by Phil Rickman
'But, what the hell,' Matt said. 'If I'm going to do this right, I'll need your help. Fact is ... it was this business of the bogman got me going. Lottie reckons I've become a bit obsessed. He laughed self-consciously. 'But the thing is ... here we are, literally face to face with one of our forefathers. And it's my belief there's a lot he can teach us ...'
Ernie Dawber felt Ma Wagstaff go still and watchful by his side.
'I mean about ourselves. About this village. How we relate to it and each other, and how we've progressed. There's summat special about this place, I've always known that.'
Moira Cairns, Ernie remembered. That was her name. Scottish. Very beautiful. Long, black hair.
'Right.' Matt bawled back over his shoulder, into the bar. 'Let's have a few lights on. Like a flamin' mausoleum in there.'
Ma Wagstaff stiffened and plucked at Ernie's jacket.
The sun wasn't ever going to get out of that low cloud, he thought. Won't know till tomorrow if it's made it to the hills or if the Moss has got it.
'By 'eck,' he said ruefully, as if his fanciful thoughts were printed on the misting, mackerel sky where Ma Wagstaff could read them, 'I'm ...'
'Getting a bit whimsy?'
Ernie laughed through his discomfort. She made it sound like a digestive problem.
'Not before time,' Ma said. 'Never any talking to you when you was headmaster. Jumped-up little devil. Knew it all - what teacher ever don't? Still ... better late than not. Now then, Ernest Dawber, I'll try and teach thee summat.'
He let Ma Wagstaff lead him away to the edge of the forecourt, from where terraced stone cottages plodded up to the high-towered church, a noble sentinel over the Moss.
'What do you see?'
'This a trick question, Ma?'
Now, with the sun gone, all the houses had merged. You couldn't tell any more which ones had fresh paintwork, which had climbing roses or new porches. Only a few front steps
stood out, the ones which had been recently donkey-stoned so they shone bright as morning.
'To be honest, Ma, I can't see that much. Can't even see colours.'
'What can you see, then?'
'It's not light,' Ernie said, half-closing his eyes, "and it's not dark. Everything's melting together.
'Go on.'
'I can't see the individual houses. I suppose I can only see the people who live in them. Young Frank and Susan and the little lad. Alf Beckett. Millicent Gill at the Post Office ...Gus Bibby, Maurice and Dee at the chip shop. And I suppose ... if I look a bit harder ...'
'Aye, you do that.'
'If I look harder I can see the people who lived in the house before ...The Swains - Arthur Swain and his pigeons. Alf Beckett's mother, forty-odd years a widow. I can bring them
all back when I've a mind. Specially at this time of day. But that's the danger, as you get older, seeing things as they were, not as they are.'
'The trick' said Ma, 'is to see it all at same time. As it was and as it is. And when I says "as it was" I don't just mean in your lifetime or even my lifetime. I mean as far back as yon bogman's time.'
Ernie felt himself shiver. He pushed the British Museum papers deeper into his inside pocket. Whatever secret knowledge of the bogman Ma possessed, he didn't want to know any more.
Ma said, 'You stand here long enough, you can see it all the way back, and you won't see no colours, you won't see no hard edges. Now when you're out on t'Moss, Brid'lo don't look that welcoming, does it? All cold stone. You know that, you've written about it enough. But it's not cold to us, is it? Not when we're inside. No hard edges, no bright colours, never owt like that.'
'No.'
'Only shades. Ma said, almost dreamily. 'Them's what's kept this place the way it is. Shades of things '
'Shades?'
'Old colours all run together. No clashes. Know what I'm telling you, Ernest?'
'Harmony?' Ernie said. 'Is that it? Which is not to say there's no bickering, or bits of bad feeling. But, fundamentally, I s'pose, Bridelow's one of those places where most of us are happy to be. Home. And there's no defining that. Not everybody's found it. We're lucky. We've been lucky.'
'Luck?' Something was kindling behind Ma's eyes. Eighty-five if she was a day and still didn't need glasses. 'Luck? You don't see owt, do you?' Ernie'd had glasses full-time since he was thirty-five. 'What's it got to do wi' luck?'
