The Man in the Moss (9 page)

CHAPTER
I

OCTOBER

With the rain hissing
venomously in their faces, they pushed the wheelchair across the cindered track
to the peat's edge, and then Dic lost his nerve and stopped.

           
'Further,' Matt insisted.
           
'It'll sink, Dad. Look.'
           
Matt laughed, a cawing.

           
Dic looked at his mother for back-up. Lottie looked away,
through her dripping hair and the swirling grey morning, to where the houses of
Bridelow clung to the shivering horizon like bedraggled birds to a telephone
wire.

           
'Mum ... ?'

           
In the pockets of her sodden raincoat, Lottie made claws
out of her fingers. She wouldn't look at Matt, even though she was sure - the
reason she'd left her head bare - that you couldn't distinguish tears from
rain.

           
'Right.' Abruptly, Matt pushed the tartan rug aside.
'Looks like I'll have to walk, then.'

           
'Oh, Christ, Dad . .

           
Still Lottie didn't look at the lad or the withered man
in the wheelchair. Just went on glaring at the village, at the fuzzy outline of
the church, coming to a decision. Then she said tonelessly, 'Do as he says, Dic.'
           
'Mum . .

           
Lottie whirled at him, water spinning from her hair.
'Will you just bloody well
do it
?'

           
She stood panting for a moment, then her lips set hard.
She thought she heard Dic sob as he heaved the chair into the mire and the dark
water bubbled up around the wheels.

           
The chair didn't sink. It wouldn't sink. It wouldn't be
easy to get out, even with only poor, wasted Matt in there, but it wouldn't
sink.

           
Maybe Matt was hoping they wouldn't have to get it out.
That he'd be carried away, leaving the chair behind, suspended skeletally in
the Moss, slowly corroding into the peat or maybe preserved there for thousands
of years, like the Bogman.
           
'Fine,' Matt said. 'That's ...
fine. Thanks.'
           
The chair was only a foot or
so from the path, embedded up to its footplate in Bridelow Moss. Dic stood
there, tense, arms spread, ready to snatch at the chair if it moved.

           
'Go away, lad,' Matt said quietly. He always spoke
quietly now. So
calm
. Never lost
his
 
temper, never - as Lottie would have
done - railed at the heavens, screaming at the blinding injustice of it.

           
Stoical Matt. Dying so well.

           
Sometimes she wished she could hate him.

It was Sunday morning.

           
As they'd lifted Matt's chair from the van, a scrap of a
hymn from the church had been washed up by the wind-powered rain, tossed at
them like an empty crisp-packet then blown away again.

           
They'd moved well out of earshot, Lottie looking around.
           
Thinking that on a Sunday
there were always ramblers, up from Macclesfield and Glossop, Manchester and
Sheffield, relishing the dirty weather, the way ramblers did. If it belonged to
anybody, Bridelow Moss belonged to the ramblers, and they made sure everybody
knew it.

           
But this morning there were none.

           
The bog, treacle-black under surface rust, fading to a
mouldering green where it joined the mist. And not a glimmer of anorak-orange.

           
As if, somehow, they knew. As if word had been passed
round, silently, like chocolate, before the ramble: avoid the bog, avoid
Bridelow Moss.

           
So it was just the three of them, shadows in the filth of
the morning.

           
'Go on, then,' Matt was saying, trying to pump humour
into his voice. 'Bugger off, the pair of you.'

           
Lottie put out a hand to squeeze his shoulder, then drew
back because it would hurt him. Even a peck on the cheek hurt him these days.

           
It had all happened too quickly, a series of savage
punches coming one after the other, faster and faster, until your body was
numbed and your mind was concussed.

           
I don't think I
need to tell you, do I, Mrs Castle.

           
That he's going to die? No. There
were signs ... Oh, small signs, but ... I wanted him to come and tell you weeks
... months ago. He wouldn't. He has this ... what can I call it ... ? Fanatical
exuberance? If he felt anything himself, he just overrode it. If there's
something he wants to do, get out of his system, everything else becomes
irrelevant. I did try, doctor, but he wouldn't come.

           
Please - don't blame yourself. I
doubt if we'd have been able to do much, even if we'd found out two or three
months before we did. However, this business of refusing medication . .
     
Drugs.

           
It's not a dirty word, Mrs Castle.
If you could persuade him, I think ...

           
He's angry, doctor. He won't take
anything that he thinks will dull his perceptions. He's ... this is not
anything you'd understand ... he's reaching out for something.

'Go on,' Matt said. 'Get in
the van, in the dry. You'll know when to come back.'

           
And what did he mean by
that?

           
As they walked away, the son and the widow-in-waiting,
she saw him pull something from under the rug and tumble it out into his lap.
It looked, in this light, like a big dead crow enfurled in its own limp wings.

           
The rain plummeted into Mart's blue denim cap, the one he
wore on stage.

           
Dic said, 'He'll catch his dea—'

           
Stared, suddenly stricken, into his mother's eyes.

