by Pauline Fisk
‘Of course you’ll want to think it over,’ Uncle said, recognising that a struggle was going on, but not understanding its true nature. ‘We wouldn’t want to rush you or anything like that.’
That night, Mad Dog ran away again. He did it properly this time, taking spare clothes, food and drink with him, and even the duvet off his bed. And he took his ffon as well. It was the first thing that he took, there in his hand without him even having to think about it, as if even the ffon knew that this wasn’t his home and the time had come to get away.
Mad Dog held it tight, feeling its secret message beneath his palm, wondering what it meant and if it could be trusted to lead him home. He set off down the Gap, hoping for the best. His determination to find his parents, or at least unravel the mystery of what had happened to them, was renewed. He was determined too, to put as much distance as possible between himself and Aunty and Uncle. They were child-thieves. That’s what they were. People who stole children from their parents, and Mad Dog had to get away from them even if he didn’t know where he was going.
He followed the Rheidol, feeling safe because it was his river – the one he watched every day from his bedroom window, knowing everything on it from the swans under the bridge to the darting kingfishers and great swooping herons that glided over its surface looking for fish. It led him around the town, walking between roads and railway lines, offices, a retail development park and a big out-of-town supermarket. Eventually it brought him to the far side of Aberystwyth, where there were still houses around and street lights and cars, but a long silent road stretched off, into the night.
Mad Dog felt as if he’d walked for hours by now, and yet he hadn’t even left Aberystwyth behind him yet. He shivered. Even with the duvet thrown over his shoulders, he couldn’t help but feel cold.
I’m getting soft, he thought, remembering the old days when he’d played out in all weathers. Once a little bit of cold night wouldn’t have bothered me. But then, that’s what comes of being Ryan Lewis and not Mad Dog Moonlight.
It was a long time since Mad Dog had thought about his old name. Perhaps he could be that old self again. Be wolfish, wild and fearless. Perhaps that old person lay inside of him still, waiting to come out.
Telling himself that trying was better than not trying and going better than staying, Mad Dog pressed on. What was it his mother had always said about trusting in the power of the open road? Finally the last few houses fell behind him and nothing lay ahead but one single dark road. Mad Dog started down it. Every time a car swept past, he flung himself into the ditch in case it turned out to be Aunty and Uncle out looking for him. Soon he was covered in mud and soaking wet. Worse still, by now he’d lost the Rheidol.
Mad Dog clutched his ffon, determined not to lose that too.
Eventually, the lights of a village appeared somewhere on the road ahead, and he hurried towards it. At one end of the village, he found a cluster of allotments behind a tall fence. Climbing over the fence, he broke into the first shed he came to. Here he flung himself down among forks, spades, wheelbarrows, flower pots and sacks of potatoes, grateful for a place of shelter and trying to ignore how cold he was.
When day broke, Mad Dog was still awake, freezing cold and as stiff as a board. He was awake when Aunty opened her eyes on the new day and found him gone, but asleep by the time Uncle went out checking under the pier. He was still asleep when Uncle came back without him and phoned the police, and still asleep when Aunty phoned school and his social worker to let them know what was happening.
He slept on through the morning, and only when an old man in a quilted jerkin wanted to get to his wheelbarrow did he finally awake.
‘Who are you?’ the old man said, staring down at the small boy lying on his shed floor.
‘I’m Mad Dog Moonlight,’ Mad Dog said.
‘And I’m Elvis Presley,’ the old man said.
‘No, that’s my brother,’ Mad Dog said.
The old man made Mad Dog a cup of tea on his camping stove, then tried again to get some sense out of him. Finally he gave up and, pretending to go for biscuits, phoned the police on his new fangled mobile. In no time at all Mad Dog found himself back at No. 3.
