The Man in the Moss

From Dawber's Book of Bridelow:

RELIGION (i)

Bridelow is dominated by the ancient church dedicated to Saint Bride and built upon a small rise, thought to be the remains of the 'low' or burial mound from which the village gets the other half of its name.

The tower is largely Norman, with later medieval embellishments, although there was considerable reconstruction work to this and to the main body of the church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The clock was added to the tower following a donation by the Bridelow Brewery in 1889 and was subsequently illuminated, enhancing the role of the tower as a 'beacon' for travellers lost on Bridelow Moss.

The churchyard offers a spectacular view over the Moss and the surrounding countryside, which, to the rear, gives way to a large tract of moorland, uninhabited since prehistoric days.

CHAPTER IV

During evensong, though he still didn't know quite what had happened with Matt, the Rector said a short prayer for the dying landlord of The Man I'th Moss.

Holding on to the lectern, eyes raised to the bent and woven branches of the Autumn Cross, he said carefully, 'Grant him strength, O Lord, and ... a peaceful heart.'

Not quite sure what he meant, but he felt it was the right thing to say; you learned to trust your instincts in Bridelow. Sure enough, several members of the congregation looked up at him, conveying tacit approval. Briefly, he felt the warmth of the place again, the warmth he'd always remember, a quite unexpected warmth the first time he'd experienced it.

Unexpected because, from the outside, the church had such a forbidding, fortress-like appearance, especially from a distance, viewed from the road which traversed the Moss. He remembered his first sight of the building, close on thirty years ago. Not inspiring, in those days, for a novice minister: hard and grey-black with too many spiky bits and growling gargoyles. And Our Sheila perpetually playing with herself over the porch.

This was the 1960s, when what the young clergyman dreamed of was a bright, modern church with a flat roof and abstract stained glass (after ten years it would look like a lavatory block, but in the sixties one imagined things could only get better and better.)

'Amen,' the congregation said as one. The old schoolmaster, Ernest Dawber, glanced up at the Rector and gave him a quick, sad smile.

The warmth.

Sometimes it had seemed as if the church walls themselves were heating up under the pale amber of the lights - they were old gas-mantles converted to electricity, like the scattered streetlamps outside. And at Christmas and other festivals, it felt as though the great squat pillars either side of the nave had become giant radiator pipes.

But the warmth was rarely as apparent now. The Rector wondered if it would even be noticeable any more to a newcomer. Perhaps not. He'd gone to the expense of ordering more oil for the boiler and increasing the heat level. Knowing, all the same, as he went through the motions, that it couldn't be that simple.

There'd been a draught in the pulpit today; he certainly hadn't known that here before. The draught was needle-thin but it wasn't his imagination because, every so often, the Autumn Cross would sway a little over his head, rustling.

It rustled now, as he read out the parish notices, and something touched his hair, startling him. When he reached out, his flingers found a dead leaf. It crackled slightly, reminding him of the furious flurry of leaves blasted against his study window at dusk, like an admonishment: you must not watch us ... you must turn your face away.

A strikingly cold autumn. October frost, nearly all the trees were bare. His arthritis playing up.

Giving him a hard time tonight. Difficult keeping his mind on the job, wanting only to get it over and limp back to his study - even though, since Judy's death, this had become the loneliest place of all.

'... and on Wednesday evening, there'll be a meeting of the morrismen in the Function Room at The Man, that's 7.30 ...

The congregation numbered close on seventy tonight, not a bad turnout. A few regular faces missing, including several members of the committee of the Mothers' Union, but that wasn't too surprising, they'd been here this morning. Couldn't expect anyone to attend twice, even the Mothers.

He rounded off the service with a final hymn, accompanied as usual by Alfred Beckett on the harmonium - a primitive reedy sound, but homely; there'd never been an organ In Bridelow Church, despite its size.

'Well done, lad,' Ernie Dawber said at the church door patting his shoulder. 'Keep thi chin up.' Fifteen years his senior, Bridelow born and bred, Ernie Dawber had always called him 'lad'. When the Rector had first arrived, he'd expected a few problems over his name. It had still seemed too close to the War for the locals not to be dubious about a new minister called ...

'... Hans Gruber,' the schoolmaster had repeated slowly rolling it round his mouth like a boiled sweet.

'Yes.'

'That's German, isn't it?'

Hans had nodded. 'But I was actually born near Leighton Buzzard.'

Ernie Dawber had narrowed his eyes, giving the new minister a very hard look. 'Word of advice, lad. Keep quiet about that, I should. Thing is ...' Glancing from side to side '... there's a few folks round here who're not that keen on ...' dropping his voice,'... southerners.'

The Rector said now, thinking of his lonely study, 'Come back for a glass, Ernie?'

'I don't trunk so, lad.' Ernie Dawber pulled on his hat 'Not tonight.'

'I'll never forgive you for this.'

He was gripping the stiffened edge of the sheet like a prisoner clutching at the bars of his cell, his final appeal turned down.

'We should never have let you go home, Mr Castle,' the nursing sister said.

'Matt, please ...' Lottie put her cool hand over his yellowed claw. 'Don't say that ...'

'You never listen.' Feebly shaking his head, inconsolable All the way here in the ambulance, Lottie holding his hand, he'd been silent, away somewhere, still on the Moss perhaps.

His eyes shone with the tears that wouldn't come, no moisture left in his body.

The nurse said, 'I think he should have some sleep, don't you, Mrs Castle?'

'Sleep?' Matt was bleakly contemptuous. 'No real sleep in here. Comes out of the bloody ... drug cabinet ... only sort sleep you can get in here.' He looked past the nurse, 'Where's Dic?'

'I told you, Matt,' Lottie said gently. 'He wouldn't come in. He's too confused. He's probably walking round the

grounds, walking it off. He'll come in tomorrow, when he's ...'

'Might be too late, tomorrow.'

Lottie smiled at him. 'Don't be soft.' There was a small commotion behind her, a nurse and a young porter putting screens around a bed opposite Matt's.

'Another one gone,' Matt grunted.

'Bath time, that's all,' the nurse said unconvincingly.

'Give you any old crap in here. Look, tell Dic ...' His faltering voice forming words as dry and frail as an ancient cobweb... Tell him, he can be in the band. If he wants to. Then ... when Moira comes, he can play. But you won't, will you? You never do owt I say.'

'You tell him,' Lottie said. 'Tell him when you see him in the morning.'

Matt Castle made no reply. He seemed too dehydrated to sweat or to weep. It was as though somebody had talcumed his face, like a ...

Lottie swallowed hard.

'Useless... bitch.'

Matt fell asleep.

Shrivelled leaves, unseen, chattered on the window-pane. The dead leaves said, Go away, draw the curtains, put on the light.

It's not your affair, the dead leaves said.

The Rector didn't move, just as he hadn't moved in the late afternoon, at dusk, when the warning flurry had hit the pane, as if flung.

At the top end, the vicarage garden almost vanished into the moor. When the light faded, the low stone wall between them dissolved into shadow and the garden and the moor became one. On the other side of the wall was a public footpath; it was along this they came, and sometimes, over the years, around dusk, the Rector had seen them, had made himself watch them.

Tonight, resting up before evening service, sitting in the window of the darkening study, wedged into a hard chair, his swollen foot on the piano stool, he'd watched three of them enter the churchyard from the footpath, passing through the wooden wicket gate. They were black, shapeless, hooded and silent. A crescent moon had wavered behind smoky cloud.

It was all over, though, as was usual, when he walked out across his garden, through the gate and into the churchyard

Half an hour before the evening service.

Now he was back in his study, listening to the leaves with the lights out. All he could see through the window was the reflection of two bars of the ineffectual electric fire.

When Judy, his wife, was alive there'd been a coal fire in the study every night from the end of September until the end of April.

The Rector was cold. Eleven years now since Judy's death. Where had all the warmth gone, the warmth which before had only increased with the drawing-in of the days? Where had the smiles gone, the smiles which lit the eyes while the mouths stayed firm?

And why, for that matter, had Ma Wagstaff's herbal preparation had so little effect this time on his arthritis?

He stood up, hobbled close to the window, cupped his hands to the pane and peered through.

At the garden's edge, a few graves lurched giddily on the slope, and then the church loomed like an enormous black beast. Lately, Hans Gruber had been wondering if life would not have been a good deal simpler in one of those modern churches, where one's main headache was glue-sniffing behind the vestry. Us and Them. Good and evil. God and Satan.

Hans thought, Wouldn't that be wonderful?

After his wife had left, they'd wheeled Mr Castle's bed into a the ward where, unless anyone was brought in suddenly, he'd be alone, until...

