The Man in the Moss

The Man in the Moss

by Phil Rickman

then ...

I

A cold midwinter fogbank lay on the Moss.

It lay like a quilt on the black mattress of the peat, and nothing moved.

Not even the village schoolteacher standing on the promontory at the end of a ragged alley of graves where the churchyard seemed to overhang the bog's edge.

Damp January was clamped across the teacher's mouth and nose like a chloroform pad. He'd only been an hour out of bed, but the cold made him tired and the sight of the Moss only made him feel colder.

It was, as he'd explained to countless generations of pupils, the biggest surviving peatbog in the North of England, a gross product of violent death and centuries of decay ... vast forests burned and torn down by the barbarian invaders ... soaring greenery slashed and flattened and transformed by time into flat, black acres bounded by the hills and the moors.

The peat was dead. But, because of its acids, the peat had the power to preserve. Sometimes fragments of the ancient dead were found in there, from iron-hard limbs of trees to the arms and legs of corpses (which were taken away by the villagers and quietly buried).

Inside his long, deeply unfashionable overcoat, the teacher suddenly shivered. Not at the thought of the corpses, but because he was waiting for the piper.

The piper on the Moss.

The sad, swollen drone, the bleak keening of a lost soul, had reached him on a sudden, spiked breeze during his habitual morning walk before school.

And he'd stopped, disquieted. The air had been still, weighted by the fog; no breeze at all except for this single, quick breath. As if it had been awoken only to carry the message that the piper was on the Moss.

This worried him, for the piping was never heard in winter.

As a rule, it came on summer evenings, when the Moss was firm and springy and the sound would be serene, rippling along the air currents, mingling with bird cries ... plaintive enough to soften the clouds.

But the piper did not come in winter.

Seeking reassurance, the teacher turned around, looking for the soft blue eye of the Beacon over the village. But the fog had closed the eye; he could not even make out the outline of the Norman church tower.

And while his back was turned, it began. A distant, drifting miasma of music. Notes which sounded ragged at first but seemed to reassemble somehow in the air and harmonize eerily with the atmosphere.

Cold music, then, with a razor-edge of bitterness.

And more. An anger and a seeping menace ... a violence, unsuppressed, which thrust and jabbed at the fog, made it swirl and squirm.

Trembling suddenly, the schoolteacher backed away from it; it was as if the fog and the frozen stillness of winter had combined to amplify the sound. And the sound made vibrant, pulsing images in his head.

It was as though the sky had been slashed and the rain bled from the clouds.

As though the cry had been physically torn from the ruptured breast of a bird in flight.

Or the morning itself had been ripped open, exposing the black entrails of another kind of night.

And then the piper himself came out of the fog with the black bladder like a throbbing tumour under one arm, and the ground exploded around him, a sound as dark as the peat under his plodding boots.

A black noise. The piper in a black mood.

'Why can't you keep away?' the teacher whispered. 'Why do you have to haunt us?'

He pulled his hat over his ears to muffle the piping and hurried away from it, back towards the church until the beacon's ghostly disc emerged from the fog and he could see the vacant smile on the face of Our Sheila who fingered and flaunted her sex on the church porch.

He rushed past her and into the church, shutting the great oak door behind him, removing his hat and clamping it to his breast, staring up at the Winter Cross, all jagged branches, blunted thorns, holly and mistletoe.

He couldn't hear the pipes any more but felt he could taste the noise - that the oozing sound had entered his ears and been filtered down to the back of his throat where it came out tasting sourly of peat.

'Doesn't mean owt, does it?' he called out to the Winter Cross. 'We'll be all right, won't we? Nowt'll change?'

And nothing would change for more than fifteen winters of fog and damp. But fifteen years in the life of a Moss was barely a blink of the eye of God, and when the Moss revealed what it had preserved ... then the changes would come, too many, too quickly and too horribly.

And the teacher, in retirement, feeling the kiss of the eternal night, would remember the first time the piper had appeared on the Moss in winter.

Meanwhile, later that week, the fog would lift and there would be snow.

then ...

