The Man in the Moss (49 page)

           
Ma turned back up the street, waited at the opening to
the brewery road till they'd gone past then took the path round the back of the
cottages so nobody else would see the state of her.

'This?'

           
Water trickled dispiritedly from under the rock and
plopped into the pool.

           
'Used to be a torrent,' Willie remembered.
           
'This is the holy well?'
           
The pool looked flat and
sullen in the rain.
           
'There should be a statue,'
Willie said.
           
'Of whom?'

           
'The ... Mother. On that ledge. She had her hands out,
blessing the spring. There's a ceremony, every May Day. Flowers everywhere. You
can see it for miles. Then the lads'd come up from t'brewery, fill up a few
dozen barrels, roll um down the hill. At one time, all the beer'd be made wi'
this water, now it's shared out, so there's a few drops in each cask.'

           
Willie kicked a pebble into the pool. 'I'm saying 'now'.
Gannons'll've stopped it.'

           
'Aye,' Moira said, 'there's no life here.' She bent down,
dipped her hands in the pool. It felt stagnant. If Ma Wagstaff had come up here
hoping for some kind of spiritual sustenance, she'd have gone away pretty damn
depressed.

           
'Used to take it all wi' a pinch of salt,' Willie said,
'I mean ... bit of nonsense, really. But we come up here. Every May Day we'd
come up here, whole village at one time, all them as could walk. Then back to
The Man, couple o' pints ... bite to eat...'

           
Willie smiled. 'Good days, them, Moira. When you think
back on it.'

           
'Hang on,' Moira said. 'There's something here.'

           
With both hands, she lifted it out, the spring water
dripping from her palms. Dripping like tears from the eyes of the battered
plaster head of the Mother of God.

           
'Oh, hell,' Willie said sorrowfully.

           
'The Mother?'

           
Willie nodded. 'There's three of um. Three statues. The
young one, the Virgin, she's brought up on Candlemas - St Bride's day,
beginning of February. Then the Mother - this one - at Lammas. Then, at
All-Hallows, they bring the winter one.'

           
'The Hag,' Moira said.

           
Willie nodded.

           
'The Threefold Goddess,' Moira said. 'Virgin, Mother,
Hag.'

           
'Summat like that. Like I say ... pinch of salt. Women s
stuff.'

           
'Your ma ... she'd never be taking it with a pinch of
salt.

           
'No,' said Willie.
           
'What about Matt?'

           
'He were different,' Willie said, 'when he come back.
When we was lads it were just the way things were, you know? One of us'd be
picked to collect stuff for t'seasonal crosses, collate it like, sort out what
were what. We didn't reckon much on it. Bit of fun, like.'

           
'As it should be,' Moira said, pushing her sodden hair
back to stop it dripping down her jacket. 'How else d'you get kids into it if
it's no' fun?'

           
'Matt come back ... wi' a mission. Know what 1 mean?
Horridges had sold off brewery to Gannon's and Gannon's didn't want t'pub - it
were doing nowt, were it? Local trade and a few ramblers of a Sunday. Perked up
a bit when t'bogman were found, but not for long - nine day wonder sorta
thing.'

           
'So Matt returns to buy the pub. Local hero.'

           
'
Exactly
. Spot
on. Local hero, I tell thi, Moira ... honest to God, he were me mate, but I
wish he'd not come. You know what I mean?'

           
'I do now,' Moira said, hearing the tape in her head. 'He
was an emotional man. An impressionable man. An obsessive man.'

           
Willie snorted. 'Can say that again.'
           
'But not a bad man,' Moira
said.
           
'Oh no. I don't think so.'

           
'So somebody - or some
thing
was using him. He was a vessel. Willie, this bogman ... ?'

           
'Oh, bugger.' Willie looked up into the sky, now putting
down water with a good bit more enthusiasm than the Holy Spring. The coins in
his pocket chinked damply, 'I'm saying nowt. You've gorra talk to Ma.'

He heard her creaking into
the hall below. 'Gerrout from under me feet, Bobbie.'
           
The cat.

           
Heard her feet on the bottom stairs and slid himself into
a room which, as he'd ascertained earlier, was a box room full of rubbish,
tea-chests, heaps of old curtaining, a treadle sewing-machine shrouded in dust.

           
Took her a long time and a lot of laboured breathing to
reach the top of the stairs. Heard her in the bathroom, the dribble and the
flush and the old metal cistern filling up behind her with a series of coughs
and gasps.

           
He brought a hand to the crown of his head, felt his
emergent, urgent bristles one last time, for luck. Luck? You made your own. He
put his glove back on. For a moment, a while back, someone hammering on the
front door had flung him back to that night last summer in the stolen car. The
police! But then he'd concentrated - go
away
- and the knocking had stopped.

           
Flexing and clenching his powerful, leathered hands, he
moved out onto the landing as the old woman sighed and braced herself to go
downstairs.

           
Not much left of her. Old bones in a frayed cardigan.
Hair as dry and neglected as tufts of last summer's sheep wool caught in a wire
fence.

           
Some witch, he thought, rising up behind her.

           
Quite slowly - although he knew he'd made no sound - she
turned around and looked up at him, at his fingers poised above her bony,
brittle shoulders. Then at his face.

           
And he looked at hers.

           
They'd always said, in the village, how fierce her eyes
were. How she could freeze you where you stood with those eyes, turn you to
stone, pin you to the wall.

           
Shaw Horridge grinned. Come on, then.

