Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

Oh, God, this was the wrong job, she hated dying people, their stretched skin, their awful smell, especially this one – the damp stench of ripe, putrid earth (the grave?). She began to shiver and tried to stand up, drawing back, away from him, but there was nowhere to go, her bottom was pressed into the edge of the desk, and Mr Castle was still hanging over her like a skeleton in a rotting sack and smelling of wet earth.

How could he smell of earth, of outside?

'Tam… sin…' Her scream was a whisper, but her mouth was stretched wide as his greenish chickenfoot hand whipped out and seized her throat.

The scuffed sixteen-year-old Ovation guitar, with its fibreglass curves, was a comfort. Its face reflected the great fire blazing on the baronial hearth.

'Ladies of noble birth…' Adjusting the microphone. 'In those days, they didn't have too much of a say in it, when it came to husbands. This is… thumbing an A-minor, tweaking the top string up a fraction, '… this is the story of a woman who's found herself betrothed to a titled guy much younger than she is. However…' gliding over a C, 'I doubt if we're talking toy-boys, as we know them. This is like… nine or ten, right?'

Tuning OK. 'I mean, you know, there's a limit to the things you can get from a boy of nine or ten.'

No reaction. You bastard, Malcolm. And you, Rory McBain – one day you really will be sick.

'Anyway, she's stuck with this kid. And she's standing on the castle walls, watching him playing down below, working out the dispiriting mathematics of the situation and wondering if…'

Shuffling on the stool, tossing back the black wings of her hair, the weight of it down her back pulling her upright so that she could see the audience and the gleaming stag skulls all round. The walls of neatly dressed stone, with spotlit banners and tapestries. The black eye-holes in the skulls, and the eyes of the conference delegates looking, from five or so yards away, just as opaque and unmoving.

'Anyway, don't expect a happy ending, OK? This is a traditional song. You don't get many happy endings in traditional songs. It's called… "Lang a-growin' ".'

The bastard McBain would have handled this better. For the sake of ethnic credibility, he'd do a couple of songs in the Gaelic, of which he understood scarcely a word. What she had these days was a different kind of credibility: sophistication, fancy nightclub ethnic, low and sultry vocals, folk tunes with a touch of jazz guitar, strictly rationed to what she could handle without fracturing a fingernail.

'He's young…' Hearing her own voice drifting vacuously on the air, the words like cigarette smoke. '… but he's daily… growin'…'

Over an hour ago, she'd called Lottie's number. A guy answered, obviously not the boy, Dic. The guy'd said Lottie was at the hospital in Manchester. Muffled voices in the background – this was a pub, right? She'd asked no more questions. She'd call back.

The hospital. In Manchester. Oh, hell.

The Great Hall was huge, the acoustics lousy. When the song was over, applause went pop-pop-pop like a battery of distant shotguns. The stags' heads gathered grimly below the ceiling, so many that the antlers looked to be tangled up.

'Splendid,' she heard the Earl call out magnanimously. How many wee staggies did you pop yourself, my lord, your grace, whatever? Maybe you invited members of the Royal Family to assist. Traditional, right?

Moira did a bit of fine tuning on the guitar. She was wearing the black dress and the cameo brooch containing the stained plaid fragment that was reputed to have been recovered from a corpse at Culloden. Credibility. 'This song… You may not know the title, most of you, but the tune could be slightly familiar. It's… the lament of a girl whose man's gone missing at sea and she waits on the shore accosting all the homecoming fishermen as they reach land.

The song's called "Cam Ye O'er Frae Campbelltoon". It's, er,… it's traditional.'

Traditional my arse. Me and Kenny Savage wrote it, still half-pissed, at a party in Kenny's flat in 1982 – like, Hey, I know… how about we invent a totally traditional Celtic lament…

She told them, the assembled Celts, 'The chorus is very simple… so feel free to join in…'

And, by Christ, they did join in. Probably with tears in their eyes. All these Scots and Irish and Welsh and Bretons and the folk from the wee place up against Turkey… writers and poets and politicians united in harmony with a phoney chorus composed amidst empty Yugoslav Riesling bottles at the fag end of Kenny Savage's Decree Absolute party in dawn-streaked Stranraer.

What a sham, eh? I mean, what am I doing here?

And Matt Castle dying.

Tears in her own eyes now. Last year he'd told her on the phone that he'd be OK, the tests had shown it wasn't malignant. And she'd believed him; so much for intuition.

The damn tears would be glinting in the soft spotlight they'd put on her, and the Celtic horde out there, maudlin with malt, would think she was weeping for the girl on the shore at Stranraer – and weeping also, naturally, for the plight of Scotland and for the oldest race in Europe trampled into the mud of ages.

'Thank you,' she said graciously, as they applauded not so much her as themselves, a confusion of racial pride with communal self-pity.

And that makes it nine songs, over an hour gone, corning up to 10.30. Time to wind this thing up, yeh? Lifting the guitar strap out of her hair. Let's get the hell out of here.

At which point someone called out smoothly, 'Would it be in order to request an encore?'

She tried to smile.

'Maybe you could play "The Comb Song"?'

It was him. It would have to be. The New York supplier of Semtex money to the IRA.

'Aw, that's just a kiddies' song.' Standing up, the guitar-strap half-off.

'Well, I don't know about the other people here,' the voice said – and it was not the American, 'but it's the song I most associate with you, and I was rather disappointed not to hear

'Oh, hell, it's a good long time ago, I don't think I even remember the words…' Who the fuck was this?

'If you go wrong, I'm sure we could help you out.' She couldn't make out his face behind the spotlight. She looked up, in search of inspiration, but her gaze got entangled in antlers.

'Also,' she said miserably, 'it isn't exactly traditional. And it's awful long. See, I don't want to bore your friends here…'

'Miss Cairns…' The Earl himself took a step towards the dais, into the spotlight, the light making tiny dollar-signs in his eyes. 'I doubt if any of us could possibly be bored by any of your songs.' A touch of threat under the mellifluousness? Some flunkey had replaced the empty Guinness glass by her stool with a full one. She picked it up, put it down again without drinking. There were murmurings.

What the hell am I going to do now? She felt their stares, the more charitable ones maybe wondering if she was ill. Aw, shit…

What she didn't feel any more were the eyes of the Watcher.

This had maybe been a mistake. Sometimes you made mistakes. It probably had been the American and it probably was no heavier than lust.

'I warn you,' Moira said, as the Ovation's strap sank back into her shoulder, 'this is the longest song I ever wrote.'

And to the accompaniment of a thin cheer from the floor her fingers found the chord, and she sang the rather clumsy opening lines. Trying not to think about it, trying to board up her mind against all those heavyweight memories tramping up the stairs.

Her father works with papers and with plans.

Her mother sees the world from caravans…

The song telling the story of this shy, drab child growing up in the suburbs of a staid Clydeside town with the ever-present feeling that she's in the wrong place, that she really ought to be some other person. Bad times at school, no friends. Brought up at home by the grandmother, restrictive, old-fashioned Presbyterian.