Phoenix Du Rose

Chapter One

Chapter One

SUMMER BLUES“Please, can I speak to Wiri?” Phoenix held her breath and waited for the reply. She disguised her voice, so the hotel receptionist didn’t recognise her. She didn’t want her father to hear she’d called and wonder why.

“He isn’t here right now. Please, can I take a message?” The woman’s clipped voice cut across the kilometres.

Phoenix’s heart clenched tight in her chest. “No, it’s fine thank you. I’ll ring back later.” The fake Scots accent borrowed from her maternal grandfather wilted. It had proved difficult enough to access the telephone in the first place without having to go back for a second attempt. Phoenix hung up the receiver and glanced around the sparse office. She stifled a sob.

She’d spent the entire year canvassing her parents for permission to attend the holiday camp. Asking them to come and fetch her after one night seemed like the worst failure imaginable. Her mother hadn’t enjoyed towing the horse trailer along the narrow lanes which cut through the dense bush. Phoenix had wanted to play a grown up role with temporary freedom from her eighteen-year-old cousin’s overbearing influence. Then at the first sign of trouble, she sought Wiremu’s help as a reflex. Her shoulders slumped. Perhaps she couldn’t manage without him. She wished she hadn’t tried. The urge to grab her rucksack and escape on her horse, played around the edges of her consciousness. She needed to speak to Wiri first, regretting how they’d left things and certain he’d offer his customary reassurance.

Phoenix crept to the window and peered through the smudged glass. The campers sat in a huddle around the campfire with the leaders dotted among them. Their faces flickered, reflecting the flames which united youth and age beneath an orange hue. The girls from her cabin sat together, testing the newness of their relationship and trying to bond. Mosquitos and night flies hummed in the glow, taking the opportunity to dive bomb anyone not wearing insect repellent. Phoenix turned the door handle with care to avoid the irritating squeak. Dusk covered her movements as she crept from the office and slipped out onto the deck. The steady rumble of conversation returned to her in snatches of words and half-finished sentences. Laughter sounded as someone’s marshmallow caught fire and a flurry of movement found the stick owner losing their trophy beneath a stamping boot.

“Don’t do it again, Sharon,” one of the camp leaders complained. “You’re doing it on purpose now.”

Phoenix slid sideways, her palms pressed against the weather board wall. She reached the end of the building and skipped down the stairs. Executing the turn she’d planned at the bottom step, she prepared to re-join the campfire huddle with the excuse of having visited the bathroom.

“Hey.” The whispering male voice took her by surprise and Phoenix jumped and squeaked at the same time. She missed her footing on the bottom step and tumbled to her knees. Grit and small stones grazed the skin. Pressing her palm over her mouth muted the hiss of pain.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” His tone sounded apologetic. Slipping from the shadows, he offered Phoenix his hand. She gripped the bony fingers and tried to salvage some of her dignity once on her feet. “What were you doing in the office?” he demanded. Keeping his adolescent voice low caused the baritone pitch to waver. “I heard you using the phone. You know we’re not allowed any technology, so what’s important enough to break the rules?”

Phoenix swallowed. It seemed an impossible task to stop the words from tumbling free. She shook her head, not trusting herself. “Nothing,” she lied. The dual actions of rule breaking and lying made her feel dirty, so she opted for misdirection to appease her horrified conscience. “Nothing important.”

The unexpected misery consuming her since her arrival burned the space between her eyes with the effort of holding it in. Used to venting to a mother who listened, Phoenix sensed the dam cracking from twenty-four hours without empathy.

The teenager frowned. “It looked like more than nothing to me,” he said. “I figure if the good girl among us is rule breaking, it must be serious.” His brown eyes held the promise of understanding and Phoenix wavered. Her lips parted in a dismissal, but her problems had other plans.

“I wanted to speak to my cousin,” she admitted. “It’s complicated.” She swallowed and gnawed on her lower lip. “It’s not important.” A sense of extreme relief accompanied the realisation she’d stopped herself blurting everything to a stranger.

