Phoenix Read online

  “I did tell you, Katie,” Mum said. “Knew you weren’t listening.”

  “We have to check out a school or something.” Ally shrugged.

  “But what about Jack?” I mouthed, concealing my face with my hand in case Dad saw in the rear-view mirror.

  Ally shook her head and shuddered, but she maintained eye contact and there was an odd look in them that I couldn’t decipher. I squinted, trying to probe her thoughts, but drew a complete blank.

  “You’re not gonna let it go, are you?” she said.

  “Not ’til I find him.”

  The signpost to Lord Worthingdale School flashed past.

  “You missed it, Dad,” I told him.

  “Oh, we’re not going there,” he replied. “Worthingdale isn’t the best school and there are people there you shouldn’t mix with.”

  Ally and I cast each other sideways glances and rolled our eyes. No school could be worse than our old high school with its drug queues, smoking and fights.

  “Besides,” Dad said, “I’d like to see what my old school is like. I’m hoping to get you both in there.”

  Dad finally left the carriageway and drove down winding country lanes over which woodland cast dappled shade. He slowed as we entered a village named Beechwood. It was virtually non-existent. On one side was a quaint white-washed pub with a thatched roof and blackened timbers tacked decoratively over the outer walls. A shaded beer garden out the front had two occupied tables. A sign with a picture of a king’s head swung at right angles from the wall above the door – The King George. In front of the pub was an empty bus shelter, and opposite that was a log cabin, in front of which a broken sign read:

  Beechwood Caravan Park

  Temporary and permanent sites available

  Enquire within.

  The caravans were well hidden behind the dense trees and other than the driveway to the side of the cabin, there was little evidence of civilisation. Despite slowing down, Dad showed no sign of stopping, which was a pity as the village had a comfortable feel to it.

  Once we were out of the village, Dad accelerated up the steep, winding lane. Second exit on the roundabout, down the hill again, and we were back in suburbia. We pulled into the car park of a multi-layered box of windows and green panelled walls.

  Ally and I both screwed our noses. Trinnington High was ugly. But it didn’t just look bad; the energy inside was really draining and intense pressure seemed to push on the outside of my skull. I massaged my forehead to try and dispel the pounding headache that started the instant we crossed the threshold.

  Our footsteps echoed as we followed the tacky cardboard signs to the primitive classrooms with their wooden desks and I stared at the stained inkwells in disbelief. Did Dad really want to send us here?

  “You wanna see the pool?” Dad asked, grinning.

  He led us to the sport’s wing where the smell of chlorine filtered towards us and compounded my headache. The glassy blue surface of a six-lane indoor pool made me yearn for our backyard pool back home. But if Dad thought he’d won me over, he was wrong. This wasn’t home and there was something – I shuddered as a ripple destroyed the pristine surface – about this freaky, haunted school that made my blood run cold.

  “Well, what do you think?” Dad asked as we headed back to the foyer.

  “Hate swimming,” Ally said.

  “Katie?” he prompted.

  “I, er, dunno. It’s a long way from Freddie’s.”

  “Closer to home than your high school was in Oz.” Mum frowned. She stopped outside the open door of the admin office.

  “Do they have equine studies?” Ally asked, crossing her arms.

  “Not sure. This isn’t rural like your old school,” Dad said, heading into the office. “You should be grateful for the facilities it has to offer.”

  “Good facilities don’t mean it’s a good school.” Ally sagged against the wall beside the office door.

  A dark-haired woman behind the desk smiled and beckoned us in.

  “How about we check the academic records?” Mum suggested, stepping inside.

  “And if they’re no good, we can go somewhere else?” I asked.

  Mum nodded.

  “You don’t need us to do that,” Ally said. “I’m going down the street to that market I saw. You coming, Katie?”

  Mum rolled her eyes and waved us away. Ally hurried back along the sloping corridor towards the front entrance.

  “Do you, um,” I said, following her, “feel something, you know, weird about this place?”

  She stopped and faced me. “It’s a bloody school, it’s the summer holidays, why the ef would I want to be here?”

  The tiny sound of something dropping to the ground drew our attention to the coat hooks on our left. The area was empty of people and clothing, yet one peg slowly twisted sideways and hung lopsided amidst the endless rows.

  Ally’s hand trembled as she grabbed my arm and we both ran out the door, only glancing back once we reached the pedestrian gate at the top of the path. My headache and nausea had both vanished.

  “Sure you don’t feel anything?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

  “S-sure,” she said. “It was just a screw falling out.”

  But the fact that she showed no reaction to the large chestnut grazing to the side of one of the double-storey houses that butted onto the school grounds, told me she was considerably distracted.

  We continued in single file to accommodate the growing number of pedestrians heading away from the market, until the pavement widened by a post office. Beside that was a café and bakery, and beyond that the shops surrounding the public square were hidden by the market stall canopies.