'Just a figure of speech, Ma.'
'Balls,' said Ma. 'Luck! What this is, it's a balancing act. Very complicated for t'likes of us. Comes natural to nature.'
Ernie smiled. 'As it would.'
'Don't you mock me, Ernest Dawber.
'I'm sorry, Ma.' She was just a shade herself now, even her blue beret faded to grey.
'Beware of bright, glaring colours,' she said. 'But most of all, beware of black. And beware of white.'
'I don't know what you mean...'
'You will,' said the little old woman. 'You're a teacher.' She put a hand on his arm. 'Ernest, I'm giving you a task.
'Oh 'eck '
'You've to think of it as the most important task you've ever had in your life. You're a man of learning, Ernest. Man wi' authority.'
'Used to be, Ma. I'm just a pensioner now ...' Like you, he was going to say, then he noticed how sad and serious she was looking.
'Get that man back.'
'Who?' But he knew. 'How?' he said, aghast.
'Like I said, Ernest. Tha's got authority.'
'Not that kind of authority, for God's sake.'
Nobody there. He swallowed. Nobody. Not in or near the bus shelter.
It was on his nearside, which was no good, he might get hurt, so he drove further along the road, reversing into someone's drive, heading back slowly until he could see the glass-sided shelter, an advertisement for Martini on the end panel, lit up like a cinema screen in the headlights: a handsome man with wavy hair leaning over a girl on a sofa, topping up her glass.
He was mentally measuring the distance.
What am I doing! What am I bloody doing?
I could park it just here. Leave it. Walk away. Too far, anyway, for her to hear the impact.
In his mind he saw Therese standing by the telephone kiosk, about to phone for a taxi. In his mind she stopped. She was frowning. She'd be thinking what a miserable, frightened little sod he was.
He could say there had been somebody in the bus shelter, two people. Get angry. Was he supposed to kill them? Was he supposed to do that?
But she would know.
He stopped the car, the engine idling. The bus shelter had five glass panels in a concrete frame. The glass would be fortified. He would have to take a run at it, from about sixty yards.
If he didn't she would know.
He remembered the occasions she'd lost her temper with him. He shivered, stabbed at the accelerator with the car in neutral, making it roar, clutching the handbrake, a slippery grip. Too much to lose. Gritting his teeth until his gums hurt.
Too much to lose.
And you'll feel better afterwards.
Took his foot off. Closed his eyes, breathed rapidly, in and out. The road was quiet now, the hedges high on either side, high as a railway embankment.
Shaw backed up twenty or thirty yards, pulled into the middle of the road. Felt his jaw trembling and, to stiffen it, retracted his lips into a vicious snarl.
He threw the Saab into first gear. Realised, as the stolen car spurted under him, that he was screaming aloud.
On the side of the bus shelter, the handsome man leaned over the smiling girl on the sofa, topping up her glass from the bottle. In the instant before the crash, the dark, beautiful girl held out the glass in a toast to Shaw before bringing it to her lips and biting deeply into it, and when she smiled again, her smile was full of blood.
You'll feel... better.
The big lights came on in the bar and were sluiced into the forecourt through the open door where Matt Castle stood grinning broadly, with his tall red-haired wife. Behind them was the
boy - big lad now, early twenties, must be. Not one of Ernie's old pupils, however; Dic had been educated in and around Manchester while his dad's band was manhandling its gear around the pubs and clubs.
'Happen he will bring a bit of new life,' Ernie said. 'He's a good man.'
'Goodness in most of us,' Ma Wagstaff said, 'is a fragile thing, as you'll have learned, Ernest.'
Ernie Dawber adjusted his glasses, looked down curiously at Ma. As the mother of Little Willie Wagstaff, long-time percussionist in Matt Castle's Band, the old girl could be expected to be at least a bit enthusiastic about Matt's plans.
Ma said, 'Look at him. See owt about him, Ernest?'
Matt Castle had wandered down the steps and was still shaking hands with people and laughing a lot. He looked, to Ernie, like a very happy man indeed, a man putting substance into a dream.
