song I most associate with you, and I was rather disappointed not to hear
'Oh, hell, it's a good long time ago, I don't think I even remember the words…' Who the fuck was this?
'If you go wrong, I'm sure we could help you out.' She couldn't make out his face behind the spotlight. She looked up, in search of inspiration, but her gaze got entangled in antlers.
'Also,' she said miserably, 'it isn't exactly traditional. And it's awful long. See, I don't want to bore your friends here…'
'Miss Cairns…' The Earl himself took a step towards the dais, into the spotlight, the light making tiny dollar- signs in his eyes. 'I doubt if any of us could possibly be bored by any of your songs.' A touch of threat under the mellifluousness? Some flunkey had replaced the empty Guinness glass by her stool with a full one. She picked it up, put it down again without drinking. There were murmurings.
What the hell am I going to do now? She felt their stares, the more charitable ones maybe wondering if she was ill. Aw, shit…
What she didn't feel any more were the eyes of the Watcher.
This had maybe been a mistake. Sometimes you made mistakes. It probably had been the American and it probably was no heavier than lust.
'I warn you,' Moira said, as the Ovation's strap sank back into her shoulder, 'this is the longest song I ever wrote.'
And to the accompaniment of a thin cheer from the floor her fingers found the chord, and she sang the rather clumsy opening lines. Trying not to think about it, trying to board up her mind against all those heavyweight memories tramping up the stairs.
Her father works with papers and with plans.
Her mother sees the world from caravans…
The song telling the story of this shy, drab child growing up in the suburbs of a staid Clydeside town with the ever-present feeling that she's in the wrong place, that she really ought to be some other person. Bad times at school, no friends. Brought up at home by the grandmother, restrictive, old-fashioned Presbyterian.
I wish to God you hadna been born.
Your hair's a mess, get it shorn.
Get it shorn…
Then the song becoming a touch obscure – one night, around the time of her adolescence, the child seems to be in this dark wood, when the moon breaks through the clouds and trees, and she finds she's holding… this curious, ancient comb. It's a wonderful magic comb and apparently is the key to the alternative reality which for all these years has been denied to her. She runs it through her hair and becomes electrified, metamorphoses into some kind of beautiful princess. Fairytale stuff.
… She sees herself in colours and
She weighs her powers in her hand…
Dead silence out there. She had them. Oh, it had its magic, this bloody song which intelligent people were supposed to think was all allegorical and the comb a metaphor for the great Celtic heritage. Most likely this was how the American saw it, and the other guy who'd demanded the song.
A bastard to write, the words wouldn't hang together – sign of a song that didn't want to be written.
The song knew from the start: some things are too personal.
Chorus:
Never let them cut your hair
Or tell you where
You've been,
Or where you're going to
From here…
Couple of twiddly bits which, after all these years, she fluffed. Then dropping down to minor key for the main reason she hadn't wanted to perform this number, the creepy stuff, the heavy stuff.
And in the chamber of the dead
Forgotten voices fill your head…
Sure, there they are… tinny little voices, high-pitched, fragmented chattering, like a cheap transistor radio with its battery dying. Tune it in, tune it in.
Who is this? Who is it?
No.
No, no, NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh, shit, please, don't die, Matt, don't die on me now…you have no right…
Singing on, through her wild tears, an awed silence in the room like a giant cavern, hall of ages, caged in bones. You think you know this song, these words, Mr New York Irishman…?
… for the night is growing colder and you feel it at your shoulder…
Icy-bright singing now, purged of that phoney, Guinnessy growl. One or two women out there shivering and reaching for their cardigans. The song rippling across the night sky, down the dark years, and you're watching its wavering passage from a different level, like an air traffic controller in a tower late at night. Something flying out to meet it, on a collision course.
Give up, you fool, there is no heat.
The Abyss opens up beneath your feet…
Here he is again, uncertainly into the spotlight, looking around. Hello again, Earl, something wrong is there, my lord, your grace…? Is it cold for you in here? Will you get some servant to turn up the heating, throw more peat on the fire?
And all the while, will you listen to these wee voices, chattering, chattering, chattering…
The comb is ice, it's brittle, oh.
You cannot hold it, must let go…
Yes, let it go. It's a trinket, it's worthless, it takes your energy. Let it drift. Let the night have it. Let…
These – Christ – these are not my words. These are somebody else's words.
I'm singing somebody else's goddamn words!
And the comb is being pulled away now in a deceptively soft silver haze, gently at first, just a tug. Then insistent, irritable – let it come, you bitch – and slender hands, slender like wires, scalpelling into her breast. Feeling delicately – but brutally and coldly, like a pathologist at an autopsy – for her emotional core, for the centre of her. somebody…
In a frenzy she's letting go of the song, she's groping wildly at the air, feeling her spirit straining in her body as the big lights come on, huge shimmering chandeliers.
Moira has fallen down from the stool.
She's lying twisted and squirming on the carpeted dais, both arms wrapped around the guitar. From miles away, people are screaming, or is it her screaming at them… Stop it! Catch it! Don't let it go from here! Help me! Help me!
She can hear them coming to help her, the army of her fellow-Celts. But they can't get through.
They can't get through the walls of bone.
The walls of jiggling swelling bone. Not just the skulls any more; the plaster's fallen from the walls and the walls are walls of bone, whole skeletons interlocking, creaking and twisting and the jaws of the skulls opening and closing, grisly grins and clacking laughter of teeth, right up against her face. She's trapped, like a beating, bloody heart inside a rib-cage.
She sees the comb and all it represents spinning away until it's nothing but a hairline crack of silver-blue. She watches it go like a mother who sees her baby toddling out of the garden and into the dust spurting from the wheels of an oncoming articulated lorry.
Mammy!
But you can't hear me, can you, mammy? The connection's broken.
I'm on my own. But no.
There is a man.
A tall, thin man, with a face so white it might be the face of some supernatural being.
No, this is a real man. He's wearing an evening suit, a bow-tie. He has a small voluptuous mouth and an
