Mad Dog Moonlight (2 page)

Mad Dog hated this strange house. It didn't shake like his parents' van, but always stayed solid and in exactly the same place. Its walls didn't rattle as if they were alive. Its floors didn't roll with the motion of the road. Its windows always opened out on the same view.

Aunty said that Mad Dog was to look upon it as his home. ‘No. 3, The Gap, Aberystwyth Harbour,' she said. ‘From now on, if anybody asks, it's your address.'

But
why
was it his address? What had happened to his real home? One day he'd been his old, usual self, living his old, usual life with his mother and his dad and, the next, he'd been turned into someone called Ryan Lewis who lived with an uncle and aunty he'd never met before and a stream of children, who came and went, who he didn't know and didn't want to.

Aunty tried coaxing him to make friends but Mad Dog wouldn't have it. What did he want friends for? All he wanted was his old life. And how could he make friends, anyway, with weird children like these who watched telly all the time and played with stupid toys, and never did any of the sorts of things he was used to doing, like building dams in streams, climbing trees and being taught by his dad to catch fish with his bare hands?

So Mad Dog ignored these other children when they came round, and took to spending most of his time upstairs at his bedroom window. He refused all Aunty's attempts at mothering him, and the only person that he relaxed around was his baby brother, whom he'd jig up and down on his lap, promising that their parents would soon come for them.

Mad Dog's brother's name was Elvis – which was another thing that had set Aunty off when they'd first arrived. ‘Elvis Preseli,' he'd said when Aunty asked. And she'd replied, ‘You must be joking!'

But Mad Dog wasn't joking. Why would he do that? He tried explaining to Aunty about Elvis being
named after a local saint who came from the Preseli Mountains in west Wales, where he'd been born. But Aunty insisted that the name Elvis was out. Again she said that people would laugh. She didn't explain what was so funny but, after that, Mad Dog's brother became Eric Lewis, just as he was Ryan Lewis.

Mad Dog didn't want them to be Lewises, but he had no choice. Everybody in Aberystwyth, or so it seemed to him, was a Lewis. The family was everywhere. Right across that area of the harbour set behind the River Rheidol and known as ‘the Gap', aunties, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, grandparents and grandchildren filled almost every house. Half the children who came to play were Lewises, and the other half were Williamses from Aunty's side of the family. But most of the Williamses turned out to be married to Lewises anyway, so there wasn't much to choose between them.

Not that it made any difference to Mad Dog. Williamses and Lewises counted for nothing as far as he was concerned. All that counted was the family he'd left behind, not the one that he was stuck with now. Aunty could go on for as long as she liked about him being ‘one of us', but she and Uncle could have been anybody as far as he was concerned – not just Lewises or Williamses, but witches, robbers, big bad wolves.
Or even school teachers.

In the old life that he'd left behind, Mad Dog had heard talk of a terrible place called
school
where his parents seemed to think he might end up if they weren't careful. Mad Dog didn't know what school was – only that it had apparently never done them any good and was best avoided.

For the first few days after arriving at No. 3, he lay awake at night, worrying that this house was school, and that Aunty and Uncle had kidnapped him and were going to do terrible things to him. Uncle was a brawny ex-seaman, six foot three in his socks, with muscles the size of hams and a head built like a battering ram. And Aunty might be short and skinny, but she didn't look any less tough.

In the end, with still no parents coming to his rescue, Mad Dog decided that the best thing was to go and find them. He went at night when he thought everyone was asleep. Dressing quietly so as not to wake his brother, he crept downstairs, opened the front door and headed off into the night. He didn't have a clue where he was going but, at the end of the Gap, where the River Rheidol ran under the road bridge before flowing out into the harbour, it came to him that the world was a big place and perhaps he should wait until he'd grown up a bit.

Mad Dog was on the way back to No. 3, trying to work out which was the right house because they all looked much the same to him, when he bumped into Uncle coming after him. Uncle didn't shout or anything like that, but it was obvious that he was rattled at having to come out in the middle of the night. When they got back indoors, Aunty was obviously rattled too – though she did manage a quick hug before telling Mad Dog off.

