Undercover Angel

by Dyan Sheldon

But this position did leave a few unanswered questions.

  Like why I didn’t plummet to the ground. And how she got into my room. And, even more puzzling, how my mother and the Bambers got on my computer.

  The human ability to reason is an incredible thing. By the time my father called me down to supper I had logical explanations for all of my questions. Every one.

  The first explanation was that I didn’t crash into the garden because it was a windy night and the baggy shirt I was wearing – my mother always bought everything too large for me – acted like a parachute.

  The second, third and fourth answers were all the same: Kuba was never in my room at all. She didn’t talk to me, she didn’t give me her opinion on hamburgers, she didn’t show me the Bambers and my mother on my monitor. It was a hallucination, like when you’re dying of thirst in the desert and you’re sure you see a blue pool of water just metres away. The shock from the fall made me think that Kuba did all that stuff. But she didn’t. I’d imagined the whole thing. What a relief.

  Just as I’d expected, my mother didn’t look as though she’d been sobbing her heart out less than an hour ago. She was her usual self, sniffing the salad for signs of pesticides and slopping cashew casserole on to everyone’s plate. There were still leaves in her hair, and she was still banging on about Mr Bamber and how she was going to stop him from building his houses, even though the other Greeners had given up.

  The rest of my family was sympathetic.

  “Of course you will, Grace,” Grandma and Grandpa kept saying. “Of course you will.”

  Uncle Cal and Aunt Lucille kept saying, “Of course you will, Grace,” too.

  My father eats with one hand and doodles designs for fountains on his napkin with the other, but even he kept nodding and saying, “Of course you will, Grace.”

  The only ones who didn’t say anything were baby Gertie and me. Baby Gertie couldn’t actually talk yet.

  And then my mother said, “So when can you help me get more signatures? Tonight? Tomorrow?”

  Grandpa shook his head sadly, his eyes on his plate. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to count your mother and me out of this,” he said. “We’ve got the competitions coming up. We can’t spare any time.” My grandparents have their own dance school over the garage.

  My mother bristled. “Not even one afternoon?”

  My grandmother shrugged. “There’s so much to do, dear…”

  My mother turned on Uncle Cal and Aunt Lucille. “What about you two?”

  Uncle Cal glanced at Aunt Lucille. Aunt Lucille sighed.

  “I’m afraid it’s impossible this week, Grace,” Aunt Lucille murmured. “We have to get that mural done. We’re already over schedule.” My Uncle Cal and Aunt Lucille are artists, only they don’t paint on canvas, they paint on walls. “Next week we’d be happy to help.”

  “But next week’s too late,” shrieked my mother. “You know that. I have to have ten thousand signatures by Thursday. That’s the day the Council meets.”

  “You know I’d love to help you, dear,” said my father, “but I really have to finish this fountain I’ve been working on. It feels urgent.”

  Only in my family could a fountain feel anything.

  My mother’s fork clattered on to the table. “Fuller Blue! What are you talking about ‘urgent’? You don’t think the state of the environment is urgent, too?”

  You thought Elmo was about as bad as it could get, didn’t you? Fuller is my father’s name. Grandpa’s name is Monrose. I come from a long line of bad names, handed down from generation to generation like a gene for big ears. It’s our family tradition.

  “But it’s about to come together,” moaned my father. “The whole design. It’s revolutionary. If I stop now it may take me months to get back to where I am now.”

  My mother leaned back in her chair and glared at the rest of us.

  “What about you, Gertie?” she asked acidly. “Would you like to help me collect signatures?”

  Gertie – who did little more than cry, sleep, wet her nappies, cry and throw up – was screaming and waving a fistful of mashed potatoes in the air.

  “I’ll help.”

  I only realized it was me who’d spoken when everyone else turned to look at me.

  “You?” My mother looked as shocked as I’d felt when I thought I saw Kuba sitting at my computer. “You told me collecting signatures was beneath you.”

  I couldn’t seem to keep my mouth shut.

