Soul Beach

. . and Danny. None of the other Guests even know I exist.
    ‘ALICE FORSTER!’
    His voice comes back to me, from the direction of our rock. It sounds different when he’s shouting, but he’s still my Danny.
    ‘I HAVE TO GO, BUT I PROMISE I’LL BE BACK TOMORROW. AND THE NEXT DAY, AND THE NEXT DAY.’
    ‘Hmm. You know, it never does any harm to play hard to get, sis. Even with dead boyfriends,’ Meggie says.
    ‘I’LL BE HERE, ALICE. ALWAYS. THE BEACH IS NOTHING WITHOUT YOU!’ Danny shouts back.
    I smile so broadly that my face almost hurts.
    My sister sighs. ‘I guess keeping love’s young dream apart is going to be tougher than I thought.’

56
    Lewis has a swanky car – a show-off’s convertible, in silver – and after Dad’s stopped asking him questions about turbos, Lewis drives out of the close in first gear. Then puts his foot down, glancing to his left to see my reaction.
    ‘You might impress the other geeks, but you don’t impress me,’ I say.
    He laughs. ‘Is that all you see me as, a geek? After all that I’ve done?’
    At the roundabout, take the third exit. Then, take the motorway .
    The sat nav has a low and bossy female voice – perhaps that’s how a dominatrix sounds. As he obeys her instructions, I watch him and wonder why he’s here. He accelerates onto the motorway, driving smoothly and not too showily, considering that the few other drivers on the road this early are giving the car admiring glances.
    He’s a decent guy, Lewis. I don’t know why he puts up with my vagueness and my snide remarks. ‘Why are you helping me like this?’ I ask him.
    ‘I like a mystery.’
    ‘I don’t believe you could like a mystery enough to put up with hanging round a moody teenage girl who won’t tell you what’s going on.’
    Lewis glances at me. ‘You’re a mystery wrapped in an enigma, that’s for sure. And very different from your sister.’
    He accelerates past a lorry, into the fast lane. It’s so quiet in here. If you couldn’t see the world whizzing past, you’d never believe we were doing a hundred and ten.
    After five hundred yards, keep right.
    ‘How well did you know my sister?’
    ‘Like I said before, she was in my year. Same parties, plus, you know, she went out with one of the kids from my class in Year Ten.’
    ‘Did she?’
    ‘For about two weeks, it was. I doubt she’d even have remembered his name, but it gave my classmate a heap more kudos. She was a catch, your sister.’
    Weird to hear him talk about her in the past, when last night she was real enough to stop me seeing the love of my life. ‘You never fancied your chances?’
    He changes gear. ‘Not my type.’
    ‘I thought Meggie was everybody’s type.’
    He keeps driving.
    After a few miles, he says, ‘You know, I’ve always thought one of the hardest things about someone dying is that you can’t tell the truth any more. My grandma died, my dad’s mum? She was a bitch who criticised everything my mother did, thought her precious son was way too good for Mum. She didn’t even come to their wedding. She was mean with money. She had no interest in me or my brother. But now, to hear everyone talk, you’d think she was a cross between Mother Teresa and a loving little old granny from a fairy story.’
    ‘God, Lewis,’ I laugh. ‘I think that’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard you make.’
    He frowns into the sunlight, pulls his sunglasses down.
    Leaving me thinking about all the things that Meggie was: beautiful, arrogant, funny, spiteful, passionate, cruel, outgoing, jealous, generous, controlling, intelligent, snobbish, fascinating, aggravating, selfish, egotistical . . .
    ‘ Stop, ’ I say to myself.
    Lewis looks across at me. ‘I didn’t know your sister, Alice, but I know that what I read about her in the papers can’t be the whole truth. That she can’t just have been this super-sickly-sweet songbird who never put a foot wrong. After all . . .’ he stops.
    ‘After all, what?’ I stare at him. ‘You were going to say, ‘after all, someone murdered her,’ weren’t you?’
    He shakes his head. ‘No. Not like that. But I wonder whether your obsession with this anorexic girl is a way of distracting yourself from your feelings about what happened to your sister.’
    ‘Are you a qualified psychiatrist, Lewis?’
    ‘No, but—’
    ‘Well, then, stop trying to psychoanalyse me. Of course I want to know who killed Meggie, I’m not a robot. But as for the rest of it, I