The Man in the Moss (31 page)

           
There, at the top of the churchyard, was the hole
awaiting Matt, the area immediately around it covered with bright emerald
matting, luridly unconvincing artificial grass. She stood on it, on the very
edge of the hole, staring down into the black, rooty soil. And saw again the
smoke-choked mouth of the great fireplace at the Earl's castle, the clawing
thing her mind had constructed there.

           
Mammy, how was he
when he died, can you tell me that?

           
Backing away from the open grave, thinking, There are
people here who can tell me that. And I can't ask.

           
Standing several yards from the church doorway now and
feeling strongly that someone was watching out for her. But knowing from
experience that this feeling of being watched wasn't necessarily a case of
someone but something. That the watcher could be something in the air,
something that existed purely to watch.

           
Spooking herself. Down here in England, where she had no
heritage and there should be no reverberations.

           
'Aw, fuck this,' she'd said aloud, turning towards the
church doorway, looking up ... directly into the massively exaggerated, gaping
pussy of the
Sheelagh na gig.

           
'Shit,' Moira said. 'Was you, wasn't it?'

           
The Sheelagh. The exhibitionist. The stone effigy of a
woman, compressed to the dimensions of a gargoyle. Thrusting out her privates
and leering about it. A blatant fertility symbol (or something) almost always
found in the stonework of churches, mostly in Ireland.

           
But rarely as prominent as this.

           
'Got yourself a prime spot, here, hen,' said Moira. She'd
walked under the
Sheelagh na gig
,
through the porch and into the church, feeling better now she knew who'd been
watching her. This was OK, this was not the white-haired, white-faced man who'd
tried to steal the comb and (maybe ... ) brought the bloody house down. This
was something older, more benevolent (maybe... ).

           
She'd been the first in church. She'd sat here alone
inside her own dark shroud, concealed by a pillar, until...

           
Until Matt arrived.

           
'... we'll all of us remember the day Matt returned,' the
Minister said. 'The gratitude felt by the whole village that its
second
most important institution was to
be saved ...

           
He's not well, this minister, Moira thought. And he's
worried. A real sense of oppression coming off him. And there shouldn't be that
in here. This is abnormal.

           
The old lady knows, the one in the really bizarre hat.

Hans leads them out into
the churchyard, the pace all the more funereal because he can hardly walk.

           
As they near the doors, Ernie Dawber, standing up in his
pew, sees the curate, Joel Beard, stride forward to take the Rector's arm. Then
there's a rush of footsteps down the aisle and he sees Catherine squeeze past
the coffin resting on the shoulders of Willie and Eric, Frank Senior and Young
Frank and practically throw herself between the two clergymen, dashing the
curate's hand aside and snatching her father's arm, clasping it.

           
By 'eck. No love lost there and she doesn't care who
knows it.

           
The pews are emptying from front to back, which means
Ernie will be the last out, except for the Mystery Woman. He glances behind
just once, as he joins the end of the procession, but she's not there.

           
Sometimes they just disappear, these people.

The next picture is so
black at first, because of the sky, that it's almost like a woodcut.

           
The graveyard packed like a dark fairground. But a circle
of space at the top, where the moor looms above the rectangular hole in the
soil, which, when the lamplight flares, is like the opening of a shaft.

           
Alfred Beckett, verger and organist, has lit a metal
paraffin lantern which he holds up on a pole, hanging it over the grave as Hans
completes the burial rite, his own version, some of it turned about, but all
the old lines there.

           
'Man born of woman hath but a short time ...'
           
As the phrases fade, like a
curlew it begins.
           
The piping.

           
Ernie gasps, muffling his mouth with a leather-gloved
hand, clutching a Victorian marble cross for support. A hush enclosing the
churchyard as the cold and homeless notes roam the air.

           
He straightens up against the cross, brushing in relief
at his overcoat. It's the lad. Dic. Matt's coffin on the ground at the edge of
the grave and Dic standing by it, the Pennine Pipes under his arm and the
wilderness music swirling up into the cold.

           
Only the lad. For just a few seconds ...

           
Ernie moving closer. The lad plays well. His dad'd be
proud. Tries to see Lottie's face, but her head's turned away.
           
Someone weeping behind him.

           
Can't see the coffin any more. The four bearers lined up
on either side of Dic, concealing the grave. Lamplight shows him the fingers of
Willie Wagstaff's left hand starting to move against his thigh, a slow beat, in
time with the piped lament.

           
Ernie finds he's standing next to the lamp-bearer, Alf
Beckett, when somebody - likely a woman - whispers, 'Put it out, Alf.'

           
'Eh?'

           
'Put lamp out.'

           
Silently, Alf Beckett lowers the pole to the ground,
unhooks the lantern, lays it on the grass at his feet, shuffling around to put
himself in front of it so that no light is cast into the
grave.

           
'That do?'

           
'Fine. Ta, lad.'

           
Oh, hell.

           
Quite soon, behind the pipes, there's a scraping and a scuffling
on the ground, like mice or rats. Ernie tries to shut it out. He's not supposed
to hear this. He looks up, away from it, and the only face he can see clearly
is the Rector's, upturned to the sky, to what light remains.

