The Man in the Moss (4 page)

           
He was taller but slighter than his father, who used to
stand, legs apart, in front of the fireplace, lighting his pipe, belching
dragon's breath and making it seem as if the room had been built around him.
When Arthur Horridge spoke, the walls had closed in, as if the very fabric of
the building was paying attention.

           
'The w-w-w-worst thing about all this ...' Shaw's thin
voice no more emphatic than the tinkling of the chandelier when a window was
open, ' ... is that when der-der-Dad wanted to expand ter-ten years ago, the
bank wouldn't back him, and now . ..'

           
'We'll ride it,' Liz Horridge told him firmly. 'We always
have. We've got twenty-three people depending on us for an income.'

           
'Ter-ter-too many,' said Shaw. 'Fer-far ...'

           
'No!' The first time ever that she hadn't waited politely
for him to finish a sentence. 'That's
not
something your father would have said.'

           
She turned away from him, glaring out of the deep
Georgian-style window at the brewery's grey tower through the bare brown tree
trunks. Its stonework badly needed repointing, one more job they couldn't
afford.

           
'When sales were sagging,' Liz said, as she'd said to him
several times before, 'Arthur always blamed himself, and it was our belt - the
family's - that was tightened. I remember when he sold the Jag to—'

           
'It was der-different then!' Shaw almost shrieked, making
her look at him. 'There was no competition to ser-speak of. Wh-what did they
need to know about mer-mer-market forces in those days?'

           
'And it's all changed so quickly, has it, in the six
months since your father's death?'

           
'It was cher-changing ... yer-years before. He just
couldn't see it. He didn't w-want to ser-see it.'-

           
'He knew what his duty was,' Liz snapped, and her son
began to wring his hands in frustration.

           
The sun shone through the long window, a cruel light on
Shaw, the top of his forehead winking like a feeble flashlight.
           
If baldness was hereditary,
people doubtless asked, why had\ Arthur managed to keep most of his hair until
the end, while Shaw's had begun to fall out before he turned twenty?

           
Behind the anger, Liz felt the usual sadness for him,
while acknowledging that sympathy was a poor substitute for maternal pride.

           
'Mother,' Shaw said determinedly, 'listen to me. We've
ger-got to do it. Ser-soon. We've got to trim the workforce. Ser-ser-some of
them have ger-got to go. Or else ...'

           
'Never,' said Liz Horridge. But she knew that such
certainty was not her prerogative. Shaw was the owner of the Bridelow Brewery
now. He glared mutinously at her, thin lips pressed tight together, only too
aware of how much authority he lost whenever he opened them.

           
'Or else what?' Liz demanded. 'What happens if we don't
trim the workforce?'

           
She looked down at herself, at the baggy jeans she wore,
for which she was rather too old and a little too shapeless these days.
Realising why she was wearing the jeans. Spring cleaning.
           
An operation which she would,
for the first time, be undertaking alone, because, when Josie had gone into
hospital, she hadn't taken on another cleaner for economic reasons. Thus
trimming her own workforce of one.

           
The ber-ber-brewery's not a charity, Mother,' Shaw said
pleadingly. 'Jim Ford says we could be out of ber-business inside a year.'

           
'Or else what?' Liz persisted.

           
'Or else we sell it,' Shaw said simply.
           
Liz laughed. 'To whom?'
           
'Ter-ter-to an outside ... one
of the big firms.'
           
'That's not an option,' Liz
said flatly. 'You know that. Beer's been brewed in Bridelow since time
immemorial. It's part of the local heritage.'

           
'And still cer-could be! Sell it as a going concern. Why
not?'

           
'And you could live with that, could you?'

           
He didn't answer. Liz Horridge was shaking with
astonishment. She faced him like an angry mother cat, narrowing her eyes,
penetrating. 'Who's responsible for this? Who's been putting these thoughts in
your head?'

           
'Ner-nobody.' But he couldn't hold her gaze. He was
wearing a well-cut beige suit over a button-down shirt and a strange leather
tie. He was going out again. He'd been going out a lot lately. He had no
interest in the brewery, and he wasn't even trying to hide this any longer.

           
'And what about the pub? Is this fancy buyer going to
take that on as well?'

           
'Ser-somebody will.' Shaw shrugged uselessly, backing
towards the door. 'Anyway, we'll talk about it later, I've got to ...'

           
'Where are you going?'

           
'I ... I'm ...' He went red and began to splutter. Pulled
out a handkerchief and blew his nose, wiped his lips. For years she'd worried
because he didn't go out enough, because he hadn't got a girlfriend (although
this had hardly been surprising). Now at last, at the age of thirty-one, he was
feebly groping for control of his own destiny ... and floundering about,
unbalancing
everything
.

           
Liz Horridge turned away from him and walked to the other
window, the one with the view of Bridelow, which summer would soon obscure. She
could see the humped but still sprightly figure of Mrs Wagstaff in the
distance, lugging a shopping basket across the cobbles to Gus Bibby's General
Stores.

