by Annie Dalton
“He said I saved his life,” she grinned when she’d rung off. “He said the kids at the home were watching When Good Pets Turn Bad!”
I don’t know if this was Brice’s idea, but for the first time the EAs invited me to go along on the sweep. When we reached the school, we had to split into pairs. Each pair was responsible for sweeping a different area of the school. Brice and I got the annexe, the area where the crack between the dimensions had first appeared.
Since the afternoon of the evil hell turd, I hadn’t risked even setting foot on that bridge, let alone crossing it, so I’d never seen the actual site of the leak. I suspect that’s why I’d been invited along. Brice thought it was time I knew the score.
One thing’s for sure; words like ‘crack’ and ‘leak’ don’t come anywhere near describing the hyperactive evil portal in the boys’ changing rooms.
I backed in revulsion from the swirling sucking thing in the floor, then got a double jolt of horror as I saw the ghostly green graffiti on the changing room wall, the words still visible through the watered-down emulsion. YOU WON’T GET AWAY WITH IT SHAY.
The graffiti was quite old, yet the hate vibes coming at me from the wall still packed enough of a cosmic punch to make me physically shaky.
I heard myself stuttering, “Did - did the EAs ever find out how that crack started?”
Brice’s tone was super-casual. “Not really. They’ve got a few theories. We know when it appeared though,” he added, like he just thought he’d mention it. “It was exactly the same time as your funeral.”
Chapter Eighteen
Mr Allbright once gave out this cute little print-out explaining why the Universe is exactly like your ideal soul-mate.
One example I remember is that when the Universe sends you helpful signs, and you totally refuse to pay attention, instead of going into a major huff and washing its hands of you, it generously sends bigger, even more disturbing, signs, until weeks, or maybe it’s centuries, later, you finally get the message.
I’m only telling you this because I was just about to get a deeply disturbing sign.
It was the evening of the dress rehearsal and the night before the show. The rehearsal went brilliantly. Jordie was over his cold, Magic Boy had recovered from his mysterious ‘injury’, and Marlon stood on his mark like a pro.
Unfortunately it was Jools’ night to baby-sit the Powers of Darkness, which was a shame, because for the first time the kids were performing to a select audience. At least ten other teachers joined Mr Lupton and Miss Rowntree in the hall for a preview of PURE VIBES.
Afterwards they seemed genuinely impressed, though I did see two female teachers tutting over Sky’s tiny clingy dress.
Sky seemed as delighted as everyone else that things had gone so well. I actually saw her throw her arms round Karmen and give her a genuinely affectionate hug.
Karmen’s eyes narrowed suddenly. “What’s this in your hair, girl?” She tried to pick off the teeny acid-green splodge.
Sky winced away, laughing. “Ow, don’t! It’s paint, you muppet! I’ve been helping my brothers decorate their room and of course Olly has to start a paint fight! Now their bunk beds look exactly like modern art!”
I felt as if all the breath had been knocked out of me. That’s because I knew something Karms and Jax couldn’t possibly know.
It was a cute family picture Sky was painting, but the only time she went back to her mum’s these days was to blag money off Dan, and grab a change of clothes.
And for the record, the green paint in her hair was not the kind you use in a little kid’s room. It was the kind you get in a spray can. The kind bored or angry kids use to spray graffiti.
I just beamed myself straight to the Nolans’ flat.
I was literally frantic, pushing my head into closed drawers and cupboards, almost sobbing, “Don’t let it be here, please please please don’t let it be here.” I was abusing the cosmic angels’ gift to invade my friend’s privacy and it felt like the most shameful thing ever.
When I finally found the aerosol cans, wrapped in her paint-stained hoody, I still couldn’t take it in. I found myself making excuses for her; she’d had a disturbed childhood, the graffiti at the Cosmic Cafe was just a stupid one-off, any number of kids could have splattered those other hate-filled words around Park Hall.
But I knew it had always been Sky.
I beamed back to Matilda Street and pounded up flights of stairs to the room where Jools was babysitting the PODS.
