by Phil Rickman
You dabbled. I said to you never to dabble.
The coloured lanterns, the insistent, whispering voices.
The comb has not forgiven you. You have some damage to repair.
Yes, Mammy.
She drove well, she thought, smoothly, with concentration. Down into England.
The way - many years ago, a loss of innocence ago - you travelled to the University in Manchester for all of four months before, one night, this local folk group, Matt Castle's Band played the student union.
Matt on the Pennine Pipes, an amazing noise. Growing up in Scotland, you tended to dismiss the pipes as ceremonial, militaristic.
Matt just blows your head away.
The Pennine Pipes are black and spidery, the bag itself with a dark sheen, like a huge insect's inflated abdomen. Matt plays seated, the bag in his lap, none of this wrestling with a tartan octopus routine.
'Where d'you get these things?'
'Like a set, would you, luv?'
'I wouldn't have the nerve, Mr Castle. They look like they'd bite.'
An hour and a couple of pints later he's admitting you can't buy them. There are no other Pennine Pipes. Perhaps there used to be, once, a long, long time ago. But now, just these, the ones he made himself.
How to describe the sound ...
Sometimes like a lonely bird on the edge of the night. And then, in a lower register, not an external thing at all, but something calling from deep inside the body, the notes pulled through tube and bowel.
'The Romans brought bagpipes with them. The Utriculus. Whether they were here before that, nobody knows. I like to think so, though, lass. It's important to me. I'm an English Celt.'
Within a month you're singing with the band, trying to match the pipes .. .which you can't of course, could anyone?
But the contest is productive: Matt Castle's Band, fifteen years semi-professional around the Greater Manchester folk clubs, is suddenly hot, the band offered its first nationwide tour - OK, just the small halls and the universities, but what it could lead to ... maybe the chance - the only chance they'll ever get at their time of life - to turn full-time professional.
Only this tour, it has got to be with Moira Cairns, eighteen years old, first-year English Lit. student. Oh, the chemistry: three middle-aged guys and a teenage siren. No Moira and the deal's off.
Typically, the only pressure Matt applies is for you to take care of your own future, stick with your studies. 'Think about this, lass. If it all comes to nowt, where does that leave you ... ?'
And yet, how badly he needs you to be in the band.
'I can go back. I can be a mature student.'
'You won't, though. Think twenty years ahead when me and Willie and Eric are looking forward to our pensions and you're still peddling your guitar around and your looks are starting to fade off ...'
Blunt, that's Matt.
About some things, anyway. There was always a lot going on underneath.
Moira shifted uncomfortably in her seat and caught sight of herself in the driving mirror. Were those deep gullies under her eyes entirely down to lack of sleep? She thought, Even five, six years ago I could be up all night and drinking with Kenny Savage and his mates and I'd still look OK.
More or less.
The further south she drove, the better the weather became. Down past Preston it wasn't raining any more and a cold sun hardened up the Pennines, the shelf of grey hills known as the backbone of England.
Some way to go yet. Fifty, sixty miles, maybe more. If she was halfway down the backbone of England, then Bridelow must be the arse-end, before the Pennines turned into the shapelier, more tourist-friendly Peak District.
Moira switched motorways, the traffic building up, lots of heavy goods vehicles. Like driving down a greasy metal corridor. Then the Pennines were back in the windscreen, moorland in smudgy charcoal behind the slip-roads and the factories. Somewhere up there: the peat.
I have to do this, Matt had written. It's as if my whole career's been leading up to it. It just knocked me sideways, the thought that this chap, the bogman, was around when they were perhaps playing the original Pennine pipes.
Time swam. She was driving not in her car but in Matt's old minibus, her last night with the band. Matt talking tersely about piping to the Moss, how the experience released him.
And he'd written, It was as if he'd heard me playing. I don't know how to put this, but as if I'd played the pipes and sort of charmed him out of the Moss. As if we'd responded to something inside us both. Now that's a bit bloody pretentious, isn't it, lass?
