by Pauline Fisk
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.
The woman smiled as if the thing was obvious. ‘There’s only one Rheidolin,’ she said.
Mad Dog bought the card along with all the other presents for his brother. On its back he wrote him an apology. He knew that Elvis wasn’t old enough to read, and his writing wasn’t that good anyway, but he wrote it anyway, then turned it over and stood staring at the river in the picture, marvelling that some things in life hadn’t changed, despite what he felt. Only one story flowed through his life, however many different homes he had. One story, and one river, which held it all together. Here in Devil’s Bridge and down at No. 3, it was one and the same life. And, whatever name he was called by, he was still the same boy.
Part III
Plynlimon
15
The End-of-Year Project
The discovery about the Rheidol was a major turnabout in Mad Dog’s summer. Knowing that the river he’d seen every day down at No. 3 was the same one that flowed through Devil’s Bridge changed his attitude to everything. It was crazy to let some nightmare spoil things for him, crazy to let homesickness ruin his summer.
Home was something that could happen anywhere, Mad Dog decided. After that, most of his time was spent down by the river. He set up rope swings, built dens, swam and explored.
Even in school, when his class teacher, Mrs Anwen Jones, suggested that they might like to choose their own subject for the annual end-of-year project, the Rheidol was his choice.
Mad Dog electioneered shamelessly on its behalf, but it was quite a fight. A small group of girls, of whom Grendel Griffiths was the leader, were determined that the project should be on dolphins. And, as anyone who knew the girls in question might have expected, they didn’t stay quiet about it either.
But Mad Dog called in favours, twisted arms, cajoled, pleaded and finally won the day. The dolphin group protested, but there was no need for the recount that they demanded. The River Rheidol won hands down.
‘This is the last piece of work you’ll ever do in this school,’ Mrs Anwen Jones said. ‘So come on, class. Show us all what you’re made of.’
She sent them off to the library to research the subject of rivers in general and the Rheidol in particular. Soon a map of the entire Rheidol region dominated the classroom, tracing the river all the way from source – or ffynnon, as Mrs Anwen Jones called it – to sea. All the birds and animals that lived on and around the river were included on the map, along with villages, bridges, lakes, waterfalls, mountain ranges, roads, railway tracks, old mines, old caves, hydro-electricity generating stations, farms, reservoirs and even the sites of a few long-forgotten castles.
Mad Dog was in his element, learning things about the river that he’d never known before. One day, investigating the possibility of otters down beneath the Devil’s Bridge, he came across the post office woman out walking her dog. She knew what he was doing, she said, because her niece was in Mad Dog’s class and her friends had voted for the dolphins, but her niece’d stuck her neck out and gone for the Rheidol.
‘She made the right choice,’ Mad Dog said, marvelling at the way the post office woman always knew everybody’s business.
‘Of course she did,’ the woman agreed. �
��The Rheidol’s a magical river, but then I’m sure you know that anyway. You spend enough time down here – I’m always seeing you. And when I say magic, I mean magic.’
She looked at Mad Dog as if she knew a thing or two. A thrill ran through him. After that, he started researching Rheidol magic on the internet. Sure enough, he found out about all sorts of strange things that didn’t get mentioned by Mrs Anwen Jones in class. Bogeys, elves and fairy folk. Black corph candles that heralded death. Characters of dark mystery, like the Red Judge of Plynlimon, who ‘came after’ children if they were naughty and, according to legend, set his dogs on them – the mythical cŵn y wbir or ‘Dogs of the Sky’.
But Mrs Anwen Jones wasn’t interested in old legends and things like that. ‘If you want to research make-believe,’ she said, ‘you’re more than welcome. But not in school. What we’re looking for here are hard facts. The Rheidol may have all sorts of little stories associated with it, but if they can’t be researched scientifically there’s no place for them in our class project.’
