Feeling the Vibes (10 page)

No matter what happens
. Helix was warning me to be prepared.

I felt them as soon as we were inside. Unlike Brice I don’t have Dark Radar, but the not-quite-there images boiling at the edges of my vision added to the sickening impression that my worst nightmare was due to materialise at any moment.

Sing
! Helix commanded.

I’m sorry, I just thought she was losing it.

“Helix, I am sharing a cosmic anomaly with the forces of evil. Strange as it may seem, I am not in a singing mood!”

Sing your theme song
, Helix insisted.
Just sing it inside your head if that makes you feel better.

“Oh, sorry, now I get you!”

Helix wasn’t losing it. As usual she was totally on the ball. Reuben’s anthem “You’re not Alone” always sends my vibes irresistibly soaring, basically making it impossible for PODS to stay in our vicinity.

I took Helix’s advice and sang privately inside my head. This probably sounds super vain, but I sound like a frog when I sing and I wasn’t giving my cosmic enemies the satisfaction.

As I sang, I found myself picturing Obi and Reuben in the time portal, heads close together, singing their hearts out, as the shimmery silvery rivers of Time and Space swirled past.

I didn’t even notice when the PODS evaporated. I just went on singing and thinking of Obi.

Three, two, one, jump!

We were in an empty street at night, so narrow it was barely wide enough to cycle down. On either side loomed tall windowless houses built of stone, their cliff-like walls smooth and shiny from all the long centuries of friction from humans brushing by.

This place felt more like an ancient fortress than a town and that night the atmosphere was suffocating. The heat was bad enough, but worse were the horrendously oppressive vibes. I hoped they were just ancient historic vibes, left over from the town’s long and bloody past.

Whatever, I was deeply grateful that Reubs and Brice were still hanging on to my hands as we all anxiously scanned our surroundings. I felt a collective rush of relief as we simultaneously recognised a small shimmery figure in the shadows.

Brice reached him first. “Hey, Obi Wan. What’s up?” he said, softly scooping him up. “You look a bit worried, dude.”

Obi’s frown instantly vanished, and he giggled. “I was looking for Amir’s house,” he explained. “I was looking and looking but it isn’t here anywhere. Will you help me?” .

Goodbye, Dev and Saraswati, hello, Amir
! Whoever Amir might be.

Brice was right, I thought. Without a secure time connection, Obi was like someone in a dream, and in dreams you totally accept whatever weird thing is happening until something jars and you either wake up or spin off into another part of the dream.

“Where are we?” I asked Brice. “Or
when
are we, even?”

I saw lines of tiny print flash up on the phone’s miniature screen. Brice’s expression changed. “We should get out of here.”

I felt my stomach lurch, but I said, “We can’t go yet. I have to ask Helix something.”

“Not here you don’t,” he said grimly. “Something major’s about to kick off, any minute.”

“Exactly,” I hissed. “Then Obi will freak and we’ll chasing him through time again. Helix knows a way to keep him and me together.”

“Five minutes,” he conceded. “Then we’re gone.”

I moved away and hastily consulted Helix in a whisper.

Well, aren’t I Miss Popular today
? she commented drily.

“Cut it out,” I told her
. “
I need you to help me stay connected with Obi
“.

That’s easy. Remember that energy experiment you did in your first term
?

“When we made funky little balls of energy and bounced them all around the classroom?”

That’s the one. This time you want the energy to form strands, though, strands of unbreakable cosmic thread
.

I wasn’t sure we had time for this. “Which will do what exactly?” I must have sounded disbelieving because Helix said sharply,
Depends if you know how to tie a knot!

“Four minutes,” said Brice.

Jeez
, I thought,
no pressure
!

“Work with me, OK?” I told the boys. “We’ve got to make some cosmic thread - fast.” I pulled frantic faces.
I daren’t explain any more in case I scared Obi and set him off time-hopping again.