'Until morning,' the young nurse whispered, reassuring herself.

Mr Castle was sleeping. She was glad; she was still afraid of people who were dying, who were in the actual process of it. She wasn't yet sure how to talk to them, how to look at them, and the awful suspense - what it would be like, the atmosphere in this small, comparatively quiet space, in the moment, the very second when it happened.

She was never going to get used to this. She was supposed to comfort the dying, but more often than not it was the dying who comforted her - old ladies, all skin and bone and no hair, patting her hand, one actually saying, Don't worry, luv, I won't keep you long.

Less bothered, it often seemed, than she was. Sometimes it was like they were just waiting for a bus.

She sat at the desk by the door, under the angled, metal-shaded lamp, the only light in the room. There were four beds in the side ward, three of them empty. It was the only part of this hospital where you could usually count on finding a couple of spare beds, it being the place where terminal patients were often brought in the final stages so they wouldn't distress other patients who were not quite so terminal.

Tamsin, the other nurse, a year or two older, was out on the main ward. Sister Murtry would pop in occasionally, see if they were all right.

Sister Murtry had been very firm with Mrs Castle, who was a tall, strong-looking woman - only Sister Murtry would have dared. 'Come on now, he needs his sleep and you need yours.'

... Mr Castle waking up suddenly and chuckling in a ghastly, strangled way when she said he needed sleep.

(She looked across now at his face on the pillow; his skin was like cold, lumpy, wrinkled custard. He wasn't so very old: fifty-seven, it said on his chart, not even elderly.)

'Will you be sure to ...' Mrs Castle had been in the doorway. Sister Murtry's hands on her shoulders, pushing her out.

'Yes, I'll ring you myself if there's any change. But there probably won't be, you know ... Just go and get your sleep, or we'll be seeing you in here too ...'

She imagined Mrs Castle lying wide awake in a cold double bed, waiting for the phone to ring. The wind howling outside - they lived up by Bridelow Moor, didn't they? The wind always howled up there.

He was quite a famous man, Mr Castle. There'd been dozens of Get Well cards when he was in last year for tests and things. Dr Smethwick, the registrar, who was a folk music fan, had been thrilled to bits to have him in. 'Pioneer of the Pennine Pipes,' she remembered him saying, and Dr Bun had said, dry as a stick, 'Oh, he works for the Water Authority, does he?' And she'd rushed out, scared to giggle because she was still a student then, and Dr Smethwick was senior to Dr Burt.

Dr Smethwick had moved on, to a better job in Liverpool. Now there was nobody left who knew anything about Mr Castle or the Pennine Pipes. All he had tonight was her, and she was afraid of him because he was dying.

She wondered how many folk had died here, in this small space, over the years. Passed away, they still preferred you to say that to the relatives. She said it to herself.

Passsssed... awayyyy. Soft, like a breath of air.

She jumped. Mr Castle had released a breath of air, but it wasn't soft. It was ... phtttt... like a cork popping out of a bottle or like a quiet fart (one of the regular noises of the night here).

'Mr Castle ... ?' Whispering, rising rapidly to her feet with a rustle of the uniform, bumping her head on the edge of the metal lampshade.

'All right, Mr Castle ... Matt.' A hairgrip, dislodged by the lamp, fell to the desk, she felt her hair corning loose at the back. 'I'm here.'

But when she reached the bedside he was breathing normally again - well, not normal normal, but normal for a man who ... for a man in his condition.

Holding her hair in place with one hand, the grip in her teeth, she went into the main ward to collect her mirror from her bag.

Plenty breathing out here, and snoring, and a few small moans, everything hospital-normal. Up the far end of the ward, Tamsin was bending over Miss Wately's bed. Miss Wately the retired headmistress who wouldn't be called by her first name, which was Eunice. Tamsin straightened up, saw her and raised a hand to her lips, tilting her head back as if the hand held a cup.

She nodded and smiled and pointed over her shoulder to the side ward, and Tamsin nodded and held up five fingers.

'Ger ... yer owd bugger ...' an old man rasped in his sleep. It was supposed to be a mixed ward but because of the attitude of patients like Miss Wately, the men tended to be at one end and the women at the other. Best, really, at their age.

No kimono-style dressing-gowns and baby-doll nighties on this ward.

She found the mirror, slipped it into her pocket, went back to the side ward and sat down, her eyes moving instinctively from bed to bed, four beds, all empty.

'Moira?'

All empty.

'Oh!' She spun round, her hair unravelling down below her shoulders.

He said, 'You've come then, eh?'

God help us, he was hanging over her ... like bones in pyjamas.

'Mr Ca—'

What was holding him up? She'd seen his legs, his muscles, wasted, gone to jelly. Been in a wheelchair for weeks and weeks. They'd said to watch him, he might even die in the night, and here he was standing up, oh God, his lips all pulled back and frozen into a ric-rictus?

'Tarn ...' trying to shout for the other nurse, but her voice was so dry the name just dropped out of her mouth like a piece chewing gum '... sin.' Hardly heard herself.

His eyes were far back in his head, black marbles, like the eyes had already died.

Then one of his hands reached out, it was all shrivelled and rigid, like a chicken's foot, and he started ... he started playing with her hair, pulling it down and fingering it, looking down at it in his fingers, mumbling, Moira ... Moira.

Eventually she managed to say, 'I'm not your wife, Mr ...Mr Castle ...'

But remembered Sister Murtry saying, 'Her name's Charlotte, I think.' And then, later, 'Come on, Charlotte, let's be having you, can't stay here all night. Not good for either of you.'

She couldn't move. The metal bars on the bed heads made hard shadows on the walls, the little ward was like a cage. If only Sister Murtry would come now, bustling in, short and dynamic. Nobody Sister Murtry couldn't handle.

Oh, God, this was the wrong job, she hated dying people, their stretched skin, their awful smell, especially this one - the damp stench of ripe, putrid earth (the grave?). She began to shiver and tried to stand up, drawing back, away from him, but there was nowhere to go, her bottom was pressed into the edge of the desk, and Mr Castle was still hanging over her like a skeleton in a rotting sack and smelling of wet earth.

How could he smell of earth, of outside?

'Tam ... sin ...' Her scream was a whisper, but her mouth was stretched wide as his greenish chickenfoot hand whipped out and seized her throat.

CHAPTER V

CENTRAL SCOTLAND

The scuffed sixteen-year-old Ovation guitar, with its fibreglass curves, was a comfort. Its face reflected the great fire blazing on the baronial hearth.

'Ladies of noble birth ...' Adjusting the microphone. 'In those days, they didn't have too much of a say in it, when it came to husbands. This is ... thumbing an A-minor, tweaking the top string up a fraction, '... this is the story of a woman who's found herself betrothed to a titled guy much younger than she is. However ...' gliding over a C, 'I doubt if we're talking toy-boys, as we know them. This is like ... nine or ten, right?'

Tuning OK. 'I mean, you know, there's a limit to the things you can get from a boy of nine or ten.'

No reaction. You bastard, Malcolm. And you, Rory McBain - one day you really will be sick.

'Anyway, she's stuck with this kid. And she's standing on the castle walls, watching him playing down below, working out the dispiriting mathematics of the situation and wondering if ...'

Shuffling on the stool, tossing back the black wings of her hair, the weight of it down her back pulling her upright so that she could see the audience and the gleaming stag skulls all round. The walls of neatly dressed stone, with spotlit banners and tapestries. The black eye-holes in the skulls, and the eyes of the conference delegates looking, from five or so yards away, just as opaque and unmoving.

'Anyway, don't expect a happy ending, OK? This is a traditional song. You don't get many happy endings in traditional songs. It's called ... "Lang a-growin' ".'

The bastard McBain would have handled this better. For the sake of ethnic credibility, he'd do a couple of songs in the Gaelic, of which he understood scarcely a word. What she had these days was a different kind of credibility: sophistication, fancy nightclub ethnic, low and sultry vocals, folk tunes with a touch of jazz guitar, strictly rationed to what she could handle without fracturing a fingernail.

'He's young ...' Hearing her own voice drifting vacuously on the air, the words like cigarette smoke. '... but he's daily .. . growin' ...'

Over an hour ago, she'd called Lottie's number. A guy answered, obviously not the boy, Dic. The guy'd said Lottie was at the hospital in Manchester. Muffled voices in the background - this was a pub, right? She'd asked no more questions. She'd call back.

The hospital. In Manchester. Oh, hell.

