The Man in the Moss (15 page)

           
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.