Welcome to chapter eleven, where we finally meet our villain!  Only halfway through the book, too!

Bloody hell.

I’d seen the inside of a few nightclubs, and they’d all been dimly-lit, crowded places with a bunch of people trying to dance to a record the DJ was scratching into oblivion. I hadn’t expected Blaze to be any different, though I had thought it was slightly strange that a woman in her 50s would want to run one. 

Again with the insistence that people in their fifties are impossibly old.  And anyway, how old would you expect the owner of a nightclub to be?  I mean, Peter Stringfellow wasn’t exactly youthful even in 2002, right?

But as soon as I got into the main hall of Blaze, I could see exactly why Svetlana had left Ben in the crèche.  If a kid Ben’s age saw the inside, they would have had nightmares for the rest of their life and ended up in a mental hospital by the time they were twenty.  Well, that or a rock group.

“That or a rock group.”  Honestly, I didn’t mean for my story to sound like a Chick Tract.

Before I get to the special Halloween decorations…

SPOILERS- We will not, in fact, get to the special Halloween decorations.  All we will be told about them is that they exist.

…I’ll just say that I’ve never seen so many mirrors in my entire life.  The walls, the dancefloor, the tablecloths (and, just for the record, I didn’t think tables had any place in a nightclub either.  Especially not ones with anorexic chairs attached). 

I’m trying to imagine what “anorexic chairs” would look like, and failing.  Maybe they just suffer from bad chair role models.

That might have been OK in the room Gary had drawn, but not here.  Basically, my face was reflected at every angle you can think of, and when you consider that I’m not all that pretty to start with this was a frightening experience. 

Because Anja is STUNNINGLY GORGEOUS but MODEST.  This is an interesting and original character trait that certainly hasn’t been used for every young female protagonist in the history of time.

And quite apart from the mirrors, there was a stage at one end of the room.  I don’t mean a huge stage, like one you get at the theatre.  This was platform-size, but it still had red net curtains drawn across it, as well as a door slightly to the side of it for exiting.  You could see the costumes hung up on the clotheshorse, and they were even worse than the walls.   

As I said, we won’t actually find out much about the walls.  So the costumes are worse than some unknown quantity (Costumes = >x).

I think Svetlana or Jean had chosen a Halloween theme, because the dresses that weren’t mirrored all had black stripes, with orange or red underneath.  I didn’t dare to think what they’d look like when someone was actually wearing one. 

And we won’t be finding out, because that would be far too interesting.

Especially the orange ones.

Nor will we be finding out why the orange costumes were so alarming that they deserved their own micro-sentence.  Never has so much description conveyed so little information!

And I’m not even going to describe the hideous creatures someone had painted on the walls.  

SEE?!?

But I will say that one of them turned out to be human and started walking towards us.

Oh good, a zombie revenant come to gobble them up.  I love a happy ending.

“Cherry, hi!” she squealed, “Is Jean not in today?”  She didn’t seem to notice me, but that was probably because her platinum blonde hair was blinding her.  There were enough mirrors in the room without her hair reflecting the lights.  Her teeth were as well.  Teeth might have been designed to be white, but not glowing white.

This girl is a “hideous creature,” you see.  Because she has blonde hair and shiny white teeth.  It’s a wonder she left the house without a bag on her head.

Svetlana looked at the blonde girl as directly as she could without burning her corneas.  “No.  Good thing my sister showed up, eh?”  Svetlana looked at my confused expression, and mouthed, “You.”

Svetlana Hughes, mistress of deception.  Why didn’t they work out their story about who Anja was before they left the house?

“Hi, I’m Honour,” I smiled, hoping I didn’t sound too surprised. 

“Wow, nice name!  Mine’s Emily, boring or what?” she gushed, before saying something I hadn’t thought of.  “Funny how two sisters could have such different names, isn’t it? 

You mean funnier than how two cousins with last names like Cleary and Hughes could end up with first names like Anja and Svetlana?

I mean, Chez, they gave you a name that no-one can pronounce…

YES.  THEY.  CAN.

…and then they call your sister Honour!”  She giggled, apparently not seeing the evil look on Svetlana’s face.  “I can see who’s your mum’s favourite!”

Wait, why is Svetlana giving Emily an evil look?  She isn’t shown to be sensitive about her name at any point before or after this moment.  OK, it’s a bit insulting to have somebody infer that you’re not your mum’s favourite, but a) they don’t actually have the same mother, and b) “Honour” isn’t really Anja’s name!  So it doesn’t matter!

It would have been interesting to see how Svetlana was going to kill Emily, but at that point a group of other people started pouring into Blaze.  Unlike Emily, they seemed to notice me immediately and wonder who I was. 

Oh yeah, now that I think about it, why aren’t Cherry/Svetlana’s friends more suspicious?  I mean, presumably they know that Cherry/Svetlana’s cousin has been killed in an accident, especially since it’s been all over the papers, and now they’re being introduced to an alleged “sister” who looks exactly like the deceased cousin only with red hair.  There’s only so much they’re going to put down to family resemblance.

Svetlana stood on the stage.  “Hey, listen everyone!  My sister Honour’s going to help me with the managerial duties until Miss Foster comes back. Treat her with the same respect you would me, only without all the jokes, OK?  It wouldn’t work, anyway- she doesn’t have anything you can make jokes about.

“Except for the smug drunk sociopath tendencies, of course.”

(And sure, give a fifteen-year-old an assistant managerial position.  I’m sure she’s the most qualified candidate.)

Or at least I don’t think she does, but some of the lads round here could get innuendo out of anything.” 

What?  Don’t encourage them!

Some men at the back cheered in agreement.  “So, in summing up, everyone be nice to my sister, OK?  If you don’t, you’ll have me to deal with.”  She smiled as she stepped down.

As everyone went into the changing rooms, I wondered if I’d ever get used to being called Honour. 

I’m still wondering why you feel you have to!

(Paragraph break goes here, because Heaven knows watching Anja actually settle into her new job wouldn’t make for interesting reading.)

Ben was jumping up and down in front of a kid’s programme.  Mr Daly was looking sulky (again).  Some bizarre looks were going from Joe to Cherry (she insisted that I call her that, since everyone else did)…

The actual reason was that fifteen-year-old me got tired of typing out “Svetlana.”

…from Cherry to Gary and between Gary and me (putting Gary off the picture he was drawing, I think).  All in all, the house was chaotic. 

If by “chaotic” you mean “slightly passive-aggressive.”

It was a good thing Cherry and me had a day off.

From my first day, Emily and the others had made it clear I fitted in.   

“The others” will not be getting any names, descriptions, or dialogue, but it’s good to know that they’ve accepted the Mary Sue as their new god.

“It’s great to have someone new around,” Emily had told me shortly after Cherry’s speech, “Especially after losing Jean and Joe.”  At this point, she’d lowered her voice.  “No offence, Honour, but from what everyone’s been telling me, Jean might not be coming back.  From the sounds of it, she’s gone a bit… off the wall since Joe died. 

SPOILERS-  We won’t be seeing any evidence of this “off the wall”- ness when we actually meet Jean.

Don’t tell Cherry I said that.  She’d hate me.”

She already hates you.  You implied that her mother liked her nonexistent sister better.  Them’s fighting words.

I hadn’t told Cherry what Emily had said, but by the looks of it she was right.  I’d been working at Blaze for nearly a week and I hadn’t seen Jean yet.

And everybody knows it’s not normal to take a couple of weeks off work following the sudden, violent death of your nephew.

But judging from what Cherry said that morning, I was just about to.

“Hey, Anja,” she asked, “I know you’re not supposed to be at work or anything, but could you come with me to drop this tape off?”  She held up a video labelled Firework Night Performance.

It takes two people to drop a video tape off, you know.

“Only Jean was worried in case last night’s show wouldn’t go well, and I want to show her that it did.  Don’t worry,” she added, “she hasn’t gone bonkers or anything, no matter what the morons at Blaze are saying.   

The morons who have assured Anja that she fits in perfectly with them.

She’s just depressed.  She’ll act pretty normal in front of strangers.  That’s partly why I wanted you to come.”  She blinked, making sure to flutter her eyelashes and smile cutely.  “Gary, do you want to come?”

Pass the sick bag.  And wasn’t she asking Anja if Joe liked her a few chapters ago?  Now she’s going to flirt unsubtly with Gary right in front of both him and Gary’s girlfriend?  Nobody’s motivation makes sense!

Gary looked up.  His face still made me jump.  “No, I might be hard to explain.  You can just tell her Anja’s your sister.”

I had to go, if only to see this woman I’d heard so much about.   

“So much” amounts to “She owns a nightclub, and she’s rich.”  Hey, it would get me interested.

I wanted to see if she knew anything about the bus disaster that we didn’t.  Maybe she could bring some facts about James and Joe’s relationship into the light.

“Anja?” Cherry asked in the car.

“Hmm?”

“You and Gary…  Would you, you know, say that you two were an item?”

I didn’t like the way this conversation was going.  “Well…  yes.”

“Ah.”  She paused, then smiled at me.  “Anja, you have brilliant taste in men.” 

SPOILERS- This will not stop her from flirting shamelessly with Gary in front of Anja.

As soon as we got to the gate of Wild Cherry House, Cherry groaned.  “Take a look at that…”

She pointed at two cars in the driveway.  One was the limousine I’d seen before, but another looked far more normal.  I have no idea what type of car it was, but I could tell that it was the large, plain kind a family would use. 

