Malcolm was six when his brother was born, still young enough for magic. The ordinary kind: the magic you find in a ruined tree stump or a fragment of pottery on the bed of a shallow stream. The kind that needs a keen set of eyes to find it, and Malcolm had long since learned the right way to look.
There was always a new ocean to cross, if you knew how to see it when the wind blew the endless hillside grass just so. There were unseen companions to conjure out of cloud-patterns on the ground when the children at school turned their backs and laughed behind their hands. There were worlds to discover in the glint of a weathered window, ice fractals on a leaf, the misty halo around the moon on a late-spring night. That had always been enough for Malcolm. But then there was Matthew.
Matthew was the brother adventurers dreamed of. Sturdy, russet-haired and with eyes as blue as a sunlit sky, he began following Malcolm as soon as he could walk, and the pattern of their story began. It was easy to be brave with a partner by your side. As Matthew grew, Malcolm taught him the secrets he’d learned in his solitary rambles: how to twist the everyday world into a ripple of colours, portals, quests through strange and far-off lands. Where to find the heroes from the legends that their father told them by the fireside. The names of the hidden pathways that criss-crossed the wilderness and the spells to conjure them out of air.
On Matthew’s fifth birthday, as they sheltered from a rainstorm in a tarpaulin castle at the centre of a dead tree, Malcolm decided to tell his brother the story of his birth.
“You were a prince in a faraway land,” he said, and Matthew’s eyes lit up.
“How did I get here?” he wanted to know.
So Malcolm told him: a tale of hope and courage. And magic, too, of course. Always a little bit of magic. The tale of a king and his fairy queen, and the heir that they’d called to them from the world of the elves.
“But a night-witch cursed the prince and banished him to a faraway dungeon,” said Malcolm, around a bite of soggy ham sandwich. “And he waited there in the dark and the cold for so long that he forgot what the whole world looked like—even the colour of the sky.”
Matthew’s mouth had dropped open, and an untouched apple hung from one hand. “What happened to him?”
“The queen knew her magic could save him,” said Malcolm. “It would just take a long time to make the spell.”
For years she worked, braiding threads from all the colours of autumn and summer. And slowly, slowly, at her loom, she wove a baby boy with hair as red as falling leaves and eyes as bright as jewels.
“It was you,” said Malcolm. “You brought the fairy queen’s magic from the land of the elves and you broke night-witch’s curse.”
Matthew’s cheeks were pink with the chill but his eyes were as wide as the summer sky. “Is Mummy a queen, then?”
“Of course she is,” said Malcolm. “If you’re a prince, she has to be a queen.”
Mother was the woman who listened to their adventures every evening while their clothes dried by the fire. At bedtime, she brushed long, gentle fingers through their hair and spun stories from stars and twilight to follow them into their dreams. She was a queen to them.
“I wish we had a dog,” said Malcolm one day, as they lay flat on their backs on the late-June hillside.
“I’ll be your dog,” said Matthew, and Malcolm grinned and scratched at his brother’s rust-coloured hair.
“No,” he said. “I mean a real dog. I wish we had a real dog, with a big shaggy coat, who followed us everywhere.”
“I follow you everywhere,” said Matthew.
“Yes, but you can’t be my dog,” said Malcolm. He scrambled upright, shading his eyes to peer into the middle distance. “I need you to help me fight those dinosaurs over there.”
“Dinosaurs?” Matthew’s blue eyes danced. And if the world was threatened once again, at least it had Malcolm and Matthew to put things right.
Matthew died that summer, hit by a car as he ran after a stray ball.
The house became a temple of whispers. Strangers filed through the narrow hallways, drinking tea and nodding solemnly to Malcolm’s grey-faced father as he passed among them with plates of sandwiches. Children clutched at their parents’ legs and hid their faces from the teachers that milled about in the kitchen, boiling endless kettles and arranging sausage rolls on the good china. Nobody spoke to Malcolm.
The lid of the coffin was tightly closed. Matthew’s blue eyes were lost forever behind a wall of dark wood.
It was August, warm and sharply sweet with the scent of fresh-cut grass turning to hay. They should have been racing each other through the hills to the hollowed-out tree with the tarpaulin stretched across its withered branches. They should have been chasing the sun across the sky from dawn to dusk. But, instead, the only sign of summer in the quiet house was in the shards of sunlight that peeked through the gaps in the curtains, streaking the gloom in shades of dirty white.
