Phil Rickman: The man in the moss

Willie had seen it. With both hands, he had pushed her back. She stumbled, fell over the kerb, the door connecting with a shuddering crunch and this girl, Gina snarling, 'Bitch…', voice as deadly cold as the grinding metal.

And then the door reopened and Willie was hauling her in and snatching it shut behind her, the girl screaming, 'Go on… feather your own nest, fucking cow!' And beating on the panel into Moira's ear as Matt started the engine and pulled urgently away into the unheeding, desultory night traffic.

'Jesus,' Willie Wagstaff said. 'Could've had your fingers off.'

'Screw up ma glittering career, huh?' White face in the streetlight and a rasp of Glasgow giving it away that Moira was pretty damn shocked. 'Couldny play too well wi' a hook.'

Matt said mildly, 'Don't let it bother you. Always one or two. Just jealous.' The snow heavy enough now for him to get the wipers going.

'Wasny about envy.' Moira had her guitar in her arms. 'I'm no' exactly popular with your fans any more is the problem.'

'You're in good company,' Matt said. 'Look how the purists shunned Dylan when he went over to rock and roll.'

'Called me a traitorous cow.'

'Yeah, well,' Matt said. 'We've been over this.' So damned nonchalant about it. He seemed so determined she shouldn't feel bad that she felt a sight worse.

Eric, the mournful one who played fiddle and twelve-string, Eric, the mediator, the peacemaker, said, 'Weren't a bad gig though, were it?'

'Was a grand gig,' Moira said. Good enough, she thought, heartsick, to be the start of something, not the end.

Least her throat wasn't hurting so bad. The guitar case was warm in her arms. The snowflakes began to suck and cluster on the side windows as Matt drove first to Eric's house at Ashton Under Lyne, where Willie had left his Minivan. They switched the drum chest to the back of the little grey van, and Willie said, 'I won't mess about. If it's snowing like this down here it'll be thick as buggery over t'top.' He hung his arms around Moira's neck and gave her a big kiss just wide of the lips. 'Ta-ra, lass. Don't lose touch, eh?'

Then Eric kissed her too, mournfully, and by the time she got into the front seat next to Matt she was in tears, both arms wrapped around the guitar case for comfort.

'This is the worst thing I ever did, you know that. Matt?'

There was silence. Just the two of them now, for the last time. Time for some plain talking.

'Don't be so bloody daft.' Still his tone was curiously mild.

'She was right, that slag, I should have ma fingers chopped off.'

'Listen, kid.' He tapped at the steering-wheel. 'You made one sacrifice for this band when you threw up your degree course. That's it. No more. Don't owe us nowt. It's been nice – cracking couple of years, wouldn't've missed it. But you're not even twenty-one. We're owd men, us.'

'Aw, Matt…' Could anybody be this selfless?

'Gone as far as we're going. Think I want to be trailing me gear around the country when I'm sixty? No way. It's a good get-out, this, straight up. For all of us. Eric's got his kids, Willie's got his…'

Matt didn't finish the sentence, covering up the break by changing down to third, swinging sharp right and taking them through Manchester's Piccadilly: bright lights, couples scurrying through the snow. Snow was nice in the city, Moira thought. For a while. When it came by night.

Think about the snow. Because Matt's got to be lying through his teeth.

But the silence got too heavy. 'OK,' she said, to change the subject. 'What do you want to be doing?'

'Eh?'

'You said you didny wanna be trailing your gear around when you were sixty. What would you like to be doing?'

Matt didn't answer for a long time, not until they were out of the city centre.

'I'm not sure,' he said eventually. 'We're all right for money, me and Lottie. Thanks to you.'

'Matt…' I can't stand this.

'All right. I don't know. I don't know what I want to do. But I'll tell you this much… I know where I want to be.'

Moira waited. The snow was heavy now, but they were not too far from Whalley Range, where she lived, and it wouldn't take Matt long to get to his bit of Cheshire and Lottie.

'What I want,' he said, 'is to be out of these sodding suburbs. Want to go home.'

'Across the Moss?' The words feeling strange in Moira's mouth.

'Yeah,' Matt said.

Across the Moss. Willie and Matt would often slip the phrase to each other, surreptitiously, like a joint. Across the Moss was Over the Rainbow. Utopia. The Elysian Fields.

'Lottie likes it fine where we are. All the shops and the galleries and that. But it's not me, never was. Don't belong. No… echoes. So. Yeah. I'm going home. Might take a year, might take ten. But that's where I'm ending up.'

Which didn't make her feel any better. Twenty years older than her and here he was, talking about ending up. Did this happen to everybody when they turned forty?

'This is Willie's village, up in the moors?'

'Yeah. And Willie stayed. Willie's got family there. My lot moved to town when I was a lad. You never get rich up there, not even the farmers. But we were happy. We were part of it. Willie's still part of it. Drops down to town to play a gig or two, get his leg…go out with a woman.'

Moira smiled. Matt tended to be kind of proper, like a father, when they were alone.

'But he keeps going back. And his mother… she's never spent a night away, his ma, the whole of her life.'

'Some place, huh?'

'Special place.' He was staring unblinking through the windscreen and the snow. 'It's quite lonely and primitive in its way. And the Moss – biggest peatbog in the North.'

'Really?'

'Vast. And when you get across it – it's weird – but there's a different attitude. Different values.'

'Isn't that what everybody says about the place they were brought up?'

'Do you?'

She thought about this.

'No,' she said. 'Maybe not.'

The world outside was a finite place in the thickening snow. Matt was somewhere far inside himself. Across the Moss.

She glanced at him quickly. Thickset guy, coarse-skinned. Nobody's idea of a musician. Brooding eyes the colour of brown ale. Most times you thought you knew him; sometimes you weren't so sure. Occasionally you were damn sure you didn't know him, and couldn't.

After a while she said, 'What's it called? I forget.'

'Bridelow,' Matt said in a deliberate way, rounding out all the consonants. 'Bridelow Across the Moss.'

'Right,' she said vaguely.

'Dramatic place. To look at. Never saw that till I started going back. I take the little lad up there sometimes, of a weekend. When he's older we're going to go hiking on Sundays. Over the moors.'

'Sounds idyllic. Like to see it sometime.'

'But mostly I go alone.' Matt pulled up under the streetlamp in front of the Victorian villa where Moira had her apartment.

'Me and the pipes.'

'You take the pipes?'

Bagpipes. The Northumbrian pipes, played sitting down, had been Matt's instrument. Then he'd started experimenting with different kinds of bag, made of skins and things. He called them the Pennine Pipes, claiming they'd been played in these parts since before the Romans came to Britain.

The Pennine Pipes made this eerie, haunting sound, full of a kind of repressed longing.

'Releases me,' Matt said.

She didn't want to ask him what it released him from.

'Takes it away,' Matt said.

She didn't want to ask him what it was that piping took away.

'On the Moss,' Matt said. 'Only on the Moss.'

The tips of her fingers started to feel cold.

'The Moss takes it away,' Matt said. 'The Moss absorbs it.

He switched off the engine. Snow was settling on the bonnet.

'But the Moss also preserves it,' Matt said. 'That's the only drawback. Peat preserves. You give it to the peat, and you've got rid of it, but the peat preserves it for ever.'