by Annie Dalton
First published in Great Britain by Harper Collins Children’s Books in 2002
This updated and revised edition published by Lazy Chair Press in 2013
Text copyright (c) Annie Dalton 2001
The author and illustrator assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work.
This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be leant, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form (including digital form) other than this in which it is published, and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
With thanks to Australian angels Kerry Greenwood and Jenny Pausacker for helping me with Mel’s trip to the Northern Territories. Thanks also to Viv French for helping me find my way around Victorian London. And a special thank you to my daughter Maria for her totally luminous inspiration.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
About the Author
Also by Annie Dalton
Credits
Chapter One
Once upon a time, I lived on a gorgeous blue-green planet called Earth. I didn’t stay there long; thirteen years and twenty-two hours max. But it often felt a lot longer. That’s because I was in a permanent state of panic. It would take too long to list all the things I was scared of. All the normal human anxieties obviously: spiders, dentists, exams. Plus those typical teen twitches, worrying that I looked fat or had evil-smelling breath or that I’d been walking around the school with my skirt trapped in my knickers. But these were just my background worries; kind of like the bass line for the really heavy stuff.
One fear was so humiliating that I was never able to admit it to anybody.
I was petrified of being by myself.
I know. It’s nuts. Loneliness can’t kill you, right? But the minute I was alone, I felt like I was literally dissolving with terror. My home felt SO empty. Even with the TV on full blast. Even when I called my mates and kept them talking for hours on the phone. Even if I made butterscotch-flavoured popcorn and pigged the lot. Even - well, you get the picture.
It all started when my dad walked out on us. This unforeseen catastrophe came so totally out of the blue, that I started worrying that my mum would be the next to go. Each time she left the flat, I absolutely knew she was going to get mashed in a road accident and I’d be taken into care. But she didn’t and I wasn’t, and eventually she met my lovely stepdad Des and we became a proper joined up family again. After we’d all moved in together I let myself relax for a whole twenty-four hours. It was pure bliss. But next day, EEP! I was back on Red Alert. Only now I was panicking about Des dying in the same tragic car wreck. Plus a few months later, my baby sister was born, so naturally I had to add her to my panic list too.
Of course that’s all ancient history now. These days you’ll find me living happily on the other side of those famous Pearly Gates. I know! It was actually me who died, which is probably the only sudden death scenario that never occurred to me! Now I just wish I could go on Oprah and broadcast an inspirational message to the stressed-out Mel Beebys of this world. “Just go with the flow, girls,” I’d tell them. “No matter what happens, you can handle it. You’re ALL going to be fine!” And to prove it, I’d show them some feel-good footage from my personal video diary.
Over a cool hip hop soundtrack, you see this like, MTV-type montage of me and my mates, shopping in our favourite department stores, paddling on the seashore and dancing the night away at the Babylon Cafe. At the end I’m by myself. The camera pulls back to show my friend Lola Sanchez watching as I sashay in through the school gates. “At first glance, Melanie Beeby looks like any normal schoolgirl,” she tells the viewer. “But appearances can be deceptive and this is no ordinary school.”
The camera focuses on a sign saying Angel Academy in shimmery letters, then it zooms in on the angel logo on the gates. Next minute there’s a new close-up of the identical logo, only this one is on my cute midriff T-shirt. I go floating through the school in graceful slow-mo, chatting and laughing with my mates.
Then CUT! Lola and I are sipping strawberry smoothies at Guru, our favourite student hang-out.
“I used to think of death as the ultimate tragedy,” I confide in my friend. “Like this scary black hole that swallowed you up forever? But the fact is, dying totally improved my life. Naturally I was upset to leave my family,” I add hastily. “But at my old school I’d got this reputation for being a real bimbo. One teacher called me ‘an airhead with attitude’.”
Lola pulls a face into the camera. “Yeah, Miss Rowntree!” she says cheekily. “And look at her now!”
“Imagine how amazed I was when I got to Heaven and found I’d won a scholarship to the Angel Academy!” I tell the camera “I guess, someone somewhere must have thought I had hidden depths!”
Now Lola and I are walking past the school library. It’s made of glass and looks a bit like a lighthouse, only with magic cloud effects scudding over the walls.
“At the Angel Academy we don’t think of ourselves as pupils,” I say into the camera. “We’re angel trainees. And if we make the grade we’ll be the celestial agents of the future, which has to be the coolest job ever!”
The scene dissolves, and suddenly we’re bang in the middle of a science class. Mr Allbright is demonstrating a new technique for beaming celestial vibes. After a few attempts, everyone successfully materialises a wobbly sphere of golden light above his or her cupped palms. We all look v. intellectual, especially Lola, who’s wearing cute little gold glasses.
This time it’s my voice on the soundtrack. “Lollie is my best friend,” I tell everyone. “She’s the soul-mate I’ve been longing for my whole life, which is incredible as originally she’s from my future! Angel trainees can come from every period of Earth’s history. Oh, except for pure angels like my buddy Reuben here.”
