The Man in the Moss (45 page)

           
And now there was ...

           
Look, Liz, why
don't we meet up?

           
And

           
Chairman's hoping
to drop by tonight.

           
Fear. Despair. She'd walked away, down the drive, down
the road, into terror, knowing she could not go home tonight. To the village,
to Ma Wagstaff, to plead for sanctuary.

           
Liz Horridge fell down, tearing her skirt, feeling the
small, jutting stones of Ma Wagstaff's front path gashing her knees. She began
to crawl towards the door, feeling the emanations of the stone buildings heavy
on her back as if they would push her into the little pointed stones beneath
her.

           
The whitened donkeystoned step gleamed like an altar.

           
Liz rose on her knees, tried to reach the knocker but
managed only the letter-box which snapped at her fingers like a gin-trap.

           
'Mrs Wagstaff:
she managed to wail.
'Please, Mrs
Wagstaff
...
let me in
...'

           
But nobody came to the door.

           
'I'm sorry! I couldn't stop it! It wasn't my fault about
the brewery. Please ... He's coming back. Please let me in.'

           
And then the stones came down on her. The weight of the
village descended on her shoulders, taking all the breath from her and she
couldn't even scream.

CHAPTER
II

'Didn't
know I was coming back to die ... I mean, that's what people do, isn't it, and
animals, go back home to die? But I wouldn't have. If I'd known. Last thing
they need here's any deadwood.'

           
The voice frail, but determined. Going to get this out,
if it ...

           
Killed him. Yeah.

           
'Just as well,
really. That I didn't know.'

           
All Moira could see through the windscreen was the Moss.
The vast peatbog unrolling into the mist like the rotting lino in the hall of
her old college lodgings in Manchester, half a life
away.

           
The BMW was parked in the spot at the edge of the
causeway where yesterday she'd sat and listened to the pipes on cassette. Now
it was another cassette, the one from the brown envelope inscribed MOIRA.

           
'Funny thing, lass
... this is the first time I've found it easy to talk to you. Maybe 'cause
you're not there. In the flesh. Heh. Did you realise that, how hard it was for
me? Lottie knew. No hiding it from a woman like Lottie. Shit, I don't care who
knows. I'm dead now.'

           
Matt laughed. The cawing.

           
She'd followed Lottie into a yard untidy with beer kegs
and crates. Beyond it was a solid, stone building the size of a two-car garage.
It looked as old as the pub, had probably once been stables or a barn.

           
'Matt's music room,' Lottie said.

           
She'd been almost scared to peer over Lottie's shoulder,
into the dimness, into the barnlike space with high-level slit windows and
huge, rough beams. Dust floating like the beginnings of snow.

           
Lottie silent. Moira, hesitant. 'May I?' Lottie nodding.
           
Moira slipping past her,
expecting echoes, but there was carpet and rugs underfoot and more carpet on
the walls to flatten the acoustics. She saw a table, papers and stuff strewn
across it.

           
Shelves supported by cement-spattered bricks held books,
vinyl records and tapes. Heavy old speaker cabinets squatted like tombstones
and there was a big Teac reel-to-reel tape machine. Matt's scarred Martin
guitar lay supine on an old settee with its stuffing thrusting out between the
cushions.

           
Hanging over the sides of a stool was something which,
from across the room, resembled a torn and gutted, old, black umbrella.

           
She'd walked hesitantly over and stared down at the
Pennine Pipes in pity and horror, like you might contemplate a bird with
smashed wings. It was as if he'd simply tossed the pipes on the stool and
walked out, forever, and the bag had maybe throbbed and pulsed a little,
letting out the last of Matt's breath, and then the pipes had died.

           
Moira's throat was very dry. She was thinking about
Matt's obsessions: the Pennine Pipes, the bogman and ...

           
'Can't help your
feelings, can you? Like, if you're a married man, with a kid, and you meet
somebody and you ... and she takes over your life and you can't stop thinking
about her. But that's not a sin, is it? Not if you don't ... Anyway, I never
realised that you ... I never realised.'

           
Matt's voice all around her now. Car stereos, so damned
intimate.

           
Lottie had turned away, calling back over her shoulder,
'I'll be in the kitchen. Stay as long as you like. Lock up behind you and bring
me the key. The parcel's on the table.'

           
And was gone, leaving Moira alone in the barn that was
like a chapel, with the pipes left to die.

           
On the table, a thick, brown envelope which had once held
a junk-mail catalogue for Honda cars. It had been resealed with Sellotape and

MOIRA

was scrawled across it.

           
Inside: the tapes, four of them, three of music. And this
one, a BASF chrome, marked
personal.

           
'Not a sin ... if you don't do owt
about it. But I always found it hard to talk to you. I mean ... just to talk to
you. Till it came time to tell you to get out of the band. That was easy. That
was a fucking pushover, kid. I'm sorry the way that worked out, with The
Philosopher's Stone. Sounded like a big opportunity. Like, for me too - chance
to make the supreme sacrifice. But we can't tell, can we? We never can bloody
tell, till it's too late.'

           
Rambling. He'd have been on some kind of medication,
wouldn't he? Drugs.

           
'But when they told me I'd had me
chips, I did regret it. Regretted it like hell. I thought most likely you'd
just have told me to piss off, but there might have been a ... Anyway, I'd have
given anything for just one ... just one time with you. Just one. Anything.'

