Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

She'd closed her own eye, the eye which was letting in the image of the tree, and this hurt. It was the side of her face Joel Beard had slapped. Maybe the eye had gone black; she couldn't bring herself to look in the mirror.

I can't believe he got away with that. Normally I'd have torn the bastard's balls off.

The BMW retched, like it was about to throw up its oil or something.

'Maybe you didn't understand me.' She gripped the wheel, shaking it. 'Maybe you only understand German. In which case you'll never know that if you don't get me to that hotel… I'm gonny trade you in, pal…'

In the driving-mirror, through the rain coming down like sheet metal now, she could see the spikes of St Bride's Church, maybe two miles back across the Moss.

'… and you'll be bought at auction by some loony, tear-arse seventeen-year-old looking for something fast and sleek to smash up and get killed in, yeah?'

Yelling at the car because she didn't want to hear anything else coming at her through the rain and the engine noise.

Didn't want to touch the radio-cassette machine on account of there was a tape inside with the late Matt Castle on it, Matt coming seriously unspooled.

Her head ached and her hair felt heavy and greasy, just awful. She pushed it away from her eyes. The Moss had gone from the mirror, it was all scrubby moorland with dark, unfinished drystone walls like slippery piles of giant sheep-shit. She came to a signpost and hesitated, then pointed the car at the place that sounded biggest and closest.

Buxton. Some kind of inland resort. With hotels. Listen, hen, what you do is you book into the biggest, plushest hotel they have there – like the Buxton Hilton or whatever – and you take several aspirins and you get a night's sleep and then you do some hard thinking. You can still think, OK, you can still function. The comb is merely an artefact invested with symbolism by you and by your mammy and however many other gypsies have had it in their gold-encrusted fists – but to claim it holds part of your spirit, your essence, your living consciousness is just ridiculous sentiment. Right?

Sure.

The Buxton road doubled back round the Moss to the Bridelow moors in a steep, curving climb, with what seemed like a sheer cliff going up on one side and another sheer cliff coming down on the other with just a low drystone wall between

Ms Moira Cairns and a long, long drop into what, being largely invisible through this sheeting rain, might just possibly be Hell.

Come on, come… on.

The BMW was faltering, its engine straining, like the big rubber band that powered it was down to its last strand.

Sweating, she flung the damn thing into third gear and then into second, revving like crazy.

Except the engine didn't.

It stalled.

In the middle of a twisting, narrow road, barely halfway up a hill that looked about three times as steep now the BMW wasn't actually ascending it any more, this bastard stalled.

'Oh, shit' – hauling on the handbrake – 'I'm really screwed this time.' First time any car had broken down on her for maybe ten years.

Also, coincidentally, the first time she'd had flu or whatever the hell it was in maybe five. And worst of all…

Worst of all the handbrake couldn't hold it.

Now, look – treading hard on the foot brake – it isn't that the cable's snapped or somebody's been messing with it, it's just stretched too far. Garage'll have it fixed in ten minutes.

What you have to do now, assuming you get to the bottom of this hill OK, you have to shove this car into the nearest grass verge then get out and walk through the filthy rain – without, OK, the benefit of a mac or an umbrella – until you come to a phone box or somebody's house.

Malcolm was always on at her to install a car phone. No way, she'd said. Malcolm said, When you want to be incommunicado you can just switch it off. She said. Incommunicado is my middle name, Malcolm, so where's the point in paying out fifty quid a month? But it's tax-deductible, Moira…

She wanted to scream with the terminal frustration of it: if she managed by some miracle piece of driving to deposit this magnificent piece of Kraut technology at the bottom of this bottomless hill, that was when her real problems would begin.

She didn't scream; her throat was hurting too much already.

Gently, oh, so bloody gently, she let out the brake and allowed the car to slip backwards down the hill, which now seemed almost fucking vertical… twisting her neck round over her shoulder to try and track the curves in the streaming wet road. Not much to see anyway but rain and more rain. She was no damn good at this; never been able to master that mirror-image coordination you needed for reversing.

Thing is to stay well into the left, hard against the sheer cliff – OK, steepish hill, that's all it is – the one going up.

And, God, if I can make it to the bottom in one piece I will walk through this filthy, blinding rain for ten miles, hear me?

This roaring in her ears, it had to be the blood, flushed up there by concentration and the flu.

Letting out the brake, going backwards in short bursts, then jamming on, feeling the wheels lock and slide on the rain-filmed road. OK… easy… you're OK…

Just as long as nothing's coming up behind you!

Then, alarmingly, she was going backwards in a sudden spurt, and when she jammed on the brakes it made hardly any difference, and the breath locked in her swollen throat.

Staring, helpless, as the car's rear end suddenly slid out into the middle of the narrow carriageway, skimming over the central white line, the tail end skidding off, aiming itself at the crumbling stones, no more than two feet high, set up between the road and Hell.

'Oh, my… Christ!'

Scared now… like really scared, Moira tried to jam both feet on to the footbrake, straightening her legs out hard, heaving her back into the seat until it creaked, the pressure forcing her head back and around until she was staring out of the front windscreen, the car slipping back all the while.

It was like going up the down escalator in one of those panicking nightmares, only with the thing on at triple speed and a wall on one side and an endless, open liftshaft on the other.

And the brakes were definitely full on… and gripping while the car was sliding backwards on the rain-slashed road, and Moira's cars were full of this dark turbulence, turning her vision black.

Black, black, black.

Black, it said.

Bridelow black … across the cab of the massive, dripping truck powering down on the BMW like some roaring prehistoric beast.

Oh…

… Christ…

… Get it into first gear…!

She was starting to scream out loud, plunging the clutch down, grinding the gearstick. But there was nowhere to go, the windscreen full of black, the truck's engine bellowing then scornfully clearing its throat as, with no great effort, it prodded the little car and Moira Cairns through the disintegrating drystone wall and the shimmering curtain of rain and over the road's edge into the endless mist beyond.

The old clergyman across the lounge was deeply asleep in his chair, head back, mouth open,

'Lifetime of begging, you see,' Hans Gruber explained to his daughter. 'He's turned into an offertory box. You go over there, drop a pound coin in his trap and it'll suddenly snap shut. Clack! Another quid for the steeple fund.'

Hans smiled.

Cathy said, 'You're feeling better, then.'

'Until I stand up. And a stroll to the loo is like the London marathon. But it's always better when you get out of hospital. Even coming here.'

The Poplars was a Georgian house with a modern, single-storey extension set amid flat, tidy, rain-daubed fields where Cheshire turned imperceptibly into Shropshire. There were all kinds of trees in the grounds except, Cathy had noted, actual poplars.