The Gift by Peter Dickinson

mustn’t do anything to push him back to being old Dad.”
    â€œBuy Super New Dad,” chanted Davy.
    â€œWith the miracle ingredient— responsibility ,” breathed Penny.
    â€œCan your Dad tell right from wrong?” intoned Davy.
    â€œNo?” asked Penny.
    â€œBut Super New Dad can,” they shouted together.
    â€œBuy Super New Dad!”
    One morning in Art Mr. Locke showed Davy’s class a lot of reproductions of abstracts by well-known painters and then told them to go and do likewise. The only rule was that there mustn’t be anything in any of the pictures that could be recognized as a picture of something. Davy hated this sort of artwork. He was fairly good at drawing animals and houses and trees, though not so good with people; but he was hopeless if he didn’t have something to work from. However, he found a sheet of fawny yellow paper in the rack, pinned it to his board, and with the side of a stick of charcoal scraped a furry darkness around the edges. Then he used the tip of the charcoal to dash a whirling squiggle into the middle of the sheet. And another. And another …
    â€œI should stop there,” said Mr. Locke quietly over his shoulder. Davy had in fact decided that already. The mess was just at that point of pressure where you thought you would yell if it got worse.
    â€œThat’s pretty, uh, interesting,” said Mr. Locke. He was a tall thin man with bloodshot eyes and an orange beard that seemed to be all part of the tangle of his long orange hair. Penny said he washed it once a year. Now he stood swaying to and fro on his heels and looking at Davy’s picture.
    â€œGiving it, uh, a title?” he said in the mumbling voice he used when he was pleased with your work.
    Davy moved away and looked at what he had done. It was not as bad as the real thing because the squiggles didn’t dart about, but they looked as though they might.
    â€œIt’s called Fury ,” he said. “It’s really a … a dream I once had—a sort of nightmare. The paper reminded me. I thought if I painted it, it might help …”
    â€œUh,” said Mr. Locke, seeming to understand. “Don’t take it off the board till you’ve fixed it or that charcoal will rub. I’ll, uh, put it in one of the frames.”
    He did so, and hung it in the passage to Assembly, so that Davy had to pass it several times a day. He couldn’t bear to look at it. The other children hardly noticed it, of course, but several of the teachers said it was disgusting and asked to have it moved. This only made Mr. Locke like it even more, so that Davy (who usually only got “Shows interest and tries hard” on his art reports) won a prize with it at the end of term.
    But that was weeks in the future now. By then the whole hideous adventure with Wolf, and Mr. Black Hat, and Monkey, and Dad, seemed to be all over.

4
    IAN
    They had a bit of luck at half term. The school closed for a week, and Dad had discovered a truck driver who spent his whole time taking loads of defective gas boilers up to a factory in Birkenhead and bringing fresh ones down. His route took him past Chester, where he dropped Penny and Davy and arranged to pick them up six days later. They caught a chugging little single-coach train down the branch line to Wrexham, where Dadda was waiting for them in the same old car. It had been a cheap journey, but slow and noisy and very tiring.
    Davy slept too late next morning to help with the milking, but he did his evening stint and thought that Bella was pleased to see him, insofar as it is possible to guess any of a cow’s slow pleasures. He stood for a while watching the pulse of her milk through the bit of glass tube at the top of the bucket.
    â€œI know that poem in Welsh, now,” he said. “I know it by heart.”
    Dadda said nothing, but smiled.
    â€œDo you know anything about Glyn Dwr?” said Davy. “I