed. The story as she had lived it ended with chapter 36, and she approached the final two chapters with trepidation.
The novel was Tom’s way of recognising she had saved his life, but, more than that, it was a sign that he’d forgiven her for lying to him and had carried on loving her after she’d left.
She was almost in tears when she read that he had come to Brown University the previous autumn, leaving without speaking to her. The same thing had happened to her, the year before!
One morning, she had decided enough was enough and got on a flight to Los Angeles, determined to tell him the truth, secretly hoping things weren’t over between them.
She’d arrived in Malibu in the early evening, but the beach house was empty, so she took a cab to try Milo’s house at Pacific Palisades. As the lights were on, she’d walked up to the house and seen through the window two couples having dinner: Milo and Carole, looking very much in love, and Tom, with a young woman she didn’t recognise.
At the time, she’d felt incredibly sad and almost ashamed at having allowed herself to imagine that Tom wouldn’t have found somebody else. Now she understood it must have been one of those Friday night ‘matchmaking dinners’ that his friends organised in the hope of finding him a soul mate.
By the time she closed the book, her heart was pounding. This time it was more than just a hope; she knew for certain their love story was far from over. What they had been through was only the first chapter and she was determined they would write the next one together!
It was getting dark on Beacon Hill. Crossing the road to the subway station, Billie passed a rather prim-looking Bostonian with a Yorkshire terrier under her arm.
She was so happy she couldn’t help declaring it to the world.
‘I’m The Girl on Paper!’ she shouted, holding up the cover for the woman to see.
*
The Ghosts and Angels Bookstore is pleased to invite you to meet the author Tom Boyd on Tuesday 12 June, 3 – 6 p.m., when he will be signing copies of his latest novel, The Girl on Paper.
*
Los Angeles
It was almost 7 p.m. The queue of readers was shrinking and the signing session nearly over. Milo had stayed the whole afternoon, chatting with customers and cracking jokes. His good humour and light-heartedness helped make their wait less tedious.
‘Jeez, is that the time?’ he exclaimed, looking at his watch. ‘I’d better leave you to finish up on your own. It’s feeding time!’
Milo’s daughter had been born three months earlier and, predictably he was smitten.
‘I’ve been telling you to go for over an hour!’ I pointed out.
He flung on his jacket, said goodbye to the store staff and hurried back to his family.
‘Ooh, I booked you a cab,’ he shouted to me from the door. ‘It’ll be waiting the other side of the junction.’
‘OK. Send Carole my love.’
I stayed another ten minutes to sign the last few books and have a quick chat to the store manager. With its warm, soft lighting, creaking floorboards and wax-polished shelves, you didn’t come across bookstores like Ghosts and Angels very often these days. It was somewhere between The Shop around the Corner and 84 Charing Cross Road. The store manager had supported my first novel long before the press picked it up, and I’d stayed faithful to the place ever since, kicking off every book signing tour there.
‘You can go out the back,’ she told me.
She’d started bringing down the metal shutter when there was a knock at the window. A tardy reader was waving around her copy of the book and clasping her hands together, praying to be let in. The manager waited for my nod before opening the door. I took the lid off my pen and sat back down at the table.
‘It’s Sarah!’ the reader said, holding out her book.
While I was writing the dedication, another customer slipped in through the open door. I handed back Sarah’s copy and took the next one, without looking up.
‘Who’s it for?’ I asked.
‘Lilly,’ a calm, gentle voice replied.
I was hurrying along, on the verge of writing her name on the title page when she added, ‘Or Billie, if you like.’
I lifted my head to find life had just handed me a second chance.
*
A quarter of an hour later, the two of us were standing outside on the pavement, and this time there was no way I was letting her go.
‘D’you want a ride?’ I asked. ‘There’s a taxi waiting for me.’
‘No, it’s OK, my car’s just here,’ she said, pointing behind me.
I turned round and, to my amazement, saw the clapped-out bubblegum-pink Fiat 500 that h
ad carried us across the Mexican desert.
‘I got quite attached to the old thing, would you believe?’ she explained.
‘How did you get it?’
‘If you only knew! There’s a story in that…’
‘Go on then.’
‘A long story.’
‘I’ve got all the time in the world.’
‘OK, maybe we could have dinner somewhere.’
‘Sounds good to me.’
‘But I’ll do the driving,’ she said, getting behind the wheel of her old banger.
I paid the cab driver for his time before getting into the car beside Lilly.
‘So, where are we headed?’ she asked, turning on the ignition.
‘Wherever you want.’
She put her foot down and the old crate rattled into action, as shaky and uncomfortable as ever. I hardly noticed; I felt as if I was walking on air, as if we’d never been apart.
‘How about I take you for some lobster and seafood?’ she suggested. ‘I know this great place on Melrose Avenue. But only if you’re paying … I’m not exactly rolling in it at the moment. And no pulling faces this time, none of your “I don’t eat this, or that, and, urgh, oysters are all slimy.” Surely you like lobster? Oh my God, I absolutely love it – the best is when it’s grilled and flambéed with brandy – yum! And what about crab? A few years ago, when I was working at this restaurant in Long Beach, they served these things called robber crabs. They can weigh more than thirty pounds, can you imagine? They climb trees, knock off the coconuts and then crack them open with their pincers to eat the flesh! Isn’t that insane? You get them in the Maldives and also the Seychelles. Have you been to the Seychelles? It’d be such a dream to go there, all those lagoons, the crystal-clear water, the white sand… And those giant turtles on Silhouette Island, they’re just incredible. Did you know they can weigh as much as 400 pounds and live for over 120 years? Pretty cool, huh? How about India? Have you been? One of my girlfriends told me about this amazing guesthouse in Pondicherry that…’