The Man in the Moss (19 page)

           
Standing on the edge of the terrace overlooking a
floodlit lawn, he cupped both palms around his face. 'I am such an asshole.'

           
No way she could disagree.

           
Macbeth hung his head. 'See, I ... Aw, Jesus, I'm in this
party of seriously intellectual Celtic people, and, like ... what do I know?
What's my contribution gonna be? What do I know? - I know a song. So I go -
showing off my atom of knowledge - I go, how about you play The Comb Song? Just
came out. Dumb, huh?'

           
She looked hard into his dark blue eyes. 'So it
was
you asked for the song.'

           
'Yeah, it just came to me to ask for that song. Then
someone else took it up. It was confusing. I coulda bit off my tongue when it
came clear you didn't want to do that number. I'm sorry.' He sat down on the
paved area, legs hanging over the side of the terrace. He rubbed his eyes. 'All
those stag heads. Like it was orchestrated.'

           
'You think it was somehow down to the song? Hence I'm a
witch? You connect that with
me
?'

           
'Uh ...' Macbeth looked
very
confused. 'I'm sorry. Whole

thing scared the shit out
of me. You feel the atmosphere in there? Before it happened?'

           
Headlight beams sliced through the trees along the drive.
The ambulance probably. Maybe two. Maybe a whole fleet, seeing this was the
Earl's place.

           
'Cold,' Macbeth said. 'Bone-freezing cold. I mean ...
shit ... it isn't even cold
out here...
now.'

           
Moira had said, 'Can you excuse me? I need to make a
phone call.'

She didn't know how old the
comb was. Maybe a few hundred years old, maybe over a thousand. She'd never
wanted to take it to an expert, a valuer; its value was not that kind.

           
The comb was of some heavy, greyish metal. It was not
very ornate and half its teeth were missing, but when she ran it through her
hair it was like something was excavating deep furrows in her soul.

           
The Duchess weighed the comb in fingers that sprayed red
and green and blue fire from the stones in her rings, eleven of them.

           
'My,' the Duchess said, 'you really are in a quandary,
aren't you?'

           
'Else why would I have come.'

           
'And someone ... You've not told me everything ... I can
sense a death.'

           
'Yes,' Moira whispered, feeling, as usual, not so much an
acolyte at the feet of a guru, more like a sin-soaked Catholic at confession.
           
'Whose?'
           
'Matt Castle.'
           
'Who is he?'

           
'You know ... He was the guy whose band I joined when I
left the university in Manchester. Must be ... a long time ... seventeen years
ago.'

           
'This was before ... ?'

           
'Yes.'

           
The Duchess passed the comb from one hand to the other
and back again. 'There's guilt here. Remorse.'

           
'Well, I ...I've always felt bad about leaving the band
when I did. And also ... three, four months ago, he wrote to me. He wanted me
to do some songs with him. He was back living in his old village, which is that
same place they found the ancient body in the peat. Maybe you heard about
that.'

           
'A little.' The Duchess's forefinger stroking the rim of
the comb.

           
'Matt was seriously hung up on this thing,' Moira said,
'the whole idea of it. This was the first time ... I mean, when we split, his
attitude was, like, OK, that's it, nice while it lasted
but it's the end of an era. So, although we've spoken several times on the
phone, it's fifteen years last January since I saw him.
 
Um ... last year it came out he'd been to the
hospital, for tests, but when I called him a week or so later he said it was
OK, all negative, no problem. So ... Goes quiet, we exchange Christmas cards
and things, as usual. Then, suddenly - this'd be three, four, months ago - he
writes, wanting to get me involved in this song-cycle he's working on, maybe an
album. To be called
The Man in the Moss
.'

           
'And you would have nothing to do with it?'

           
'I... Yeh, I don't like to bugger about with this stuff
any more. I get scared ... scared what effect I'm gonna have, you know? I'm
pretty timid these days.'

           
'So you told him no.'

           
'So I ... No, I couldn't turn it down flat. This is the
guy got me started. I owe him. So I just wrote back, said I was really sorry
but I was tied up, had commitments till the autumn. Said I was honoured, all
this crap, and I'd be in touch. Hoping, obviously, that he'd find somebody
else.'

           
She paused. Her voice dropped. 'He died last night. About
the same time all this ...'

           
The Duchess passed the comb back to Moira. 'I don't like
the feel of it. It's cold.'

           
The comb is icy,
brittle, oh ...

           
Her mother was glaring at her, making her wish she hadn't
come. There was always a period of this before the tea and the biscuits and the
Duchess saying, How is your father? Does he ever speak of me? And she'd smile
and shake her head, for her

daddy still didn't know,
after all these years, that she'd even met this woman.

           
The Duchess said, 'That trouble you got into, with the
rock and roll group. You dabbled. I said to you never to dabble. I said when
you were ready to follow a spiritual path you should come to me. It was why I
gave you the comb.'

           
'Yes, Mammy, I know that.' She'd always call her Mammy
deliberately in a vain effort to demystify the woman. 'I'm doing my best to
avoid it. That's why ...'

           
'The comb has not forgiven you,' the Duchess said
severely. 'You have some damage to repair.'

