Autobiography (23 page)

This moorland remains unchanged for centuries and it extends no kindness, for why should it? It grinds on in its secrecy regardless of whatever changes sweep through Halifax
town center. These moors you will not control, and something about the chilling darkness makes the motorist lean inwards – away from the window, where you thoughtfully check your own reflection to make sure that it is indeed yours. Historically, the moors have thrown up unanswered questions, and fueled by foggy footpaths and lowland crag the Brontës’ imagination appeared to understand all workings of the heart even though such short lives rarely left Haworth Parsonage. The poor, trapped Brontës; myth unmatched and growing with each century – did they ever enjoy their own bodies? Did they ever even
see
their own bodies?

I start to sing, which doesn’t help, and James jabbers on about some unfolding plot in
Brookside.
Linder, proudly, has no knowledge of
Brookside.
It is at this point that we decide to stop the car and get out. The private spot is a small graveled summit allowing some three vehicles (at most) enough space to pull off from the main road. The wildest views stretch to the western side of the moor, across hill and valley, peat and heather. The view is treeless, and beyond there are miles upon miles of black peat-bog, and we can now spot an array of tiny flickering lights, which Tim estimates to be about six miles away. What they are, we do not know. To the left, right, and rear of us there is nothing – not even sinking remains of stoneworkers’ cottages. Sunken footpaths have nowhere to lead you. In mid-day brightness tedious people in hiking shorts will delight at the sight of shy grouse, and will ponder the secret world of ley-lines. They will make rough sketches of local stone and will calmly leave the moor without carelessly clashing with nightfall. We, on the other hand, are worthy game. There are moments in life to be foolish, brief though they may be. But what harm?

Tim switches off all power in the Mercedes and we are plunged into subjugating darkness, with no reaching trees to throw shadows. My thumb strokes the plastic pattern of an unlit flashlight. Anything to keep the conversation up, we all comment upon the stirring stillness that only has the soft high-pitch of a vicious wind to break it. What being could thrive and survive here – at the end of everything? A summit so bleak and deadly that surely all life has given in? Unthinkably, Tim suggests that we all step outside to reap the wild wind with its sweep to infinity, this 1989 landscape no different from that of 1777. We each force the car doors open, but they are pushed back on us by a sharply ear-splitting gale. Our faces disfigured, our bodies bent against the punishing wind, we huddle by the side of the Mercedes – hunched shoulders against the evil iciness that surely could not be endured by any other living creature.

Our searching flashlights scan the immediate area, lighting upon nothing but a pathetically vandalized public waste bin – a monument to what is oddly known as civilization. Not vandals as such, but more than likely to be those blandly smiling families, out for the day, restless and careless, the earth belonging only to them and their smelly children as they advance decay wherever they go. Here, the bleak moor has seen them all out: the determined fell-walker, the pot-holers – eager to fall in and call for rescue and, more importantly, to appear on the nightly news announcing how they will certainly be back on the moors as soon as their leg heals and their dentures are found – the revolting students, the wild and the visionary, the restless minds, the child-killers who murder and smile, the black hounds of literature, the girls who would be Jane Eyre, the spirits of centuries, the cowardly hunters who must shoot and kill in order to soothe the wretched agonies of their own souls, the cattle and deer who live their lives out in persecution; with no God to save them, the moor has seen them all out.

Urbanized society has yet to encroach upon Saddleworth Moor, and maybe it has tried, but a harsher energy has beaten it back. There are distinct atmospherics walking ahead and behind you on the moor, wrapped in the insidious fog of anonymity. Nothing metaphorical here – the threats are literal. I can scarcely imagine more terrible things as I stand here, as we are all silenced by the rising inferno of the wind. Do the wails of the gales drown out pitiful sobs? Might a roadside sack contain the remains of the sister of the murdered boy? Is it here where your lover might cut your throat and leave you, and where underground cavities lead to a box containing human bones? We are so gripped by how a life is brought to its end, enticed to this remote spot, the ideal locale for dark crimes and miseries. The fog is now black mist. James and Linder pile back into the car.

