Living the Dream (3 page)

We hurried downstairs and out into the morning. It suddenly hit me that this was actually the first time Reuben and I had gone anywhere together that wasn’t strictly work- related.

I used to tell everyone Reuben was just like my angel big bro. I’d be like, “It’s SO cool how we can just enjoy each other’s company without any of that boy/girl stuff messing things up.” I know, I know; you can totally see what’s coming, right?

One day, when we were alone together on our first ever soul-retrieval mission, Reuben let slip that he was in love with some mystery angel girl. Then he went all mysterious on me, refusing to tell me who she was, and for some reason we both got really huffy. Things got worse when he bought Millie to be his support DJ at my birthday party. Lola remarked casually that they’d been tight since they were little kids, which really upset me. I mean, a normal girlfriend is one thing, but a childhood sweetheart -you’ll never measure up, will you?

Miraculously, India put our friendship back on track. The stress of protecting a child buddha from the forces of cosmic evil could have driven me and Reubs even further apart, but it actually brought us a lot closer; though not quite close enough to bring up the exact nature of his relationship with his childhood sweetheart.

Now here we were sitting on opposite sides of a window table in Guru, our fave cafe, and neither of us could think of a thing to say! I’d let myself hope that our relationship was about to enter a new and very special phase, but with a painful silence whistling through my ears like wind over the prairies, this was starting to seem like wishful thinking.

“So what’s been happening while I’ve been away?” Reubs said awkwardly, having already asked me this exact question.

“Not a lot!” I fibbed… again.

“Settled back in OK after India?”

“Yeah, totally!”

“Have you heard how Lola’s getting on?”

“A bit,” I said vaguely.

“She texted me a couple of times.” He frowned. “She didn’t give much away. I get the feeling this mission isn’t a whole lot of fun.”

“She could just be mad-busy?”

“She sounds sad more than busy,” said Reubs.

I felt a guilty pang. Preoccupied with my own problems, I’d taken Lola’s brief jokey texts at face value.

“Take a look at these little cuties!” Reuben pushed his phone across the table.

“Oh, REUBEN, they’re so SWEET!” I cooed over each pic of the helpless little newborns. All baby animals are sweet, but snow leopard cubs are just magic.

“I bet Chase is over the moon!”

Reubs shook his head. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

Reubs explained that the snow leopard’s lair was on a mountain which locals believed to be sacred. Now the animals were threatened with the arrival of a new railway that was going to carve right through the holy mountain.

“Ever get the feeling that humans are literally out to punish their planet?”

“No, actually, I don’t.” My voice sounded sharper than I meant it to.

“That came out wrong,” Reubs said quickly. “In theory I do get that the Powers of Darkness have a sneaky knack of making humankind do their dirty work for them. It’s just so hard to remember when you’re there though, isn’t it?”

“Almost impossible,” I agreed. “So if it’s hard for angels, who know there’s a cosmic war going on, it’s no wonder humans get confused.”

I saw that Reuben’s expression had become a little fixed.

“What?” I said nervously. “I’ve got mascara on my nose, haven’t I?”

He shook his head. “You’re twiddling your hair. You always do that when you’re stressing.”

“I’m not stressing,” I fibbed, quickly sitting on my hands. “I just hate that my century is in such bad shape.”

Reuben broke into a totally luminous smile. Lola calls it his Sweetpea smile. It makes him look as if he’s just received a personal message from the Universe telling him everything is going to be OK.

“I’d much rather go to times like yours,” he said, “where angels and humans can really pull together and make a difference, wouldn’t you?” He started delving in his flight bag, eventually bringing out a minidisc. “I burned this for you the night we got back from India.I’ve been carrying it all around the Himalayas. Track one is just a Bollywood remix of ‘You’re not Alone’.”

Lola and I loved Reubs’ feel-good anthem so much we instantly adopted it as our cosmic theme tune. I even have it as my ringtone!

“Reubs, that’s such a cool idea!” Reubs knows I’m mad about everything Bollywood.

“The other tracks are pretty much works in progress. Don’t expect too much, OK?” Reuben looked like he half wanted to snatch it back.

“You always give me such sweet presents,” I said impulsively.

He looked alarmed. “Do I?”

“Yeah, you do! You gave me that bear.”

Reuben gave an embarrassed laugh. “I just won that at the fair. I wasn’t exactly going to keep a big blue teddy for myself!”

And you gave me that charm bracelet for my birthday, and once you brought me back a tropical flower from the Heavenly interior, just because you knew I was having a bad time.
I didn’t say that part aloud. Reuben looked hot and bothered as it was. I was pretty hot and bothered myself!

At that moment Mo appeared with our order. “I forgot to say congratulations, you guys,” he said, beaming. We stared at him blankly.

“Congratulations for…?” I said cautiously.

“For delivering Obi safely to the monks! The little buddha?”

“Oh, right! Thanks!”

Mo hovered, obviously eager for more details of our mission. Reubs patiently answered his questions, describing our last glimpse of Obi as he set out on the rope bridge to the hidden monastery.

I pretended to dab up the crumbs from my muffin, but I was suddenly incapable of swallowing. All the colours had drained out of the cafe. The angel’s ominous words rang in my ears:
And when he walks back across the bridge as a young man, what kind of planet will he see
?

Eventually Mo left to serve some new customers. Reuben lightly touched my hand. “What’s wrong?”

He’d given me the perfect opportunity, yet I still couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I mean, it was happening to me and even / didn’t believe it half the time. I fiddled unhappily with the minidisc case where Reubs had scrawled his playlist:

track 1, ur not alone b’wood mix

track 2 earth dreams

tracks 3, 4 & 5

I felt a smile start somewhere deep inside my heart. One of Reubs’ “works in progress”, that he said he’d burned the night we got back from India, was called “Melanie’s Song”.