As if to give an example of the sort of research she called ‘scientific’, Mrs Anwen Jones arranged for a class visit to the local power station to see how electricity was made. Compared to elves and fairy folk, it didn’t sound much fun, but at least it meant a day off school. Letters were sent home with consent forms to be signed, and instructions were issued about what not to wear and how much pocket money to bring.
When the day of the trip arrived, Mad Dog sat on the school bus, braced for a day’s worth of total boredom. The last thing he wanted to do was waste a day staring at massive cooling towers and smoking chimneys.
When he arrived, however, there wasn’t a chimney in sight. The bus followed the Rheidol to the point where it opened out into a silvery lagoon, then passed through a half-hidden gateway and started up a treelined drive. Mrs Anwen Jones rose to her feet and started gathering her belongings together as if they’d arrived somewhere.
‘Don’t all rush at once,’ she said.
The bus drew up in front of a stone building. Mrs Anwen Jones started handing out clipboards and questionnaires, and moving everybody down the aisle. Outside a guide stood waiting to welcome them. The stone building was the power station, she said, and she was here to show them how the waters of the Rheidol could be used to generate electricity. There were no chimneys or cooling towers, just a collection of interconnected reservoirs, dams, aqueducts and hidden pipelines, bringing water down from Plynlimon Mountain, where the Rheidol had its source.
Their guide led them through a computer room full of massive consoles to a cathedral-high chamber housing generators that only required the Rheidol to kick them into life. Down in the bowels of the building, Mad Dog saw the place where it came pouring in, driving the generators to make the electricity. Then, back outside again, he saw the tree-lined cliff where the water came tumbling down from the hills, with a series of man-made pools beneath it, stocked with trout which were being bred to put back into the river.
The day ended with a walk round the lagoon, which was where the water ended up after the generators had finished with it. Mad Dog watched the Rheidol flowing through it on its way down to Aberystwyth. The sky had turned dark above them and someone in the stone building had made the decision to switch on the floodlights, making the lagoon twinkle like something out of fairyland.
At the end of the day, Mad Dog drove back to school with an entirely new impression of the Rheidol. This wasn’t just a river for swinging over and making dens. This river worked. It had a job to do. It had a purpose and a use and, every time from this day forward, when a light was switched on or a toaster popped, Mad Dog would think of the river making it happen.
Here on the Rheidol, he thought, even science can be magical.
16
Up Plynlimon
After that, Mad Dog worked like crazy on his project. The hand-in date approached and he printed up everything he could find on every subject from hydro-electricity to Owain Glyndwr, the great Welsh hero who’d unfurled his banner at Glyn Hyddgen, high on Plynlimon, close to the source of the Rheidol, and, in the words of Shakespeare, beaten the English by calling forth ‘spirits from the vasty deep’.
His friends were stunned by all the information he dug up, not to say anything of all the time he spent in the school library, and Mrs Anwen Jones praised him for his dedication. When he’d finished, Uncle helped him bind his project and Aunty read it through and pronounced it to be brilliant.
On the morning of the hand-in, five minutes before Uncle was due to drive them down to Aberystwyth, Mad Dog Google-Earthed a map of the Rheidol’s ffynnon to use as its cover. It was amazing to see the river coming into focus, clicking down from Planet Earth to Europe, to the British Isles, to Wales and eventually to Plynlimon Mountain.
Mad Dog stared at the mountain, taking in all its contours, all its dips and ridges and valleys. The three great rivers that the post office woman had told him about were plain to see, and there in between them was the ffynnon of the Rheidol – a small black lake called Llyn Rheidol, marked in English as ‘Eye of the Rheidol’.
Mad Dog found it impossible to stop staring at it. If it hadn’t been for Uncle shouting for him to hurry up, he’d have been late for school. When Mrs Anwen Jones saw the size of the project that he hauled in, she said he should feel proud. But, once he’d handed it over, all he felt was horribly flat. It was as if something important had passed out of his life. There was nothing to get excited about any more. Nothing to work towards or look forward to, except the end of term followed by a new school in the autumn – and that was something Mad Dog didn’t know whether to wish for or dread. Even when Mrs Anwen Jones announced that, as a reward for all their hard work, she was taking the class up to Llyn Rheidol, to see for themselves the river’s source, it didn’t have the power to cheer him up.
