The Man in the Moss (67 page)

           
He glanced at the girl in the Jesus sweatshirt. Her eyes
were glazed and unfocused. She had a certain look Willie had seen before, but
usually on people who were on something.

           
High. She was high on God.

           
As he watched, slow tears rolled down her white cheeks.

           
The hymn soared on. Joel Beard stood in his pulpit,
apparently soaring with it, eyes closed and palms upturned. Willie thought of
his mother, now lying in a chapel of rest in Macclesfield. How was he supposed
to make funeral arrangements when the service would have to be conducted by
this pillock?

           
The drum machine stopped and then the organ trailed away,
but the voices went on, and the words were no longer trite, no longer actually
made any sense. Were, in fact, no longer what you might call words.

           
Willie listened to the girl.

           
'Holia ... holia ... amalalia ...
awalah ... gloria ...hailolalala ...'

           
He was bewildered. All around him voices rose and fell
and rose and swelled, ululating together in a strange, enveloping coda.

           
Everyone singing different words.

           
'Ohyalala ... holy
... holy ... malaya ... amala . . '

           
He looked up at Joel, presiding Angel, and Joel was
smiling, with his eyes closed.

           
For a while Willie closed his own eyes and was at once carried
away on it, drifting, aware that his fingers were stretching, feeling as if
they were coming directly out of his wrists, nerves extending. His fingers
moved very lightly against his thigh, sometimes not quite touching it.

           
Something fluttering like a small bird in his own chest
and rising into his throat.

           
'Mayagalamata ...'

           
That was
me.

           
Willie stopped, stood very still for a moment, opening
his eyes and taking in the scene. All those upturned palms. All those eyes,
closed or glazed.

           
He sighed and slid quietly out of the pew and down the
aisle to the church door. It was bolted, but nobody heard him draw back the
bolts and slip out into the teeming rain.

           
Standing in a spreading puddle at the edge of the porch,
Willie looked up at where Our Sheila used to hold open her pussy. He closed his
eyes against the cold dollops of rain.

           
'Speaking in tongues,' he muttered. 'Speaking, chanting,
singing in tongues.'

           
Language of the angels. Open up your hearts to God and
He'll fill your mouth with rubbish.

'It's a block,' he said to
Milly Gill and Ernie Dawber. 'They're blocking everything out. They're
surrounding um selves with sound and emotion. But it's like blanket emotion -
you feel good, you feel you're being drawn into something. It's just like candyfloss.
You know what I mean? Like ... psychic candyfloss.'

           
Ernie couldn't remember when he'd heard such a long
speech from Willie Wagstaff. Always such a shy lad, in and out of class. You
kept forgetting he was Ma's son and therefore, even in a Goddess-oriented
society, he must have picked up a few tips.

           
'It's stirring things up, though,' Milly said. 'And
that's not good at All Hallows. You've got to be very careful at All Hallows.'

           
'We probably asked for it,' Willie said. 'Whole
congregation going on strike like that.'

           
'He provoked it,' Milly said. 'He destroyed things dear
to us. He provoked us. Were we supposed to sit there and listen to his pious
ramblings after that?'

           
'Perhaps,' Ernie said reasonably, 'that was what he
wanted to do. Provoke a confrontation. It's no great secret, if you know what
you're looking for, that the religious practices in Bridelow are not as
elsewhere. His brand of Christianity views it with very serious disapproval,
not to say abject horror.'

           
'Hans could've said no to him,' Milly Gill said, 'Hans
could've said he didn't want a curate.'

           
'Hans was a sick man, Millicent. He
did
need the help. And Bridelow does change people, you know.
Straightened out, a lad like Beard could even be an asset. It's just everything
happened so quickly. Left on his own in what he sees as an evil, pagan parish …
The way he is now, everything's either black or white. Which is what Ma warned
me about. Beware of black, she said, and beware of white.'

           
'Aye,' Willie said. 'But where's the black corning from?'

           
'Mr Beard thinks we're the black,' Milly said.

           
Ernie almost smiled. There she was in one of her endless
wardrobe of floral dresses sitting on her flower-patterned sofa with her flower
pictures on the walls, bundles of dried flowers and herbs dangling from the
beams. She was life, she was colour. Flowers were all the children she'd never
had.

           
Even if the flowers were wilting.

           
'You keep saying that,' Willie almost snapped.
'"He's God, we're Satan". You're avoiding the bloody issue. There
is
bad here. Real bad. Ma saw it coming,
and we all said, Ah, poor old woman's off her trolley. We ignored the signs.
Look at that bloody tree as suddenly appears out on t'Moss. Did anybody really
check that thing out?'

           
'I never go on the Moss,' Ernie admitted.

           
'No, you don't, Mr Dawber. You like t'rest of us - we
can't turn it into allotments, so we ignore it. And when somebody like Matt
comes back and he looks out there and he says,
Thai's where we're from
... Well, we pat him on the back; we know
he'll settle down. That's the trouble, see, we've all bloody
settled down
... even the Mothers've
settled down. This is not a place you can totally settle down, you've always
got to keep an eye open and perhaps Ma was the last one who did.'

           
It's a balancing
act,
Ernie Dawber heard in his head, Ma nagging him again. Willie was
right. Even this morning, going up to find Liz Horridge, he was telling her to
go away, leave me alone, Ma, get off my back.