And Moira could almost hear his cawing laugh.
She came off the motorway and ten minutes later, getting swept into naked countryside that was anything but green, she thought, Shit, what am I doing here? I don't belong here. I
walked out on the guy fifteen years ago.
... traitorous cow ...
Hadn't escaped her notice that one thing Lottie had not done was invite her to the funeral.
Always a space between her and Lottie. Never was quite the same after Moira found the nerve to get her on one side during her second pregnancy and warn her to take it easy, have plenty of rest - Lottie smiling at this solemn kid of nineteen, explaining how she'd carried on working until the week before Dic was born.
Never was quite the same with Lottie, after the termination and the hysterectomy.
The road began to climb steeply. It hadn't rained here, but it was cold, the tops of stone walls and fences sugared with frost.
Jesus, I am nervous.
It was gone 2 p.m., the funeral arranged for 4.30. Strange time. At this point in the year they'd be losing the light by then.
Her month was dry. She hadn't eaten or drunk anything since the two aborted sips of the filthy coffee in the Lake District, and no time now for a pub lunch.
The sky was a blank screen, the outlines of the hills now iron-hard against it.
Lottie was jealous back then, though she'd never let it show.
The countryside was in ragged layers of grey, the only colour a splash of royal blue on the side of some poor dead sheep decomposing by the roadside, tufts of its wool blown into a discarded coil of barbed wire. The sky harsh, blanched, without sympathy.
Unquintessential England. As hard and hostile as it could get. No water-meadows, thatched cottages or bluebell woods.
No reason for Lottie to be jealous. Was there? Well, nothing happened, did it? Matt was always the gentleman.
Was.
Can't get used to this. I need to see him buried.
In front of her, a reservoir, stone sides, a stone tower. Cold slate water. She followed the road across it, along the rim of the dam, slowing for a black flatbed lorry loaded with metal kegs, the only other vehicle she'd seen in three or four miles.
Across the cab, in flowing white letters, it said,
BRIDELOW BEERS
The road narrowed, steepened. It was not such a good road, erosion on the edges, holes in the tarmac with coarse grass or stiff reeds shafting through. No houses in sight, no barns, not even many sheep.
And then suddenly she crested the hill, the horizon took a dive and the ground dipped and sagged in front of her, like dirty underfelt when you stripped away a carpet,
'Christ!' Moira hit the brakes.
The road had become a causeway. Either side of it - like a yawning estuary, sprawling mudflats - was something she could recognize: peatbog, hundreds of acres of it.
There was a crossroads and a four-way signpost, and the sign pointing straight ahead, straight at the bog, said BRIDELOW 2, but there was no need, she could see the place.
Dead ahead.
'Hey, Matt,' Moira breathed, a warm pressure behind her eyes. 'You were right. This is something.'
Like a rocky island down there, across the bog. But the rocks were stone cottages and at the high point they sheered up into the walls of a huge, blackened, glowering church with a tower and battlements.
Behind it, agains
t a sky like taut, stretched linen, reared the ramparts of the moor.
Unconscious of what she was doing until it was done, her fingers found the cassette poking out of the mouth of the player.
She held her breath. There was an airbag wheeze, a trembling second of silence, and then the piping filled up the car.
Moira began to shiver uncontrollably, and it shook out all those tears long repressed.
She let the car find its way across the causeway.
On the other side was a shambling grey building with a cobbled forecourt. The pub. She took one look at it and turned away, eyes awash.
So she saw the village through tears. A cliff face resolved into a terraced row, with little front gardens, white doorsteps, houses divided by entries like narrow, miniature railway tunnels. Then there were small dim shops: a hardware kind of store, its window full of unglamorous one-time essentials like buckets and sponges and clothespegs, as if nobody had told the owner most of his customers would now have automatic washing machines; a fish and chip shop with some six-year-old's impression of a happy-looking halibut painted on a wooden screen inside the window; a post office with a stubborn red telephone box in front - British Telecom had now replaced most of them with shoddy, American-looking phone booths, that, thankfully, had forgotten about Bridelow.
