Free Phoebe Finds Her Voice by Anne-Marie Conway Page B

school?” he asked, as we started to walk home.
    â€œOkay, I guess. What did you want to talk about?” I wondered if it was something to do with Mum, or if he’d finally managed to get a new job.
    â€œWell you know how Miss Howell has been asking parents to come in and talk about their professions or hobbies to the class, erm…if they’re unusual or a bit different? Well…I’ve been thinking it might…”
    I stopped dead and looked at him in horror. “Oh no, Dad, please don’t say what I think you’re going to say.”
    â€œIt’s just I thought it might be nice if I came in to your class and gave a talk about the Life centre and the sorts of things we do there.”
    â€œBut Dad!” I grabbed his arm. “You can’t. I’ll die! Don’t you care about me at all? You can’t come in to my class and talk about spiritual journeys and stuff like that. I mean you only joined the stupid group so that you wouldn’t have to spend any time with me on Saturdays.”
    Dad swung me round to face him. He looked really upset, but I didn’t care. “Come on, Phoebe, you know that’s not true. You mean everything to me, you and Sara.”
    â€œ But Dad! ”
    My hands were trembling. I wanted to grab hold of him and shake him hard till he realized what a nightmare this was.
    The whole Life thing started when we went on holiday to Cornwall, a few months after Dad lost his job. We were down at the beach on the first day and Dad got talking to this man called Spirit who was out walking his dog. Spirit was a member of Life and he told my dad that if he learned how to look inwards or something then he’d be able to transform his life. They ended up in the pub, sitting there for hours talking and drinking coffee, their heads bent close together. I remember Mum kept trying to get Dad to come back down to the beach and spend some time with us, but he didn’t want to.
    On the last day of the holiday I found this incredible shell. It was really smooth and it had a sort of shiny, rainbow-coloured fossil embedded in it. Before I went to bed that night I left the shell on my dad’s pillow but I don’t think he even noticed it. When I went into their room the next morning it was shoved under the bed and he never said thank you or mentioned it or anything. It was as if he could only see Spirit and the rest of us had become invisible.
    As soon as we got back from the holiday Dad joined a Life centre near us and bit by bit he started to change. He began to wear different clothes for a start – tie-dyed T-shirts and those horrid, brown sandals, and then a few months after that he became a vegetarian. He even tried to get rid of the TV because according to him it was “quenching our creativity”.
    Then one morning he came into the kitchen while Mum was making us breakfast and said, “Maxine, my love, I can see your aura and it’s very dull. Please, Max, you need to let go of your negativity. Just take a deep breath and watch it float away.”
    Mum, who was holding an empty saucepan at the time, took a really deep breath, bashed the saucepan on his head really hard and stormed out of the room.
    A few days later, well nineteen to be precise, they broke up. He moved into his flat on the other side of town and that was the end of that. I’ve still got the shell though, from the holiday. I sleep with it under my pillow every night.
    I looked at Dad now. He was staring down at the pavement and I could see this little talk wasn’t going the way he thought it would.
    â€œWhat are you going to say anyway?” I muttered. “‘Hi, everyone. My name is Eagle Dust and I’m on a journey?’ I’m not going in that day; I swear I’m not. And you can’t make me.”
    â€œCome on, Phoebe, it’s not that bad is it? It might be quite interesting. I could talk to your class about meditating and