Wow, I can just picture it!

(And I didn’t pick up on this before, but Jean owns a limo?  Why?  The only people who’d drive around in it on a regular basis would be Jean and Joe, and presumably one of them would be doing the driving.  It strikes me as a waste of seats.)

“That,” Cherry announced, “is James Foster’s car.  He probably turned up to” she indicated speech marks with her fingers, “‘Look after her.'”

…Two weeks after Joe’s “death”?  Why now?

I decided to take matters into my own hands.  “Let’s give her the tape anyway,” I told her.

…Was there any indication that they weren’t going to do exactly that?  This doesn’t count as being pragmatic, Anja.

“Maybe while we’re in there James will say something that’ll help us.  And even if…”

Cherry interrupted.  “It’s not just him, Anja, it’s…  Well, you’ll see.”

And I did see.  For a start, when I rang the doorbell I saw that the person who answered was an exact clone of Joe. 

“Oh my, this really does change things!  I already knew Joe had a twin brother, but I never imagined they’d look alike!”

(Aaand paragraph break.)

“It was very hard on Jack, losing his twin like that,” Joe’s mum informed me.

SPOILERS- Jack will seem perfectly cheerful and well-adjusted in every scene he’s in.

She had explained why she and her family had turned up, and it was exactly what Cherry had thought.  Something told me, though, that Melissa (as she’d told us to call her) had no idea of what her husband was up to. 

The psychic powers again!  It’s a good thing they’re there, or Anja might actually have to think about who she can and can’t trust, and we can’t have that!

Her face had the same eager-to-please look that Emily’s had, although it was clear that Joe’s “death” had hit her hard.

“It was bad enough when Joe moved out of the house,” Melissa continued, “Identical twins have a really hard time if they’re split up. 

It’s worth noting that fifteen-year-old me had never met a set of identical twins.

And Joe and Jack had barely been separated a day in their lives.”  She sighed, then realised what she’d just said.  “Not that I blame Aunt Jean for anything.  Joe just wasn’t happy living with us, and she was right to adopt him.  I’ve got to tell you, girls,” she whispered, “my husband never really… got on with Joe.”

Cherry nodded.  “Yeah, he told me.”

At this point, someone else came into the room.  She looked as if she was in her late fifties, and definitely, despite what Emily had told me, completely sane. 

You can tell that just by looking!

Her hair was dyed blonde and brushed to within an inch of its life.  She looked at all three of us in turn, with different reactions on her face.  I saw her view Melissa with a scowl, Cherry with an approving smile and me with raised (pencilled) eyebrows.  I would find out why in a few minutes.

Aunt Jean is a silent film star.  Who knew?

“Hello, Aunt Jean!” Melissa said with the fake happiness people usually reserve for lunatics, toddlers or idiots.  Jean was not impressed, but her niece kept it up.  “Cherry’s brought her sister along.  That is OK…  Isn’t it?”  I could tell from her tone that she was scared of Jean.  And I could see why from the glare of revulsion on Jean’s stark face.

Jean cleared her throat.  “Melissa, could I speak to Miss Hughes and her sister alone, please?”  Joe’s mum got up from her chair and left so quickly she could have given a cheetah a run for its money.  Yep.  Definitely scared.

Just as Joe is SMARMY and Gary is VULNERABLE, Melissa is TIMID.  Got that?

“Thanks Heavens she’s gone,” Jean sneered, “Sometimes I think she’s just as bad as James.”

Cherry shrugged.  “She’s always seemed nice to me.  Sure, maybe she’s a bit stupid, but…”

“Well, quite,” Jean interrupted.  She looked straight at me.  “I might as well tell you now.  I know who you are, Anja.”   

Woo!  Another sane character!  I’ve really been missing those!

My heart jumped.  How much did she know, exactly?  Did James know as well?  Had Cherry told her?

Apparently not.  Cherry was open-mouthed in shock.  “But the papers said…”

“I know full well what the papers said.  In fact, until I saw you I believed them myself, though I did think it suspicious that no bodies were found.  But I have no doubt that this young lady is Anja Cleary.  She has changed her hair, that is true, and I imagine that has been enough to fool most people.   

“Most people in a badly-written story, anyway.”

But I have a talent for seeing through people’s disguises.  That’s why I have never trusted James.”

I love how Jean is trying to make herself out to be Sherlock Holmes for working out that the girl who looks exactly like Cherry’s deceased cousin might just be the same person.  And for working out that the obvious villain is an obvious villain.

I began to wish I wasn’t in the same room as someone who could see through people. 

Oh, come on, Anja!  She may have her powerful deductive skills, but you’ve still got your psychic powers.  I’d say you two were evenly matched.

“You’re right,” I stammered, “I survived the accident.  Joe and Mark did too.”

Jean nodded.  Apparently, she’d already made that conclusion.  I would still have felt a lot better if she’d at least pretended to be surprised. 

You’re lucky she’s not strangling you.  “Oh yeah, by the way, that nephew you’ve been mourning for a fortnight?  Totally still alive.”

“Now, I must ask you something.  Am I right in thinking that what happened on the bus that day was no accident?”

“I think so,” I replied, “And I think the person who did it must have wanted to get rid of Mark so he could be with Estelle.  Also, it must have been someone who hated Joe…”

Jean nodded.  “James fits all your criteria. 

By this point in the story, everyone just takes it for granted that James is the villain.  He won’t even appear on-page until the end of this chapter, by the way.

In fact, as I recall, he disapproved of Mark and Estelle’s marriage so much, he was seeing bad omens everywhere.”  She raised her eyebrows.  “And your own presence on that bus wasn’t a coincedence.  Your death would have been a warning to your cousin.”  Jean nodded to Cherry.  “Tell her about the snail, Miss Hughes.”

Jean’s main job here will be exposition.  Did I mention that this is her only scene?  Good to know it’s used well, eh?

Cherry’s eyes flicked around to check that no one was listening.  “Well…  I was round Ms Foster’s house one day, right?  We were sort of planning Mark and Estelle’s wedding- with James saying stuff like ‘Don’t lose your ring, Estelle, that’s bad luck,” and “You can’t wear red to your own wedding!  Brides are supposed to wear white.’  But…”

“Which is ridiculous for two reasons,” Jean sneered, “For one thing, brides are only supposed to wear white if they’re virgins, or at least pretending to be, and for another, red has always suited Estelle perfectly.”

“Exactly.  But Mark and Joe had sort of been dragged away by Ben- he wanted to play on Sa…  the snail.”  I could see that Jean didn’t think of her snail as “Sammy.”  She nodded, and Cherry resumed her story.  “But I was staring at the garden, and I suddenly noticed that the snail was at a funny angle.  So I started worrying, thinking it might be dangerous for Ben, and I had to go outside and look at it.”  She paused for dramatic effect, but Jean decided to tell the end herself.

“What do you think she found, but that the snail was practically hanging off the ledge!  If Joseph and Mark had put little Ben on it, his weight would have thrown the snail right onto them!  It’s a heavy statue, Miss Cleary.  I’m sure it’s more than heavy enough to crush two grown men to death.  I hope that James’ plan was for Benjamin to simply fall onto the grass, but fortunately your cousin made sure that we’d never know.  Miss Hughes moved the snail back into its proper place, thinking its positioning an accident, and came back into the house.”

“I told everyone what had happened,” Cherry added, “You know, just to make sure they knew not to move the snail again.  When I saw James’ face, he just looked… annoyed.  As if I’d done something to upset him.  I started being a bit suspicious of him then, but I didn’t really put two and two together until the bus thing…”

So his first attempted murder involved a snail statue, and his second involved exploding light fixtures.  Whatever happened to just poisoning someone’s coffee?

Just then, a small squeaky voice shouted, “Are you talking about my dad?”

I looked round.  An angry-looking girl was standing at the door, with that look of indignant rage that was slightly more mature than Ben’s.  Her black hair and small freckled nose told me she was probably Joe’s sister, and she certainly lived up to her reputation. 

What reputation?  She’s been mentioned once!

She was wearing the kind of clean, sensible clothes that were specifically designed for avoiding getting on your parents’ nerves.  You couldn’t climb trees in that skirt if your life depended on it.

Said parents came in after her.  That’s right, her parents.  Not just Melissa.  For the first time, I was looking at James Foster. 

And finally, eleven chapters into the book, we actually meet the villain!  Not that he’ll make much of an impression in the nine chapters he’s got left.  He’ll mainly wander about grinning creepily.

Personally, I couldn’t see why Melissa had married him.  She wasn’t a supermodel or anything, but she could have done better that him.  He looked like he was used to stress, and that’s putting it politely.

Tsk, so shallow.  Maybe she’s attracted to his quirky, murderous charm.

But the most important thing I noticed was the same expression of shocked recognition that Jean had shown when she’d seen me.   He knew who I was.  But judging by the beaming and unusually white smile he put on two seconds later, he wasn’t going to admit it.

“Sorry about this, Aunt Jean!” Melissa trilled in abject terror, “Leah was just curious.  Honestly, you take your eyes off children for five minutes, and look what happens…” She tried to pick her daughter up, but Leah wasn’t having any of it.  “Mum!  They were saying things about Dad!  That’s rude, that is!”

