The Man in the Moss (2 page)

           
Matt didn't finish the sentence, covering up the break by
changing down to third, swinging sharp right and taking them through
Manchester's Piccadilly: bright lights, couples scurrying through the snow.
Snow was nice in the city, Moira thought. For a while. When it came by night.

           
Think about the snow. Because Matt's got to be lying
through his teeth.

           
But the silence got too heavy. 'OK,' she said, to change
the subject. 'What
do
you want to be
doing?'

           
'Eh?'

           
'You said you didny wanna be trailing your gear around
when you were sixty. What would you like to be doing?'

           
Matt didn't answer for a long time, not until they were
out of the city centre.

           
'I'm not sure,' he said eventually. 'We're all right for
money, me and Lottie. Thanks to you.'

           
'Matt... .'
I can't
stand this
.

           
'All right. I don't know. I don't know what I want to do.
But I'll tell you this much ... I know where I want to
be
.'

           
Moira waited. The snow was heavy now, but they were not
too far from Whalley Range, where she lived, and it wouldn't take Matt long to
get to his bit of Cheshire and Lottie.

           
'What I want,' he said, 'is to be out of these sodding
suburbs. Want to go home.'

           
'Across the Moss?' The words feeling strange in Moira's
mouth.

           
'Yeah,' Matt said.

           
Across the Moss. Willie and Matt would often slip the
phrase to each other, surreptitiously, like a joint. Across the Moss was Over
the Rainbow. Utopia. The Elysian Fields.

           
'Lottie likes it fine where we are. All the shops and the
galleries and that. But it's not me, never was. Don't belong. No ... echoes.
So. Yeah. I'm going home. Might take a year, might take ten. But that's where
I'm ending up.'

           
Which didn't make her feel any better. Twenty years older
than her and here he was, talking about ending up. Did this happen to everybody
when they turned forty?

           
'This is Willie's village, up in the moors?'

           
'Yeah. And Willie stayed. Willie's got family there. My
lot moved to town when I was a lad. You never get rich up there, not even the
farmers. But we were happy. We were
part
of it
. Willie's still part of it. Drops down to town to play a gig or two,
get his leg ...go out with a woman.'

           
Moira smiled. Matt tended to be kind of proper, like a
father, when they were alone.

           
'But he keeps going back. And his mother ... she's never
spent a night away, his ma, the whole of her life.'

           
'Some place, huh?'

           
'Special place.' He was staring unblinking through the
windscreen and the snow. 'It's quite lonely and primitive in its way. And the
Moss - biggest peatbog in the North.'

           
'Really?'

           
'Vast. And when you get across it - it's weird - but
there's a different attitude. Different values.'

           
'Isn't that what everybody says about the place they were
brought up?'

           
'Do you?'

           
She thought about this.

           
'No,' she said. 'Maybe not.'

           
The world outside was a finite place in the thickening
snow. Matt was somewhere far inside himself. Across the Moss.
           
She glanced at him quickly.
Thickset guy, coarse-skinned. Nobody's idea of a musician. Brooding eyes the
colour of brown ale. Most times you thought you knew him; sometimes you weren't
so sure. Occasionally you were damn sure you didn't know him, and couldn't.
           
After a while she said,
'What's it called? I forget.'
           
'Bridelow,' Matt said in a
deliberate way, rounding out all the consonants. 'Bridelow Across the Moss.'
           
'Right,' she said vaguely.

           
'Dramatic place. To look at. Never saw that till I
started going back. I take the little lad up there sometimes, of a weekend.
When he's older we're going to go hiking on Sundays. Over the moors.'
           
'Sounds idyllic. Like to see
it sometime.'
           
'But mostly I go alone.' Matt
pulled up under the streetlamp in front of the Victorian villa where Moira had
her apartment.
           
'Me and the pipes.'
           
'You take the pipes?'

           
Bagpipes. The Northumbrian pipes, played sitting down,
had been Matt's instrument. Then he'd started experimenting with different
kinds of bag, made of skins and things. He called them the Pennine Pipes,
claiming they'd been played in these parts since before the Romans came to
Britain.

           
The Pennine Pipes made this eerie, haunting sound, full
of a kind of repressed longing.
           
'Releases me,' Matt said.

           
She didn't want to ask him what it released him from.
           
'Takes it away,' Matt said.

           
She didn't want to ask him what it was that piping took
away.

           
'On the Moss,' Matt said. 'Only on the Moss.'

           
The tips of her fingers started to feel cold.

           
'The Moss takes it away,' Matt said. 'The Moss absorbs
it.
           
He switched off the engine.
Snow was settling on the bonnet.
           
'But the Moss also preserves
it,' Matt said. 'That's the only drawback. Peat preserves. You give it to the
peat, and you've got rid of it, but the peat preserves it
for ever
.'

