Soul Beach (4 page)

Warm?

I look down at my toes. They’re resting on my IKEA rug.

The screen has frozen now. All I can see is pale brown. Has the site crashed?

I move my mouse and the blue comes back.

Ah. I’d fallen face-first onto the sand.

As I scramble to my feet, a cloud of dust appears at the edge of my vision. I clamp my lips shut so it doesn’t go in my mouth.

Yeah, right. Because virtual sand is really something to worry about, compared to insanity.

I keep walking, keep looking for an exit. The perfection of this place suddenly feels claustrophobic. This isn’t heaven. Maybe it’s hell. Or maybe it’s a virus that’s
infected my computer: the
Wish You Were Here
virus. Dad’s going to go mad if this thing is eating my hard drive. They only bought me the laptop on my birthday.

My birthday. Meggie’s
death
-day.

‘I don’t need this, I really don’t need this,’ I say, and I realise I’m crying. ‘Not on top of everything else.’

The sound of the waves changes.

No.

It can’t be.

I move closer to the tinny speaker in my laptop and then I hear it for sure. Somewhere below the waves, there is a voice. It’s small. It’s frightened. It’s hardly recognisable.
But it’s there.

‘
Florrie? Is it you, at last? Oh, please. I need it to be you . . .’

‘Meggie?’ I whisper her name, unable to believe it’s really her.

Nothing comes back. Perhaps I wasn’t loud enough. I nudge closer to the mike on my laptop. ‘Meggie?’

‘Florrie . . .’ A murmur, nothing more. She sounds different. Flatter, less lively, not at all like my sister. The possibility that she’s a hoaxer, that this whole thing is a
sick set-up, pinballs round my head again, but I dismiss it; no one would go to this much trouble. It’s too crazy.

More crazy than communicating with the dead through a social networking site?

‘Are you really there, Meggie?’

‘Of course I am. But I didn’t think
you
were ever going to show up.’

That’s more like her. ‘Where are you, Meggie?’

I hear a
very
Meggie-like sigh now. ‘Oh, bloody hell. So they were right.’

‘They?’

‘The others. They said that maybe you wouldn’t be able to see us at first.’

‘All I can see is an empty beach.’ So empty that it feels like the very end of the world.

‘Weird. There are loads of us around this morning. The philosophers are having a picnic to your left. The Emos are on the edge of the pier, wondering whether to jump, and feeling extra
pissed off that if they do they’ll float right back to the surface again like suicidal life buoys.’

Emos? Picnics? So many questions form in my head. I start with the most important. ‘Where are
you
?’

‘I’m right beside you. I’m touching your right hand.’

I look down at my hand, gripping the mouse. ‘I can’t feel anything.’

‘Well, doh. You are
on a website
, aren’t you?’ and she sounds so big sister-ish that I smile.

‘Where are you now, Meggie?’

‘I haven’t moved.’

‘No, I mean, where are you? Where is . . . this?’

A huge sigh comes out of my speakers now. On the screen, a massive wave breaks on the shore and I think I catch a glimpse of a person in front of it, but then the shape melts away like sea
spray.

‘You were exactly like this when you were four.
Why does the man in the moon never blink? How can cheese be yellow when milk is white? Why don’t humans have wings?
The truth
is, I don’t have a bloody clue where this is. The philosophers debate it endlessly, but that’s not my idea of a good night out.’

‘Might you be in heaven?’

I know it’s madness but I swear I feel her breath on my neck as she laughs. ‘Maybe. It’s certainly a version of paradise. We always joke about it being modelled on some icky
honeymoon resort. Danny’s been all over the Caribbean and reckons it’s like that, but then Triti’s Indian and she says it’s like Goa.’

Danny? Triti?
I hadn’t imagined my sister having fun in the afterlife. All this time I’ve been so alone, and now I find out she’s got herself a gang of mates again.
‘Who are the philosophers?’ I rack my brains. ‘Marx and Einstein?’

‘Oh, no,’ she scoffs. ‘There’s no one
old h
ere. It’s our nickname for the really intense bunch who refuse to talk to the rest of us because they
haven’t accepted that they’re here yet. Suicides, we reckon.’

‘Suicides? Is everyone there dead?’

‘Well, doh.’

It’s then I realise I haven’t asked her the most important question of all. The one that never leaves me, even in my nightmares.

‘Meggie? Who killed you?’

The screen freezes. The early morning mist reappears. The sound of the waves fades, and then the display turns a thousand shades of blood red, like a sunset after a massacre.

‘Meggie?’ I whisper first, and then scream. ‘MEGGIE!’

But I’m back on my homepage, and when I try to click back to the site via my introductory email, my browser simply tells me
The URL you have entered does not exist. Please
check your spelling or try later
.

‘Are you OK in there, Alice?’

It’s my mother, back from Group. For a moment,I imagine telling her that I’m not OK, not at all, and why. The thought makes me laugh, in a hysterical sort of way. ‘Fine, Mum.
Fine.’

But I’m not fine. I’ve lost my sister all over again, and I don’t know if I can bear it this time round.