He nodded, giving Phoenix time to sort her thoughts back into their relevant boxes. Tall for his age, he wore his hair hanging over his face like curtains as though he spent his life hiding. “You’re Phoenix,” he said and took a step forward. “I’m Kirwan.”

“I know.” Phoenix frowned. “You got told off on the first night for smoking.”

“Yup.” Kirwan pulled a lighted cigarette from behind his back. His easy smirk spread into a grin. Not much wider than a cocktail stick, he’d rolled it with expertise to conserve tobacco. “Busted. I’m glad they didn’t find my whole stash, or I wouldn’t last until the end of the week.”

Phoenix wrinkled her nose. “But it stinks,” she said. “How can you stand to put that muck into your body?”

Kirwan frowned and deep furrows appeared in his forehead. “It’s the only thing I have,” he admitted. He nipped the end of the cigarette between finger and thumb, blowing on the stub to cool it. Then he pushed it into the front pocket of his jeans. “Waste not, want not,” he said. “Are you gonna tell?”

“No!” Phoenix took a step back. Logan Du Rose’s daughter knew better than to squeal to the authorities about anything. She shook her black curls with more emphasis than she intended.

“You didn’t answer my question about who you were phoning.” Kirwan patted his pocket as though afraid the cigarette stub might already have disappeared.

Phoenix sighed. “My cousin,” she admitted. “I want to go home.”

“After one night and a day?” Kirwan’s head jerked back on his neck. “Aren’t you enjoying it here?”

Phoenix shook her head. “It’s not what I thought it would be like.” Her voice lowered to a whisper and disappeared in a sigh.

Kirwan shrugged. “So, you’re phoning the cousin you wanted to get away from? Must be bad.”

Phoenix turned her head towards the sounds coming from the campfire. The sudden urge for confession had abandoned her. “We should get back,” she said. Her fingers writhed in front of her tee shirt.

“What, to roasting gluten free marshmallows over the fire?” Kirwan scoffed. “And not being allowed to swear for an entire week?”

Phoenix smiled and the action felt genuine. Kirwan’s colourful dialogue had got him more fines in the single game of Capture the Flag than he would ever finish paying. If the game had involved real money, he’d be bankrupt before the age of sixteen. “I should have come with a friend,” she admitted. “I thought it sounded great. But he got called away at the last moment and couldn’t come.”

“Boyfriend?” Kirwan raised a dark eyebrow and Phoenix’s cheeks turned pink. Her fingers writhed and she shoved them behind her back to hide their betrayal of her discomfort.

“No, he’s my pastor,” she said. Her tone became defensive. Burning pink cheeks disclosed the monster crush she’d had on Sam since junior school. It had survived his marriage to a local woman and the birth of his own child. But his veneer of the perfect man had lost some of its shine when he informed her she’d be attending the camp alone. Empty words and a pat on the head told her she’d be fine.

Phoenix squared her shoulders to make the thread of disappointment lose its grasp. “Do you like it here?” she asked, only half interested.

“Hell no!” he replied. “I’m only here so my foster family can go on holiday without me.” His fingers fluttered over the comforting outline of the cigarette in his pocket. “I’d rather stay here than spend a week listening to them complain about how much extra it cost them to take me with them. They only foster me for the money.”

Phoenix gaped and her eyes widened. “That’s horrible!” she whispered.

Kirwan gave her a rueful smile. “Welcome to my world,” he said. His nose wrinkled. “I lived with a nice family for a while, but I messed it up, as usual. The mum caught me wagging school and I got mad and put my fist through the bedroom door. The social worker wouldn’t let me stay there after that.”

“There you are.” A woman rounded the corner and raised a blonde eyebrow overlaid with thick brown pencil. It gave her a look of perpetual surprise. Kirwan’s lips curled into a sneer at the sight of the girls’ leader. A blush crept up Phoenix’s olive neck, prickling the soft skin as it flooded into her cheeks.

“I fell, Tina,” she gushed, pointing to the scuff marks in the dirt. “Kirwan helped me.”

“Oh.” Tina’s head jerked back on her neck and her sharp features softened. “Are you okay?”

