Soul Beach (2 page)

I think of her under the lid of her coffin. I know she’s wearing stilettos and her second favourite dress, the one with big red hand-painted poppies. She couldn’t wear her true
favourite, the silky white wrap dress that flowed like spring water, because she had it on when she was found. It’s
evidence
.

I thought coffins were as sturdy as a Landrover Discovery, to see the passenger safely into the afterlife. But hers is slim and sleek, with chrome handles as flimsy as the straps on her
stilettos.

That’s when I stop acting brave. And that’s when I start crying.

I can’t do it. I can’t see her buried.

It is the worst thing that could happen to her. She hated the dark, hated cramped spaces, and as for dirt . . . my sister never even made sandcastles because she didn’t want filthy
nails.

Instead, I run home – two miles through the back streets, so I don’t bump into anyone I know. All the way, I try to block out images of her under the ground, hands grasping at the
heavy earth, lungs gasping for oxygen but filling up with soil with every breath.

Is that how she felt when the killer held a pillow over her face?

My hand is shaking so much that I can hardly get the key in our front door, and my own breath is loud and painful. When I’m back in my room, I peel off my sweaty clothes, but my skin still
smells of church, of incense. Of death.

My computer suddenly seems menacing. I power up, half expecting to find that I imagined that email. And half hoping there will be another one.

But when I log on, nothing’s changed. The email’s still there but nothing more.

I stare at it, in case there’s a picture there somewhere, hidden in the pixels, but nothing changes. Not even the time: 10.05.09

Four months and five days since she left us.

I open up my email and begin to write.

No. Totally the wrong way to start. I never used to call her soppy names, and even though she’s never going to see this, she’d laugh, or think I’d gone properly crazy if I
started now.

I delete the first line, and start again.

Better. It’s one of the thousand or so nicknames I had for her.

I’ve never used that phrase before.

Earth. The word makes my breathing go shallow again.

I stop. Would a dead person even care about the fate of their body, or would they have abandoned it like last season’s Primark specials?

I re-read the email. Maybe I should be telling her everything that’s happened since she went: the silences at home, the tribute single, my ‘better than expected,
given the circumstances’ GCSE results, my relapse as a nail-biter.

But if she’s watching from heaven, then she knows all that already. What she needs to know instead is the stuff that
really
matters, and I feel lighter now that I’ve told her.
OK, so if that blank email
was
sent by a stupid, sicko fan who hacked her account, then I’ve given him more than enough drama to make his day. But who cares? If there’s a tiny
chance she’ll hear me – even if it’s tinier than me discovering men on Mars or a cure for cancer – then it’s worth the risk of some sad loner with a fetish for dead
girls knowing how I feel.

I press
send
.

My parents are arguing again downstairs. Same old, same old. I thought the funeral might possibly make things better, but a week on, they’re still at it. I used to feel
smug when my friends moaned about their parents’ rows. Not any more.

‘Doesn’t this matter to you at all?’

‘Bea, don’t do this, please.’

‘No. I want to know if it matters to you.’

I switch my music up, but it doesn’t really block out their voices.

‘OK. No. No, it doesn’t matter to me one bit.’

‘Glen, you can’t mean that. Megan deserves the right tree. Something beautiful and delicate but strong. Maybe a fruit tree is best. But then would it be strange to eat it? Oh God,
you see why I need your help . . .’

‘Megan couldn’t tell an oak tree from a Swedish pine. She was nineteen, Bea. She didn’t give a stuff about gardening.’

‘It’s not gardening. It’s a symbol of her life.’

‘Do whatever makes you happy. Water your tree with champagne and feed it caviar, it makes no difference. We can’t replace Megan with a tree, or a rose bush or a bloody hanging
basket.’

Maybe talk radio will drown them out. I push my headphones into my laptop.

What now? I could call Robbie, but he’ll want to talk about the funeral, because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. Cara would try to distract me with her latest crush, which I
can’t face either.

If I’m really desperate, I could do my media studies assignment. I pick up the sheet:
A globalised, centralised media inevitably means an impoverished world view. Discuss, with relevant
examples.

Maybe I’m not that desperate.

I know what I
want
to do. It’s been at least ten minutes since I last checked my email, so I want to check again. Since the funeral, nothing’s come from Meggie’s
account. Perhaps the ghost in the machine has floated off to haunt someone else. I’ve been fighting the temptation to send another email. It might be crazy, but sending that first one made me
feel a tiny bit better.

The spam folder shows three emails, none from Meggie’s account.

I’m about to delete them and then I see the subject line of the bottom one . . .

What the hell?
Soul Beach?