They twigged luckily. Brice’s obvious anxiety made me all fingers and thumbs, but we quickly managed to materialise a small spool of shimmery thread

Obi looked enchanted. “What’s that pretty string for?”

“So you won’t get lost again, sweetie,” I explained.

He looked puzzled. “Did I get lost?”

“Mel’s just playing,” Reuben said quickly. “It’s a game we play in big school, isn’t it, Mel? We tie a thread to someone and we have to follow wherever they go.”

“I want to play that game!” Obi held out his wrist, giggling.

We tied one shimmery end to Obi. The other Reuben carefully fastened just below the sweet little charm bracelet he gave me for my first proper birthday as an angel.

Brice gently set Obi down and I saw him srub his arms, shivering.

Like Brice I felt the vibes before I actually heard them because suddenly all the tiny hairs stood up on the back of my neck. Then a terrifying noise crashed against my eardrums, a confused baying and howling, like a zoo full of enraged animals.

Instinctively I snatched up Obi. I wanted to run - somewhere, anywhere, away from that terrible inhuman sound, but there was nowhere to go.

Chapter Thirteen

F
irst came the sounds of wood splintering and glass breaking, and then the bloodthirsty yells, bare seconds before the mob erupted from the alleyways chanting and shouting: angry men with knives, sticks and burning torches, all yelling the same slogan.

”
Pakistan Zindaban! Pakistan Zindabad
!” Long live Pakistan.

Another roar came from behind us. Another army, raising a different war cry. “
Hindustan Zindabad! Hindustan Zindabad
!”

I saw one man bare his teeth, literally snarling like a dog as he hurled a torch into a rubbish-filled doorway. Livid orange flames licked through the dark.

I heard Obi scream as only little kids can. “GO AWAY, BAD M E N! GO AWAY!!!”

And they did, they went away!

Like a movie rewinding, the oppressive street with its murderous mob scrolled back to reveal a dusty golden evening. It was so peaceful you could hear every little sound, the swish of a broom, the vigorous scratching of a dog investigating its fleas in the gutter.

Obi’s face had dirty tear tracks, yet he was smiling, tugging on my hand, already enchanted by this exciting new dream.

“Silly me, I got mixed up, it’s the wrong street!” he giggled. “Amir’s house is just round the corner!”

But I wasn’t flitting through a world of dreams like Obi. I was numb from what had just happened. Sick and dazed, I allowed him to lead me around the corner into an almost identical street. We’d gone back in time, I knew that. I just wished I knew by how much.

“That’s Amir’s house,” Obi announced, clearly relieved. “I can hear him playing, can you?”

A door had been left wide open to let in the evening breeze. Inside someone was playing a sitar. The sound came flowing out into the street like warm honey. After so much hatred and violence, the aching beauty of that music broke my heart.

Obi was humming, as if he knew this swooping Indian melody by heart. “Amir plays the sitar
really
well, doesn’t he, Melanie?” he said proudly.

Two boys came cruising into the narrow street, both sharing the same old-style bicycle. The designated cyclist was a Sikh boy in a brilliant blue turban. His passenger swung himself off the crossbar and the Sikh boy rode away with a cheerful, “Bye, Vikram!”

Vikram cautiously peered through the open door. “Amir? Are you coming to the fort?”

The music broke off.

“That blasted Hindu boy is round here so often I don’t know why he doesn’t just bloody convert to Islam and move in!”

“Amir will be coming out in ten minutes!” the same stern male voice called out. “Now don’t be disturbing sitar practice again, please!”

The music began again and Amir’s friend sat down to listen. After a while I saw him surreptitiously wipe away a tear.

I couldn’t imagine a boy in my country, definitely not in my century, letting himself be so moved in public, though I have to say Amir played spectacularly well.

Someone, possibly his stern-sounding dad, was playing a tabla, setting complicated drum rhythms for Amir, sometimes hectically fast, sometimes sweet and slow like a heartbeat.