  “No, I didn’t. I said it was embarrassing.” My mouth smiled. “But I’ve got over that.”

  She frowned. She couldn’t have looked more worried if I’d been a sparrow-hawk with a broken foot. “Maybe we’d better take you to casualty,” said my mother. “You must have fallen on your head.”

  MY FIRST DAY AS AN

  ENVIRONMENTAL

  ACTIVIST

  When I woke up the next morning and saw the rain pouring down, I wondered if maybe I had fallen on my head.

  I mean, what normal child volunteers to spend his Sunday squelching through a storm, begging people to sign a petition when he could be dry and warm at home? Even a child who was in danger of being roped into a tango lesson by someone who didn’t have a partner wouldn’t be that stupid. What was I thinking of, offering to help my mother with her petitions on a Sunday? Especially since I did think it was embarrassing. I wasn’t that happy to be seen with my mother at the best of times, but when she was in Greener mode was the worst.

  I got out of bed slowly, trying to remember just what it was that had made me shout out “I’ll help” like that. It was as if someone had taken over my voice. I put on my warmest socks and two shirts.

  It took a long time to get to the town centre, because my mother doesn’t drive an ordinary car. Of course. Polluting the atmosphere with toxic fumes is against her principles. She has a bike with a trailer at the back that she uses for work and for shopping and stuff like that. But when she has to haul something big, like a couple of trees or a ton of manure, she uses the milk float. It doesn’t say Dansworth’s Dairy on the front like it used to – she painted it green with Grace Blue, Gardener in yellow – but it’s still a milk float. She decided to take the milk float because of the weather. For some reason she seemed to think the milk float would provide more protection from the rain than a bi­cycle. She was wrong. Not only could we have got there faster if we’d biked, but we’d have been a lot drier when we arrived, too.

  All the way, my mother banged on about how important this was, and how she knew that we’d get enough signatures if we really tried, and how happy she was that I was finally taking an interest in the environment.

  I said “Yeah” and “Um” and stuff like that, and huddled in my raincoat. I could only pray that none of the kids from school who pushed me around saw me. I’d never live it down if they found out my mother drove a milk float.

  My mother stood on one end of the street, in front of McDonald’s, and I stood at the other, in front of Gap. My mother is against plastic bags, but she can bend her principles when it’s really necessary, so we each had a clipboard with a sheaf of papers in a carrier bag so they wouldn’t get wet.

  There weren’t many people out. Most people were at home doing what my mother calls the “dead animal ritual”, which means having Sunday lunch. After lunch, they’d curl up on the sofa and watch TV. There was usually a good film on Sunday afternoon. My canvas trainers leaked (no leather allowed in our house), and water trickled down the back of my neck. I wanted to be at home watching a film, too.

  In the first two hours I got three signatures. It was really discouraging. I couldn’t understand how my mother could put herself through this day after day, year after year. Maybe Mr Bamber was right, and my mother really was mad.

  I’d thought that all I’d have to do was say “Excuse me, but would you like to sign this petition?” very politely and that would be it. But it wasn’t. Everybody had an excuse. If they were going into a shop, they told me they’d
sign on the way out. If they were coming out, they told me they had to get to their car before the traffic warden did. A lot of people raced right past me without even looking at me, never mind saying anything. It was easy enough for them to do. They’d see me ahead of them, lower their umbrellas and charge by.

  The first two signatures I got were from old ladies who felt sorry for me. One of them even offered to give me money so I could get a nice cup of tea and some fries in McDonald’s. I would have loved a nice cup of tea right then, I can tell you. But my mother doesn’t like McDonald’s either. I’d missed every birthday party I was ever invited to because they were all held at McDonald’s and my mother wouldn’t let me go. Which explains why I had no friends. My mother was planted right in front of the golden arches, so there was no way I could sneak in for a quick snack without her seeing me. A single chip could destroy all the pride she had in me for finally caring about the environment.

  The third signature I got was from a woman from Australia.

