The Girl on Paper Read Free Page A

depression. The writer had barely leftthe house in six months, preferring to barricade himself in his luxurious prison, refusing all phone calls and visitors.
    ‘Last chance, Tom: let me in!’
    Every evening Milo came to bang on the door of the luxury house, but every evening all that greeted him was the angry complaints of annoyed neighbours and the inevitable intervention of the security guards who were employed to protect the houses of the mega-rich residents of Malibu Colony.
    But he had had enough of waiting around for Tom to open up. It was time for more extreme measures.
    ‘OK, you asked for it!’ he said, taking off his jacket and grabbing the metal crowbar lent to him by Carole, their childhood friend who was now a detective with the LAPD.
    Milo glanced back at the view behind him. The sandy beach was basking in the warm early-autumn sun. Lined up like sardines, the luxury villas extended along the seafront, as if creating a kind of barrier against unwelcome intruders. The area was home to countless Hollywood stars and business tycoons. Tom Hanks, Sean Penn, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Aniston were all said to own properties here.
    Milo blinked, dazzled by the sunlight. Fifty yards away, a tanned Adonis was standing in front of a small hut on stilts. He was clearly a lifeguard and was looking through his binoculars, apparently mesmerised by the surfer girls enjoying the powerful Pacific waves.
    As no one was watching, Milo got to work with the crowbar.
    He wedged the curved end of the metal lever into one of the small slits in the shutter and pushed down with all his might until the wooden slats broke away from the frame.
    Do you have the right to save your friends from themselves? he wondered as he broke into the house.
    But the moment of moral doubt didn’t last long; apartfrom Carole, Milo had only ever had one friend and he was prepared to do anything to help him forget his heartache and start living again.
    *
    ‘Tom?’
    In the half-light it felt as if the house was in an eerie state of suspended animation, and it smelt stale and musty. The kitchen sink was overflowing with dirty plates and the living room looked as though it had been vandalised: the furniture had all been turned over, while the floor was littered with dirty laundry and broken plates and glasses. Milo had to pick his way through pizza boxes, empty Chinese takeaway cartons and beer bottles to get to the windows, which he opened to bring some light and air back into the room.
    The two-storey house was built in an L-shape with an underground swimming pool. In spite of the mess, the house seemed calm, with its maple furniture, pale wooden floors and abundant natural light. The interior design was a blend of modern and vintage, mixing more up-to-date pieces with furniture that harked back to the days when Malibu was just a surfing beach, before it became the luxury haunt of miilionaires.
    He found Tom on the sofa, curled up in the foetal position. He was a shocking sight; pale, with a Robinson Crusoe-style beard, he looked nothing like the stylish photos on the back of his novels.
    ‘Anyone in there?’ shouted Milo.
    He moved closer to the sofa. The coffee table was littered with crumpled prescriptions from Dr Sophia Schnabel, the ‘psychiatrist to the stars’, whose Beverly Hills clinic kept a significant proportion of the area’s jet-set population in legal drugs.
    ‘Tom, get up!’ Milo barked as he knelt down beside his friend.
    Warily, he inspected the pillboxes that were scattered around the floor and table: Vicodin, Valium, Xanax, Zoloft, Stilnox. A lethal modern cocktail of painkillers, tranquillisers, antidepressants and sleeping pills.
    ‘My God!’
    Suddenly fearing an overdose, he was seized by panic and took his friend by the shoulders to try and rouse him from his drug-induced slumber.
    Violently shaken back to consciousness, the writer finally opened his eyes.
    ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he slurred.

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