The Great Hall was huge, the acoustics lousy. When the song was over, applause went pop-pop-pop like a battery of distant shotguns. The stags' heads gathered grimly below the ceiling, so many that the antlers looked to be tangled up.

'Splendid,' she heard the Earl call out magnanimously. How many wee staggies did you pop yourself, my lord, your grace, whatever? Maybe you invited members of the Royal Family to assist. Traditional, right?

Moira did a bit of fine tuning on the guitar. She was wearing the black dress and the cameo brooch containing the stained plaid fragment that was reputed to have been recovered from a corpse at Culloden. Credibility.

'This song ... You may not know the title, most of you, but the tune could be slightly familiar. It's... the lament of a girl whose man's gone missing at sea and she waits on the shore accosting all the homecoming fishermen as they reach land.

The song's called "Cam Ye O'er Frae Campbelltoon". It's, er, ... it's traditional.'

Traditional my arse. Me and Kenny Savage wrote it, still half-pissed, at a party in Kenny's flat in 1982 - like, Hey, I know ... how about we invent a totally traditional Celtic lament ...

She told them, the assembled Celts, 'The chorus is very simple ... so feel free to join in ...'

And, by Christ, they did join in. Probably with tears in their eyes. All these Scots and Irish and Welsh and Bretons and the folk from the wee place up against Turkey ... writers and poets and politicians united in harmony with a phoney chorus composed amidst empty Yugoslav Riesling bottles at the fag end of Kenny Savage's Decree Absolute party in dawn-streaked Stranraer.

What a sham, eh? I mean, what am I doing here?

And Matt Castle dying.

Tears in her own eyes now. Last year he'd told her on the phone that he'd be OK, the tests had shown it wasn't malignant. And she'd believed him; so much for intuition.

The damn tears would be glinting in the soft spotlight they'd put on her, and the Celtic horde out there, maudlin with malt, would think she was weeping for the girl on the shore at Stranraer - and weeping also, naturally, for the plight of Scotland and for the oldest race in Europe trampled into the mud of ages.

'Thank you,' she said graciously, as they applauded not so much her as themselves, a confusion of racial pride with communal self-pity.

And that makes it nine songs, over an hour gone, corning up to 10.30. Time to wind this thing up, yeh? Lifting the guitar strap out of her hair. Let's get the hell out of here.

At which point someone called out smoothly, 'Would it be in order to request an encore?'

She tried to smile.

'Maybe you could play "The Comb Song"?'

It was him. It would have to be. The New York supplier of Semtex money to the IRA.

'Aw, that's just a kiddies' song.' Standing up, the guitar-strap half-off.

'Well, I don't know about the other people here,' the voice said - and it was not the American, 'but it's the song I most associate with you, and I was rather disappointed not to hear

'Oh, hell, it's a good long time ago, I don't think I even remember the words ...' Who the fuck was this?

'If you go wrong, I'm sure we could help you out.' She couldn't make out his face behind the spotlight. She looked up, in search of inspiration, but her gaze got entangled in antlers.

'Also,' she said miserably, 'it isn't exactly traditional. And it's awful long. See, I don't want to bore your friends here ...'

'Miss Cairns ...' The Earl himself took a step towards the dais, into the spotlight, the light making tiny dollar-signs in his eyes. 'I doubt if any of us could possibly be bored by any of your songs.' A touch of threat under the mellifluousness? Some flunkey had replaced the empty Guinness glass by her stool with a full one. She picked it up, put it down again without drinking. There were murmurings.

What the hell am I going to do now? She felt their stares, the more charitable ones maybe wondering if she was ill. Aw, shit...

What she didn't feel any more were the eyes of the Watcher.

This had maybe been a mistake. Sometimes you made mistakes. It probably had been the American and it probably was no heavier than lust.

'I warn you,' Moira said, as the Ovation's strap sank back into her shoulder, 'this is the longest song I ever wrote.'

And to the accompaniment of a thin cheer from the floor her fingers found the chord, and she sang the rather clumsy opening lines. Trying not to think about it, trying to board up her mind against all those heavyweight memories tramping up the stairs.

Her father works with papers and with plans.

Her mother sees the world from caravans ...

The song telling the story of this shy, drab child growing up in the suburbs of a staid Clydeside town with the ever-present feeling that she's in the wrong place, that she really ought to be some other person. Bad times at school, no friends. Brought up at home by the grandmother, restrictive, old-fashioned Presbyterian.

I wish to God you hadna been born.

Your hair's a mess, get it shorn.

Get it shorn ...

Then the song becoming a touch obscure - one night, around the time of her adolescence, the child seems to be in this dark wood, when the moon breaks through the clouds and trees, and she finds she's holding ... this curious, ancient comb. It's a wonderful magic comb and apparently is the key to the alternative reality which for all these years has been denied to her. She runs it through her hair and becomes electrified, metamorphoses into some kind of beautiful princess. Fairytale stuff.

... She sees herself in colours and

She weighs her powers in her hand ...

Dead silence out there. She had them. Oh, it had its magic, this bloody song which intelligent people were supposed to think was all allegorical and the comb a metaphor for the great Celtic heritage. Most likely this was how the American saw it, and the other guy who'd demanded the song.

A bastard to write, the words wouldn't hang together - sign of a song that didn't want to be written.

The song knew from the start: some things are too personal.

Chorus:

Never let them cut your hair

Or tell you where

You've been,

Or where you're going to

From here ...

Couple of twiddly bits which, after all these years, she fluffed. Then dropping down to minor key for the main reason she hadn't wanted to perform this number, the creepy stuff, the heavy stuff.

And in the chamber of the dead

Forgotten voices fill your head ...

Sure, there they are ... tinny little voices, high-pitched, fragmented chattering, like a cheap transistor radio with its battery dying. Tune it in, tune it in.

Who is this? Who is it?

No.

No, no, NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, shit, please, don't die, Matt, don't die on me now ...you have no right ...

Singing on, through her wild tears, an awed silence in the room like a giant cavern, hall of ages, caged in bones. You think you know this song, these words, Mr New York Irishman... ?

... for the night is growing colder

and you feel it at your shoulder ...

Icy-bright singing now, purged of that phoney, Guinnessy growl. One or two women out there shivering and reaching for their cardigans. The song rippling across the night sky, down the dark years, and you're watching its wavering passage from a different level, like an air traffic controller in a tower late at night. Something flying out to meet it, on a collision course.

Give up, you fool, there is no heat.

The Abyss opens up beneath your feet...

Here he is again, uncertainly into the spotlight, looking around. Hello again, Earl, something wrong is there, my lord, your grace ... ? Is it cold for you in here? Will you get some servant to turn up the heating, throw more peat on the fire?

And all the while, will you listen to these wee voices, chattering, chattering, chattering ...

The comb is ice, it's brittle, oh.

You cannot hold it, must let go ...

Yes, let it go. It's a trinket, it's worthless, it takes your energy. Let it drift. Let the night have it. Let ...

These - Christ - these are not my words. These are somebody else's words.

I'm singing somebody else's goddamn words!

And the comb is being pulled away now in a deceptively soft silver haze, gently at first, just a tug. Then insistent, irritable - let it come, you bitch - and slender hands, slender like wires, scalpelling into her breast. Feeling delicately - but brutally and coldly, like a pathologist at an autopsy - for her emotional core, for the centre of her.

somebody ...

In a frenzy she's letting go of the song, she's groping wildly at the air, feeling her spirit straining in her body as the big lights come on, huge shimmering chandeliers.

Moira has fallen down from the stool.

She's lying twisted and squirming on the carpeted dais, both arms wrapped around the guitar. From miles away, people are screaming, or is it her screaming at them ... Stop it! Catch

it! Don't let it go from here! Help me! Help me!

She can hear them coming to help her, the army of her fellow-Celts. But they can't get through.

They can't get through the walls of bone.

The walls of jiggling swelling bone. Not just the skulls any more; the plaster's fallen from the walls and the walls are walls of bone, whole skeletons interlocking, creaking and twisting and the jaws of the skulls opening and closing, grisly grins and clacking laughter of teeth, right up against her face. She's trapped, like a beating, bloody heart inside a rib-cage.

She sees the comb and all it represents spinning away until it's nothing but a hairline crack of silver-blue. She watches it go like a mother who sees her baby toddling out of the garden and into the dust spurting from the wheels of an oncoming articulated lorry.

Mammy!

But you can't hear me, can you, mammy? The connection's broken.

I'm on my own.

But no.

There is a man.

A tall, thin man, with a face so white it might be the face of some supernatural being.

No, this is a real man. He's wearing an evening suit, a bow-tie. He has a small voluptuous mouth and an expanse of white forehead marked with greyish freckles, and the white hair ripples back from the forehead; not receding, it has always been that way. She ought to know him; he knows her.