Lately, this door was always kept shut but I rushed in without even knocking. “Jools!” I gasped. “Something awful’s—”
Jools practically dived to block my view of the monitors, in a belated attempt to stop me seeing the devastating sight.
I couldn’t move.
There Sky was caught on camera, just letting herself through the shabby back door. I glimpsed shadowy stairs and a floor littered with junk mail, then the door closed.
“She had a key?” I whispered. “She had a key to that house?”
Night after night, Sky had waved laughing goodbyes to the other Pinks and gone straight to this evil place.
Jools was in tears. “I’m so sorry, Mel.”
“Were you ever going to tell me?” I asked numbly.
“It just never felt like the right time,” she almost wailed. “You were doing so well with the others. We started to think maybe you could help Sky too. When she agreed to be in the show, we all thought that was such a hopeful sign. I still think that production could turn her around.”
“She doesn’t care zip about the show,” I said in a bleak voice. “Jordie’s right not to trust her. It’s Sky who’s been writing all that hate graffiti about Shay - that’s what I came to tell you.”
Jools looked genuinely shocked. “How do you know?”
“Karms spotted green paint in her hair. I checked Sky’s room and found, well, evidence.” I let out a choking sob. “It’s almost funny - on my way back here I thought things were about as bad as they could be. But they were so, so much worse!”
Jools was practically wringing her hands. “She’s not a bad person, Mel, you have to believe that. That girl is just so totally desperate to belong to someone.”
I sat down and covered my face. “Let’s face it -you’ve got to be a tiny bit desperate to date a PODS,” I said with a slightly hysterical laugh.
“No, I swear,” Jools said in a pleading voice. “We checked that out. He’s just an unsavoury human boy sharing a really unsavoury squat.”
“Unsavoury! Hello!!” I said from behind my hands.
I wasn’t mad at the earth angels. I was mad at myself.
The Universe had sent enough signs. The instant I heard that ringtone, I knew. Something bad HAS happened to her, Helix had said.
Without me to keep her on track, Sky had taken a wrong wrong turning. Now she couldn’t turn back; she had too much hate and pain stored up in her heart. Did she even know why she hated Shay so much, or did she just need someone to hate? I couldn’t begin to guess the answers.
I just knew one thing. Tomorrow, a troubled girl with an evil boyfriend was presenting a show in a school with a dangerous cosmic leak; and there wasn’t a thing we could do to stop her.
Chapter Nineteen
Jax and Karms had insisted all performers should be backstage one hour at least before the world premiere of PURE VIBES kicked off.
They all made it, even Magic Boy. One of the girls from an R&B group called the Hussies had to be sick in the toilets, but at least she was there!
The first act was unannounced. Twenty kids in dazzling white judo suits just exploded on to the stage and did an electrifying display of a Brazilian martial arts form called Kapoeira, the closest thing I’ve seen to angelic fighting styles.
The kids ran off to astonished applause and Sky flew on to introduce the second act. In the wings, for just an instant, she’d gone deathly white, but now she was at the mike for real, you wouldn’t think she had a nerve i
n her body. She was actually better than in rehearsals - maybe because the audience so obviously loved her - and she was getting all those warm vibes streaming back.
Sky used to say the thing in comedy is timing. When we screamed with laughter at one of her fave female comics, she’d tell us, “It’s all about timing, guys. OK, it’s partly how she says it, but that’s not nearly so important as when.”
Possibly it’s the same with revenge.
Sky waited so long for the moment she and the boyfriend had planned, I started to think Jools had got it right. Like the other Pinks, Sky had finally, and miraculously, turned a corner.
You know what? I think that almost happened.
All that warm human approval flooding back from the audience did start to penetrate some frozen place in Sky that angel vibes couldn’t reach; showing my friend not just what she could be, but who she really was.
When she ran on to introduce the Hussies, she looked so lovely and luminous that I almost dared to hope.
