Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

And which God?

As he entered the church of St Bride under the spread thighs of the leering Sheelagh, he experienced the unpleasant illusion of being sucked into…

No!!

'Long-haired girls,' Dic Castle said bitterly. 'Always the long, dark hair.'

Moira said, 'I can't believe this.'

'No?'

'No,' she said firmly.

The minister's daughter had left them alone in the Rectory sitting room. Dic had wanted her to stay, like he needed a chaperone with this Scottish whore, but she wouldn't. They could hear her banging at a piano somewhere, ragtime numbers, with a lot of bum notes. Letting them know she wasn't listening at the door.

'He never touched me sexually,' Moira said. 'He never came near. On stage, it was always him on one side, me on the other, Eric and Willie in between but a yard or two back. That was how it was on stage. That was how it was in the van. That was how it was.'

Somewhere, walls away, Catherine Gruber went into the 'Maple Leaf Rag', savaging the ivories, getting something out of her system…

'And you clearly don't believe me.' Moira was sitting on a cushion by the fireplace. Paper had been laid in it, a lattice of wood and a few pieces of coal.

Dic said, 'Followed him once. After a charity gig. She was waiting for him in the car park. About twenty-one, twenty-two. About my age. Long, dark hair.'

'When was this?'

'Fucking little groupies,' Dic said. He was semi-sprawled across a sofa, clutching a cushion. 'At his age. Er… 'bout a year ago, just before he… before it was diagnosed.'

Dic had a lean face, full lips like Matt. Dark red hair, like Lottie. Still had a few spots. 'And, yeah,' he said, 'I do know she wasn't the first.' Staring at Moira in her jeans and her fluffy white angora sweater, hands clasped around her knees, black hair down to her elbows.

'Because you still think the first was me. Sure. And you know something… Gimme a cigarette, will you?'

He tossed the cushion aside, got out a crumpled pack of Silk Cut and a book of matches. 'Didn't know you smoked.'

'Tonight,' she said, taking a cigarette, tearing off a match, 'I smoke.'

The minister's daughter was playing 'The Entertainer', sluggishly.

Moira said, 'Just answer me this. Earlier tonight, at your dad's funeral, at the graveside… I mean, how'd you feel about that?'

His face closed up, hard as stone. 'I just played the pipes. Badly. I didn't see anything.'

She nodded. 'OK.'

'So I don't know what you're talking about.'

'I understand. We'll forget that, then.'

He lit his own cigarette, said through the smoke, 'Mum said you wouldn't be coming anyway.'

'She didn't know.'

'You seen her?'

'No. And that's not because… Listen, I'm gonna say this. There was a time when I felt bad. Twenty, fifteen years ago. When I felt bad because I never came on to him, not even after a gig in some faraway city when we were pissed. And I felt bad that I was twenty years younger and I was taking off nationally, and he was maybe never going to.'

'I bet you did.' Dic sneered. 'I bet that really cut you up.'

She ignored it. 'I was thinking, if we'd slept together, just the once, to kind of get it over, bring down that final barrier… You got the vaguest idea what I'm saying?'

He just looked at her through the smoke.

'Anyway,' Moira said, 'we didn't. It never happened. Maybe that's another piece of guilt I'm carrying around. I don't know.'

The piano music stopped. Dic lay back on the sofa, hands clasped behind his head. Outside, the wind was getting up, spraying dead leaves at the windows.

There was a polite knock on the door and Cathy came in.

'I'm making some tea, if…'

'Oh, yeah, thanks.' Dic sitting up, looking sheepish.

'Be ten minutes,' Cathy said.

Moira said as the door closed, 'Lottie. Your mother. She know about this?'

'We never discussed it."

'But you think she knows, right?"

Dic shrugged.

'This girl. This so-called girl of Matt's. You know who she was?'

'No. I tried to find out from people at the folk club – The Bear, you remember the joint? Nobody seemed to know her.'

'So how do you know they were…?'

'Because they went straight into this shop doorway. Would've taken a jack to prise them apart.'

'Right,' Moira said sadly. 'And she looked… like me?'

'Yeah. Superficially. Like you used to look.'

'Thanks a lot.'

Dic picked up the cushion and hurled it with all his strength at a bare wall. 'I didn't mean it like that, OK? I don't mean a fucking thing I say. I just like insulting people, yeah?'

'Sure,' Moira said. This wasn't getting either of them anywhere. She wished she'd stuck to her original plan and never agreed to come here with him. So he had problems. They'd made him stand there playing the pipes while they messed with his dad's body in its coffin. She could feel the confusion and the rage billowing out of him.

'Dic…' She was going to regret this.

'Yes?'

No, she wasn't. She wasn't going to say anything either of them might regret. She gathered up her cloak from the carpet.

'I'm away, all right?' The hissing sound disturbed him. And the occasional popping. And the blue glow.

It came from the circular wick of the paraffin stove. Intense, slightly hellish, ice-blue needles pricking the dark, the close stone walls shimmering like the inside of a cave lit by a cold and alien sea-glare.

Joel turned the flame up fully until it was flaccid and yellow, and then he blew it out. The stove was having little or no effect anyway. His original plan had been to bring an electric heater down here, but there was no power point, and the nearest one in the church was too far away for Alfred Beckett's extension lead to reach.

Joel lit a candle.

With the stove out, the temperature must be plunging, but at least it didn't look as cold.

He sat on the side of the camp-bed, with the double duvet wound around him.

Cold he could live with, anyway, insulated by years of refereeing schoolboy rugby matches. Cold he could almost relish.

He'd taken off his boots but added an extra pair of rugby socks. When he lay down, his feet – projecting from the bottom of the bed – would touch the stone blocks of the far wall. That was how cramped this cell was.

But discomfort was good. It was a holy place. Above him the nave of St Bride's, around him its ancient foundations. Rock of Ages. A blessed place, a sanctuary where bishops – well, at least one bishop – had passed the dark, cold hours in sacred solitude.

If he hadn't been so bone-tired, so sated with righteous rage, Joel might have spent the night in holy vigil, on his knees on the stone floor, like some mediaeval knight. Praying for divine aid in the deliverance of Bridelow from its own dark dragon.

But his body and his mind were both demanding sleep… a state often at its most elusive when most needed. He was also rather appalled to find his loins apparently yearning for the comfort of a woman. Before his conversion, Joel had exploited his God-given glamour at every opportunity – and there had been many. Now he did not deny himself the yearning, only its habitual, casual assuagement.

He told himself this unseemly erection in the House of God was merely a side-effect of the cold and the pressure of the duvet.

His watch told him it was not yet 10 p.m. But tomorrow, he felt, would be a long day. So he would allow his body sleep.

When he blew out the candle and lay back, the paraffin stench hung over him like a chloroform cloth. He must not sleep in this air. Clutching the duvet around him, he arose into the absolute darkness, followed his nose to the stinking heater and pulled it two yards to the oaken door. Bent almost double, he carried the appliance into the little tunnel which led to the stairway.