II

They were all around her at the stage door, like muggers in the night. She could smell the sweat and the beer ... and a sour scent, like someone's rancid breath, squirting out of the darkness and straight to the back of her throat.

Coughing. Coughing at nothing. For as long as she could remember, hostility had occasionally come to her like this ... like a single, piercing puff from a poisoned perfume spray.

But nothing there, really.

There were maybe twenty of them, but it was mostly OK, wasn't it? Mostly warm wishes and appreciation? Just never happened to her before. One of them had his jacket off, eyeing her. He was grinning and mumbling.

'Sign your what?' she said.

'Get used to it, lass.' Matt Castle grinning too. 'This is only the start of it. For you.'

Now the guy was rolling up a chequered shirt sleeve in the sub-zero night, handing her this thick black felt-tip pen.

'Oh, your arm.' She tried to smile, printing her name all the way up the soft, hairless underside of his forearm.

Moira Cairns.

Usually it would be just a handful of enthusiasts, harmless as train-spotters, chattering learnedly about the music and mainly to Matt. Dropping away as they headed for the car park. Shouting, See you again ... stuff like that, mostly to Matt.

You should be loving this, hen, she told herself. Real fans. Can you believe that? You're a star.

Willie and Eric were loading the gear into Matt's old minibus, wanting to be away - more snow on the way, apparently. Two girls in leather jackets held open the back doors for the tea chest Willie kept his hand-drums in.

She felt it again, back of her throat. Nearly choked on it.

'Ta,' Eric said. Moira saw Little Willie sizing up the girls for future reference. Tonight, she knew, he was worried he wouldn't get home across the Moss, if the snow came down.

Matt got into the driving seat, Eric slammed the back doors and climbed in on the passenger side. One of the girls in leather - buxom piece - opened a rear side door for Willie. Willie rolled his eyes at her, gave her his most seductively innocent grin. 'See you sometime, eh?'

Moira's throat was burning up.

The girl said, 'Yeah, I'll be around.' She held on to the open door. 'Gina,' she said. The wire-caged light over the backstage exit threw a grille of shadows on to her pale, puffy cheeks.

Willie, five and a bit feet tall, liked his women big. 'Gina. Right," he said, 'I'll remember.'

The first sparse snowflakes hit the wet black asphalt and dissolved. Moira, tucking her long hair down her coat collar, smiled at the girl, put out a foot to climb into the van next to

Willie.

And then the moment froze, like life's big projector had jammed.

Moira turned in time to see the girl's eyes harden, glazing over like a doll's eyes as she whirled - a big, clumsy dancer - and flung the door. Like the door was a wrecking hammer and Moira was the side of a condemned building.

Snarling, 'Traitor!' Discoloured, jagged teeth exposed. 'Fucking bitch!'

Willie had seen it. With both hands, he had pushed her back. She stumbled, fell over the kerb, the door connecting with a shuddering crunch and this girl, Gina snarling, 'Bitch...', voice as deadly cold as the grinding metal.

And then the door reopened and Willie was hauling her in and snatching it shut behind her, the girl screaming, 'Go on ... feather your own nest, fucking cow!' And beating on the panel into Moira's ear as Matt started the engine and pulled urgently away into the unheeding, desultory night traffic.

'Jesus,' Willie Wagstaff said. 'Could've had your fingers off.'

'Screw up ma glittering career, huh?' White face in the streetlight and a rasp of Glasgow giving it away that Moira was pretty damn shocked. 'Couldny play too well wi' a hook.'

Matt said mildly, 'Don't let it bother you. Always one or two. Just jealous.' The snow heavy enough now for him to get the wipers going.

'Wasny about envy.' Moira had her guitar in her arms. 'I'm no' exactly popular with your fans any more is the problem.'

'You're in good company,' Matt said. 'Look how the purists shunned Dylan when he went over to rock and roll.'

'Called me a traitorous cow.'

'Yeah, well,' Matt said. 'We've been over this.' So damned nonchalant about it. He seemed so determined she shouldn't feel bad that she felt a sight worse.