‘Tim,’
I begin,
‘if you drive off and leave me I’ll be dead before you’ve had time to change gear.’

‘I didn’t bring my cabaret clothes with me, anyway,’
he says. It’s a joke, of course, but one that I couldn’t grasp for at least a minute.

Once we are all re-seated amongst soft radio sounds and the reassurance of heat and light, and as the security locks all slip into place we realize that we have seen enough. We are soft creatures of habit, and we must return to enclosed surrounds of locks and bolts and alarms. Tim is unsure of the road back, but we can all recall passing a turn-off about a mile away, a road that looked wide enough to lead somewhere. The hardened darkness has lowered our spirits, and the dreary grief of moorland is surely safest in its own company. Our dreamscapes have had their fill. We back onto what we see as the main road, and it is barely broad enough for one vehicle, but we crawl along it in search of the turning that we had all remembered. Once again we are silenced by the expanse of blackness, and Tim drives more cautiously than ever. In the midst of this hostile landscape the Mercedes bobs gently like a small ship lost at sea, our silent engine heaving through, and we safe within. We all murmur a soft sigh of recognition as the entrance to the turn-off finally appears.

‘I don’t think there’s any point in me indicating,’
says Tim, as the wheels turn us on to the awaiting road. And it is here that it happens.

As the Mercedes made its measured maneuver to the right, throwing two strong arms of light onto the new road, rising up from the black of the earth came a figure – standing upright and then throwing his arms towards our lights in a terrifying and unspeakably forlorn plea for our attention. United in shock, we all gave a low cry at the sight of this specter. Within a split second of a hair’s breadth, Linder shouts,
‘Stop the car!’
and Tim jerks a fast brake.

‘Nooooo!’
I bang on the back of Tim’s seat, and then Tim just as quickly lifts his foot from the brake and accelerates. James recoils from the passenger door where, just beyond, stood this wretched vision of sallow cheeks and matted shoulder-length hair, a boy of roughly 18 years wearing only a humiliatingly short anorak coat that was open to expose the white of his chest and the nakedness of the rest of his body. The vision chilled our blood as the boy threw out his arms in a forsaken Christ-like appeal. Zooming away, and with him now lost in the dark, our talk is a clutter of ‘
What WAS it?’
and ‘
Jesus, what
...
?’
and
‘How could ANY being be alive out here?’

We had all seen the same thing, so there was no misunderstanding the form that the vision took. The worn face had pleaded for us to stop, or to notice him. His body rose to full height as if he had been crouched in wait, hidden in the browny purples, or else he had climbed the hillside to reach the road in order to flag us down. But something was amiss. He was very thin and quite tall, and apart from his nakedness there would be one curious factor that struck all of us at once, and this was how all the components of his body – face, hair, skin, crumpled little jacket – stood out as one sheet of grey.

We were given heart by an old-fashioned telephone box at the entrance to the village of Marsden. Here, too, a sign told us that we were on the Wessenden Road. Only 8
PM
now, and the village is closed, its inhabitants pulling their chairs closer to the glow of a low fire – by hearth near heath, safely locked in from any creatures of endurance that may in their troubles find themselves wandering. There are such people, aren’t there, so low in human spirit and so insignificant in their being that they can only gain your attention by frightening you.

We squeeze into the phone box, where we call the local police. Quaintly, all the necessary information is provided before us – emergency details listed clearly, and surprisingly free of modern-world graffiti. Tim explains everything to the police, but they cut him short. Tim pushes on.
‘But the point is – he was naked, and I’m sure you realize it’s below freezing point out here, and
...
’

It is no good. Tim hangs up, and we look to him for an explanation.

‘He said a lot of strange things have been reported on the Wessenden Road and that we should keep an open mind.’

‘Keep an open mind about someone in distress?’
I baulk.

‘He is telling us that what we have just seen is commonly known as a ghost.’

Back in the car, we are all somewhat numb.

‘You do realize what’s just happened?’
says James.
‘We’ve all seen a ghost.’