Jean winked at me and whispered, “Ask Joseph about Violet.”  As I wondered who Violet was, Melissa and James herded us out of the room. 

SPOILERS- Anja won’t ask Joe about Violet for another few chapters, even though asking him would have cleared up any number of misunderstandings in the meantime.

“Sorry girls,” James sighed, “I think maybe you should leave for now.  Aunt Jean hasn’t been the same since Joe died.  She’s got it into her head that it’s our fault.”  He shook his head.  “He could do no wrong in her eyes.  Wearing rose-colour glasses all the time, Aunt Jean.”

Something in Melissa seemed to snap.  “James!” she hissed, “Joe’s dead!  Don’t you think you can suspend a silly grudge against him now?”

As we left, James was replying.  “Silly grudge?  Mel, what Joe did to his sister was unforgivable!”

“It wasn’t all his fault!”

We didn’t say anything until we’d parked outside Cherry’s home.  “What do you think Joe did?” I asked, still amazed at how close Mark and Joe had come to a horrible death.

“A different horrible death to the one I already knew about, that is.”

Cherry shrugged.  “No idea.  I’m worried about Jean, myself.  If he knows she’s worked out what he’s up to…  Well, things could get pretty nasty.”

That should have been on my mind, too.  I realised that later.  But all I could think about was the fact that Joe had done something “unforgivable” to Leah.  I forgot how well we’d been getting on recently.  I forgot how helpful he’d been.  I forgot the way he always defended me and Gary against Mr Daly.  From that moment on, he became the slimy, untrustworthy person I’d always thought him to be.  I never trusted him again.

Now I know the whole story, I wish I’d trusted him a little more.  Maybe then he might have told me how he felt before it all came to a violent climax. 

Yep, from this point, Anja decides she doesn’t like Joe.  No real reason, just a few words from the obvious villain, who is clearly a trustworthy source of information.

Next time, we bid a tearful goodbye to the only two sane characters, and to anything resembling a plot.

Here we are in the tenth chapter of “Memory Lives On,” taking us to the approximate halfway point.  We just need to get over the hump, and then it’s all downhill.

“What if this Cherry person refuses to give us any information?” Mr Daly asked Joe for the millionth time.

“Despite the fact that she’s invited us to Southend specifically to do so?  Look, we already know that logic doesn’t run in her family.”

We were walking along the seafront, which, like beaches the world over, usually looks better in August than on Halloween.  Considering Southend is in Essex not the Caribbean, it never looks exactly tropical even during a heatwave, but today was even worse.  The sea was pencil-lead grey, the sand looked like huge pile of frozen biscuits that an elephant had sat on, and the sky was that white colour you only get when the weather is aiming a whole load of iciness at you.  If you ask me, beaches should try and hide during winter, and not just hang around depressing people.

But then where would the crabs go?  THINK OF THE CRABS, ANJA.

Joe smirked back at Mr Daly, but it looked like he was getting annoyed.  “I told you, she’ll tell us everything she knows.   Cherry can’t stand my dad.  Besides, she works for my aunt, so we’ll be able to talk to her as well.” 

“I haven’t tried to get in touch with her until now, but it’s perfectly safe to do so now that we’ve found out that one of her employees is Anja’s cousin!”

(Seriously, I wrote this, and even I don’t get the characters’ logic.  I’m not sure I got it at the time, either.)

“Hmm,” Mr Daly growled, obviously trying to give the impression that he was actually thinking about something other than his image, “Mr Foster, I feel I should warn you not to be too trusting of this Cherry.  She may have a pretty face, but many dangerous women have the same.

And now I’m reminded how much better a story this would be if it turned out that Cherry was plotting against them.  But nope, Anja trusts her, and therefore she’s on the level.

She won’t be the first woman who’s used the way men feel about her for her own gains.”  He gave me a pointed look that scared me.

…Wasn’t he trying to protect her innocence from the wicked boys just a chapter ago?

Does Mr Daly know about Gary and me? I wondered.  I’d have thought he was too dumb to work that out. 

Well, he knows that you shared a room, in defiance of common sense, and he knows that Estelle told the hotel you and Gary were a couple, in defiance of all that is pure and good.  So I don’t blame him for having suspicions.

And what business is it of his, anyway?  I didn’t stop to think that Mr Daly had never really felt like minding his own business, and if things had turned out differently that might have been the one mistake that ruined my life.

SPOILERS- “If things had turned out differently” translates as “if Anja was less inclined to break people’s wrists with her bare hands.”

Svetlana’s place wasn’t far from the beach.  We just had to avoid the occasional speeding car that zoomed along the road, walk up a street opposite the seafront, get lost about five times, argue, and finally walk into her driveway.  Nothing to it, really.

I could see Mr Daly’s disappointment as Svetlana answered the door.  He was clearly expecting a femme fatale type…

Anja knows this because…  Oh, you get the idea.  If fifteen-year-old me had wanted to include all these glimpses into other people’s thoughts and motivations, she should either have written this in third person or picked a more intelligent narrator.

…and that was something Svetlana was not.  She was quite pretty, I guess, but she looked worn out.  Her chestnut hair was all over the place, her T-shirt hadn’t been ironed and the laces on her trainers had snapped. 

…What, both trainers?  Wouldn’t she have replaced the laces for the first one that broke before the second one did?

But even so, I saw Joe’s face light up when he saw her.  I also saw something, which, like Mr Daly’s suspicion of me, I would later regret ignoring.

Just before running up to give Joe and me a hug, Svetlana gave Gary a look I didn’t like one bit.

DUN DUN DUN.

(This bit of foreshadowing actually is relevant to the plot!  It’s a miracle!)

“Halloween today!” Ben told us with delight.  Whoever had given him that tiger costume really hadn’t thought about the consequences.

“The consequences” being that he’d wear it.  Oh, what damage they wrought with their hubris!

“Sh, Ben,” Svetlana told him, “I’ve got to talk to your Auntie Annie about something important.  Put a lid on it, OK?”

Ben looked up at me.  “Hello Auntie Annie!  Halloween today!”

Ben had never really got the hang of my name.  To be honest, I don’t think I knew how to pronounce “Anja” when I was two, so I didn’t really mind. 

GAAAH.  IT’S NOT THAT HARD.  IT REALLY ISN’T.

Gary looked surprised, but Joe and Mr Daly had other things to worry about.  Joe was gazing moonily at Svetlana, while Mr Daly looked around disapprovingly.

“I didn’t realise you had a son, Miss Hughes,” Mr Daly sneered, as if having kids out of wedlock still came with a massive social stigma attached.  Svetlana looked at him like he was some kind of horrible insect she needed to squash, and replied, “Well, I do.  He isn’t bothering you or owt, is he?”  Her tone of voice could have frozen a decent-sized volcano, and it definitely put Mr Daly in his place.

That might have been really effective if fifteen-year-old me had bothered to paragraph it properly.  Or in any way foreshadowed Mr Daly’s disapproval of unwed mothers.  Or if Mr Daly had actually continued the conversation instead of wilting away at Svetlana’s brilliant comeback.

“So anyroad… 

I didn’t actually know anyone from Manchester at the time, so I lifted Svetlana’s entire idiolect from Coronation Street.

I need to go round Jean’s place to see if I need to open Blaze again today.  You come with me, Anja.  We can ask her about James when we’re there.  Gary and Joe, you stay here and keep an eye on things.” 

It’s not nice to call Mr Daly a “thing”!

She knelt down to talk to Ben.  “Now Ben, do you want to come to Auntie Jean’s house, or do you want to stay here with Joe and Gary?”  She left Mr Daly out, I noticed.  He noticed too, judging by the constipated pig look on his face.

Ben looked confused as he glanced from Svetlana to Joe.  “See Sammy?” he asked.

Svetlana smiled.  “Yes, you’ll see Sammy.  You coming with me?”

“Yeah,” Ben smiled.  He zoomed towards the door and tried to open it.  Nobody had told him that doors were more likely to open if an eighteen-year-old turned the handle than if a two-year-old rammed right into them.

Ben is not actually important to the plot at any point.  His entire function is to provide “cute” moments like this one.  But at least he knows how to pronounce his own name, Anja.

“Who’s Sammy?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” Svetlana grinned as she picked up Ben. 

For some reason, Ben seemed extremely enthusiastic about “Sammy,” whoever he or she was.  In the time I spent staring vacantly out of the window at the park that would probably have looked really beautiful if it hadn’t rained last night, Ben kept chanting “Sammy’s house!  Sammy’s house!  Sammy’s house!”

“Now, Ben,” Svetlana chastised, “It’s not Sammy’s house, is it?  He only lives in the garden.  It’s Auntie Jean’s house.”

Now I was really confused. 

Svetlana could have cleared up this confusion three paragraphs ago by actually explaining who/what Sammy was, but she didn’t.  Maybe she just enjoys seeing Anja squirm.

I started staring at the leaves that had fallen off the trees, looking vaguely like cloths that had just been used to mop up something truly disgusting.  I think Halloween is autumn’s only saving grace.  I mean, during the winter, you get Christmas, New Year and snow if you’re lucky (Svetlana’s parents usually spent half the winter phoning us up and telling us about the blizzards going on where they lived, which was a bit unfair considering we barely saw a snowflake).  In spring, you get Easter and nice weather.  And in summer you get a holiday unless you’ve got a really demanding job, plus weather hot enough to allow you to go swimming.