THREE versions! In that moment I knew I could tell this angel boy anything and he wouldn’t think I was bigging myself up; he’d just accept what I said because…

“Reubs,” I said, throwing caution to the wind.

A chime of bells came from his mobile.

He groaned. “Chase said he’d call if we get the green light to head back out on our snow leopard project.” He left the table to take his call. When he came back, he couldn’t stop grinning.

“I’m guessing it’s good news! That’s fantastic, Reubs,” I added, injecting oodles of enthusiasm into my voice. “Congratulations.” (Well, no one likes a clingy angel girl, do they?)

“Thanks!” he said shyly. “We’ve got a briefing at the Agency in an hour. We’re leaving as soon as they find us a time slot.” He pulled his chair up next to mine. “You were going to tell me something?”

A pair of hands came down over my eyes. “I’ll give you a clue,” said a voice. “I’m handsome and I’m dangerous!”

“That’s two clues,” I pointed out wearily. “Actually, until the ‘handsome’ bit I was going to say Brice.” If there had been a painless ejector button, I’d have fired him through the ceiling into the celestial Light Fields.

Lola’s boyfriend and reformed cosmic dropout dropped his hands, laughing. “Nice going,” he said to Reubs, grabbing a chair. “Chase says you got the snow leopard gig.” Brice dresses totally in black, which makes the bleached blond spikes in his hair even more of a contrast. Across his T-shirt was a message in teeny letters:

IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU’RE STANDING ON MY AURA!

“We could use another team member,” Reuben told him.

Brice shook his head. “Michael says I’m grounded till I hand in my overdue paper on Skin Walkers.”

“What are Skin Walkers?” I asked, totally not caring.

Brice gave a pretend shudder. “You don’t want to know.” (Which was actually true.)

“You could bring your laptop and write your Skin Walker paper between watches,” Reuben suggested.

“Nah! I was glad to help get things off the ground, but I’m not a Child of Nature like you and Chase.”

He and Reubs started reminiscing about their trip. They’ve grown to be such big buddies, it’s hard to believe that in his bad-boy days Brice once left Reuben for dead. Lola and I only just reached Reubs in time.

Evolution, our headmaster calls it. The mysterious force that drives life forms to take that impossible leap to the next level: caterpillars morphing into butterflies; shiny little pips turning into apple trees; a damaged angel boy turning into the most loyal buddy you could ever wish for.

When I think back to that afternoon in Guru, I wonder why I didn’t just volunteer to make up the numbers. OK, I’m not a Child of Nature either, but I do genuinely care about endangered species.

Was I scared of seeming uncool? Was I worried I’d look as if I was chasing after Reuben? Maybe a bit of both. But let me tell you something. This Universe is balanced on a TOTAL knife edge. We make these sudden random decisions, never ever dreaming what we’re setting in motion. When I chose to stay behind, I was actually choosing a totally new direction for my future as an angel. I just didn’t know it.

Brice and Reuben were cracking jokes now about some dodgy inn Brice had taken them to in the Himalayas where everything reeked of yak. I got up to leave. Our brief private moment was over, plus I had a hot library date with the witch hunters of Salem.

“Stay safe, angel boy,” I said shyly to Reuben. “Have fun with the Skin Walkers, if fun is the right word,” I told Brice.

I went back to the library and found the witches book straight off. No desert breezes, no chanting. It looked as if the angel had given up. I made notes for a couple of hours then I just had to go back to my room and listen to the songs Reubs had written for me. It sounds super-vain, but no one had ever written a song for me before. I practically ran across the campus!

For some reason my door didn’t want to open. When I finally forced my way in, I found my room jam-packed with books from floor to ceiling. There was a teeny gap so I could reach my bed, also (to my relief) my bathroom.

I didn’t need to read the book titles. I knew they’d have environmental scare words like HEAT, MELTING, CATASTROPHE. The angel had thoughtfully left a global-warming DVD on my bed. The cover had a v. depressing picture of smoking factories.

I squeezed over to my bed and perched tensely, trying to think. None of this was normal. Creation angels don’t just up and leave Earth to harass other angels.

What’s happening on Earth isn’t normal though
, said the small quiet voice of my inner angel.
What if things are so bad he can’t actually DO his job any more
? It was the first time Helix had come online since we’d fallen out. I didn’t want to admit it, but she was right.

But there were Cosmic Agencies
completely
dedicated to looking after Earth. Agencies composed of super-brilliant angelic scientists all feverishly working on these exact problems. What could one ditzy angel trainee do that Heaven’s scientists weren’t doing already?

Did he seriously think I was going to read my way through several hundred books on the environment? Assuming I understood
one zillionth
of the contents?

Like a little shining fish, a new idea swam into my mind.
He doesn’t expect you to READ the books. He’s trying to TELL you something, you moron
!

I got up to pace, but of course there was nowhere to pace so I squeezed over to the window, staring out over the Heavenly rooftops until I’d teased out the next shiny little thought.

He’s saying that all these words have been written, the Agency has all the facts, humans have all the facts and NOTHING’S changed. Earth is STILL dying.

I felt a tear splash on to my hand. For the first time I’d let myself glimpse the angel’s agony, that the Universe could allow such terrible things to happen to his beautiful blue-green planet.

I was still clutching the global-warming DVD. Play time 93 mins. “You know what, angel girl?” I asked myself. “You can’t read all these books, but would it totally KILL you to watch ONE measly DVD?”

On cue, the angel came shimmering out through the books. Like Helix he’d just been waiting for me to open my eyes. I’m such a slow learner sometimes!

The angel watched with unblinking golden eyes as I took the DVD out of its case and slid it into my laptop. I stretched between two piles of books to pull down my blind, propped myself up on my pillows and pressed PLAY.