           
He turned and looked at her; she saw something swirling
in his eyes and the truth exploded in her mind.
Oh, Christ, don't let me taste it. God almighty, don't let it come. Was
the girl, what's her name, Gina ...it was the girl, it wasny you, Matt, wasny
you ... please, don't let it be you ...

In the silence, the kind
which only new snow seemed to make, they looked at each other in the
streetlight made brighter by the snow.
           
'This is it then,' Matt said flatly.

           
'Think I might cry again.' But
she
was lying now. There was the residue of something unpleasant
here, something more than sadness swirling in Matt's eyes.

           
Matt had his door open. 'Pass us your guitar.'
           
'Huh? Oh. Right. Sorry.'

           
The street was silent, snow starting to make the three
and four-storey houses look like soft furnishings. Lights shone pastel green,
pink and cream behind drawn curtains. Matt took the guitar case, snowflakes
making a nest in his denim cap. He pushed it back. He said, just as relaxed,
just as mild and just as offhand as he'd been earlier, 'One thing I've always
meant to ask. Why do you always take this thing on stage with you?'

           
'The guitar?'

           
'No, lass. The case. This old and cracked and not very
valuable guitar case. You never let the bloody thing out of your sight.'

           
'Oh.' How long had he been noticing this? She looked at him.
His eyes were hard. He'd never asked her questions; everything he knew about
her she'd volunteered. Matt was incurious.

           
And because of that she told him.

           
'There's... kind of a wee pocket inside the case, and
inside of that there's, like, something my mother gave me when I was young.'

           
He didn't stop looking at her.

           
'It's only a comb. Kind of an antique, you know? Very
old. Too heavy to carry around in your pocket. It means a lot to me, I
suppose.'

           
'That's your mother, the ... ?'

           
'The gypsy woman. Aye. Ma mother, the gypsy woman.'
           
She shook snow off her hair.
'They're big on good luck tokens, the gypsies. Throw'm around like beads.'

           
Matt said roughly, 'Don't go making light of it.'

           
'Huh?'

           
'You're trying to make it seem of no account. Traditions
are important. Sometimes I think they're all we have that's worthwhile.' He
propped the instrument in its stiff black case against the wide concrete base
of the streetlamp.

           
Moira said, 'Look, you're gonny get soaked.'

           
He laughed scornfully, like the noise a crow makes.

           
'Matt,' she said, 'I'll see you again, yeh?' And she did
want to, she really did. Sure she did.

           
He smiled. 'We'll be on different circuits now, lass. You
in a suite at the Holiday Inn, me over the kitchen at the Dog and Duck. Tell
you what, I'll buy all your records. Even if it is rock and roll. How's that?'

           
She took a step towards him, hesitant. He was only a wee
bit taller than she was.

           
This was it. The final seconds of the last reel.

           
Two years in the band, building up her reputation on the
back of his. Matt watching her with some pride. A touch supervisory at first,
then graciously taking half a pace back until even the wee folk clubs were
announcing 'The Matt Castle Band with Moira Cairns'. And a couple of times, to
her embarrassment, Moira Cairns in bigger letters.

           
And now she was leaving. Off to London for the big money.

           
Traitorous bitch
...

           
'Matt . . It was the worst moment. She should kiss him
too, but that would seem perfunctory, demeaning and pretty damn cheap.

           
Also, for the first time, she didn't want to go that
close to him.

           
He'd pulled down his cap; she tried to peer under the
peak, to find out what his eyes were saying.

           
Nothing. His eyes would show no resentment, no
disappointment. She was leaving the band which had changed her life, made her
name. Leaving the band just when she was starting to put something back, and
Matt felt ...

           
He felt nothing.

           
Because ... Jesus...

           
'Did you go on the peat today?' she asked him in a very
small voice, the snow falling between them. 'Did you go on the peat with the
pipes? Did you let the damn peat absorb it?'

           
And then the projector stuttered and stalled again,
images shivering on the screen of the night, and she saw him suddenly all in
white. Maybe just an illusion of the snow. He was very still and framed in
white. It wasn't nice. The white was frilled around him, like the musty lace
handkerchiefs in the top dresser drawer at her gran's house.

           
And a whiff of soiled perfume.
           
Death?

           
For the first time, there was a real menace to him. Too
transient to tell whether it was around him or
from
him. Her throat swelled. She coughed and the tears came, the
wrong kind of tears. She felt the snow forming on the top of her own head; it
was almost warm. Maybe she looked like that too, shrouded in white.

           
Matt held out his right hand and she gripped it like a
lifeline, but the hand was deathly cold. She told herself, Cold hands, warm
heart, yeah? And tried to pull him closer - but all the time wanting to keep
him away and hating herself for that.

           
He dropped her hand and then put both of his on her
shoulders. His arms were rigid, like girders, but she felt they were trembling,
his whole body quivering with some titanic tension, something strong holding
out against something potentially stronger, like a steel suspension bridge in a
hurricane.

           
Then he said, 'Going to show me?' Voice colder than the
snow.