           
Wanting her to do that to him. Focus her eyes like
lasers. Wanting the challenge, the friction. Wanting something he could smash,
like hurling someone else's Saab Turbo into a bus

shelter.

           
Wanted to do it and
feel
better.

           
But her eyes surprised him. They were as soft and
harmless as a puppy's.

           
For a moment, this froze him.

           
'Come on,' he said, suddenly agitated. 'Come on, witch.'

           
She stared calmly at him, heels on the very edge of the
top stair. Wouldn't take much of a push. That was no good.

           
He said, 'Where's your magic, eh? Where's your fucking
magic now?'

           
She bit her worn-down bottom lip, but otherwise didn't
move. 'Don't you know me?' she said. 'Do you not know me?'
           
He shook his head. 'You're
going to die,' he said. 'Don't you realise that?'

           
The withered old face crumpled into an apology for a
smile. 'I'm dead already, lad,' Ma Wagstaff said, voice trickling away like
sand through an egg-timer. 'Dead already. But it's nowt t'do wi' you. You'll be
glad of that, one day.'

           
Her ancient face was as blank as unmarked parchment as
she threw up her arms, hands wafting at the air. Her body seemed to rise up at
him, making him lurch back into the landing wall, and then she flopped down the
stairs, with barely a bounce, like an old, discarded mop.

CHAPTER
V

The gypsy guy with the
beat-up hat and the Dobermans wasn't too sure about this. Still looked like
he'd prefer to feed the stranger to the dogs.
           
'No,' Macbeth said, 'I don't
even know her name.' Had to be easier getting to meet with the goddamn Queen.
'All I know is she isn't called Mrs Cairns.'

           
The guy's heavy eyebrows came down, suspicious. 'Who is
it told you where to come?'

           
'Uh, Moira's agent. In Glasgow. Listen. I'm not with the
police, I'm not a reporter.'

           
'OK, well, you just stay here, pal,' the gypsy guy said,
and to make sure Macbeth didn't move from the gates of the caravan site he left
the two dogs behind. Macbeth liked to think he was good with dogs, but the
Dobermans declined to acknowledge this; when he put out a friendly hand, one
growled and the other dribbled. Macbeth shrugged and waited.

           
The gypsy was gone several minutes, but when he returned
he'd gotten himself a whole new attitude. Unbolting the gates, holding them
back for the visitor. 'Wid ye come this way, sir ...' Well, shit, next thing
he'd be holding his hat to his chest and bowing. Even the Dobermans had a
deferential air. Macbeth grinned, figured maybe the old lady had sussed him
psychically, checked out his emanations.

           
Whatever, in no time at all, here's Mungo Macbeth of the
Manhattan Macbeths sitting in a caravan like some over-decorated seaside
theme-bar, brass and china all over the walls.

           
'I'll leave ye then, Duchess ... ?'

           
'Thank you, Donald.' Lifting a slender hand loaded up
with gold bullion.

           
She was Cleopatra, aboard this huge, gold-braided
Victorian-looking chaise longue. She had on an ankle-length robe, edged with
silver. Had startling hair, as long as Moira's, only dazzling white.

           
'Well, uh ...' This was bizarre. This was an essentially
tricky situation. Awe was not called for. And yet this place was already
answering questions about Moira that he hadn't even been able to frame.

           
She said, 'Call me Duchess. It's a trifle cheap, but one
gets used to these indignities.'

           
Didn't look to be more than sixty. Younger by several
centuries, he thought, than her eyes.

           
'And you'll come to the point, Mr Macbeth. Life is
short.' He blinked. 'OK.' Swallowed. Couldn't believe he'd come here, was doing
this. 'Uh ... fact of the matter is ... I spent some time with your daughter,
couple nights ago.'
           
'Really,' the Duchess said
dryly.

           
'No, hey, nothing like ... See, I ...' This was his first
meeting with Moira all over again. Couldn't string the words together. 'Can't
get her off of my mind,' he said and couldn't say any more.

           
'You poor man.' The merest shade of a smile in the crease
down one check. 'How can I help?'

           
Acutely aware how embarrassingly novelettish all this was
sounding, how like some plastic character in one of his own crummy TV films, he
said solemnly, 'See, this never happened to me before.'

           
The Duchess had a very long neck. Very slowly she bent it
towards him, like a curious swan. 'Are you a wealthy man, Mr Macbeth?'

           
'One day, maybe,' he said. 'So they tell me.' Thinking,
if she asks me to cross her fucking palm with silver, I'm out of here.

           
'The feeling I'm getting from you ...' Those ancient,
ancient eyes connecting with his, '... is that, despite your name, you've
always been very much an American.'

           
'That's that the truth,' Macbeth confirmed with a sigh.
'All we've got to do now is convince my mom.'

           
The Duchess smiled at last. 'I think I like you, Mr
Macbeth,' she said. 'We'll have some tea.'

Later she picked up on the
theme. 'You're really not what you appear, are you?'
           
'No?'

           
The Duchess shook her head. Tiny gold balls revolved in
her earrings.

           
'This worries you. You feel you've been living a lie. You
feel that all your life you've tried to be what people expect you to be. But
different people want different things, and you feel obliged, perhaps, to live
up to their expectation of you. You feel ...' The Duchess scrutinized him, with
renewed interest, over her gold-rimmed bone china teacup. 'You feel you are in
your present fortunate position because of who you are rather than what you can
do.'