And where she keeps the comb.

This person, unnoticed in the hubbub by everyone but her, is lifting the black guitar case from the steps of the dais and examining it to see how it opens. He looks at her, furiously impatient, and the air between them splinters like ice and when she tries to see into his eyes, and they are not there, only the black sockets in a face as white as any of the skulls.

Their eyes meet at last. His have projected into the sockets from somewhere. They are light grey eyes. And there's a whiteness around him, growing into arms like tree-branches above his head. No, not arms, not branches.

Antlers.

Moira shrieked, flinging the guitar away from her. It made a mangled minor chord as it rolled down the steps of the dais.

She threw herself after it, headlong into the glass-spattered Guinness-sodden tartan carpet, clawing at the pair of shiny, elegant evening shoes, the air at first full of swirling, unfocused energy.

And then, for a moment, everything was still.

Most of those in the room were still seated at their tables, with drinks in front of them, the men and women in their evening wear, white shirts and black bow-ties, jewellery and silk and satin. The American half out of his seat, dark Irish hair tumbling on to his forehead. The Earl on his feet; his expression ... dismay turning to disgust; was this woman having a fit? In his castle?

Everybody shimmering with movement, but nobody going anywhere.

Projector-jam.

Until the first skull fell.

It was possibly the smallest of them, so comparatively insignificant that Moira wondered briefly why anyone would have admitted to having shot it, let alone wanted to display it. She watched it happen, saw the antlers just lean forward, as if it was bowing its head, and then the wooden shield it was mounted on splintered and the poor bleached exhibit crashed seven or eight feet on to a table, crystal glasses flying into the air around it.

'God almighty!' a man blurted.

The white, eyeless head toppled neatly from the table into the lap of a woman in a wine-coloured evening dress, the antlers suddenly seeming to be sprouting from her ample Celtic cleavage.

For a whole second, the woman just looked at it, as though it was some kind of novelty, like a big, fluffy bunny popped onto her knees by an admirer at a party. Her glossy red lips split apart into what appeared for an instant to be an expression of pure delight.

It was this older woman next to her, whose ornate, red-brown coiffure had been speared by an antler, she was the one who screamed first.

More of an escalating gurgle actually. Both women jerking to their feet in quaking revulsion, clutching at one another, chairs flying ...

... as, with a series of sickening ripping sounds, several other skulls cracked themselves from the walls, all at once ...

(Look!' Some guy grabbing the Earl by the shoulders, shaking him.)

... and began to descend in, like, slow motion, some so old they fell apart in the air and came down in pieces.

Moira's audience in cowering disarray. 'Stop this!' the Earl commanding irrationally, limbs jerking in spasms, semaphoring incomprehensible fear, like a spider caught in its own web.

'Stop it! Stop it at once!'

This tumultuous tending and creaking from all the walls. Even the great fire looking cowed, burning, back, low and smoky as though someone had thrown muffling peat at it.

Next to the fireplace, this severe and heavy lady - a matriarch of Welsh-language television, it was said - just sitting there blinking, confused because her spectacles had been torn off and then trodden on by a flailing bearded man, some distinguished professor of Celtic Studies, eyes full of broken glass, one cheek gashed by a blade of bone.

And, pulling her gaze away from this carnage, in the choking maw of the great fireplace Moira thought she saw a face ... so grey it could only have been formed from smoke. The face swirled; two thrashing arms of smoke came out into the room, as if reaching for her.

Moira whispered faintly, 'Matt?' But it was smoke, only smoke.

The butler guy weaving about helplessly in the great doorway as the stag skulls fell and fell, this roaring, spitting avalanche of white bone and splattering glass, battered heads and scored skin, people yelping, moaning, hurling themselves under collapsing tables, craving shelter from the storm.

She caught the black guitar case as it fell towards her. Caught it in her arms.

Come to mammy.

She sat bewildered on the bottom step of the dais, in the refrigerated air, in the absurdly shocking mess of glass and antlers.

I have to be leaving, she thought.

Hands on her shoulders. 'You OK? Moira, for Chrissake ... ?'

'Get the fuck off me!'

But it was only the American, Mr Semtex.

'Please ... You OK? Here, let me take that...'

'No! Let it alone, will you?'

She saw the white-faced man on his knees, not six feet away. He was holding one of the skulls, a big skull, one antler snapped off halfway, ending in a savage point, a dagger of bone. There was blood on the point.

And blood welling slowly out of his left eye, blood and mucus, a black pool around the eye.

The other eye was very pale, grey going on pink. He was staring at her out of it.

Moira clutched the guitar case defiantly to her throbbing breast.

'Just hang on in there, pal,' the American said to the white-faced man. 'We're gonna get you a doctor.'

Ignoring the American, the man with the injured eye said (and later the American would swear to her that he hadn't heard this, that the guy was too messed up to speak at all)...

The man said, very calm, very urbane, 'Don't think, Miss Cairns, that this is anything but the beginning.'

CHAPTER VI

In Matt Castle's band, Willie Wagstaff had played various hand-drums - bongo-type things and what the Irish called the bodhran, although Matt would never call it that; to him it was all Pennine percussion.

This morning, without some kind of drum under his hands, Willie looked vaguely disabled, both sets of fingers tapping nervously at his knees, creating complex, silent rhythms.

Lottie smiled wanly down at him. They were sitting on wooden stools at either end of the kitchen stove, for warmth

'Can you finish it, Willie? Can it be done?'

Willie looked up at her through his lank, brown fringe, like a mouse emerging from a hole in the wall. Lukewarm autumn sunbeams danced with the dust in the big kitchen behind the public bar. Such a lot of dust. She'd been neglecting the cleaning, like everything else, since Matt had been bad. Now it was over. Dust to dust.

Willie said, 'We got two or three instrumental tracks down, y'know. The lament. It all got a bit, like ... half-hearted, as you can imagine. Me and Eric, we could see it weren't going to get finished. Not wi' Matt, anyroad.'

'I want it finished,' Lottie said crisply. 'It was his last ... I'm not going to use the word obsession, I've said it too much.' She hesitated. '... I'm not religious, Willie, you know that, not in any ... any respect.'

Willie gave three or four nods, his chin keeping time with the fingers on his knees.

'But I just feel that he won't be at peace ... that it won't be over ... until that music's finished.'

'Aye.' Willie's fingers didn't stop. Nerves.

'So what about Dic?' Lottie said.

'Will Dic want to do it?'

Lottie said grimly, 'He'll do it. Is he good enough?'

'Oh, aye,' Willie said without much difficulty. 'I reckon he is. With a bit of practice, like. But really, like, what we could do with is ...He beat his knees harder to help him get it out. ' ... Moira.'

'She rang me,' Lottie said. 'Last night.'

Willie's eyes lit up, expectant. Dear God, Lottie thought, they're all in love with her.

'Actually, it was early this morning. I mean very early. Gone midnight. The kind of time people don't ring up unless it's an emergency.'

'Oh,' Willie said, and his hands were suddenly still.

'She asked me about Matt. She said, was he ill? I told her yes he was very ill. I told her it was close to the end. I told her ...' Lottie stood up and put her hands on the warm metal covers over the hot-plates of the kitchen stove, pressing down with both hands, hard. 'I didn't need to tell her.'

Willie was quiet.

'We didn't say much. She started to explain why she'd put him off when he wrote to her. I stopped her. I said we'd discuss it some other time.'

There was a new kind of silence in the room.

'I put the phone down,' Lottie said. 'It was about twenty-five past twelve. I waited for a minute or two, in case Dic had heard the phone, but he was fast asleep. I thought, I'll make some cocoa, take it up with me. But I didn't move. I knew. I mean, why should she suddenly ring after all these years at that time of night? And sure enough, not five minutes had passed and the phone rang again, and it was Sister Murtry at the hospital. And I just said, He's gone, hasn't he?'

There was more silence, then Lottie said, 'I've not slept since. I've just sent Dic to bed for a few hours. I'm not tired, Willie. I'm not using up any energy - not thinking, you know?'

Lottie sat down again. 'I shan't be staying here. Only until it's done. His bloody project. I think coming back here, buying the pub, the whole bit, that was all part of it. The project. All I want is to draw a line under it, do you see? I mean, I hope somebody'll buy the pub, somebody sympathetic, but if not ...' She shrugged. 'Well, I've got to get away, regardless.'

Willie nodded. Fingers starting up very slowly. 'Um ... what about Moira?'

