Feeling the Vibes (4 page)

“So call him! I’ll call him for you if you want?”

“That’s just wussy. I’ll call him.”

“When are you leaving again?”

“The day after tomorrow. It’s going to be v. hectic. Obi’s got his goodbye party, plus there’s the briefing session, plus I need to figure out what clothes to take!”

“Which part of India are you going to?”

“Kashmir, up in the north. It’s winter while we’re there.”

“Layers obviously,” Lola said at once. “And I’ll lend you my sheepskin boots; just promise not to get PODS slime on them!”

“Ooh, when did I ever get PODS slime on any of your clothes? Tell me one time?”

“I’m just saying those are my rules! Mind if I finish that?” Lola calmly helped herself to the uneaten corner of my pastry. “Don’t suppose you’ll meet any Bollywood stars in Kashmir?” she asked hopefully.

“Maybe,” I agreed, so as not to spoil her fantasy. “If they’re filming on location.”

Lola’s eyes had a flirty glint. “If you see Hrithik Roshan on location, you’ve GOT to send me a phone pic, like
immediately
!”

“No chance,” I told her, giggling. “I’ll be swooning at his feet!”

It was my human friend Karmen Patel who’d originally got me into Bollywood movies and now Lola was as addicted as me.

“Gotta run!” she said, catching sight of her watch. “Text me from India, OK? And send loads of pics!”

After she left, I took a calming breath and called Reuben. He picked up on the first ring. “Beeby! What’s up?”

I could hear the sound of grunting in the background. Outside school hours, when Reubs wasn’t making music, he was usually at the dojo doing angelic martial arts.

“Lola said you’d offered to be my back-up,” I said awkwardly. “That’s really sweet of you, Reubs. I’ve got to go to a briefing at two tomorrow. Don’t worry if you can’t make it though.”

“No, I’ll make it.”

I had an involuntary flash of Reuben, barefoot in martial arts baggies, baby dreads flying in all directions.

There was a sticky pause while we both wondered what to say next.

“That’s 2 p.m. at the Agency Tower?” he repeated.

There was another long pause.

“I’ll see you there then? If not before?”

“Yeah, see you there,” I echoed lamely.

Before we went on our soul-retrieval mission, Reubs was just like my angel big brother - a fun person to be around. I never once thought,
Woohoo! Boyfriend material
! (Though I did think he had beautiful eyes. All pure angels have the most amazing eyes; it’s so unfair.)

On our soul-retrieval mission Reuben had dropped various hints about liking some mysterious angel girl, then he brought Millie to my birthday party and the mystery was solved. Lola told me they’d been at angel nursery school together and, as you know, childhood sweethearts are more sacred even than normal girlfriends.

Millie was REALLY pretty and like Reuben she was a super-talented DJ and - AARRGGH! I clunked my phone against my head to knock some sense into it.

OK, so we’re immortal and have superpowers. But this boy-girl thing is just as confusing for us angels, let me tell you!

Chapter Six

I
asked our driver to drop us off at the end of the street, so Obi could watch the Agency Tower changing colour. In the time it took to reach the revolving doors, we saw the divine skyscraper change from coppery gold to deepest rose to brilliant glowing scarlet.

The Agency Tower, a.k.a. Angel HQ, is the most beautiful building in the Universe. So far as I know it’s also the tallest, literally reaching up into the clouds. Brilliant starbursts of light came and went over our heads as celestial agents arrived and departed.

“When we leave Heaven, will there be a flash?” Obi asked, wide-eyed.

“A huge enormous flash,” I told him.

Brice was in the foyer, slouched against the wall, checking his messages. Reuben arrived seconds later. We made an interesting trio of guardian angels, I have to say!

Reuben was in his white martial arts baggies, having come straight from the dojo. Brice, as usual, was totally in black. The only colour you ever see on Brice is the bleached spikes in his hair!

I thought I looked reasonably Ok until Brice greeted us with, “Hey, it’s Obi Wan and Princess Fruit Salad.” (I was wearing a tunic top with a strawberry motif on the hem, over cropped leggings.)

“He’s just being funny, Melanie, isn’t he?” Obi said uncertainly.

“Yeah, Brice is a real comedian,” I told him.

Michael’s assistant, Sam, was setting up the conference room when we walked in. “Good, you’re here!” he grinned. “I can show off my new toy.”

They had a spangly new conference table made of some transparent stuff that looked like glass but wasn’t.

“Touch it,” he told Obi.

Obi tentatively dabbed it with his finger. The table instantly flashed up a map of India, a living map like we were seeing the actual continent from the air. The room filled with a steady ebb and flow of sound like ocean waves, or maybe those incomprehensible noises that astronomers pick up from outer space.

As I listened, what initially seemed like random uproar started sounding more like some extraordinary kind of music.

“That’s India - singing,” Sam said with his sweet grin.

I stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

“We call them ‘soul songs’,” he explained. “A healthy country will have a harmonious song. A troubled country usually produces a harsh, discordant sound. Yet India, which has every problem known to Planet Earth, goes on pouring out this joyful hymn to the Universe night and day.”

“There’s a lot of Light in India,” Brice said unexpectedly, “and a lot of humans helping to keep up the Light levels.”

Sam nodded. “It’s true. India seems to use its pain to produce extraordinary and wonderful humans.”

“Like
bodhisattvas
,” I said.

“
Bodhisattvas
for sure,” Sam agreed. “But India is full of saints and gurus, many of them living quite humble lives.”

“My friend Karmen’s great granny lived in India and she saw a god,” I told him. “She was fetching holy water from the river and she saw him playing a flute. She knew he was a god because his face was blue.”

It was funny to be remembering Karmen’s story here in the Agency building. When she originally told us, we were all like,
Oh, right
! Growing up on an estate like ours, you didn’t easily relate to blue-faced gods - or holy water for that matter.