Here Aunty was beside herself with worry and Uncle as angry as a mountain in a thunderstorm. It wasn’t so much the running away that did it, or even the timing of the thing, coming as it did straight after the party and his and Aunty’s offer to give Mad Dog a proper home. It was the word child-thief that Mad Dog somehow managed to let slip. When he discovered what Mad Dog thought of him, Uncle’s eyes flashed bolts of fury and words like selfish, thoughtless and ungrateful started hurtling about like thunderclaps.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself! After all we’ve done for you! What we’ve been through, taking care of you! And all the good things we’ve tried to do for you! Well, if this is what you think of us, you can clear off somewhere else. We’ve had enough. Phone social services! Get your bloody social worker to sort you out! Or simply disappear – see if we care!’
He stomped off in a rage, slamming doors behind him. Aunty said he hadn’t meant it. Her eyes were red with crying. Mad Dog only had to look at her to realise what a terrible thing he’d done. He hung his head and felt ashamed. He was a wicked boy. Aunty and Uncle had every reason to be upset. Of course they never, ever, would have tried to steal him. How could he possibly have thought otherwise? Whatever they’d meant when they’d talked about adopting him, it hadn’t been that. People stole sweets and money and things like toys. They didn’t steal children.
Finally Mad Dog went up to Aunty and tried to say sorry by standing next to her, wrapping his fingers round the soft material of her skirt and tugging it. She looked down at him.
‘I don’t mean to be bad,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it like this. I want everything to be good, but it never is.’
Aunty smiled at that, and picked him up and hugged him. ‘Oh, Ryan,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do with you?’
She must have given it some thought, because later she came in with the Lewis family Bible tucked under her arm – an enormous leather thing with covers falling off it and lists of names inside that went back for generations.
‘Now then,’ she said, setting it down before them both on the kitchen table. ‘If you really mean it about wanting things to be good, this is what we’re going to do. You’re going to put your hand on this book – which is full of family history, and names and dates and people just like you and me, who probably wanted that as well – and you’ll swear on your word of honour never to run away again. Then I’ll swear never to talk to you about adoption again, not unless you invite me to, and that’ll be the last we mention on the subject. You’ll keep your word, so help you God, and so will I. And we’ll start afresh. The both of us. We’ll try to make a go of this. What do you think?’
6
The Storm
That same year, the worst storm in living memory hit Aberystwyth. It arrived one day without warning in a full-frontal attack. Nobody expected it, not even Mad Dog whose mother had once taught him how to read the colours of a storm before they hit. Without a single warning sign, it simply roared in.
Great white waves crashed between the stone pier and wooden jetty that marked the harbour’s entrance, and the waters beyond them started seething. Pontoons smashed against each other and boats were crushed between them, their guy ropes flying about like whips, their prows smacking into each other like duelling swords.
A massive wind got up and the River Rheidol found itself forced back, its waves standing up in ridges like a dog’s coat being stroked the wrong way. Usually the Rheidol was the king of the harbour, forcing everything out of its way as it flowed into the sea, but today the sea was king.
It came up over the grass where, until only half an hour ago, the boys had been playing football, lifted the barge den off the mud and threw it against the Gap wall. The boys tore home while they still could. The harbour in front of them was heaving like a was
hing machine full of sudsy water. Everywhere they looked, people were clinging to lamp posts and running for cover.
‘Upstairs,’ Aunty yelled when Mad Dog came hurrying up the path. ‘Stay up there with Eric. I don’t want either of you coming down. Unless I’m mistaken, we’re in for a flood.’
Mad Dog wanted to help get ready for the flood, but Aunty wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I want to know you’re safe,’ she said. ‘And I want to know your brother’s safe as well. Do what I ask for once, and don’t argue about it.’
She went out to the shed to collect the sandbags that were always kept down there for ‘just in case’. Then Uncle came in from the harbour office, and he and Aunty piled them up against the front and back doors. They checked that all the downstairs windows were not only shut but bolted, put chairs on tables, took up rugs and electrical appliances and came upstairs to, as Uncle put it grimly, ‘watch the fun’.
All along the Gap, Mad Dog could see the rest of the Lewis-Williams clan doing the same. They could have left their houses and headed inland, but they’d all decided to stay. They were harbour people, those Lewises and Williamses. Gap people. They’d seen storms before, and reckoned they could handle them.