'I'm not inviting her to the funeral, that's for sure.' Lottie folded her arms, making a barrier. 'If she wants to help complete these songs, that'd be ... I'll not be begging. No more of that. And another thing, Willie - tell whoever needs to be told, tell them I'm not having anything to do with these stupid ... traditions. You know what I'm saying? Matt might've accepted it, I don't. All right?'

'Aye, all right,' Willie said, not sounding too happy. But that was his problem, Lottie thought. 'Yeh,' he said. 'I'll tell her.'

When Willie had gone, Lottie pushed her hands on to the hot-plate covers again, seeking an intensity of heat, needing to feel something. Something beyond this anaesthetized numbness.

Wanting pain - simple pain. Loss. Sorrow.

Not any of this confusion over the gratitude that he was gone and the wanting him back ... but back as he used to be, before all this. Before his project.

A blinding sun through leafless trees ricocheted from the windscreens of cars on the forecourt. A perky breeze ruffled the flags projecting from the motel's awning and lifted tufts of Chrissie's auburn hair. She thought she probably looked quite good, all things considered.

That, she told herself, was what a good night's sleep could do for you.

Ha!

Roger Hall paused, gripping the door-handle of his Volvo Estate. Don't say it, Chrissie thought. Just don't give me that, I still can't understand it, this has never happened to me before ...

He didn't. He merely put on an upside-down, pathetic grin.

'Can we try again sometime?' Eyes crinkled appealingly, full of silly morning optimism, and she felt herself falling for it - even if she knew he still wasn't telling the half of it.

'Why not,' she said, daft bitch. She squeezed his arm. 'How long will you be gone?'

'Oh, only until Tuesday. That is, I'll be back late tonight so I'll see you tomorrow morning. Have lunch together, shall we? Would that be ... ?'

'Of course,' she said. She would have wangled the day off and gone to London with him. They'd been too close to the Field Centre last night, that was probably the problem. Too close to him.

'I'm really only going down there,' Roger said, 'to make sure we get all the stomach returned. Don't want them trying to pinch him back, bit by bit.'

Shut up! Just shut up about that fucking thing!

'Don't worry about it, Roger. Just drive carefully.'

As the Volvo slid away past the Exit Southbound sign, two commercial traveller types came out to their twin Cavaliers and gave her the once-over. Chrissie found herself smiling almost warmly at the younger one. It would be two years in January since her divorce.

She got into her Golf. She looked at her face in the driving-mirror and decided it could probably take a couple more years of this sort of thing before she ought to start looking for

something ... well, perhaps semi-permanent.

Sadly, Roger's marriage was now in no danger whatsoever. Not from her, anyway.

All the trouble he'd gone to to deceive his wife. Was that for her? Was that really all for her? And then he couldn't do it. Because of 'tension'.

She imagined him driving like the clappers to London, where he was supposed to have spent the night, and then driving determinedly back with the bogman's peaty giblets in a metal samples case.

There was his real love. And there was more to it

Alter the way he'd been talking last night, she'd half expected to wake up in the early hours to find him all wet and clammy and moaning in his sleep about lumps of the stuff in the bed.

But that hadn't happened either. Indeed, the only thing to remind her of soft, clammy peat was the consistency of Roger's dick.

Chrissie got out of the motel compound by the service entrance and drove to work.

Not to worry.

Later that morning, little Willie Wagstaff went to see his mother in her end-of-terrace cottage across from the post office.

'Need to find a job now, then,' the old girl said sternly before he'd even managed to clear himself a space on the settee. Ma was practical; no time for sentiment. Dead was dead. Matt Castle was dead; no living for Willie playing the drums on his own.

'Can't do owt yet,' Willie said. "Sides, there's no work about.'

'Always work,' said Ma, 'for them as has a mind to find it.'

Willie grinned. Rather than see him relax for a while, Ma would have him commuting to Huddersfield or Chorlton-cum- Hardy to clean lavatories or sweep the streets.

'Devil makes work for idle hands,' she said. Her as ought to know - half the village reckoned she'd been in league with the bugger for years.

'Aye, well, I've been over to see Lottie this morning.'

'Oh aye? Relieved, was she? Looking better?'

'Ma!'

'Grief's one thing, our Willie, hypocrisy's summat else. She's done her grieving, that one.'

'I've to tell you ...' Willie's fingers were off ... dum, dum de-dum, side of his knees.

Ma's eyes narrowed. Her hair was tied up in a bun with half a knitting-needle shoved up it.

'Er ...' Dum, dum, dum-di-di, dum-di-di...

'Gerrit out!' Ma squawked.

'No messing about,' Willie mumbled quickly. 'Lottie says, none of that.'

'What's that mean?' Making him say it.

'Well, like ... well, naturally he'll be buried in t'churchyard. First one. First one since ...' His fingers finding a different, more complicated rhythm. 'What I'm saying, Ma, is, do we have to ... ? Does it have to be Matt?'

Ma scowled. She had a face like an over-ripe quince. She wore an old brown knee-length cardigan over a blue boiler-suit, her working clothes. The two cats, one black, one white, sat side-by-side on the hearth, still as china. Bob and Jim. Willie reckoned they must be the fourth or fifth generation of Ma's cats called Bob and Jim, and all females.

Willie liked his mother's cottage. Nothing changed. Bottles of stuff everywhere. On the table an evil-looking root was rotting inside a glass jar, producing a fluid as thick as Castrol.

Comfrey - known as knitbone. And if it didn't knit your bones at least it'd stop your back gate from squeaking.

'Rector come round,' Ma told him. 'Said was I sure I'd given him right stuff for his arthritis.'

'Bloody hell,' said Willie. 'Chancing his arm there.'

'No, he were right,' said Ma surprisingly. 'It's not working. Never happened before, that hasn't. Never not worked, that arthritis mixture. Leastways, it's always done summat.'

She reached down to the hearth, picked up an old brown medicine bottle with a cork in it; Ma didn't believe in screw tops. 'Full-strength too. Last summer's.'

Willy smiled slyly. 'Losing thi touch, Ma?'

'Now, don't you say that!' His mother pointing a forefinger stiff as a clothes-peg. Think what you want, but don't you go saying it. It's not lucky.'

'Aye. I'm sorry.'

'Still...' She squinted into the bottle then put it back on the hearth behind Bob or Jim. 'You're not altogether wrong, for once.'

'Nay.' Willie shook his head. 'Shouldn't've said it. Just come out, like.'

'I'm not what I was.'

'Well, what d'you expect? You're eighty ... three? Six?'

'That's not what I'm saying, son.'

Ma's brown eyes were calm. She still didn't need glasses, and her eyes did wonderful things. In Manchester, of a Saturday, all dolled up, she could still summon a waitress in the café with them eyes, even when the waitress had her back turned. And Willie had once seen this right vicious-looking street-gang part clean down the middle to let her through; Ma had sent the eyes in first.

But now the eyes were oddly calm. Accepting. Worrying, that. Never been what you might call an accepter, hadn't Ma.

'None of us is what we was this time last year,' Ma said.

'Ever since yon bogman were took ...'

'Oh, no, Willie stood up. 'Not again. You start on about that bogman and I'm off.'

'Don't be so daft. You know I'm right, our Willie. Look at yer fingers, drummin' away, plonk, plonk. Always was a giveaway, yer fingers.'

'Nay,' Willie said uncomfortably, wishing he hadn't come.

'I'm telling you, we're not protected same as we was.' Ma Wagstaff stopped rocking. 'Sit down. Get your bum back on that couch a minute.'

Willie sat. He was suddenly aware of how dim it was in the parlour, despite all the sunlight, and how small it was. And how little and wizened Ma appeared. It was like looking at an old sepia photo from Victorian times. Hard to imagine this was the fiery-eyed old woman who'd blowtorched a path through a bunch of Moss Side yobboes.

'We've bin protected in this village,' Ma said. 'You know that.'

'I suppose so.'

'We're very old-established, y'see. Very old-established indeed.'

Well, this was true. And the family itself was old-established in Bridelow, at least on Ma's side. Dad had come from Oldham to work at the brewery, but Ma and her ma and her ma's ma ... well, that was how it seemed to go back, through the women.

'But we've let it go,' Ma said.

Willy remembered how upset she'd been when her grand-daughter, his sister's lass, had gone to college in London. Manchester or Sheffield would've been acceptable, but London

...It's too far ... ties'll be broken. She'll not come back, that one ...

He said, 'Let it go?'

