The Man in the Moss

CHAPTER I

Across the border, heading south, Moira ignored all the big blue signs beckoning her towards the M6. Motorways in murky weather demanded one-track concentration; she had other roads to travel.

You should take a rest, Moira. The Duchess. Unravel yourself.

Well, sure, nothing like a long drive to a funeral for some serious reflection ... for facing up to the fact that you were also journeying - and who knew how fast? - towards your own.

The countryside, getting rained on, glistening drably, looked like it also was into some heavy and morose self-contemplation. It was almost like she'd left Scotland and then doubled back: there were the mountains and there were the lochs. And there also was the mist, shrouding the slow, sulky rain which made you wet as hell, very quickly.

Cumbria. She stopped a while in a grey and sullen community sliding down either side of a hill. Wandered up the steep street and bought a sour, milky coffee in a snack-and-souvenir shop. A dismal joint, but there was a table where she could spread out the map, find out where she was heading.

Many places hereabouts had jagged, rocky names. Nordic-sounding, some of them. The Vikings had been here, after the Romans quit. And what remained of the Celts? Anything?

She looked out of the cafe window at a ragged line of stone cottages with chalet bungalows, Lego-style, on the hillside behind.

She watched a couple of elderly local residents stumbling arm-in-arm through the rain.

English people.

... this guy was telling us, at the conference this afternoon, how the English are the least significant people - culturally, that is - in these islands ... mongrels ... no basic ethnic tradition.

And what the hell, Moira wondered, were New Yorkers?

Mungo Macbeth, of the Manhattan Macbeths. Could you credit it?

Moira had another go at the coffee, made a face, pushed the plastic cup away.

She sighed. Poor Macbeth. Poor glamorous, superficial Macbeth. Who, back home, through the very nature of his occupation and his connections, would likely have whole queues of mini-series starlets outside his hotel room. Who, in New York, would have been chasing not her but his lawyer, wondering if a bonestorm was an Act of God or maybe worth half a million in compensation.

But who, because this was Scotland, the old ancestral muckheap, and because of the night - the crazy, surrealistic, Celtic night - had behaved like a man bewitched.

Moira took her plastic cup back to the counter, which was classic British stained-glass - stained with coffee, congealed fat, tomato ketchup.

'On your own?' the guy behind the counter said. He was lanky, late-twenties. He had a sneery kind of voice out of Essex or somewhere. Nowhere you went these days in Britain, did the people running the tourist joints ever seem to be locals.

She said, 'We're all of us alone, pal.' And, slinging her bag over her shoulder, headed for the door.

'You didn't finish your coffee,' he called after her. 'Something wrong with it?'

'It was truly fine.' Moira held up the back of a hand. 'Got all my nail varnish off, no problem.'

About half an hour later, she surrendered to the blue signs. On the motorway the rain was coming harder, or maybe she was just driving faster into it. At a service area somewhere around Lancaster, she found a phone, stood under its perspex umbrella, called her agent in Glasgow and explained where she was.

'Previous experience, Malcolm, told me not to call until I was well on the road, or you'd instantly come up with a good reason why I wasn't to cross the border.'

'Never mind that. I have been telephoned,' Malcolm said ponderously, the Old Testament voice, 'by the Earl's man.'

Oh, shit.

'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.

The streetlamps were black and iron, old gaslamps. Maybe a man would come around at night with a pole to light them.

Well, it was conceivable. Much was conceivable here.

Moira saw an old woman in a doorway; she wore a fraying grey cardigan and a beret: she was as much a part of that doorway as the grey lintel stones.

Peat preserves, Matt had said.

Peat preserves.