Sam chuckled. “That must have been Krishna. Krishna loves to flirt with pretty village girls.”

Obi laid his ear against the table. “Melanie, listen!” he whispered. “You can hear its heart!”

I had a familiar sensation as if the top was lifting ever so slightly off my head, and the room went super-shimmery.

Michael
, I thought.

Our headmaster materialised in the doorway, wearing a beautiful but shockingly crumpled suit. As well as being our headmaster and supervising our training, Michael is an archangel, a being so awesome and powerful, I get seriously dizzy in his vicinity.

I felt that familiar mixture of joy and panic as his beautiful eyes looked directly into mine.

“I’ve kept you all waiting, sorry,” he said with a smile. “I just got back from Earth.”

Michael has always just got back from Earth! He’s like one of those birds that sleeps in mid-air. No sooner has he touched down than he has to go zooming off again. As archangel with special responsibility for humankind, he’s constantly dealing with cosmic crises.

Obi immediately went to climb into Michael’s lap (the super-high Light levels didn’t seem to phase him at all) and our briefing began.

Sam used his funky new map to show us the secret valley where Obi was going to be hidden away for sixteen plus years of his life. He pointed out the monastery perched on a ledge part-way down the valley. Ragged red and blue prayer flags fluttered in the wind. Monks in wildly billowing robes were hammering in steel pegs, making adjustments to the bridge which would temporarily connect their monastery to the world outside.

An indoor view of the monastery flashed up, a high-ceilinged room almost totally bare except for a beautiful rug in reds, blues and golds. The ceiling was supported on elaborately decorated pillars painted in the same rich colours. Painted statues of divine beings stared down sternly from niches in the walls.

“This is where Obi will have his lessons,” Sam explained.

I pictured Miss Dove’s nursery crammed with dressing-up clothes and toys, and I looked back at the statues, some of which might seem quite scary, I thought, if you were only four.

The map flashed up a different, more homey room. It was dark now and butter lamps flickered from niches. The light glimmered gently on and off the monks’ orange robes as they sat quietly talking. Outwardly, the monks were calm, but you could feel their excitement in the air like electricity: a new
bodhisattva
was coming.

In the observatory a lone monk silently watched the night sky through a telescope.

“I’m not in the sky!” Obi said in surprise.

Michael laughed. “You’re not in the rainbow either.” He explained that a rainbow in the close vicinity of a
bodhisattva
was a clincher that a child was a true potential buddha.

I was amazed. “They really go looking for a child
bodhisattva
based on positions of stars and whatever?”

“Stars, rainbows, unusual cloud formations,” said Sam. “Meaningful dreams. Sometimes a rare animal will be born near the home of a child
bodhisattva
, a pure white buffalo calf say, which gives off spiritual vibes.”

“And Miss Dove said they’ll do like, tests?”

“They will,” said Sam. “They’ll show Obi certain ritual objects, ask him questions about previous
bodhisattvas
and his other lives as a monk.”

I had lived in the exact same time period as these monks, yet we’d occupied totally different worlds. Never at my inner-city school had we once been tested on what we remembered about our previous lives.

“They look for signs on the child’s body too,” said Michael. “Show Melanie your hands, Obi.” Obi smilingly held them out.

“Wow,” I breathed. “That is SO cool!”

Obi’s small stubby palms had almost no lines, but in the centre of each one was a clear curving shape: a tiny but totally unmistakable seashell.

“OK,” said Sam briskly. “Down to business. The Agency doesn’t want Obi just wandering around northern India until the monks show up, so you’re delivering him to an orphanage in a border town in Kashmir.”

He touched the map and we went zooming across to the Kashmiri town where Obi’s handover was to take place.

It was a stunning location. A sky-blue lake reflected snow-capped mountains. Graceful, curving
shikaras
, a type of local ferry boat with a roof, took passengers back and forth over the water.

On Earth, though, you often need to look beneath the surface to see what’s really going on. We zoomed into a
shikara
for a close up and saw strain on the passengers’ faces as a military helicopter did a U-turn above their heads, heading back into the mountains.

“This area has been a war zone for years.” I heard a sudden weariness in Michael’s voice. “You all understand what that means.”

“Complications,” Brice muttered.

Human wars are all basically just spin-offs from the never-ending war between the Cosmic Agencies. But Michael quickly filled us in on the human version of the origins of the war.

For centuries the British had ruled India as part of the British Empire, but in 1947 they finally agreed to give it back. They were worried, though, that conflicts between different Indian racial and religious groups would break out once they left. Indian politicians were worried too, so it was agreed to split India into two countries: India (what used to be called Hindustan) and a brand new country called Pakistan. The deal was that areas with the most Muslims would belong to Pakistan, and towns and villages with a majority of Hindus would stay with India.

Kashmir’s large Muslim population made it a natural candidate for Pakistan, but the Maharajah of Kashmir heard a rumour that Pakistani soldiers were blocking supplies of food and petrol, trying to influence his people’s decision. This annoyed him so much that he angrily opted for his country to be part of India.

In my own time this decision was still causing major problems between India and Pakistan, plus people in Kashmir were now fighting for their state to be totally independent…

Obi got a bit bored and wriggly during this explanation so Michael smilingly changed the subject.

“I expect you’d like to see where you’ll be staying until the monks arrive?”

Obi perked up. “I’m going to a orphanage,” he told everyone as if this was like a major treat.

The map flashed up a shabby townhouse with a dilapidated blue front door. A sign in English, Urdu and Kashmiri said: THE LITTLE FLOWERS HOME FOR ORPHANS. (Being able to understand all the human languages is one of those unexpected angelic perks which always gives me a secret little buzz.)