The camera drops in on a martial arts class, where a skinny, honey-coloured boy is performing a sequence of ninja angel moves. He looks focused, yet utterly relaxed with his little dreads whipping around his head.
CUT! It’s sunset and the whole class is sitting on the beach in the lotus position. The sun slips down into the ocean, beaming rosy rays across our faces. A musical throbbing builds on the soundtrack, sounding like some huge invisible humming top.
I say, “This is the first sound I heard after I left my body and found myself in Heaven. I call it my cosmic lullaby, because it always makes me feel so safe and secure. You see, life seriously doesn’t end when you die! It actually just gets better and better!”
At this point though, my imaginary video diary totally runs out of steam.
Diaries are meant to tell the truth and I’m not sure mine is giving a true picture. In trying to focus on the bright side, I accidentally make my school look like a Pepsi commercial. (Like, I never once mention the Dark Powers.) I also give the impression that I’m finally sorted (yeah, right!).
But like our teacher Mr Allbright says, being an angel is not about being perfect. It’s about being real. So I want you to forget all about that phony Pepsi Heaven, because I’m about to tell you the uncut, unvarnished, utterly unglamorous story of my last angelic assignment.
But first, to help you understand what happened, I’ve got to tell you about Brice.
I ran into Brice on my very first trouble-shooting mission to Earth. At that time he was working for the PODS (that’s what
my mates and I call the Powers of Darkness). I won’t lie to you, I hated him on sight. It didn’t help that this cosmic low-life was the exact double of a really buff boy I once fancied at my old school, right down to the bleached hair and bad-boy slouch.
Anyway, without going into the sordid details, I got the better of him. After that Brice became like, my evil nemesis or whatever, because he turned up again on our mission to Tudor England. This time he beat our buddy Reuben up so badly that Reubs had to be airlifted back home. He’s still got a huge scar.
Now I’ve probably convinced you that Brice belongs firmly on the dark side of the cosmic fence, right? If only it was that simple.
You see, once upon a time, Brice was an angel like me.
I don’t understand why it’s more shocking for an angel kid to go over to the PODS than if he’d just been one of the bad guys from the beginning, but it is.
I’m not going to get into how and why Brice sold his soul to the PODS. But the Agency obviously thought there were major extenuating circumstances, because last term, after complex negotiations with the Opposition (that’s the official Agency term for the Powers of Darkness), they brought Brice in from the cold. And next thing I know: bosh! He’s back at school. They actually had him working on the Guardian Angel hotline, would you believe!
Our headmaster explained that the Agency has to take the long-term view, plus he also said a heap of other stuff, about Eternity and how if you wait long enough trees eventually evolve into diamonds.
It was an excellent speech, but I still thought Brice was a jerk. Luckily he was keeping well out of my way. I’d catch unwelcome glimpses of him at popular student hang-outs, but he was always on his own and never stayed longer than a few minutes. Once I bumped into him mooching around the stacks in the school library. And another time I saw him on the beach, chucking pebbles at the sea, looking incredibly depressed.
The boy’s a freak, I thought smugly. He can’t hack the Hell dimensions and he can’t stand Heaven. I made a secret bet with myself that he wouldn’t make it to the end of term.
Basically I couldn’t wait for Brice to let everyone down again and go slinking back to the Dark dimensions where he belonged. Then I could pretend he never existed and life could go back to how it was before.
Then summer came and things took a totally unexpected turn.
I only have myself to blame for what happened. Lola was desperate for me to spend the holiday with her in the heavenly interior doing some kind of extreme adventure activities. “Everyone says you come back totally transformed,” she enthused. “We’ll be like angel warriors! The PODS won’t know what hit them!”
But I’m not exactly the bungee-jumping type, and anyway I’d promised to help out at the preschoolers’ summer camp. So at the end of term, we went our separate ways.
For the first few days I literally felt like I was missing a limb.
Every time I went into town I’d leave a message for Lollie on the Link - the angel internet. But days and weeks went by and she still didn’t reply.
I told myself she must be holidaying somewhere super remote, where they hadn’t even heard of internet cafes. But I wasn’t convinced. I mean, we’re soul-mates, right? From the start, we had this strong telepathic link. I could usually sense the absolute instant she started thinking about me. Yet now I seemed to be getting this permanently ‘ENGAGED’ signal, as if my soul-mate’s thoughts had drifted totally elsewhere.
Luckily with thirty hyperactive angel tots to take care of, I didn’t have much time to mope. Days whizzed by in a blur of activity: picnics on the beach, treasure hunts among the dunes, trips to the Sugar Shack for home-made ices. Finally it was our last day. Since we’d worked so hard, Miss Dove told us we could have a couple of hours off.
Picture me lying in a hammock in the afternoon sunshine, listening to the soothing whisper of waves from the beach below, my eyes glued to a spine-chilling novel I’d found in our holiday cottage. From nearby came a babble of excited little voices as the toddlers tried to guess the mystery objects in Miss Dove’s special magic bag.
I heard the creak of a hammock and Amber sat up. “Boy, you’ve really got the bug,” she yawned. “You were reading Sherlock Holmes last time I looked!”