We know this to be true, and our hearts sink. In fact, we knew this to be true as soon as the vision hit our eyeline, and this was why we were all so instantly overcome with grief. We consider the possibilities, and Linder suggests that – if real and alive – the boy had possibly broken free and fled from a nearby farmhouse where he had been subjected to either violence or rape – or the violence
of
rape – and in a fit of exhaustion he had reached the road and saw our Mercedes as his only hope. James agreed, adding that the boy was obviously being hunted. Somehow I disagreed. My instincts told me that he had been placed as bait at a scene of ambush where cars are flagged down by a distressed figure, only then to be surrounded by marauders once the car had stopped. Tim held another view, saying that the boy was obviously a lunatic who had parked his car in darkness and who enjoyed the triumph of terrifying people. But it just wasn’t enough. We sat up through the night and could not avoid the inevitable decision to drive back to the Wessenden Road in daylight, and by 9
AM
the next morning we were there, stepping from the car onto a verge of flattened heather where our specter had stood, and we recalled his rise as if from some underground tunnel.

Saddleworth Moor at 9
AM
was merely a slightly brighter version of its hellish nighttime, and our bodies still shook with the snapping cold. It was all we could do to stand upright. This spot, at the corner of the Wessenden Road, offered no clues as to the origin of the visitation, all points in full circumference revealing nothing to the eye – neither barn nor broken gate, nor falling coach-house – just miles and miles of friendless moorland, its craggy wet earth a living death that no soul could plough through, with no shell of a feeding shed from which a frightened boy might flee during a drugged liaison gone wrong. A weight fell as we noticed a pair of y-front underpants discarded in the wet grass, discolored with dirt, but certainly of the type which an 18-year-old might wear. We shook our heads and we shivered. The surrounding grassland and the roadside with its absence of any public footpath (for who would be using them? from where, to where?) indicated nothing at all of what this boy’s experience could possibly have been in the immediate moments prior to our fog-lights landing upon him. He, or his cohorts, could not have parked a vehicle just off the road, for this deep wet earth would have pulled it in for good. If our specter had been here last night, would he not also be here now – watching us? In a desperate bid for survival he had called to us with the full of his lungs. Being mortal, we could not help – except with the discipline of prayer, which may have been all he required. How many unfortunates have Saddleworth Moor as their final resting place? Or are there still people so disfigured that they cannot live at society’s lack of mercy, and can only find solace in dark places? There may very well be spirits of 1780 who still roam, begging for release by prayer – buried without ceremony, out of the way, beyond gaze, blotted out of creation just for knowing too much, or for saying too much, or for being witness to some dark crime; rent boys and runaways, troubled teens and latchkey kids, motherless druggies and hastily pregnant Carol Annes, now silenced good and proper, deliberately dumped so far from their homes that even a most determined spirit could not find its way back.

Scattered singles flit through 1990, rounded off by the puzzle of
Piccadilly p
alare
(number 18), a student work of novelty that wears off before noon. I am so confused by the song that I turn down
Top of the Pops
. EMI would not speculate on a video, and there is – as always – no airplay, but for once I am not especially surprised. With the fluster of
Piccadilly palare
I am confused by a song that I do not overly care for – mainly because of the rinky-dink Kinks sound spurting from the pale and pasty
Kill Uncle
sessions. Recording something for the sake of recording delivered
Kill Uncle
unto the world
,
and I am finally up against the limits of my abilities, whilst surely not fooling anybody. Having been so right, it is suddenly shocking to be so wrong, yet
Kill Uncle
is number 8 in England and number 52 in the US. It will always be the orphaned imp that nobody wants, and even I – its father and mother – find it difficult to feed. But
Kill Uncle
shocks me into solid action, and in 1991 I brush aside my finicky ways and I undertake an extensive American tour. For this, nature compels the formation of a band, and north London will provide four musicians as, at last, the solo years begin. Friendship prospered with Chas Smash from Holloway, and for a while we are a loosely matching pair in Camden taverns and racquet-club steam rooms.