  Women in the prettiest summer dresses pushed strollers amongst the stalls, paying no attention to the goods on sale, but I doubted the designer fashion they favoured would be available at an outdoor market anyway.

  Colourful, cheap clothes fluttered from racks, and cookware, glasses, candles and produce made up the bulk of the other stalls. There were no preloved items, nothing of any interest.

  “You got any money, Ally?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “So what are we doing here then?” I flicked the sleeve of a pink hoodie as I passed a circular rack.

  Ally stopped in front of me, her face contorted like she didn’t know whether to laugh or frown.

  “Okay, so I have to face it,” she said. “I know what you’re talking about with the sapphires.”

  “For real? You see my past life?”

  “What I see is really fuzzy, like walking through dense fog or some weird dream. You’re there though, like real and solid, and…” She stared at the odd laces of my skate shoes. “It’s like you’re meant to be there. And the thing is, when you hold the sapphire and I don’t, you kinda like…”

  I grasped her wrists until she met my gaze.

  “Go, like, you know,” she shrugged, “invisible.”

  My eyes widened.

  A woman rammed her stroller into the back of my legs and I twisted around, glaring. She held her nose in the air and Ally tugged me closer to a stall to make room.

  “We have as much right to be here as you do.” I glowered at the snob’s back.

  “Oh get over it, Katie,” Ally said. “You might have a right to be here but you don’t want to be.”

  “Huh?” I stared at her, confused.

  “I know what you’re going to do,” Ally said.

  She did? I wasn’t even sure myself what I was going to do. Ally walked a few steps ahead of me and pretended to examine a T-shirt on a circular rail.

  “Tenner each,” a guy called behind us. “Or two for fifteen.”

  “You’re going to put those jewels back to clear Jack’s name,” Ally said as we hurried away. “Only you’re gonna do it in your past life, not now.” She snatched an apple from the fruit stall and tossed it from one hand to the other.

  “I’ll have to weigh that,” the stallholder said. “So I
know how much to charge you.” He weighed the two apples I held to him and charged me a pound.

  “You make that sound like a bad thing,” I said, biting into my apple. It was sweet and crisp but had no sticker for me to identify the variety.

  Ally stopped again at the end of the row of stalls, and faced me.

  “Listen to yourself!” she said through a mouthful of apple. “Of course it’s bad, it’s not frigging normal!” She swallowed. “And like I said, when I’ve been there with you, it’s like you, well, fit and once those jewels are back in place and you’ve found Jack…” She broke off, shuddering and stared at the ground between us.

  “What is it?” I asked hesitantly.

  Her expression was fierce when she stared back at me.

  “Like you said, your portal to the past will be gone…”

  “So?”

  “I’ve got a feeling,” she closed her eyes, “that when you’ve confronted your shadow you won’t be able to leave.” Her eyes flicked open again and bored so deep into mine that I shivered. “You won’t even want to leave.”

  My lips parted in shock, not just at her accusatory tone but at the fact she’d seen my shadow and had sensed what might happen. Her eyes glared defiantly as she dug in her cardigan pocket, but her shaking hands as she withdrew an opened envelope betrayed her fear.

  My apple suddenly tasted sour as I identified my letter.

  “Oh Ally! I… what can I say!”

  “If I hadn’t seen what those freaky gemstones can do,” she thrust the letter under my nose but I stepped back, unwilling to take it, “I’d never have believed this.”

  “When did you find it?” I asked quietly.

  “This morning. I was gonna borrow your jacket ’cause mine’s dirty…” she glanced down at the tomato sauce stain by her top button.

  “You?” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Borrow my daggy clothes?”

  “Daggy’s better than dirty.” She shrugged but her spite-filled voice kept the tension between us. “I can’t believe you’re so chicken that you were just gonna leave a note!” She flapped it in my face then shoved it back into her pocket.

  “It’s more than you left when you…”

  “That was totally not the same!”

  Her hostility severed my words and I drew a deep breath to try and calm my pounding heart.

  “Have Mum and Dad seen it?”

  “You think they’d just ignore it if they had?” She rolled her eyes. “Especially Dad!”

  I stared at the ground, the note like a broken bridge between us.

  “I don’t know what to say, Ally.”

  “You don’t give a stuff about anyone else!” Ally’s voice was hard and fast, each word like a blow to my stomach.

  Both our apples rolled to the ground when I grasped her hands again.

  “It’s not like that,” I whispered. “I don’t have a choice.”

  “Of course you do!” She snatched her hands free. “Yet you’re choosing another life – and not even a better life – over this one.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said. “But I believe that’s why I’ve come back as a twin this time. So that at least some resemblance of me continues in the now. For our parents.”

  “If you,” she said, folding her arms, “had to live with a demented old stranger in a new country and start at a freaking school out of the dark ages.” She glared at me. “How would you feel?”

  I wanted to say something in defence of Freddie, but I bit back my words.

  “Scared? Like me?” she said. “And you’re telling me,” she pulled the letter out again, “that you want to run back to the past and leave me to do all this on my own?”

