Forever Phoenix Read online

  My maniac mother delivers a change of clothes for me as promised. Unfortunately she has the fashion taste of a colour-blind OAP. There is no universe in which I would be seen dead in a yellow ruffled blouse, beige cardigan and green plaid kilt that feels like it was woven from a mixture of nettles and camel hair. I stuff the offending items into an empty locker and raid the lost property cupboard instead.

  There, behind piles of boxes filled with dusty old textbooks and a wickerwork cat basket belonging to Tiger, the school cat, I find assorted items of abandoned school uniform. The pleated black skirt is pleasingly short and the grey cable-knit socks bizarrely long, and the black crew-neck sweater is so big it does the job of a coat. A pair of almost-new Ash trainers completes the look; although they’re a size too big, the cable-knit socks help a little.

  I dig about in someone’s long-lost make-up bag, find a black eyeliner pencil and swipe it expertly beneath my lower lashes. My hair, still damp from the shower, falls down my back in red ringlet curls.

  I trudge through the school, loitering a little outside Mum’s office, scuffing the toes of my adopted trainers against the shiny wooden skirting board. Tiger the cat appears from nowhere, pressing himself against my legs and swishing his ginger tail regretfully. At least he will miss me – and Pie too, of course.

  I bite my lip. Pie may or may not have been the architect of my downfall, but I cannot bear the thought of leaving him behind. Could a magpie fit into a cat basket? I run back to the gym and haul out the wicker cat basket – now all I have to do is find him. I spend the next half hour combing the grounds, calling Pie and saying a silent farewell to the place that’s been home these last three years, adding a sprig of purple heather and a charred, soaked scrap of what was once my maths exercise book to the Quality Street tin as I go. It’s not like I’ll ever forget this place, but old habits die hard.

  My magpie friend is nowhere to be seen. He’s not in the tree I found him beneath back in the spring. He’s not up by the summer house, our favourite hangout. He’s not in the vegetable garden annoying Mr McArdle, the sour-faced school groundskeeper who’s been known to take pot shots at Pie with his air rifle.

  Pie is nowhere at all. He’s probably flown up to the forest, upset by the smoke and the fire engines and the fuss … but what if he was caught in the fire after all? What if he’s hurt, or worse?

  ‘Pie, please!’ I yell, but there is no answering ‘chacker chacker’ call.

  I can’t find Pie. I can’t kidnap him. I can’t even wave goodbye.

  As I head back to the school building, the promised taxi sweeps to a halt on the gravel drive. It’s eleven o’clock exactly.

  ‘Not much luggage then?’ the driver asks, eyeing the empty cat basket and my Quality Street tin, and I can’t quite trust my voice to tell him I don’t have a thing in the world, at least not any more. That’s when I spot Pie watching me from between the ears of one of the stone lions that perch grandly on either side of the steps, his blue-black and white plumage sleek, his bright beady eyes glinting.

  ‘Pie!’ I squeal. ‘You’re safe! I just knew you’d be OK!’

  He spreads his wings and glides over to settle on my shoulder, making a soft, sad chittering sound. If he wasn’t a magpie, I would tell him about my disgrace, my banishment. I would tell him how sad I am feeling, how he is my best friend in the world, how much I’m going to miss him. Let’s face it, I’d tell him all of that anyway if only the taxi driver wasn’t leaning out of the window, chewing gum and listening.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asks. ‘A magpie? Watch it don’t peck your eyes out!’

  Magpies are so misunderstood, I kid you not.

  ‘He’s a rare Caledonian long-tailed macaw,’ I declare. ‘His name is Pie.’

  ‘Aye, right – and I’m Bonnie Prince Charlie,’ the taxi driver says. ‘Caledonian long-tailed macaw … pull the other one!’

  I spot a pale face lurking behind the leaded glass window of Mum’s office, looking sad and anxious, and for a moment I wonder if she will rush down the steps and cling on to me too, in a Pie-like display of affection. Then I realize she’s on the phone, probably talking to a parent-governor about the fire and trying to pass it off as a freak lightning-strike incident.

