by Pauline Fisk
After supper, Mad Dog’s mother folded up the table and his dad pulled down their beds. The little fold-down cot, which had once been Elvis’s, now belonged to this new baby, but Mad Dog’s bed was still his own. He expected it to be too small for him but, when he climbed in, he found that it fitted perfectly.
His mother tucked him in as if he was still a five-year-old, then, taking a coat off the back of the door, she went and sat on the step to give the baby its final feed. Mad Dog’s dad went and sat with her, and Mad Dog was left alone.
He lay looking around the van, marvelling that everything – every last, single thing – was exactly the same. You’d have thought there’d been some changes, but even the same bucket stood in for a sink. The kitchen cupboards were just the same, showing off his dad’s carpentry skills. And the exact same bits of silver jewellery were scattered about everywhere, made by Mad Dog’s mother.
Mad Dog fell asleep at last, comforted by the sameness of it all. But when he awoke later he found that his parents still hadn’t come to bed, but that the step was empty.
Mad Dog called, but no one replied. He went and stood on the step, but couldn’t see a soul outside and a sense of panic washed over him. Surely he couldn’t have found his parents again, only to lose them! What sort of carelessness was that?
Mad Dog called again. Still no one replied, but this time, somewhere off in the darkness, he caught a sound of singing. A sense of relief washed over him. Singing, he told himself. Only singing – and how many times had his dad gone off in the night to sing to himself beneath the stars? There was nothing to worry about here. All that had happened was that his mother had gone with him, taking the baby.
But the sense of having nearly lost something was hard to shake off. Mad Dog started following the singing, anxious to rejoin his family. The stony track outside the van led him up a small hillock from which he could see a campfire down the other side. He couldn’t see his parents, but he could hear his father singing and his mother laughing.
Mad Dog started down the track, trying not to feel resentful because his parents had taken the baby but left him behind. By the time he got anywhere near the campfire, which had been built against the side of a broken-down old wall, the baby was crying but neither parent was doing anything about it. They were too busy having a good time, sharing from a bottle that Mad Dog could see them passing back and forth between each other.
It wasn’t like Mad Dog’s parents to ignore a crying baby, and he found himself surprised. His mother in particular had always been so caring around Elvis. She’d had her grouchy moments – especially when she was tired – but she’d always been there for him. Always treated him with tenderness. Always been so quick to sense her baby’s needs.
So what was going on here? Why was Mad Dog’s mother ignoring this new baby? And why was she acting so differently to her normal self? As Mad Dog watched, she staggered to her feet, shaking with laughter as if something was hysterically funny. Mad Dog couldn’t see anything to laugh about, but she swayed from side to side, unable to stand straight.
What was the matter with her? Mad Dog’s mother had never been the sort of person to laugh at nothing, and she’d had no time for people who did. Even if a thing was funny, it was hard to get her laughing, though sometimes Mad Dog’s father had succeeded, cracking a joke that was so terrible that she’d throw back her head and it would be as if all the light of the world was pouring out of her.
But she wasn’t laughing like that now. It wasn’t light coming out of her. It was something else. Mad Dog reached the wall, which he now realised was the remains of a ruined cottage, and peered round the edge of it. Something was wrong with his mother – wrong with both his parents. A steady stream of bottles was passing between them, getting drained and being thrown away, glass smashing everywhere. He could never remember his parents acting like that before. Never remember them throwing rubbish around, never remember them being even tipsy. But now his mother’s head was lolling this way and that, and her long hair was flying, and his dad was crouching at her side, half-dancing, half-stamping like an enraged beast.
Why were they behaving like that? Before tonight, his mother had never been anything less than graceful, but now she shook like a tree in a storm, all flailing branches and flying limbs. She had something in her hand and was trying to do some sort of little drum majorette’s routine with it, throwing it up into the air in a twist of silver and laughing hysterically when she failed to catch it. One time it fell in the fire and her skirt almost caught alight when she scrambled to retrieve it.
