Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

The comb was of some heavy, greyish metal. It was not very ornate and half its teeth were missing, but when she ran it through her hair it was like something was excavating deep furrows in her soul.

The Duchess weighed the comb in fingers that sprayed red and green and blue fire from the stones in her rings, eleven of them.

'My,' the Duchess said, 'you really are in a quandary, aren't you?'

'Else why would I have come.'

'And someone… You've not told me everything… I can sense a death.'

'Yes,' Moira whispered, feeling, as usual, not so much an acolyte at the feet of a guru, more like a sin-soaked Catholic at confession.

'Whose?'

'Matt Castle.'

'Who is he?'

'You know… He was the guy whose band I joined when I left the university in Manchester. Must be… a long time… seventeen years ago.'

'This was before…?'

'Yes.'

The Duchess passed the comb from one hand to the other and back again. 'There's guilt here. Remorse.'

'Well, I…I've always felt bad about leaving the band when I did. And also… three, four months ago, he wrote to me. He wanted me to do some songs with him. He was back living in his old village, which is that same place they found the ancient body in the peat. Maybe you heard about that.'

'A little.' The Duchess's forefinger stroking the rim of the comb.

'Matt was seriously hung up on this thing,' Moira said, 'the whole idea of it. This was the first time… I mean, when we split, his attitude was, like, OK, that's it, nice while it lasted but it's the end of an era. So, although we've spoken several times on the phone, it's fifteen years last January since I saw him. Um… last year it came out he'd been to the hospital, for tests, but when I called him a week or so later he said it was OK, all negative, no problem. So… Goes quiet, we exchange Christmas cards and things, as usual. Then, suddenly – this'd be three, four, months ago – he writes, wanting to get me involved in this song-cycle he's working on, maybe an album. To be called The Man in the Moss.'

'And you would have nothing to do with it?'

'I… Yeh, I don't like to bugger about with this stuff any more. I get scared… scared what effect I'm gonna have, you know? I'm pretty timid these days.'

'So you told him no.'

'So I… No, I couldn't turn it down flat. This is the guy got me started. I owe him. So I just wrote back, said I was really sorry but I was tied up, had commitments till the autumn. Said I was honoured, all this crap, and I'd be in touch. Hoping, obviously, that he'd find somebody else.'

She paused. Her voice dropped. 'He died last night. About the same time all this…'

The Duchess passed the comb back to Moira. 'I don't like the feel of it. It's cold.'

The comb is icy, brittle, oh…

Her mother was glaring at her, making her wish she hadn't come. There was always a period of this before the tea and the biscuits and the Duchess saying, How is your father? Does he ever speak of me? And she'd smile and shake her head, for her daddy still didn't know, after all these years, that she'd even met this woman.

The Duchess said, 'That trouble you got into, with the rock and roll group. You dabbled. I said to you never to dabble. I said when you were ready to follow a spiritual path you should come to me. It was why I gave you the comb.'

'Yes, Mammy, I know that.' She'd always call her Mammy deliberately in a vain effort to demystify the woman. 'I'm doing my best to avoid it. That's why…'

'The comb has not forgiven you,' the Duchess said severely. 'You have some damage to repair.'

'Aye, I know.' Moira said. 'I know that too.' She'd returned from the phone floating like a ghost through a battlefield, blood and bandages everywhere – well, maybe not so much blood, maybe not any. Maybe the blood was in her head.

'You all right, Miss Cairns? You weren't hit?'

'I'm fine. Your… I'm fine'

'You're very pale. Have a brandy.

'No. No, thank you.'

All this solicitousness. Scared stiff some of his Celtic brethren would sue the piss out of him. She was impatient with him. Him and his precious guests and his precious trophies and his reputation. What did it matter? Nobody was dying.

Yes, Moira. Yes, he is. I'm sorry… No, not long. I'll know more in the morning. Perhaps you could call back then.

She had to get out of this house, didn't want to see wounds bathed and glass and antlers swept away. Didn't want to see what had happened to the pale man.

Outside, Mungo Macbeth, of the Manhattan Macbeths, still sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the terrace.

Moira joined him, feeling chilly now in her black dress, stiff down by the waist where it had soaked up spilled Guinness from the carpet.

And, because he was there and because he was no threat any more, she began to talk to Macbeth. Talked about many things – not including Matt Castle.

In fact she was so determined not to talk about Matt – and, therefore, not to break down – that she blocked him out, and his dying, with something as powerful and as pertinent to the night: she found she was telling Mungo Macbeth about the Comb Song.

'Everybody thinks it's metaphor, you know?'

'It exists?'

'Aye. Sure.'

Then she thought. Only person I ever told before was M…

She said quickly, 'Your family make regular donations to the IRA?'

'… what?'

His eyebrows went up like they'd been pulled on wires and she stared good and hard into his eyes. They were candid and they were innocent.

'Sorry,' she said. 'I forgot. You aren't even Irish.'

'Moira, let's be factual here. I'm not even Scottish.'

She found herself smiling. Then she stopped. She said, 'Every year these gypsies would camp on the edge of the town, derelict land since before the War. Only this year it was to be redeveloped, and so the gypsies had to go. My daddy was the young guy the council sent to get rid of them. He was scared half to death of what they might do to him, the gypsy men, who would naturally all be carrying knives.'

Some night creature ran across the tiered lawn below them, edge to edge.

'My gran told me this. My daddy never speaks of it. Not ever. But it wasn't the gypsy men he had cause to fear, so much as the women. They had the poor wee man seduced.'

Macbeth raised an eyebrow, but not much.

'Like, how could he resist her? This quiet Presbyterian boy with the horn-rimmed spectacles and his first briefcase. How could he resist this, this…' Moira swung her legs and clicked her heels on the terrace wall.

'I can sympathize,' Macbeth said.

'She was a vision,' Moira said. 'Still is. He'd have laid down his beloved council job for her after the first week, but that wasn't what they wanted – they wanted the camp site until the autumn, for reasons of their own, whatever that was all about.

And they got it. My daddy managed to keep stalling the council, his employers, for reasons of his own. And then it all got complicated because she wasn't supposed to get herself pregnant. Certainly not by him.'

She'd glossed over the rest, her daddy's ludicrous threats to join the gypsies, her gran's battle for custody of the child, the decision by the gypsy hierarchy that, under the circumstances, it might be politic to let the baby go rather than be saddled with its father and pursued by his mother.

And then her own genteel, suburban, Presbyterian upbringing.

'And the rest is the song. Which you know.'

The American, sitting on the wall, shook his head, incredulous. 'This is prime-time TV, you know that? This is a goddamn mini-series.'

'Don't you even think about it, Mr Macbeth,' Moira said, 'or Birnam Wood'll be corning to Dunsinane faster than you can blink.'

'Yeah, uh, the wood. I was gonna ask you. The scene in the wood where you get the comb…?'