Soul Beach

a blurry palm, and I join her. ‘What’s this about?’ Maybe it’s not Danny at all. Maybe she wants to know if I’ve been to Greenwich and got a confession out of Tim yet.
    She sighs. ‘It’s Triti. She’s in the most awful state.’
    ‘Triti?’ I think of the last time I saw her, so utterly lonely among so much laughter. ‘What’s happened?’
    ‘She keeps . . . doing stuff. Like jumping off the pier head first, even though of course she never drowns. She’s even started cutting herself. I mean, she bleeds, but then seconds later her skin’s healed up, and she keeps trying, as though if she does it enough times, she’ll succeed.’
    The waves suddenly seem more like a quickening pulse than a tide. ‘But she won’t, will she?’
    Meggie shivers. ‘Nope. The trouble is, she’s upsetting people. The Guests who really did drown, who did slash their wrists. It’s like she’s replaying what they did to themselves over and over. It’s not fair.’
    I hear anger in her voice. Is she cross with poor Triti, or is it more frustration at knowing that she’s is in exactly the same boat herself?
    ‘I know, Meggie.’
    She stares at me, her eyes bluer and more real than anything else on the beach. ‘You can help her.’
    I nod. ‘I want to. I really want to.’ Though who am I to think I’m capable of helping anyone, when a stupid crush turns me into a gibbering idiot? I wouldn’t trust myself to help an old lady across the road, never mind deal with life-or-death stuff.
    Yet, as Danny said, maybe I’m the only person who can even attempt it.
    ‘Well, is there any chance you could hurry it up a bit, Florrie? This is important. She needs to get off this bloody beach, not just for her sake but for ours.’ Her bossy tone is the same as when she ordered me to stop biting my nails, because ‘ no boy will ever want to go out with a girl who gnaws away at herself!’
    ‘I am working on it,’ I say, resolving to get back on the case the instant I log off the Beach. After all, helping Triti might help my sister too. ‘I did try to find her on the web, but nothing came up. It’s like she never existed.’ For a moment, Meggie looks as though she’s about to give me another lecture. But something worse happens: she reddens, a colour as dark as spilled blood, from her hairline to her chest. Even her eyes are scarlet.
    Like last time.
    ‘Meggie? Meggie, what is it?’
    And then – it can only have been a couple of seconds, but it feels like hours – she blinks, and the colour drains away again, leaving just that flawless tan and a pale imitation of a smile.
    ‘Sorry, Florrie. I felt like . . .’
    ‘Like you were being buried alive?’
    She stares at me, and nods. ‘I . . . please don’t say that. I don’t want to think about it.’
    ‘Sorry.’
    ‘No, it’s not your fault. I just . . . anyway, we were talking about Triti. I have faith in you, little sis. I know you can do it. So please keep trying. For her sake. For all our sakes.’
    I curse myself for being distracted by trivia, when for the first time in my life, I might be able to do something worth doing. ‘I’ll give it everything I have, Meggie. I promise you that.’
    Now I just have to work out where to begin.

45
    I’m making Mr Bryant’s day, I can tell, by asking his advice on my studies.
    ‘Research is one of life’s guilty pleasures, Alice. What’s the project?’
    I’ve thought carefully about this: if I tell him I want to research a girl who starved herself to death, I’ll be booked in for Olavotherapy before you can say ‘death fixation’. Whereas if I handle this right, the word of my new attitude will be round the staffroom in a millisecond.
    ‘Fame and body image,’ I say.
    ‘Fame and body image,’ he repeats. ‘Excellent. Well, I happen to have an old uni pal who runs a small but comprehensive newspaper archive at the other end of the District line. Here,’ he scribbles down an email address and a phone number.
    As I leave, he’s smiling to himself like a modern day Mr Chips.
    I have to race to the archive straight from school on Friday because it shuts at five. The journey takes an hour, so it’s seriously dark by the time I find the squat building two streets behind the tube station.
    Mr Bryant’s old pal isn’t what you’d call welcoming. ‘You’ve got forty minutes,’ he says, showing me into a low-ceilinged, windowless room with five pods that look like sit-in driving-game consoles from an