Someone in the house was cooking. I could smell chilli and onions. The evening sun felt warm on my skin without the hot sting of the day. Everything was so peaceful it made me feel totally crazy.

It seemed like all that hate we had seen should leave a trace. There should be broken glass, smouldering ashes. My mind had grasped that the terrifying night of violence hadn’t actually happened yet, but my heart was still in deepest shock.

My buddies appeared looking frazzled.

“You OK?” asked Reuben.

Brice rudely talked across him. “Move it! We need to get this little
bodhisattva
out before Lahore goes into total meltdown.”

“Is that where this is?” I asked, still dazed. “Lahore?”

“Lahore in 1947. Remember when Michael explained about the British leaving India?”

“Kind of,” I gulped. “Was that in 1947?”

Brice nodded grimly. “Obi just took you back in time by a couple of weeks. Two weeks from now, India becomes independent. At midnight on August 15th to be precise. After that, as you saw, all hell breaks out.”

“But independence - isn’t that like, a
good
thing? I’d have thought everyone would be hanging out the flags to see the Brits go?”

Sick to my stomach from the ugly vibes, I couldn’t get my head round any of this.

Brice quickly checked Obi, saw he was still listening to the sitar music and filled me in.

“India has never been easy to rule, OK? It’s a huge country with a massive population, made up of all different racial groups and religions. People worried that without the British to keep a grip on everything, all the different groups would turn on each other. So before the handover, they drew up a new map, literally splitting India down the middle.”

I nodded. I remembered this part. “Towns and villages with a majority of Hindus belonged to Hindustan, or India, and areas that had a Muslim majority would belong to a brand-new country called Pakistan.”

“It was officially known as Partition.” Brice gave a humourless smile. “Sounds painless, right? Like dividing a house. You bang up a false wall and bish-bosh, you’ve got two for the price of one.”

“What if you were Muslim, though,” said Reuben. “And you were living in the Hindu part?”

Brice avoided our eyes. “You locked up your house,” he said very quietly, “and if you had any cash, you got on the first available train to Pakistan. Otherwise you walked, cycled or hitched a lift on some guy’s farm cart and prayed to Allah to keep you alive.”

I remembered the furious chanting. “
Pakistan Zindabad
!” “
Hindustan Zindabad
!” I pictured the raging mob, their faces distorted with bloodlust.

Reubs closed his eyes like he was seeing it too. “The PODS must have had a field day.”

Brice nodded grimly. “You bet your boots. Humans who’d been good neighbours for as long as they could remember suddenly turned on each other like wild animals.”

“Thousands of people must have had to leave their homes though?” I said.

“Millions,” he corrected. “Up to fifteen million homeless humans with little kids and old grannies, goats, chickens, pots and pans, all fleeing in a state of total terror.”

The music had stopped. Amir’s ten minutes must be up. Inside the house, Amir and his mother started having an argument. She wanted him to take his little brother to the fort to get him out of her hair. He wanted to have fun without babysitting his kid bro.

A boy suddenly burst out of the house with a shout of laughter. “I won!” he said triumphantly. “No pesty little brother.”

Obi giggled. “That’s Amir. He’s funny, isn’t he?”

Something about Amir made me want to smile. He had a sensitive, almost delicate face, but his eyes danced with fun and mischief.

A tall, slightly stooping man followed him out into the street. Everything he wore was pure snowy white: his crocheted skull cap, his immaculate
salwar kamiz
. His stern face, with its long sharp nose, reminded me of some fierce and elegant bird. “We will practise tomorrow,” he told Amir. “And next time please concentrate. You will never be a musician if you are always being so slapdash.”

I thought he looked more like a grandfather than a dad, but Amir said obediently, “Yes, Abbu. No, Abbu.” You could see him trying not to laugh.

“Are you being cheeky to your father, Amu?” his father demanded. He wasn’t really mad, I knew, because he’d called his son by his baby name.