I go straight onto Google, but nothing shows up. I try going directly to the website: soulbeach.org. My hands are shaking so much that I keep mistyping, but when I finally get it right and hit
go
the browser freezes. Nothing happens. Nothing at all. I feel like screaming at the screen, but I know Mum would hear me. So instead I whisper.

‘What does this mean, Meggie? Where the hell are you? Are you even there?’

But of course there’s no answer. How could there be? I guess it’s two-nil to the sick bastard who must be loving the fact that I was dumb enough to respond to that first email.

There’s a rushing in my ears, I’m so angry. I need to get out of here. Dunno where. Anywhere but in front of this bloody screen. I shut down Firefox and then . . .

Oh my God.

I stare at the desktop. I’ve had the same wallpaper forever – since before it all happened, a photo-collage of brilliant days with my mates, my parents, and, of course, my sister. In
the centre of the screen is a shot of the two of us on a camping holiday in France, just after we won the fancy dress contest as Alice and the Mad Hatter. (Of course, Meggie got to be Alice,
despite it being my name. She just looked the part.)

Except, she’s not there any more. None of us are. The collage is gone, and in its place there’s a new image.

Of the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen.

Cara reads the email print out about fifty times before she says anything. Then, finally:

‘Sickos.’

She pops another Nicorette gum into her mouth. Her mum’s a GP and has been slipping her a pack a week since school reported Cara for smoking before her GCSE Physics exam. What
Mummy
doesn’t know is that a) Cara bought her first packet of fags on her thirteenth birthday, and b) the gum doesn’t stop her smoking, it just keeps her going at break, as smoking
anywhere
on site now would get her permanently excluded. Two strikes and you’re out at Redview School for Girls.

‘I mean,’ she says, twisting a strand of newly-dyed blue-black hair around her finger, ‘what kind of psycho does this kind of thing?’

‘You’d be surprised how many weirdoes there were on forums talking about Meggie after she died.’

‘You
Googled
her?’

I blush. ‘Yeah. Does that make me weird too?’

She chews it over; the gum keeps reappearing, grey as a headstone next to her newly whitened teeth. ‘Nah. I’d have done the same if it had been my sister.’

Cara’s an only child. We used to say that we were soul sisters, until Meggie died and I realised too late that there’s
nothing
like the real thing.

‘The Facebook stuff was pretty normal, if sending tonnes of virtual bouquets to someone you’ve never met counts as normal. But then there were whole forums about her voice, her face,
even made-up stories about her life. And everyone posting had some unique theory about who’d killed her, and why.’

Cara gives me a sympathetic look. ‘Like it’s not obvious.’

I frown. ‘He hasn’t been charged. If it’s that obvious, he’d be in prison, Cara, you know that, whatever the papers say.’

Tim isn’t the murderer. I’m not sure about anything else in the world any more, but I know that a guy who used to rescue spiders from the communal kitchen in the student flats,
can’t be a killer.

But if it’s not him, then who?

She gives me that look, the one that says
well, we all know you fancied Tim right from the first time Meggie brought him home with her from college so you can’t be expected to see
sense.

It’s not even true. I liked him because he was the first one of Meggie’s boyfriends to treat me as an interesting person in my own right, but Cara couldn’t believe it was that
simple, and she used to tease me about him all the time – though she has cut me more slack since my sister died.

She reads the email again. ‘So, what’s it like?’

‘Eh?’

‘The site, dummy. What’s Soul Beach like? Is every day really
as beautiful as the last?
’

It’s my turn to give
her
a look. ‘I didn’t click on the actual link. It was probably a trap. Anyway, I Googled Soul Beach and it doesn’t even exist.’

Cara stares at me, as if she doesn’t understand me at all, and then the bell goes and I head off to English and she goes to Law and I don’t listen to a word the teacher says because
I’m too busy writing my reply to the Soul Beach
psycho
in my head.

What if the person emailing isn’t some random stalker, but someone I know? I don’t have many enemies. At school, a few of the girls dislike me because I hang round with Cara and they
hate her for her big mouth and her big boobs. But if someone wanted to upset her, they wouldn’t do it through me, would they?

Messenger flashes up.

Later? I’d forgotten all about it, even though Robbie is the least forgettable boyfriend in the world. All the girls like him because he has a broad smile like Zac Efron’s, and thick
golden hair that’s too good to be true. We met in Year Ten, when Cara was dating his friend, and though she dumped the friend after a month, Robbie and I have been together ever since. A year
and a half. Makes us pretty much married, according to our friends.

Then the news came, and when Robbie turned up at my house, crying almost as much as me, it was like a switch had been turned off inside me. I felt nothing. And I still don’t.

Maybe I should finish with him, but I won’t feel like this forever, will I?