  I finished explaining about the valuable, ancient woods and the fields full of wildflowers, and the beautiful, historically interesting old cemetery, and the lovely lake where children used to boat and swim, and she said, “I’m sorry, honey, I’m just visiting.”

  This made sense to me. I mean, they weren’t her trees, were they? I was about to say I under­stood when a voice behind me cut me off.

  “Just visiting the planet?” asked the voice.

  Both the woman from Australia and I looked round.

  I admit it. I was a little surprised to see Kuba standing there in her wrinkled jacket and her old hat, totally dry and smiling her everything’s wonderful smile. In order to be behind me like that, she had to have come out of Gap. But she couldn’t have come out of Gap, because I’d been standing there for nearly two hours and she hadn’t gone in. But this time I knew she wasn’t a hallucination caused by my fall from the house because the woman from Australia said, “What?”

  I gave Kuba a nudge and muttered, “Go away.”

  Kuba ignored me completely.

  “Are you just visiting the planet?” she asked sweetly. “Because if you are, then I can see that you wouldn’t be very interested in what happens around here.”

  “What are you doing?” I hissed. And then, forgetting that she hadn’t really been in my room the night before, I added, “I thought you weren’t meant to interfere.”

  “Within reason,” Kuba hissed back. Her smile was like sunshine, and shining on the woman from Australia. “What galaxy is it you come from?” she asked politely.

  “Australia.” The woman from Australia closed her umbrella. It had suddenly stopped raining.

  Down the street I could see my mother looking in my direction. I waved.

  “Now that’s different,” Kuba was saying. “Australia is on this planet. Which means that anything that affects us here eventually affects you there.”

  Drawn by the unexpected appearance of the sun, more people appeared on the street.

  Kuba said to me, “Isn’t it true that everything on our planet is interconnected, Elmo?”

  A couple of people had stopped and were standing beside the woman from Australia. All of them looked at me.

  I tried hard to ignore my mother and her causes. But my twelve years of living with Grace Blue, champion of the endangered species of this world, were obviously stronger than my desire not to hear a word she said. More or less on automatic, I started to explain all the stuff I knew because my mother never stopped talking about it. I explained about trees and the atmosphere, and pollution and the atmosphere, and all about the hole in the ozone layer and the sinking ionosphere, and how everybody’s weather was changing and whole species were dying – including humans – and how more would die if we didn’t do something about it. Ironically enough, scientific fact actually backed my mother’s beliefs.

  By the end of my speech, several people were queuing up to sign my petition. I’d just hand­ed the clipboard over to the woman from Australia when I spotted Mr Bamber at the back of the crowd. I glanced over my shoulder, but Kuba was gone.

  Mr Bamber was staring at me so hard that I thought he was going to say something to me. You know, something like “Hello” or “What are you doing here, Elmo?” But he didn’t.

  In his usual clear, pleasant and reasonable voice Mr Bamber said, “What sort of world do we live in when a group of adults will stand around listening to a child give a physics lecture?” He said it loudly.

  Even more loudly, the woman from Australia said, “‘And a little child shall lead them…’”

  I knew that was a quote from the Bible because of my grandmother. My grandmother loves the Old Testament.

  Mr Bamber laughed. “Where’s this little child going to lead you?” he chuckled. “To the sweet shop?”

  Not this little child. Not with my mother, he wouldn’t.

  WEIRDER AND

  WEIRDER

  My mother was over the moon.

  “Can you believe it?” she shrieked above the whirr of the milk float as we drove home. “I can’t believe it! A thousand signatures. A thousand signatures in one afternoon! If you don’t call that a miracle, what do you call it?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that. Well, I had an answer, but it wasn’t the one I wanted.

  “It’s really good,” I said.

  My mother was staring through the windscreen, grinning at the road ahead.

  “It’s a miracle,” she repeated. “I really feel that God is on our side on this one.” She turned her grin on me. “Don’t you, Elmo?”

  This was another point I didn’t feel I could argue. The fact that everybody else saw Kuba this time sort of destroyed my theory that she was just a hallucination. I was reading Sherlock Holmes at the time. Holmes says that once you eliminate the impossible, whatever’s left, no matter how improbable, is the truth. Which meant that Kuba probably was an angel.

