The Man in the Moss (14 page)

After his wife had left,
they'd wheeled Mr Castle's bed into a the ward where, unless anyone was brought
in suddenly, he'd be alone, until...

           
'Until morning,' the young nurse whispered, reassuring
herself.

           
Mr Castle was sleeping. She was glad; she was still
afraid of people who were dying, who were in the actual process of it. She
wasn't yet sure how to talk to them, how to
look
at them, and the awful suspense - what it would be like, the atmosphere in this
small, comparatively quiet space, in the moment, the very second when it
happened.

           
She was never going to get used to this. She was supposed
to comfort the dying, but more often than not it was the dying who comforted her
- old ladies, all skin and bone and no hair, patting her hand, one actually
saying,
Don't worry, luv, I won't keep
you long.

           
Less bothered, it often seemed, than she was. Sometimes
it was like they were just waiting for a bus.

           
She sat at the desk by the door, under the angled,
metal-shaded lamp, the only light in the room. There were four beds in the side
ward, three of them empty. It was the only part of this hospital where you
could usually count on finding a couple of spare beds, it being the place where
terminal patients were often brought in the final stages so they wouldn't
distress other patients who were not quite so terminal.

           
Tamsin, the other nurse, a year or two older, was out on
the main ward. Sister Murtry would pop in occasionally, see if they were all
right.

           
Sister Murtry had been very firm with Mrs Castle, who was
a tall, strong-looking woman - only Sister Murtry would have dared. 'Come on
now, he needs his sleep and you need yours.'
           
... Mr Castle waking up
suddenly and chuckling in a ghastly, strangled way when she said he needed
sleep.
           
(She looked across now at his
face on the pillow; his skin was like cold, lumpy, wrinkled custard. He wasn't
so very old: fifty-seven, it said on his chart, not even elderly.)

           
'Will you be sure to ...' Mrs Castle had been in the
doorway. Sister Murtry's hands on her shoulders, pushing her out.

           
'Yes, I'll ring you myself if there's any change. But
there probably won't be, you know ... Just go and get your sleep, or we'll be
seeing you in here too ...'

           
She imagined Mrs Castle lying wide awake in a cold double
bed, waiting for the phone to ring. The wind howling outside - they lived up by
Bridelow Moor, didn't they? The wind always howled up there.

           
He was quite a famous man, Mr Castle. There'd been dozens
of Get Well cards when he was in last year for tests and things. Dr Smethwick,
the registrar, who was a folk music fan, had been thrilled to bits to have him
in. 'Pioneer of the Pennine Pipes,' she remembered him saying, and Dr Bun had
said, dry as a stick, 'Oh, he works for the Water Authority, does he?' And
she'd rushed out, scared to giggle because she was still a student then, and Dr
Smethwick was senior to Dr Burt.

           
Dr Smethwick had moved on, to a better job in Liverpool.
Now there was nobody left who knew anything about Mr Castle or the Pennine
Pipes. All he had tonight was her, and she was afraid of him because he was
dying.

           
She wondered how many folk had died here, in this small
space, over the years. Passed away, they still preferred you to say that to the
relatives. She said it to herself.

           
Passsssed...
awayyyy
. Soft, like a breath of air.

           
She jumped. Mr Castle had released a breath of air, but
it wasn't soft. It was ...
phtttt
...
like a cork popping out of a bottle or like a quiet fart (one of the regular
noises of the night here).

           
'Mr Castle ... ?' Whispering, rising rapidly to her feet
with a rustle of the uniform, bumping her head on the edge of the metal
lampshade.

           
'All right, Mr Castle ... Matt.' A hairgrip, dislodged by
the lamp, fell to the desk, she felt her hair corning loose at the back. 'I'm
here.'

           
But when she reached the bedside he was breathing
normally again - well, not
normal
normal, but normal for a man who ... for a man in his condition.

           
Holding her hair in place with one hand, the grip in her
teeth, she went into the main ward to collect her mirror from her bag.

           
Plenty breathing out here, and snoring, and a few small
moans, everything hospital-normal. Up the far end of the ward, Tamsin was
bending over Miss Wately's bed. Miss Wately the retired headmistress who
wouldn't be called by her first name, which was Eunice. Tamsin straightened up,
saw her and raised a hand to her lips, tilting her head back as if the hand
held a cup.

           
She nodded and smiled and pointed over her shoulder to
the side ward, and Tamsin nodded and held up five fingers.

           
'Ger ... yer owd bugger ...' an old man rasped in his
sleep. It was supposed to be a mixed ward but because of the attitude of
patients like Miss Wately, the men tended to be at one end and the women at the
other.
        
Best, really, at their
age.

           
No kimono-style dressing-gowns and baby-doll nighties on
this ward.

           
She found the mirror, slipped it into her pocket, went
back to the side ward and sat down, her eyes moving instinctively from bed to
bed, four beds, all empty.

           
'Moira?'

           
All
empty
.

           
'Oh!' She spun round, her hair unravelling down below her
shoulders.

           
He said, 'You've come then, eh?'

           
God help us, he was hanging over her ... like bones in
pyjamas.
           
'Mr Ca—'

           
What was holding him up? She'd seen his legs, his
muscles, wasted, gone to jelly. Been in a wheelchair for weeks and weeks.
They'd said to watch him, he might even die in the night, and here he was
standing up
, oh God, his lips all pulled
back and frozen into a ric-rictus?