Jordie’s was the last act but one. The idea was to hand the audience over to the Vibe Tribe totally buzzing, so they could lift the roof with a final feelgood set which they’d dedicated, touchingly, to my memory.
Before Sky could go out to introduce him, Jordie barged right past her on to the stage. “I don’t need no freaking introduction,” he growled over his shoulder. “I’m gonna just storm on and slay all the people dead with my charisma!”
Jordie’s rap was called Pressure, and it was about the pressures of growing up in Park Hall. As he prowled around the stage, spitting lyrics, you could see parents becoming visibly moved. Through this furious, rapping boy, they could almost feel how hard it was for their kids.
After long talks with Karmen, Jordie’s rap had acquired an almost hopeful ending. The Hussies slipped back on stage, becoming his backing singers as he rapped more softly:
“Used to be some forests when this world was new.
Then evolution carbonise ‘em. Same with me and you.
Pressure keep a coming, squeezin’ diamonds outa coal.
Same thing happenin’ to us kids in Park Hall.”
The audience went crazy. People stomped and shouted. Jordie stormed off stage the way he came on, but he was almost crying now.
I was in the wings when Sky went on to introduce the final act. She took the mike from the stand and waited until the audience calmed down.
“Well, guys, it’s almost the end of our show, and the Vibe Tribe are waiting in the wings to play their special tribute for Mel.”
Sky’s voice always took on a special serious tone for her final link. “Everyone who knew Mel knows she would have been loving this show. Sadly she can’t be with us. Just a few hours after her thirteen birthday, she was tragically killed. But we’ve all felt her with us while we were rehearsing and she’s particularly in our thoughts today.”
Sky deliberately threw down her cue cards. “I know Jordan Hickman must be thinking about Mel a lot,” she said in a conversational voice.
Karms and Jax exchanged alarmed glances. This wasn’t in the script.
“I always wonder how he can even get those lyrics out,” Sky said in the same chatty tone. “They must break him up. That bit about ‘trying to run faster than the murder machine, and he can’t find the brake pedal and the wheels keep turning’. That’s so exactly how that joy-rider must have felt when he murdered Mel.”
A chilling new vibe was creeping into the hall.
People in the audience looked uncomfortable as Sky babbled on about Jordie’s lyrics.
“Get her off, Jordie,” Jax hissed. “Do another rap if you have to.”
When Sky saw Jordie coming out of the wings, she gave a theatrical gasp. “Jordie, I’m SO sorry!! I just realised you probably didn’t even know?” She looked down at her fingernails and there was an electric silence in the hall. When she looked up again, there was a weird little smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
“You probably had no idea who was driving that stolen car?”
She deliberately met Jordie’s eyes.
“You genuinely didn’t know it was your brother who’d killed my best friend,” she said in a breathy insincere voice.
There was a collective gasp.
“Poor Jordie,” Sky sighed. “What a truly terrible way for you to find out - in front of all these people!”
And not only for Jordie.
My knees had totally gone from under me. I was hearing screaming brakes and smelling burning rubber. I saw raw rusty metal and a white terrified face: the last face I’d seen in this world.
Now that face finally had a name.
You’ll get yours, Shay!
Jordie just walked off stage and would have kept walking right out of the building if Jax and Karms hadn’t forcibly grabbed on to him.
Marlon and the rest of the Vibe Tribe had been waiting to go on. Now they looked paralysed with shock.
How had she known? And if she knew, why didn’t she just tell someone, instead of exposing Shay and his brothers in public like this?
Obviously just putting him in prison wasn’t enough to satisfy her thirst for revenge at losing her friend. Shay’s brothers, and the entire community, had to be punished too.
Well, Sky had punished Park Hall big time. You could see people’s faces closing up like clams. I heard booing, and someone angrily kicked over a chair as they stormed out. You could feel the vibes dropping, first to levels more normal for Bell Meadow, and then they just went on dropping.
When you raise expectations in a place like Park Hall, then cruelly dash them, the shock to human souls makes them feel like there’s no hope left anywhere.
