by Pauline Fisk
Aunty asked where the sailors came from, and they shrugged and laughed and said nowhere in particular. Both talked at once, as tight together as a pair of barnacles on a hull. Their tales were tall but, they insisted, had all really happened. Whales, coral reefs, pirates, treasure islands, even mermaids – they’d seen them all.
‘You mean you’ve really seen a mermaid?’ Mad Dog said.
‘Of course we have,’ the man sailor said. ‘And lots of other things as well. You wouldn’t believe what’s out there in the world.’
It was a long evening, but no one wanted it to end. For a few hours round the fire, they all knew what it was to be torn apart by hunger, beaten by the sun and bound by frost. They were all hung about with icicles, longing for a homeland and a journey’s end.
‘But there is no journey’s end,’ the woman sailor said. ‘That’s what we’ve discovered. All horizons lead to new ones, all discovery to even more.’
Mad Dog shivered. The woman sailor’s words had a magic about them that set him drifting off. When he returned to himself, he found Aunty clearing away cocoa mugs and talking about mundane things like going to bed. The evening was over. Mad Dog wanted more, but the sailors said there was always another day.
Everybody slept late next morning but, as soon as Mad Dog got up, he was on at the sailors to tell more stories. They promised they would later but, in the meantime, they had a boat to repair and Mad Dog and his family had a service to attend in the big town church.
This was a solemn occasion to commemorate the damage done by the storm and those who’d fought so valiantly to save lives. The entire town, it seemed, turned out and the church was full. The harbour master sat at the front, along with his team of volunteers, and the men and women from the rescue services and the mayor and mayoress. The vicar preached a sermon about surviving nature with the help of God, but Mad Dog wriggled all the way through it, his mind fixed on the sailors, wanting more of their stories, not this worthy sermon.
When they returned home, however, the sailors had gone. Mad Dog knew it the minute he stepped through the door. The smell of sea salt had gone too, and so had the metal trunk and all the things that had been drying out. All that remained were the porcelain cups, with a fifty-pound note tucked inside one of them, along with a letter written in fairy handwriting.
Aunty tried to read it, but the writing was so small that she even had a struggle wearing glasses.
‘You’ve been brilliant,’ she read at last. ‘Thanks for everything. Boat repaired – at least as good as we can get it for now. Tide right. The sea calls. Sorry we don’t have the time to say goodbye. We’ll never forget your kindness to us. Please keep the cups. A little something to remember us by. And the money’s just a gesture really, to cover costs. What you did for us can never be repaid.’
The sailors hadn’t even signed the note, or left a forwarding address. Aunty screwed it up. You could see how offended she was that they’d gone off like that. She even screwed up the money and went to chuck it in the bin.
But Uncle wouldn’t let her. ‘That’s life,’ he said. ‘They’ll have meant no harm. They just weren’t thinking. Besides, when could we afford to throw good money away?’
He flattened out the money and stuck it in one of the cups for when they needed a bit of spare cash. Aunty put them on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet, where she kept things she never used. In the days and weeks that followed, she never talked about the sailors again or the strange way they’d come bursting into their lives. You’d have thought she had forgotten them, and Uncle had as well.
But Mad Dog thought about them all the time, and wondered who they were.
Part II
Devil’s Bridge
7
The Aged Relative
Some people burned bright, it seemed, then simply disappeared. They came into your life and then went again, and there was nothing you could do but stand by and watch. Mad Dog’s parents, for example, and now the sailors.
Ever afterwards, there was something about those sailors that wouldn’t let Mad Dog go. He mightn’t know their names or anything else about them, but they’d come bursting into his life bringing stories of other places far away – of other worlds, and other ways of looking at the world. And even years after they’d gone, Mad Dog dreamt about their wide horizons and journeys without ending, and imagined himself a sailor just like them, travelling across seas that might be cruel but could never subdue him, meeting mermaids, discovering lost continents, chasing dolphins and cruising across silver seas. The rest of his life was dominated by mundane things like school and lessons and routine. But at least, as he grew up, he had other things to dream about.