Mad Dog cried out, but his mother didn’t hear him and neither did his dad. He’d snatched the thing out of the fire and was teasing Mad Dog’s mother with it, whirling it around and holding her out of reach. She kept leaping up and trying to get it, but he broke away from her and started staggering down the track with her following him, shouting give that here.
Mad Dog watched them and didn’t know which he should do – take the baby and return to the van where he could pretend he’d never seen any of this happen, or go after his parents and try to get them to behave like their old selves. In the end, he chose the latter course.
Promising the baby that he’d be back, he stumbled downhill following the track. Here, right in the bottom of the valley, he found a river flowing through the darkness and his dad ankle-deep in it, bottles in each hand. His mother was in it too, trying again with her drum majorette routine. She’d regained whatever it was she’d been fighting for, and was tossing it up in the air and catching it while his father tried to get it off her. The two of them were laughing, wading out deeper, swigging from the bottles and throwing them about.
Mad Dog followed them to the water’s edge, knowing that he had to do something before his parents got themselves into serious trouble. His mother was up to her waist by now, shivering and shrieking. Mad Dog yelled at her to come back, but she didn’t hear and neither did his dad, too busy splashing her and horsing around.
Mad Dog yelled again, only this time louder. ‘Mother! Dadda! Stop it! Stop it! STOP IT!!’
Mad Dog started wading out as well, but his parents didn’t notice him. They were right out in the middle of the river now, holding each other tight and swirling round and round. Mad Dog’s mother’s hair flew round her like a cloud of darkness. It flew round them both. Then she threw up what Mad Dog now saw was a stick – and lost her footing in the process, and started keeling over.
After that, everything happened at extraordinary speed. Mad Dog’s dad grabbed his mother, but then lost his footing too, and the two of them went down like a pair of pins in a bowling alley. They were there one second and gone the next, leaving nothing but a walking cane, which came falling out of the sky for Mad Dog to catch.
He was reaching out for his parents, but his ffon fell into his hands instead! Not that he realised what it was. He was far too busy trying to find his parents. By now he was out in the middle of the river as well, but he couldn’t see them anywhere. He was up to his chest and the river’s undercurrent was dragging at his feet, trying to tip him over.
Mad Dog stumbled in a panic, looking for a better footing. For a moment he nearly tumbled headlong like his parents had done. But then, thanks to the ffon, he managed to regain his balance. He felt it take his weight, felt the familiar silver topknot beneath his fist. Looked down and there it was, steadying him and saving his life.
But any questions about how it had got there had to be put aside for later. For even as Mad Dog struggled out of the water, a figure caught his attention. He was standing on a stony bank, his arms full of bottles, watching everything that was going on. At first Mad Dog thought he was his dad, who had struggled ashore. But his dad was dark, whereas this figure had goldish-coloured hair and was the taller of the two. And he wasn’t wet as if he’d just come out of a river, and his face belonged to a stranger. It might be nighttime, and the man might be wrapped about in shadows, but Mad Dog knew he wasn’t his dad.
The impor
tant thing, though, was that help was at hand. ‘Here, quickly! Help!’ Mad Dog cried, wading towards the figure.
But, instead of helping, the stranger burst out laughing. Mad Dog reeled back as if he’d been slapped. The man threw back his head. His eyes danced like twin fires with malevolent intent – and there was something about those eyes. Something about that laugh. Something strangely familiar.
Before Mad Dog could figure out what, however, a din broke out around him that sounded like the howl of dogs but grew until Mad Dog felt as if an entire mountain was raining down on him. Behind him, he heard the river crying as if it wanted no part in what was going on. But already it was too late. Darkness fell, and the sky fell with it, and Mad Dog was overwhelmed. The river rose as if it had no choice and Mad Dog’s last thought, as his feet were swept out from under him, was that everything had been for this.
The words it’s time had been for this.
Everything he’d done in his whole life had been for this.
This moment now.
