Last time on “Memory Lives On,” Anja and Gary were hanging around in a graveyard for little or no purpose, and Gary pointed out something he seemed to find embarrassing.

It was doubled-up, a family vault.  Only one of the people the stone was for had been buried, because no body had ever been found. 

Because, as we’ve established, exploding light fixtures completely obliterate bodies.

Jessica Miranda Wolf

Loving wife of Paul and mother of Gareth

Born 12^th March 195_

Died 1^st August 199_

Gareth Richard Wolf

Son of the above

Born 15^th January 198_

Died 22^nd October 200_

“Keep climbing.”

Gary looked back at me.  “Well, now you know my birthday. 

Because that’s the most important thing to take away from this.

Incidentally, when I wrote this, I was convinced that “Gary” was always short for “Gareth.”  It turns out that, most of the time, they’re completely unrelated (“Gary” is German and “Gareth” is Welsh, and they mean different things.)  Some people do use “Gary” as a shortened form of “Gareth”, but it’s pretty rare, and it’s not where the name originally comes from. As you’ll find out later in the chapter, there are  actually a lot of names whose origins I wasn’t too bothered about.

Come on; let’s get back.  The others are probably worried about us.”

I didn’t follow him for a few seconds.  I’d just noticed something small and white between the tulips.  On closer inspection, it turned out to be a folded piece of paper anchored by a pebble.

Don’t ask me what made me pick it up.  I’ve always been too curious for my own good, and since the disaster I’d felt like being at the centre of things. 

“Since the disaster.”  Riiight.

It was always best to know what was happening to me, in case I had to remember later.

As soon as I read what was written, I wished I hadn’t.  It read, I should have looked after your baby, Jessie.  I’m sorry I failed.  Love from Paul.

Now, when it came to this bit of the story, my first instinct was to talk again about how awful Anja and Gary were for knowingly letting Mr Wolf torture himself with guilt instead of telling him that his son was alive.  Then I remembered that, on Mr Wolf’s watch, Gary was regularly beaten up, tortured into a near-fatal heart attack, and made to witness the death of his best friend.  So, really, Mr Wolf is probably right to feel that he’s let his late wife down!

At that point, I decided that from now on someone would be looking after Jessie’s baby, namely me.  I had an inkling that the vow would come back to haunt me, but I made it nonetheless.

What did I tell you about the Oedipal overtones?

I showed the note to Joe later.  “Poor guy,” he murmured, “Sounds like the world thinking he’s dead is the best thing that’s ever happened to him.”  His face looked so tragic anyone might have thought he was the one who’d had so much bad luck.

I sat down and faced him.  “By the sounds of it, your life hasn’t exactly been a fairy tale either.  I mean, what with your dad and all.”

“Actually,” he smirked lazily, “it’s been exactly like a fairy tale.  You know, the ones with all the witches and ogres that keep eating people.” 

How do you “smirk lazily”?

I wasn’t in the mood for messing about.  “You know what I meant, Joe.”

“We’ll have no humour in these parts, mister!”

“OK, OK.  But my life isn’t a patch on what happened to Gary.  I mean, when he was telling it to everyone yesterday, it was all I could do not to cry my eyes out.”  His voice was starting to quaver just remembering it. 

Isn’t it great how the narrative keeps telling you how tragic Gary’s past is, instead of letting you come to that conclusion by yourself?  That’s great literature, right there.

“No Anja, what happened to me was barely anything.  My dad was a complete bastard, that I’ll admit, but he never beat me up or wrecked my room or anything.  And he definitely wouldn’t have if I’d had something wrong with my heart.  All he did was make it very obvious that he loved the others and not me.”  He sighed.  “And that ended when Aunt Jean asked me to live with her in Southend.  I think I’d always been her favourite, which made a change from my parents and their Leah-worshipping.” 

This is probably the longest Joe’s gone so far without grinning sleazily or making Anja feel uncomfortable.  He must be growing up!

My mind was racing, putting together small facts I’d got.  The word “Southend” had reminded me of something, and now my train of thought was out of the station and zooming into the sunset towards a seemingly impossible conclusion.  A nightclub in or near Southend…  The owner’s relative called James…  A young single mother working there…  At the end of my thoughts, I had one question I needed to ask Joe. 

“Joe, you know Cherry?”

He did that grin again.  This time he looked a bit like a shark.  “I’d know her in the Biblical sense if I had my way, believe me…” 

Or not.

“Enough.  Listen, is Cherry her real name or just a nickname?”

He sniggered.  “No, it was a kind of stage name.  I can’t remember her real name.  She was the only one who could pronounce it.  

Eh?  “Svetlana” isn’t that hard to pronounce.  Not compared with, say, Pheidippides.  Or Gwenfrewi.

Oh, sorry- SPOILERS.

