Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

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.

It had begun. For the last time?

Please, God.

She looked out of the window-space, unblinking, cheeks awash.

Fifty yards away, hunched in the peat, bound in cold winding-sheets of rain, the black bag under his arm like a third lung…

… Matt Castle playing on his pipes.

Eerie as a marsh bird, and all the birds were silent in the rain.

The tune forming on the wind and falling with the water, the notes pure as tears and thin with illness.

Dic rubbed his eyes with his fingers. 'I don't know it,' he said. 'I don't know this tune.' Petulant. As if this was some sort of betrayal.

'He only wrote it… a week or so ago,' Lottie said. 'When you were away. He said…' Trying to smile. 'Said it just came to him. Actually, it came hard. He'd been working at it for weeks.'

Lament for the Man, he'd called it. She'd thought at first that that was partly a reference simply to their pub, The Man I'th Moss, adrift on the edge of the village, cut off after all these years from the brewery.

But no. It was another call to him, wherever he was. As if Matt was summoning his spirit home.

Or pleading for the Man to summon him. Matt.

'I can't stand this,' Dic said suddenly. Dic, who could play the pipes too, and lots of other instruments. Who was a natural – in his blood too, his dad more proud than he'd ever admit, but not so proud that he'd encouraged the lad to make a profession of it.

'Christ,' said Dic, 'is this bloody suicide? Is it his way of…?'

'You know him better than that.' Figuring he just wanted a row, another way of coping with it.

'It's not as if he's got an audience. Only us.'

'Only us,' Lottie said, although she knew that was wrong. Matt believed – why else would he be putting himself through all this? – that there had to be an audience. But, it was true, they were not it.

'All right, what if he dies?' Dic said sullenly, brutally. 'What if he dies out there now?'

Lottie sighed. What a mercy that would be.

'What I mean is… how would we even start to explain…?'

She looked at him coldly until he subsided into the passenger seat.

'Sorry,' he said.

The piping was high on the wind, so high it no longer seemed to be coming from the sunken shape in the wheelchair, from the black lung. She wondered if any people could hear it back in Bridelow. Certainly the ones who mattered wouldn't be able to, the old ones, Ma Wagstaff, Ernie Dawber. They'd be in church. Perhaps Matt had chosen his time well, so they wouldn't hear it, the ones who might understand.

Dic said, 'How long…?'

'Until he stops. You think this is easy for me, Dic? You think I believe in any of this flaming stupid… Oh, my God!'

The piping had suddenly sunk an octave, meeting the drone, the marsh bird diving, or falling, shot out of the sky.

Lottie stopped breathing.

And then, with a subtle flourish of Matt's old panache, the tune was caught in mid-air, picked up and sent soaring towards the horizon. She wanted to scream, either with relief and admiration… or with the most awful, inexcusable kind of disappointment.

Instead she said, briskly, 'I'm going to call Moira tonight, I've been remiss. I should have told her the situation. He wouldn't.'

Dic said, 'Bitch.'

'That's not fair.' He was twenty, he was impulsive, things were black and white. She leaned her head back over the seat. 'I can understand why she didn't want to get involved. OK, if she'd known about his illness she'd have been down here right away, but at the end of the day I don't think that would have helped. Do you?'

The end of the day. Funny how circumstances could throw such a sad and sinister backlight on an old cliche.

Dic said, 'It would have taken his mind off his condition, maybe.'

Lottie shook her head. 'It's an unhealthy obsession, this whole bogman business.' They'd never really spoken of this. She'd have made things worse. She probably knew that.'

He said sourly, 'Why? You mean… because of his other unhealthy…'

Lottie suddenly sat up in the driving seat and slapped his face, hard. 'Stop it. Stop it now.'

She closed her eyes on him. 'I'm tired.'

The pipes spun a pale filigree behind her sad, quivering eyelids, across the black moss where the rain blew in grey-brown gusts.

Take him, she prayed. To God. To the Man. Away.

Was this so wrong? Was it wrong, was it sinful, to pray to the Man?

God? The Man? The Fairies? Santa Claus? What did it matter?

A thrust of wind rattled the wound down window, pulling behind it an organ trail from St Bride's, the final fragment of a hymn. It lay for a moment in strange harmony upon the eddy of the pipes.

No, Lottie decided. It's not wrong.

Take him. Please.

Anybody.

Three hours.

Three hours and he hadn't touched her. Chrissie had heard of men who paid prostitutes just to sit on the edge of the bed for half the night and listen to them rambling on about their domestic problems.