Oh, goody.  Another one of Anja’s inner monologues that have nothing to do with what’s going on, but are desperately needed to show you how DEEP and PHILOSOPHICAL she is.

But in autumn, you get no time off school/work at all, the weather’s lousy and barely anything interesting happens.  Oh, don’t try to tell me Firework Night is interesting.  I like watching fireworks as much as the next person, but any fun you get from that is tainted by legions of Mr Daly clones whinging about how dangerous and expensive fireworks are. 

Hm?  I thought Mr Daly was a moron and you didn’t care what he thought?

Halloween has a similar problem, with narrow-minded people going on about how evil and disconcerting it is, but nothing can ruin it for me. 

…But they can ruin Firework Night?  Why?

And in real life, the Mr Daly clones usually praise Firework Night to the skies as the moral, patriotic answer to Halloween.  So this makes even less sense.

And, judging by the fact that he was still wearing his tiger costume, Ben was the same. 

“It’s my fault, really,” Svetlana told me, “Ben saw all the Halloween stuff in Woollies and he got scared. 

It’s set in 2002, remember.  A simpler time, when Woolworths were still in business, e-mail didn’t exist, and exploding light fixtures could not only kill you but completely disintegrate your remains.  Ah, the good old days.

So I told him about Halloween, and how you can dress up as whatever you like.  And he got all excited and yelled, ‘Tiger!'”  She groaned.  “I don’t know what the obsession with tigers is.  Most kids his age are into dinosaurs.”

She parked her car outside somewhere that was probably a house.  Well, it had a garden and curtains at the window, so it couldn’t have been a multi-storey carpark.

I think the “multi-storey car park” simile is supposed to indicate that the house is really big, not that it’s a hideous concrete rectangle.  But you never know.

But nothing else made it look like a place where someone might actually live. 

“Svetlana!” I hissed, “Are you sure this is where Jean lives?”

“Yeah.  Why?”

“Well, it’s huge, for a start.  And look at this.”  I pointed to the sign.

Wild Cherry House

Owner/Occupier: Ms E.B. Foster

“I mean, it clearly has her name on it!  It can’t possibly be hers!”

“Impressive or what?” Svetlana grinned, “This is why everyone keeps calling me Cherry.  One of Jean’s family- might have been James, actually- called me ‘our very own wild cherry’ at a party for some reason- his idea of a joke- and everyone started teasing me afterwards.”  She shrugged, and carried Ben out of the car; nearly dropping him on the limo that was parked beside us.  “So if Joe tells you it’s because I have a reputation for seducing virginal boys, he’s lying.”

“Why did James call you that, exactly?” I laughed.  Some people have a very strange sense of humour.

“He’d just made this speech about how I spent so much time round Wild Cherry House, coming up with ideas for Blaze, I was basically like part of the furniture.”  She pointed at the haggard trees around the path, making the pine trees further on look freakishly healthy.  “Like these cherry trees, get it?  Not really all that funny, but everyone laughed anyway.  They were taking the piss for months afterwards.” 

See?  I told you the explanation was stupid.

She paused, looking a little nervous.  “Anja, could you take Ben into the garden while I go and talk to Jean?  Only she might still be depressed about Joe, see, and if Ben mentions him it’ll only make it worse.”

“She might still be depressed about the gruesome death of her beloved nephew last week.  Don’t ask me why.”

Ben was already racing across the grass, his tail trailing behind him, so I ran behind the house after him.  Even after the rain, the grass was the same colour as lime jelly with streaks of mud. 

In October.  I hope the local council knows that Auntie Jean’s lawn is genetically modified.

Ben stopped in front of a circular white figure on a ledge, partially hidden by the pine trees, and turned to me.

It was a stone statue of what appeared to be a snail.  The snail was about three metres tall, if you counted the antennae.

“Is Sammy,” Ben explained.

Well, I’m glad that particular mystery was solved!  I’m not sure I could have taken any more suspense.

“Oh, right!  Sammy the snail,” I replied, my confusion over who Sammy was replaced by confusion over why anyone would want a snail in their garden.

Why wouldn’t they?  That’s probably the single best idea in this whole story.

Ben saw I was interested, so he decided to elaborate.  “Is my friend,” he said proudly, “Sammy!  Say hello Auntie Annie!”

I paused for what seemed like a good amount of time.  “Yep, definitely heard that.  He said it very quietly, though.  Is he a shy snail?”

“Yeah.  Snails are shy.  ‘Swhy they don’t talk much.”  He grinned at me.  “Sammy likes you.”

And that was another Cute Ben Moment, ladies and gentlemen!  Don’t complain- he’s pretty much the only character who consistently acts like a real person.

I didn’t notice that Svetlana was behind me until she started talking.  “Jean said I had to open Blaze again.  Let’s go.”

She kept looking nervously at the snail.  For some reason, Ben’s beloved Sammy was really spooking her.  Ben gave her that angry look that two-year-olds are especially good at.  “Mummy doesn’t like Sammy,” he said grumpily.

“Don’t be silly, Ben,” Svetlana murmured unconvincingly, “Of course I like Sammy.”  She looked me in the eye, and mouthed something.  I couldn’t really tell what she was trying to say, but by now I know for a fact it was “I’ll tell you later.”

And we’ve reached the halfway point!  Next time, we meet Auntie Jean, who points out the plot holes for us.  I can’t wait!

We begin with the group on their way to Southend.  We will never find out where they started off from.  Let’s just call it the Town With No Name.

The day we went our separate ways was the 30^th October.  As we piled our stuff into the car, a strange smell of cheap sweets and bonfires reminded me it was going to be Halloween the following day.  I usually liked this time of year, even though my parents had never let me have a Halloween party or anything.  For some reason, they hadn’t liked the house being stuffed with my friends, which was odd because the house was stuffed with my brother’s friends on a daily basis and they hadn’t minded that.

“Therefore, they deserved to have their daughter fake her death and never contact them again!  You’d have done the same thing!”

“Are you really going to call yourself Maureen?” Gary asked me as we sat down in the back seat.

I thought for a minute.  “Nah.  I think I’d better stick to something that sounds a bit like Anja.  Do you think Honour’s a good name?”

He looked confused.  “Well, it isn’t spelt much like Anja…”

…Neither’s Maureen!

I was going to tell him that it didn’t matter, when I noticed his sketchbook.  “Hey, can I have a look at some of your pictures?  I haven’t seen any of them.”

He handed me the pad.  “Knock yourself out.”

As the others got in and Mark started the car, I opened the pad. 

The sketchbook, which will has only been mentioned once before and will not be mentioned all that much in the future, serves as a way of showing the readers how DEEP and TROUBLED Gary is.  Because that certainly hasn’t been pounded into our heads so far.

I was just looking at the burning fortress he’d drawn on the first page when Mr Daly started up.  “I presume you’ve come up with a plan of action?” he asked, “The others appear to regard you with a great respect, young Mr Foster.”  He said that grudgingly, as if he felt he should be regarded with a great respect himself.   Fat chance.

After eight chapters of declaring Joe to be his nemesis, Mr Daly has decided he likes him now.  Mr Daly’s personality and behaviour operate solely on the basis of what will be most annoying to Anja.

Joe looked surprised that Mr Daly had given him, if not exactly a compliment, something that didn’t really sound like an insult.  “I wouldn’t know about respect,” he replied, smirking at me and Gary, “but I know what we’re going to do once we get to Southend.  We’ll see what Cherry thinks.”  I could tell he was looking forward to seeing Svetlana.

So can the readers, Anja.  You don’t need to point it out.

Mr Daly actually seemed to be getting into the spirit of things for once.  “Should we really rely on this Cherry character?  How are we to know she’s not a double agent?  We’re in dangerous territory now, boy, and you must learn quickly that you can’t trust anyone!”

“Except Cherry,” Mark interrupted, “She’s never liked Joe’s dad. 

“And Joe’s brother Jack!  My wife says he’s a nice guy, so he can’t possibly be a murderer!”

Says she’s amazed that nice people like Jean and Joe could be related to such a bastard, doesn’t she?”

“Couldn’t that be a front?” Mr Daly asked hopefully.

 “No.  Sorry.  She keeps saying he makes her flesh crawl, and I can tell she really means it. 

He can tell.  Psychic powers, y’know.

I stared at Gary’s picture.  Most people draw fire in really basic red, yellow and orange colours, but Gary’s flames actually seemed to glow.  He’d done them in glaring white with yellow around the edges.  The fortress or castle or whatever it was looked ready to collapse in on itself, almost as if it was fed up of staying upright and wanted to implode at any minute.  And the evil-looking people at the door weren’t exactly helping by trying to hammer it down.

What could this subtle symbolism possibly mean?  Could it be saying that Gary is a perpetual victim, constantly under siege from “evil-looking people” who like to poke him just for a laugh?  Which we’ve been told about five hundred times already, and is in fact the only thing we know about him as a character?

Mr Daly was continuing with his “doomed hero” act. 

Dammit, Mr Daly, that’s Gary‘s job!

He put on a pained look.  “I didn’t have time to say goodbye to your wife, Mr Freeman.  In case she never sees me again, can you tell her that I wish you both all the best for the future?  And I hope your child is a strong, healthy boy.”

“Er… thanks,” Mark replied. 

