Feeling the Vibes (5 page)

“This is where you’ll be sleeping, Obi,” said Michael.

The unpainted room with its rows of mats and threadbare blankets made my heart sink, but Obi just wanted to know which sleeping mat was his. I remembered that in one of his lives he had lived out on the street. Maybe to Obi that’s just how it was on Planet Earth.

Michael gently lifted Obi’s chin so the little boy was looking directly into those lovely, scary archangel eyes.

“Did Miss Dove explain you can only leave the orphanage if Melanie or the boys come with you? Do you remember why that is?”

Obi nodded solemnly. “Because the Dark Agencies doesn’t want me to be a
bodhisattva
.”

I saw Brice shift unhappily in his seat. I don’t often think about his dodgy past, not now, but Lola told me he tortures himself about it every single day.

“So the time capsule is dropping us off at the orphanage, right?” I asked.

Sam shook his head. “Unfortunately not. Those things give off too much Light.”

Brice gave a grim nod. “You might as well stick a flashing sign over the orphanage: ‘Potential buddha inside’.”

“We’re dropping you on the town’s outskirts,” said Sam. “It’s a border town so there’s a lot of heavy patrolling from the Indian military, not to mention civilian traffic. Hopefully all the activity will help camouflage your arrival.”

Only “hopefully”, I noticed. Sam didn’t sound too sure.

At the end of the briefing, Michael asked, “Do you have any questions, Obi?”

Obi thought for a minute. “Will I still see angels like I can now?”

Michael smiled. “Yes, you will still see angels.”

“Yippee, because I will still see Melanie!”

“But as a
bodhisattva
you won’t just see Light beings. Did Miss Dove explain that?”

Obi nodded. “I might see beings from the Hell realms too, but Miss Dove says I mustn’t be scared.”

Brice seemed like he might totally vanish inside his jacket.

Being a child
bodhisattva
definitely wasn’t for sissies. I hoped fate would be kind and not let Obi see any actual Dark Entities until he’d finished his training.

“Have you got any other worries or concerns, Obi, that you’d like to tell us about?” Sam asked.

Obi swung his legs and thought. “Nope,” he decided cheerfully. “I’ve been a monk loads of times and I’ve lived in India loads of - look, there’s an elephant!”

Sam had left the map in active mode and it was beaming back random scenes from outside the orphanage. Obi had spotted a bored looking elephant being led down the street.

“Miss Dove says I’m like an elephant!” Obi said with a giggle. “She says I don’t forget anything because, did you know, I still remember ALL my lives!”

I was stunned at how well Obi was coping. But did he really understand what he was letting himself in for?
I
was upset at the prospect of Obi leaving Heaven and I was just losing one little boy. Obi was losing an entire world, a totally luminous world of love and Light. Decades of human time would probably pass before his return to Heaven. Yet he seemed completely sunny and calm.

“We’ll do our best for him, don’t you worry,” Reuben murmured as we rode down in the lift.

Before we left, Brice gently knocked fists with Obi. “Get an early night, yeah, Obi Wan? We need you sharp for the big mission.”

I was telling myself the same thing all day as I worked through my To Do list, getting ready for the trip.

It was well after midnight by the time I finally fell into bed in my cupboard-sized room in our school dorm. I’d been asleep five minutes, max, when I jerked awake to find Obi beside my bed in his little blue PJs.

I switched on my light, groggily willing my brain into action. “Sweetie? What’s wrong?”

Obi was shivering so violently I could hear his teeth chatter.

“I didn’t like that swingy bridge,” he quavered. “What if it breaks and I fall down the mountain?”

“The bridge won’t break,” I said firmly.

I squashed down horror-movie images of Obi wobbling across the bridge above a terrifying chasm, as a stealthy PODS knife blade slashed at a crucial rope…

“Hop in,” I told him, yawning. “You might as well stay now you’re here.”

My sister Jade always used to come into my bed when she’d had a bad dream. I’d find her beside me in the morning, fast asleep, hogging the duvet. Jade’s feet were like icicles too.

