Counting Stars by David Almond

run.
    Maria held Theresa tight.
    “What you after?” she asked.
    “Saw you in church,” I said to Theresa. I gagged and gaped. “Never seen anybody so beautiful.”
    “She’s Theresa,” said Maria. “My cousin. She’s from Winlaton.”
    “Come out with me,” I said.
    Mick struck a match behind me.
    “She’s come to be with me,” said Maria.
    “All of us,” I said. “You and all. Mick and all.”
    They huddled together and whispered and giggled; then Theresa came in close. Her corduroy on the back of my hand, her scent, the sweetness of her breath.
    “Tomorrow,” she whispered. “Same time. Here.”
    And they were gone, heels clacking through the shadows of the trees.
    The back of my hand was tingling. My spirit was soaring.
    “Thanks be,” Mick said.
    “Amen. Amen.”
    Dad was still alive then. He told me I was a member of the most privileged generation the world had ever seen. There’d be nothing I couldn’t do. Nothing must hold me back. We used to stand together in the garden and he talked about the war, how it had stifled his own generation. He said a time of great liberation had arrived. He understood the doubts that I was prey to: the problems of my faith, the complexity of my young body, the yearnings and confusions of my liberated mind. He said there were temptations and possibilities he had no experience of.
    Mam used to cry when I questioned the faith. But he used to whisper, “Find your own way. Go as far as you need.”
    He’d hold me close.
    “Just don’t leave us behind. You’ll need us waiting here with our love.”
    Then he’d ask about books, and we’d start to smile. He knew that the library had begun to overcome the church. The library was a prefabricated place on a green beside the square. I took out armfuls of Hemingway and Lawrence and now-forgotten names from the Recommended New Novels section. I pored in excited confusion through
The Waste Land
and
The Cantos
. I learned Dylan Thomas and Stevie Smith by heart. I plundered the shelves of the paranormal. I devoured surveys of the occult, read tantalizing accounts of spontaneous combustion, the aura, teleportation, poltergeists and human vanishings. I took home books on yoga and propped them on the bedroom floor as I attempted the Plow or the Lotus or teetered upside down on my head. I squatted between the beds, meditated, and attempted to reach some higher plane.
    I kept reading about the body’s subtlety: there was the thing of bones and the thing of spirit; in between was an astral body with elements of both these forms. This body could be inhabited by adepts, who traveled in the astral plane above the material world. I wanted to do this. I wanted to learn the necessary mantras, to submit to arcane disciplines. But the references were coy and confusing, gushing descriptions, no instruction.
    Then I discovered T. Lobsang Rampa, my exotic counterpart, my guide. He was a Tibetan monk forced into exile by the barbaric Chinese. His map of Lhasa in
The Third Eye
was an exalted version of Felling. I imagined walking past the Potala Palace as I walked past Felling Square, loitering in Norbu Linga as I loitered in Felling Park, gazing down toward the Kyi Chu River as I gazed toward the Tyne.
    Lobsang taught me that there were no secrets. Imagination was the only key. With thumping heart I read his words, so thrilling, so intimate:
    As you lie alone upon your bed, keep calm. Imagine that you are gently disengaging from your body. Imagine that you are forming a body the exact counterpart of your physical body, and that it is floating above the physical, weightlessly. You will experience a slight swaying, a minute rise and fall. There is nothing to be afraid of. As you keep calm you will find that gradually your now-freed spirit will drift until you float a few feet off. Then you can look down at yourself, at your physical body. You will see that your physical and your astral bodies are connected by a shining silver cord which