Mad Dog Moonlight (11 page)

The only difference this time was that it was set in Devil's Bridge, and the Manager was in it, and so were his dogs. They came streaming through the woods, driving everything before them into the rushing waters beneath the waterfall. Mad Dog tried to get away, but they caught his scent and started after him. They chased him up the steep sides of the gorge, tearing through the trees until the Falls Hotel appeared ahead.

For a wonderful moment, Mad Dog thought that he was safe. He tore towards the hotel, only to realise at the last moment that it had turned back into the Aged Relative's B & B. But he headed for it anyway, dashing through the porch and catching a whiff of boiled
cabbage again, strong enough to gag him.

But it wasn't the Manager he found waiting for him this time. It was his parents.

Mad Dog's parents.
They stood before him, holding out their hands, just the way they'd done in the old dreams he used to have. Mad Dog woke up in a panic, shouting in the darkness and punching the air. Aunty came running. She was at his bedside within seconds.

‘What's the matter?' she said.

But Mad Dog couldn't tell her. He couldn't put the bits of dream together. Couldn't work out what they meant. All he could manage was, ‘
I don't want to go.
'

‘Go where?' Aunty said.

‘Up to Devil's Bridge,' Mad Dog said. ‘I had a dream … dogs in it … a chase … the Manager …'

‘The Manager's gone,' Aunty said. ‘There's no way, ever, that I'd let him back. You're safe from him, I promise you.'

But Mad Dog didn't feel safe. At a stroke, his memories of a happy Christmas up at Devil's Bridge were completely wiped away.

‘I won't go,' he said. ‘You can't make me. I won't.
I won't.
'

Aunty didn't argue. He'd be fine once he got there, she told herself. Just like at Christmas, he'd come round. All the way through Easter, she made sure to keep an eye on him, treating him with care as if he was a special guest. And in every other way things went well. Uncle and Elvis were in their element. The guests loved the place. The weather was great. Even Ruth and Kathleen in the kitchen were great, pulling together in a real team effort that had feasts on the table every night and smiles on every face.

The day the last guest left, Aunty made another of her snap decisions. They were packing up for home and the start of the new school term, and she suddenly announced that, in her opinion, they should bring up everything they needed from No. 3, and spend the rest of the summer at the Falls Hotel. Uncle could carry on with his job in the harbour office, and help in the hotel on evenings and at weekends. And Mad Dog and Elvis – who had just started the reception class – could commute up and down with him on a daily basis, staying with her sisters after school until he could collect them from work.

‘But what about No. 3?' Mad Dog said.

‘What about No. 3?' Aunty said. ‘No. 3's our home, and it always will be. When we've got ourselves on our feet and can afford to employ more staff, we'll move back down. But first we've got to get ourselves established.'

Mad Dog looked at Uncle in the hope that he'd object. But Uncle said that it was the obvious way forward. Mad Dog looked at Elvis. But Elvis – the traitor – was smiling as if Devil's Bridge meant more to him than the Gap had ever done.

Mad Dog swallowed hard. Why did he feel as if everything that had ever been a home to him was slipping away? ‘Do you promise, on your word of honour, that if we stay for the summer, we'll go back down to No. 3 in the autumn?' he said.

‘As soon as the summer season's over. On our word of honour,' Aunty said.

Three days later Uncle hired a van and filled it with their belongings, leaving very little behind. By the time he'd finished, No. 3 looked utterly abandoned, no matter what anybody said about it still being home. On the evening before they moved out, Mad Dog went and sat at the end of the Gap, watching the Rheidol flowing through the harbour. Swans went gliding past him and a heron flew overhead. He watched the river glinting in the fading light and wondered if it would ever be the river of his home again.

Next day they left. Uncle drove the van, and Aunty followed in her Range Rover, which was packed right up to the window of the back door. Everybody lined the Gap and waved them off as if they were royalty. They might only be going for the next few months – and might be making the world's worst mistake, as far as some people were concerned – but leaving the Gap still required a good send-off.

‘Really!' Aunty said, as she edged the Range Rover out on to the road. ‘It's not as if we're never coming back. You'd think we were emigrating to Australia.'

