Fogging Over (4 page)

We sat down in the desert and beamed vibes until I felt dizzy.

The old man started mumbling to himself. “I put it in my pocket,” he blurted suddenly. “I put it in my pocket!”

After half an hour or so, I saw Lola shading her eyes. “Is that a tornado?” she asked anxiously.

A huge swirling cloud of dust was travelling rapidly towards us. But it wasn’t some kind of Australian whirlwind as Lola thought. It was a wagon pulled by sweating horses.

“Whoa!” The driver jumped down from his seat and knelt beside the old man. “Wonder how long you’ve been here, you poor old devil?”

He unstoppered his water bottle and tried to drip some water down the old man’s throat, but it ran away uselessly into the sand.

“I can’t just leave you here,” he muttered. The driver was a really sweet guy, also tres strong and muscular. He lifted the old man as easily as if he was a baby and laid him in the back of the wagon.

“We’d better go with him, to make sure he’s OK,” Lola said.

Distances in Australia are really something else.

We went bumping down that track for FIVE hours. Was this really the nearest place the driver could think of? The old man was still raving deliriously about his mysterious pocket.

Poor old guy, he’s lost it, I thought. I won’t pretend I was thrilled at this unexpected diversion, but when you’re an angel you have to take the yin with the yang and whatever, and I did feel genuinely sorry for him.

“Yikes, tingles!” squeaked Lola suddenly. “I’m getting major tingles all over.”

“Me too,” I said startled. “What’s doing it?”

“I should imagine it’s that rock,” said Brice, and he pointed into the near distance.

I thought the glowing red rock formation looked practically extraterrestrial. It was huge, like some massive crouching animal.

“It’s out of this world,” breathed Lola.

“It is in a way. It’s sacred to the Aborigines, so it exists in multi-dimensional reality as well as the 3D kind,” Brice told her.

We all gazed at the awesome rock. It was a really special moment. Of course, then Brice had to spoil it. “The Aborigines are the original Australians, Melanie,” he added with a sarcastic grin. “Those people who don’t live here, remember?”

I spent the rest of the journey in huffy silence.

At last we spotted a big plantation of eucalyptus trees. Behind the trees was a wooden church, and beside the church was the mission house, a white-painted building with a large shady verandah.

The driver reined in his team and bellowed a greeting. Two serving women immediately ran out of the house looking stunned to see another human being.

“Got an old timer in my wagon, half-dead with sunstroke,” he told them.

The older woman climbed up and laid her hand on the old man’s forehead. “Sunstroke is right. You could fry eggs on him,” she muttered.

She frowned as she registered the livid scars on the old man’s leg. “You can’t bring him in the house,” she told the driver. “Convicts make the missus nervous.” She gave a rasping laugh. “They made an exception for me. Good cooks are hard to find, eh!”

Luckily the driver was a real charmer and he managed to persuade the women to make up a bed on the verandah. He carried the old man into the shade. “I put it in my pocket,” the old man moaned. “I put it in my pocket.”

“Never mind, grand-dad,” said the woman. “You’ll be out of it soon.”

“He’s had it hard,” said the younger woman timidly. “You can see it in his face.”

The other servant snorted. “Him? He didn’t have to slave in the prison laundry for five years. And he didn’t live with a drunken bully and lose two precious little babies to the diphtheria, so don’t tell me I should feel sorry for
him
.”

But she wasn’t as cynical as she pretended, because with her next breath she told the driver to come round to the kitchen for a feed of boiled mutton and some strong tea. They went into the mission house, leaving the old man alone.

“I can’t believe those missionaries won’t let a dying man in their house,” I said. “I thought Christians were supposed to like,
forgive
people.”

“I’m not convinced he is dying, actually,” said Lola. “I’m not getting that death vibe, are you? I don’t think he’s ready.”

I knew what she meant. You could feel the old man’s spirit hanging on grimly by its fingernails.

It’s almost like something won’t
let
him die, I thought. Like that guy in the albatross poem.

A shiver went through me. “Can the PODS do that?” I asked in a panic. “Can they make someone stay alive even if they don’t want to?”

Brice shook his head. “Definitely not. He has to be doing it himself.”

Hours passed and still the old man hung on. The fierce heat began to lose its sting and at last the sun went down like a great ball of red fire.

We were watching over our human so anxiously that we didn’t notice the old Aboriginal woman come out of the bush. She was just suddenly there, padding silently up the wooden steps and on to the verandah. She went straight to the old man, squatted down beside him and started giving him a real telling-off!

As you know, angels understand every human language going, and her scolding went something like this.

“I know why you can’t die, you wicked old white fella. You still got work to do. You got a terrible wrong to put right.”

It was amazing. The old man instantly calmed down. It was like he actually understood what she was saying. Brice and Lola looked as astonished as I felt.

“That’s better,” said the old woman fiercely. “You been a real loud-mouth your whole life. Now listen to someone else for a change. That’s good! Now you get to hear the Earth singing to you. You didn’t know everything got its own song, even a no-good white fella like you? Well it has.” The woman’s eyes flickered slyly in our direction. “And these Shining People, they came out of the Dreaming to help me sing it to you.”

Omigosh, she must mean us! I thought.

The old woman had begun to chant aloud in her own language.

“Show some respect, will you,” Brice snapped at us. “She said we’d come to help. So help already!”

That’s the extraordinary thing about the angel biz. You never know what’s going to happen next. You confidently set off to Victorian London, and before you know it, you’re in Australia taking part in a tribal chantathon on a Christian verandah.

And after a while this incredibly mystical thing happened. The night literally came alive around me. The coolest thing was that I was a part of it! Angels, sacred rocks and eucalyptus trees, mad men and wise old women, we were all a part of the same living, breathing, star-spangled web, and for just a moment we shared a heart and mind.

