Soul Beach

to protect me any more.’
    Another pause. I can definitely hear people now. Have they always been there, in the background, and it’s taken me this long to decipher the sounds?
    ‘All right, then. I feel like crap, Florrie. Lonely, and desperate. I get up every day and the sun is shining in the same perfect way, not a cloud in the sky. Like in that bloody song: When we’ve been here ten thousand years . Maybe there’s no escape, and I wasted the bit of life I had, and there’s not a single thing I can do about it.’
    ‘Oh.’ I want to tell her how many millions of people miss her, and how that must be proof that she didn’t waste a second of her life. ‘I’m so sorry, Meggie. Are you in pain?’
    ‘No. Nothing physical hurts at all. Here . . . How can I put this? Everyone is whole. Undamaged. Some of them died horribly, but there’s not so much as a ripped shirt. Though there’s the odd pair of deliberately ripped jeans.’
    ‘Good.’ It’s only now that I imagine how the place could have been if they weren’t whole, a beach crowded with the dead, bits missing or hanging off, bleeding into the sand. I try to block it out, to think instead of questions that might help me understand and help me see . ‘How many is everyone ?’
    ‘I don’t know. Sometimes it seems like a few dozen. But sometimes hundreds. The beach, well, it kind of goes on for ever. Take a look yourself.’
    I move the mouse through three hundred and sixty degrees. The view is turquoise and gold, like Tutankhamen’s breath-taking death mask. Apart from the pier and the beach bar, and the clusters of bamboo-and-palm beach huts, there’s nothing but beach and sea and sky. Oh, and the hundreds of other people I can’t see.
    ‘Can you see me , Meggie?’
    A pause. ‘I can see a shadow. A you-shaped shape. And I knew straight away it was you because . . . I don’t know. If I say you’ve got an aura it sounds wanky, doesn’t it? And just cos I’m dead doesn’t mean I’ve gone all new-age. They say you might get clearer, or you might not. But in my head, you’re there, right down to the cowlick to the left of your fringe, and the big spot you always get between your eyebrows.’
    I hear the sadness in her voice. ‘Shows what you know,’ I say. ‘The antibiotics the doctor gave me finally kicked in. I haven’t had a spot since April.’
    ‘You’re growing up, Alice.’
    She only ever calls me Alice when she’s being serious. ‘Yeah.’
    The silence between us is heavy.
    Finally she speaks. ‘I ought to let you go now, baby sis. It’s quite draining, isn’t it, being back together and knowing that it could end at any moment?’
    I’m about to argue that I want to stay, but I suddenly realise I do feel dog-tired, and when I look at my watch, it’s almost midnight. I’ve been on the Beach for nearly three hours. How did that happen? It felt like minutes. The best, yet worst, minutes of my life.
    ‘I’ll go. But I’ll be back tomorrow, if that’s all right?’
    ‘All right?’ She laughs. ‘I can honestly say that you turning up on the Beach is the most wonderful thing that has happened to me since I died. Sweet dreams, Florrie.’
    And she’s not pretending. I can hear the truth in her voice.
    ‘Sweet dreams, Meggie.’

17
    ‘Three questions are enough to find the truth. With just three questions you can bring down a government, reveal an affair, unmask a killer.’
    Mr Bryant’s words slice through my daydream.
    Unmask a killer? Talking to my sister again has put finding her murderer back on the agenda. All I think about is that, and her, and the Beach.
    ‘So now, in groups of four, I want you to plan an interview for one of your favourite celebrities. One that will reveal more than ever before. But only in three questions.’
    Mr Bryant claps his hands together, like he’s applauding himself. I used to like his classes, the way he at least tries to be entertaining, unlike most of our teachers.
    But now I resent the fact that I have to listen to his cheesy lines, when all I want to do is be on Soul Beach, with my sister.
    At lunchtime, Cara and I take our Diet Cokes out onto the school field so she can try to top up her fading tan in the thin autumn sunshine. The Goth look has been abandoned – ‘the guys who like it are all depressive morons’ – and she’s spent two entire Saturdays having her black hair turned to honey blonde. She’s also on a caffeine-only diet, in preparation for a date