“Is it true you really remember all your lives?” I asked to distract us both from the image of that ominous swingy bridge.

“Yes, and all my mummies and daddies I can remember, and do you know, I sometimes got the same ones!”

Obi saw I had no clue what he was on about.

“I had the same mum in lots of my lives,” he explained patiently, “and the same dad in lots of my lives! They didn’t have the same names or bodies, but the souls inside their bodies were
exackly
the same. Do you get it now, Melanie?” He patted my cheek as if I was the one who was four.

“Oh, right, wow, and I bet you loved your mummies and daddies a LOT,” I said, a really lame thing to say in the circumstances.

“I did love them, but I usually couldn’t live with them though.”

“No? Why not?”

“I think it was fate or karma. I don’t aksherly know.”

Obi lay down and pulled the covers up over his face.

I switched off the lamp and heard breathing and occasional swallowing sounds. I realised he was trying really hard not to cry.

“One time,” he gulped, “I lost them at a railway station.”

“In India?”

“Yes. We were running away from some bad people, but there were so many people at the station. I didn’t know which were the bad ones. Abbu said, “Don’t let go of my hand!” But I fell over and I let go and I lost Abbu and I lost
Ammi
.”

“You mean you lost them for ever?”

“Yes,” he said in a very small voice.

I imagined his parents desperately swept along in the crush, helplessly calling their little boy’s name. My friend Karmen said India was so hectic you could lose someone for ever in a blink.

I heard my quilt rustle as Obi sat up. “Melanie, I need to ask you a really important thing.”

I swallowed a yawn. “OK, but then we totally have to go to sleep.”

“Because we have to be sharp for our mission?”

“That’s right!”

Obi edged so close he was tickling my ear with his breath.

“If I get lost in India this time, will you come to find me, Melanie? Even if I’ve gone far away, so you can’t hear me calling and calling?”

I hugged him. “Sweetie, you won’t go far away. We’re going to be with you every step of the way.”

“But if I do, will you?” I could hear that Obi was seriously close to tears now.

“I will come to find you, I promise. Now try to go to sleep; it’s a big day tomorrow.”

He was a supersensitive little boy who’d got overtired, that’s what I thought.

I never dreamed I’d have to keep my promise for real.

Chapter Seven

O
bi woke me at six, singing a nursery-school ditty about sausages which I couldn’t really imagine going down a storm at the monastery. I prised open my eyelids to find him beaming right into my face. “Hello, Melanie! You’re awake now, aren’t you!”

“Yes, I know,” I said through gritted teeth.

I couldn’t believe it. Obi was his old serene self like his night terrors had never happened. He was still singing his tedious sausages song when the limo picked us up and he went on and on singing it all the way down to the Agency building.

Normally we have to queue for our angel tags, but because of Obi we’d been given them in advance.

Reuben fastened Obi’s tiny tags, with the familiar Heavenly logo, around his neck. “Know what this is?”

Obi nodded vigorously. “It means I’m working for the Agency, but humans won’t see it.”

“You won’t see it either, or feel it, but you’ll know it’s there connecting you to every angel in the Universe.”

“It will connect me to you and Mel for ever and ever, won’t it?” Obi said solemnly. “And Brice, won’t it?” He was still fingering his tags as we went into the time portal.

I thought he’d wobble for sure when the door slid shut and he saw Michael and Miss Dove waving to him through the glass. I had a lump in my throat and I was coming back to Heaven! But Obi just waved merrily.

“It’s like he can’t wait to get started,” I whispered to Reuben.

“Maybe that’s how it feels to be a
bodhisattva
,” Reuben suggested. “Birds need to sing, angels need to fly missions and
bodhisattvas
need to, you know, do their
bodhisattva
thing!”

He buckled Obi carefully into his safety seat. “You look the business, little dude,” Reubs told him. “No one will guess you just arrived from Heaven.”

Obi had insisted on putting on his Kashmiri orphan clothes by himself. “That’s what orphan means,” he explained to us very firmly. “It means you have to do everything all by your own.”