           
Her breast heaved and she felt tears pumping behind her
eyes.

           
Arthur ... it's not
my fault
.

           
Mrs Wagstaff stopped in the middle of the street and -
although it was too far away for Liz to be certain - seemed to stare up through
the trees at the Hall ... at this very window.

           
As though the old girl had overheard Liz's thoughts. As
though she could feel the agony.

           
When Liz turned around, wet-eyed, she found she was
alone; Shaw had quietly left the room.

Although he'll be cool
enough when the Press and the radio and TV reporters interview him in a few
hours' time, the County Highways foreman is so shaken up right now that he has
to be revived with whisky from the JCB driver's secret flask.

           
What he's discovered will come to be known as the
Bridelow Bogman. Or the Man in the Moss. Important people are going to travel
hundreds of miles to gaze with reverence upon its ancient face.

           
'And what was your reaction when you found it?' asks one
of the reporters. 'What did you think it was?'

           
'Thought it were a sack o' spuds or summat,' the foreman
says, quotably. His moment of glory. But out of his hands soon enough - so old
and so exciting to the experts, like one of them Egyptian mummies, that nobody
else seems to find it upsetting or horrifying, not like a real body.

           
But, though he'll never admit it, the foreman reckons
he's never going to forget that first moment.

           
'And what did you think when you realised what it was?'

           
'Dunno, really ... thought it were maybe an owd tramp or
summat.'

           
'Were you shocked?'

           
'Nah. You find all sorts in this job.'

           
But that night the foreman will dream about it and awake
with a whimper, reaching for his warm missus. And then fall asleep and wake
again, his sweat all over both of them and his mind bulging with the moment he
bent down and found his hand was gripping its cold and twisted face, his thumb
between what might have been its teeth.

Part Two

From
Dawber's Book of Bridelow:

                       
The first-time visitor to Bridelow is
strongly urged to approach it from the west, from which direction a most dramatic
view of the village is attained.

                       
From a distance of a mile or two, Bridelow
appears almost as a craggy island when viewed from the narrow road which is
virtually a causeway across Bridelow Moss.

                       
A number of legends are attached to the Moss,
some of which will be discussed later in this book.

CHAPTER I

In early summer, Bridelow
hopefully dolls herself up, puts on a bit of make-up and an obliging smile for
the sun. But the sun doesn't linger. On warm, cloudless evenings like this it
saves its final pyrotechnics for the moor.

           
Sunset lures hues from the moor that you see at no other
time - sensual pinks and melodramatic mauves which turn its stiff and spiky
surface into velvet

... a delusion, thought
Joel Beard, soon to leave theological college. A red light tenderizing the face
of an old whore.

           
He had his back to the sinking sun. To him, it seemed
agitated tonight, throwing out its farewell flames in a long, dying scream. As
well it might.

           
Most of the lonely village was below the moor, and the
sun's flailing rays were missing it. The stone houses hanging from the hill
were in shadow and so was the body of the church on its summit. Only the spikes
of the church tower were dusted with red and gold.

           
Joel dismounted from his motorbike.
           
In the centre of the tower was
a palely shining disc. Like a rising full moon, it sent sneering signals to the
sun: as you fade, it promised gleefully, I'll grow ever brighter.

           
Joel glared at the village across the sullen, scabby
surface of the Moss. He imagined Bridelow under moonlight, stark and white as
crow-picked bones.
           
Its true self.

           
The disc at the centre of the tower was actually an
illuminated clock face, from which the hands had long ago fallen.
           
Often said to be a friendly
face which turned the church into a lighthouse at night, across the black ocean
of the Moss.

           
... you see, at one
time, Mr Beard, very few people dared to cross the Moss ... except those for
whom the Devil lit the way - have you heard that legend?

           
It was no legend. On a dark night, all you would see of
the village would be this silver disc, Bridelow's own, permanent full moon.

           
Was this how the Devil lit the path? Was this the Devil's
light, shining from the top of the stairs in God's house, a false beacon for
the weak, the uncertain and the disturbed?

           
Joel's black leathers straightened him, like armour, and
the hard white collar lifted his eyes above the village to the luminous moor.
Its lurid colours too would soon grow dull under the night. Like a harlot's
cheap dress.

           
From the village, across the barren Moss, he heard voices
raised, a shriek of laughter.

           
The village would be alive tonight. A new landlord had
installed himself at the decrepit local inn. The Man I'th Moss, thus saving it
from closure, a side-effect of the widely condemned sale of the Bridelow
brewery.

           
Joel waited, astride his motorbike, his charger, until
the moor no longer glowed and the illusion of beauty was gone.

           
Everyone saw shadows in the blackened cities, those
obvious pits of filth and fornication, where EVIL was scrawled in neon and the
homeless slept with the rats. And yet the source of it was up here, where
city-dwellers surged at weekends to stroll through the springy heather, picnic
among the gorse ... young couples, families, children queuing at the roadside
ice-cream vans, pensioners in small cars with their flasks of tea.