The Man in the Moss (25 page)

           
'Hoping you were fully recovered.'
           
'Right...' she said
cautiously.

           
'And most apologetic about the abrupt termination of your
performance the other night by the inexplicable precipitation from the walls of
approximately a hundred stags' heads. Now, was that not an extraordinary thing
to happen?'

           
'Bizarre.'

           
'Several people had to be treated for minor lacerations,
and there were two broken arms.'
           
'Oh, dear.'

           
'So naturally the Earl wanted to reassure himself that
you had not been damaged in any way.'
           
'I'm fine. Just fine.'

           
'Because you seemed to have disappeared. Along with one
of his guests, a gentleman called, er, Macbeth.'

           
'Sorry,' Moira said. 'No more money.' She hung up and ran
back into the rain, black hair streaming behind her, before he could say
anything about witchy women.

The psychic thing.

           
A millstone, a fucking albatross.

           
She started the car, the eight-year-old BMW with a
suitcase in the boot, the suitcase jammed up against the Ovation guitar
steeping in its black case like Dracula in his coffin - we only come out at
night, me and that guitar, together. With sometimes devastating results.

           
The damned psychic thing.

           
If you really could control it, it would be fine. No,
forget fine, try bearable. It would be bearable.

           
But going down that old, dark path towards the
possibility of some kind of control. Well, you took an impulsive step down
there, the once, and you found all these little side-paths beckoning, tiny
coloured lanterns in the distance - follow
me
,
I'm the one.

           
You dabbled. I said
to you never to dabble.
           
The coloured lanterns, the
insistent, whispering voices.
           
The comb has not forgiven you. You have some damage to repair.

           
Yes, Mammy.

She drove well, she
thought, smoothly, with concentration. Down into England.

           
The way - many years ago, a loss of innocence ago - you
travelled to the University in Manchester for all of four months before, one
night, this local folk group, Matt Castle's Band played the student union.

           
Matt on the Pennine Pipes, an amazing noise. Growing up
in Scotland, you tended to dismiss the pipes as ceremonial, militaristic.

           
Matt just blows your head away.

           
The Pennine Pipes are black and spidery, the bag itself
with a dark sheen, like a huge insect's inflated abdomen. Matt plays seated, the
bag in his lap, none of this wrestling with a tartan octopus routine.

           
'Where d'you get
these things?'
           
'Like a set, would you, luv?'

           
'I wouldn't have the nerve, Mr
Castle. They look like they'd bite.'

           
An hour and a couple of pints later he's admitting you
can't buy them. There are no other Pennine Pipes. Perhaps there used to be,
once, a long, long time ago. But now, just these, the ones he made himself.

           
How to describe the sound ...

           
Sometimes like a lonely bird on the edge of the night.
And then, in a lower register, not an external thing at all, but something
calling from deep inside the body, the notes pulled through tube and bowel.

           
'The Romans brought
bagpipes with them. The
Utriculus.
Whether
they were here before that, nobody knows
.
I like to think so, though, lass. It's important to me. I'm an English
Celt.'

           
Within a month you're singing with the band, trying to
match the pipes .. .which you can't of course, could anyone?

           
But the contest is productive: Matt Castle's Band,
fifteen years semi-professional around the Greater Manchester folk clubs, is
suddenly hot, the band offered its first nationwide tour - OK, just the small
halls and the universities, but what it could lead to ... maybe the chance -
the only chance they'll ever get at their time of life - to turn full-time
professional.

           
Only this tour, it has got to be with Moira Cairns,
eighteen years old, first-year English Lit. student. Oh, the chemistry: three
middle-aged guys and a teenage siren. No Moira and the deal's off.

           
Typically, the only pressure Matt applies is for you to
take care of your own future, stick with your studies.
'Think about this, lass. If it all comes to nowt, where does that leave
you ... ?'

           
And yet, how badly he needs you to be in the band.

           
'I can go back. I
can be a mature student.'

           
'You won't, though.
Think twenty years ahead when me and Willie and Eric are looking forward to our
pensions and you're still peddling your guitar around and your looks are
starting to fade off ...'

           
Blunt, that's Matt.

           
About some things, anyway. There was always a lot going
on underneath.

           
Moira shifted uncomfortably in her seat and caught sight
of herself in the driving mirror. Were those deep gullies under her eyes
entirely down to lack of sleep? She thought, Even five, six years ago I could
be up all night and drinking with Kenny Savage and his mates and I'd still look
OK.

           
More or less.

The further south she
drove, the better the weather became. Down past Preston it wasn't raining any
more and a cold sun hardened up the Pennines, the shelf of grey hills known as
the backbone of England.

           
Some way to go yet. Fifty, sixty miles, maybe more. If
she was halfway down the backbone of England, then Bridelow must be the
arse-end, before the Pennines turned into the shapelier, more tourist-friendly
Peak District.

           
Moira switched motorways, the traffic building up, lots
of
 
heavy goods vehicles. Like driving
down a greasy metal corridor. Then the Pennines were back in the windscreen,
moorland in smudgy charcoal behind the slip-roads and the factories. Somewhere
up there: the peat.