I think it’s Russian, those names are usually hard to work with, and that was weird, because she was originally from Manchester or somewhere…” 

We never do find out why Cherry/Svetlana has a Russian name, any more than we find out why Anja has a Russian first name and an Irish last name.  Best to put it down to their innate specialness and move on.

It was true.  “Not… Svetlana?”

“Something like that.  Why, do you know her?”

A shiver was starting down my spine, and even Joe looked slightly less apathetic.  “I think I might,” I whispered, “I’ve got a cousin called Svetlana who works in a nightclub in Southend…” My voice faded out when I saw Joe’s bored look.  Appearances can be deceiving, though; he was actually getting more interested by the second.   

Anja knows this because of those psychic powers we mentioned earlier.

He pursed his lips in thought. 

I can honestly say I don’t know anyone, male or female, who purses their lips while they think.

“How’s she related to you?”

“I just said, she’s my…”

“I know that, but is she your dad’s brother’s daughter or what?”

“Oh.”  I thought for a second.  “Her mum’s my dad’s sister.”

“So her last name is different from yours?”

“Yeah.”  I got onto the next step before Joe could say anything.  “Her last name’s Hughes.” 

See?  Welsh last name.  So we still don’t know where all these Russian names are coming from.

There was a silence which probably only lasted a few seconds, but seemed to be longer because so much was dependent on how the silence broke. 

I’m not sure that anything is dependent on how the silence broke, to be honest.  Unless they mean that they’ll have to stop lazing around Mark and Estelle’s house and actually do the detective work they’ve been talking about

Joe’s eyes bugged out in shock.

“Snap,” he said finally, “That’s Cherry’s last name too.”

That’s not really such a shock, now, is it?  We more or less knew that Svetlana and Cherry were the same person three or four paragraphs ago.

But apparently it’s enough of a Wham Line to end the scene on, because we pick up an hour or two later.

I’ve got to hand it to Estelle.  She didn’t fall off her chair when I told her that Blaze’s rising star was my cousin.  Well, to be pedantic she was standing up anyway, but she took it very well.

Boom boom.

I don’t know when she started the phone call, but I’m guessing it took quite a while to persuade Svetlana that I really wasn’t dead.  It would have taken a while to persuade me if it had been the other way round.

We don’t hear any part of Estelle and Svetlana’s conversation, because, once again, that would be far too interesting.

The first I heard of it was when Estelle handed the phone to me and shot out of the room.

“Anja?”  That was it.  There was no doubt whatsoever that Cherry and Svetlana were the same person.  Two voices can’t sound so similar, especially since they both had the same excited, high-pitched Mancunian accent.

“Hi, Svetlana.”

“Oh my God, Anja, this is amazing!   

That’s exactly how I’d react if I found out that my cousin had faked her own death and let me and my entire family grieve over her for a week!

I mean, I didn’t believe it when I heard you were dead!  I thought you must have been able to get out of the bus somehow! 

“I didn’t bother to tell your parents or the police about this suspicion, however, because I didn’t really care.  Couldn’t you just have stayed dead?”

And I was right!  Man, Anja, why didn’t you tell me before?”

This is the closest anybody other than Mr Daly will come to confronting Anja about her awful behaviour.

After I’d recovered from this flurry of emotive sentences, I could answer.  “I didn’t know the others knew you until about an hour ago!”

And Anja completely misses the point.  Were you expecting anything else?

“You’re kidding!”  She’d gone from overjoyed to vaguely put out.  “Joe didn’t mention me?”

Because that’s what you should be concerned about, Cherry/Svetlana.  Whether or not your previously-thought-dead friend mentioned to your previously-thought-dead cousin that he has a crush on you.

“He did, but he called you Cherry.  I didn’t know that was your nickname, that’s all.”

She laughed.  “Well, you can’t go dragging a name like Svetlana around all the time, can you?  I mean, not everyone can pronounce it.”   

YES THEY CAN.  IT’S NOT HARD.

I could hear Ben chirping in the background.  “Who are you talking at, Mummy?”

I thought of something.  “Does Ben know I’m supposedly…”

“Oh.  No, I didn’t tell him.  He only saw you every few months before, so I was hoping he wouldn’t notice you weren’t there.  I don’t think he’d have understood, anyway.”   

Nice side-stepping of potential guilt and plot problems there, Cherry/Svetlana.  “Oh, your Auntie Anja went to live on a farm with lots of other smug drunk sociopaths!”

Her voice brightened.  “But now he’ll be seeing a lot more of you!  Wow, and to think I thought…”

“Hang on, why will he be seeing more of me?”

“Oh, didn’t Estelle tell you yet?  She’s putting you, Joe and those other two guys up in a hotel near me.  You know, so we can confront Mr Foster and so on.

SPOILERS- By “confront,” they mean “go out to dinner with.”  And “let him pay for their wedding.”

I’m sure Jean will help us- she’s never liked him.”