Gary spoke out of the blue.  He’d mainly been looking out of the window at the chaotic fields by the motorway until now. 

How are the fields chaotic?  I’d much rather be hearing about that than about Gary’s sketchbook.

“I get what you’re saying” he told Mr Daly, a strange look on his face, ” According to you, boys can’t have any worth if they’re not strong and healthy, can they?”

“How dare…” Mr Daly began, before seeing me giving him the evil eye.  He knew that if he started on Gary, I might humiliate him again.

Yes, fear the Mary Sue, Mr Daly.  Your whole universe was designed to revolve around her.  You are but a troublesome speck in her eye.

Mark cut in instead.  “Easy, Gaz,” he pleaded, “He was just trying to be polite.”

Shut up, everyone.  Back to Gary’s sketchpad. 

Aww.  I wanted to hear about those chaotic fields.

The second drawing was pretty normal, at least compared to the first.  It showed a girl crouching in a room with mirrored walls.  She was surrounded by endless plants, multicoloured candles, lava lamps and what appeared to be tarantula cages.  The room was such a mess of colours that the girl fitted right in. 

The point of this paragraph is to show what a free spirit Topaz was (oh yeah, SPOILERS), but all I can think about is where she got the money for mirrored walls.  And whether or not candles are bad for tarantulas.

She was wearing a T-shirt that seemed to have been dyed using a rainbow with tie-dyed jeans.  The less said about her hair the better, but to say it was blonde would be like saying the hard shoulder of the M25 wasn’t a very good place to sunbathe. 

That’s some great prose there, fifteen-year-old me!

She was crouching while she reached for a CD, but she looked like a coiled spring about to snap straight.

Call me stupid if you want…

I do!

…but I didn’t work out who she was until I saw the cactus on her shelf.

*

There was barely a parking space left in Southend when we got there, and the one Mark eventually found was about half a mile away from the Black Heart hotel.  You try dragging suitcases across fifteen busy roads (Mark kept getting lost).  I think this was one of the reasons I was so angry when we found out how the rooms were arranged.  Well, I was angry about the rooms issue itself, but the fact that my feet were threatening to fall off didn’t help.

We will not see any of this anger in the scene itself.  You know things are bad when the writer forgets what she wrote less than a page ago.

Just after Mark had left, we walked through the dark, airy corridors to the lift, which stopped conveniently outside our rooms.  But when he squinted at the keys in the half-light (the architect had spent more money on the royal blue wallpaper than on the lighting) Joe had noticed that we only had three.  It didn’t take him long to work out that there were four of us, so we went back to the desk to complain.

They didn’t notice this at the reception desk because the hotel staff just handed over the keys without a word.  Because that’s how hotels operate.  No “That’s two double rooms,” no “Here’s the wifi password,” just “Here’s your keys, now bugger off.”  Who’d have thought a place called the Black Heart Hotel would have such lousy customer service?

The reception wasn’t well lit either.  The entire building seemed lifted out of some Victorian horror story, and this room, with its black and white walls and plain black flooring, was no exception.  I half expected to see candles on the walls, instead of the tulip-shaped lightbulbs hanging from the light fixture in the ceiling.  I hate tulips. 

I hate you, so shut up.

The receptionist squinted at her notebook, then looked up at Joe apologetically.  “I’m very sorry, sir,” she told him, “But Mrs Freeman gave us the impression that two of you were… um…” she looked flustered, “…a couple.”  She then started to stare at Gary and me, partly because Joe and Mr Daly were doing the same. 

So she’s booked a double room for two confused teenagers who met less than a week ago.  Estelle Freeman- de facto foster parent of the year!

“Well,” Mr Daly snorted, “I can see where she got that idea.  Am I to assume that it would not be appropriate for the two young men here to share a room?”

“Put it this way- there’s only one bed in each of the rooms.”   

…So?  From what we’ve seen, both Joe and Gary are heterosexual, so having them share a bed means there’s no chance of hanky-panky.  Problem solved!

Joe and Gary flinched, Gary looking suddenly scared.

“Huh,” said Mr Daly, turning to Gary, “I can only allow this if you agree to be a perfect gentleman towards Miss Cleary.  Remember how young she is- you wouldn’t want to be responsible for ruining her reputation, I hope.” 

If Mr Daly’s so concerned about protecting Anja’s virtue, why doesn’t he insist on the boys sharing?  Or on him sharing with Gary, so he can keep an eye on him?  There’s absolutely no reason for him to give in this easily!

“Sure,” Gary replied, “I’d never do that to anyone.”  And I can tell by the look in his eyes as he glanced at me that he meant it, then.  But I felt that my reputation had been damaged so much since I’d “died” that I had nothing to lose.

Anja’s newspaper obituaries failed to mention her love of Venus fly traps.  Therefore, she will forget about the fact that she’s underage and jump into bed with a boy she met less than a week ago.  I can’t fault her logic there.

Once we got up there, we could see what the receptionist meant.  Room 125 had a double bed just next to the bathroom door, and just by glancing at it I could tell that it had other purposes than to be slept in.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a duvet in that shade of pink before.

“That cheeky cow!” I gasped.  Gary looked at me in bug-eyed surprise.  “I mean Estelle,” I explained, “Should have guessed she was up to something, really.  Did you see the looks she kept giving me every time someone mentioned our names in the same sentence?”  I couldn’t help pretending to be annoyed. 

You see?  In ten paragraphs, we go from “I was angry about the rooms issue itself” to “I couldn’t help pretending to be annoyed.”

Basically, Estelle had done the same thing as Mr Daly- assuming something on the grounds of not very much.  But I couldn’t be really angry with Estelle because…

“…she’d completely condoned it and bought us an expensive hotel room.”

unlike Mr Daly, she hadn’t been a hundred per cent wrong. 

Unlike when Mr Daly assumed the exact same thing, she wasn’t a hundred per cent wrong!  Wrongness depends on who you are, after all.

Mind you, it was still unfair for her to spring this on us.

Gary was looking at me hesitantly, sitting on a chair at the table nearby.  “Um, Anja..?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m going to ask you something, but you’ve got to know that I’m only asking out of interest.  I’m not going to think you’re a tart or anything if the answer’s yes.  I was just wondering, have you ever…” He looked embarrassed as he tried to think of a good way to put it.  “You know…”

“Done it?” I guessed abruptly. 

Having the characters talk like twelve-year-olds is a brilliant way to show that they’re mature enough for sex!

(SPOILERS- And more than mature enough to get married a few months later.)

He nodded, relieved.  “Nah,” I said, knowing exactly why he’d asked, “Lack of opportunity really.  I’ve never fancied a boy who’s felt the same way back.  You?”

He looked right down at the table so I couldn’t see his eyes.  “Well, you know I told you about Shell?”

“Oh yeah?”  I hadn’t been expecting this.  “You two were an item?”

“Not exactly.  But after all the fuss about Jordan and Topaz had died down, everyone saw us together and…  Well, you know what people assume when a boy and a girl are spending all their time together. 

“Usually, they book you an expensive hotel room and tell you to go nuts, of course.”

“So we thought we’d try it out and…” He looked embarrassed again, but I wanted all the details.  Well, probably not all.  My imagination knows no limits, so it was probably a good thing that Gary eventually finished his sentence.  “Well, we didn’t really enjoy it.  I mean, we didn’t feel that way about each other.”  He looked at me awkwardly, and for some reason I started to feel uncomfortable.  “Anja, can I tell you something?”

There it was again.  My heart was making it loudly clear that it didn’t like what I was doing.  I wished the neckline on my blouse wasn’t so low, though come to think of it, why did I care?  If it had been some pervy teacher, or one of the maggots from school, I’d have known why I was feeling like that, but I liked Gary.  Actually, “like” is a stupid word for what I was feeling.  Look, the point is that I was feeling uneasy. 

Hmm.  It seems that Estelle’s plan has added a ton of awkward pressure to the proceedings.  Who’d have thought that openly encouraging two nervous teenagers to undergo a major rite of passage against their better judgement would have led to anything but happiness?

“Uh-huh,” I mumbled, “And I bet I know what it is you want to tell me, too.”

He stepped towards me.  “Yeah.  The thing is, I think I do feel that way about you.”  He grinned.  “You’ll hate me for this, but I was sort of glad when I realised what Estelle had done with the rooms.  Well, glad and nervous.”

I nodded.  By this time, I was biting my lower lip so hard I was going to turn into the amazing one-lipped wonder if I kept it up.  Happiness and nervousness were at the top of my mood statistics as well.  Oh, I’d feigned anger at Estelle…

Barely.

…but that just mysteriously disappeared the minute Gary took hold of my arm.  The nervousness followed it a few seconds later.

And a good thing too, because otherwise Estelle’s boneheaded decision might have backfired and made everybody miserable!  Oh, it’s great when things work out.

Since some of you might be of a prudish disposition, I’m going to leave what happened after that to your imagination.

They played Cards Against Humanity for six hours, then passed out fully-clothed.  You can’t prove they didn’t!

Next time, we meet Cherry/Svetlana and her adorable kid, and there’s a snail statue.  That’s about it.  It’s a truly thrilling chapter.

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!

I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided to deviate from the formula for the first half of this post.  On rereading the following chapter, I decided the subject matter was far too unpleasant for me to get any laughs out of without sounding glib. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not any better written than the previous chapters (although Gary’s narration is slightly less obnoxious than Anja’s), but it’s just a little too realistic to be funny. I think it’s best if I summarise it quickly and then move on to the next one.

