All Moira could see through the windscreen was the Moss. The vast peatbog unrolling into the mist like the rotting lino in the hall of her old college lodgings in Manchester, half a life
away.
The BMW was parked in the spot at the edge of the causeway where yesterday she'd sat and listened to the pipes on cassette. Now it was another cassette, the one from the brown envelope inscribed MOIRA.
'Funny thing, lass ... this is the first time I've found it easy to talk to you. Maybe 'cause you're not there. In the flesh. Heh. Did you realise that, how hard it was for me? Lottie knew. No hiding it from a woman like Lottie. Shit, I don't care who knows. I'm dead now.'
Matt laughed. The cawing.
She'd followed Lottie into a yard untidy with beer kegs and crates. Beyond it was a solid, stone building the size of a two-car garage. It looked as old as the pub, had probably once been stables or a barn.
'Matt's music room,' Lottie said.
She'd been almost scared to peer over Lottie's shoulder, into the dimness, into the barnlike space with high-level slit windows and huge, rough beams. Dust floating like the beginnings of snow.
Lottie silent. Moira, hesitant. 'May I?' Lottie nodding.
Moira slipping past her, expecting echoes, but there was carpet and rugs underfoot and more carpet on the walls to flatten the acoustics. She saw a table, papers and stuff strewn across it.
Shelves supported by cement-spattered bricks held books, vinyl records and tapes. Heavy old speaker cabinets squatted like tombstones and there was a big Teac reel-to-reel tape machine. Matt's scarred Martin guitar lay supine on an old settee with its stuffing thrusting out between the cushions.
Hanging over the sides of a stool was something which, from across the room, resembled a torn and gutted, old, black umbrella.
She'd walked hesitantly over and stared down at the Pennine Pipes in pity and horror, like you might contemplate a bird with smashed wings. It was as if he'd simply tossed the pipes on the stool and walked out, forever, and the bag had maybe throbbed and pulsed a little, letting out the last of Matt's breath, and then the pipes had died.
Moira's throat was very dry. She was thinking about Matt's obsessions: the Pennine Pipes, the bogman and ...
'Can't help your feelings, can you? Like, if you're a married man, with a kid, and you meet somebody and you ... and she takes over your life and you can't stop thinking about her. But that's not a sin, is it? Not if you don't ... Anyway, I never realised that you ... I never realised.'
Matt's voice all around her now. Car stereos, so damned intimate.
Lottie had turned away, calling back over her shoulder, 'I'll be in the kitchen. Stay as long as you like. Lock up behind you and bring me the key. The parcel's on the table.'
And was gone, leaving Moira alone in the barn that was like a chapel, with the pipes left to die.
On the table, a thick, brown envelope which had once held a junk-mail catalogue for Honda cars. It had been resealed with Sellotape and
MOIRA
was scrawled across it.
Inside: the tapes, four of them, three of music. And this one, a BASF chrome, marked personal.
'Not a sin ... if you don't do owt about it. But I always found it hard to talk to you. I mean ... just to talk to you. Till it came time to tell you to get out of the band. That was easy. That was a fucking pushover, kid. I'm sorry the way that worked out, with The Philosopher's Stone. Sounded like a big opportunity. Like, for me too - chance to make the supreme sacrifice. But we can't tell, can we? We never can bloody tell, till it's too late.'
Rambling. He'd have been on some kind of medication, wouldn't he? Drugs.
'But when they told me I'd had me chips, I did regret it. Regretted it like hell. I thought most likely you'd just have told me to piss off, but there might have been a ... Anyway, I'd have given anything for just one ... just one time with you. Just one. Anything.'
Christ. Moira stared out of the side window to where half a tree had erupted from the Moss, like bone burst through skin.
'When you wrote back and you said you were too busy, I was shattered. I'd convinced meself you'd come. I just wanted to at least see you. Just one more time.'
Moira bit down on her lower lip.
'I'd tried to write a song. Couldn't do it. It was just a tune without words. Nothing. Best bloody tune I ever wrote, which isn't saying much - play it for you in a minute. Won't be much good, the playing, what d'you expect? Be the last tune I ever play. Gonna play it over and over again until I get it perfect, and then I'm gonna get Lottie to take me out and I'll play it to the fucking Moss. The Man in the Moss. That's what it's about. The Man in the Moss. That'll be me, too. Want to die with this tune in me head. This tune ... and you.'
She felt a chill, like a low, whistling wind.
'It's called Lament for the Man. I want the Moss to take it. A gift. Lament for the Bridelow Bogman. Soon as I read about him, months ago, before it came out about the sacrifice element, I was inspired by him. Direct link with me own past. The Celts. The English Celts. Like he'd come out the Moss to make a statement about the English Celts. And I was the only one could interpret it - sounds arrogant, eh? But I believe it. Like this is what me whole life's been leading up to.'
Man starting to cough. On and on, distorting because the recording level couldn't handle it. The car-speakers rattling, like there was phlegm inside.
'Fuck it,' Man said. 'If I go back and scrub this I'll forget everything I was gonna say. Sorry. Can you handle it? See, this was before they'd completed the tests on the bogman, before it was known about the sacrifice. Even then I was pretty much obsessed. I didn't care if we spent every penny we'd got. Lottie - she's a bloody good woman, Moira, I never deserved Lottie - she went along with it, although she loved that chintzy house in Wilmslow and she hated The Man I'th Moss, soon as she clapped eyes on it. But she went along with it. Sometimes I think, did she know? Did she know before me, that I was gonna snuff it? She says not. I believe her.'
Across the Moss she could see the pub, a huge grey boathouse on the edge of a dark sea, its backyard a landing stage.
'And then, soon after we came, the report came out about the bogman. About what he was. A sacrifice. To appease the gods so they'd keep the enemy at bay, make this community inviolate. Protect these Celts, these refugees from the fertile flat lands, the Cheshire Plain, Lancashire, the Welsh border. Invaders snatching their land, Romans, Saxons. And this, the old high place above the Moss - maybe it was a lake then. Bridelow.'
Man's voice cracked.
'Bridelow. The last refuge. I cried. When I heard, I cried. He went willingly. Almost definitely that was what happened. Almost certain he was the son of the chief, everything to live for - had to be, see, to make a worthwhile sacrifice.'