The questions in my head stop me sleeping until my overloaded brain shuts down at four or five a.m. And then I’m so deeply asleep that Mum has to come in and wake me for
school, something she hasn’t done since I was in Year Ten.

‘Come on, Miss Wonderland. It’s like trying to wake the dead.’

I freeze, halfway between lying and sitting up.

My mother freezes too. Then her Grief Buddy training kicks in and she tries hard to smile. ‘You know, it’s only an expression. It doesn’t have any power to hurt us any more
than we already have been.’

I can’t speak. Now I’m awake, the memories of Soul Beach flood my brain and I wish I was there, with Meggie, and then I remember I’ve been thrown out of paradise.

Mum sits down on the bed. I know that look. She’s building up for a proper
talk
. If I’m lucky it’ll be sex or drugs. Anything but . . .

‘Olav has set up a new group, for younger people, and I wondered whether you might be interested in trying it out.’

‘A group for other kids with dead relatives?’
I can’t think of anything worse.

‘Yes!’ she says. ‘Not like the stuffy group I go to, this is much more informal. There’s no theme to the sessions. A chance to chat, that’s all.’

‘Who would go to something like that?’

She looks hurt.

‘Sorry, Mum. I don’t mean
you
. But I’ve got Cara and Robbie to talk to.’

She ignores the suggestion that she’s got no friends. ‘Well, Olav already has a dozen potential members, all in their teens. I’ve met some of them at socials, they’re a
lovely bunch.’

I say nothing. Images of Soul Beach distract me, and I can still hear those waves.

‘Alice?’

‘Sorry. I’m not really awake yet.’

‘No. Of course not.’ She shifts on the bed. ‘I’ll leave you to get dressed. But, remember, however supportive Cara and Robbie try to be, they can’t begin to
understand. At the group, there’ll be people who can.’

‘Maybe I don’t want to sit on a beanbag drinking herbal tea and snivelling into free tissues. It won’t bring her back, will it?’ I sound sharper than I meant to.

Mum stands up. ‘You’re absolutely right, Alice. She’s gone, and we all need to find our own way of accepting that. I shouldn’t have pushed it. You’re entitled to
your space. I’m really sorry.’

I wait till I’ve heard hear her feet going down the staircase. Then I switch on my laptop, and try Soul Beach again.

When I try to access it through my browser history, there is absolutely no trace of any web-surfing after seven o’clock last night. It’s as though I never walked on Soul Beach at
all.

Could I have dreamed it all, down to the sand between my toes and the sarcasm in my sister’s voice? Has grief driven me crazy, like Ophelia in
Hamlet
?

But before I call out to Mum, begging her to sign me up for urgent Olavotherapy, I remember the emails. There they are: the blank one from the day of the funeral, and two from Soul Beach.

Does it make me feel less mad?

Yes.

Does it make me feel any better?

Not even slightly.

Seven days of hell. A week has never felt this long, not at Christmas, not birthdays, not ever.

I’m jumpy and foul-tempered and feverish. Mum thought I was sick, but when the Digital Thermometer wouldn’t budge from Normal, she lost sympathy. She’s still pissed off that I
won’t join Olav’s Teens in Tears sessions, and it doesn’t help that Dad thinks I’m siding with him, so now no one’s really talking to each other
.

Sometimes I feel like the only adult in the house.

Except I haven’t been very adult this week. I skulk around, checking my email even more often than usual, but there’s been nothing from the Soul Beach Management Team. Assuming they
even exist. In between refreshing my account over and over again, my days pass in the usual jumbled way – lessons, canteen, homework, more homework, inane chatter from Cara about men, intense
questions from Robbie about university choices. I can’t focus on any of it. Soul Beach might not be a computer virus, but it’s infected my head. Where
is
Meggie? Is she happy?
And will I
ever
hear her voice again?

When I lost her the first time, it hurt like hell, but I swear this is worse.

‘What
is
your problem?’ Cara finally asks me when we’re walking home. It’s too hot for the last day of September, and my school shirt sticks to my back.

‘What do
you
think?’

She raises her eyebrows. We keep walking. After a bit, she says, ‘I don’t get why you’ve suddenly gone downhill again. I thought you were getting better.’

Yet again I consider telling her about getting onto the site. But she won’t understand. ‘Oh, I’m
sorry
. I didn’t realise that you’d get bored with such a
mopey best friend. Better find yourself a more cheerful one, eh, Cara?’

‘Come on, Alice, I didn’t mean—’

But I don’t want to listen. I hear the rush of blood, or the ocean, or whatever it is. I run and I don’t stop till I’m home. All I can think about is that at eleven forty-five,
it will be
exactly
seven days since I was blocked by the site. So I must get an answer by then. Surely?

I shower. I eat three rounds of toast spread with too much Marmite, but I can’t taste it. I sneak some vodka from the freezer but spit out the first sip. I try to do my homework on the
laptop, checking email every couple of words . . .

Maybe I’m being
too stupid to live
by believing this could still turn out OK, that the people behind the site will play fair. This isn’t Apple or Microsoft or the BBC
or—

I click again and for a moment I don’t believe what I’m seeing.

There’s an email.