Phoenix nodded and bent to brush the dirt from her knees where they’d struck the baked earth. Lines of blood streaked her palm in the half light from a dirty overhead bulb. “It’s nothing,” she said, adding as much dismissal into her voice as she dared. “I didn’t look where I was going and tripped.”

“I bet she’s had worse injuries falling off horses.” Kirwan smirked and Phoenix couldn’t tell if he meant to help or hinder her.

“Come to the office and I’ll get the first aid box.” Tina wagged her fingers and turned her body towards the stairs. She halted and frowned. “Where were you going?”

“I went to the bathroom,” Phoenix said. The crafted lie seemed to stick in the back of her throat. Her lifetime goal of impressing Sam with a persona of kindness and honesty drifted further out of reach. She sighed and stared at a tuft of sun scorched grass between her ankle boots.

“Did you go to the bathroom too?” Tina’s blue eyes narrowed and she regarded Kirwan with a look hard enough to convey her thinly veiled disdain. Phoenix held her breath. Tina’s inference hung over them, the unasked question forming a guillotine above their heads.

Kirwan snorted. “No, Tina. We didn’t go to the bathroom together. Just say what you mean.” He jerked his head towards the dense tree covering beyond the cabins. “I went for a smoke.”

Phoenix swallowed as Tina’s jaw flexed and then set into a firm line. “You can’t smoke here.” Disgust entered her tone and Phoenix pursed her lips. Standing with Kirwan gave her an alternate view. No one had spoken to her with as much dislike as Tina conveyed in a single sentence to Kirwan. Phoenix was Sam’s prodigy, arriving at the camp with a reference and a verbal pedigree. Kirwan came on sufferance; to suffer and be suffered.

Kirwan jerked his chin up, perhaps in acknowledgement but more likely intending to disarm Tina. “I’m an addict,” he said. “Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry, but his words had their desired effect. Tina nodded and her expression softened.

“Grant brought nicotine patches if you’re interested in quitting,” she said. “I know he already caught you once. But you can’t keep smoking in the bush. It’s a fire hazard.”

Phoenix resisted the urge to dart a sideways glance at the raging campfire floating sparks and flakes of lighted marshmallow into the tinder dry bush. She tamped down the debate rising in her chest and clamped her tongue between her teeth to keep her objections inside. Growing up on her father’s mountain, she knew the risks of fire in the vegetation. One spark took on a life of its own. It would blacken a whole section of bush within minutes, chewing through it like a child eating popcorn at the movies. Her paternal grandparents had both died in a house fire the night before she was born.

The sense of injustice rose and refused to remain contained behind her gritted teeth. The words popped out before she could stop them. “What about the campfire?” she demanded. “My father won’t allow any fires on our property.”

Kirwan’s gaze tracked towards her. Behind the veil of scorn, Phoenix detected a flicker of appreciation. Tina huffed. She jabbed an index finger at a hose pipe running from the boys’ bathroom shed and disappearing under the office. It reappeared on the other side and snaked around the edge of the fire pit. “Grant set the hosepipe up, so they’re ready if it gets out of hand,” she bit. “We know what we’re doing.”

Phoenix opened her mouth with an instant objection. The pipe wouldn’t work without the tap turned on at the source and she saw from the handle it wasn’t. Someone would have to remember to run across and turn it on in an emergency. The slight shake of Kirwan’s head halted her and she licked her lips in confusion. She felt like a marionette controlled by his force of will. A heady sensation of fear sent off cloudbursts in her brain.

“I’ll get you some antiseptic for that cut,” Tina said. She jogged up the steps to the office without looking back and the door handle creaked beneath her fingers.

Hearing a low snicker, Phoenix glanced up at Kirwan and caught the smile spreading across his lips. His dark eyelashes lowered in mischief, giving him an attractive, cheeky appearance. “Nice distraction technique, Phoenix Du Rose. She forgot to punish me now.” His grin grew wider and he c****d his head. “Maybe we can help each other?”

Despite herself, Phoenix smiled before following Tina up the steps.