Ma Wagstaff leaned back in the rocking-chair, closing her eyes. 'Aye,' she said sadly. 'You say as you don't want to hear this, Willie, but you're goin' t'ave to, sooner or later. You're like all the rest of um. If it's up on t'moor, or out on t'Moss, it's nowt to do wi' us. Can't do us no harm. Well, it can now, see, I'm telling thee.'

All eight of Willie's fingers started working on his knees.

Ma said, 'They're looking for openings. Looking for cracks in t'wall. Been gathering out there for years, hundreds of years.'

'What you on about, Ma?' .

'Different uns, like,' Ma said. 'Not same uns, obviously.

'Yobboes,' Willie said dismissively, realising what she meant. 'Bloody hooligans. Always been yobboes and hooligans out there maulin' wi' them owd circles. Means nowt. Except to farmers, like. Bit of a bugger for farmers.'

'Eh ...' Ma was scornful. 'Farmers loses more sheep to foxes. That's not what I'm saying.'

Her eyes popped open, giving him a shock because there was no peace in them now, no acceptance. All of a sudden they looked just like the little white marbles Willie had collected as a lad, shot through with the same veins of pure, bright red.

She stabbed a finger at him again. 'I can tell um, y'know. Couldn't always ... Aye. Less said about that...'

Willie's own fingers stumbled out of rhythm, the tips gone numb. 'Now, don't upset yourself.'

'But there's one now,' Ma said, one hand clutching an arm of the rocking-chair like a parrot's claw on a perch. 'Comes and goes, like an infection. Looking for an opening ...'

'Shurrup, Ma, will you. Whatever it is, Lottie doesn't want...'

'Listen,' Ma said without hesitation. 'You tell that Lottie to come and see me. Tell her to come tomorrow, I'm a bit busy now. Tell her I'll talk to her about it. Just like we talked to Matt. Matt knew what had to happen. Matt were chuffed as a butty.'

'Aye.' Matt and his mate, the bogman. Together at last.

'Only we've got to protect the lad,' Ma said.

'I don't like any of this. Ma. Lottie'll go spare.'

'Well, look.' Ma was on her feet, sprightly as a ten-year-old, moving bottles on the shelf. 'Give her this.'

'What is it?'

Daft question.

'Aye.' Accepting the little brown bottle. 'All right, then, I'll give it her. Tell her it'll calm her down. Make her feel better. But I'll not tell you're going ahead with ...' Willie gave his knee a couple of climactic thumps. 'No way.'

He didn't tell Ma what Lottie had said about them finishing Matt's bogman song-cycle. Because, when it came down to it, he didn't like the thought of that himself. And he had a pretty good idea how Ma would react.

I warned him not to meddle with stuff he knows nowt about, she'd say. And I don't expect to have to warn me own son.

So, in a way, Willie was hoping Lottie would have forgotten about the whole thing by the time the funeral was over.

A funeral which, if she'd any sense, she'd be attending with a very thick veil over her eyes.

CHAPTER VII

The man with two Dobermans prowling the inside of the wire mesh perimeter fence was clearly too old to be a security guard. His appallingly stained trousers were held up by a dressing-gown cord with dirty gold tassels; a thinner golden cord was draped around the crown of his tattered trilby.

However, the dogs looked menacing enough, and when the man flung open the metal gate, they sprang.

For just a few seconds, the dun-coloured sky disappeared as the Dobermans rose massively and simultaneously into the air. And then they were on her, both heads into her exposed face, hot breath pumping and the great, savage teeth.

'Oh, my God!' Moira shrieked as the rough tongues sliced through her make-up. 'Do you guys know what this bloody stuff cost?'

She threw an arm around each of the dogs, trapping the four big front paws to her tweed jacket, and they all staggered together through the gate and on to the site, knocking over an empty, grey plastic dustbin.

The elderly man in the black trilby caught the bin as it fell. 'Moira!,' he yelled. 'Hey!'

'Donald,' Moira said, arms full of black and gold paws. 'You all right?'

'Well, damn.' He pulled his hat off. 'We wisny expecting ye today, hen, the Duchess didny say ...'

'That's because she doesn't know,' Moira said. 'I hope she's not away from her van ... Down, now ...'

The dogs obediently sat at her feet. 'Ye've still got the way, all right,' Donald said admiringly.

'They've grown. Again. I swear I've never seen Dobermans this big. What d'you feed them on?

Donald didn't smile. 'Public health officials.'

'My daddy,' she reminded him gently, "was a public health official.'

'Aye, I know. But your daddy wisny like the hard-faced bastards they send 'round these days.' Donald turned his head and shouted at a woman pegging baby-clothes to a washing line outside a lilac-coloured caravan.

'Hey, Siobhan, the Duchess, she in now?'

'Oh ... sure' The woman stumbled and dropped a nappy in a puddle. She picked it up, wrung out the brown water and hung it on the line. 'Leastways, I haven't seen no red carpet goin' down today.'

'Tinkers,' Donald said disparagingly. 'They're all bloody tinkers here now, 'cept for the few of us.'

Moira followed him and the dogs through the site, with its forty-odd vans on concrete hard-standings and its unexpectedly spectacular views of the Ayrshire coast. It might have been a holiday caravan site but for the washing lines full of fluttering clothes and the piles of scrap and all the kids and dogs.

They passed just one perfect old Romany caravan, bright red and silver, originally designed for horses but with a tow-bar now. A man with a beard and an earring sat out on the step whittling chunks out of a hunk of dark wood. He wore a moleskin waistcoat trimmed with silver. Moira stared at him, amazed. 'Who the hell's that?'

Donald turned his head and spat. One of the Dobermans growled. 'Oh,' Moira said. 'I see.'

'Bloody hippies. Call 'emselves New Age gypsies. Wis a time this wis a select site. All kindsa garbage we're gettin' now, hen.'

He stopped at the bottom of six concrete steps leading to the apex of the site, a flat-topped artificial mound with the sides ranked into flowerbeds.

Nothing changes, Moira thought. Wherever she's living it's always the same.

Evergreen shrubs, mainly laurel, sprouted around the base of the shining silver metal palace which crowned the mound like the Mother Ship from Close Encounters. The old man mounted the bottom step. 'Hey, Duchess!'

It wasn't what you'd call a traditional Romany caravan. Few like it had been seen before on a statutory local authority gypsy site. Only movie stars on location lived quite like this.

Donald stayed on the bottom step, the Dobermans silent on either side of him. There were antique carriage lamps each side of the door, a heavy door of stained and polished Douglas fir, which slid open with barely a sigh.

She came out and stood frailly in the doorway, a soft woollen evening stole about her bony shoulders. The day was calm for the time of year, no breeze from the sea.

Donald said, 'Will you look who's here. Duchess.' From the edges of the stole, the Duchess's hair tumbled like a cataract of white water almost to her waist. She looked down at Moira and her face was grave.

Moira said, 'Hullo, Mammy.'

'You OK?'

He'd looked anxious, his tuxedo creased, the thistle lolling from his buttonhole.

Well, actually, it was more than anxious; the guy had been as scared as any of them in the room full of splintered bone - twisted antlers across the tables on beds of broken glass, and one pair still hanging menacingly among the glittering shards of a chandelier.

Moira had said, 'You ever see bomb damage in Belfast?'

'Huh?'

She was up on her knees now, examining the guitar for fractures.

'Bomb damage,' she said, not looking at him.

He was silent. He crouched down next to her, the two of them by the dais, all the others, the multi-national Celts, brushing each other down, sheltering in groups in the corners of the Great Hall.

The pale man had been helped away by the Earl and some servants He'd looked just once at Moira with his damaged eye.

There were no cracks in the body of the guitar, although its face was scratched and it looked to be very deeply offended.

'What's your name?' Moira turned to the American.

'Huh?'

'What are you called?'

'I, uh ...' He grimaced, the suaveness gone, black curls sweated to his forehead. He looked as limp as the thistle he wore. 'I don't believe this has happened. Some kind of earthquake? Or what? Uh ... Macbeth.'

'That's your name? My God. Here, hold this a second.' She passed him the guitar while she untangled her hair.

He held the instrument up by the neck, gripping it hard.

'You have earthquakes in these parts?'

'What?' She'd started to laugh.

'Earthquakes. Tremors.'

She said 'Macbeth. I thought you were going to be Irish despite the thistle. New York Irish '

'Just New York. Born and raised. Mungo Macbeth. Of the Manhattan Macbeths. My mother said I should wear the kilt.' He straightened the thistle. 'We compromised,'

'That's a compromise?'

He said, 'You really are OK now?'

'Oh, I'm fine. Just fine.' Feeling like she'd come through a war - a whole war in just a few minutes.

