Calling the Shots (8 page)

On the last day of filming, Mr Mantovani held a party at the town’s only hotel. Officially everyone was drinking fruit punch, but I glimpsed the inevitable brown paper bag doing the rounds and everyone started getting a bit flirty and giggly. I’d noticed that banning alcohol seemed to have made it more thrilling and desirable than ever.

Just as things were getting a teensy bit out of hand, a tow truck pulled up outside. A guy in dungarees came in and peered around the crowded bar. “Is there a lady called Rosa Bloom here?”

Rose turned in surprise and her short shiny hair went swooshing across her rouged cheekbones. “I guess that must be me!” she laughed.

“Sign here please and print your name clearly underneath,” he said. “Oops, nearly forgot to give you the keys!”

Rose pulled a comical face at the other Bloomfields, like, “What is going on?”

They all followed him outside, totally bemused. The delivery man unhitched a battered old pick-up from his vehicle. “She’s all yours!” he said cheerily and climbed back into his cab.

Rose stared at the pick-up with a stunned expression.

Mr Mantovani came up behind her. “Don’t look so surprised, doll,” he chuckled. “You kept your side of the deal, now I’ve kept mine!”

“I thought you were going to give us the train tickets,” she said wonderingly. “Not our very own truck.” She looked doubtful. “It isn’t stolen, is it?”

He looked wounded. “Don’t insult me, Rosa! I called in some favours, is all.”

Rose reached up and kissed him on both cheeks. “Why thank you, Mr Mantovani!” Then she yelled, “Honesty, Clem, Mama - grab your bags, let’s go!!”

Lenny was looking down in the mouth. “You can’t even drive,” he said.

Rose’s eyes sparkled. “No, but you can! Hollywood is in California too. What better place to be a stuntman than Hollywood?”

Yess! I thought. Hollywood was only just starting to be known for making films in Lenny’s time, so he’d be arriving at exactly the right time.

“And when all those other directors come knocking on your door, doll, tell them Tony Mantovani saw you first!” the director called plaintively.

Rose laughed. “I told you, I’m not interested in movies. When we get to California I’m going to college and one day I’ll be a famous archaeologist.”

She climbed into the back of the old pick-up, put her glasses on and started to read. I had to smile. With her new confidence and her ‘It’ girl haircut, Honesty’s bookworm sister looked gorgeous, even in her hideous specs.

Lenny, Grace and Clem climbed into the front of the truck. Lenny started singing, “California here I come!” and Grace and Clem joined in.

I suddenly felt desperately bleak vibes coming from Honesty. She had seated herself as far possible from Rose. She had her usual blank zombie expression, but for the first time in weeks, I could hear her thoughts;
Everyone is following their dreams. Everyone but me.

I had a sudden shocking insight. It wasn’t that Honesty didn’t have a dream. She did. She had a totally impossible one. She wanted everything the way it was before her father died. She wanted to be living with her mama and papa in suburban Philadelphia, scoring As and Bs at school.

If she couldn’t have that, she didn’t want anything. In other words, she was going to stay a zombie for the rest of her life.

I experienced the sickening falling sensation that I get when I’m seriously out of my depth.
Admit it, Melanie, you are a hopeless guardian angel
, I told myself unhappily. You have beamed so many vibes at this girl, she ought to be glowing in the dark by now. But not only is she not getting better. She’s actually getting worse. You should hand her over to the professionals, before it’s too late.

I called up the GA hotline as we bumped along in the back of the truck.

It was hard to talk, partly because of the truck, partly because I was trying not to cry, and also because bits of my hair kept blowing into my mouth.

“Orlando?” I snivelled. “You’d better tell the Agency to send someone else. I’m just not getting through to her.”

“You are,” he insisted. “You just being there is helping her more than you know.”

“I just don’t understand her,” I wailed. “To be honest, I don’t even like her that much.” It was the first time I’d admitted this even to myself, and I felt a rush of shame. What kind of guardian angel
dislikes
her human?