“I finished it last night,” I mumbled. My reading marathon started out of sheer self defence. After a hard day keeping up with the tinies, I needed to flake out and relax. Unfortunately Amber and the other volunteers were bursting to hold lengthy midnight discussions on various deep angelic issues. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, so I had to pretend to be fascinated by the crumbling and mildewed book collection in my attic bedroom. Without me realising, one book led to another and I was now shamelessly addicted. My current read was keeping me totally mesmerised! You would not believe the things that happened to that poor heroine! First both her parents die in a storm at sea. Then her relatives pack her off to a typhoid-ridden boarding school on the moors, so they can cheat her out of her rightful inheritance. I was desperate to know how it would turn out.
Suddenly shrieks of excitement made me look up.
“YAYY! I guessed right!” Next minute little Maudie landed on top of me. My hammock wobbled madly, tipping both of us on the ground, and I found myself buried under a heap of giggling preschool angels.
Finally the day was over and my fellow volunteers and I tottered back to our cottage at the top of the cliffs. It was still really warm so we ate outdoors, watching the lighthouse wink on and off across the bay.
Out of the blue, Amber said, “So have you guys decided where you’re going yet?”
For the second time that day I came back to reality with a bump.
I gasped with dismay. “I can’t believe I forgot!”
Just before we broke up, Mr Allbright had announced that the History students would be going on a field trip at the beginning of the new term; a field trip with a twist. We had to pick an era in human history which genuinely interested us. If the Agency approved our choice, we’d be assigned a suitable human from that time period and we’d go to Earth to study them, like, in their natural context.
That’s what I think is so cool about angel school. We don’t just learn history from books, we visit historical eras for real. No, I mean it; we literally travel in Time!
This time we were supposed to be working in groups of three, something to do with power triangles or whatever. I had naturally assumed I’d be in a three with my fellow cosmic musketeers, Lollie and Reuben But it had been a v. stressful term and my frazzled mates couldn’t seem to agree on anything.
Lola wanted us to go back to ancient Persia where she’d done her Guardian Angel module, and Reuben had this bizarre fixation with King Arthur and his Round Table.
“Hate to burst your bubble, Reubs,” I told him, “but that King Arthur thing is just a story. Camelot never actually existed.”
As a pure angel Reuben sometimes struggles to grasp quite basic concepts, such as the difference between human history and fairy tales. In the end both my mates got really grumpy with me.
“You decide then,” Lola said irritably.
“Yeah, since you know so much,” Reuben growled.
“Ok,” I said huffily. “I will.” And then, I’d immediately put it to the back of my mind. After all, I had the whole summer in front of me.
Now the holidays were over and I still hadn’t thought of a destination. You see, I wanted it to be somewhere truly amazing. I mean, obviously I wanted my mates to have a great time, but most of all I wanted to wow them with my super de luxe five-star decision-making skills. Unfortunately under that kind of pressure my mind totally turns to pink bubblegum, incapable of making even weedy one-star decisions.
I wasn’t even back at school yet but my stress levels were soaring dangerously. So I took myself off to have a calming read in the bath.
I lit a small army of candles, climbed into the old-fashioned tub, lay back in the hot water and settled down to finish my old fashioned mystery story. Th
e pages started to go wavy in the steam, but I refused to budge until the evil rellies got their just desserts. At last I closed the book with a sigh of satisfaction. Then I shot bolt upright, sending bath foam everywhere. I had had the most fantabulous idea!
I quickly towelled myself dry, put on the Treat me like a Princess T-shirt that I wear for a nightie, and flew up to my room to investigate my old-fashioned book collection.
Every title literally gave me goosebumps. The Story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Woman in White, Collected Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens, and most spine-tingling of all, real-life reports of the case of Jack the Ripper! And all these books had been written in the exact same era; Victorian times. Well, was that a sign, or was that a sign?
I grabbed the Ripper book and screwed my eyes tight shut. “Just give me a date,” I muttered. “Any date will do.” I opened the book at random and peeped out from under my lashes.
There it was, bang in the middle of the page. 1888!
By total fluke, I’d found the perfect destination for our Time trip. Lola, Reubs and I could do a spot of enjoyable time-tourism, plus we’d easily be able to collect enough info on social conditions and whatever to satisfy Mr Allbright.
Now I could relax and enjoy the last few hours of my holiday with a clear conscience. I was so impressed with myself that it never once occurred to me that my mates might not be quite as thrilled with my genius idea!
Have you noticed how the moments you most look forward to are usually the ones that are a total let-down?
The instant I got back to school, I hurtled along to Lollie’s room to tell her the good news, but she still hadn’t returned from her extreme adventure experience. So I dashed along to my room and called Reuben’s number. Reuben had to be back, surely. Only he wasn’t.
I collapsed on to my narrow bed and gazed out over the heavenly rooftops. It was evening and lights were coming on all over the city, like sprinkles of little stars. But tonight all this heavenly beauty just made me depressed. “Hi, I’m back,” I told my empty room. And then I said, “Well, can’t sit about here all day.”