Read Online Fire by Deborah Challinor - Free Book Online Page A

tree.
    ‘Thanks, Mum,’ Louise said. ‘I mean it.’
    Marion kissed her daughter. ‘I wouldn’t miss it, love. She keeps me young, she really does.’
    That night Allie lay in bed, doing her best to get to sleep because she had a busy day tomorrow, but failing miserably. She’d had a hot cup of cocoa and a long bath to relax. She’d tried counting sheep but had given up when she’d got to a thousand. She’d imagined herself lying on the beach at Mission Bay in her togs, the sun warm on her skin, the breeze so light she could barely feel it, and the small waveshissing in and out, in and out, in and out, lulling her closer and closer to sleep, but that hadn’t worked either. Then she’d read for half an hour, a book she’d pinched out of Donna’s satchel—Mickey Spillane’s latest, Kiss Me, Deadly , which had been banned by the school, so God only knew where she’d got it—but found the story quite unpleasantly violent and gave up on it.
    Now she was lying in the dark, her bedroom window open and the blind up a little to let in the smell of the sea, still thinking about Sonny Manaia and her date with him the following night. She was looking forward to it, and feeling nervous about it, in roughly equal measures. When she’d said to Irene that she hardly knew him, it had been the truth: she’d never even spoken to him before Monday. He’d come into the cafeteria one morning with a group of the lads from stores and you couldn’t help noticing him. He was nice-looking and had sort of a confident air about him and seemed to have plenty of mates.
    And of course he was Maori, and there weren’t many Maoris working at Dunbar & Jones. Allie tried to count them in her head. She thought there might be two blokes in stores, and there was Hori who drove one of the delivery vans. And one of the girls in the typing pool was part-Maori, she knew that. So those four, plus Sonny, made five—not many in a staff of nearly four hundred and fifty. There was the girl who had modelled in the dress department’s spring fashion show, a really beautiful young woman, but Allie didn’t count her because she wasn’t sure if she actually was Maori, or whether she was from some exotic faraway country. Somewhere foreign probably, with her stunning looks. And anyway she wasn’t a house model so she wasn’t on the Dunbar & Jones payroll.
    And who was Sonny Manaia, anyway? What had he been doing before he came to work at Dunbar & Jones? Where did he come from and where did he live? She didn’t even know what age he was, though she suspected he couldn’t be that much older than she was. And why did he want to take her out? She wasn’t the sort of girl who stood out in a crowd, though sometimes she did laugh a bit loudly in the cafeteria: she couldn’t help it once she got going. What if she didn’t turn out to be what he’d been expecting?
    She’d been out with boys before, of course, and had had a boyfriend, Derek, for six months, but it hadn’t lasted. What she’d initially taken for a reserved and cautious nature had turned out to be dullness and a distinct lack of initiative, and she’d grown tired of always being the one to decide what they were going to do on Friday and Saturday nights, so eventually she told him it wasn’t working out and that was that. So why was she so nervous about this date?
    She was also worried about what she was going to wear. She knew it shouldn’t be that important, but she kept turning it over and over in her head. She’d told Irene she had decided on her grey skirt and Irene’s bright blue top, but when she’d tried them on together that night the outfit had looked a bit, well, tarty, to be honest. Well, certainly much closer to racy than…not racy. Especially with her black platform heels that made her two and a half inches taller than she actually was. Oh God, how tall was Sonny? She couldn’t remember. What if she towered over him? Perhaps she should take another pair of shoes in her