Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

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, against 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.