Max Kowalski Didn't Mean It Page 7

  They fell on it standing, too hungry to sit or bother with plates. Max found a long knife, with a worn wooden handle and a blade that was curved by use, and hacked thick slices of bread off the loaf. They spread butter on with spoons. He ate without tasting, swallowing it down just to have something inside him.

  ‘I love Bill Bevan,’ said Thelma, her mouth full of Welsh cake.

  ‘I love bread,’ said Ripley, reaching greedily for the bread rolls.

  ‘Wait,’ said Max, tapping her hand away and folding the rolls into their paper bag. ‘We’re having dinner, remember? And we need to make this lot last. Save some for tomorrow.’

  And the next day, he thought; and after that – who knew?

  ‘We can just ask Bill for some more,’ said Thelma. ‘Bill won’t let us starve, will he? Not lovely Bill.’

  ‘Wait, but – no one was meant to know we were here, Max,’ said Louise, suddenly putting her bread down as if it might bite back.

  Now Bill Bevan knew all their names.

  And so did the wolf boy, Tal.

  14

  At seven o’clock, they went to dinner at the Bevans’ house.

  It was dark when they came out, the sky ink-black and every mountain in the valley lost to it. The looming peaks of the day had been stolen. The winding path beyond the bridge, vanished. Only the soft mehhhh of distant sheep on the slopes gave the place away: Nant Glyder, Snowdonia, North Wales; their perfect hiding place.

  That and Thelma with a guidebook, the open page lit by torchlight.

  ‘So we go, er, north-west … and then west towards a road called, um … Penny Glider.’

  Max sighed. ‘Calm down, Bear Grylls. Let’s just call it “crossing the road and going two doors down”.’

  The Bevans’ house was like their own cottage – as if huge boulders had been piled together and painted white – but this was bigger, on two floors. Outside was a big muddy-wheeled 4×4, and a white van, with VALLEY MOUNTAIN CENTRE printed on the side.

  ‘I don’t know about this, Max,’ whispered Louise, shivering as they walked up the path. ‘They already know too much.’

  But Max had figured it out. People who were hiding kept the curtains closed, and the lights off. People who belonged: they just got on with it. So of course they were the English cousins. Of course they were meant to be here.

  Besides, Bill had been kind, and Max liked him, wanted to be liked back.

  ‘But I’m hungry,’ whined Ripley.

  There was a smell of food – roast chicken, maybe, something salty and hot anyway – wafting towards them.

  ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ said Louise dramatically. ‘We’re being lured to our doom. I bet that Tal boy is the last person they kidnapped – and he’s probably cooking in the oven right now. The next people who come and visit will get Ripley pie and Thelma gravy.’

  Ripley squealed, half-terror, half-giggle.

  ‘No one’s making me into gravy,’ muttered Thelma, marching up and ringing the bell.

  But the man who opened the door looked like he genuinely might. He was tall – taller than Dad – with a thick thatch of wavy dark hair and an even thicker beard that grew out from his face in all directions. He filled the whole doorframe: broad shoulders encased in a heavy fleece, thick woollen socks on his massive feet. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, and Max could see a swirl of bluish tattoos, faded with age, all up one hairy arm. He glared at them from under heavy eyebrows, and spat out something incomprehensible under his breath.

  Ripley squealed again, and hid behind Max.

  Thelma took a step back too.

  Louise threw Max an ‘I told you so’ look.

  Then Bill appeared behind the giant, all smiles, elbowing him in the ribs to get past.

  ‘Hello! You’re here. Come in. Don’t mind him, he’s only fifty per cent ogre.’

  Bill muttered at the giant, slipping from English to Welsh without a beat.

  The giant softened, and thrust out a huge hand for Max to shake. ‘Oh, right. Hello. Welcome. I’m Michael, Tal’s other dad.’

  His voice was deep and warm, with a breathy accent that seemed to be built for other vowels and wrapped itself awkwardly round his words.

  Max shook the hand warily and followed him inside, toeing off his wet trainers.

  The front room was warm like a bath and filled with orangey-yellow light from a wood burner. There was a dog, all legs and long nose, asleep on a big brown cushion next to a pile of chopped wood; Ripley dashed to it at once to stroke its head and rumple its ears. At one end of the room were squashy sofas, and a broad-branched Christmas tree: a real one, filling the room with the scent of pine.