           
'Tarn ...' trying to shout for the other nurse, but her
voice was so dry the name just dropped out of her mouth like a piece chewing
gum '... sin.' Hardly heard herself.

           
His eyes were far back in his head, black marbles, like
the eyes had already died.

           
Then one of his hands reached out, it was all shrivelled
and rigid, like a chicken's foot, and he started ... he started playing with
her hair, pulling it down and fingering it, looking down at it in his fingers,
mumbling,
Moira ... Moira.

           
Eventually she managed to say, 'I'm not your wife, Mr
...Mr Castle ...'

           
But remembered Sister Murtry saying, 'Her name's
Charlotte, I think.' And then, later, 'Come on, Charlotte, let's be having you,
can't stay here all night. Not good for either of you.'

           
She couldn't move. The metal bars on the bed heads made
hard shadows on the walls, the little ward was like a cage. If only Sister
Murtry would come now, bustling in, short and dynamic. Nobody Sister Murtry
couldn't handle.

           
Oh, God, this was the wrong job, she hated dying people,
their stretched skin, their awful smell, especially this one - the damp stench
of ripe, putrid earth (the grave?). She began to shiver and tried to stand up,
drawing back, away from him, but there was nowhere to go, her bottom was
pressed into the edge of the desk, and Mr Castle was still hanging over her
like a skeleton in a rotting sack and smelling of wet earth.

           
How could he smell of earth, of
outside?

           
'Tam ... sin ...' Her scream was a whisper, but her mouth
was stretched wide as his greenish chickenfoot hand whipped out and seized her
throat.

CHAPTER
V

CENTRAL SCOTLAND

The scuffed
sixteen-year-old Ovation guitar, with its fibreglass curves, was a comfort. Its
face reflected the great fire blazing on the baronial hearth.
           
'Ladies of noble birth ...'
Adjusting the microphone. 'In those days, they didn't have too much of a say in
it, when it came to husbands. This is ... thumbing an A-minor, tweaking the top
string up a fraction, '... this is the story of a woman who's found herself
betrothed to a titled guy much younger than she is. However ...' gliding over a
C, 'I doubt if we're talking toy-boys, as we know them. This is like ... nine
or ten, right?'

           
Tuning OK. 'I mean, you know, there's a limit to the
things you can get from a boy of nine or ten.'

           
No reaction. You bastard, Malcolm. And you, Rory McBain -
one day you really will be sick.

           
'Anyway, she's stuck with this kid. And she's standing on
the castle walls, watching him playing down below, working out the dispiriting
mathematics of the situation and wondering if ...'

           
Shuffling on the stool, tossing back the black wings of
her hair, the weight of it down her back pulling her upright so that she could
see the audience and the gleaming stag skulls all round. The walls of neatly
dressed stone, with spotlit banners and tapestries. The black eye-holes in the
skulls, and the eyes of the conference delegates looking, from five or so yards
away, just as opaque and unmoving.

           
'Anyway, don't expect a happy ending, OK? This is a traditional
song. You don't get many happy endings in traditional songs. It's called ...
"Lang a-growin' ".'

           
The bastard McBain would have handled this better. For
the sake of ethnic credibility, he'd do a couple of songs in the Gaelic, of
which he understood scarcely a word. What
she
had
 
these days was a different kind of
credibility: sophistication, fancy nightclub ethnic, low and sultry vocals,
folk tunes with a touch of jazz guitar, strictly rationed to what she could
handle without fracturing a fingernail.

           
'He's young ...' Hearing her own voice drifting vacuously
on the air, the words like cigarette smoke. '... but he's daily .. . growin'
...'

           
Over an hour ago, she'd called Lottie's number. A guy
answered, obviously not the boy, Dic. The guy'd said Lottie was at the hospital
in Manchester. Muffled voices in the background - this was a pub, right? She'd
asked no more questions. She'd call back.

           
The hospital. In Manchester. Oh, hell.

           
The Great Hall was huge, the acoustics lousy. When the
song was over, applause went pop-pop-pop like a battery of distant shotguns.
The stags' heads gathered grimly below the ceiling, so many that the antlers
looked to be tangled up.
           
'Splendid,' she heard the Earl
call out magnanimously. How many wee staggies did you pop yourself, my lord,
your grace, whatever? Maybe you invited members of the Royal Family to assist.
Traditional, right?

           
Moira did a bit of fine tuning on the guitar. She was
wearing the black dress and the cameo brooch containing the stained plaid
fragment that was reputed to have been recovered from a corpse at Culloden.
Credibility.

'This song ... You may not
know the title, most of you, but the tune could be slightly familiar. It's...
the lament of a girl whose man's gone missing at sea and she waits on the shore
accosting all the homecoming fishermen as they reach land.
           
The song's called "Cam Ye
O'er Frae Campbelltoon". It's, er, ... it's traditional.'

           
Traditional my arse. Me and Kenny Savage wrote it, still
half-pissed, at a party in Kenny's flat in 1982 - like, Hey, I know ... how
about we invent a totally traditional Celtic lament ...

           
She told them, the assembled Celts, 'The chorus is very
simple ... so feel free to join in ...'

           
And, by Christ, they
did
join in. Probably with tears in their eyes. All these Scots and Irish and Welsh
and Bretons and the folk from the wee place up against Turkey ... writers and
poets and politicians united in harmony with a phoney chorus composed amidst
empty Yugoslav Riesling bottles at the fag end of Kenny Savage's Decree
Absolute party in dawn-streaked Stranraer.