Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

Could have bitten her tongue off. She supposed lots of women would find him awfully attractive, with the tight golden curls, the wide smile – and that physique. Perhaps she really was gay.

Certainly she hated the man now. How could he say these things?

… that filthy whore parades her parts…

Our Sheila?

You're insane! She wanted to fling open the study door and scream it at him. Joel said reasonably, 'We're not asking you to do anything yourself. Obviously, you've had to live with these people for a very long time. Big part of your life. And we all realise you're not well…'

'And who?' Hans asked wearily, as if he didn't know, 'are we?'

Joel, for once, was silent.

'The Bishop? Our newly appointed archdeacon? Perhaps he fancies you, Joel, have you thought about that?'

Joel Beard turned away in distaste. 'Christ says…'

'But… but you're not Christ, Joel,' Hans said, horrified at the hollow weakness of his own voice. He slumped back into the chair, into the endless cavern of his pain, his eyes closed. The Rev. Joel Beard laughed agreeably. 'We'll crack this thing together, Rector. You and me and God.'

Hans heard him rubbing his hands. 'Well. Time's getting on. Funeral to conduct. Though I can't think why you left it until so late in the day.'

'Family request,' Hans mumbled, lying. 'Some relatives had… long way to travel.'

'Hmm. I see. Well, come on, old chap.' Joel's strong Christian hand on his shoulder. 'Soon be over.'

From behind the door, Cathy scurried away, pulling on her coat. He'd caught her once today. He'd never catch her again. The two of them stood at the bottom end of the churchyard, not far from the lych-gate. There was a monument here on its own, stark and pointed, like an obelisk, one word indented on a dressed-stone plaque.

HORRIDGE

'It was always pretty scary, Shaw said, 'to think that one day I'd be under that too.'

Therese, in her ancient fox-fur coat, walked all round the monument. 'Is it a vault?'

'Something like that. I didn't take too much notice when they stuck my father in there. I'm sure that one of the reasons I was determined to unload the brewery was to avoid being buried here. I mean, I didn't think about it at the time, but it must have been at the back of my mind. To break the family ties with Bridelow, get the hell out of here. For good. I mean… not have to come to people's funerals who you hardly knew, because you're a Horridge. I reckon the old man would have sold out himself if he'd had half a chance.'

'Where would you like to be buried?'

'Somewhere warm. If it has to be in this country I'd prefer to be cremated.'

'I wouldn't mind.'

'Being cremated?'

'Being buried here,' Therese said. 'I like vaults.' She smiled, her eyes glinted. 'You can get out of them.'

Shaw shuddered, a feeling he was growing to enjoy. She looked very edible today, as ever. However, for the first time, he rather hoped she was not naked under that coat. It was so cold, though, that he didn't really imagine she could be. She'd attached a scarf-thing to it today, with the fox's head on the end. Shaw, who'd ridden to hounds two or three times whilst staying with friends, didn't find this offensive but suspected there were people in Bridelow who would; they appeared to have strong views about killing animals for pleasure.

She said, 'Have you ever seen him, your father?'

He knew her well enough by now to know exactly what she meant by that, but he pretended he didn't. 'Of course I've seen him. He didn't die until I was twenty-five. Come on, let's get a drink before the show starts.'

'It's your family vault, after all,' Therese said. 'You've got rights of access. Why don't we pop in and visit him one…'

'For God's sake, Tess…' Not his bloody father, the sanctimonious old sod.

'I've told you before,' she said coldly. 'I don't like to be called Tess.' Then she turned her head and looked up into his face, and the fox's glass eyes were looking at him too. 'We could ask him, you see.'

He felt the chill wind raising his hairline even more, wished he'd worn his stylish new Homburg. She was playing with his mind again. Sometimes it was difficult to sleep.

'We could ask him if you were right. That he really did want to get out of Bridelow. That he would've had no objections at all to Gannons taking over the brewery. Give your mother something to think about.'

'I'd rather not, if you don't mind,' Shaw said. He was thinking about last summer, a warm day in August, when he'd found out about another side of Therese. Over dinner one night in Manchester, he'd giggled nervously and said to her, 'You know, I'm beginning to think you must be some sort of vampire, only ever corning out at night.'

'Would you like that – if I was a vampire?'

'I don't know. What would it mean?'

'I could make you undead, couldn't I?'

'Er… haven't you got to be dead before you can be undead?'

She'd put down her glass and looked at him, red wine glistening on her lips, face still and golden in the moving candlelight, like a mask from some Egyptian tomb.

'And what,' she said, 'makes you think you aren't?' And he began to shake with desire, a new kind of desire which began at the bottom of his spine.

But he'd kept on at her in the car – it was a Range Rover this time, belonging, she said, to a friend – as she whizzed them down Deansgate around 1 a.m. What did she do at weekends, in the daytime? Social work, she said.

'Social work?'

And it was true; two days later they were out on the moors. He was following Therese in gloriously tight jeans and there were two friends called Rhona and Rob and a bunch of people Therese described loosely as 'offenders'.

Rhona, who was quite attractive, despite having a sort of crewcut, was apparently a professional social worker with the local authority. Rob, a lean, hard-looking man, was – amazingly – a policeman, a detective sergeant. You had to admire her cheek, being friends with a copper after all the cars and things she'd stolen.

They'd parked their vehicles in a long lay-by off the Sheffield road and after two hours of hard walking, Shaw's legs were starting to ache.

'Where are we going exactly?'

'Not far now,' Therese assured him. The six 'offenders', who were of both sexes and ranged in age from teens to about sixty, were fairly silent the whole way.

After a further few minutes, Therese stopped. They were on a kind of plateau, offering a magnificent view of miles of sunlit moorland and, more distantly, a huge expanse of darkness which he assumed was the Moss, with the hills behind it reaching up to Kinder Scout.

'Gosh, look,' Shaw said, 'there's the Bridelow road. We've come a hell of a long way round. If we'd just gone through the churchyard and carried on up the moor we'd have been up here in about half an hour.'

'It was better to come this way,' Therese said. 'Don't whinge, Shaw.'

There were stubby stones around where she was standing, arranged in a rough sort of circle, or maybe an egg-shape; it was hard to tell, they were so overgrown.

One of the older offenders was on his knees. He was probably exhausted. He had his arms around one of the bigger stones, a thing about two and a half feet high, and he seemed to be kissing it.

'What sort of offenders are they?' Shaw whispered.

'Just people who society considers maladjusted,' Therese said. 'It's stupid. They all have special qualities nobody seems to want to recognize.'

Rob said, 'We're helping to rehabilitate them.'

Therese had taken a few objects from her backpack – odd things, photographs in frames, a small pair of trainers, a large penknife – and arranged them around the circle, up against the stones.

They had a rough sort of picnic outside the circle of stones, with a whole cooked chicken, which everybody pulled bits off, and red wine. Afterwards, they all sat around in the springy yellow grass, not talking, the sun going down, Shaw starting to feel a little drunk, a little sleepy.