           
'I were out there,' Willie said, 't'other morning. Wi'
t'dog. Young Benjie kept going on at me - "Oh, there's a dragon out there,
Uncle Willie." "Nay," I said, "it's bog oak." But I
went out t'ave a look, just to satisfy him, like. Dog come wi' me ... and
he
knew what it were about. And what did
I do? I buggered off sharpish. I dint listen to t'dog and I made fun of Ma. I
made fun of Ma over Matt's coffin and the witch bottle - scared stiff she'd ask
me
to do it. I dint mind helping
pinch t'bogman back, bit of a lark, that were. But opening Matt's coffin ...'

           
Willie shuddered. 'Wimp,' he said. 'That's me.'

           
'She was right,' Milly said. 'Matt wasn't protected. We
were putting him in as the Man's guardian. What use is a guardian without a
sword?'

           
As usual, Ernie Dawber, schoolteacher, man of words, man
of science, was floored by the exquisite logic of all this.

           
'Who ... was it?' he asked delicately. 'Who dug them up?'

           
Milly's sigh was full of despair, 'I can't begin to
guess, Mr Dawber. So many signs. We could see them, but we couldn't see a
pattern. I've been praying to the Mother for a pattern. Can't seem to get
through, even to meself. It's like all the wires are crossed. Or there's a
fog.'

           
'There's a fog in the church,' Willie said. 'They're
making one. White fog. You can't get through because it's like all your lines
of communication've been pulled down. The holy well, the church. Ma. It's like
the white and the black have joined forces to crush us.'

           
'And what are we supposed to do?' There was no colour in
Milly's cheeks. 'What can we do when we're so weakened, and we don't know who
we're fighting or why?'

           
Ernie Dawber thought, So many sad, bewildered, frightened
people. An invisible enemy. An ancient culture feebly fighting for its soul.

           
He noticed that all of Willie's fingers lay motionless on
his knees.

           
'You know what I think,' Ernie said calmly, 'I think we
need another sacrifice.'

CHAPTER
IV

Milly Gill shifted on the
sofa. It creaked.
           
'Eh?'
           
Ernie Dawber smiled in a
resigned sort of way. He was sitting on a straight-backed chair, still wearing
his old gaberdine mac, his hat on his knees.

           
'I don't know the story of the Man in the Moss,' he said,
'any more than anybody does. Some say he came all the way from Wales, or even
Ireland. That he was sent as a sacrifice. Well, that seems likely, but we don't
really know for certain
why
he was
sacrificed.'

           
Willie said, 'I thought...' Then he shut up.
           
'Some historians speculate it
was to keep the Romans at bay,' said Mr Dawber. 'But we don't
know
that. And in the end the Romans
weren't so bad. They were a relatively civilized people. Bit stiff and starchy,
like Joel Beard, but nowt wrong with them really. They taught us how to build
proper roads and walls and useful things like that, but I like to think we
taught them a lot as well.'
           
'We?' said Willie.

           
'The Celts. The earliest real civilization in Europe.
Cultured, spiritual. Knew how to fight when it was needed, but not military
like the Romans. The Celts never sought to impose order, only to recognise the
order that existed around them. And the moods of nature and the atmosphere.
"Shades of things," Ma said.'

           
'Aye,' said Willie, remembering. 'Shades of things.'
           
'Moderation,' said Mr Dawber.
'Equality. Respect for each other, nature, animals. For religions. A simple,
logical philosophy and one I've tried to pass on to generations of schoolkids,
just like my forefathers did. And do you know ...'

           
'Aye,' Willie said, it worked. It always worked. Kids
leave school, bugger off to the cities, rebel against their parents and their
parents' values and that. But there's summat about Bridelow. What we learned
here, we didn't reject. I suppose ... 'cause it was so
different
. Radical, like, in its quiet way.'

           
'Little island, Willie. Sacred island of the Celts.
Little island of moderation in an ocean of extremes. Takes some protecting
that. A balancing act.'

           
Mr Dawber turned his hat round on his knees. He's
nervous, Willie thought.

           
'I've written a new edition of
The Book of Bridelow
. What you might call the unexpurgated edition.
Just for me own benefit really. Just to reason things out. You'll find it in a
blue typing paper box on top of the big bookcase in my study.'

           
Willie said, 'Why're you telling us that?'

           
'Maybe it should be printed. Just one copy, to be kept in
safekeeping, for posterity. As a reminder of how Bridelow was and
why
it was what it was. To look back on
when everything's changed, when the outside world's absorbed us.'

           
Willie looked hard at the stately old chap, trying to
remember what Mr Dawber had been like when he was young, when he'd taught him
for four years. He couldn't.

           
He glanced at Milly, who was silent, pensive. 'Mr
Dawber,' he said, 'why are you telling us now?'

           
'You see, that's the obvious explanation to me,' said Mr
Dawber, looking down at his hat. 'That's what he died to save. Not to prevent
anything as transient as another Roman invasion. He died to protect a way of
life, a whole attitude. The Celtic way. Something worth dying for, don't you
think?'

           
'Happen,' Willie said cautiously.

           
'I think I'd like to die for that,' said Mr Dawber.

           
Milly Gill leaned forward on the floral sofa and lifted
one of his liver-spotted hands from his hat brim. 'What are you trying to say,
Mr Dawber?'