Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

'I've had visions. Dreams. I've been tested. All the time I'm there I'm tested. It tries to twist me. How can I handle this? I'm only one man.'

'No. You're not only one man, Joel. We're here. We're in this together. Tens of thousands of us. Listen, you were our emissary. You've seen and you've come back. We hear you, Joel. We hear you!'

Yes.

He slowed for the cobbles, bumping up the street towards the church, its stonework black with age and evil.

'Say the word, Joel. Just say the word. We're with you.'

'I'm tired. I've only been there a couple of days, and I'm exhausted.'

'You'll sleep tonight, Joel. We'll cover you with our prayers. You'll sleep well.'

And he had. Even if it was only for a few hours. He'd awoken refreshed and ready for his first morning worship at St Bride's, no prepared sermon in his pocket, no script, no text. He would stride into that pagan place and cleanse it with the strength of his faith. His sermon would be unrehearsed; it would almost be like… speaking in tongues. Cathy said, 'You look really awful.',

'Thanks.'

'I've been trying to understand it,' Cathy said.

'Don't. It won't do you any good.'

Cathy pushed the fingers of both hands through her hair, 'I mean, they broke in here, in this really obvious, unsubtle way and they didn't take the telly or the video, or even your guitar… just this comb. Does it look valuable?'

Moira broke the end off a piece of toast and tried to eat it. 'Looks like one of those metal combs you buy for grooming dogs, only not so expensive and kind of corroded. Like a lot of stuff over a thousand years old, it looks like junk.'

'Look,' Cathy said reasonably, is it not possible it just sort of slipped out when you were bringing your stuff in? Should I search the garden?'

Moira shook her head, gave up on the toast.

'Should we call the police?'

'No… No, this is… Only guy I ever took the thing out for was… Matt Castle, and I never wanted to. Look, I'm sorry. Your father's had a coronary, you've got this Joel Beard moving into your house and I'm rambling on about a damn comb. What time are you leaving?'

'This afternoon – sooner if I can.' Cathy said she'd wait for the cleaner, to tell her to put Joel Beard in the room Moira had slept in and to get Alf Beckett to fix the pantry window. Then she'd pack a couple of suitcases for her father and drop them off at The Poplars, this home for clapped-out clergy. And then think about going back to Oxford.

'What are you studying at Oxford?'

'This and that,' Cathy said. 'Where will you go? Home?'

Moira didn't answer. Where was home anyway? Glasgow? The folk circuit? She felt motiveless. The white-tiled rectory kitchen looked scuffed but sterile, like a derelict operating theatre. Getting to her feet was an effort. The view from the window, of graves, was depressing. The sky was like a crumpled undersheet, slightly soiled.

'I don't know what to do,' Moira said, and the words tasted like chewed-out gum. 'When something dreadful's going down and you don't know what it is or how you connect…'

'Why do you have to connect? You just came to a friend's funeral. You can go home.'

'Can I?'

'Just take it easy, that's all. You can't drive all the way to Scotland without sleep, you'll have an accident. Why don't you book in somewhere for a night?'

'I look that bad?'

'You look like somebody walked off with your soul,' Cathy said with this shockingly accurate perception. Holy Communion, by tradition, was at 9, but by 9.15 nobody had arrived.

Joel went to pick up a stray twig in the aisle, a piece of the Autumn Cross the cleaners had missed. He took it outside, through the churchyard, and dropped it on the cobbles outside the lych-gate. Depositing it safely on secular ground.

On his return he glanced above the doorway, where the Sheelagh na gig had hung, half afraid the thing would have left some murky impression of itself on the stonework beneath, but there was only dust. He'd sent the vile plaque to be locked away in the school cellars until such time as a museum might be persuaded to take it.

He waited, in full vestments, in the vestry doorway, looking over the backs of empty pews towards the altar. Yesterday evening he'd had Beckett bring the wine up from the cellar room and then had the room locked, and he'd taken the key and hurled it away Across the Moss.

The church clock gave a single chime for 9.30. When nobody came to Holy Communion. It didn't really surprise him. How could anyone here kneel at the altar, accepting the blood and body of Christ – knowing what they knew? Knowing that stipends and student grants added up to bugger-all, she tried to give Cathy some money for the two nights' accommodation.

Cathy laughed. 'After you were burgled?'

Moira didn't think she looked too convinced, about the comb. Understandably, perhaps.

They were standing by the front gate of the Rectory. She felt weak and washed out and cold without her cloak. The raw air hurt her cheeks and made her eyes water.

Cathy said, 'You look like you're coming down with something. Hope it's not this Taiwanese flu.'

Moira looked down the hill towards The Man I'th Moss.

Either side of the cobbled street, the cottages looked rough and random, like rocks left by a landslide. She said goodbye to Cathy, kissed her on the check. Cathy's cheek felt hot and flushed, Moira's lips felt cracked, like a hag's. She was remembering the day the Duchess had given her the comb. How she'd stood before her wardrobe mirror and the old comb had stroked fluidly through her short hair, like an oar from a boat sailing with the tide, and the hair had seemed suddenly so lustrous and longing to be liberated, and that was when it began, the five-year war with her gran, who thought children should be seen and not heard and not even seen without their hair was neatly trimmed.

'… if that's what you were thinking,' Cathy was saying in a low voice.

'Huh?'

'I said…' raising her voice,'… it wasn't Dic.'

'What wasn't?'

'Whoever broke in. You've been indicating it was a personal thing. I mean, how many people would know about that comb anyway?'

'I didn't say anything.'

'You didn't have to. You thought it was Dic. Well, he wouldn't do a thing like that and anyway he… he's away teaching.'

'Where's he teach?'

'I'm not telling you,' Cathy said. Her pale eyes were glassy with tears. 'Please, Moira, it wasn't him. It wasn't.'

Moira thought, What's happening to her? What's happening to me? When she picked up her fancy, lightweight suitcase and her guitar case they both felt like they were full of bricks, and her hair felt lank and heavy, suffocating, like an iron mask, as she made her way over the cobbles to the church car park. In the room directly over the Post Office, Milly Gill brought Willie Wagstaff tea in bed.

'Shouldn't've bothered,' Willie grumbled.

Milly said, 'I'm your mother now.'

'Don't say that.'

Balancing her own cup and saucer in one hand – the Mothers were supposed to be good at balancing things – she got gracefully back into bed with him. She was wearing an ankle-length floral nightdress tied over the breasts with an enormous pink bow. She looked like a giant cuddly rabbit, Willie thought, never more grateful for her than he had been this past night.

'I'm everybody's mother now,' Milly said miserably. 'Who else is there? Old Sarah?'

'Shit,' said Willie, 'I don't want it to be you.'

Milly shrugged her big shoulders and still kept the cup balanced on the saucer, 'I've lived opposite Ma for twenty years. I've studied her ways, best I can. I've been… well… almost a daughter-in-law.'

'I was always led to believe,' Willie said, 'that Ma was supposed to announce her successor. "There's one as'll come after me." And it weren't you, luv, I'm sure of that.'