As usual, Orlando was serenely unshockable. “Give her time. Honesty hasn’t come to terms with her father’s death, that’s all.”

“Come to terms!” I wailed. “Orlando, she hasn’t shed a single tear!”

“Of course not. She’s frozen inside. That’s how the PODS like it.”

I felt myself turn cold. “Omigosh! The PODS got to her when I wasn’t looking!” I was used to the dark powers operating on a huge scale - world wars, famines, famous authors and whatever. I had stupidly forgotten that ordinary individuals were equally at risk.

“I don’t think they targeted her deliberately,” Orlando was saying. “But it’s easy for someone as vulnerable as Honesty to tune into a PODS wavelength. Now she’s getting blasted with toxic vibes twenty-four hours a day.”

I had also stupidly forgotten that we’re not the only cosmic beings who broadcast vibes.
I am SO useless
, I thought.

As usual, Orlando read my mind. “Don’t beat yourself up, Melanie,” he said calmly. “Honesty Bloomfield
called
you, remember?” And he hung up.

But I knew I had failed her just when she needed me most. I was crying seriously by this time, and I’d got to the crucial stage when you need a really good blow. I scrabbled in my bag on the off-chance I’d brought some tissues and was astonished to find a bulky paperback.

How weird
, I thought. I completely didn’t remember packing my Angel Handbook. It must have fallen in when I wasn’t looking. Then I whispered, “Omigosh, it’s a sign!”

I shut my eyes tight, opened the Angel Handbook at random and read, “It is said that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.”

I looked up and saw Honesty staring emptily into space as if she had no idea where she was going and couldn’t care less if she arrived. Then I remembered her singing the Nickelodeon song, and I felt this terrible ache inside my heart.

Orlando’s right
, I thought.
She called me and I can’t let her down
.

Chapter Seven

A
ll through Texas and into Oklahoma, I stuck to Honesty like glue.

I didn’t just beam vibes, I chatted to her nonstop. I even sang to her. I figured, if it works with coma victims, it might work with Honesty too. Assuming Orlando was right, her fragile energy system was getting a twenty-four-hour battering from PODS FM. Our vibes are designed to make humans feel stronger, so they can get on with whatever they came to Earth to do. But the vibes the PODS put out literally poison human hearts and minds, making their lives seem totally meaningless.

Humans have free will as you know, so I couldn’t physically disconnect Honesty from the PODS, even if I knew how. She had to do that herself. My job as Honesty’s guardian angel was to remind her there were other cosmic vibes available: uplifting, inspiring, groovy, feel-good vibes.

We sat in the back of the pick-up, rattling across huge empty prairies under an equally huge empty sky. Oklahoma weather is really something else. One minute we’d be driving along in a blizzard, the next we’d be basking in hot sunlight. In one place we ran into the tail end of one of those mid-western twisters (that’s like a cyclone). To everyone’s horror, it started raining frogs!

Rose and Honesty shrieked and threw the icky things out as fast as they landed. But I totally refused to let a local frog storm distract me from my mission.

Once I was quite sure that frogs had stopped falling out of the sky, I settled down beside Honesty, and told her the story of my own short, sweet but incredibly cool life on Earth. Oh, and I set her straight about that cloud-filled waiting room, in case she was worrying. “Heaven won’t be the same for your papa as it is for me, obviously,” I explained. “For one thing, I was only thirteen when I died. But if he has half the fun that me and Lola have, I promise he’ll be having a ball!”

I also apologised to Honesty for dissing her the way I did, when she turned out to be just a regular person instead of some precocious child star.

“You’re really special, Honesty,” I told her. “And you have your own special path to follow. But your dad’s death really shocked you and the PODS took advantage. I am your guardian angel and I’m going to help you through this, OK?”

One afternoon the Bloomfields picked up a Mexican woman with a baby.The woman had obviously been walking for hours, and was completely exhausted. Rose immediately put down her book and took the baby, so his mother could take a nap in the back of the truck. The baby started grizzling and she hushed him in her arms, and started to sing a Twenties ballad about true love and apple blossom, only she made it sound like a lullaby. She had a surprisingly tuneful voice.