Eric, the mournful one who played fiddle and twelve-string, Eric, the mediator, the peacemaker, said, 'Weren't a bad gig though, were it?'

'Was a grand gig,' Moira said. Good enough, she thought, heartsick, to be the start of something, not the end.

Least her throat wasn't hurting so bad. The guitar case was warm in her arms. The snowflakes began to suck and cluster on the side windows as Matt drove first to Eric's house at Ashton Under Lyne, where Willie had left his Minivan. They switched the drum chest to the back of the little grey van, and Willie said, 'I won't mess about. If it's snowing like this down here it'll be thick as buggery over t'top.' He hung his arms around Moira's neck and gave her a big kiss just wide of the lips. 'Ta-ra, lass. Don't lose touch, eh?'

Then Eric kissed her too, mournfully, and by the time she got into the front seat next to Matt she was in tears, both arms wrapped around the guitar case for comfort.

'This is the worst thing I ever did, you know that. Matt?'

There was silence. Just the two of them now, for the last time. Time for some plain talking.

'Don't be so bloody daft.' Still his tone was curiously mild.

'She was right, that slag, I should have ma fingers chopped off.'

'Listen, kid.' He tapped at the steering-wheel. 'You made one sacrifice for this band when you threw up your degree course. That's it. No more. Don't owe us nowt. It's been nice - cracking couple of years, wouldn't've missed it. But you're not even twenty-one. We're owd men, us.'

'Aw, Matt...' Could anybody be this selfless?

'Gone as far as we're going. Think I want to be trailing me gear around the country when I'm sixty? No way. It's a good get-out, this, straight up. For all of us. Eric's got his kids, Willie's got his...'

Matt didn't finish the sentence, covering up the break by changing down to third, swinging sharp right and taking them through Manchester's Piccadilly: bright lights, couples scurrying through the snow. Snow was nice in the city, Moira thought. For a while. When it came by night.

Think about the snow. Because Matt's got to be lying through his teeth.

But the silence got too heavy. 'OK,' she said, to change the subject. 'What do you want to be doing?'

'Eh?'

'You said you didny wanna be trailing your gear around when you were sixty. What would you like to be doing?'

Matt didn't answer for a long time, not until they were out of the city centre.

'I'm not sure,' he said eventually. 'We're all right for money, me and Lottie. Thanks to you.'

'Matt... .' I can't stand this.

'All right. I don't know. I don't know what I want to do. But I'll tell you this much ... I know where I want to be.'

Moira waited. The snow was heavy now, but they were not too far from Whalley Range, where she lived, and it wouldn't take Matt long to get to his bit of Cheshire and Lottie.

'What I want,' he said, 'is to be out of these sodding suburbs. Want to go home.'

'Across the Moss?' The words feeling strange in Moira's mouth.

'Yeah,' Matt said.

Across the Moss. Willie and Matt would often slip the phrase to each other, surreptitiously, like a joint. Across the Moss was Over the Rainbow. Utopia. The Elysian Fields.

'Lottie likes it fine where we are. All the shops and the galleries and that. But it's not me, never was. Don't belong. No ... echoes. So. Yeah. I'm going home. Might take a year, might take ten. But that's where I'm ending up.'

Which didn't make her feel any better. Twenty years older than her and here he was, talking about ending up. Did this happen to everybody when they turned forty?

'This is Willie's village, up in the moors?'

'Yeah. And Willie stayed. Willie's got family there. My lot moved to town when I was a lad. You never get rich up there, not even the farmers. But we were happy. We were part of it. Willie's still part of it. Drops down to town to play a gig or two, get his leg ...go out with a woman.'

Moira smiled. Matt tended to be kind of proper, like a father, when they were alone.

'But he keeps going back. And his mother ... she's never spent a night away, his ma, the whole of her life.'

'Some place, huh?'

'Special place.' He was staring unblinking through the windscreen and the snow. 'It's quite lonely and primitive in its way. And the Moss - biggest peatbog in the North.'