One by one, we stopped chanting and my head filled up with this vast silence. We just sat there without speaking, or even thinking, and it was so peaceful I can’t tell you.

The chanting must have been quite powerful too, because when the sun rose next morning the old man was sleeping like a little baby, and the old woman was nowhere to be seen.

Lola did one of her catlike stretches. “Our human’s out of the woods. Now it’s up to him to sort his life out. That means it’s time to hit the road, guys.”

Brice gave me a mocking grin. “Are my little Shining People ready to beam yourselves to London?”

Beam
ourselves! I thought. Do we really have to?

Brice has this unnerving ability to sense my weaknesses. “Angel tags? Remember those?” he reminded me sarcastically. “You use them to connect with your cosmic power source, blah blah blah.”

“I know how angel tags work, thank you,” I said stiffly. “But what if we end up in the wrong place?”

“We won’t,” said Lola. “We’ve done it before.”

Yeah from like, a
street
away, I thought.

Brice’s smirk made it insultingly clear that he thought I was chicken.

“OK, fine!” I snapped. “Let’s beam ourselves to completely the other side of the world. I mean, what’s so hard about that?” And I grasped my tags and concentrated on connecting with my cosmic power source, like Brice said.

There are places on Earth where it’s almost impossible to get a decent angelic signal, and then there are others where the atmosphere is so pure that the connection is instantaneous. The Australian outback is the second kind.

The power surge totally lit up our surroundings. Next minute the arid desert landscape started to stream away from us like flowing lava.

Oh-oh, this is way too mystical for me! I panicked. Suppose we get separated and I get left behind in the Dreaming all by myself? I’ll be floating around here forever and ever. I was so scared that I just grabbed for Lola’s hand and shut my eyes.

To my huge relief, the terrifying cosmic rushing sensation stopped almost as soon as it had begun.

After a few seconds I dared to peek and was confused to see Brice rubbing the feeling back into his fingers. “You should take up arm-wrestling, angel girl,” he told me. “You’ve got quite a grip.”

It wasn’t Lola I’d clutched in my terror. It was Brice.

Chapter Three

I
t seems very different. From Elizabethan times, I mean.”

Lola’s obvious disappointment penetrated my blur of shame. She
hates
it, I thought miserably. She thinks I’ve screwed up big time. And now I came to take in my surroundings, so did I.

We were on a street corner in the East End of London, just before dawn. An old-fashioned gas lamp made a wobbly halo in the fog. Figures toiled past like grey ghosts. They all seemed to be struggling with things that were too heavy for them, lugging baskets or bundles, or patiently dragging home-made carts and trolleys. Soot-blackened tenements loomed over the street, shutting out the sky.

It isn’t like this in Sherlock Holmes, I thought.

“Hey, we just went from summer to winter in twenty seconds. That’s enough to make anyone feel strange,” I said brightly. “The sun will come up in a minute. Then we’ll see how cool this is.”

Brice pulled his hood over his head. “I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

A young girl trudged by. ‘“Oo will buy?” she called in a harsh voice. ‘“Oo will buy my sweet pippins?”

I saw Brice examining his watch with a baffled expression. It just showed a bizarre row of zeros. So did mine and Lola’s.

“Maybe the Dreaming confused them,” Lola suggested.

Trainees don’t strictly need the Agency’s hi-tech watches to monitor the local thought and light levels, or to signal the approach of humans assigned to them. Angels functioned perfectly well for aeons without modern technology and so could we. But this unexpected technical hitch made me feel scarily far from home.

Without a word, we set off down the street. Brice was visibly cheesed off, and Lola kept darting him worried looks, like, “Oh, no, poor Brice is in a bad mood.”

I scowled to myself. Why did he have to be here? OK, maybe Victorian London wasn’t as buzzy as I’d hoped. But if Lola and I were by ourselves, we’d still be having a laugh. She’s not giving it a chance, I thought in despair. She’s under this sinister Brice spell and she’s seeing everything through his eyes.

It wasn’t light yet, but all around us Londoners were grimly starting the new day. Shutters went up with a clatter, and sleepy shop assistants stumbled out and started sweeping the pavements, getting ready for business. Since we’d arrived, traffic had been trickling steadily into the city and horse-drawn cabs, carts and omnibuses began to compete for space in the narrow streets.

I noticed Lola peering into a dingy shop-front. Over the door was a painted sign showing three golden balls. The shop window was crammed with old tat: tarnished jewellery, broken clocks, a pair of faded leather gloves worn into holes. Who’d be desperate enough to buy that? I thought.

“What does this shop sell?” Lola asked in a puzzled voice.

“It’s not a shop, it’s a pawnbroker’s, ” Brice explained. “People only come here when they’re stony broke. They leave an item as security, a few teaspoons, a necklace or whatever, and the pawnbroker lends them some cash until they can afford to buy it back. Only mostly they can’t, which means the pawnbroker usually gets to collect.”

I quickly moved away. It was the gloves. The thought of anyone wanting to buy them. The thought of anyone being that poor.

I’d been picturing Victorian London as scenery basically; a lively backdrop for a spot of angelic tourism - the sound of trotting hooves on cobbled streets, hot buttered muffins by the fire. I hadn’t thought what it would
feel
like for humans living there.

A terrifying figure emerged from an alleyway with a bundle of filthy brushes on his back. He was dragging a little boy by the arm. Both man and child were totally black with soot, except for their red-rimmed eyes. The little boy was crying in the hopeless way kids do when they know no-one cares.

“Stop your bleedin’ row, will ya!” the man yelled. “Or I’ll stop it for ya!”

Lola looked shocked. “What’s he doing with that little kid?”

“Providing him with a career opportunity,” said Brice. “Giving him a chance to be an honest tax-paying citizen.”