Everything had brought him here.
When Mad Dog came to, he found that he’d been washed up by the river and deposited face-down on a grassy bank. He lay there, shivering but alive, knowing that the Rheidol had rescued him. He could have drowned, but it hadn’t let him. The one river that ran through his life – it had saved him from death.
But what about his parents? Where was their rescue? Mad Dog struggled to his feet, but he knew he wouldn’t see them, because everything felt different now. The world had changed. It felt a smaller place.
Once the night had rung with songs and laughter, but now it was filled with the most terrible deep silence. And it was the silence that had lain inside Mad Dog for all these years. Every time when Aunty had asked him where he went, then this was it. This night from his childhood, which he’d just lived through again!
Mad Dog searched the river until morning, and never found his parents. Finally the sun appeared over Plynlimon Fawr and an all-too-familiar-looking crossroads between valleys emerged into the light. Mad Dog recognised it immediately, and he recognised the ruined cottage beside the track and understood why he’d been so frightened standing on that hillock, scared to take another step.
On the way back to the van, Mad Dog passed the remains of the campfire that his parents had sat around on the last night of their lives. The whole thing felt like years ago now, not something that had happened only last night. The van too, when he climbed over the hillock and found it on the other side, looked as if it had been abandoned for years. Its roof had half caved in, its windows hung off their frames, its curtains were in tatters and most of its fittings had weathered to the point of rotting.
Looking down upon his little narrow bed, its mattress shredded and its springs sticking out, Mad Dog understood that the past was back where it was meant to be – in the past – and the time had come to move on.
‘It’s what I never did,’ he said out loud. ‘Somewhere deep inside myself, I was always here. When I lost my parents, my body walked away but my Mad Dog self remained. That’s why I could never explain where I came from, when people asked. Because the real me was still here, and the boy that they were talking to was just a shell.’
Mad Dog left the van as he had left it once before, years ago when he’d lost his parents and hadn’t known what else to do. Somewhere on the other side of Plynlimon, he told himself, lay a world where the worst that could happen was a house going up for sale without anybody asking. In that world, mountains didn’t fall like shadows, parents didn’t dance themselves to death and mysterious strangers didn’t stand in the darkness, refusing to help and laughing at their predicament.
Mad Dog walked all day. Sometimes he stopped and ate blackberries, cramming his mouth full of them. Sometimes he drank from mountain springs. Occasionally he stopped to rest, though never for long, in case exhaustion got him and he fell into the sort of sleep from which he wouldn’t wake. People went up Plynlimon, after all, and never came back, and Mad Dog didn’t want to be one of them.
Finally, in the late afternoon, he found what he was looking for – or, to be more precise, she found him. Lost in woodland, contemplating yet another night out in the open, Mad Dog heard a sound in the undergrowth somewhere up ahead. For a moment he thought it was a fox or snake or otter. But then a figure appeared between the trees, and the next thing he knew, it was running towards him.
It was Aunty. Aunty, with her arms outstretched and Uncle behind her, crying out with relief. Mad Dog ran towards them and they scooped him up. This time there was no scolding for running away. Tears poured down Mad Dog’s cheeks. They poured down Aunty’s too, and she hugged him hard. Then Uncle hugged him and said something about Elvis.
Exhausted and confused, Mad Dog started panicking. ‘The baby!’ he cried out. ‘The baby…! Where’s the baby? I forgot the baby. I promised I’d go back for it, and I never did …’
He didn’t stop until Elvis appeared. His baby brother Elvis, a schoolboy now and all grown up. And if Mad Dog had any doubts that the past was back where it was meant to be, he only had to stand there while his brother flung his arms around his neck.