           
I have to do this
,
Matt had written.
It's as if my whole
career's been leading up to it. It just knocked me sideways, the thought that
this chap, the bogman, was around when they were perhaps playing the original
Pennine pipes.

           
Time swam. She was driving not in her car but in Matt's
old minibus, her last night with the band. Matt talking tersely about piping to
the Moss, how the experience released him.

           
And he'd written,
It
was as if he'd heard me playing. I don't know how to put this, but as if I'd
played the pipes and sort of charmed him out of the Moss. As if we'd responded
to something inside us both. Now that's a bit bloody pretentious, isn't it,
lass?

           
And Moira could almost hear his cawing laugh.

           
She came off the motorway and ten minutes later, getting
swept into naked countryside that was anything but green, she thought, Shit,
what am I doing here? I don't belong here. I
walked out on the guy fifteen years ago.

           
...
traitorous cow
...

           
Hadn't escaped her notice that one thing Lottie had not
done was invite her to the funeral.

           
Always a space between her and Lottie. Never was quite
the same after Moira found the nerve to get her on one side during her second
pregnancy and warn her to take it easy, have plenty of rest - Lottie smiling at
this solemn kid of nineteen, explaining how she'd carried on working until the
week before Dic was born.

           
Never was quite the same with Lottie, after the
termination and the hysterectomy.

           
The road began to climb steeply. It hadn't rained here,
but it was cold, the tops of stone walls and fences sugared with frost.

           
Jesus, I am nervous.

           
It was gone 2 p.m., the funeral arranged for 4.30.
Strange time. At this point in the year they'd be losing the light by then.

           
Her month was dry. She hadn't eaten or drunk anything
since the two aborted sips of the filthy coffee in the Lake District, and no
time now for a pub lunch.

           
The sky was a blank screen, the outlines of the hills now
iron-hard against it.

           
Lottie was jealous back then, though she'd never let it
show.

           
The countryside was in ragged layers of grey, the only
colour a splash of royal blue on the side of some poor dead sheep decomposing
by the roadside, tufts of its wool blown into a discarded coil of barbed wire.
The sky harsh, blanched, without sympathy.

           
Unquintessential England. As hard and hostile as it could
get. No water-meadows, thatched cottages or bluebell woods.

           
No reason for Lottie to be jealous. Was there? Well,
nothing happened, did it? Matt was always the gentleman.

           
Was.

           
Can't get used to this. I need to see him buried.

           
In front of her, a reservoir, stone sides, a stone tower.
Cold slate water. She followed the road across it, along the rim of the dam,
slowing for a black flatbed lorry loaded with metal kegs, the only other
vehicle she'd seen in three or four miles.
           
Across the cab, in flowing
white letters, it said,

BRIDELOW BEERS

           
The road narrowed, steepened. It was not such a good
road, erosion on the edges, holes in the tarmac with coarse grass or stiff
reeds shafting through. No houses in sight, no barns, not even many sheep.

           
And then suddenly she crested the hill, the horizon took
a dive and the ground dipped and sagged in front of her, like dirty underfelt
when you stripped away a carpet,

           
'Christ!' Moira hit the brakes.

           
The road had become a causeway. Either side of it - like
a yawning estuary, sprawling mudflats - was something she could recognize:
peatbog, hundreds of acres of it.

           
There was a crossroads and a four-way signpost, and the
sign pointing straight ahead, straight at the bog, said BRIDELOW 2, but there
was no need, she could see the place.
           
Dead ahead.

'Hey, Matt,' Moira
breathed, a warm pressure behind her eyes. 'You were right. This is something.'
           
Like a rocky island down
there, across the bog. But the rocks were stone cottages and at the high point
they sheered up into the walls of a huge, blackened, glowering church with a
tower and battlements.

           
Behind it, against a sky like taut, stretched linen,
reared the ramparts of the moor.

           
Unconscious of what she was doing until it was done, her
fingers found the cassette poking out of the mouth of the player.

           
She held her breath. There was an airbag wheeze, a
trembling second of silence, and then the piping filled up the car.

           
Moira began to shiver uncontrollably, and it shook out
all those tears long repressed.

           
She let the car find its way across the causeway.
           
On the other side was a
shambling grey building with a cobbled forecourt. The pub. She took one look at
it and turned away, eyes awash.

           
So she saw the village through tears. A cliff face
resolved into a terraced row, with little front gardens, white doorsteps,
houses divided by entries like narrow, miniature railway tunnels. Then there
were small dim shops: a hardware kind of store, its window full of unglamorous
one-time essentials like buckets and sponges and clothespegs, as if nobody had
told the owner most of his customers would now have automatic washing machines;
a fish and chip shop with some six-year-old's impression of a happy-looking
halibut painted on a wooden screen inside the window; a post office with a
stubborn red telephone box in front - British Telecom had now replaced most of
them with shoddy, American-looking phone booths, that, thankfully, had
forgotten about Bridelow.