Living the Dream (2 page)
Authors: Annie Dalton
Admittedly, after that first night, he gave up hassling me in any way. He was just
there
, filling my room with v. disturbed emotions: despair, fury, grief - feelings I can’t even describe.
A disturbed seven-foot-tall angel staring reproachfully at the back of your neck doesn’t exactly help your concentration. Plus, I know this sounds pathetic, but if I needed to change into my PJs, I felt like I should do it in the bathroom, the only place I was sure of privacy!
The worst part was when I tried to sleep. I only had to close my eyes and instantly the angel and I would be swooping through the celestial Light Fields side by side, his tawny-gold wings outstretched, like some huge, silent owl.
The flying part should have been lovely, but after that first time it felt too much like the opening moments of a recurring bad dream. Now I always knew where he was taking me: back to my century, to one polluted, scorched, flooded, war-torn Earth region after another.
I’m not totally brainless. I did know my century was in trouble. But when someone forces you to see how humans (under the influence of the Dark Powers) are devastating your beautiful little planet, when you see how the horror just goes on and on and on, it makes you feel like your heart is being pounded into ten million little hurting pieces.
Out of all the many harrowing sights the angel showed me, one still comes back to haunt my dreams. I don’t know why. It wasn’t the worst thing, not by miles. We’d landed on an island; I think it was in the Pacific. White sands, palm trees, sun. It should have been paradise. Except I’ve seen paradise and the ocean isn’t carpeted with floating bits of plastic, and the sand isn’t filled with dead, or dying, sea birds. The birds had innocently tried to eat the plastic and their poor little stomachs had - sorry, there’s no other word - exploded.
Now I get that the angel had to share these things with someone. He needed to make someone care as much as he cared, or maybe he just needed someone to agonise with? But back then I couldn’t handle it. My night journeys were leaving me so exhausted, I had to whack on a ton of concealer to hide my dark circles. One morning I asked - actually I begged- Helix to help me.
Helix is my inner angel; that’s like, my celestial GPS system and Jiminy Cricket all rolled into one. When I’m struggling with some knotty cosmic problem, Helix is generally v. happy to set me straight. But when I asked how I could get the Creation angel to leave me in peace, she was REALLY sharp with me!
Ever thought of TALKING to him
? she snapped, as if she was talking to an unusually dense child.
I was like: “Have you ever tried to have a conversation with a billion-year-old Creation angel? Well, I have, so I can tell you exactly how it would go.
Angel:
It is your task to save the world. Melanie
: ‘No, it’s not! Reason One: I’ve been an angel for like, FIVE minutes. Reason Two: I have NO world-saving abilities whatsoever.’ Angel:
It is your task to save the world
…”
There was a pause, then Helix said crisply:
Sorry, angel girl, you’re on your own with this one.
I said something sarky, like, “Well, thanks SO much for your input, Helix!” Then I spoiled it by bursting into tears.
In the end I fell back on the same strategy I used when my dad walked out and I started having all those bad dreams. I forced myself to stay awake. Instead of sleeping I sat up revising, or texted my friend Lola who was still away on some big mission, or played my most vibey music and drank gallons of strong hot chocolate…
Several times I fell asleep at my desk with my face
smooshed
against a pile of books. Each time the angel was waiting for me with new scenarios to break my heart: tiny polar bear cubs drowning because the ice had become so thin they just fell through into the freezing waters below; Amazonian rainforests being reduced to acres of stinking charcoal; dying coral reefs like bleached boneyards…
And all the time the angel was beside me with his wounded golden eyes. I always picked up the same despairing thought:
Angel child, this was not what we dreamed.
O
ne afternoon I was in the library, curled up on a big comfy sofa. Without looking I could feel awesome cosmic patterns slowly rearranging themselves above my head.
I wasn’t a big fan of libraries when I was human, but our school library is actually v. v. cool. The reading room has a ceiling which doubles as an actual planetarium. I’ll be stressing over some assignment, then I just happen to glance up and catch the stars and planets doing their slow boogie, and it reminds me that even a lowly angel trainee is a tiny part of this vast shimmery dance.
This particular afternoon though I could barely even focus on the dancing planets. It had taken me ten minutes to realise I was reading the wrong book! The book I thought I’d taken down from the shelf was Mr Allbright’s recommended text on the Salem witch trials. The book I was holding in my hand was something like The History of Human Tribes. No help with my witches assignment whatsoever.
I could feel myself slowly sinking into the sofa. I had a quick glance round at the other library users peacefully taking notes.
Go o
n, coaxed my inner sleepyhead.
Take a tiny catnap. He won’t bother you here. He only ever comes when you’re alone..
.
A hot breeze came swooshing into my corner of the reading room, bringing that scorched rubber smell you get in deserts, and flicking through the pages of my book so fast it sounded like a gambler shuffling cards.
You fell asleep
, I told myself, genuinely desperate to believe it.
You’re asleep in the library and this is just a dream.
Now as well as crisply flicking pages I could hear more distant sounds as if they were reaching me from another world or another time: horses snorting, burning wood snapping and crackling, and a woman chanting in a low intense voice:
House made of the dawn.
House made of evening light. House built of pollen..