28
Mad Dog, Mad Dog, Mad Dog
Back in the vardo, his head on his pillow and his eyes refusing to stay open, Mad Dog knew that he’d come home. These people were his family now. As much as any of those names in Aunty’s big family Bible, he was one of them. Through the thin bedroom wall, he could hear Aunty and Uncle talking about what had happened, trying to reassure each other that some sort of watershed had been crossed and nothing like this would ever happen again. Poor old them, Mad Dog thought. What he’d put them through. Poor old Aunty and Uncle and Elvis, not to say anything of his friends. Hippie … Luke … Rhys …
Mad Dog fell asleep. When he awoke, the rest of the day had passed and it was getting dark. He opened his eyes. Uncle was leaning over him and slowly he realised that he was shaking him awake.
‘Ryan, Ryan,’ he was saying. ‘Get dressed. Come on. You’ve got visitors.’
Mad Dog pulled on his clothes and went out to the living room – only to find the sailors, Abren and Phaze II, being fussed over by Aunty. The sailors! Mad Dog stood in the doorway. Aunty was going on about coincidences but Mad Dog knew that, where the sailors were concerned, nothing ever happened by accident.
When she saw him, Abren rose to her feet. ‘Good to see you,’ she said, a smile on her face. ‘We’ve brought you something. You’ve probably been missing it, and it’s definitely been missing you. This is going to sound crazy, but it wants you back. We were driven here by it. Sitting there in the boat, it made us come. Tomorrow wouldn’t have done. All the way up from Aberystwyth, it had to be today.’
She raised a hand in which she held a miraculously restored ffon, only the slightest mark bearing witness to what Mad Dog had done to it. He took it from her, feeling its weight of history. This was the ffon that he’d broken in a temper, but it was also the ffon that had saved him in the river. The one his mother had thrown up into the air as she’d keeled over, and he had caught. And never again would he wonder how it had come into his possession, because now he knew.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Aunty insisted that the sailors should stay overnight and be her guests. It was getting late, she said, and she wouldn’t dream of them turning round and driving all the way back to Aberystwyth. She installed them in the best room in the hotel, which she somehow, mysteriously, managed to make vacant. Any bitterness she’d ever felt about the way they’d once sneaked off, years ago without goodbyes, was forgotten. Now that she knew it was they who’d looked after Mad Dog and taxied him home when they’d found him in the Gap, there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for them.
Mad Dog left them heading for the dining room to be fed like kings, and went and sat out on the vardo step. Here he looked out over the garden and listened to Uncle getting Elvis ready for bed. It was the music of home, and it sounded good.
U
p above him the moon rose. All around him the night was gentle and still, warm and safe. Mad Dog pulled the ffon towards him, feeling as if he’d reached journey’s end. His story was complete. Everything he needed to know had been found out. Everything that needed to be done had been accomplished.
Silently he nursed his ffon, drawing strength from it in ways he’d never understood before. Its silver topknot glowed in the moonlight, its intricately engraved swirls looking almost fluid, like the currents running through a river. Mad Dog remembered what Grendel had said about it shining in the long grass. He remembered what she’d said about its light and he’d thought she’d made it up. But it did have a light.
Mad Dog tipped the topknot towards him, running his fingers over its letters and catching them in the light. It was as if the cane was speaking to him, explaining that he’d got it wrong and his story wasn’t over yet, not quite.
Slowly, curiously, Mad Dog ran his fingers over the engraved curls that made up the W, then followed the outline of the A, then traced the imprint of the fancy Os that were so intricate he scarcely could believe that human hands had made them. Finally he traced the letter at the end, which he’d always thought of as a C for ‘cat’ but, he now realised with some surprise, looked more like a G for ‘God’.
Mad Dog held the topknot close, wondering if, when he’d thrown the ffon at Abren, it had got damaged. There were no dents that he could see, not even any scratches. But the letter was definitely a G and, if he’d ever thought otherwise, then he’d been reading it wrong.
Mad Dog ran his fingers back over the letters, checking for other mistakes. He reached the middle Os, and probed behind them, lifting them close again. Suddenly it came to him that they weren’t the same. The second was an O, most definitely, but the first looked more like a D, or even two Ds, looped inseparably around each other.