Mungo Macbeth had been looking around at all the wreckage, where the stags' heads had fallen. Then up at the ceiling.

'There isn't one of them left hanging,' he'd said, awed. Not a goddamn one.'

He was right.

What have I done?

'I mean, is that weird?' Mungo Macbeth said. 'Or is that weird?'

'And what was it that made you think,' the Duchess said contemptuously, 'that it was you?'

She didn't sound at all like Moira. Her voice was like the refined tink you made when you tapped with your fingernail on crystal glass of the very highest quality. A most cultured lady who had never been to school.

'Not me on my own,' Moira said. 'Someone ... something was ... you know, like an invasion? I felt threatened. This guy ... Also, I didn't like the setup anyway, generations of stalkers' trophies, and all these elitist folk, like "we are the Celtic aristocracy, we're the chosen ones ..." '

The Duchess lifted her chin imperiously. 'What nonsense you talk. Do you seriously think that if you began to suddenly resent me or something, you could come in here and break everything on my walls?'

Virtually all the wall space in the luxurious caravan had been decorated with fine china.

'Your walls, no,' Moira said.

'I should think not indeed.'

'But this place, I felt very threatened.'

She kept seeing, like on some kind of videotape loop, the man unfastening her guitar case. But it was all so dreamlike, part of the hallucination summoned by the song and the strangeness of the night. She couldn't talk about it.

'I'm mixed up, Mammy.'

'Don't whine,' the Duchess said mildly.

'I'm sorry.' And the smoky form in the fireplace? The sensation of Matt - and yet not Matt?

And the knowing. Confirmed by the call.

Lottie? Lottie, listen, I know it's late, I'm sorry ... Only it's Matt. I've been thinking about Matt all night...

The Duchess said, 'Have you the comb with you?'

'Surely.' Moira pulled her bag on to her knee.

'Show me.'

The Earl had said he couldn't explain it; the heads had been accumulating on the walls for four or more generations, and had ever been dislodged before. Some sort of chain-reaction perhaps, the domino effect. He had suggested everyone go through to the larger drawing room, and the servants had been dispatched for extra chairs and doctors to tend the injuries, none of them apparently major.

Uninjured, Moira and the American called Macbeth had gone outside into the grounds.

'Clear my head,' he said.

The house behind them was floodlit, looked like a wedding cake. A narrow terrace followed the perimeter of the house, and they walked along it, Moira carrying the guitar in its case.

'Why are you here?' she said, drifting. 'What do you do? Or are you just rich?'

'TV,' Macbeth said. 'I make lousy TV shows. But, also we're rich, the Macbeths. Which is why they let me make my lousy TV shows, and also why I'm here. That is, my mother ... she was invited. She owns the company.'

'Uh huh.' Moira nodded, as if she was interested. White flakes of bone were still silently spattering her vision, like static.

'They sent me," Macbeth said, 'on account of, A I'm about the most expendable member of the family, and B - they figured it was time I reconnected with my, uh, roots.'

Roots sometimes need to stay buried,' Moira said. 'You dig up the roots, you kill the tree.'

'I never thought about it like that '

'It's probably just a clever thing to say. You found your roots? Have you been to where Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane?'

'No,' he said. 'But I think I just found one of the three witches.'

'Really?' Moira said coldly.

'Only these days they come more beautiful.' Macbeth stopped suddenly and threw up both hands. 'Ah, shit, I apologise. I don't mean to be patronizing, or sexist or anything. It was, uh ... The hair ... your wonderful, long, black hair ...'

Oh, please ...

'With that lonely grey strand,' Macbeth said. 'Like a vein of onyx. Or something. I recognized it soon as you came into the room tonight. See, I don't know much about Celtic history, but rock music and folk ... I mean, I really do have those albums.'

'Would that you didn't,' Moira said quietly. Then she shook her hair. 'Sorry. Stupid. Forget it.'

Standing on the edge of the terrace overlooking a floodlit lawn, he cupped both palms around his face. 'I am such an asshole.'

No way she could disagree.

Macbeth hung his head. 'See, I ... Aw, Jesus, I'm in this party of seriously intellectual Celtic people, and, like ... what do I know? What's my contribution gonna be? What do I know? - I know a song. So I go - showing off my atom of knowledge - I go, how about you play The Comb Song? Just came out. Dumb, huh?'

She looked hard into his dark blue eyes. 'So it was you asked for the song.'

'Yeah, it just came to me to ask for that song. Then someone else took it up. It was confusing. I coulda bit off my tongue when it came clear you didn't want to do that number. I'm sorry.' He sat down on the paved area, legs hanging over the side of the terrace. He rubbed his eyes. 'All those stag heads. Like it was orchestrated.'

'You think it was somehow down to the song? Hence I'm a witch? You connect that with me?'

'Uh ...' Macbeth looked very confused. 'I'm sorry. Whole

thing scared the shit out of me. You feel the atmosphere in there? Before it happened?'

Headlight beams sliced through the trees along the drive. The ambulance probably. Maybe two. Maybe a whole fleet, seeing this was the Earl's place.

'Cold,' Macbeth said. 'Bone-freezing cold. I mean ... shit ... it isn't even cold out here... now.'

Moira had said, 'Can you excuse me? I need to make a phone call.'

She didn't know how old the comb was. Maybe a few hundred years old, maybe over a thousand. She'd never wanted to take it to an expert, a valuer; its value was not that kind.

The comb was of some heavy, greyish metal. It was not very ornate and half its teeth were missing, but when she ran it through her hair it was like something was excavating deep furrows in her soul.

The Duchess weighed the comb in fingers that sprayed red and green and blue fire from the stones in her rings, eleven of them.

'My,' the Duchess said, 'you really are in a quandary, aren't you?'

'Else why would I have come.'

'And someone ... You've not told me everything ... I can sense a death.'

'Yes,' Moira whispered, feeling, as usual, not so much an acolyte at the feet of a guru, more like a sin-soaked Catholic at confession.

'Whose?'

'Matt Castle.'

'Who is he?'

'You know ... He was the guy whose band I joined when I left the university in Manchester. Must be ... a long time ... seventeen years ago.'

'This was before ... ?'

'Yes.'

The Duchess passed the comb from one hand to the other and back again. 'There's guilt here. Remorse.'

'Well, I ...I've always felt bad about leaving the band when I did. And also ... three, four months ago, he wrote to me. He wanted me to do some songs with him. He was back living in his old village, which is that same place they found the ancient body in the peat. Maybe you heard about that.'

'A little.' The Duchess's forefinger stroking the rim of the comb.

'Matt was seriously hung up on this thing,' Moira said, 'the whole idea of it. This was the first time ... I mean, when we split, his attitude was, like, OK, that's it, nice while it lasted

but it's the end of an era. So, although we've spoken several times on the phone, it's fifteen years last January since I saw him. Um ... last year it came out he'd been to the hospital, for tests, but when I called him a week or so later he said it was OK, all negative, no problem. So ... Goes quiet, we exchange Christmas cards and things, as usual. Then, suddenly - this'd be three, four, months ago - he writes, wanting to get me involved in this song-cycle he's working on, maybe an album. To be called The Man in the Moss.'

'And you would have nothing to do with it?'

'I... Yeh, I don't like to bugger about with this stuff any more. I get scared ... scared what effect I'm gonna have, you know? I'm pretty timid these days.'

'So you told him no.'

'So I ... No, I couldn't turn it down flat. This is the guy got me started. I owe him. So I just wrote back, said I was really sorry but I was tied up, had commitments till the autumn. Said I was honoured, all this crap, and I'd be in touch. Hoping, obviously, that he'd find somebody else.'

She paused. Her voice dropped. 'He died last night. About the same time all this ...'

The Duchess passed the comb back to Moira. 'I don't like the feel of it. It's cold.'

The comb is icy, brittle, oh ...

Her mother was glaring at her, making her wish she hadn't come. There was always a period of this before the tea and the biscuits and the Duchess saying, How is your father? Does he ever speak of me? And she'd smile and shake her head, for her

daddy still didn't know, after all these years, that she'd even met this woman.

The Duchess said, 'That trouble you got into, with the rock and roll group. You dabbled. I said to you never to dabble. I said when you were ready to follow a spiritual path you should come to me. It was why I gave you the comb.'

'Yes, Mammy, I know that.' She'd always call her Mammy deliberately in a vain effort to demystify the woman. 'I'm doing my best to avoid it. That's why ...'

'The comb has not forgiven you,' the Duchess said severely. 'You have some damage to repair.'

'Aye, I know.' Moira said. 'I know that too.'