           
'Aye, I know.' Moira said. 'I know that too.'

She'd returned from the
phone floating like a ghost through a battlefield, blood and bandages
everywhere - well, maybe not so much blood, maybe not any. Maybe the blood was
in her head.

           
'You all right, Miss Cairns? You weren't hit?'
           
'I'm fine. Your ... I'm fine'
           
'You're very pale. Have a
brandy.
           
'No. No, thank you.'

           
All this solicitousness. Scared stiff some of his Celtic
brethren would sue the piss out of him. She was impatient with him. Him and his
precious guests and his precious trophies and his reputation. What did it
matter? Nobody was dying.

           
Yes, Moira. Yes, he
is. I'm sorry ... No, not long. I'll know more in the morning. Perhaps you
could call back then.

           
She had to get out of this house, didn't want to see
wounds bathed and glass and antlers swept away. Didn't want to see what had
happened to the pale man.

           
Outside, Mungo Macbeth, of the Manhattan Macbeths, still
sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the terrace.

           
Moira joined him, feeling chilly now in her black dress,
stiff down by the waist where it had soaked up spilled Guinness from the
carpet.

           
And, because he was there and because he was no threat
any more, she began to talk to Macbeth. Talked about many things -
not
including Matt Castle.

           
In fact she was so determined not to talk about Matt -
and, therefore, not to break down - that she blocked him out, and his dying, with
something as powerful and as pertinent to the night: she found she was telling
Mungo Macbeth about the Comb Song.

           
'Everybody thinks it's metaphor, you know?'

           
'It exists?'

           
'Aye. Sure.'

           
Then she thought.
Only
person I ever told before was M
...
           
She said quickly, 'Your family
make regular donations to the IRA?'

           
' ...
what?'

           
His eyebrows went up like they'd been pulled on wires and
she stared good and hard into his eyes. They were candid and they were
innocent.

           
'Sorry,' she said. 'I forgot. You aren't even Irish.'

           
'Moira, let's be factual here. I'm not even Scottish.'

           
She found herself smiling. Then she stopped. She said,
'Every year these gypsies would camp on the edge of the town, derelict land
since before the War. Only this year it was to be redeveloped, and so the
gypsies had to go. My daddy was the young guy the council sent to get rid of
them. He was scared half to death of what they might do to him, the gypsy men,
who would naturally all be carrying knives.'

           
Some night creature ran across the tiered lawn below
them, edge to edge.

           
'My gran told me this. My daddy never speaks of it. Not
ever. But it wasn't the gypsy men he had cause to fear, so much as the women.
They had the poor wee man seduced.'
           
Macbeth raised an eyebrow, but
not much.
           
'Like, how could he resist
her? This quiet Presbyterian boy with the horn-rimmed spectacles and his first
briefcase. How could he resist this, this ...' Moira swung her legs and clicked
her heels on the terrace wall.

           
'I can sympathize,' Macbeth said.
           
'She was a vision,' Moira
said. 'Still is. He'd have laid down his beloved council job for her after the
first week, but that wasn't what they wanted - they wanted the camp site until
the autumn, for reasons of their own, whatever that was all about.

           
And they got it. My daddy managed to keep stalling the
council, his employers, for reasons of
his
own. And then it all got complicated because she wasn't supposed to get herself
pregnant. Certainly not by
him
.'

           
She'd glossed over the rest, her daddy's ludicrous
threats to join the gypsies, her gran's battle for custody of the child, the
decision by the gypsy hierarchy that, under the circumstances, it might be
politic to let the baby go rather than be saddled with its father and pursued
by his mother.

           
And then her own genteel, suburban, Presbyterian
upbringing.

           
'And the rest is the song. Which you know.'

           
The American, sitting on the wall, shook his head,
incredulous. 'This is prime-time TV, you know that? This is a goddamn
mini-series
.'

           
'Don't you even think about it, Mr Macbeth,' Moira said,
'or Birnam Wood'll be corning to Dunsinane faster than you can blink.'

           
'Yeah, uh, the wood. I was gonna ask you. The scene in
the wood where you get the comb ... ?'

           
'Poetic licence. What happened was, the gypsies were in
town, right, just passing through. Two of them - I was twelve - these two
gypsies were waiting for me outside the school. I'm thinking, you know ... run
like hell. But, aw ... it was ... intriguing. And they seemed OK, you know? And
the camp was very public. So I went with them. Well... she'd be about thirty
then and already very revered, you could tell. Even I could see she was my
mother.'

           
'Holy shit,' said Macbeth.

           
'We didn't talk much. Nobody was gonna try and kidnap me
or anything. Nobody offered me anything. Except the comb. She gave me that.'

           
'And is it a magic comb?'

           
'It's just a comb,' Moira said, more sharply than she
intended.

'He's close to you,' the
Duchess said.

           
'Who?'

           
'The departed one.'
           
'Still?'

           
'We'll have some tea,' the Duchess said in a slightly
raised voice, and a young woman at once emerged from the kitchen with a large
silver tray full of glistening white china. 'One of my nieces,' the Duchess
said, 'Zelda ...' There would always be nieces and nephews to fetch and carry
for the Duchess.