Maybe they weren't, but it felt like that to Mad Dog. All the way up the Gap, he kept turning back, wanting to be a little boy again, playing on the barge den and kicking balls about on the grass. No. 3 disappeared and he felt a lump in his throat. Then the
family disappeared. Then he couldn't see the Rheidol any more, twisting like a piece of spangled silk beyond the walls of the Gap. Then finally the sea disappeared – the great, vast, shifting, shimmering ocean itself, that had brought him those sailors with their stories of adventure.

Mad Dog closed his eyes. Those magic days were gone, just like the sailors had gone and that mermaid long before them. When he opened his eyes again, the whole of Aberystwyth had gone too, with its network of streets, shops and houses that he knew like the back of his hand. He told himself it didn't matter, because he'd be back at school on Monday. But he knew it wouldn't be the same. On Monday morning, the town would be just any town, not the one he lived in. And the Gap would be just any street with houses on it, overlooking some harbour that wasn't special any more because it wasn't home.

The drive up to Devil's Bridge was conducted in silence. Even Elvis sat quietly, as if he knew that something of significance was taking place. He tried holding Mad Dog's hand, as if looking for reassurance. But Mad Dog hadn't forgiven him yet for his betrayal, and wouldn't let him.

They drove over hills, across open moorland, through woodlands and finally into Devil's Bridge, twisting and turning up its hairpin bends until they pulled up outside the Falls Hotel. Here Uncle was waiting for them, having got there first and parked the van. He didn't look very happy.

‘I've got one question for you,' he said, as soon as Aunty had parked the Range Rover and jumped out. ‘What's
that
?'

He pointed behind the hotel to where, between the kitchen and the dripping cliff, an old battered-looking caravan had been installed.

Aunty braced herself for trouble. ‘It's a period piece,' she said.

‘
Who's
period piece?' Uncle said.

‘It's our period piece,' Aunty said. ‘I got it cheap on eBay. It's a real bargain. An old 1950s showman's vardo. That's what they used to call them. I bought it as an investment. I thought that we could do it up. Besides, I reckoned that it would solve the accommodation problem.'

‘
What
accommodation problem?' Uncle said, a hint of danger in his voice.

Aunty flushed. ‘It's like this,' she said. ‘We're the victims of our own success. Every available room in the hotel has suddenly been filled, and I've had to book our own rooms too. So what else could I do?'

‘You could have told me.'

‘I didn't want to bother you.'

Uncle shot Aunty a look that said
lame excuse
. He was no happier with the vardo when he got inside. Elvis wasn't very happy either, complaining that it smelt of old people, whatever that meant.

But Mad Dog felt at home from the word go. Outside the vardo might look run down, but inside it reminded him of the old home he'd lived in before No. 3. It made him feel safe. It was like a nest. It was tiny but everything was there – a fitted kitchen with a bottled-gas stove, a sitting room with an open fireplace, bedrooms with narrow bunk-beds, and a tiny bathroom with a peppermint-coloured sit-up bath.

That evening, with Elvis gone to bed and Aunty and
Uncle busy in the hotel moving furniture about, Mad Dog sneaked off on his own. He needed time to think and take in what was happening. The vardo had changed everything. It wasn't just that he'd found a place where he felt safe, but he'd found a place that stirred old memories.

Mad Dog walked down through the wood, careful to keep to the tourist paths so that he wouldn't get lost. No one else was down there, only him. Trees rose around him, growing precariously out of the steep slopes of a deep gorge.

Mad Dog reached the valley floor, and found a river running through it. Without stopping to think, he peeled out of his trainers and waded straight in. The river was as cold as ice – far colder than the sea – but he didn't flinch, just stood there with it slapping over his ankles, looking up at the sunlit tops of the trees, the light fading fast and the moon rising in a pale, clear sky.

This was all right, he told himself. This river mightn't be the Rheidol, but it would do.

Occasionally Mad Dog heard a car coming along the road above him, its sound fading as it hit the bends, and its headlights disappearing. Then a kingfisher appeared from upriver and flitted past him. A silver fish leapt up, twisting in the air, and the kingfisher dived for it, quickly come and quickly gone in a flash of gold and turquoise.