He was growing bigger all the time, and so was Elvis, who’d turned into a tough but friendly little lad, coming home from playing with his friends with scraped knees and glorious tales of fights. Mad Dog was proud of him. Aunty wasn’t so impressed, but he reckoned he could see his brother’s Trojan blood coming out in him. Nothing more was said about adoption, not since the day they’d sworn on the Bible, but neither was there any mention of leaving the Gap.
No. 3 was their home, and Aunty and Uncle were their parents in all but name. The past was set aside as if it had never been. The ffon languished in the wardrobe, its secret message forgotten. Mad Dog was embarrassed about those old days when he’d talked to his walking cane as if it was a person. Only five-year-olds did things like that. And besides, he didn’t need secrets to feel like a person who mattered. He didn’t even need parents. Life was fine the way it was.
And it remained fine too, until one February morning, the beginning of half-term week, when Mad Dog came downstairs to find Aunty on the phone and everything about to change. In total ignorance of what was happening, he went out to play on the barge den, only to come back later and find Aunty and her sisters huddled in the kitchen. Their heads were knit together and their voices were raised as one in indignation – which meant there could be only one person they were talking about.
The Aged Relative.
Mad Dog didn’t know exactly who the Aged Relative was, and he didn’t care if he never found out. He’d only spoken to her once, and that had been enough, picking up the phone when no one was about, only for a cold voice to bark at him, ‘I don’t want you. God, what’s wrong with the world? Why are children allowed to answer phones? I want to talk to your aunt.’
Sometimes Aunty or one of her sisters would visit the Aged Relative, going with long faces and coming back with even longer ones. At times like Christmas there’d be discussions about having her to stay but, despite their best-laid plans, she’d either refuse to come or pull out at the last minute. Now some sort of crisis seemed to be taking place, because Luke’s mum was saying, ‘It’s always the same,’ and Hippie’s mum was saying, ‘When we need help, she’s never there for us,’ and Rhys’s mum was telling Aunty, wagging her finger as she did so, ‘You leave well alone. If she’s got into a mess, it’ll be of her own making. However much you do for her, it’ll never be enough. But she tries it on with you because she thinks you’re a soft touch.’
Unfortunately for Mad Dog, the advice wasn’t taken. Aunty flared up at the suggestion that she was a soft touch and said that her sisters weren’t being fair, either to her or the Aged Relative who – just this once – appeared to have a genuine grievance. Her sisters snorted and said, ‘Since when?’
Aunty didn’t answer, but when Uncle came in for lunch, he found her packing the car. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked, and didn’t look very pleased about it when Aunty told him.
‘You can’t take children to a place like that,’ he said.
‘What else am I to do?’ said Aunty. ‘Are you going to take time off work and look after them? I don’t think so. And my beloved sisters certainly aren’t going to.’
She was in a foul mood, and it didn’t get any better when they’d set off. All the way through Aberystwyth she banged the steering wheel and cursed as if no one else had a right on the road. Usually
she was such a careful driver, but today she kept beeping her horn and changing lanes without indicating.
They left the town behind and started down the coast road. The sun was shining and Mad Dog’s hopes began to rise. Perhaps the Aged Relative would turn out to live in a bungalow by the sea with a beach nearby where he and Elvis could go and play, which meant that, however horrible she was, they could always get out of her way.
A few miles down the road, however, Aunty took a sharp turn inland, leaving the sea behind and heading up into the hills. The road she’d chosen went up and down like a fairground switchback and Mad Dog started feeling carsick. He tried to focus his eyes on the way ahead, but dizzying glimpses of sheer drops and the valley floor beneath him didn’t help.
‘How much further?’ he kept on asking.
‘Not far now,’ Aunty would reply.
