Soul Beach

hang from the beams, showing Danny’s face. A choir of girls dressed in the royal blue and crimson uniform of his exclusive private school sing an ‘inspirational’ song I don’t recognise. Half of the congregation are on the brink of tears. A Botoxed pastor gives a sound-bite about lost promise and God’s unfathomable ways.
    Then the video cuts to a long shot of the Cross tomb, the grieving family like stick figures at this distance. The voiceover mentions a childhood sweetheart, and I see a pretty girl with chestnut hair step forward to throw something – flowers, earth? – into the grave.
    See, Meggie? He’s straight.
    There are more headlines linked from this page: a report blaming the pilot for the accident, because he allowed a kid to take over the controls. A rumour that Vincent Cross was planning to sue the pilot’s family for recklessness. Then a final story denying the rumour, and stressing that Mr Cross had gone to considerable lengths to ensure the widow and daughters would be provided for. Between the lines, the message is clear: Vincent Cross is one of the good guys.
    I watch the funeral footage again, with the sound off, trying to make sense of it all. Like my sister, Danny died a violent death, one that made him more famous than he had been alive. And, like my sister, his face sells newspapers: the two of them had it all but readers can take some warped comfort from the fact that neither Meggie’s brief fame or Danny’s huge fortune could stop them losing everything.
    OK, they’re not Curt Cobain or Princess Diana or Che Guevara. They weren’t alive long enough to become real legends, and they’ll be forgotten or replaced by the next tragic teen sooner or later. But their deaths did say something to people about life, however briefly.
    Is that why they’re on the Beach?

28
    I wake up with a pen in my hand, and loose pages of unreadable scribble scattered across the duvet and the floor.
    Last night I spent hours trying to make sense of the rules of the Beach, but I must have been in a kind of trance. The few words I can decipher trigger vague memories of my frenzied searching for details about Danny and his death. Oh, and my theory that Soul Beach is a collection of kids who found their fifteen minutes of fame when it was too late for them to enjoy it.
    My head throbs. I open the laptop and go online again. If Javier is Danny’s death ‘twin’ then it should be easy to find out about how he lost his life, too. On the news search page, I choose the date I now know that Danny died: September thirteenth. Then I type Javier + Spain + death .
    I wait. Nothing appears in the auto-complete box, and so I press return .
    Your search terms have not returned any results for this date. Would you like to widen the search to include other dates?
    Could Javier or Danny have arrived a few days apart, and then got confused? I press yes , and a page loads with thousands of results, most of them in Spanish. I click on auto-translate and, finally , there’s a headline from a Barcelona newspaper, in broken English:
Boy, 17, dies in fall of tragedy during fiesta, drugs suspected
    I scroll down the short article. Javier Natera Fernandez . The dead teenager is ringed in a family photograph: mother, father, a boy, a small girl and a baby on a beach, all grinning at the camera. It must be an old photo because the boy is no more than ten – the defiance in his eyes is absolutely familiar. It’s our Javier.
    But didn’t he say he was an only child?
    There’s another picture, of a roof terrace just visible from street level. Six, seven floors up. I imagine Javier falling . . . falling . . . Was he pushed? Did he call out, wave his arms to try to get some resistance against the air?
    ‘Alice? Are you up yet?’
    The house is coming to life beyond my bedroom door. The fan whirring in the bathroom, the boiler firing up for Mum’s shower, Radio Four in the kitchen. Funny. Those sounds haven’t changed since Meggie died.
    Yet now I think about it, I realise the sound of the waves is always there in the background. A reminder of what I’m missing . . .
    I’m running late, but I crave the Beach so deeply that I don’t care. I log in quickly. My mouth is dry and instead of the familiar rush of energy, all I feel is dread. I can’t explain it: maybe it’s guilt at snooping into the lives of bereaved families, which surely makes me no better than the gawpers at my sister’s funeral. Or maybe it’s fear that