           
The Rector also knows he is not supposed to hear or to
see. He has his eyes tightly closed.

           
'Get it over with
,'
Ernie hisses.
'Get it bloody done!
'

           
Raises his eyes above the little graveside scrum but
doesn't close them. Sees the black
 
shapes of the sparse trees on the edge of the churchyard, where it meets
the moor. The trees trembling. Has this withering, shrivelling sense of
something blowing towards them, off the moor, off the Moss.
           
Irrational. His nerves. Like
the night when he was scared the Moss would swallow the sun and it would never
come up again.
           
Come on, settle down, calm
yourself, there's nowt you can do except keep your mouth shut and your eyes
averted. Nowt here for the Book of Bridelow.

           
Dic keeps on piping, the same melancholy tune, over and
over again, but erratic now, off-key; he's getting tired ... but the noises
behind him go on, the scuffling on the ground, and now a jarring creak and an
intake of breath.

           
And then all hell ...

           
'Stop! Let me
through!'

           
Rough hands thrusting Ernie aside.

           
'Mr Beckett, where's the lamp? Stand back, will you.
Stand back, I said, or somebody ... will ... get ... hurt.'

           
The lantern snatched up, its gassy-white flame slanting,
flaring in the furious eyes of the Rev. Joel Beard, smoke rolling from the
funnel.

           
Hands grab at him to hold him back from the grave, but
Joel, snarling, is big and fuelled-up with rage, the metal cross swinging as
his cassocked chest swells and his elbows slam back.

           
The lamp flies up into the night and Joel catches it by
its base as it falls, pushing Alf Beckett so that Alf spins sideways into Dic
Castle and the Pennine Pipes make a squirming, ruptured noise, subsiding into
empty, impotent blowing and wheezing.

           
The Rev. Joel Beard steps to where the coffin of Matt
Castle lies at the grave's edge, and he lifts the lantern high.

CHAPTER
VI

She was not among those
weeping when the Pennine Pipes began.

           
It got to her in other ways ...
           
Hanging back behind the crowd,
still as the headstones around her, Moira felt confused, puzzled ... the
plucking at something inside her, starting this small, familiar tingle in her
lower abdomen.

           
OK, she would have known anyway that it wasn't Matt she
could hear, there wasn't the same lilting, light-as-air technique, the
inimitable
agility
. Would have been
no mistaking that.

           
And yet ...

           
The Roman numerals on the church clock, lit-up, said
5.30. It
would
be dark at 5.30 this
time of year. But the darkness had the icy, velvet quality of midnight, and
whoever had organized this service had
known
it was going to end like this.
           
Why?

           
Sure as hell was the strangest funeral she'd ever been
to, the minister and the principal mourners in a distant lamplit huddle, the
freezing air over the entire churchyard somehow electric with this almost
feverish, dreamlike tension, and the piping going on and on and on, like in a
time-loop ... so that you wound up mentally pinching yourself, asking
, is this real
?

           
Like, where am I?
Did I drive across these unknown hills into some dream dimension?

           
Needing at last to break through, maybe talk to someone,
hear the sound of her own voice, anybody's voice, she moved closer,
symbolically tossing back the hood of her cloak ... at the moment the lantern
went down.

           
She saw the big shapes of the trees at the end of the
churchyard. Below them, shadows intertwined. The amorphous tableau at the top
of the small rise where Matt's grave was to be. From whence came the insistent,
never-ending piping but no sounds of a funeral service, no suggestion of anyone
leading the proceedings.

           
Only - under the pipes, as she drew close - a whispering,
as if there was more than one person whispering but they weren't listening to
each other, the voices rustling together like wind-dried leaves.

           
And she caught a passing perfume, a sick, sad smell.

           
Then, to her left, a small commotion. An expulsion of
breath from a yard or so away, a dragging on her cloak and she was almost
pulled down.

           
'
Stop
!' A man's
voice, strong, authoritarian.
'Let me
through'
: For just a second everything froze, and then there was this
instinctive communal resistance, a tightening of the clutch of bodies around
her. The whispering intensified, new urgency in it, the dead leaves really
crackling now.

           
A scrabbling now, by her feet; some guy had been pushed
over, rolled on to the cloak.
    
He
found his feet, she reclaimed the cloak. Somewhere nearby there was a struggle
going on.

           
She didn't move. The lamp appeared again, bouncing wildly
in the air, like some will-o'-the-wisp thing. In the spinning light she got a
split-second picture of ... must be Matt's boy, Dic Castle, playing the pipes,
the bag trapped in an elbow, his face red with effort, and Willie Wagstaff next
to Dic, Willie's eyes flitting anxiously, from side to side, and she could
almost feel the rhythm of the little guy's famously impressionable fingers in
her head, thud, thud ...

           
Thud, thud...
.
And then the oil-lamp went up again, was held steady.

           
And Moira looked down, oh, Jesus, into Matt Castle's face
framed in quilted white.