Even Elvis seemed to have caught the mood of general rattlement, looking up from his cot with an accusing face, as if he knew that Mad Dog had walked out on him. Mad Dog only had to look at him to feel ashamed.

After that, he tried to be a better brother and stop thinking about running away. Instead of burying himself in deep, dark thoughts, he tried to lighten up for Elvis, playing with him, helping at feeding time, rocking him when he had wind and even changing the odd nappy. Then at night-time in their room together, he lulled his brother to sleep with their parents' stories. He told their dad's favourite one about them having Trojan blood and being twice as brave as anybody else, his mother's favourite one about the silver river, and a string of others about doing what she'd always called ‘trusting in the power of the open road'.

‘
You'll always be rovers
,' their mother had said. ‘
One only has to look at you to see you've got travelling blood. You're dark like a pair of secrets – dark like the earth itself. Fierce, and flint-hard, and you'll always end up on the move. It's your curse and calling, just like it's mine. You'll never settle down.
'

Well, she was wrong about that one! Some nights, after he'd talked Elvis to sleep, Mad Dog would cry into his pillow. He refused to do it in front of Aunty because of what his dad had said about being brave. But the darkness was different. Here, if he dishonoured his Trojan blood, no one needed to know.

But one night Aunty heard Mad Dog. ‘What's the matter?' she said, coming into his room and sitting on his bed. ‘You can tell me. Come on, Ryan. There are lots of things that we could talk about if you'd only open up. You know you can tell your aunty anything. There's a good boy.'

Mad Dog turned away from her. There were things
he might have opene up about – mysteries in his life that he couldn't explain – but how could he talk about them to someone who wouldn't even call him by his proper name?

‘Ryan,
speak to me
,' Aunty said. ‘You've been silent ever since you've got here, and this can't go on. You've got a story to tell and we want to know what it is. We want to help you, but we can't if you won't tell us anything about yourself. Is there something you're frightened of? Something that happened to you that you want to forget? Do you have a secret? Come on, Ryan, open up.'

Still Mad Dog didn't answer, and Aunty finally gave up, saying that, if he changed his mind, he knew where she was.

‘What was wrong?' he heard Uncle saying as she climbed back into bed.

‘He wouldn't tell me,' she answered.

‘He's a strange one,' Uncle said.

‘You'd be strange if the police had found you wandering around with a baby in your arms and you didn't know whose it was, or who you were or where you'd come from,' Aunty said.

She made excuses for Mad Dog all the time. Of all the children who came through the house, he was the special one. When he wouldn't eat, she refused to scold. When he threw a mad dog fit and started chucking things about, she tried to laugh it off. Even when he stood for days on end staring out of the window, his face as blank as a plain piece of paper, she refused to let it get to her.

Those were the worst times, though. And not just worst for Aunty, who couldn't get through to Mad
Dog or understand what was going on inside his head, but worst for him too, who felt as if a bottomless pit lay inside of him and he was falling down it. There'd be times when his refusal to eat would go on for days, and nameless terrors inside of him seemed to rise to the surface, almost close enough to touch.

Sometimes Mad Dog would feel so frightened about what was happening to him that he'd wet himself or do even worse. Then Aunty's sisters would see the extra washing hanging on the line and huddle in the kitchen with her, saying that though she'd had years of fostering experience behind her and been on courses run by social services and things like that, perhaps this time she'd bitten off more than she could chew.

Mad Dog heard them, but he didn't understand what they were on about. Words like ‘fostering' meant nothing to him. One day somebody called ‘his social worker' came round to talk to him, but he didn't know what a social worker was and nobody explained.

She was a tall woman with a wobbly face who encouraged Mad Dog to draw pictures of his old life. Could he draw his parents? she wanted to know. Could he draw his home? Was it on a street? In a town, or in a village? Did it stand alone? Could he remember anything in particular about it? A colour on the front door? A number? A pet? A garden? Any sort of landmarks anywhere nearby?