September cast a mantle of red and gold across the hillside, and autumn dimmed the summer sun. The fairy queen had faded into shadow and solitude, curled into one corner of her wide bed and drifting on a wave of sorrow and the pills that the doctor had left.
In the mornings, before school, Malcolm would wait in the doorway to her bedroom, watching the play of sunlight on her still shoulders, the shadows cast by scrunched-up tissues and half-finished glasses of water. Sometimes her breath would catch, sending a small shudder across her back, and, for a moment, he’d think she was about to turn around. Those were the days when he knew that she knew he was there. Other times, there would be nothing but silence, broken by the uneven sounds of sleep or sadness, until Malcolm’s father called him downstairs to explain that Mum wasn’t feeling well again, and that maybe everyone could do with just a little bit of time to themselves.
In the evenings, Dad would pull up a seat by the stove and ask Malcolm about his adventures that day. And Malcolm would tell him how he’d been to India to ride an elephant, or Rome to see the Colosseum, so that his father would smile his faraway smile and ruffle Malcolm’s hair. But the truth was, he’d forgotten the way to his secret worlds and his unseen companions had drifted on the breeze.
Now, when he walked the hills, he walked alone.
October dissolved into November. The nights drew in. The fairy queen had begun to sicken: her long, gentle fingers turned to bone, her face hollowed and darkened by shadow. At night, fierce whispers would drift down the stairs to where Malcolm sat alone by the fire: her voice and his father’s; jagged words like indulgent and bereft. Sometimes, the doctor appeared, and he hovered in the hallway with Malcolm’s father, speaking in hushed tones, while Dad said nothing and stared at the floor and Mum curled on her wide bed, faced towards the window, silent and still. Malcolm spent his days on the hillside, so that he didn’t have to see that he wasn’t enough for his mother, and that she couldn’t survive without her littlest boy.
In mid-November, he was sheltering from a storm in the hollow tree that had once been a castle. Rain beat heavily on the tarpaulin, but it was only rain and nothing more. Not a shower of comets. Not sparks from a goblin’s spell. Just the hammering of water from a black-grey sky, whipped by the wind into freezing bullets that shattered and bled into the ground below. It was a lonely place, but it was a place where a boy could cry his heart out without fear of being overheard.
He had cried so long and so hard that it had become the only sound in the world, and so he almost didn’t hear the small whimper from the other side of the oilcloth flap that kept the world outside. For a moment, Malcolm thought it was a trick of the wind. But when the sound came again, he was ready for it, hand poised to peel back the makeshift door in search of its source.
It was a dog. Framed against the downpour and the louring sky, its thick chestnut coat was dark and heavy with rainwater, matted with neglect and months upon months without love. Waterlogged mud had puddled around its flanks and its head hung low, shivering with the cold. But Malcolm’s heart had frosted over since the summer.
“Go away,” he said, with a flick of a tearstained hand. “I don’t want a dog anymore.”
The dog whimpered and shuffled on its haunches, one paw padding at the ground. A shuffle forwards, and it turned its stare on Malcolm, doe-eyed and liquid with sadness. There was warmth in the gaze, even in the bleak November mist: a warmth that called Malcolm a liar.
“All right, then,” he muttered. “You can come in. But only for a little while.”
He held the flap up and the dog crawled in beside him, settling at his side and dropping its head into Malcolm’s lap. Malcolm’s hand hovered over the rank red fur that pressed flat and wet against its skull, and he let loose a shaky breath that misted in the damp air in front of his face. Tears were impossible with an audience.
“What a good dog you are,” he said softly. “You’re a good dog, aren’t you? Maybe you could come home with me when the rain stops.”
The dog wouldn’t be persuaded to follow Malcolm back to the little house at the foot of the hills that night. But the next day, when Malcolm rounded the copse at the top of the tor, it was waiting for him, thick tail smacking the ground with enthusiasm. Malcolm tried not to be pleased.
“Oh, you’re back, are you?” he said. “Are you hungry?”
Dog was a good dog. Dog would fetch sticks or gloves or forgotten tennis balls from the clutches of brambles. Dog would streak through dead leaves like a rocket, red on red, scattering them like confetti for Malcolm to gather and bundle into the air around them. Dog would roll in mud and chase boats made of twigs as they careened down a lonely stream; Dog would yip and holler as startled birds scattered from the barren treetops. Dog would paw at freshly fallen snow and lose his footing on patches of ice that caught at booted feet as they scrambled through great drifts of white. Dog would run at Malcolm’s side like a shadow, and gaze at him with adoring eyes, and Malcolm found himself doing something he’d never expected to do again.
