Free The Girl on Paper by Guillaume Musso Page A

‘provocative and mocking, at once confident and childlike’.
    ‘Most prized quality in a man?’
    ‘Did you get your questions out of Proust?’
    ‘Something like that.’
    ‘I like men to be men . I don’t have much time for those guys who are so obsessed with their “feminine side”. You know what I mean?’
    I looked doubtfully at her. I was about to fire another question at her, when she suddenly spoke up again.
    ‘What about you? What quality do you value most in a woman?’
    ‘Imagination, I think. Humour is the foundation of intelligence, isn’t it?’
    She pointed at the digital picture frame which was playing the slideshow of photos of Aurore.
    ‘You say that, but your pianist doesn’t look like she has much of a sense of humour.’
    ‘How about we stick to the point?’ I suggested, joining her on the sofa.
    ‘You’re starting to like this interrogation thing, aren’t you? Are you enjoying the power trip?’ she joked.
    But I was not to be distracted, and I continued with my questioning.
    ‘If you had to change one thing about the way you looked, what would it be?’
    ‘I’d like to be a bit curvier, more feminine.’
    I didn’t know what to say. She knew everything. Either this woman really was mad and had identified with Billie to the point where she had started to become her, or she really was Billie, and it was me that was going mad.
    ‘Come on then,’ she taunted.
    ‘All this shows is that you know my books really well,’ I said, doing all I could to hide my surprise.
    ‘OK, ask me some more questions then.’
    That was exactly what I intended to do. Just to provoke her, I chucked the copy of my book into the chrome-metal trash can, then opened my compact laptop and typed in my password to access my desktop. I actually knew much more about my characters than what went into my novels. To really get inside the heads of my ‘heroes’ I had got into the habit of writing a detailed biography of about twenty pages or so for each one. I put as much information as possible into thesebiographies, from their date of birth to their favourite song, including things like the first name of their nursery-school teacher. At least three-quarters of this information did not end up in the published version of the book, but it was all part of the invisible framework necessary for the mysterious alchemy of writing. I had convinced myself that this exercise gave my characters a certain level of credibility, or at least a little humanity, which perhaps explained why many of my readers identified with them.
    ‘Do you really want to keep going?’ I asked, bringing Billie’s file up on screen.
    The young woman pulled a small silver lighter and an opened pack of Dunhills out of a drawer in the coffee table, a pack that I hadn’t even known was there; it had no doubt belonged to one of the women I had dated before Aurore. She lit a cigarette with a peculiar elegance.
    ‘That’s exactly what I want to do.’
    I looked at the screen and picked something at random.
    ‘Favourite rock band?’
    ‘Um … Nirvana,’ she said before changing her mind. ‘No, the Red Hot Chili Peppers!’
    ‘Not a particularly original choice.’
    ‘But it’s the right answer, isn’t it?’
    She had a point. Probably a lucky guess. Who didn’t love the Red Hot Chili Peppers?
    ‘Favourite meal?’
    ‘If it’s a friend from work asking, I’d say Caesar salad, so I don’t look like a total pig, but really it’s a nice greasy portion of fish and chips!’
    This time, she couldn’t have just been guessing. I felt beads of sweat forming on my forehead. No one, not even Milo, had read these ‘secret’ biographies of my characters. The only place I kept them was on my computer, where they werewell protected by a password. Still refusing to take this as evidence that she was telling the truth, I hit her with another question.
    ‘Your favourite position?’
    ‘Fuck off.’
    She got up from the sofa and stubbed out her