           
Christ. Moira stared out of the side window to where half
a tree had erupted from the Moss, like bone burst through skin.

           
'When you wrote
back and you said you were too busy, I was shattered. I'd convinced meself
you'd come. I just wanted to at least see you. Just one more time.'

           
Moira bit down on her lower lip.

           
'I'd tried to write a song. Couldn't
do it. It was just a tune without words. Nothing. Best bloody tune I ever
wrote, which isn't saying much - play it for you in a minute. Won't be much
good, the playing, what d'you expect? Be the last tune I ever play. Gonna play
it over and over again until I get it perfect, and then I'm gonna get Lottie to
take me out and I'll play it to the fucking Moss. The Man in the Moss. That's
what it's about. The Man in the Moss. That'll be me, too. Want to die with this
tune in me head. This tune ... and you.'

           
She felt a chill, like a low, whistling wind.

           
'It's called Lament
for the Man. I want the Moss to take it. A gift. Lament for the Bridelow
Bogman. Soon as I read about him, months ago, before it came out about the
sacrifice element, I was inspired by him. Direct link with me own past. The
Celts. The English Celts. Like he'd come out the Moss to make a statement about
the English Celts. And I was the only one could interpret it - sounds arrogant,
eh? But I believe it. Like this is what me whole life's been leading up to.'

           
Man starting to cough. On and on, distorting because the
recording level couldn't handle it. The car-speakers rattling, like there was
phlegm inside.

           
'Fuck it
,' Man
said.
'If I go back and scrub this I'll
forget everything I was gonna say. Sorry. Can you handle it? See, this was
before they'd completed the tests on the bogman, before it was known about the
sacrifice. Even then I was pretty much obsessed. I didn't care if we spent
every penny we'd got. Lottie - she's a bloody good woman, Moira, I never
deserved Lottie - she went along with it, although she loved that chintzy house
in Wilmslow and she hated The Man I'th Moss, soon as she clapped eyes on it.
But she went along with it. Sometimes I think, did she know? Did she know
before me, that I was gonna snuff it? She says not. I believe her.'

           
Across the Moss she could see the pub, a huge grey
boathouse on the edge of a dark sea, its backyard a landing stage.

           
'And then, soon
after we came, the report came out about the bogman. About what he was. A
sacrifice. To appease the gods so they'd keep the enemy at bay, make this
community inviolate. Protect these Celts, these refugees from the fertile flat
lands, the Cheshire Plain, Lancashire, the Welsh border. Invaders snatching
their land, Romans, Saxons. And this, the old high place above the Moss - maybe
it was a lake then. Bridelow.'

           
Man's voice cracked.

           
'Bridelow. The last
refuge. I cried. When I heard, I cried. He went willingly. Almost definitely
that was what happened. Almost certain he was the son of the chief, everything
to live for - had to be, see, to make a worthwhile sacrifice.'

           
Voice gone to a whisper.

           
'Gave himself up.
Willingly.
That's the point. Can you
grasp that, Moira? He let them take him on the Moss and they smashed his head,
strangled him and cut his throat, and he knew ... he fucking knew what was
gonna happen.'

           
She stared through the windscreen at the Moss. Thick, low
cloud lay tight to the peat, like a bandage on its putrefying, suppurating
skin.

           
'Hard to credit,
isn't it? I mean, when you really think about it. When you try and picture it.
He let the buggers do it to him. Young guy, fit, full of life and energy and he
gives himself up in the most complete sense. Can you understand that? Maybe it
affects me more because I've got no youth, no energy, and what life there's
left is dribbling away by the minute. But by God ... I realised I wanted a bit
of that.'

           
She thought about the bogman. The sacrifice. She thought
about Matt, inspired. Always so contagious, Matt's inspiration. She thought, I
can't bear this ...

           
'Can you get what I'm saying? Like,
they took him away, these fucking scientists, with never a second thought about
what he meant to Bridelow and what Bridelow, whatever it was called back then,
meant to him. So I wanted ... I wanted in. To be part of that. To go in the
Moss, too. Lottie tell you that? Lottie thinks it's shit, but it isn't ... '

           
'No,' Moira whispered. 'It wouldn't be.'
 
... want some of me out there. With him. He's
my hero, that lad ... I'm fifty-seven and I'm on me last legs - nay, not even
that any more, me legs won't carry me - and I've found a fucking hero at last.'

           
Matt starting to laugh and the laughter going into a
choke and the choking turning to weeping.

           
'Me and Ma Wagstaff
met one day. One Stormy day. Ma understands, the old bitch. Willie's Ma, you
know? Says to me, "We can help you help him. But you must purify
yourself."'

           
Out on the Moss, the dead tree like bone was moving. It
had a tangle of thin branches, as if it were still alive, and the branches were
waving, whipping against the tree.
           
'She says. "You have to purify yourself".'
           
The tree was a bad tree, was
about to take its place alongside the encroaching stone toad on the moor, the
eruption of guts on an ancient, rough-hewn altar. Bad things forcing themselves
into Bridelow.

           
'And then you came
home ...'
           
Moira's eyes widened.

           
'I used to think
she was ... a substitute. Me own creation. Like, creating you out of her, you
know what I mean? An obsession imposes itself on what's available. But I
should've known. Should've known you wouldn't leave me to die alone.'