It felt far to Mad Dog – especially after Aunty took a wrong turning and had to retrace their journey for several miles. Finally, however, the car plunged down into woodland, and the outskirts of a village came into view. They passed an empty railway station with a sign announcing that it was closed until Easter; a general store; a campsite set in a sunless wood; a tourist shop that had been boarded up; a series of old bridges, each built over the other and set back amongst woodland; and a tumbling waterfall that appeared to be the village’s main tourist attraction but couldn’t be got down to without going through a turnstile and paying money.
The waterfall was at the lowest part of the village, set next to a rather grand-looking hotel. Once past it, the car crawled its way up a series of hairpin bends until Aunty pulled sharply left on to a gravel drive. Here a grey stone house loomed into view, its paintwork peeling, its gate hanging off its hinges, weeds growing up its path.
‘Well, here we are,’ Aunty said with a sigh.
She switched off the engine and got straight out of the car as if afraid of changing her mind if she hesitated. Mad Dog got out too, and immediately the sound of running water rushed to greet him from a cliff that stood behind the house. Everything was cast in its shadow. The house. The garden. Even the sign by the hanging gate.
THE DEVIL’S BRIDGE B & B it said, and, handwritten underneath it, in capital letters, underlined heavily, were the words:
NO VACANCIES
8
The Man with Red Tattoos
It didn’t take a man with red tattoos all over his chest to convince Mad Dog that the Devil’s Bridge B & B was not a place where he wanted to spend his half-term holiday. But the man didn’t help. Before they’d even got up the path, he’d materialised in the porch as if by magic and stood, hands on hips, shirt open, silver charms around his neck, glaring down at them, his hair as red as danger, his eyes as black as wrinkled prunes.
It was as if they’d no right to be there. Aunty waved for him to come and help them with the luggage, but he took no notice and they had to manage on their own.
‘We have a room booked,’ Aunty said when she reached the porch.
The man refused to get out of her way. She stood right in front of him, but he wouldn’t budge. ‘You must have got that wrong,’ he said. ‘We’ve been closed since before Christmas.’ He pointed down to the NO VACANCIES sign as if to say can’t you read?
‘But I booked a room only a couple of hours ago,’ Aunty insisted. ‘And the person I spoke to didn’t say anything about being closed.’
She pushed the man aside and entered the B & B, dragging Mad Dog and Elvis behind her. Mad Dog never forgot the smell of boiled cabbage as he passed the man. The hall in which he found himself was dark, with yellowing wallpaper. He shivered, wishing that Aunty had booked them into the hotel down the road. He couldn’t understand what they were doing here in this horrid B & B, and, for the first time in ages, he thought about his ffon and wished he had it with him to keep him safe.
By now Aunty had located the reception ‘desk’ – a small square hatch in the wall that looked as if it hadn’t been opened for years. Positioning herself in front of it, she pressed a bell that set off a piercing scream all over the house. With a sigh of annoyance, the tattoed man disappeared through a door behind them, then reappeared behind the hatch.
‘Look, you’re not down in the register,’ he said, opening out a dusty-looking ledger with nothing written in it.
‘I don’t care what I may or may not be down in,’ Aunty said. ‘If you don’t take me to my room, I’ll call the Manager.’
‘I am the Manager,’ the man said.
Aunty looked him up and down. ‘Oh yes?’ she said. ‘Then show me to my room or else I’ll call the owner instead.’
It was obvious she wasn’t going to back down. The Manager stared at her with all the friendliness of a cornered dog. He pushed the book at her and she signed her name, then he led them upstairs to a sunless room which was cold even by February’s standards, and dominated by the sound of running water.
At first Mad Dog thought there must be a leak somewhere, but then he realised that the sound came from the rock face immediately outside their window. He turned towards Aunty, who was busy examining cobwebs that hung in strings across the ceiling and dots of black mould on the wallpaper.
‘You can’t seriously expect us to stay in here?’ she said.
‘This is the only room that isn’t closed for redecoration,’ the Manager said, and turned and left them to it.
Mad Dog wished that he could leave as well. He wished that Aunty would tell the Manager where to stick his room. But all she did was take a few quick photos on her mobile phone – although what for Mad Dog couldn’t imagine – then start the process of making things more comfortable.