'Really?'

'Vast. And when you get across it - it's weird - but there's a different attitude. Different values.'

'Isn't that what everybody says about the place they were brought up?'

'Do you?'

She thought about this.

'No,' she said. 'Maybe not.'

The world outside was a finite place in the thickening snow. Matt was somewhere far inside himself. Across the Moss.

She glanced at him quickly. Thickset guy, coarse-skinned. Nobody's idea of a musician. Brooding eyes the colour of brown ale. Most times you thought you knew him; sometimes you weren't so sure. Occasionally you were damn sure you didn't know him, and couldn't.

After a while she said, 'What's it called? I forget.'

'Bridelow,' Matt said in a deliberate way, rounding out all the consonants. 'Bridelow Across the Moss.'

'Right,' she said vaguely.

'Dramatic place. To look at. Never saw that till I started going back. I take the little lad up there sometimes, of a weekend. When he's older we're going to go hiking on Sundays. Over the moors.'

'Sounds idyllic. Like to see it sometime.'

'But mostly I go alone.' Matt pulled up under the streetlamp in front of the Victorian villa where Moira had her apartment.

'Me and the pipes.'

'You take the pipes?'

Bagpipes. The Northumbrian pipes, played sitting down, had been Matt's instrument. Then he'd started experimenting with different kinds of bag, made of skins and things. He called them the Pennine Pipes, claiming they'd been played in these parts since before the Romans came to Britain.

The Pennine Pipes made this eerie, haunting sound, full of a kind of repressed longing.

'Releases me,' Matt said.

She didn't want to ask him what it released him from.

'Takes it away,' Matt said.

She didn't want to ask him what it was that piping took away.

'On the Moss,' Matt said. 'Only on the Moss.'

The tips of her fingers started to feel cold.

'The Moss takes it away,' Matt said. 'The Moss absorbs it.

He switched off the engine. Snow was settling on the bonnet.

'But the Moss also preserves it,' Matt said. 'That's the only drawback. Peat preserves. You give it to the peat, and you've got rid of it, but the peat preserves it for ever.'

He turned and looked at her; she saw something swirling in his eyes and the truth exploded in her mind. Oh, Christ, don't let me taste it. God almighty, don't let it come. Was the girl, what's her name, Gina ...it was the girl, it wasny you, Matt, wasny you ... please, don't let it be you ...

In the silence, the kind which only new snow seemed to make, they looked at each other in the streetlight made brighter by the snow.

'This is it then,' Matt said flatly.

'Think I might cry again.' But she was lying now. There was the residue of something unpleasant here, something more than sadness swirling in Matt's eyes.

Matt had his door open. 'Pass us your guitar.'

'Huh? Oh. Right. Sorry.'

The street was silent, snow starting to make the three and four-storey houses look like soft furnishings. Lights shone pastel green, pink and cream behind drawn curtains. Matt took the guitar case, snowflakes making a nest in his denim cap. He pushed it back. He said, just as relaxed, just as mild and just as offhand as he'd been earlier, 'One thing I've always meant to ask. Why do you always take this thing on stage with you?'

'The guitar?'

'No, lass. The case. This old and cracked and not very valuable guitar case. You never let the bloody thing out of your sight.'

'Oh.' How long had he been noticing this? She looked at him. His eyes were hard. He'd never asked her questions; everything he knew about her she'd volunteered. Matt was incurious.

And because of that she told him.

'There's... kind of a wee pocket inside the case, and inside of that there's, like, something my mother gave me when I was young.'

He didn't stop looking at her.

'It's only a comb. Kind of an antique, you know? Very old. Too heavy to carry around in your pocket. It means a lot to me, I suppose.'

'That's your mother, the ... ?'

'The gypsy woman. Aye. Ma mother, the gypsy woman.'

She shook snow off her hair. 'They're big on good luck tokens, the gypsies. Throw'm around like beads.'

Matt said roughly, 'Don't go making light of it.'

'Huh?'