.
The pages gradually stopped turning, leaving my book open at two old-style sepia photographs of a Native American boy.
Happily on a trail of pollen, may I walk. As it used to be long ago, may I walk
…
The chanting voice and the boy’s intense dark eyes pulled me in. It was like I
had
to read the info under those faded old pictures.
I learned that the boy’s name was Tom Torlino. He’d been born into the Navajo tribe. The two pictures were taken after he’d been forcibly removed from his village with other Navajo boys and sent away to a government-run boarding school. The authorities took before and after photos because they wanted to show that Indian kids could be “civilised” if you could just get them away from the contaminating influence of their families.
In the “before” picture, Tom Torlino wore his long black hair loosely pulled back off his face. A ceremonial blanket was draped around his shoulders. Silver hoops, the size of small coffee cups, hung from his pierced ears. Around his neck were several strings of beads and also a complicated kind of collar made from beautifully carved bones; presumably that was for protection, though he didn’t seem like he needed much protecting. He looked like a boy who could wrestle a wolf if need be, a child warrior.
The second picture showed Tom after three years at the white man’s boarding school. His thick glossy hair had been cropped shorter than a seal’s fur. He was buttoned into an old-fashioned school uniform that looked uncomfortably tight across the chest. But in both pictures his eyes were exactly the same: fierce, proud, totally untamed.
I felt like I ought not to be looking at this dignified boy. That second picture was just wrong. What they did to Tom Torlino was wrong.
This was not what we dreamed
, the angel said inside my head.
I slammed the book shut. Messing with my mind in the library was just going too far. I felt a sighing, golden breath and clamped my hands over my ears. “Go away!” I hissed. “Don’t breathe in my ear, don’t follow me around school and don’t swap my books around, OK?”
Or you’ll do what
? I asked myself. The truth is I only had myself to blame. I should have told someone when the angel first appeared. So why didn’t I?
I’d asked myself this same question every night and I always came up with the same reason. I didn’t tell anyone because it sounded - kind of grandiose.
Being “grandiose”, if you didn’t know, is a major no-no for angels. Mr Allbright is constantly telling us there are no superstars in the angel biz; we’re all just links in a divine chain, members of a team, blahdy blahdy blah.
This teamwork thing was a v. tough concept for me to grasp when I started my training. The human Melanie prided herself on being a unique individual; so unique that on my first field trip as a bona fide angel, I broke the rules, took off on my own and almost got my mind melted by the Powers of Darkness.
So the thought of telling my long-suffering teacher that out of all the angel trainees in the Universe, I had been singled out by a Creation angel to solve Earth’s huge environmental problems made me go hot and cold all over.
I might have gone on fretting all day, but suddenly every cell in my body suddenly sparkled to attention. My buddy Reuben had appeared at the top of the stairs, a battered old flight bag slung over his shoulder, and looking a great deal too warm in his cold weather clothes. I told myself I could handle this just fine. My heart was only beating ten million times faster than normal after all.
As if life wasn’t complicated enough, I’d fallen in love.
T
hey say opposites attract and Reuben and I are COMPLETE opposites. He’s a super-talented musician. I sing like a cartoon frog. Reubs doesn’t give two hoots what he wears. I am totally style obsessed. Even our cosmic backgrounds are drastically different. I grew up on Earth in a gritty inner city estate. Reuben grew up in Heaven.
The instant he spotted me Reubs’ face lit up.
Still deafened by my own heartbeat, I pushed back my chair and went over. “Hiya!” I said, all super-casual. “When did you get back?”
Having unwound his woolly scarf, Reuben peeled off his padded cap. “Just now!” he said, beaming.
“You came here without even dropping off your stuff?”
“I was coming to find you. Amber said you practically live in the library these days. What’s going on, Beeby?” he teased. “Burning the candle at both ends? That isn’t like you.”
I felt my cheeks going pink. “I’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” I said quickly, which wasn’t a complete lie. “I missed loads when we were in India.”
“I’ve missed more! Probably not as much as Chase though!”
Chase is a major wildlife freak. Lola describes him as half angel, half beast! He heard the Agency was after volunteers to track down a rare snow leopard and her unborn cubs. As soon as we returned from India, he dragged Reubs and Brice back off to the Himalayas, which we’d just left twenty-four hours previously!
“So what’s been happening while I’ve been away?” Reubs asked.
I’m being haunted by a billion-year-old angel
.
“Nothing much,” I fibbed. “We’re studying this v. depressing module on human prejudice. I’m doing an assignment on witch hunters.”
“So you wouldn’t mind a break?”
I pretended to think. “Hmm. Sit in the library, reading about murderous witch-hating humans, or go to Guru, drink hot chocolate and hear about the cute baby snow leopards - that’s a tough one!”
“How did you know about the baby leopards?” he said, amazed. “We only found them yesterday!”
“I don’t know. I just—” Then I realised what he’d said. “You actually
found
them?”
Reuben patted his jacket. “Not only found them, Beeby. I’ve got picsl”
Despite, or maybe because of, his Heavenly upbringing, Reubs is fascinated by anything and everything to do with my home planet: music, people, wildlife. I sometimes think he loves Earth even more than I do!
