'Right…' she said cautiously.
'And most apologetic about the abrupt termination of your performance the other night by the inexplicable precipitation from the walls of approximately a hundred stags' heads. Now, was that not an extraordinary thing to happen?'
'Bizarre.'
'Several people had to be treated for minor lacerations, and there were two broken arms.'
'Oh, dear.'
'So naturally the Earl wanted to reassure himself that you had not been damaged in any way.'
'I'm fine. Just fine.'
'Because you seemed to have disappeared. Along with one of his guests, a gentleman called, er, Macbeth.'
'Sorry,' Moira said. 'No more money.' She hung up and ran back into the rain, black hair streaming behind her, before he could say anything about witchy women. The psychic thing.
A millstone, a fucking albatross.
She started the car, the eight-year-old BMW with a suitcase in the boot, the suitcase jammed up against the Ovation guitar steeping in its black case like Dracula in his coffin – we only come out at night, me and that guitar, together. With sometimes devastating results.
The damned psychic thing.
If you really could control it, it would be fine. No, forget fine, try bearable. It would be bearable.
But going down that old, dark path towards the possibility of some kind of control. Well, you took an impulsive step down there, the once, and you found all these little side-paths beckoning, tiny coloured lanterns in the distance – follow me, I'm the one.
You dabbled. I said to you never to dabble.
The coloured lanterns, the insistent, whispering voices.
The comb has not forgiven you. You have some damage to repair.
Yes, Mammy. She drove well, she thought, smoothly, with concentration. Down into England.
The way – many years ago, a loss of innocence ago – you travelled to the University in Manchester for all of four months before, one night, this local folk group, Matt Castle's Band played the student union.
Matt on the Pennine Pipes, an amazing noise. Growing up in Scotland, you tended to dismiss the pipes as ceremonial, militaristic.
Matt just blows your head away.
The Pennine Pipes are black and spidery, the bag itself with a dark sheen, like a huge insect's inflated abdomen. Matt plays seated, the bag in his lap, none of this wrestling with a tartan octopus routine.
'Where d'you get these things?'
'Like a set, would you, luv?'
'I wouldn't have the nerve, Mr Castle. They look like they'd bite.'
An hour and a couple of pints later he's admitting you can't buy them. There are no other Pennine Pipes. Perhaps there used to be, once, a long, long time ago. But now, just these, the ones he made himself.
How to describe the sound…
Sometimes like a lonely bird on the edge of the night. And then, in a lower register, not an external thing at all, but something calling from deep inside the body, the notes pulled through tube and bowel.
'The Romans brought bagpipes with them. The Utriculus. Whether they were here before that, nobody knows. I like to think so, though, lass. It's important to me. I'm an English Celt.'
Within a month you're singing with the band, trying to match the pipes…which you can't of course, could anyone?
But the contest is productive: Matt Castle's Band, fifteen years semi-professional around the Greater Manchester folk clubs, is suddenly hot, the band offered its first nationwide tour – OK, just the small halls and the universities, but what it could lead to… maybe the chance – the only chance they'll ever get at their time of life – to turn full-time professional.
Only this tour, it has got to be with Moira Cairns, eighteen years old, first-year English Lit. student. Oh, the chemistry: three middle-aged guys and a teenage siren. No Moira and the deal's off.
Typically, the only pressure Matt applies is for you to take care of your own future, stick with your studies. 'Think about this, lass. If it all comes to nowt, where does that leave you…?'
And yet, how badly he needs you to be in the band.
'I can go back. I can be a mature student.'
'You won't, though. Think twenty years ahead when me and Willie and Eric are looking forward to our pensions and you're still peddling your guitar around and your looks are starting to fade off…'
Blunt, that's Matt.
About some things, anyway. There was always a lot going on underneath.
Moira shifted uncomfortably in her seat and caught sight of herself in the driving mirror. Were those deep gullies under her eyes entirely down to lack of sleep? She thought, Even five, six years ago I could be up all night and drinking with Kenny Savage and his mates and I'd still look OK.
More or less. The further south she drove, the better the weather became. Down past Preston it wasn't raining any more and a cold sun hardened up the Pennines, the shelf of grey hills known as the backbone of England.
Some way to go yet. Fifty, sixty miles, maybe more. If she was halfway down the backbone of England, then Bridelow must be the arse-end, before the Pennines turned into the shapelier, more tourist-friendly Peak District.
Moira switched motorways, the traffic building up, lots of heavy goods vehicles. Like driving down a greasy metal corridor. Then the Pennines were back in the windscreen, moorland in smudgy charcoal behind the slip-roads and the factories. Somewhere up there: the peat.
I have to do this, Matt had written. It's as if my whole career's been leading up to it. It just knocked me sideways, the thought that this chap, the bogman, was around when they were perhaps playing the original Pennine pipes.
Time swam. She was driving not in her car but in Matt's old minibus, her last night with the band. Matt talking tersely about piping to the Moss, how the experience released him.
And he'd written, It was as if he'd heard me playing. I don't know how to put this, but as if I'd played the pipes and sort of charmed him out of the Moss. As if we'd responded to something inside us both. Now that's a bit bloody pretentious, isn't it, lass?
And Moira could almost hear his cawing laugh.
She came off the motorway and ten minutes later, getting swept into naked countryside that was anything but green, she thought, Shit, what am I doing here? I don't belong here. I walked out on the guy fifteen years ago.
… traitorous cow…
Hadn't escaped her notice that one thing Lottie had not done was invite her to the funeral.
Always a space between her and Lottie. Never was quite the same after Moira found the nerve to get her on one side during her second pregnancy and warn her to take it easy, have plenty of rest – Lottie smiling at this solemn kid of nineteen, explaining how she'd carried on working until the week before Dic was born.
Never was quite the same with Lottie, after the termination and the hysterectomy.
The road began to climb steeply. It hadn't rained here, but it was cold, the tops of stone walls and fences sugared with frost.
Jesus, I am nervous.
It was gone 2 p.m., the funeral arranged for 4.30. Strange time. At this point in the year they'd be losing the light by then.
Her month was dry. She hadn't eaten or drunk anything since the two aborted sips of the filthy coffee in the Lake District, and no time now for a pub lunch.
The sky was a blank screen, the outlines of the hills now iron-hard against it.
Lottie was jealous back then, though she'd never let it show.
The countryside was in ragged layers of grey, the only colour a splash of royal blue on the side of some poor
