Free The Man in the Moss by Phil Rickman Page A

window.
                Because she didn't understand it either. Nor, she was sure,
was she meant to. Which hurt. The sound which still pierced her heart, which
had been filtered through her husband, like the blood in his veins, for as long
as she'd known him and some years before that.
                It had begun. For the last time?
            Please, God.
                She looked out of the window-space, unblinking, cheeks
awash.
                Fifty yards away, hunched in the peat, bound in cold
winding-sheets of rain, the black bag under his arm like a third lung ...
                ... Matt Castle playing on his pipes.
                Eerie as a marsh bird, and all the birds were silent in
the rain.
                The tune forming on the wind and falling with the water,
the notes pure as tears and thin with illness.
                Dic rubbed his eyes with his fingers. 'I don't know it,'
he said. 'I don't know this tune.' Petulant. As if this was some sort of
betrayal.
                'He only wrote it ... a week or so ago,' Lottie said.
'When you were away. He said ...' Trying to smile. 'Said it just came to him.
Actually, it came hard. He'd been working at it for weeks.'
                Lament for the Man, he'd called it. She'd thought at
first that that was partly a reference simply to their pub, The Man I'th Moss,
adrift on the edge of the village, cut off after all these years from the
brewery.
                But no. It was another call to him , wherever he was. As if Matt was summoning his spirit home.
                Or pleading for the Man to summon him. Matt.
                'I can't stand this,' Dic said suddenly. Dic, who could
play the pipes too, and lots of other instruments. Who was a natural - in his
blood too, his dad more proud than he'd ever admit, but not so proud that he'd
encouraged the lad to make a profession of it.
                'Christ,' said Dic, 'is this bloody suicide? Is it his
way of ...?'
                'You know him better than that.' Figuring he just wanted
a row, another way of coping with it.
                'It's not as if he's got an audience. Only us.'
                'Only us,' Lottie said, although she knew that was wrong.
Matt believed - why else would he be putting himself through all this? - that
there had to be an audience. But, it was true, they were not it.
                'All right, what if he dies?' Dic said sullenly,
brutally. 'What if he dies out there now?'
                Lottie sighed. What a mercy that would be.
                'What I mean is ... how would we even start to explain
... ?'
                She looked at him coldly until he subsided into the
passenger seat.
                'Sorry,' he said.
                The piping was high on the wind, so high it no longer
seemed to be coming from the sunken shape in the wheelchair, from the black
lung. She wondered if any people could hear it back in Bridelow. Certainly the
ones who mattered wouldn't be able to, the old ones, Ma Wagstaff, Ernie Dawber.
They'd be in church. Perhaps Matt had chosen his time well, so they wouldn't
hear it, the ones who might understand.
            Dic said, 'How long ... ?'
                'Until he stops. You think this is easy for me, Dic? You
think I believe in any of this flaming stupid ... Oh, my God!'
                The piping had suddenly sunk an octave, meeting the
drone, the marsh bird diving, or falling, shot out of the sky.
                Lottie stopped breathing.
                And then, with a subtle flourish of Matt's old panache,
the tune was caught in mid-air, picked up and sent soaring towards the horizon.
She wanted to scream, either with relief and admiration ... or with the most
awful, inexcusable kind of