Killing hope is what the PODS do best.
Next comes getting others to do their dirty work. Sky’s petty act of human revenge was nothing to what the Dark Powers had planned.
My heart turned over as I saw that other darker school showing clearly now through the walls. Now it was the human school which felt unreal, as the hell vortex in the changing rooms opened to the max, releasing hideous howls and whisperings and a rush of clammy stinking wind which you could smell in the school hall.
Desperate for comfort, I was unconsciously fiddling with Reuben’s charm bracelet, going this charm is for protection, this charm is for protection…
Jools clutched at my hand. This was all our fault. We’d added too much light to Park Hall’s darkness, treating these troubled kids like angels in waiting. Don’t want any humans growing wings, Lola had joked. We’d raised them up so high, but we’d never got round to teaching them how to fly.
The darkness in the hall visibly curdled and thickened, as the first hell trash came skittering and slithering in from the foyer. Hell trash is the lowest, most fast-breeding cosmic life form; think of normal earth vermin - rats or cockroaches - hideously remixed by the PODS, and you’ll get an idea of the sheer vileness of these creatures. They were being sent in to drag the light levels down to an all-time low, so the PODS to complete the school switch.
The human audience couldn’t see the hell trash, or hear the hell sounds or the evil whiplash voices of the shadowy teachers herding their dead-eyed pupils over the bridge into the school hall. But they must have felt them, because they were suddenly completely desperate to leave.
But my friends weren’t going to let them go without a fight.
Karmen practically ran out of the wings and took the mike. She was shaking with fury. “I can’t believe you’re walking out on us!” she blazed at the astonished audience. “Did you love our show or not? YES you did! Weren’t you freaking gobsmacked that your kids could actually pull this off. YES you were! So you might at least wait to hear what we’ve got to SAY about it?”
The audience was so surprised to find themselves being told off by a tiny Asian girl with a lisp that they just stood and took it, open-mouthed.
Karmen pointed a shaking finger at Sky. “Maybe one day I’ll be able to forgive you for disrespecting all the pure love we’v
e all put into this show. But you made a big mistake when you disrespected Melanie. Mel wasn’t about this, Sky. She wasn’t about hate or revenge. How could you call yourself a Shocking Pink and not know that?”
Now Jax came pushing up to the mike. “Say what you like about us, Sky. We’re still here to defend ourselves, yeah, but you didn’t just sabotage our show, you tried to poison that lovely girl’s memory and we can’t allow that. This show made me feel like I was part of something,” she told the audience, choking with emotion. “I never ever felt like that in my life before. I miss Mel, but these have been…” her entire face quivered as she sobbed out the last words “…the two happiest weeks of my life!”
If the audience was stunned, that was nothing to the PODS. The clammy hell winds from the annexe seemed to falter as the light levels inched up a tiny notch.
That’s all it took. Under the alarmed clicks and warbles of the hell trash, I heard the electronic hum of a wheelchair as Tariq came punting out of the wings with a determined expression. Behind him came a pale, stricken Jordie, quickly followed by the entire Vibe Tribe. Then the Hussies, Magic Boy and twenty kapoeira kids filed on from the wings, all taking their places defiantly beside Jax and Karmen. Even Mr Lupton and Miss Rowntree hurried up out of the audience to declare their support.
Karmen’s eyes widened as she looked out into the hall. “They’re coming back! Start singing, you muppets!”
The Vibe Tribe bravely launched into “Where is the Love?”
I felt the ends of my hair start to tingle. Strong new voices were joining in my fave Black Eyed Peas song. The light levels began to lift as angels came beaming down everywhere.
Among them I saw familiar faces, earth angels I’d chatted to on Hampstead Heath: the girl who worked with street kids, a boy with a rucksack, a stern business man in a beautiful suit.
All the Matilda Street angels had come - Hendrix and Tallulah, Dino and Delphine - and still new angels kept on arriving, until the hall shone and shimmered with their light.
Jools had said London had seven energy hot spots, but just then it felt like there were eight.