           
'I don't understand
any more
,' he said, panicked. 'Where he is ... I've lost him. Is that ... I
mean, is it any place to be? In his state?'

           
'Move.' Lottie speaking in harsh monosyllables. 'Go.' The
only way she could speak at all. Turning him round and prodding him towards the
van.

           
'Is it the drugs? Mum, is it the drugs responsible for
this?'

           
Lottie climbed into the van, behind the wheel. Slammed
the door with both hands. Wound the window down, keeping the rain on her face.
She said nothing.

           
Dic clambered in the other side. He looked more like her
than Matt, the way his dark red hair curled, defying the flattening rain. Matt
didn't have hair any more, under his blue denim cap.

           
'Mum?'

           
'No,' Lottie said. 'There's no drugs. Listen.'
           
It was beginning.

           
Faint and fractured, remote and eerie as the call of a
marsh bird, familiar but alien - alien, now, to
her
.
           
But not, she was sure, to the
Moss.
           
She saw that Dic was crying,
helpless, shoulders quaking.
           
An aggressive thing, like
little kids put on: I can't cope with this, I
refuse
to cope ... take it away, take it
off
me.

           
She couldn't. She turned away, stared hard at the
scratched metal dashboard, blobbed with rain from the open window.

           
Because she didn't understand it either. Nor, she was sure,
was she meant to. Which hurt. The sound which still pierced her heart, which
had been filtered through her husband, like the blood in his veins, for as long
as she'd known him and some years before that.

           
It had begun. For the last time?
           
Please, God.

           
She looked out of the window-space, unblinking, cheeks
awash.

           
Fifty yards away, hunched in the peat, bound in cold
winding-sheets of rain, the black bag under his arm like a third lung ...

           
... Matt Castle playing on his pipes.

           
Eerie as a marsh bird, and all the birds were silent in
the rain.

           
The tune forming on the wind and falling with the water,
the notes pure as tears and thin with illness.

           
Dic rubbed his eyes with his fingers. 'I don't know it,'
he said. 'I don't know this tune.' Petulant. As if this was some sort of
betrayal.

           
'He only wrote it ... a week or so ago,' Lottie said.
'When you were away. He said ...' Trying to smile. 'Said it just came to him.
Actually, it came hard. He'd been working at it for weeks.'

           
Lament for the Man, he'd called it. She'd thought at
first that that was partly a reference simply to their pub, The Man I'th Moss,
adrift on the edge of the village, cut off after all these years from the
brewery.

           
But no. It was another call to
him
, wherever he was. As if Matt was summoning his spirit home.

           
Or pleading for the Man to summon him. Matt.

           
'I can't stand this,' Dic said suddenly. Dic, who could
play the pipes too, and lots of other instruments. Who was a natural - in his
blood too, his dad more proud than he'd ever admit, but not so proud that he'd
encouraged the lad to make a profession of it.

           
'Christ,' said Dic, 'is this bloody suicide? Is it his
way of ...?'

           
'You know him better than that.' Figuring he just wanted
a row, another way of coping with it.

           
'It's not as if he's got an audience. Only us.'

           
'Only us,' Lottie said, although she knew that was wrong.
Matt believed - why else would he be putting himself through all this? - that
there had to be an audience. But, it was true, they were not it.

           
'All right, what if he dies?' Dic said sullenly,
brutally. 'What if he dies out there now?'

           
Lottie sighed. What a mercy that would be.

           
'What I mean is ... how would we even start to explain
... ?'

           
She looked at him coldly until he subsided into the
passenger seat.

           
'Sorry,' he said.

           
The piping was high on the wind, so high it no longer
seemed to be coming from the sunken shape in the wheelchair, from the black
lung. She wondered if any people could hear it back in Bridelow. Certainly the
ones who mattered wouldn't be able to, the old ones, Ma Wagstaff, Ernie Dawber.
They'd be in church. Perhaps Matt had chosen his time well, so they wouldn't
hear it, the ones who might understand.
           
Dic said, 'How long ... ?'

           
'Until he stops. You think this is easy for me, Dic? You
think I believe in any of this flaming stupid ... Oh, my God!'

           
The piping had suddenly sunk an octave, meeting the
drone, the marsh bird diving, or falling, shot out of the sky.

           
Lottie stopped breathing.

           
And then, with a subtle flourish of Matt's old panache,
the tune was caught in mid-air, picked up and sent soaring towards the horizon.
She wanted to scream, either with relief and admiration ... or with the most
awful, inexcusable kind of disappointment.

           
Instead she said, briskly, 'I'm going to call Moira tonight,
I've been remiss. I should have told her the situation. He wouldn't.'
           
Dic said, 'Bitch.'

           
'That's not fair.' He was twenty, he was impulsive,
things were black and white. She leaned her head back over the seat. 'I can
understand why she didn't want to get involved. OK, if she'd known about his
illness she'd have been down here right away, but at the end of the day I don't
think that would have helped. Do you?'

           
The end of the day. Funny how circumstances could throw
such a sad and sinister backlight on an old cliché.