  Michael led Max to a table at the other end, set up with chairs and plates waiting for them.

  ‘They didn’t cook him at all!’ said Ripley, looking up from the dog as Tal walked in.

  ‘Shush,’ hissed Max. He gave the boy a curt nod. ‘All right, Tal.’

  ‘All right,’ said Tal, setting a jug of water on the table.

  He was dressed in another pair of those odd baggy trousers, this time with a purple-and-blue woven diamond pattern. Max wished he could take a photo to send to Elis Evans, so they could laugh over it together. Look Elis, look! Max would say, and Elis Evans would say, Yep, that’s my mum’s bedroom curtains, and they’d crack up together and only they’d know the joke.

  But Elis Evans was already friends with this strange boy, maybe best friends, and thinking about it just made Max feel lonely.

  ‘So – how are you finding our beautiful Snowdonia so far, then?’ asked Bill, serving out a steaming dish of chicken in some kind of wet sauce. ‘Been out for a walk today?’

  Max nodded, trying to wall off the sauce from his mashed potato with a dam of sacrificial peas.

  ‘We went all the way to the post office,’ said Ripley proudly.

  ‘And back,’ added Louise, in case that didn’t sound impressive enough.

  They had, too. It turned out Nant Glyder was not entirely shop-less. There was a little village post office, back past the bus stop, and open a confusing three hours a day, four days a week.

  Tal raised an eyebrow.

  Bill coughed, smiling. ‘Reckon we can do a bit better than that, eh? This is a good start,’ he said, picking up Thelma’s guidebook. ‘Lots of options here. Hmm … you good walkers, you lot? Think you could manage an easy scramble?’

  Max shrugged.

  ‘We’ve never really been up a mountain,’ said Louise.

  Tal snorted. ‘You’ve never been up a mountain? Not one?’

  ‘Maybe they’re in the right place to conquer their first, eh?’ said Bill, a little sharply. He looked at Max. ‘You drop by the mountain centre some time, Max,’ he said, more gently. ‘Michael here’ll teach you a thing or two; a few basics, till your father’s well enough to take you out himself. There might be a mountain man in you yet.’

  Max didn’t think there was, to be honest. So far, mountains meant being cold, and lost, and, judging by all the passers-by he’d seen today, wearing a lot of fleeces. But Michael looked up from scooping mash, his piercing eyes under his heavy eyebrows settling on Max assessingly, and he nodded, just once, as if it was agreed.

  Tal looked sour as he cut his chicken.

  ‘I want to do the one by our house,’ said Thelma, taking the book. She flicked through the pages until she found it: a map, and a black-and-white photograph of a mountain summit. It wasn’t pointed in a peak, like a drawing of a mountain. It was a vast, peculiar row of jagged spikes of rock, piercing the sky. ‘Why Drag Hour,’ she read, her finger on the map.

  Tal snorted again.

  ‘Y Ddraig Aur,’ said Bill. Uh Th-rye-g Ire, with a hard ‘th’ and a roll of the Rs.

  ‘Y Ddraig Aur,’ she repeated carefully after him, under her breath.

  ‘It means “the golden dragon”,’ explained Bill.

  Max put his hand in his pocket and touched the cool nobbled spine of the china dragon keyring.


  Louise’s eyes lit up.

  ‘I thought the Welsh dragon was red?’ said Ripley.

  ‘Different dragon, different mountain.’ Bill’s eyes twinkled. ‘The legend goes like this … Wait, you tell it, Mike. You know it best.’

  Michael glanced reluctantly up from his mug of tea, then around at the upturned faces at the table. He drew his shoulders up and back, as if drawing himself together. He stroked his beard. Then he spoke, soft and deep, in that strange accent that sounded as if he came from far away and long ago.

  ‘A dragon lives atop the mountain in the Castle of the Winds. In the day, it is stone grey and sleeping, still as rock. But the dragon, like all dragons, loves treasure. Beneath the Castle of the Winds lies a lake of molten gold: treasure beyond price. Every night, in the darkness, the dragon wakes and climbs inside its castle. It bathes in the lake of gold till every scale and wing and claw is covered in it. Y Ddraig Aur – the golden dragon – flies from its castle at sunrise. It brings the morning, blazing across the sky with bright light, rays of reflected gold – until the risen sun burns it all away. The dragon settles back upon the mountaintop, stone grey, sleeping, till night falls again …’

  Michael let the last words drift away into silence.