The streetlamps were black and iron, old gaslamps. Maybe a man would come around at night with a pole to light them.
Well, it was conceivable. Much was conceivable here.
Moira saw an old woman in a doorway; she wore a fraying grey cardigan and a beret: she was as much a part of that doorway as the grey lintel stones.
Peat preserves, Matt had said.
Peat preserves.
From Dawber's Book of Bridelow:
RELIGION (ii)
That Bridelow was a place of pre-Christian worship is beyond doubt. As has already been noted in this book, there are a number of small stone circles dating back to Neolithic times on the moor less than a mile from the village. The original purpose of these monuments remains a matter for conjecture, although there have been suggestions that some are astronomically-oriented.
As for the village itself, the siting of the church on a presumed prehistoric burial mound is not the only evidence of earlier forms of worship. Indeed ...
CHAPTER II
'Steady Pop, just take it ve... ry steady.'
'No, leave me, please, I'll be fine, if I can just ...'
'God, I never realised. How could you let it get to this and say nothing? How could you?'
Hans hissed, 'Shut up!' with a savagery that shocked her. He pulled away and ducked into the church porch, and Cathy was left staring at Our Sheila who was grinning vacuously, both thumbs jammed into her gaping vagina.
Cathy turned away and saw why her father had been so abrupt: a large man was bearing down on them, weaving skilfully between the gravestones like a seasoned skier on a slalom.
'Catherine!' he roared. 'How wonderful!'
'Joel,' Cathy said wanly.
'So. You've come all this way for Matt Castle's burial. And you're looking well. You're looking ... terrific. Now.' He stepped back, beamed. 'Did I spot your esteemed father ... ?'
'In here, Joel.'
He was slumped on the oak bench inside the porch looking, Cathy thought, absolutely awful, the pain now permanently chiselled into his forehead. Joel Beard didn't appear to notice.
'Hans, I've been approached by two young chaps with guitars who apparently were among Matt Castle's many protégés in Manchester. They say they'd like to do an appropriate song during the service, a tribute. I didn't see any problem about that, but how would the relatives feel, do you think?'
Cathy's father looked up at his curate and managed to nod.
'I'll ... Yes, we must consult Lottie, obviously. Perhaps, Cathy ...'
Cathy said, 'Of course. I'll ring her now. And I'll come and tell you, Joel, OK?' Why couldn't the big jerk just clear off?
But, no, he had to stand around in the porch like some sort of ecclesiastical bouncer, smiling in a useful sort of way, his head almost scraping the door frame.
'Can we expect any Press, do you think? Television?'
Cathy said, 'With all respect to the dead, Joel, I don't think Matt Castle was as famous as all that. Folkies, no matter how distinguished, tend to be little known outside what they call Roots Music circles.'
'Ah.' Joel nodded. 'I see.' With those tight blond curls, Cathy thought, he resembled a kind of macho cherub.
'Staying the night, Catherine?'
'Probably. The roads are going to be quite nasty, I gather. Black ice forecast. In fact,' she added hopefully, 'I wouldn't hang around too long after the funeral if I were you.'
'Not a problem,' Joel said. 'I have accommodation.'
'Oh?' Damn. 'Where?'
'Why ...' Joel Beard spread his long arms expansively. 'Here, of course.'
Hans sat up on the oak bench, eyes burning. 'Joel, I do wish you wouldn't. It's disused. It's filthy. It's ... it's damp.'
'Won't be by tonight. I've asked the good Mr Beckett to supply me with an electric heater.'
'Hell,' Cathy said. 'Not the wine-cellar.' It was a small, square, stone room below the vestry where they stored the communion wine and a few of the church valuables. It was always kept locked.