Anja wakes up the next morning to find a ten-page note from Gary on her pillow.  He tells her about how Jordan used to bully him into doing his homework and tidying his room by threatening to cause him a fatal heart attack.  After Jordan wrecked Gary’s room (going as far as to burn some of the furniture), his mother, Claire, punished him, making him angry.  The following morning, before the rest of the family was awake, Jordan dragged Gary into the kitchen and poured boiling water on his chest, giving him a massive heart attack.  Gary survived, but didn’t tell anybody what Jordan did.

After returning to school, Gary befriended two girls named Topaz and Shell.  They noticed that Gary frequently had bruises, and asked him where they came from.  Gary tried to come up with excuses, but eventually told them about Jordan.  The three of them agreed to pack up Gary’s stuff and go back to Shell’s house, where they would presumably contact the authorities.  Unfortunately, while at Gary’s house, Jordan cornered the three of them on the stairs, and a fight broke out.  Shell and Gary got away unhurt, but Jordan somehow killed Topaz.  Jordan was jailed for his actions, but Gary thinks that he may have paid somebody to blow up the bus and kill him.

Please note that none of this has anything to do with the actual plot.

The next chapter opens with another newspaper quote.

“Jesus wanted Anja Cleary to be one of His angels.

So that we mortals wouldn’t have to put up with her?  How thoughtful!

Just to look at her face makes you wish we lived in a better world, but sadly we don’t.  We need to get our act together if we don’t want any more tragedies like that of Anja.”- 28th October, 200_

Yes.  Poorly-maintained buses are the greatest humanitarian crisis facing the world today.

OK, I admit it.  I was enjoying this “nation’s sweetheart” thing…

Right, everybody make a note of that.  She was enjoying watching everybody weep over her.

…but it was getting out of hand.  The bus company was being sued (not, I hasten to add, by any of our relatives), everyone was getting their light fixtures checked lest they get fried to ashes, and people were using the explosion to back up arguments that had absolutely nothing to do with it.  At this rate, we were the only ones with any hope of working out what was going on.  The police didn’t even seem to think it was weird that no remains had been found, and something that just incinerated five people would seem a bit suspicious to me.

The police in this story are hopelessly incompetent, because the plot says so.

(We never find out who’s suing the bus company.)

Fortunately, I was distracted from the article after reading the first few sentences.  Mark was keen to get some information from me.  “Um…  Listen, Anj.  Did Gary tell you anything about this Jordan guy?  Only we need to find out as much as we can to see if he’s connected to Joe’s dad.  So, anything?”

I looked at Mark.  I didn’t want to betray Gary, so I only gave him the basic details.  “Jordan was his stepbrother.  He was on trial for murder, and Gary would have been the main witness.”  There, that was all Mark needed to know.  He nodded.  “This detective thing is easier than I thought.”

They’re so incompetent, in fact, that Anja and pals feel that they only need to make the faintest attempt at research to declare themselves “detectives.”

It was funny how quickly I felt comfortable with him and Estelle.  Usually when  stayed in other people’s houses I felt on edge, constantly reminding myself that I wasn’t at home.  But that feeling had evaporated about ten minutes after crossing the threshold, around the time I saw the size of their TV.

Yay, priorities!

That was a joke, in case you were wondering.

It wasn’t, Anja, admit it.

The quality of their house didn’t have all that much to do with it.  It was Estelle and Mark’s whole demeanour.  They were easygoing, cheerful and not easy to shock.  Having said that, Estelle had been pretty shocked when we’d all turned up on her doorstep.  If it had just been me she’d have assumed that I was Joe’s new girlfriend, but Gary and Mr Daly had been harder to analyse.  My mind would probably have boggled pretty quickly.

We don’t get to see this scene, of course.  That would be far too interesting.

By now, the entire group were sitting around the room.  Mr Daly was too, though for some reason I never counted him as part of the group.  The others seemed not to, either.  Joe was already a friend of Mark and Estelle, and Gary and I had slotted right in.  Mr Daly had stayed at the edges, never abandoning what he considered to be his right to be considered superior to us frivolous younger people.  Usually when there’s a character like that in a book, you’re encouraged to feel sorry for him, no matter how much of a cantankerous jerk he is.  But I just couldn’t get past the constant stream of insults.

“Yeah, other stories might have things like pathos and subtlety and complex characters, but we’re far too special for that!  Mr Daly was introduced as a verbal punching-bag, and that’s the way he’ll stay!”

“Alright, everyone,” Mark announced, “We’ve got our prime suspect, and although he might not be working alone, I think he’s the source of our problem.  James Foster- that’s Joe’s dad- needs to be tracked down and interrogated.  Chances are he’ll be in Southend.”

James Foster…  For some reason that name seemed very familiar to me.  Still, I had to push that to the back of my mind when Mr Daly started up.

“Are we playing detective now, Mr Freeman?” he sneered, “Why can’t you leave it to the proper authorities?”

…This is only occurring to him now?  They’ve been playing detective for best part of a week!

Mark looked annoyed, and rightly so.  “Because…  Tell him, Estelle.”

Estelle told him.  “We haven’t got any evidence.  If we told this to the police, they wouldn’t be able to do much. 

Except bringing him in for questioning, putting Anja and pals under police protection, and other boring stuff like that.

We, on the other hand, aren’t acting officially, so we can do what we want.”

“And if we catch this James Foster, what then?” Mr Daly sarcastically persisted, “Do we subject him to a citizens arrest, or do we simply tell him why what he did was wrong and let him go?”

I love how Mr Daly valiantly tries to point out the plotholes.  Nobody pays him any attention, but it was worth the effort.

Joe looked up moodily.  “Leave Estelle alone, alright?  She knows what she’s doing.  Which is more than you do.”

“Well, that’s just the kind of attitude I’d expect from someone like you!  You’re so disloyal you can’t even forgive your own father!”

I personally thought this was a bit rich after Mr Daly had been so hostile about the “telling him what he did was wrong and letting him go” issue, but there you go.  Joe held his ground.  He gave Mr Daly a blank look and said, “He tried to kill me.”

Mr Daly opened his mouth to say something else, but something had really annoyed Joe.  He slapped Mr Daly round the face.

Huh.  Not just a verbal punching-bag, then.

(Not that Joe isn’t in the right here, but the Mr Daly bashing is getting seriously out of hand.)

I was so impressed that I could barely take anything in, but I saw Mr Daly’s mistake.  If Joe had hit me, I’d have hit him right back.  But Mr Daly had such an inflated ego, he imagined Joe respected him too much to slap him.  He stood there with his mouth open until Joe had left the room.

Once Joe was gone, though, there was no holding him back.  “Mr and Mrs Freeman, I demand you throw that… that piece of scum out of your house!  Assault, that’s what that’s called!  I could sue!”   

“Legally dead people sue other legally dead people all the time, right?”

As Mark and Estelle were still doing their guppy impressions (I was too), Gary said something.

It’s funny how one sentence can change the whole course of a story. 

SPOILERS- This one doesn’t.

If Gary hadn’t said that one thing, I wouldn’t have got angry, so I wouldn’t have said all those things, so I wouldn’t have worked out something blindingly obvious about Cherry the next day…

SPOILERS- She almost certainly would have.

and thanks to what wouldn’t have happened after I hadn’t worked it out, you’d be looking at a different story.

Tell me more about this other story.  Does it have an actual plot?

But as it was, those three words, clear and true, spilled forth from Gary’s lips.

“You deserved it.”

In a split-second, Mr Daly had grabbed Gary’s arm and started screeching at him. “Do you know what I thought when I first saw you?  I’ll tell you!  I thought, he’s never contributed anything to society!  Stupid, weak, lazy people like you are all the rage nowadays!”

I lost it.  “Weak?!?  Gary’s not weak!

“He’s a woobie!  Get it right!”

Oh, sure, physically maybe he’s a little on the weedy side, but mentally he’s like iron or something!  Listen, he’s been…”

“How dare you?” Mr Daly bellowed. 

I would usually have been a bit scared by a man who was half a foot taller than me screaming in my face, but I was too angry to feel fear.  “I dare very easily, in fact!  Now listen to this.  What Joe just did isn’t even the smallest patch on what’s happened to Gary over the last two years!”  At this, I put my arms around Gary so he couldn’t run off again.   

Very caring behaviour.  After all, who needs personal space and autonomy when you’ve got LURVE?

“He’s been bereaved, threatened, abused, tortured and almost killed.  And before you say anything, he deserved none of it.  It didn’t come from him having no moral fibre or whatever.  Someone too cowardly to hit someone who’d hit back used him as a punchbag.  You know those situations on NSPCC adverts?  Well, I bet none of them could shock Gary, because he’s lived it.  He’s lived through Hell.” 

Yes, I’m sure Gary needed to be restrained in order to hear all that.  So much for not wanting to betray his secrets.

(Note how Gary has no input in this conversation whatsoever.  He might as well just have slept through this bit.)

I looked around.  Everyone was hanging on my every word, even Mr Daly.  “You know, I like to think I’m a fairly strong person, for a stupid, lazy, disillusioned teenager,” I concluded sarcastically, “but if half of what’s happened to Gary happened to me, most of my brain would have to shut down to block out the memories.  If it hadn’t, I’d probably have killed myself.  Gary’s stared those memories in the face every day since they’ve happened.  He’s a strong, brave person, alright?”