  Max felt a chill walk his spine.

  It was like story time with his mum again: like lions and fauns and Turkish Delight.

  But this … Was this even a story?

  ‘Is it true?’ he asked. ‘Is there really a dragon?’

  There was hope in the way he asked it. He held his breath.

  But Bill laughed. ‘Course it’s not true. How often do you think we see the sun around here?’

  Then the conversation moved on, to rain and waterproofs and the Big Snow to come.

  Max looked at his plate, and felt daft. Of course there wasn’t a dragon. It was only a story. Real life didn’t have magic in it. Real life was Dad being in trouble, and Nice Jackie, and the Reflection Room, and getting down to your last six pounds and seven p. He felt eyes on him and looked up to see Tal staring, boring into his brain and judging him. If you were Ripley, you were allowed to believe in dragons. If you were Max, it just made you weird.

  Pudding was apple pie with vanilla ice cream, melting into a pool round the edges. Max scooped out the dry pastry in the middle, chewing fast. He just wanted to leave now.

  When they had all finished, Ripley yawned noisily and rested her head on Max’s arm.

  ‘Right,’ said Max, standing up and tugging Ripley with him. ‘You can’t go falling asleep here.’

  ‘She snores,’ explained Thelma.

  ‘I don’t!’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘So do you, T,’ said Louise.

  ‘I bet none of you is anything like as loud as this one,’ said Bill, nodding at Michael. ‘Like a tractor, the minute his head hits the pillow. You can probably hear him over by your place.’

  Michael made a low growly noise, and glared from under his bushy eyebrows as he gathered up the pie plates.

  ‘Give your father our best,’ said Bill over his shoulder as he followed Michael into the kitchen. ‘You come tell me, if you need the doctor out.’

  Tal lingered, hanging off the carved wooden post at the bottom of the stairs.

  There was a painting in the hallway that Max hadn’t noticed on the way in. He recognized it at once: the mountain from the book, the dragon mountain. There were the strange shards of rock, standing up like toppling spears. But in the painting, there was a sheen to them, of reflective gold paint at the tips. If he looked carefully, they seemed to arrange themselves into a new shape: a long neck, a spine, a spiked tail. There were even what seemed to be eyes – narrow slits in the rock, ruby red and clever.

  Max stared at it, feeling an odd pull in his gut. His eyes slid from the gold-tipped spikes of rock to the pencilled name of the artist, tucked in the right lower corner.

  Taliesin Bevan.

  ‘That’s you!’ Max looked at Tal anew. ‘You painted this?’

  Tal nodded, casually tucking a wing of hair behind one ear, but obviously pleased. ‘Yeah. I do a bit. Did all of these.’

  He waved a hand at the hallway and the stairwell. There were small pictures in frames dotted everywhere; a few photographs of the family, but mostly splodgy watercolour landscapes, of forbidding purple-blue skies over green hills.

  ‘This is my favourite, though,’ said Tal, nodding at the dragon.

  Something about the way Tal’s eyes glittered as he spoke made Max brave.

  ‘Do you believe the story?’ he asked. ‘Do you believe in the golden dragon?’

  Tal smiled as if he’d been waiting to be asked. He lowered his voice, glancing round carefully to be certain they weren’t overheard.

  ‘I don’t just believe in it. I’ve seen it.’

  15

  Max dreamed of dragons.

  He was on the mountain, and he wasn’t cold, even though a wind was blowing and there was snow falling all around. He was at the very top, standing on shaly chips of grey rock like arrowheads, and before him was the dragon’s castle: the Castle of the Winds. It looked like Tal’s picture: tipped with gold at every spike, and more dragonish the more you looked.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Max shouted at it, bunching a fist. Then dream-Max pulled out a sword, because even in a dream punching a dragon is a bad idea.

  But the dragon – he could see it clearly now, the head, the spine, the folded wings – was sleeping soundly.

