Chapters (49)
Lotte, Theo and I choose our spot carefully: at the far end of the beach, away from the Italian holidaymakers and just before the rocky outcrop. Using toy spades, the three of us dig a shallow grave.
‘Do we say anything or do we just put her in?’
‘Whatever you want.’
Lotte drops Ruby-May’s doll, Pearl, into the hole. She lands with a soft thud. The doll is naked, apart from a purple ribbon around her neck, because Lotte didn’t want to part with any of her clothes. Both children carefully arrange a collection of objects around her: a conch shell, an ice-cream wrapper, a pure white pebble, a chocolate coin, a twig of driftwood bleached to bone and an amethyst-coloured bead. I crouch on my haunches, the sun beating down on my shoulders. They’re so serious and diligent. Pearl reminds me of an Egyptian mummy being sent into the hereafter with all that she – or, rather, Ruby-May – held dear.
As if the same thought had occurred to Theo, he says, ‘When an important person died in Egypt, Anubis would cut out his heart and weigh it. If it weighed less than a feather, he would go to the afterlife. If he’d been bad, the god Ammut would eat his heart.’
‘I don’t think anyone will eat Ruby-May’s heart!’ Lotte says.
‘We should put in a feather!’ Theo says.
We find a seagull’s and Theo threads it into Pearl’s plastic fist. Some of the damp sand caves in as he leans over the doll.
‘It’s okay,’ I tell him, before he can get upset. ‘It’s time to fill it in anyway.’
We shovel sand on top of Pearl and then pat the mound until it’s smooth. Lotte places a scallop shell in the middle, and Theo lays a few stones round the edge. We picked all the geraniums from the trough at the front of the house on our way here, and the two children push the thick stems into the sand. Most of the flowers fall off in the process and our little patch of beach is bright with the blood-red petals.
‘Do you want to say anything?’ I ask. ‘You know, like a poem or something Ruby-May might have liked?’
They stare at me as if I’ve gone mad.
‘She liked Peppa Pig,’ says Lotte, ‘but I don’t know any of the words.’
They both snort like pigs and fall about laughing.
‘Bye-bye, Ruby-May,’ says Theo, and then the two of them race back along the beach.
They leave me standing next to a baby-sized grave, feeling as if I’ve been flayed, and unable to get the thought out of my head that my sister, with her diploma in Drama Studies, is lying exceptionally convincingly to me.