  She catches sight of me and her mouth shrinks into a pinched, pained shape, her fingers tugging at the phoenix necklace round her neck. Grandma Lou gave her the necklace on her sixteenth birthday, and apparently it inspired my name. I have a matching bracelet, a silver chain with a phoenix charm that Mum gave me when I was ten. I still wear it as a bright glimpse of times gone by. It’s one of the few personal presents Mum has ever given me.

  Anyway, it’s clear that she isn’t coming out to say goodbye. She flicks a hand in my direction in what might be a half-hearted wave – or an attempt to brush me out of her line of vision.

  Pie chirrups again. Right now, he’s pretty much all I have left in the world. I found him in the spring when he was a tiny fledgling, fluffy and fierce-looking with feathers sticking out everywhere. I never knew for sure if he’d fallen out of the nest or tried to fly too soon and failed, but earlier that day Mr McArdle had been boasting that he’d shot a magpie. Pie was almost certainly an orphan, so I scooped him up and put him in a cardboard box and hid him in the dorm to save him from Tiger.

  I fed him cat food and hard-boiled eggs chopped into bits, and digestive biscuits soaked in orange squash – that last one wasn’t actually on the list of possible foodstuffs I found on the internet, but he seemed to like it. My dorm mates weren’t so keen, especially when Pie took to landing on their heads and squawking in their ears. They said magpies were bad luck, especially a lone magpie.

  ‘One for sorrow,’ the girl in the room next to mine said, quoting the old folk rhyme. I told her that was stupid, so she snitched on me, and Mum made me release Pie back into the wild.

  ‘He’s a wild creature, Phoenix,’ she said. ‘Not a pet!’

  I knew she was right, but still I cried when I took him up the hill behind the school and let him go. I thought that would be the last I’d see of him, but Pie never forgot me. He’d swoop down on to my windowsill and tap on the dorm window with his beak, and if nobody was around, I’d sometimes let him in and we’d talk about old times together.

  I am not going to leave him behind, wild creature or not. I can’t.

  ‘C’mon, Pie … adventure time!’ I open the basket lid and watch him jump in.

  He’s like that – bright, brave, endlessly curious and always up for a long journey in a wickerwork basket. Well, I’m not sure about that last bit, but I’m willing to find out.

  I jump into the taxi and we drive away in a hail of gravel. My life at Bellvale is over, just like that. I pride myself on maintaining a tough and confident attitude, but being turfed out without a backward glance hurts. At least I have Pie to keep me company, and that makes me feel a little less alone.

  I collect my tickets, buy a sandwich and catch the train with minutes to spare. It hurtles south, taking me into uncharted territory and to a grandmother I haven’t seen for four years after some family rift that Mum would never talk about. I prop my feet up on the seat opposite and try not to think about what might happen if she doesn’t want me either. I have no doubt that Mum has told her I am a teen arsonist, a wild child who laughed as the school burned.

  Oh, and so much for the borrowed lemon shampoo, because actually my hair still smells of dust and ashes.

  Hours later, a second cab dumps Pie and me on the pavement outside the big wrought-iron gates at Greystones. The sky explodes with early 5th November fireworks, and I can’t decide whether this signals good luck for my new start or warns of explosive drama yet to come. Knowing my luck, probably the second.

  I pay the cabbie and push open the gate, swinging the cat basket and clutching the Quality Street tin, trying to look cool and careless as I march along the drive. Greystones is not so much a house as a full-blown mansion, ivy-clad and slightly forbidding in the half
-light.

  To my left, wisps of music roll out from behind the trees, as if someone is holding an early-evening gig in the grounds of Grandma Lou’s house. It’s possible they are – my gran is eccentric and unpredictable. She was a famous model in the sixties – Louisa Winter, jet-setter and friend of the stars, her face on the covers of all the glossy magazines. She threw it all away a decade later, returning to Greystones with a baby bump and no sign of a husband or even a boyfriend.

  The baby grew up to be my mother, Vivi Winter, a woman carved from ice and stone, a woman so unsuited to life as the daughter of a sixties wild child that you have to wonder if she was accidentally swapped at birth.