Finally Mad Dog trailed back up through the wood, listening to blackbirds all the way, singing in the dark. Aunty was cross when he got back, because he'd gone off without saying. But it had been worth it, Mad Dog reckoned. And, besides, if Aunty was going to be so
busy all the time, what else could she expect?

From that time on, however, busyness was Aunty's distinguishing characteristic. It was Uncle's too, trying to run two jobs and commute between them. For all their efforts to include him, Mad Dog found himself left on his own. Elvis was fine because he'd made friends in the village. But, when Mad Dog was invited to go and play, he held himself aloof.

Increasingly he felt as if he didn't know where he belonged any more. The hotel pulled one way and No. 3 pulled the other and, between them, Mad Dog didn't know where was home. Every morning at six his day would begin with Aunty's alarm going off and him, Elvis and Uncle leaving the vardo as if it was a mother ship, and driving light years away to the forbidden planet that was life back in Aberystwyth. Then, at the end of the school day, Uncle would pick them up and drive them back to Devil's Bridge, by which time school felt like the mother ship, and the Falls Hotel the next worst thing to oblivion.

Mad Dog felt totally bewildered by it all. Was his true home in the vardo, where he felt safe? Or by the river, which had come to feel like a friend? Or was there no real home for a boy like him? Was he born to be a rover, like his mother had once said?

Mad Dog didn't like thinking about his mother. Whenever he did, darkness closed around him, terrible and deep, just the way it used to do when he'd first lived at No. 3. He started getting snappy and couldn't explain why. There were arguments in the kitchen with Ruth and Kathleen. Arguments with passing guests who, according to Mad Dog, seemed to think he was their servant. One day there was even an
argument with Elvis that ended up in a fight.

It started over names. The two of them were on their own in the vardo and Mad Dog decided the time had come to put Elvis straight about this Ryan person that his brother was always calling him.

‘My name's not Ryan,' he said tetchily. ‘I'm sick of Ryan – stop calling me it!'

‘What am I meant to call you, then?' Elvis said. ‘You can call me Mad Dog Moonlight,' Mad Dog said.

Elvis burst out laughing. ‘That's a
stupid
name,' he said.

Mad Dog turned bright red. ‘If you say that again, I'll smash your face in!' he said. ‘Besides, your name's not Eric Lewis. It's Elvis Preseli.'

‘Don't be stupid – of course it's not!'

‘Who are you calling stupid?'

‘I'm calling you, Ryan, Ryan, Ryan Lewis –'

‘
That's not my name. I TOLD YOU!!
'

Elvis ran around in circles, chanting ‘Ryan Lewis' over and over again. It ended up with fists. Mad Dog was twice his brother's size but he didn't even attempt to stop himself. Uncle came in and broke them up. Elvis was giving as good as he got, but Mad Dog was to blame and afterwards he was ashamed of himself.

What was happening to him and Elvis, he wondered later, down by the river where he'd gone to lick his wounds. Once his brother had looked up to him. They'd done everything together, two peas in a pod, one little, one big but the same dark look, the same dark eyes, even the same taste in food and the same love of stories.

Now, however, there was a distance between them. He and Elvis were growing apart. Once he'd been his brother's keeper but now they were scarcely even friends.

Next time he had any spare pocket money, Mad Dog went down to the post office to try and put things right. He bought Elvis a fridge magnet shaped like a Welsh dragon, a bag of sweets, a plastic car and a couple of comics. Then, whilst paying for it all, his eyes fell on a stack of postcards next to the counter. Some were of the waterfalls and bridges that made Devil's Bridge famous, but one was of the gorge with the river flowing through it.

Mad Dog picked up the card to take a closer look. ‘I see you like our Rheidolin,' said the woman behind the counter, who had the sort of eyes that never missed anything.

‘Your what?' Mad Dog said.

‘Our River Rheidol,' the woman said. ‘The youngest of Plynlimon's three great rivers – you
do
know what I'm talking about?'

Mad Dog shook his head. ‘Are you saying that the river down there in the valley is the
Rheidol
?' he said.