But never a storm quite like this!
By now, a major battle was under way between the weather and the land – and the weather was winning hands down. It was only three o’clock in the afternoon, but the sky was black and the harbour had become as empty as midnight. Mad Dog watched the tide getting higher all the time, riding in on waves that looked as hard as iron. Right down the Gap, windows shook and roofs rattled. Even the brand new apartments on St David’s Quay were shaken, slates blowing off their roofs and crashing on to the ground, and wheelie bins flying around, along with kiddies’ bikes and skateboards.
Beyond the quay, the wind whipped its way round the bowl of the harbour in a low, furious hiss. Dinghies piled up against each other and even a couple of old iron fishing boats, weighing countless tons, strained their moorings and crashed against each other.
The storm raged for the rest of the day and on into the night. When Mad Dog went to bed it was still raging, and it was still going in the morning when he awoke. Uncle was out at the harbour office, where he’d spent the night helping coordinate rescue efforts, and, when he finally came in, he said that if any one was still out there at sea, they didn’t stand a chance.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he said. ‘It’s as if the storm’s a person. As if it’s got a life all of its own and there’s something in it, beyond the power of an ordinary storm. I don’t know how else to explain it. It feels different to any other storm.’
The storm felt different to Mad Dog too. He sat up in his bedroom with Elvis, wrapped in duvets because the electricity was off, praying for it to blow itself out. Uncle had gone again, called back to the harbour office already because a new emergency had arisen. Mad Dog watched him fight his way back along the Gap. He was a big man, but he could hardly stand.
Behind him, Mad Dog saw waves roll in off the Atlantic like Neptune’s cavalry charging the town’s defences. Rain fell from the sky like sheets of deadly arrows and great white plumes of spray spewed everywhere like sea blood. Mad Dog thought of what Uncle had said, and wondered if he was right. Did this storm really have a life all of its own?
Suddenly a small boat came limping into harbour through the gap between the wooden jetty and stone pier. Mad Dog stared at it in horrified fascination. The boat moved across his vision against a backdrop of seething waters and sheet rain. For a moment it disappeared, then against all hope Mad Dog saw it again – a ragged excuse of a boat, its mast at an angle, its sails in ribbons, keeling dangerously to one side.
Elvis stared as well. He pointed with his finger and said, ‘Look, boat.’ But it took Aunty, standing behind them both, to draw in her breath and say, ‘Oh, my God – there are people on that boat!’
The boat made it up the harbour, corkscrewing back and forth across the swollen waters of the Rheidol until it hovered directly opposite the entrance to the Gap. Here the wind picked it up and almost threw it into the Gap like an old toy being discarded. It crashed against the inner wall, right opposite No. 3. Elvis cried out and Mad Dog flinched and stepped back as if he thought the boat was going to end up flying through their window.
But, instead, it tipped over and started sinking. Mad Dog returned to the window just in time to see its mast disappearing behind the quay wall. Aunty saw it too, and leapt into action. She tore downstairs to phone for help and, when she couldn’t get through, yelled, ‘You stay here. Don’t you dare move! I’m going over to the harbour office to get a rescue team!’
She staggered down the path – and the storm took her. Mad Dog watched it happening from his window. The wind lifted her clean off her feet and, if it hadn’t been for Uncle coming the other way, she’d have ended up over the quay wall, along with the boat.
For a moment the two of them clung to each other. Mad Dog rattled on the window, calling them to come back. But, instead of turning for home, they started inching their way towards the quay. They were going to try and help the sailors, weren’t they? Rain lashed against them and blasts of winds buffeted them. Elvis started crying. Mad Dog turned and snapped at him to shut up.
When he turned back, he couldn’t see Aunty and Uncle any more. Long minutes passed, during which the rain got heavier and Elvis failed to shut up. Once Mad Dog caught a glimpse of what looked like Aunty lying flat on her belly, hanging over the edge of the wall. Another time he thought he saw Uncle with a massive coil of rope and something attached to the end of it. But then rain and clouds came down like pantomime curtains at the end of a show, and Mad Dog saw nothing until the rescue truck turned up, its yellow lights flashing on and off.