  ‘It was no kind of childhood,’ Mum once told me, sour-faced. ‘Louisa was busy reinventing herself as an artist at the time – that was all she cared about. There were troops of famous people coming and going. We went on a round-the-world trip when I was seven – Europe, India, Morocco, Mozambique. Downright irresponsible. I’d rather have had a seaside holiday with donkey rides and sandcastles …’

  ‘Nightmare,’ I’d said. I could just imagine her as a child, dressed in sari silk and paddling in the Ganges, sulking because she wanted to be back at school, learning her three times table. In our family, the adventurous gene seems to skip a generation here and there, causing heartache and havoc all round.

  My grandmother is a famous artist now – one of her paintings hangs in the Tate Britain – but Mum is no more impressed by that claim to fame than by my grandmother’s famous modelling years.

  She doesn’t approve of Grandma Lou’s house, either. Part of Greystones is a kind of hippy co-operative for assorted arty save-the-earth types. The last time I was here, there was a woman called Willow living in a yurt in the grounds who made rugs and baskets out of plaited plastic bags.

  ‘C’mon, Pie, let’s do this,’ I say, but he’s silent now, exhausted by the long train journey and resentful of his basket prison. I walk up the steps and ring the bell, listening to it echo ominously throughout the house. The ache in my stomach forms itself into a hard, sharp knot of dread so I tilt my chin up and fix a don’t-care look on my face.

  The door opens and Grandma Lou appears, a wispy creature in a paint-stained tunic and green suede clogs, her blazing auburn hair piled up haphazardly on her head and speared through with three or four paintbrushes.

  I wonder if she’s still angry enough with my mum over that long-ago quarrel to slam the door in my face, but her green eyes shine and she shakes her head.

  ‘Oh, Phoenix,’ she says.

  That’s all it takes.

  A single fat and salty tear rolls slowly down one cheek as she hauls me in for a hug, and even though it’s four years since I was last here, with nothing but a few Christmas and birthday presents in between, something inside me shifts and melts.

  I wonder if this is what it feels like to come home.

  3

  Free Spirit

  I sit on the ancient squishy sofa as Grandma Lou drapes a crochet blanket round my shoulders and hands me a box of tissues. A tidal wave of memories surfaces – memories of the two of us making sticky paint handprints on the living-room wall, of cutting up the kitchen curtains to sew a princess dress and making a sword from corrugated cardboard to go with it, of eating banana cake at midnight, sitting on the big, low horizontal branch of our favourite oak tree. You could clamber up to it quite easily via a series of lower branches and, if I remember rightly, Grandma Lou sipped white wine out of an enamel mug while I drank Ribena.

  She is not the usual kind of grandmother.

  ‘Let it all out,’ she says now, stroking my hair as the tears roll down my cheeks, an ugly, salty waterfall of pain. ‘Let it go.’

  So I do, and she pulls me close and I breathe in her trademark scent of strong coffee, Pears soap and turpentine. I cry a wet patch on the shoulder of her embroidered tunic dress. She tells me that things will be OK, and I want to believe her, I really do.

  ‘Want to tell me what happened?’ she asks, wiping the last of my tears and holding me at arm’s length. It’s something my mum never bothered to ask.

  ‘It was my fault,’ I whisper. ‘But … I didn’t do it on purpose. I lit a candle. Which isn’t allowed, obviously, but it was Hallowe’en and the rest of the world was partying and dressing up and having fun, and I wanted to celebrate it, just a little bit.’

  Grandma Lou nods, still stroking my hair.

  ‘There’s this tame magpie who jumps on to the windowsill all the time … if you leave the window open, he comes in. His name is Pie and I’ve known him since he was a chick – I sort of saved his life. I wanted some company, so I opened the window and in he came.’

  Grandma Lou looks thoughtful. ‘I see,’ she says. ‘A lighted candle, an open window and a marauding magpie … not a great combination. Does your mother know?’

  I sigh. ‘She can’t get past the arson theory. Besides, if it turns out Pie was involved … well, Mum’d be even madder than she already is. She doesn’t like him.’

  Grandma Lou raises an eyebrow. ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Our little friend in the cat basket … that’s Pie?’

  ‘I couldn’t leave him there,’ I argue. ‘The school groundsman shot his mother with an air rifle, and he’s always threatening to get Pie too – seriously, the world sucks if you’re a magpie.’

  The world sucks if you are a fourteen-year-old girl with big dreams and a knack of repeatedly doing the wrong thing at any given moment too, but I don’t say this to Grandma Lou.