First she found an electric fire and switched it on, then she went down to the reception area and came back with hot-water bottles to air the beds, dusters, spray-can polish and even a vacuum cleaner. Then she got stuck in.
Mad Dog couldn’t understand why she was bothering. None of it made sense. Even he – with his limited knowledge of the world – understood that if you booked into a B & B you weren’t meant to do your own cleaning. But Aunty did it all, and afterwards she dug a kettle out of the back of the wardrobe and brewed them all a cup of tea.
Mad Dog didn’t like tea, but given how cold he was he drank it anyway. The three of them sat facing each other on the edges of their beds. Their coats hung on the back of the door. Their shoes lined up along the wall. Their clothes were unpacked into the wardrobe, and the room still mightn’t look remotely homely but Aunty had done her best.
‘So, when are we going to see the Aged Relative?’
Mad Dog said.
Aunty shrugged. ‘When I’m ready,’ she said – whatever that meant.
‘And when will that be?’ Mad Dog said.
This time Aunty didn’t even answer. Other things plainly were on her mind. After they’d finished their tea, she led them off on a tour round the rest of the house, opening doors and looking round them, poking into corners, tutting over what she found, taking more photographs and writing things down in a little notebook that she kept digging out of her handbag.
Mad Dog was worried about the Manager catching them out, but Aunty said she couldn’t care less. When they’d finished with the bedrooms – which might be closed for redecoration, but there was precious little to be seen of it – she took them downstairs to see the dining room.
This turned out to be a grubby pink-and-blue box of a room with chairs on tables, which looked as if it hadn’t been used for years. Aunty poked her way round it, looking in drawers and counting plates and silver cutlery, then led them through the kitchen, where she did the same.
Finally they even found their way into the office, which lay behind the reception hatch. Mad Dog expected the Manager to come leaping out and chase them away, but he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Having failed to keep them out, it seemed, he’d simply given up.
It was only on their way back to their room that they came across him. Aunty heard a piano being played somewhere and in
sisted on going to investigate. And there, in a dusty old conservatory at the back of the house, amid stacked-up chairs and trestle tables, an empty counter with a tea urn, and an old box-freezer for Lyons Maid ice cream, they found the Manager playing tunes from a stack of yellowing sheet music held together with Sellotape.
‘Some Enchanted Evening’ he played, smiling to himself as if at some private joke, singing along as if he didn’t know that anyone was watching.
Mad Dog shivered. He really didn’t like this Manager. There was something about him that went deeper than mere grumpiness. Something he couldn’t put his finger on but, if he’d been Aunty, he’d have turned tail and gone.
Aunty, however, had no intention of going anywhere. ‘I’m hungry,’ she announced. ‘We all are. We’ve been looking for you everywhere. Could you find us something to eat?’
The Manager closed the piano. When he turned his face towards them, the smile had gone, replaced by an expression of perfect blankness. He said that the Devil’s Bridge B & B didn’t ‘do’ food any more and the dining room was closed until further notice.
But Aunty wouldn’t have it. Mad Dog had never seen her so determined. She was a pretty strong-minded woman normally but, ever since coming here to Devil’s Bridge, her strong-mindedness had moved into a whole new league.
Now she said she wanted food, and had no doubt that, if he applied himself, the Manager could ‘do something about it’. The Manager didn’t like it, but Aunty wouldn’t back down and, in the end – with her threatening to take over his kitchen – he agreed to ‘rustle something up’.
When their meal arrived, however, Mad Dog rather wished the Manager hadn’t bothered. He forced down tinned tomato soup heated to lukewarm, boiled haddock that was cold in the middle, sliced white bread, a mound of soggy cabbage, and mashed bananas served with lumpy custard and tinned cream.
It wasn’t the worst meal Mad Dog had ever eaten – that honour went to Hippie’s mum with her lentils and mung beans – but it wasn’t far off. All the way through it, Mad Dog poked his food around his plate and waited for Aunty to complain. But she didn’t say a word and he wondered what was wrong with her.