Brice literally just squeaked into Departures in time to catch the time flight, looking v. rough. He didn’t even say hello, just put his iPod in and zoned out for most of the trip.

I wouldn’t have minded a little power nap myself, but Obi was way too full of beans. We’d brought along puzzles, crayons and whatever to keep him amused, but all he wanted was to ask me v. hard cosmic questions like, “Why do I see bright lights inside my eyelids when I blink? Is that my soul, Melanie?”

Then he wanted to sing his sausages song to Reuben. I pulled a face at Reubs, like: Nooo, pleeaase, not the sausages song!

“Has Mel taught you our theme song?” Reubs asked cunningly.

“I haven’t actually,” I said, equally cunningly. “Ooh, maybe you could sing it for him, Reuben?”

“And Brice could sing it!” Obi suggested brightly.

“I think Brice needs a little rest,” I told him. Brice has mellowed a LOT, but a jolly angel singsong might just be pushing it.

Obi was too busy learning the lyrics of our cosmic theme song to notice the huge jolt as we left the Light Fields of Heaven behind, shifting into serious time-travel mode.

“You’re not alone. Open your eyes…”

I sneaked a peek at Reubs. Time zones whooshed past the glass like swirling rivers of starlight, but my buddy went on singing, seeming totally at home.

Of course Reuben is going out with a pure angel girl
, I thought wistfully. For thirteen years I’d genuinely believed that Planet Earth (basically a tiny lump of spinning rock) was my home, but Reuben and Millie had belonged to a vast starry Universe from the start.

“We’re going faster,” Obi said excitedly. “That means we’re nearly there.”

“That’s right,” said Reuben. “See those bright sparkly bits? Those are time periods where the Agency is winning the cosmic war.”

Obi pressed his nose to the glass. “It’s not so sparkly where we’re going,” he commented. “It’s REALLY dark aksherly.”

Brice suddenly leaned across. “We should have a code,” he said in my ear. “I don’t want him seeing, you know,
stuff
.”

That’s why he was so shattered. He’d been worrying about Obi being exposed to X-rated sights from the Hell dimensions.

“If I pick up on anything, I’ll say ‘pothole’,” he hissed, “then you hustle him out of the way, or tell him to look at the pretty birdie or whatever.”

“I’ll tell Reubs,” I whispered back. “Oh! What if there are real potholes though?” It seemed like a reasonable question, but Brice just rolled his eyes.

A few minutes later we were coming in to land, skimming over the lake we’d seen on Sam’s map. We had time to glimpse the brilliant colours of a floating veggie market then we were zooming above a hectic highway coming in to land.

Outside the portal cars, buses, mopeds, bicycles and donkey carts fought for space with humongous, brightly-painted trucks belching diesel fumes. Some of the trucks had sacred mantras painted on their bonnets. Given the local driving style, I thought that was a wise precaution.

A roadside sign said: BETTER BE MISTER LATE THAN A LATE MISTER. Nearby a burned-out vehicle stood totally on end.

“Welcome to Planet Earth,” said Brice under his breath.

Reuben squatted beside Obi. “We can’t hold your hand, little buddy, now you’re in a human body. But you can still see us, right?”

Obi gave a delighted nod. “You all look very shimmery aksherly, but I’m not any more, am I, now I’m human?”

Miss Dove must have told him humans don’t go around talking to angels in public. Obi was literally talking behind his hand like a spy!

“We should get moving,” said Brice. “And put up your freakin’ shields, angel girl!” He shot me a meaningful glare.

War vibes are not something you want to take into your aura by choice, so I quickly put up my cosmic defence shields. In the old days I’d have resented Brice bossing me around, but I knew he was just trying to take good care of everyone.

Brice checked the GPS on his phone. “OK, Obi, bit of a walk now,” he said in a jolly un-Brice-ish voice. “Soon have you inside in the warm.”

We set off to the orphanage. Obi hadn’t totally got his Earth legs back. Now and then he stumbled into the frozen snow piled at the side of the road. I saw him shiver in his thin kaftan top.