Mad Dog must have a home somewhere, the social worker insisted. Was it in the Preseli Mountains like Aunty had suggested, or somewhere inland among the mountains of mid-Wales? Or did Mad Dog belong further away than that, over the border in England, maybe in a city somewhere, far from where he'd been
found? The police had looked everywhere, but they'd drawn a blank. Surely there was some place waiting for him to come back. And if not a mother or father, then grandparents, aunties, uncles.
Somebody
.

But Mad Dog wouldn't answer. When people asked him questions like this, a deep silence would fall upon him and it wasn't just a matter of being unable to remember things – he didn't even
want
to remember them. Didn't people understand that memories were dangerous things, best left untouched? If things were slipping from his grasp – like his parents' faces, for example – perhaps it was all that he deserved.

Mad Dog didn't want to lose the memory of his parents' faces, but the fear rose up in him that perhaps he'd done something terrible and they were angry with him. He'd better behave at No. 3, he told himself, or else it just might happen here as well. He'd try harder to be the Ryan Lewis that everybody wanted, smiling back when people smiled at him and asked how he was today, and eating what they gave him and being a good boy.

But, for all his trying, the old Mad Dog Moonlight was never far behind. At the slightest provocation, Aunty and Uncle would find themselves confronted by an angry child, more wolf than boy, snarling, biting and throwing things about.

Then the social worker would be invited round again, and Aunty's sisters would chip in with their good advice. ‘Syndromes' and ‘psychological assessments' would be talked about, but Aunty wouldn't have any of it. Against all comers, she stood her ground.

‘We're in unknown territory,' she kept on saying. ‘We can't play this by the book. How often have any
of us come across a child who doesn't know where he's come from, let alone who he is? I mean, when he first arrived, he thought he was a dog and his brother was Elvis Presley! There's a story in that boy waiting to come out. And one day it will, you mark my words, and I'll be there for him when it does. He hasn't got a syndrome and he doesn't need assessments. All he needs is time, and a bit of love.'

One morning Mad Dog awoke to find a walking cane lying across the bottom of his bed. It was a tall, thin thing, made of polished wood, with a silver topknot. Mad Dog was certain it hadn't been there when he'd gone to sleep the night before, and yet there was something strangely familiar about it.

Mad Dog only had to pick it up, feel its weight in his hand and run his fingers over the topknot for something from his old life to come flooding back. He could see his mother again, see the face he'd almost forgotten, lost in rapt attention as she engraved a pattern on the topknot with the little tool she used for making silver jewellery. Then suddenly he could see his dad too – see him polishing the whole finished cane from top to toe, and hear him saying that it was his, Mad Dog's.

‘It's your
ffon
,' he said, using the Welsh word for walking cane, which Mad Dog thought he had forgotten. ‘We've made it especially for you. It's for when you grow up and want to know who you are. It's not a toy – so don't you play around with it. Over my dead body, after all the trouble we've taken, are you going out with it and losing it somewhere!'

Mad Dog dropped the
ffon
immediately when he remembered that. Was that what he'd done? Taken it somewhere and lost it, and lost himself into the bargain?

Aunty called upstairs that breakfast was ready. Mad
Dog thought about hiding the
ffon
under the bed. But curiosity got the better of him and he took it downstairs instead, hoping that Aunty could explain where it had come from.

‘At last,' she said as he walked through the door. ‘What does it take to make you get up in the morning? What time do you call this?'

Mad Dog sat down with the
ffon
. Aunty put his breakfast in front of him. He tapped the
ffon
on the floor, but she didn't say anything except, ‘Well, aren't you going to eat?'

Mad Dog tapped the
ffon
on the floor again, only louder. Why was Aunty ignoring it? And what did she know that she wasn't telling him? When she'd tucked him up in bed last night, there'd been no
ffon
. When she'd turned out the lights, there'd been no
ffon
. When he'd gone to sleep there'd been no
ffon
, and now here was his
ffon
and surely she, of all people – here in her own house – had to know what was going on!