“I don’t blame her.  Honestly, treating his son like that!  Where does he get off?”  There had been something strange about what Svetlana had said about the hotel, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

“I know!  Estelle wanted to come and sort him out herself, but Mark doesn’t think she should risk any damage in her condition…”

Aha.  That was it.  I’d forgotten about Mark and Estelle.  “What condition?”

“Didn’t you know?” Svetlana asked in surprise.

“No.  What’s wrong with her?”

“Nowt.  In fact it’s great as far as her and Mark are concerned.  They’re over the moon.”

“But you said she had a condition, so…  Oh, I see.”  I could only think of one ‘condition’ that was a good thing.  “She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”

SPOILERS- Estelle’s pregnancy, which wasn’t even hinted at until now, will have no significance to the plot other than giving her and Mark an excuse to disappear from the story.  Good luck to them, that’s what I say.

“Yeah.  Only two months or so, so she’s not showing yet.  But I’m surprised she didn’t tell you.  It were all she and Mark talked about before the accident.”  Her tone became more serious.

I realised something.  “You thought Mark was dead as well?  And Joe?”

“Yeah.”

“In the same accident as me?  Didn’t you think it was…”

“A big coincedence.  And I think I was meant to realise it.”

“Huh?”

“What I mean is, I think Mr Foster was trying to warn me.   

“Through body-disintegrating light fixtures and the deaths of half my friends.  He’s never been particularly subtle.”

I found out something a couple of months ago, see, and killing me would attract too much suspicion, so I guess he thought he could… 

…kill five other people, including his own son.  Nobody will be suspicious about that!

I must have mentioned at some point about having a cousin living in the same town as Mark.”

I knew that when I got to Southend, she’d probably have a whole lot more to tell me.  And so would Jean, probably.  We’d find our way out of this mess. 

If I’d known about all the things that were going to happen when I was in Southend, I’d probably still have gone.  I wouldn’t have been as excited about it, though.

SPOILERS- Neither should we be.

“It’s called the Black Heart Hotel,” Estelle told us.

“Funny name, that.  Can’t be good for their image.”  This was Mark, in case you were wondering.  It was all very well him saying that.  He wasn’t the one who was going to have to stay there.

“Actually it’s very good for their image,” Estelle replied, “Not many hotels have dramatic names like that.   

Because they know they’d get laughed out of business in the first week.

Black Heart sounds like exciting things are going to happen there.  Which they are.”  She turned to Gary Joe and me.  “For you, at least.” 

I love how Estelle is trying to make this sound like an adventure holiday.

“This is ridiculous,” murmured Mr Daly. 

The only sane character!  How we’ve missed you!

He’d been in a sour (well… sourer) mood since I’d shown him up about Gary, but he wasn’t prepared to go on any rants in case I did it again.  He was just sitting in the chair (he’d wanted to pick out a chair to be his ‘usual’, but today Joe had nicked it just to be irritating) grumbling.  I was wishing he didn’t have to go with us.  He’d just be a pain in the arse when we were in the car, and he’d probably want to see us first thing in the morning, just to make sure we had no fun whatsoever.   

And everybody knows there’s no point in bringing murderers to justice unless it’s fun.

Well, we’d see about that.  I’d already hatched a plan to get up really early and zoom off to Svetlana’s, leaving him behind.  But maybe that was too cruel. 

Oh, stop trying to convince us that you’ve got a conscience, Anja.

“I mean to say,” he moaned, “we’re going to stay in the Black Heart hotel whilst trying to catch the man who probably has nothing to do with the bus whatsoever… I suppose it has to be a nice hotel.  We wouldn’t want to run out of toilet paper while we’re busy making idiots of ourselves, would we?”

I’d changed my mind.  Nothing was too cruel.  Just so that everyone would know I thought this, I announced to the entire room, “Does he have to come?”

Thank you!  I prefer my sociopaths unapologetic.

“Excuse me, young lady!” Mr Daly snapped.  He was going to turn into a crocodile at this rate.  “Who’s ‘he’?  I have a name, you know!”

I decided to defend my title of ‘Only Person in the Room Prepared To Stand Up To Mr Daly’.   

But… Joe?  And Estelle?

“Well, so do I,” I replied, “You haven’t used my real name once in the past week.  It’s Anja, OK?  Not ‘young lady’, not ‘the girl’- Anja.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” Estelle butted in, “I’ve told the hotel your last name is ‘Cleary.’ I think that should be safe, especially if anyone else in the hotel knows Cherry.  They should know she has relatives called Cleary, especially now.  But if anyone asks for your first name, you should probably call yourself Maureen, like you said.  Pay no attention to what Mark and Joe say, it’s a good name.”

“For a forty-year-old,” Mark sniggered.  Estelle gave him a look, then suggested everyone start packing.

And so we come to the end of chapter eight.  Next time, we’ll have unsubtle symbolism and a really pathetic attempt at a sex scene.  See you then!