Then other bodies started moving about too, and Mad Dog caught another glimpse of Aunty, and then he saw Uncle and, between them both, he caught sight of a couple of bedraggled bodies wrapped up like turkeys in silver foil. The rescue team gathered round them. To begin with it looked as though they were going to be bundled into the truck and driven off. But then the truck raced off without them as if it had had another call, and Uncle, Aunty and the people they had rescued headed up the path to No. 3.
Mad Dog ran downstairs, flung open the front door and helped them in. Aunty said that the wind almost blew him away but all he remembered afterwards was the hall full of people all hugging each other with relief.
The boat people were exhausted, and shaking so much that Mad Dog wondered how they’d ever stop. They might look like hardened seafarers with their weather-beaten faces, but the storm had really done for them. Aunty went rushing about for blankets, towels and dry clothes. She made up spare beds as if a couple of new foster children had arrived in need of mothering. She poured tea down the sailors, forced them to eat against their will, then led them up to bed, where they fell asleep immediately.
Next morning, when they all awoke, the storm had gone. Mad Dog pulled back his curtains to find the sun shining down upon a harbour full of broken boats. The roof had come off the end of the harbour office. Windows were broken in the apartments on St David’s Quay. Benches were upended, bins thrown about like litter – even a couple of cars had been turned upside down.
But the strangest thing of all was the eerie stillness. Apart from the Rheidol, still swollen to capacity as it rushed past the end of the Gap, nothing moved out there in the harbour. Not a person, car or even seagull, and definitely not a breath of wind. It was as if the harbour was holding its breath, not quite sure if the storm had really gone.
But it had gone. By the time that breakfast was over, the sound of hammering could be heard all over Aberystwyth. The sailors went to see what had become of their boat. The tide was out and they found it lying on its side in the mud. Uncle reckoned that it had had it, but they climbed on board anyway, to see what could be salvaged. The sea had got into every bit of it, but the sailors didn’t seem disheartened. They’d be all right, they sa
id. They’d recovered from worse.
They brought a massive metal trunk into the house and emptied out its contents. With it came a smell of sea salt that filled every room. Mad Dog watched as out came everything from cooking pans and sewing kits to balls of string, maps, shells, peacock feathers and an amazing quilt, embroidered with fairy stitches. Carved animals emerged, and wooden boxes inlaid with mother-of-pearl, tins of everything from dried beetles to green tea, leather pouches, silk scarves and a pure white tea-set made of porcelain so fine that Mad Dog could see through it when the woman sailor held it up.
Most of the saucers had been smashed but, for some reason, the cups were fine. In fact, most things in the trunk only needed washing to be put right. The sailors laid them out to dry, then returned to their boat where they spent the rest of the day seeing what could be salvaged. Late in the afternoon, exhausted by their efforts, they went back to bed. But, by suppertime, they were awake again and ready to tell the story of how the storm had hit them and how they’d survived.
After supper, Uncle built up the fire in the sitting room, and everybody crowded round. Mad Dog sat opposite the sailors and watched them intently. He was fascinated by them. Fascinated by the lines on their faces and their tough, calloused hands, which seemed to tell a story of their own.
The woman sailor was as tiny as a sunburnt elf and the man sailor looked like a proper swarthy seaman with his mop of hair tied back in a pigtail. His eyes were blue, but there was nothing soft about them. Like the woman’s, they were flinty and determined and told of a hard life.
Aunty brought in mugs of hot chocolate all round. The sailors knocked theirs back in one go. They had a light way of inhabiting the room, sitting on the edge of their chairs as if ready to set off at a moment’s notice. It was obvious that they weren’t weekend sailors, and Mad Dog hung on to their every word. Perhaps the storm had gone, but something else had blown his way, something just as wild and strange.