'You're trying to make it seem of no account. Traditions are important. Sometimes I think they're all we have that's worthwhile.' He propped the instrument in its stiff black case against the wide concrete base of the streetlamp.

Moira said, 'Look, you're gonny get soaked.'

He laughed scornfully, like the noise a crow makes.

'Matt,' she said, 'I'll see you again, yeh?' And she did want to, she really did. Sure she did.

He smiled. 'We'll be on different circuits now, lass. You in a suite at the Holiday Inn, me over the kitchen at the Dog and Duck. Tell you what, I'll buy all your records. Even if it is rock and roll. How's that?'

She took a step towards him, hesitant. He was only a wee bit taller than she was.

This was it. The final seconds of the last reel.

Two years in the band, building up her reputation on the back of his. Matt watching her with some pride. A touch supervisory at first, then graciously taking half a pace back until even the wee folk clubs were announcing 'The Matt Castle Band with Moira Cairns'. And a couple of times, to her embarrassment, Moira Cairns in bigger letters.

And now she was leaving. Off to London for the big money.

Traitorous bitch ...

'Matt . . It was the worst moment. She should kiss him too, but that would seem perfunctory, demeaning and pretty damn cheap.

Also, for the first time, she didn't want to go that close to him.

He'd pulled down his cap; she tried to peer under the peak, to find out what his eyes were saying.

Nothing. His eyes would show no resentment, no disappointment. She was leaving the band which had changed her life, made her name. Leaving the band just when she was starting to put something back, and Matt felt ...

He felt nothing.

Because ... Jesus...

'Did you go on the peat today?' she asked him in a very small voice, the snow falling between them. 'Did you go on the peat with the pipes? Did you let the damn peat absorb it?'

And then the projector stuttered and stalled again, images shivering on the screen of the night, and she saw him suddenly all in white. Maybe just an illusion of the snow. He was very still and framed in white. It wasn't nice. The white was frilled around him, like the musty lace handkerchiefs in the top dresser drawer at her gran's house.

And a whiff of soiled perfume.

Death?

For the first time, there was a real menace to him. Too transient to tell whether it was around him or from him. Her throat swelled. She coughed and the tears came, the wrong kind of tears. She felt the snow forming on the top of her own head; it was almost warm. Maybe she looked like that too, shrouded in white.

Matt held out his right hand and she gripped it like a lifeline, but the hand was deathly cold. She told herself, Cold hands, warm heart, yeah? And tried to pull him closer - but all the time wanting to keep him away and hating herself for that.

He dropped her hand and then put both of his on her shoulders. His arms were rigid, like girders, but she felt they were trembling, his whole body quivering with some titanic tension, something strong holding out against something potentially stronger, like a steel suspension bridge in a hurricane.

Then he said, 'Going to show me?' Voice colder than the snow.

She wanted to squirm away; she made herself remain still, trying to find his eyes. No. Please. Don't spoil this. I'll buy it. You're a selfless, self sacrificing guy. I don't want to know any more.

'This famous comb,' he said with a smile that was faintly unpleasant.

'It's no' famous,' she said quickly, almost snapping.

His brown eyes were steady. Hey, come on ...this is Matt Castle. What's he gonna do, steal it off you, snatch it out your hand and drive away?

Keep it safe. Never take it out for show ... Never treat it as a trinket or a wee souvenir. You understand, child?

No, see, all it is. He wants a link. A special moment, something between us and no one else.

You owe him. You owe him that.

You owe him nothing.

She stopped searching his eyes, didn't want to know what they might have to tell her about Matt Castle, the kindly father figure, that Matt Castle who'd said, Take your chance, grab it while you can, lass. Never mind us. We're owd men.

Dumbly, Moira laid the guitar case on the pavement in the snow and - hands shaking with the cold and the nerves - flipped up the chromium catch.

It was like opening someone's coffin.

Only the guitar lay in state. In a panic, she felt beneath the machine-heads for the velvet pouch which held the ancient metal comb.

I have to. I owe him, Mammy. I'm sorry, but I owe him.