Everybody else was excited, even those who didn’t like the countryside and hated walking, because it meant a day out of the classroom. But Mad Dog was in such a bad mood that he didn’t even bother telling Aunty, and she only discovered the night before. Then there was a panic to find the things on Mrs Anwen Jones’s equipment list, including a suitable knapsack for carrying provisions and shoes strong enough for walking over difficult terrain.
It was the shoes that Mrs Anwen Jones made the biggest fuss about, oddly enough. The day before the trip she made a speech about them, listing the different types of shoe and boot that would and wouldn’t do, and particularly saying no fashion items please.
‘And make sure you bring drinks and sunhats too,’ she added. ‘And waterproofs, just in case of rain. Plynlimon’s not a mountain to be played around with. It’s unpredictable and full of surprises. It mightn’t look much from a distance, but the closer you approach it, the bigger it gets. People have been known to get into trouble up there, partly because they underestimate the size of it and partly because they don’t listen to the weather forecast before they set out. But we’ll be all right. Don’t you worry. The weather forecast’s good, and you’re all going to bring the right shoes, aren’t you?’
Next day, however, the sky was cloudy. Against all expectations, clouds came blowing in from the sea, and the handful of parents and dinner ladies who’d volunteered as helpers looked as though they wondered what they were in for. So did the class, especially the Grendel gang, and the situation wasn’t made any better when word came through that Mrs Anwen Jones, out celebrating her first wedding anniversary the night before, had been crippled by a bout of food poisoning – which meant that Mrs Heligan was in charge instead!
When he heard that, Mad Dog felt like walking out. He’d never forgotten how miserable Mrs Heligan had made him in his first year at school. And nothing about her had changed, it seemed. She came marching into the classroom, lined them up, helpers and all, and made a speech about being good, as if they were all still five.
‘If it wasn’t for me, this trip would have been called off,’ she said. ‘So I’m expecting you to beha
ve yourselves, and work hard.’
The idea that the day was meant to be a treat seemed not to have occurred to her. Before they set off, she divided the class into pairs that had nothing to do with personal friendships and everything to do with the fact that girls, in her view, were plainly more sensible than boys.
Mad Dog ended up sitting on the bus next to Grendel Griffiths, which couldn’t have been a worse pairing for either of them. Grendel tried changing seats, but Mrs Heligan hauled her back. Then she complained that Mad Dog had hit her, but all Mrs Heligan did was fix Mad Dog with her stony eyes and say, ‘Nothing much has changed with you, has it? Watch it, Ryan!’
Poor old Grendel – she even tried wheezing, on the principle that she was allergic to Mad Dog. But Mrs Heligan told her to pull herself together and stop being stupid.
‘My dad’ll get you if you talk to me like that,’ said Grendel.
‘I’d like to see him try it,’ Mrs Heligan replied.
All the way up to Plynlimon, Mad Dog and Grendel sat looking in opposite directions, making sure their eyes didn’t meet. Grendel played games on her mobile phone and Mad Dog looked out of the window and clutched his ffon. Why he’d brought it with him, he didn’t know. Everyone had laughed when he’d turned up with it, especially Rhys and Hippie, who’d said that walking sticks were for old women. But, when Mad Dog had woken up that morning, the ffon had been the first thing he’d seen – there by his bed, waiting to be picked up.
At the village of Ponterwyd, the school bus turned off the main pass road and started up a smaller one, signposted to the Nant y Moch reservoir. The view ahead was glorious – rolling mountains and open grasslands, grazing pastures and wide skies. It should have raised even Mad Dog’s spirits, but it was hard to feel cheerful with Mrs Heligan sitting right behind him.