I was completely charmed. It was the first time I’d seen this softer side of Rose. Honesty was watching her too. She had a new alert expression in her eyes, suddenly, almost as if she was making mental notes. Since they’d left Georgia, Honesty’s family had been living a hand-to-mouth existence. But I happened to know that Grace wasn’t completely penniless. She still had a valuable diamond ring that her husband had given her. She kept it wrapped inside a blue silk scarf in a secret pocket inside what Americans call a purse, and I call a handbag. Once I saw Grace take it out when her children were asleep, and touch it to her cheek. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to part with it. The ring was the only thing she had left of her husband.

Sometimes Lenny managed to earn a few dollars, helping out at farms or country homesteads along the way. But they often went to sleep hungry, and most nights they had to sleep under the stars.

These days, the Bloomfield kids were scarcely recognisable as the same people who had left Philadelphia. They looked browner and wirier and somehow tougher, even little Clem. Their smart Philadelphia clothes were starting to get faded and raggedy around the edges.

It wasn’t easy to keep clean on the road either, and any time the Bloomfields came to a public washroom, they dived inside and made the most of the free soap and hot water. I could only look on with envy. That’s one big drawback to being a celestial agent. We can’t use earthly facilities. Our molecules are too subtle or something. For the same reason, we can’t tuck into the local cuisine; we have to make do with a kind of angelic trail mix which luckily is quite sustaining.

Despite the tough conditions, Honesty’s mother always somehow kept herself looking good. Grace Bloomfield struck me as one of those natural celebrities. She wasn’t snooty or superior, yet she had this real dignified air about her. Our fellow travellers immediately noticed this and treated her with respect.

And we met all kinds on the road, I can tell you. 1920s America was positively heaving with colourful characters with weird Twenties-type occupations. As you might have guessed, quite a few of these occupations had to do with booze. Rum-runners smuggled it across the state line, bootleggers sold it, and moonshiners were the people who actually manufactured the stuff. There were also holly rollers, preaching hellfire and damnation to anyone who would listen, quack doctors selling miracle cures for every known ailment (yeah, right!), and flashy salesmen hoping to make a quick buck.

We also ran into a smooth-talking land speculator. This conman was trying to dupe people into buying ‘building land’ in Florida. Lenny reckoned it was pure swamp.

One evening Lenny stopped the truck to give a lift to a man called Caleb Jones. He said he was heading west hoping to find work as a fruit picker. It was getting late so Grace invited him to share their supper. “That’s if you don’t mind bean and potato stew,” she said apologetically.

“Sounds like a feast to me,” he said.

They all sat by the camp fire, eating stew off tin plates and listening to the howling of a pack of nearby prairie wolves.

“I noticed your truck seems to be developing a problem with its exhaust,” he said shyly. “I’ll fix it for you, if you’ll let me.”

As Grace said later, Caleb was a guy you could pass in a crowd without noticing. He wasn’t tall or good-looking or exceptionally ugly. Yet he gave off a completely peaceful vibe, which is something you rarely find in humans.

I heard him talking to Grace when the others were asleep. “Your younger daughter seems troubled,” he said. “Was she always that way?”

Grace shook her head. “Just since her daddy died.”

He nodded as if he’d suspected something of the kind.

“I’ve been telling myself she’ll come out of it, Grace said. “But lately I’ve been thinking, what if Honesty just keeps going deeper and deeper into herself and never comes back out?”

I felt my skin prickle with sympathy because I’d been worrying the exact same thing. But I noticed that Caleb didn’t immediately try to make Grace feel better. He just sat there silently turning over what she’d said in his mind. For a while there was no sound except the crackling of the fire and the familiar night sounds of the prairie. Then he said quietly, “Some of the strongest people in this world are those who go down into the dark and come out the other side.’