So strong and brave that he desperately needs Anja to stand up to Mr Daly for him.

By this time, I was so furious I think I’d have punched Mr Daly’s lights out if he’d disagreed.  But everyone, including him, looked horrified.  Joe had heard my shouts and come back downstairs to see what was going on, and he looked the same.

Estelle’s eyes turned to Gary, full of pity.  “Is this true?”

Gary nodded,  “It all started…”

 ***

Gary woke me up the next morning.  He’d had his arms around me the whole night, and when I woke up he quickly assured me he wasn’t going to “do anything.” 

That doesn’t make it any less creepy, Gary.  Wait til somebody’s awake before trying to cuddle them, alright?

I knew that.  And I also knew that his feelings for me had changed.  He’d liked me a lot, as Mark had suspected, from the start, but Gary later told me that my big hissy fit at Mr Daly was the moment when he realised he loved me.

“It was when she physically restrained me and blabbed things to our friends that I’d told her in confidence that I realised she was the one for me!”

I can’t pinpoint a moment when I realised I loved him back, but I did.

“Listen, Anja,” he whispered; “I want to show you something in town.  The others won’t be up for a while yet.”

My brain made my legs move before they had any idea of what was going on.  That’s about normal for me in the morning.  I somehow managed to trip over Joe without waking him, and got to the bathroom to change. 

Please note that a few days ago, all it took to wake Joe up was Gary crying faintly.  But today he can sleep through Anja tripping over him.  Maybe Gary slipped him some sleeping pills so he could have a bit of privacy.

The cold outside hit me right in the face.  That, mixed with the damp of the rain the previous night, made me surprised not to be breathing in ice.  The darkness didn’t help either.  It was 5am, an hour I’d never seen before.  I didn’t like it.  It was eerily lit up by the dark yellow glow of the lamps, the sky getting gradually brighter as the minutes went by.  I always feel a bit scared walking outside in the dark, and had to keep reminding myself that I was not alone.  I wasn’t even accompanied by another girl, which could have been almost as dangerous as being alone, depending on who the girl was.

Oh, whereas Gary makes an excellent bodyguard!

I’d never been alone with an attractive boy before, let alone one who liked me.

The streets were freakishly silent.  Even at midnight there would have the noise from a few wild parties, but now even the most eager partygoers had mostly got bored and wandered off.  The world seemed to have shut down and left Gary and me behind.  Here and now, in the silent hour, two worried teenagers, believed by the nation to be dead, reigned supreme.

I decided I should probably stop to take in my surroundings before I crashed into something.  After I did, I gave a start.

“Gary!  Why the hell are we going into a cemetery?”

“Because WE BELONG DEAD, Anja!  Let us surrender to the quiet dignity of the grave!”

He gave me a surprised look, but even then those icy blue eyes flashed with depths I wasn’t sure I wanted to delve into.

See?

“I need to show you something.”  I was too tired to argue.

Outside the cemetery itself, there were endless rows of light grey gravestones, each adorned with flowers and other plants, apparently well cared-for. 

Gary walked towards a far corner of the plot.  As he seemed to stop, I spotted a plant I liked a lot more than all the roses and lilies.

“Now that person had taste,” I whispered, pointing at the tiny cactus, “It’s not a Venus flytrap, but it’s better than a pansy.”

Yeah- bloody grieving relatives, putting unimaginative flowers on their loved ones’ graves.

Gary smiled strangely.  “It’s funny,” he said.

“What?”

“That’s exactly what I wanted to show you.  Read the epitaph.”

I did as I was told, recognising the name almost before I read it properly.

Topaz Geraldine Seaman

Beloved sister, daughter and friend

Born 30^th October 198_

Died 25^th September 200_

“May you fly on the wings of angels forever.”

Gary looked casually at my shocked face.  “I knew you’d be impressed by the cactus,” he explained, “Topaz always had to stand out from the crowd, and after she died her mum wanted everyone to remember exactly what kind of a person her daughter had been.  Whenever anyone went on about, say, what a hardworking girl Topaz had been, Mrs Seaman would remind them that she was always getting detentions for missed homework.”

That’s a very realistic way for somebody to act after their daughter’s been murdered.

“Hmm.  Nice.”

“It was, kind of.  Mrs Seaman wanted everyone to remember Topaz’s personality, warts and all.  She said that if people didn’t have bad points, you wouldn’t notice their good points as easily.”

I nodded.  It wasn’t exactly dawn, but the sky had gone from ink-soaked black-blue to the colour they always paint the sea in kid’s books.  “I understand.  What you’re saying is, Topaz’s mum did the exact opposite to her memory that the media are doing to mine?”

 “Precisely.  They’re saying you’re an angel, but they’re not saying how interesting and optimistic you are. They’re also not saying how you never get up before ten, how you sneeze your head off when you go within a million miles of an air-freshener, how you…”

I’m pretty sure Gary could have delivered this compliment without dragging Anja to a graveyard.

(“Interesting and optimistic.”  I guess that’s one way of putting it.)

“That’s enough of that, bright-eyes,” I laughed.  Gary grinned cheekily, and I did the same back.  He bent down to look at another gravestone next to a bunch of tulips.  “Oh no,” he groaned, “Take a look at this.”

“This” turns out to be creepy and Oedipal, much like Anja and Gary’s entire relationship.  Find out in the next chapter!

Welcome to part five, in which we’re introduced to the biggest red herring in the story. But first, have some callous disregard for other people’s grief!

“That’s your dad, your uncle and two of your brothers,” Estelle called. She was working her way through a box of éclairs while keeping a list of the members of Joe’s family that had called her to share the grief. “Our suspect list is getting pretty long.”

You’ve heard of “fiddling while Rome burns,” right? Well, I’m pretty sure that “eating a box of éclairs while your friends sob over their dead son and your dead husband” is similar.

Joe smiled again. I didn’t know if it was possible for him to do a halfway normal smile or if he was a snake in a previous life. “You know what? I think if someone fancied you they’d call in person. So cross off anyone who just got someone to give you their love or whatever.”

“That’s why your mum isn’t on this list,” Estelle replied, “Well, one of the reasons, anyway.

The other reason is that that would make the story far too interesting.

So, we need to look at other motives. I know your dad never liked you, that was obvious, but your brothers?”

“Well, I got the impression they thought I was betraying the family when I went to live with Aunt Jean. They didn’t have enough imagination to work out what was going on.”

We will not get this impression when we actually meet Joe’s brothers.

Estelle nodded. “Well, I guess not all your family can be like you and Jean. If they didn’t have that much imagination, though, they probably wouldn’t have had the imagination to do that thing with the lights. Robbie’s out anyway, I think he’s a little too young to know how to do anything like that, but I’m guessing Vick didn’t know either.   Not to mention that thing where Anja was kept in at school, if that was part of the plan to get her on the bus and not just a funny coincidence.”

“What about Jack, though?”

“Joe, I know Jack and he’s basically a nice person.

And that’s enough of an alibi for them!

(I’m serious. The idea of Jack being the murderer will not be brought up again. Estelle says he’s a nice person, and that’s enough to completely exonerate him.)

He wouldn’t kill his own twin. Besides, he got engaged last month.

Which has nothing to do with anything. Joe’s dad is married, and that didn’t stop him trying to kill Estelle’s husband!

(Oh yeah, SPOILERS- It was Joe’s dad. There will occasionally be half-hearted attempts to convince you it wasn’t, but basically, we know it was Joe’s dad for most of the story.)

Your uncle, what about him?”

Joe thought for a second. “I don’t think he had anything against me.”

Joe’s uncle will not be appearing in the story, but I expect he’s glad to have these two sentences of characterisation.

I had no idea what was going on, and Joe and Estelle didn’t look like they were planning on telling me. “What was with your dad, Joe?”

They suddenly remembered that I was actually in the room. Being incredibly cool, self-controlled people they didn’t jump or anything, but Joe shifted in the chair. Weird, I was sitting in his chair’s identical twin and I couldn’t get into that position. He must have had bones made of rubber.

What position? What do the chairs look like? How does Anja know that Joe and Estelle are incredibly cool and self-controlled? Details, fifteen-year-old me, details!

Having recovered, Joe looked serious for once. “He couldn’t stand me. I’ve got no idea why, but the way he acted you’d think my mother had died giving birth to me or something, which she didn’t. I mean, all of the boys in our family felt like second best, because my parents made it really obvious that my sister Leah was their favourite… That’s an understatement, because the way they acted you’d think the Pope was offering to canonise her…”

We will see no evidence of this when we actually meet Joe’s family. Are you noticing a pattern here?

Estelle could tell that Joe was rambling, so she interrupted, “Anyway, Joe’s dad always treated Leah like a saint, the other brothers like normal human beings and Joe like dirt, right Joe?”

Joe nodded. “I could always tell he didn’t love me, because I had my mum to compare him to. Still, she also thought that the sun shone out of Leah’s…”

“Joe!”

Joe put on a joke-scared face at Estelle’s anger. “Please don’t kill me!” he whimpered. Estelle picked up a kitchen knife and stabbed at the air just as Mark came in.

Who does that?!?

He scurried out of her way and landed on the sofa.