  “I don’t know where they all came from.” My mother sighed. “All those people…”

  I knew exactly where they’d come from. I’d seen my mother stand in front of McDonald’s for two whole days and be happy if she got a hundred signatures. To get a thousand signatures on a Sunday afternoon in Campton High Street was right up there with Jesus feeding hundreds of people with a couple of fish and loaves of bread if you asked me. The only explanation was that Kuba had brought them.

  “I reckon it was the sunshine,” I muttered. It was something to say. Something better than, “Well, you do realize Kuba Bamber’s an angel, don’t you?”

  “Um…” said my mother. “The sunshine… That was another miracle, wasn’t it?”

  The thing was, I didn’t see what Kuba being an angel really had to do with me. It was my mother she was meant to be helping, so why couldn’t she leave me alone?

  This was one of the things I wanted to think about on the long ride home. Mr Bamber was the other. He’d been my role model ever since the Bambers moved in across the road, only now I was beginning to wonder if I was wrong about him. He’d been his usual smiling self today, but he wasn’t very nice. “Smile, and smile, and be a villain”, as my grandmother liked to say.

  My mother, however, wouldn’t let me think about anything. She couldn’t stop talking.

  “If we can do this every day between now and Thursday, Mr Bamber won’t be playing golf in Campton in this lifetime,” said my mother. She gave me a big smile. “And you, Elmo! You were brilliant. You’re a natural activist. The way you drew the crowds…”

  The last thing I needed was for my mother to think I had a talent for getting people to sign petitions. She’d have me standing on street corners for the rest of my life.

  “It wasn’t just me,” I said modestly.

  My mother nodded. “Oh, you mean that girl.”

  I didn’t mean that girl at all. I’d been hoping she hadn’t noticed Kuba. What I meant was that I thought public opinion was on the Greeners’ side for a change.

  I stared back at her bla
nkly. “Girl?”

  My mother laughed. “Yes, the girl in the hat. The one who was standing with you. Who is she?”

  I was going to deny all knowledge. She wasn’t standing with me, I was going to say. She was just standing near me. But then it occurred to me that telling my mother who Kuba was (within reason) was probably the fastest and easiest way of making Kuba disappear that I was going to find. My mother didn’t want me anywhere near the Bambers. She didn’t want me fraternizing with the enemy. She would put her foot down, and she’d make sure that Kuba Bamber never bothered me again.

  “She’s the new kid,” I told her. “You know, the one the Bambers adopted.”

  “Ah… So that explains what Old Building Breath was doing there. I thought he was just lurking.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I thought they’d adopted a boy,” said my mother. “Isn’t that what it said in the paper?”

  I explained about the clerical error. “You know, someone typed male when they were meant to type female.”

  “Bureaucracies,” muttered my mother. Her face clouded over for a second. She likes bureaucracies about as much as she likes McDonald’s. But she cheered up again straight away. “So, how did you happen to meet her?”

  I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty honest person, but Grace Blue never fails to make me feel shifty.

  “Meet who?”

  I could hardly hear her sigh because it sounded a lot like the noise of the milk float.

  “Who are we talking about, Elmo? David Attenborough? The Bambers’ new daughter, of course.”

  I swallowed a small stone that had suddenly materialized in my throat.

  “She just came up to me.” I hoped my mother could hear the surprise and shock in my voice. “I know I’m not meant to talk to her, Mum, but I couldn’t stop her. Really.”

  Demonstrating the lack of logic for which she is famous, my mother said, “But why should you want to stop her? Why shouldn’t you talk to her?”

  I couldn’t believe that she was asking me that question. Not after the way she carried on last spring. Last spring Grace Blue not only stormed through the house calling Mr Bamber every name she could think of, but she threatened to board up the front window so she wouldn’t have to see the Bambers even accidentally. My father only stopped her because it would have destroyed our view of the dragon fountain as well.