Lottie Castle had remained on the step, half inside the doorway, half her face in shadow.
'She knows,' Ma Wagstaff said.
'Eh?'
'I doubt as she can see it, but she knows, anyroad.'
'Ma ... ?'
'Look at him. Look hard. Look like you looked at t'street.'
Matt Castle grinning, accepting a pint. Local hero.
I don't understand,1 said Ernie Dawber. He was beginning to think he'd become incapable of understanding. Forty-odd years a teacher and he'd been reduced to little-lad level by an woman who'd most likely left school at fourteen.
Ma Wagstaff said, 'He's got the black glow, Ernest.'
'What?'
On top of everything else she'd come out with tonight, this jolted Ernie Dawber so hard he feared for his heart. It was just the way she said it, like picking out a bad apple at the greengrocer's. A little old woman in a lumpy woollen skirt and shapeless old cardigan.
'What are you on about?' Ernie forcing joviality. Bloody hell, he thought, and it had all started so well. A real old Bridelow night.
'Moira?' Matt Castle was saying. 'Aye, I do think she'll come. If only for old times' sake.' People patting him on the shoulder. He looked fit and he looked happy. He looked like a man who could achieve.
The black glow?' Ernie whispered. 'The black glow?
What had been banished from his mind started to flicker - the images of the piper on the Moss over a period of fifteen, to twenty years. Echoes of the pipes: gentle and plaintive on good days, but sometimes sour and sometimes savage.
Black glow?' his voice sounding miles away.
Ma Wagstaff looked up at him. 'I'm buggered if I'm spelling it for thee.'
Part Three
bog oak
From Dawber's Book of Bridelow:
Bridelow Moss is a two-miles-wide blanket of black peat. Much of its native vegetation has been eroded and the surface peat made blacker by industrial deposits - although the nearest smut-exuding industries are more than fifteen miles away.
Bisected by two small rivers, The Moss slopes down, more steeply than is apparent, from the foothills of the northern Peak District almost to the edge of the village of Bridelow.
In places, the peat reaches a depth of three metres, and although there are several drainage gullies, conditions can be treacherous, and walkers unfamiliar with the Moss are not recommended to venture upon it in severe weather.
But then, on dull wet, days in Autumn and Winter, the gloomy and desolate appearance of the Moss would deter all but the hardiest rambler ...
CHAPTER I
OCTOBER
With the rain hissing venomously in their faces, they pushed the wheelchair across the cindered track to the peat's edge, and then Dic lost his nerve and stopped.
'Further,' Matt insisted.
'It'll sink, Dad. Look.'
Matt laughed, a cawing.
Dic looked at his mother for back-up. Lottie looked away, through her dripping hair and the swirling grey morning, to where the houses of Bridelow clung to the shivering horizon like bedraggled birds to a telephone wire.
'Mum ... ?'
In the pockets of her sodden raincoat, Lottie made claws out of her fingers. She wouldn't look at Matt, even though she was sure - the reason she'd left her head bare - that you couldn't distinguish tears from rain.
'Right.' Abruptly, Matt pushed the tartan rug aside. 'Looks like I'll have to walk, then.'
'Oh, Christ, Dad . .
Still Lottie didn't look at the lad or the withered man in the wheelchair. Just went on glaring at the village, at the fuzzy outline of the church, coming to a decision. Then she said tonelessly, 'Do as he says, Dic.'
'Mum . .
Lottie whirled at him, water spinning from her hair. 'Will you just bloody well do it?'
She stood panting for a moment, then her lips set hard. She thought she heard Dic sob as he heaved the chair into the mire and the dark water bubbled up around the wheels.
The chair didn't sink. It wouldn't sink. It wouldn't be easy to get out, even with only poor, wasted Matt in there, but it wouldn't sink.
Maybe Matt was hoping they wouldn't have to get it out. That he'd be carried away, leaving the chair behind, suspended skeletally in the Moss, slowly corroding into the peat or maybe preserved there for thousands of years, like the Bogman.
'Fine,' Matt said. 'That's ... fine. Thanks.'
The chair was only a foot or so from the path, embedded up to its footplate in Bridelow Moss. Dic stood there, tense, arms spread, ready to snatch at the chair if it moved.