He laughed.
Just a little one at first. Hardly a laugh at all: an uncertain hiccup, bubbling up from somewhere long forgotten and taking him by surprise. But something had shifted, and, as the winter drew on, the laugh grew stronger. It wasn’t the way he used to laugh, but maybe that was all right too: a trill of something that felt like happiness used to feel, and Dog yipped in time with the sound, whirling and wagging his tail. The laugh followed them like a flash of sunlight as they raced across the frozen hillside, and when they paused for breath, Dog leaping big paws onto Malcolm’s shoulders to lick his face, the world seemed just a little bit warmer.
Malcolm was laughing again.
But Christmas was coming.
“Dog, you never met my brother,” said Malcolm one evening in the tarpaulin shelter, as sleet streaked down around them. “He was my little brother. He got hit by a car in the summer.”
Dog whimpered softly and nudged his head against Malcolm’s hand, tongue darting between his teeth to lick at a gloved wrist. Dog understood. Dog was so clever.
Malcolm’s fingers scratched at the russet-coloured fur. “It’s not fair, Dog. He was only little. He loved Christmas. He shouldn’t have to not have Christmas anymore.”
But Dog just whimpered again and licked Malcolm’s face.
In the end, they found the stick together: the perfect throwing stick, but Dog didn’t want to play fetch. He dropped the stick at Malcolm’s feet and looked up at him with eyes that waited for Malcolm to understand.
“Clever dog,” said Malcolm at last. “It’s a ray-gun, isn’t it? It’ll make a brilliant ray-gun. It just needs a bit of work…”
Not a lot of work, not really. Just a scrape here and there with a Swiss army knife, and the word MATTHEW engraved on the side. They gave it to him on Christmas Eve, Dog and Malcolm, sitting quietly side by side in the tarpaulin shelter, as a dusting of snow wound down from the black skies above.
That night, the fairy queen found her way back down the stairs to sit in front of the fire with a blanket around her shoulders and a far-off look in her face. Malcolm curled into a wingback chair and hid his face against the flame-warmed fabric, but when he looked up, he saw his mother’s eyes were fixed on his, dark behind their clouds of loss, but clear enough to let him know that she could see her biggest boy once more. And when her lips trembled upwards into an uncertain smile, and she asked Malcolm where his adventures had taken him that day, he only hesitated for a second before he told her.
In the morning, when he went back to the tarpaulin castle, the ray-gun was gone.
Dog appeared less often as winter drew to a close and spring began to struggle through the frozen ground, and each time he came back he looked a little bit different. He was there on Matthew’s sixth birthday, his coat shining and healthy and free of tangles, his bones better covered than Malcolm remembered. They ran wild in the hills again, where a hundred worlds were returning to life in pockets of fragrant white and yellow, until they fell, exhausted, on their sides in the new grass. For a while it was enough to just roll over and pant and stare at the sky, at the clouds that were building labyrinths of cotton wool, but a thought had been building in Malcolm’s mind. It was a quiet thought, a lonely thought that didn’t want to be spoken, but it came out just the same.
“Dog,” he said slowly, after a moment, “I think you’ve found somewhere else to live. You look like someone’s looking after you now. And you’re hardly ever here.”
But Dog just rolled over and licked Malcolm’s face. The blue skies above glistened in his eyes.
They careened down hillsides together, Malcolm’s arms outstretched to see if he could run fast enough to fly. They found fragments of eggshells, downy feathers, river-washed pebbles so bright they might be gemstones. And when the rain fell, they rode to their tarpaulin stronghold with pockets full of treasures: a boy and his dog, lords of the realm.
They parted in the evening; Dog still wouldn’t come home. Malcolm watched him disappear into the April night in a hazy streak of red, and, for a moment, he almost called him back. The words rose up in his throat like the panic in a nightmare, the way it feels when the world’s about to shift before you’re ready. But that was ridiculous. There was always an undiscovered world for tomorrow, and at least he wasn’t alone.
Mum and Dad were waiting for Malcolm in the kitchen when he pushed open the back door, stove lit and kettle bubbling on the hob. The fairy queen was smiling again, and a little glint of sunshine was in her face as she drew Malcolm into a tight hug and told him a brand new story. There were no witches or wizards, no pirates or aliens or death-defying quests, but there was courage, and there was hope, and there was a little bit of magic. Sometimes, that was the best kind of story of all.
Malcolm’s brother was born that summer, with a mop of shaggy red hair and eyes that were bluer than an August sky.
And Dog never returned.