“Shame on you, Estelle!” he laughed, “What did that oxygen do to you? One minute it’s just floating around, helping to breathe, you heartless cow, the next…”

Estelle put the knife down and giggled. “Mark, if you don’t shut up, you’re going the same way as the air.”

Mark sniggered again. “So, what’s going on, gorgeous?”

“We were just filling Anja in on a bit of background. There’s so much we haven’t told her and the others.”

Estelle, they’ve been in your house for the best part of a week! What have you been doing for all this time that you didn’t have time to explain this stuff?

“Catch me telling that Mr Daly anything,” Mark sniffed, “Miserable old get. Gary seems alright, though.”

Oh, right. Sniping pointlessly at Mr Daly.

“Yes,” Estelle murmured, giving Mark a look, “For one thing, he’s quiet.”

I couldn’t help thinking back to the previous night. Gary hadn’t been quiet then. Neither had Joe been very slimy. They’d both dropped the most prominent aspects of their personalities, and I’d been the only one who’d heard. It was as if I’d slipped into a parallel universe or something, where those two actually acted like normal people. I mean, my eyelids had been glued together. Anything could have happened.

“They’d both dropped the most prominent aspects of their personalities.” I don’t know if this is Anja being confused by people having more than one personality trait, or fifteen-year-old me quietly admitting that Gary and Joe aren’t very well-characterised.

Joe seemed to be having the same thoughts. “He was being really strange last night. Said everything that had happened was his fault. Said he’d wrecked our lives.”

I didn’t see any reason to keep quiet after that. I mean, it had been only me that Gary had talked about, not any of the others.

Eh?

“Oh yeah! I think I heard part of that.” Joe looked annoyed that he wasn’t the centre of attention anymore. Feeling weirdly pleased, I carried on.

“Nobody gets more attention than the Sue! Nobody!”

“I think he’s got an inferiority complex or something. Someone must have put ideas into his head, Joe. Remember he went on about someone called Jordan?”

By “went on about him,” she means “mentioned him exactly once.”

Joe thought for a minute. “He said, ‘Jordan was right! I shouldn’t exist!’ You’d have to really hate someone to tell them something like that.” The expression on Joe’s face showed that he knew what it was like to be really hated.

Estelle didn’t know what it was like, but by the looks of it she could guess.

How do you know Estelle doesn’t know what it’s like? You’ve known her for less than a week!

“That poor child,” she murmured in shock, pretty much echoing my thoughts.

“He’s not a child,” Mark commented, trying to change then atmosphere a bit, “He’s only a couple of years younger than you.”

Mark’s plan didn’t work. “This is no time to be pedantic, Mark,” Estelle snapped…

But that’s his only character trait!

“I can’t think of anything worse to be told. Imagine telling someone they shouldn’t exist… If someone had told me that, I’d have killed myself if I’d believed them.” She was getting angry. “What gave this Jordan person the right to say who should or shouldn’t exist? What could Gary have done that was so damn terrible that he shouldn’t…”

I didn’t know why Estelle stopped talking until I saw where she was looking. Her eyes were fixed on the doorway, as if she’d seen something tragic happen through it.

Gary stared back for a second, looking as if he’d just stepped into his worst nightmare. Then he turned and sprinted up the stairs.

We all knew someone had to follow him, and I was the one he liked.

I’d like to point out that, at this stage of the story, Gary and Anja have never actually had a conversation.

By the time I’d got upstairs, Gary had locked himself in the bathroom. I knocked on the door, knowing this wasn’t going to be easy. “Gary!”

He replied in a voice that told me he’d been crying. “Go away. Please.”

“Gary, I’m sorry I was talking about you behind your back. It’s just that you haven’t talked to us much. We guessed you wouldn’t tell us straight out about this Jordan person, so we were trying to work it out ourselves. I’m sorry.”

“We could have just asked you, I suppose, but where’s the fun in that?”

There was a long silence before Gary said, “I can’t tell you. You’ll hate me.”

“Why?”

“It was something terrible. Seriously. I don’t mean stupid stuff like shoplifting or whatever. Something really, really bad happened and it was my fault.”

That shocked me. It would have shocked me even if Joe had said it, but Gary had seemed like an inoffensive sort of person. I’d only known him for a week and that side of his personality had hit me in the face. I couldn’t imagine him doing anything terrible.

Once again- this is the first proper conversation they’ve ever had. Anja has no way of knowing whether or not Gary’s likely to have done anything terrible.

Though actually, he hadn’t said he’d done it…

“Gary? Did you mean that you didn’t mean for it to happen, or what? You can tell me.” He clearly didn’t think he could, so I leant against the door and tried something else. “Whatever it is, it sounds like you regret it. I’m not going to be angry at you for something you regret. It can just be between you and me, OK?”

SPOILERS- This is a complete lie.

There was another pause. “Look, Gary, if you don’t tell me we might not be able to work out who tried to do us in, and why. That means he could kill other people while we’re trying to work it out. Don’t you want us to get to the bottom of this?”

This worked. I heard a scraping sound as Gary undid the lock. The door opened a little to let me in, the closed as he locked it again. He fixed me with his sapphire eyes, looking more fragile than ever. “The others don’t have to know, right?” Gary pleaded.

“Not if you don’t want them to,” I said, sitting down against the radiator with him, “Now, tell me about this Jordan guy.”

SPOILERS- Again, complete lie.

He inhaled in preparation. “OK. It all started about four years ago, when my mum had a heart attack and died. She’d always had this thing wrong with her heart, so it wasn’t really a shock, but I still missed her. I don’t know when my dad started getting new girlfriends, but whenever I met them they always seemed to like me. I’d inherited my mum’s heart condition, so I was always a bit delicate, and I guess women often like people they can feel protective of.” He looked up at me to see if I agreed with this. “Yeah, we do,” I replied, thinking, You in particular, Gary.

And so begin the weird, Oedipal overtones that will come to define Anja and Gary’s relationship!

“Anyway, my dad met a widow named Claire. She was similar to his other girlfriends, a bit… you know, ditzy, but really sweet natured. I knew they were getting serious when they introduced me to her two kids, Jordan and Helen. Helen was eight when I met her, and because she’d heard I was unhealthy she acted really nervous around me, like I was going to explode. She talked to me occasionally, though, because she thought ignoring me would make her a bad person. Jordan, on the other hand,” Gary’s voice began to quaver, “was older than me, went out of his way to ignore me, and I got the impression that he was a bad person. And I was right.”

We don’t find out how Gary got this impression. Maybe Jordan spent a lot of time twirling his moustache and laughing evilly.

He was looking down at the thick indigo carpet, which I thought was a bit unhygienic in a room with a toilet in.

I think the bath’s more of an issue than the toilet, myself.

I put my arm around his shoulders. “So, this is the person who told you that you shouldn’t exist?”

Gary nodded.   “He didn’t at first, though. He looked right through me, like I didn’t exist. Jordan just seemed to want to break up my dad and Claire.

Again, we never find out how Jordan tried to break up Gary’s dad and Claire. Or maybe he didn’t actually try anything, and instead just glowered at them and thought evil thoughts.

Dad was the first man Claire had gone out with since her husband had died five years before, so they thought he just wasn’t used to his mum seeing someone. I think maybe he thought she was betraying his dad’s memory or something.” Gary closed his eyes. “Things didn’t get really bad until the wedding.”

“I’m guessing your dad and Claire, right?”

No, it was Gary and Helen’s wedding. Of course it was Gary’s dad and Claire, Anja, you pillock.

“Yep. I was fifteen, and Helen had just turned nine, but there weren’t any people of her age at the service, so she hung around with me. She kept asking me all these questions about my life, and I didn’t want to tell her that everyone in the whole school hated my guts and thought I was a freak.

“Because, you see, I was the king of the woobies, and fate had decreed that no aspect of my life was allowed to be less than hellish.”

I can’t remember what I said, but I know I made something up. Probably the same thing I told my dad and Claire, so they wouldn’t worry about me. She was more interested in my drawings than my school life, anyway, so it didn’t matter. Anyway, Jordan was chatting up one of my cousins, I think, but when he saw me talking to Helen he came up and punched me in the stomach.” Gary looked right at me, for the first time since he’d started talking. “You know I was picked on at school, Anja, but everyone knew I had a heart condition, so nobody ever beat me up or anything, because they thought that would have killed me. They just made it clear that I didn’t belong. Jordan was the first person who hit me on purpose. He told me not to contaminate his sister.

“Everyone knows that being an over-the-top woobie is catching! No sister of mine is going to be someone’s unrealistically tragic love interest!”

So Helen went, ‘Sorry, Gary. Jordan’s just being stupid. I’ve got to talk to you now, even if I didn’t want to, ‘cause you’re my brother too now, and Jordan wouldn’t like it if I ignored him…’” Gary went quiet, so I decided to prompt him. “What did Jordan do then?”

“He said that he wouldn’t be seen dead with someone like me in his family. Then he hit me again and walked off. But that wasn’t as bad as…”

I didn’t find out what it wasn’t as bad as, at least not then. There was an impatient knocking on the door, and Mr Daly’s testy voice echoed across the bathroom. “Will whoever’s in there please get out! I need to use this room.”

And so the chapter ends. Next time, there’s more Mr Daly bashing, and plenty of squicky speculation about Anja’s love life. See you then!