'Go away, lad,' Matt said quietly. He always spoke quietly now. So calm. Never lost his temper, never - as Lottie would have done - railed at the heavens, screaming at the blinding injustice of it.
Stoical Matt. Dying so well.
Sometimes she wished she could hate him.
It was Sunday morning.
As they'd lifted Matt's chair from the van, a scrap of a hymn from the church had been washed up by the wind-powered rain, tossed at them like an empty crisp-packet then blown away again.
They'd moved well out of earshot, Lottie looking around.
Thinking that on a Sunday there were always ramblers, up from Macclesfield and Glossop, Manchester and Sheffield, relishing the dirty weather, the way ramblers did. If it belonged to anybody, Bridelow Moss belonged to the ramblers, and they made sure everybody knew it.
But this morning there were none.
The bog, treacle-black under surface rust, fading to a mouldering green where it joined the mist. And not a glimmer of anorak-orange.
As if, somehow, they knew. As if word had been passed round, silently, like chocolate, before the ramble: avoid the bog, avoid Bridelow Moss.
So it was just the three of them, shadows in the filth of the morning.
'Go on, then,' Matt was saying, trying to pump humour into his voice. 'Bugger off, the pair of you.'
Lottie put out a hand to squeeze his shoulder, then drew back because it would hurt him. Even a peck on the cheek hurt him these days.
It had all happened too quickly, a series of savage punches coming one after the other, faster and faster, until your body was numbed and your mind was concussed.
I don't think I need to tell you, do I, Mrs Castle.
That he's going to die? No. There were signs ... Oh, small signs, but ... I wanted him to come and tell you weeks ... months ago. He wouldn't. He has this ... what can I call it ... ? Fanatical exuberance? If he felt anything himself, he just overrode it. If there's something he wants to do, get out of his system, everything else becomes irrelevant. I did try, doctor, but he wouldn't come.
Please - don't blame yourself. I doubt if we'd have been able to do much, even if we'd found out two or three months before we did. However, this business of refusing medication . . Drugs.
It's not a dirty word, Mrs Castle. If you could persuade him, I think ...
He's angry, doctor. He won't take anything that he thinks will dull his perceptions. He's ... this is not anything you'd understand ... he's reaching out for something.
'Go on,' Matt said. 'Get in the van, in the dry
. You'll know when to come back.'
And what did he mean by that?
As they walked away, the son and the widow-in-waiting, she saw him pull something from under the rug and tumble it out into his lap. It looked, in this light, like a big dead crow enfurled in its own limp wings.
The rain plummeted into Mart's blue denim cap, the one he wore on stage.
Dic said, 'He'll catch his dea—'
Stared, suddenly stricken, into his mother's eyes.
'I don't understand any more,' he said, panicked. 'Where he is ... I've lost him. Is that ... I mean, is it any place to be? In his state?'
'Move.' Lottie speaking in harsh monosyllables. 'Go.' The only way she could speak at all. Turning him round and prodding him towards the van.
'Is it the drugs? Mum, is it the drugs responsible for this?'
Lottie climbed into the van, behind the wheel. Slammed the door with both hands. Wound the window down, keeping the rain on her face. She said nothing.
Dic clambered in the other side. He looked more like her than Matt, the way his dark red hair curled, defying the flattening rain. Matt didn't have hair any more, under his blue denim cap.
'Mum?'
'No,' Lottie said. 'There's no drugs. Listen.'
It was beginning.
Faint and fractured, remote and eerie as the call of a marsh bird, familiar but alien - alien, now, to her.
But not, she was sure, to the Moss.
She saw that Dic was crying, helpless, shoulders quaking.
An aggressive thing, like little kids put on: I can't cope with this, I refuse to cope ... take it away, take it off me.
She couldn't. She turned away, stared hard at the scratched metal dashboard, blobbed with rain from the open window.
Because she didn't understand it either. Nor, she was sure, was she meant to. Which hurt. The sound which still pierced her heart, which had been filtered through her husband, like the blood in his veins, for as long as she'd known him and some years before that.