  I stared at her, speechless. She’d described everything I’d been feeling before we left Australia, except she had no choice but to face the future.

  “You’re the pits, Katie!” She twisted so her back was to me. “And a wuss who’s just too scared to face the future.”

  I flinched at her words. How could I be a wuss when I was prepared to go back to a former life and make things right? But challenging her while she was in this mood was pointless.

  “I thought you were okay with it all,” I said to her back.

  “Okay with what?” she hissed, spinning around. “Being ditched by my twin? Being dragged to England? Or do you mean that I’m okay with being a bloody freak of nature who can see crap from the past when I hold gems!” She turned her back to me again. “Yeah, course I’m cool with it, why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Please don’t be like that,” I sighed.

  “Like what?”

  My shoulders slumped as I stared at her stiff back. My sister, always defiant, had never admitted her fear before.

  “I’m sorry, Ally, really I am.”

  “No you’re not.” She started walking away from me. “If you were sorry you’d just give the jewels to that old wrinkly at the museum and be done with it.”

  “But that would just confirm everyone’s suspicion about our family,” I said, hurrying after her. “I mean, poor Freddie…”

  She stopped walking and drew a deep breath. “Look, I’m gonna make a suggestion but don’t think for one minute that it means I’m okay with all this.”

  “Go on.” I stepped in front of her to make her face me but she sidestepped me and walked purposely down the next aisle of stalls. She stopped beside a jewellery stall and began poking the colourful display.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, confused.

  “If I find it, I want to make a deal.”

  “Go on,” I asked, curious.

  “If you can return to the war to clear the Stewart name and still get back, would you do it?”

  “I, well, what about finding Jack?” I said. “Freddie would love to know where he got to.”

  “It’s a compromise, Katie,” Ally said. “I don’t even want you to go back, but if you do and can at least stop people like that old woman slandering…”

  Ally’s eyes, circled through lack of sleep, pleaded with me. How could I leave it to her to tell Mum and Dad that I’d chosen to stay with my brother, Freddie, back in the war, instead of here, now, with them? They’d done nothing to me that wasn’t my destiny. In fact, they’d brought me to this, my parallel life, where maybe I could finally be in control of my own destiny.

  I managed a smile and even though hugging sisters was totally weird, I did it anyway.

  “So you’ll do it?” she asked, wrestling free.

  “Sure.” I shrugged. “Whatever ‘it’ is.”

  “Is there something in particular you’re looking for?” the stallholder asked.

  We both blushed, realising she must have listened to our totally weird conversation, and took a cautious look towards the woman. A string of beads was looped around her neck and as she flicked her head backwards, two enormous blue oval earrings swung from under her black hair.

  “Yes! Your earrings, we want some just like that!” Ally said.

  “I don’t have any like this for sale.” The woman shrugged.

  “Then we’ll buy yours,” Ally said.

  “Tush, they’re just tat from a car boot sale.” The woman flicked the beads and they swung under her lobes.

  “Doesn’t matter.” I shook my head.

  The woman leaned forwards and squinted at my ears. “They’re not for pierced ears.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I assured her again. “We must have them!”

  The woman looked down her nose at me. “Twenty quid and they’re yours.”

  “Rip off!” Ally shrieked.

  “Twenty quid,” the woman said. “Bargain at that, antiques they are.”

  “Bullsh…” I tugged Ally’s arm to cut her off.

  “Take it or leave it.” The woman fiddled with necklaces in front of us then snatched the whole tray away as if she thought we were going to steal it.

  “How about nineteen?” I said, digging in my pocket. “It’s all I’ve got.”

  “Deal.” The
woman’s long black fingernails scratched my palm as she snatched the money and thrust the earrings at me.

  As we headed back to the school, I copied Ally and prised the clasp off a glass earring.

  “There,” Ally said, giving me her bead. “Put those in the statue when you’re,” she shuddered, “you know.”

  The glass wasn’t quite as blue as the sapphires or as smooth, and they were a fair bit smaller, but hopefully without the real jewels to compare them to, they would fool the people in my past life.

  Mum and Dad were waiting by the car when we slipped in the school gate and that sickness returned to my stomach. Mum was smiling.

  “Welcome to your new school,” Dad said, waving his arms at the building. “You start in the new school year, two weeks from now.”

  “I-I can’t,” I said.

  “I know it’s all a bit overwhelming,” Mum said. “But you’ll soon settle in and make new friends.”

  “And according to the head mistress,” Dad said, “there’s another new kid starting and they’re gonna put you all in the same class, so at least you won’t feel quite such outsiders.”

  But unless the new kid was also a freak of nature I couldn’t see how that could ever be true. Still, at least the school was co-ed. Kathy’s last high school in England wasn’t. She and Jack had gone to different schools after juniors – no high schools were co-ed and even though juniors were mixed, they’d had to play in separate playgrounds back then.