Soul Beach

like a piggy today, in shiny tights that are too hot for the Indian summer, a granny-ish black skirt and a puffy-sleeved cream blouse that my mother chose. I sweat between my parents, dressed like a five-year-old on her way to a birthday party, and I have to jam my hands under my legs to stop myself reaching for the door and making a run for it.
    As the car pulls up at the church, the size of the crowd is shocking.
    Could Meggie’s murderer be here?
    The first person I recognise is Sahara, because she’s so tall. She raises her muscular arm in a half-wave. Sahara lived in the room next to Meggie in halls, and I recognise some of the other girls from my trips to uni alongside her. I scan the faces, looking for guilt. Or evil.
    Did one of you kill my sister?
    I want to scream the question at them, to see if anyone reacts. But would knowing the truth make any of this any easier for me to stand?
    A couple of the girls have been crying already. Sahara’s boyfriend is the only guy with them. What’s his name? Andrew? Aidan? He’s that memorable.
    There’s no Tim, of course. Mum was going to ban him, but Dad pointed out that he wouldn’t have come anyway. He’s the kind of guy who’d understand that it’d be the wrong thing. Mum tutted and muttered something like, ‘And the kind of guy that murders his girlfriend and gets away with it’ .
    But I don’t believe for one second that he killed her. And I know that today he’ll be thinking of us. Thinking of Meggie.
    To the left of Sahara there are more people who could be students, but I don’t recognise any of them. So what the hell are they doing here? I clock the glazed eyes and the slack jaws and the way they’re staring at me, and then I know. They’re the same people who hang out on the net, posting comments after the clips of Meggie on YouTube or on the Sing for your Supper fan forums, saying how they miss her and how they loved her and how she was their best friend.
    All it took was one series of that crappy reality show for them to believe she was part of their lives, and that they owned a little part of her.
    But does that mean one of them killed her?
    Dad says they’re just harmless nutters, but how did they know to come to this church today? Maybe there’s a website for people who get off on death.
    Or a website for people who want to impersonate their dead heroes?
    I might be looking into the eyes of the person who hacked her account and sent me that email. I feel sick .
    We get out of the car, and Mum is swallowed up by a huddle of people. Her grief buddies. Five women, and a tall, sandy-haired man with swollen lips, like a supermodel’s, and an airbrushed face. I know straight away this must be Olav, the Expert in Loss.
    Robbie and Cara are standing by the church entrance. They’re always here for me. In a parallel universe, where the only reason to remember 10/05/09 is for my sixteenth birthday, Robbie would still feel like my boyfriend and Cara would feel like my best friend and all three of us would be planning which uni to apply for, and wondering whether our folks will let us go on holiday together. Instead . . .
    They hug me, Cara first, then Robbie. Cara looks the same as ever – she’s going through a phase of always wearing black, even on the beach – but Robbie, who lives in jeans, looks so much older and more serious in his suit and, well, kind of sexier, I guess. Except I don’t know if I feel that way about him any more.
    Dad looks lost. There’s no one here for him.
    It’s hot outside after the air conditioned car, and then cold again as we step into the dark church porch. I feel feverish.
    Oh, God.
    That can’t be her, in that coffin ahead of me. We file into the front pew, and I stare at my hands. Anything but look at it. She’s with us, but not. And she’s certainly, definitely, one hundred per cent not able to send me blank emails at mystically significant times.
    The vicar has a booming voice that fills the church space with words about my sister, a girl he never knew, and never will.
    ‘Today is a day for grief, but also for gratitude, for the life of Megan Sophie London Forster. The long wait to put Megan to rest has been taxing for those who loved her, and most of all for her mother, Beatrice, her father, Glen, and her sister, Alice . . .’
    Around me, people are singing. Sahara is belting it out, and so are most of the stalkers. But hymns meant nothing to Meggie: even Amazing Grace , the song that launched