  Max could step past it and into the castle. Into the castle and to the lake of gold. All he had to do was walk.

  Move, he said to himself. Move.

  ‘Move where?’ said Ripley crossly.

  Her tumbly hair fell into his face and Max woke up with a start. Ripley was kneeling on his bed, glaring at him sleepily.

  ‘You woke me up,’ she said sternly.

  Max got up, pulled on his damp trainers, and stepped out into the morning.

  The eighteenth of December. Seven days till Christmas.

  Dark still hung in the valley like damp velvet to the skin.

  The dim garden was dew-fresh and cold. Cloud hung in long low beds, almost near enough to touch. Beyond was a field filled with sheep. Beyond that, lost to the dark and the cloud, was the mountain. Y Ddraig Aur: the golden dragon.

  Max breathed in. The air was almost too fresh. It smelled so different from home: wet grass and rocks and sheep poo and something else – oxygen, maybe. Air was made out of oxygen. And in the town, Max wondered, perhaps it was used up by chip vans and funfair doughnuts and cars. Out here, in the mountains, there was more than enough to go round.

  Here, it smelled of earth, and rock; things growing, and things mouldering. It smelled alive.

  Max felt a tingle of something behind the air too. Like electricity. Like a humming of something old and ancient, deep beneath his feet and growing up through the blades of grass and along the branches of trees and finding its way into the rolling cloud up to the hidden sky above.

  He felt it thrum up through his bones and into his fingertips –

  ‘Hello! What’s your name?’

  Ripley’s skipping footsteps broke his reverie.

  It was a sheep. A black sheep: black-faced and brown-eyed, with thick curls of grey-black wool. With a jolt, Max realized it was not in the field beyond, with the others. It was in the garden, standing under a tree. In their garden. Stepping through the grass towards Max, as if he might be food.

  ‘I shall call you New Potato,’ said Ripley. ‘You’re going to be my best friend.’

  She stepped forward fearlessly, and pulled the silver plastic tiara from her head, balancing it awkwardly about the sheep’s ears.

  Mehhhh, said the sheep.

  It blinked ruefully at Max.

  Then it bolted, twisting its round body through a hidden gap in the fence and returning to the field beyond, the tiara now dangling jauntily off one ear.

  Max grinned.

  That ne
ver happened at home either.

  Back inside, the twins were up, eating buttery toast round the kitchen table.

  Louise wore huge woollen socks on her feet and a big red fleece, borrowed from the wardrobes in her bedroom.

  ‘This book is amazing,’ she gushed, her eyes wide. ‘It’s got bosoms in it.’

  Max could see that; there was a pair of them on the cover, bursting out of a girl’s dress while she fell into the arms of a muscular man with flowing long dark hair, and a kilt. It was called The Scots Bride’s Lament. It didn’t look like Louise’s usual sort of thing at all – but she kept her eyes glued to the page as she ate.

  ‘Who has a house without a TV?’ Thelma moaned as she buttered more toast. ‘It’s like ye olden days.’

  ‘We’ll be all right. Elis Evans used to come here on holiday every year, and he liked it. There’s probably loads of stuff to do.’

  Thelma rolled her eyes and went to sit on the sofa, facing the now cold, ash-filled wood burner and staring at it in case it magically started picking up Nickelodeon.

  All Max wanted to do was go to the Bevans’ and talk to Tal. About the painting: about the golden dragon he had seen. But Tal was at school, and the day dragged its heels unkindly.

  If he stopped to think, Max’s mind filled up with worries. Nice Jackie wanting her suitcase; the police wanting Dad; some social worker with a briefcase wanting to take them away, maybe forever. And having to go back and face it all one day. So he kept busy.

  There were two copper cauldrons either side of the wood burner, with some thin sticks of ready-cut kindling and a few logs left. Max took Ripley out and picked more wood from the garden, wet twigs and mossy branches from the rain-tipped grass. There was no sign of the black sheep though; only the plastic tiara, now snagged on a fence in the field beyond. He peered into cupboards hung with coats and waterproofs; at the rack of well-loved walking boots.

  He paced the little garden, holding up Dad’s mobile phone, hunting for a signal. Two bars, if you stood in just the right spot with your arm in the air. Just enough for Dad to call.