  ‘At least we have space for him here,’ she is saying. ‘Plenty of trees, a park right across the road …’

  ‘Oh! I was thinking he might like to be an indoor magpie.’

  ‘Is that fair on Pie?’ she asks gently, and my hopes crumble because it isn’t. I know that. Pie and I are both free spirits – and you cannot keep a free spirit in a cat basket, or not for long. I lift the basket and peer inside. Pie is in the corner, eyes beady and frightened, feathers fluffed up. He seems to be shaking, and there’s been no chittering for hours now.

  ‘No,’ I admit. ‘He’s not an indoor bird, not any more. I’ll let him go.’

  ‘Good girl.’

  I pull the crochet blanket round me and carry the cat basket to the door. It’s properly dark outside now, the sky like indigo velvet. The blanket trails behind me like a cloak as I make my way down the steps and across the grass towards the ancient oak tree where my grandmother and I once ate banana cake at midnight, long, long ago.

  It’s the kind of tree Pie might appreciate.

  I stop beneath the oak, drop to my knees and unfasten the cat-basket lid. Pie is out of there like a shot, spirits restored – he flies up on to my shoulder and hides behind my hair.

  ‘New home, Pie,’ I tell him, making my voice as upbeat as I can. ‘A nice big oak, and I’m told the neighbours are friendly. There’s a park close by if you want to go crazy, and no trigger-happy groundsman, I promise …’

  Pie shows no interest in leaving my shoulder. ‘I’ll be right here … just a stone’s throw away,’ I whisper.

  Of course, I don’t know if that’s true. I might end up with Dad, or maybe I’ll be packed off to some other boarding school, if any can be bribed to take me. My future is hanging in the balance, but Pie doesn’t need to know that.

  ‘You’ll be safe here, wherever I end up,’ I tell him. ‘You’ll be free …’

  I stretch an arm out to the lowest bough, and Pie hops along it and flutters into the tree. He pauses for a moment, eyes glinting, then turns and flies higher, vanishing into the dark.

  I don’t think I have ever felt more alone.

  The night air smells of woodsmoke and autumn, and I stand for a moment breathing it in, trying to find courage for whatever the coming days will bring. My life is in tatters, but I will gather it up, stitch it together and carry on, the way I always do. I am the queen of brave faces.

  As I stand in the darkness, I hear the sound of distant voices and laug
hter, the eerie discordant whisper of music. Ghostly figures appear through the trees, their faces faint blurs in the darkness as they turn towards the wrought-iron gates. I shiver, the hairs prickling on the back of my neck. It’s only a day after Hallowe’en, but … do ghosts carry guitars and violin cases?

  Their footsteps crunch across the gravel as they pass through the gates and out into the night.

  Grandma Lou joins me beside the oak tree. ‘The Lost & Found,’ she says softly.

  My eyes widen. ‘The … what?’

  ‘Our resident teen band,’ she explains. ‘Although they’re not actually resident, apart from Jake. They practise here in the old railway carriage, and they’re fabulous. If you stay here and go to the local school, you’ll meet them …’

  I blink, register a distant blast of trumpet and echoing laughter. Surprise, disbelief and a tangle of hope and fear pulse through me.

  ‘Stay here?’ I echo.

  ‘Seems like the best plan. Your mother says things aren’t working out at Bellvale. Your father … well, he seems busy with his new family,’ Grandma Lou says, an edge of disapproval in her voice. ‘Besides, I don’t think either one of them has a clue how to handle a girl like you.’

  She’s right about that.

  ‘When I was your age, my parents had certain ideas of what was expected of me,’ she continues. ‘I didn’t like those ideas. I felt misunderstood, stifled, trapped …’

  ‘That’s how I feel!’ I exclaim.

  ‘I know, Phoenix. You’re full of spirit and mischief and wonderful, dangerous ideas … and your mum doesn’t know how to deal with that. My parents didn’t, either.’

  I think of my grandmother as a teenager in the sixties, taking a train to London to make her fortune as a model. I think of her coming home again as a single mum, hanging out with pop stars and artists, travelling the world and earning fame all over again as a painter. She makes breaking the rules seem like a brave and exciting thing to do, not something to be ashamed of.