'Ah, now, Catherine, this is a latter-day misnomer. The records show that it was specifically constructed as emergency overnight accommodation for priests. Did you know, for instance, that in 1835 the snow was so thick that the Bishop himself, on a pastoral visit, was stranded in Bridelow for over two weeks? When he was offered accommodation at the inn he insisted he should remain here because, he said, he might never have a better chance to be as close to God.'
'Sort of thing a bishop would say,' said Cathy.
'Ah, yes, but...'
'And then he'd lock himself in and get quietly pissed on the communion wine.'
Avoiding her father's pain-soaked eyes, but happy to stare blandly into Joel Beard's disapproving ones, Cathy thought, I really don't know why 1 say things like that. It must be you, Joel, God's yobbo; you bring out the sacrilegious in us all.
The digital wall-clock in the admin office at the Field Centre said 14.46.
'Er ...' Alice murmured casually into the filing cabinet 'as it's Friday and Dr Hall's not likely to be back from that funeral and there's not much happening, I thought I might ...'
'No chance,' Chrissie snapped. 'Forget it.'
Alice's head rose ostrich-like from the files. 'Well... !' she said, deeply huffed.
Done it now, Chrissie thought. Well, bollocks, she's had it coming for a long time. 'I'm sorry, Alice,' she said formally, 'but I don't think, for security reasons, that I should be left alone here after dark.'
Alice sniffed. 'Never said that before.'
'All right, I know the college is only a hundred yards away and someone could probably hear me scream, but that's not really the point. There are important papers here and ... and petty cash, too.'
She'd caught one of the research students in here when she returned from lunch. The youth had been messing about in one of the cupboards and was unpleasantly cocky when she
informed him that he was supposed to have permission.
'Nothing to do with him, of course.' Alice smirked. 'Because you're not silly like that, are you?'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Him! In there. The one with no ... personal bits.'
'Don't be ridiculous,' Chrissie mumbled, head down so that Alice would not see her blush. How stupid she'd been the other night, thinking ...
'It was just a thought,' Alice said. She opened the bottom drawer of the smallest filing cabinet and brought out her make-up bag.
... when obviously it couldn't have been ... what you thought. You were just more frightened than you cared to admit, going in there on your own ...
'Going anywhere tonight?'
... it was just the way the thing was lying, and the projecting
... item was just some sort of probe or peg to hold it together ...
'What? Sorry, Alice ...'
'I said, are you going anywhere tonight?'
'Oh, I thought I'd have a night in,' Chrissie said. 'Watch a bit of telly.'
She didn't move. She was still aching from last night. Roger had taken her to dinner at a small, dark restaurant she'd never noticed before, in Buxton. And then, because his wife was on nights, had accompanied her back to her bungalow.
Roger's eyes had been crinkly - and glittering.
His 'stress', as experienced at the motel, had obviously not been a long-term problem. Gosh, no ...
'I wonder,' Alice said, 'if Mrs Hall will be with him at the funeral.'
'I think he likes to keep different areas of his life separate,' Chrissie said carefully.
Lottie said, shaking out her black gloves, 'To be quite honest, I wish he was being cremated.'
Dic didn't say anything. He'd been looking uncomfortable since the undertakers had arrived with Matt's coffin. For some reason, they'd turned up a clear hour and a quarter before the funeral.
'I don't like graves,' Lottie said, talking for the sake of talking. 'I don't like everybody standing around a hole in the ground, and you all walk away and they discreetly fill in the earth when you've gone. I'd rather close my eyes in a crematorium and when I open them again, it's vanished. And I don't like all the flowers lying out there until they shrivel up and die too or you take them away, and what do you do with them?'
Dic, black-suited, glaring moodily out of the window, his hands in his hip-pockets. Lottie just carried on talking, far too quickly.
'And also, you see, in a normal situation, what happens is the funeral cars arrive, and they all park outside the house, with the hearse in front, and all the relatives pile in and the
procession moves off to the church.'
'Would've been daft,' Dic said, 'when it's not even two minutes' walk.'