Ma Wagstaff said, 'He's got the black glow, Ernest.'
'What?'
On top of everything else she'd come out with tonight, this jolted Ernie Dawber so hard he feared for his heart. It was just the way she said it, like picking out a bad apple at the greengrocer's. A little old woman in a lumpy woollen skirt and shapeless old cardigan.
'What are you on about?' Ernie forcing joviality. Bloody hell, he thought, and it had all started so well. A real old Bridelow night.
'Moira?' Matt Castle was saying. 'Aye, I do think she'll come. If only for old times' sake.' People patting him on the shoulder. He looked fit and he looked happy. He looked like a man who could achieve.
The black glow?' Ernie whispered. 'The black glow?
What had been banished from his mind started to flicker – the images of the piper on the Moss over a period of fifteen, to twenty years. Echoes of the pipes: gentle and plaintive on good days, but sometimes sour and sometimes savage.
Black glow?' his voice sounding miles away.
Ma Wagstaff looked up at him. 'I'm buggered if I'm spelling it for thee.' Part Three bog oak
From Dawber's Book of Bridelow:
Bridelow Moss is a two-miles-wide blanket of black peat. Much of its native vegetation has been eroded and the surface peat made blacker by industrial deposits – although the nearest smut-exuding industries are more than fifteen miles away.
Bisected by two small rivers, The Moss slopes down, more steeply than is apparent, from the foothills of the northern Peak District almost to the edge of the village of Bridelow.
In places, the peat reaches a depth of three metres, and although there are several drainage gullies, conditions can be treacherous, and walkers unfamiliar with the Moss are not recommended to venture upon it in severe weather.
But then, on dull wet, days in Autumn and Winter, the gloomy and desolate appearance of the Moss would deter all but the hardiest rambler…
CHAPTER I
With the rain hissing venomously in their faces, they pushed the wheelchair across the cindered track to the peat's edge, and then Dic lost his nerve and stopped.
'Further,' Matt insisted.
'It'll sink, Dad. Look.'
Matt laughed, a cawing.
Dic looked at his mother for back-up. Lottie looked away, through her dripping hair and the swirling grey morning, to where the houses of Bridelow clung to the shivering horizon like bedraggled birds to a telephone wire.
'Mum…?'
In the pockets of her sodden raincoat, Lottie made claws out of her fingers. She wouldn't look at Matt, even though she was sure – the reason she'd left her head bare – that you couldn't distinguish tears from rain.
'Right.' Abruptly, Matt pushed the tartan rug aside. 'Looks like I'll have to walk, then.'
'Oh, Christ, Dad..
Still Lottie didn't look at the lad or the withered man in the wheelchair. Just went on glaring at the village, at the fuzzy outline of the church, coming to a decision. Then she said tonelessly, 'Do as he says, Dic.'
'Mum..
Lottie whirled at him, water spinning from her hair. 'Will you just bloody well do it?'
She stood panting for a moment, then her lips set hard. She thought she heard Dic sob as he heaved the chair into the mire and the dark water bubbled up around the wheels.
The chair didn't sink. It wouldn't sink. It wouldn't be easy to get out, even with only poor, wasted Matt in there, but it wouldn't sink.
Maybe Matt was hoping they wouldn't have to get it out. That he'd be carried away, leaving the chair behind, suspended skeletally in the Moss, slowly corroding into the peat or maybe preserved there for thousands of years, like the Bogman.
'Fine,' Matt said. 'That's… fine. Thanks.'
The chair was only a foot or so from the path, embedded up to its footplate in Bridelow Moss. Dic stood there, tense, arms spread, ready to snatch at the chair if it moved.
'Go away, lad,' Matt said quietly. He always spoke quietly now. So calm. Never lost his temper, never – as Lottie would have done – railed at the heavens, screaming at the blinding injustice of it.
Stoical Matt. Dying so well.
Sometimes she wished she could hate him. It was Sunday morning.
As they'd lifted Matt's chair from the van, a scrap of a hymn from the church had been washed up by the wind-powered rain, tossed at them like an empty crisp-packet then blown away again.
They'd moved well out of earshot, Lottie looking around.
Thinking that on a Sunday there were always ramblers, up from Macclesfield and Glossop, Manchester and Sheffield, relishing the dirty weather, the way ramblers did. If it belonged to anybody, Bridelow Moss belonged to the ramblers, and they made sure everybody knew it.
But this morning there were none.
The bog, treacle-black under surface rust, fading to a mouldering green where it joined the mist. And not a glimmer of anorak-orange.
As if, somehow, they knew. As if word had been passed round, silently, like chocolate, before the ramble: avoid the bog, avoid Bridelow Moss.
So it was just the three of them, shadows in the filth of the morning.
'Go on, then,' Matt was saying, trying to pump humour into his voice. 'Bugger off, the pair of you.'
Lottie put out a hand to squeeze his shoulder, then drew back because it would hurt him. Even a peck on the cheek hurt him these days.
It had all happened too quickly, a series of savage punches coming one after the other, faster and faster, until your body was numbed and your mind was concussed.
I don't think I need to tell you, do I, Mrs Castle.
That he's going to die? No. There were signs… Oh, small signs, but… I wanted him to come and tell you weeks… months ago. He wouldn't. He has this… what can I call it…? Fanatical exuberance? If he felt anything himself, he just overrode it. If there's something he wants to do, get out of his system, everything else becomes irrelevant. I did try, doctor, but he wouldn't come.
Please – don't blame yourself. I doubt if we'd have been able to do much, even if we'd found out two or three months before we did. However, this business of refusing medication.. Drugs.
It's not a dirty word, Mrs Castle. If you could persuade him, I think…
He's angry, doctor. He won't take anything that he thinks will dull his perceptions. He's… this is not anything you'd understand… he's reaching out for something. 'Go on,' Matt said. 'Get in the van, in the dry. You'll know when to come back.'
And what did he mean by that?
As they walked away, the son and the widow-in-waiting, she saw him pull something from under the rug and tumble it out into his lap. It looked, in this light, like a big dead crow enfurled in its own limp wings.
The rain plummeted into Mart's blue denim cap, the one he wore on stage.
Dic said, 'He'll catch his dea-'
