Soul Beach

is furious. Scary even. ‘I’m not going to be trapped in my own house by those scum. It’s not like I’m the guilty one, is it?’
    We follow her into the hallway, Dad trying to change her mind. But when she opens the front door, the driveway and the street are completely empty.
    ‘How did they know?’ Mum asks.
    Fran shrugs. ‘We try to keep things under wraps, but I guess the news got out.’ I realise she’s carrying her bag and coat. Planning a fast exit, I think. I wish I could leave too.
    My mother hesitates on the doorstep. Her anger’s gone, now, and her shoulders slump. Fran opens the door, slips through. ‘I’ll be in touch, hopefully with more positive news.’
    Dad takes my mother’s arm and this time she doesn’t swat him away.
    ‘Brandy,’ he says, and she lets herself be led back inside.
    We all have a brandy, and my mother doesn’t even given my father a dirty look for pouring me one. She can’t sit down. Instead she paces like a zoo animal, mumbling under her breath.
    ‘If you’ve got something to say, then say it, Bea,.’ Dad tells her.
    She tuts. ‘I can’t talk to you about this, can I? You’d rather go on a Tim Ashley is Innocent march than admit he might have killed her.’
    I want to leave but I can’t. I don’t trust my legs to hold me up. The brandy has left an evil, woody taste in my mouth and I want to be sick.
    ‘Maybe I was wrong,’ Dad says.
    Maybe I was wrong, too. Perhaps I was fooled by Tim’s shyness. Wasn’t Hitler meant to be a mild-mannered vegetarian, when he wasn’t committing genocide? Perhaps Tim only pretended to be interested in me as some kind of sick smokescreen.
    My mother sits down next to me. Then she opens her arms and, let’s face it, it would be heartless of me to turn away. When she hugs me I smell Meggie’s perfume, Coco Mademoiselle, which Mum wears when she’s missing my sister so much that she can’t bear it, and wants to remind herself that she was real, once. And then she whispers,
    ‘They’ll get him in the end, Alice, I know they will.’
    I let her hold me, but all the time I’m thinking, well, how , if they’ve held him and questioned him and threatened him and he still hasn’t admitted it?
    And that’s when it occurs to me.
    Tim might just tell me the truth . . .

They should have bottled how Meggie smelled.
    Honey and lemon to soothe her throat after a performance. Chamomile shampoo for that silky blonde hair. And last night’s party always clinging to her clothes, last night’s perfume sticky on her skin.
    Sometimes I try to recreate the smell, to help me remember. But for all my alchemy, there’s a missing element, always. The element that made her, her.
    Meggie would have been turned into a brand, had she lived. There would have been a reality show, an autobiography, a range of novels, perhaps. And definitely a signature perfume. Not under her own name, of course. Meggie is too harsh a name. It would have been called Songbird or something even more crass. And it wouldn’t have smelled of her at all. Instead, it would have been sickly. Sweetness and light with no edge.
    A lie, because the Meggie I knew, especially at the end, was more than sweetness and light.
    At least I saved her such indignities.

25
    I count to three. Then I pull away from my mother’s arms.
    ‘I’m really tired, Mum.’
    ‘Of course you are,’ she says, and then she finally notices the brandy Dad poured for me earlier, and gives him a dirty look. ‘Sleep tight, sweetheart. Tomorrow it will all seem better.’
    She doesn’t believe that any more than I do.
    My father hugs me briefly, silently.
    On my way upstairs, I know the only way I’m going to feel better is by seeing Meggie again, even though it’s only twenty minutes since I left her.
    Outside my room, a wave of nausea hits, and I only just make it to the bathroom in time.
    Afterwards I throw water into my face, and try to drink it from the tap, to wipe out the revolting taste. Is it insane to believe that Tim might talk to me ? That our friendship might make him trust me?
    I scrub at my face with a flannel. It’s ridiculous. This isn’t a re-run of Buffy or Scooby Do . Perhaps I am losing it, to imagine he’d confess just because I ask him nicely.
    But then again, perhaps what makes me different is that I’m pretty much the only person out there who wants to believe he’s innocent. I can’t imagine him smothering my sister, ignoring her struggles, and then calmly