She'd returned from the phone floating like a ghost through a battlefield, blood and bandages everywhere - well, maybe not so much blood, maybe not any. Maybe the blood was in her head.

'You all right, Miss Cairns? You weren't hit?'

'I'm fine. Your ... I'm fine'

'You're very pale. Have a brandy.

'No. No, thank you.'

All this solicitousness. Scared stiff some of his Celtic brethren would sue the piss out of him. She was impatient with him. Him and his precious guests and his precious trophies and his reputation. What did it matter? Nobody was dying.

Yes, Moira. Yes, he is. I'm sorry ... No, not long. I'll know more in the morning. Perhaps you could call back then.

She had to get out of this house, didn't want to see wounds bathed and glass and antlers swept away. Didn't want to see what had happened to the pale man.

Outside, Mungo Macbeth, of the Manhattan Macbeths, still sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the terrace.

Moira joined him, feeling chilly now in her black dress, stiff down by the waist where it had soaked up spilled Guinness from the carpet.

And, because he was there and because he was no threat any more, she began to talk to Macbeth. Talked about many things - not including Matt Castle.

In fact she was so determined not to talk about Matt - and, therefore, not to break down - that she blocked him out, and his dying, with something as powerful and as pertinent to the night: she found she was telling Mungo Macbeth about the Comb Song.

'Everybody thinks it's metaphor, you know?'

'It exists?'

'Aye. Sure.'

Then she thought. Only person I ever told before was M ...

She said quickly, 'Your family make regular donations to the IRA?'

' ... what?'

His eyebrows went up like they'd been pulled on wires and she stared good and hard into his eyes. They were candid and they were innocent.

'Sorry,' she said. 'I forgot. You aren't even Irish.'

'Moira, let's be factual here. I'm not even Scottish.'

She found herself smiling. Then she stopped. She said, 'Every year these gypsies would camp on the edge of the town, derelict land since before the War. Only this year it was to be redeveloped, and so the gypsies had to go. My daddy was the young guy the council sent to get rid of them. He was scared half to death of what they might do to him, the gypsy men, who would naturally all be carrying knives.'

Some night creature ran across the tiered lawn below them, edge to edge.

'My gran told me this. My daddy never speaks of it. Not ever. But it wasn't the gypsy men he had cause to fear, so much as the women. They had the poor wee man seduced.'

Macbeth raised an eyebrow, but not much.

'Like, how could he resist her? This quiet Presbyterian boy with the horn-rimmed spectacles and his first briefcase. How could he resist this, this ...' Moira swung her legs and clicked her heels on the terrace wall.

'I can sympathize,' Macbeth said.

'She was a vision,' Moira said. 'Still is. He'd have laid down his beloved council job for her after the first week, but that wasn't what they wanted - they wanted the camp site until the autumn, for reasons of their own, whatever that was all about.

And they got it. My daddy managed to keep stalling the council, his employers, for reasons of his own. And then it all got complicated because she wasn't supposed to get herself pregnant. Certainly not by him.'

She'd glossed over the rest, her daddy's ludicrous threats to join the gypsies, her gran's battle for custody of the child, the decision by the gypsy hierarchy that, under the circumstances, it might be politic to let the baby go rather than be saddled with its father and pursued by his mother.

And then her own genteel, suburban, Presbyterian upbringing.

'And the rest is the song. Which you know.'

The American, sitting on the wall, shook his head, incredulous. 'This is prime-time TV, you know that? This is a goddamn mini-series.'

'Don't you even think about it, Mr Macbeth,' Moira said, 'or Birnam Wood'll be corning to Dunsinane faster than you can blink.'

'Yeah, uh, the wood. I was gonna ask you. The scene in the wood where you get the comb ... ?'

'Poetic licence. What happened was, the gypsies were in town, right, just passing through. Two of them - I was twelve - these two gypsies were waiting for me outside the school. I'm thinking, you know ... run like hell. But, aw ... it was ... intriguing. And they seemed OK, you know? And the camp was very public. So I went with them. Well... she'd be about thirty then and already very revered, you could tell. Even I could see she was my mother.'

'Holy shit,' said Macbeth.

'We didn't talk much. Nobody was gonna try and kidnap me or anything. Nobody offered me anything. Except the comb. She gave me that.'

'And is it a magic comb?'

'It's just a comb,' Moira said, more sharply than she intended.

'He's close to you,' the Duchess said.

'Who?'

'The departed one.'

'Still?'

'We'll have some tea,' the Duchess said in a slightly raised voice, and a young woman at once emerged from the kitchen with a large silver tray full of glistening white china. 'One of my nieces,' the Duchess said, 'Zelda ...' There would always be nieces and nephews to fetch and carry for the Duchess.

She lifted the lid of the pot and sniffed. 'Earl Grey. Never mind. You should take a rest, Moira. Unravel yourself.'

'Maybe I'd rather not see what's inside of me.'

The Duchess stirred the tea in the pot, making it stronger, making the Earl Grey's rich perfume waft out. 'Maybe you should get away, and when you get back your problems will be in perspective. Go somewhere bland. St Moritz, Barbados ...'

'Jesus, Mammy, how much money you think I'm making?'

'Well, England then. Tunbridge Wells or somewhere.'

'Tunbridge Wells?'

'You know what I mean.'

'Yeah. You're telling me it's something I'm not gonna get away from no matter where I go.'

'Am I?'

'You said there was damage to repair. You think I damaged Matt Castle?'

'Do you?'

'I don't kn ... No! No, I don't see how I could have.'

'That's all right, then,' said the Duchess. She smiled.

Moira felt profoundly uneasy. 'Mammy, how was he when he died? Can you tell me that?'

'Moira, you're a grown woman. You know this man's essence has not returned to the source. I can say no more than that.'

Moira felt the weight of her bag on her knees, the bag with the comb in it. The bag felt twice as heavy as before, like a sack of stolen bullion.

She said in a rush, 'Mammy, somebody was after the comb. I had to fight for it.'

'Yes. That happens. The comb represents a commitment. Sometimes you have to decide whether or not you want to renew it.'

'So it was this struggle which caused ... See, I'm confused. I feel exhausted, but I feel I made it through to a new level, a new plateau. But that usually means something heavy's on the way. Well, doesn't it?'

The Duchess blinked. 'How is your father?' she said brightly. 'Docs he speak of me often?'

She said goodbye to Donald at the gate and patted the Dobermans. Her old BMW was parked about fifty yards away near a derelict petrol station. Parked behind it was a car which had not been there before, a grey Metro with a hire-firm sticker on the rear window.

Leaning against the Metro was a man wearing a dinner jacket over a black t-shirt. On the t-shirt it said in red, I ♥ Govan. The remains of a thistle hung out of one lapel of the jacket.

His face fumbled a grin.

'Uh, hi,' he said.

Moira was furious.

'You followed me! You fucking followed me!'

'Listen ... Moira ... See, this has been ... Like, this was the most bizarre, dramatic, momentous night of my life, you know?'

'So? You've had a sheltered life. Is that supposed ... ?'

'I can't walk away from this. Am I supposed to like, push it aside, maybe introduce it as an anecdote over dinner with my associates?'

Moira stood with her key in the door of the BMW. She wanted to say, OK, while you're here maybe you can tell me something about a tall, pale man with white hair.

Instead, she said, 'Macbeth, you shouldn't believe everything a woman tells you when she's in shock.'

'I ... Goddammit, I saw. And I tried to sleep on it and I couldn't, so this morning ...' Mungo Macbeth looked sheepish and spread his hands ...

She gave him a cursory glance intended to wither, fade him out.

'I figured maybe you could use some help,' he said.

OK,' she said. 'You see those gates? Behind those gates is a guy with two huge and ferocious dogs. The dogs'll do anything the guy says ... And the guy - he'll do anything I say. You got the message?'

'Couldn't we go someplace? Get a bite to eat?'

'No, we could not.' Moira opened the driver's door of the BMW and got in, wound down the window. 'You think I need a strong male shoulder to lean on, that it? Or maybe a bedpost?'

Macbeth said helplessly, 'I just think ... I just think you're an amazing person.'

'Macbeth ..." She sighed. 'Just go away, huh?'

He nodded, expressionless, turned back to his hire car. He looked like he might cry.

This was ridiculous.

'Hey, Macbeth . . Moira leaned back out of the window, nodded at his T-shirt. 'You ever actually been to Govan?'

'Aw, hell ...' Macbeth shrugged. 'I cruised most of those Western Isles. Just don't recall which is which.'

Moira found a grin, or the grin found her. Hurriedly, she put the car into gear, drove away, and when she looked back there was only a bus, a long way behind.