The Man in the Moss

            Moira's throat was burning up.

            The girl said, 'Yeah, I'll be around.' She held on to the open door. 'Gina,' she said. The wire-caged light over the backstage exit threw a grille of shadows on to her pale, puffy cheeks.

            Willie, five and a bit feet tall, liked his women big. 'Gina. Right," he said, 'I'll remember.'

            The first sparse snowflakes hit the wet black asphalt and dissolved. Moira, tucking her long hair down her coat collar, smiled at the girl, put out a foot to climb into the van next to

Willie.

            And then the moment froze, like life's big projector had jammed.

            Moira turned in time to see the girl's eyes harden, glazing over like a doll's eyes as she whirled - a big, clumsy dancer - and flung the door. Like the door was a wrecking hammer and Moira was the side of a condemned building.

            Snarling, 'Traitor!'  Discoloured, jagged teeth exposed. 'Fucking bitch!'

            Willie had seen it. With both hands, he had pushed her back. She stumbled, fell over the kerb, the door connecting with a shuddering crunch and this girl, Gina snarling, 'Bitch...', voice as deadly cold as the grinding metal.

            And then the door reopened and Willie was hauling her in and snatching it shut behind her, the girl screaming, 'Go on ... feather your own nest, fucking cow!' And beating on the panel into Moira's ear as Matt started the engine and pulled urgently away into the unheeding, desultory night traffic.

            'Jesus,' Willie Wagstaff said. 'Could've had your fingers off.'

            'Screw up ma glittering career, huh?' White face in the streetlight and a rasp of Glasgow giving it away that Moira was pretty damn shocked. 'Couldny play too well wi' a hook.'

            Matt said mildly, 'Don't let it bother you. Always one or two. Just jealous.' The snow heavy enough now for him to get the wipers going.

            'Wasny about envy.' Moira had her guitar in her arms. 'I'm no' exactly popular with your fans any more is the problem.'

            'You're in good company,' Matt said. 'Look how the purists shunned Dylan when he went over to rock and roll.'

            'Called me a traitorous cow.'

            'Yeah, well,'  Matt said. 'We've been over this.' So damned nonchalant about it. He seemed so determined she shouldn't feel bad that she felt a sight worse.

            Eric, the mournful one who played fiddle and twelve-string, Eric, the mediator, the peacemaker, said, 'Weren't a bad gig though, were it?'

            'Was a grand gig,' Moira said. Good enough, she thought, heartsick, to be the start of something, not the end.

            Least her throat wasn't hurting so bad. The guitar case was warm in her arms. The snowflakes began to suck and cluster on the side windows as Matt drove first to Eric's house at Ashton Under Lyne, where Willie had left his Minivan. They switched the drum chest to the back of the little grey van, and Willie said, 'I won't mess about. If it's snowing like this down here it'll be thick as buggery over t'top.' He hung his arms around Moira's neck and gave her a big kiss just wide of the lips. 'Ta-ra, lass. Don't lose touch, eh?'

            Then Eric kissed her too, mournfully, and by the time she got into the front seat next to Matt she was in tears, both arms wrapped around the guitar case for comfort.

            'This is the worst thing I ever did, you know that. Matt?'

            There was silence. Just the two of them now, for the last time. Time for some plain talking.

            'Don't be so bloody daft.' Still his tone was curiously mild.

            'She was right, that slag, I should have ma fingers chopped off.'

            'Listen, kid.' He tapped at the steering-wheel. 'You made one sacrifice for this band when you threw up your degree course. That's it. No more. Don't owe us nowt. It's been nice - cracking couple of years, wouldn't've missed it. But you're not even twenty-one. We're owd men, us.'

            'Aw, Matt...' Could anybody be this selfless?

            'Gone as far as we're going. Think I want to be trailing me gear around the country when I'm sixty? No way. It's a good get-out, this, straight up. For all of us. Eric's got his kids, Willie's got his...'

            Matt didn't finish the sentence, covering up the break by changing down to third, swinging sharp right and taking them through Manchester's Piccadilly: bright lights, couples scurrying through the snow. Snow was nice in the city, Moira thought. For a while. When it came by night.

            Think about the snow. Because Matt's got to be lying through his teeth.

            But the silence got too heavy. 'OK,' she said, to change the subject. 'What do you want to be doing?'

            'Eh?'

            'You said you didny wanna be trailing your gear around when you were sixty. What would you like to be doing?'

            Matt didn't answer for a long time, not until they were out of the city centre.

            'I'm not sure,' he said eventually. 'We're all right for money, me and Lottie. Thanks to you.'

            'Matt... .' I can't stand this.

            'All right. I don't know. I don't know what I want to do. But I'll tell you this much ... I know where I want to be.'

            Moira waited. The snow was heavy now, but they were not too far from Whalley Range, where she lived, and it wouldn't take Matt long to get to his bit of Cheshire and Lottie.

            'What I want,' he said, 'is to be out of these sodding suburbs. Want to go home.'

            'Across the Moss?' The words feeling strange in Moira's mouth.

            'Yeah,' Matt said.

            Across the Moss. Willie and Matt would often slip the phrase to each other, surreptitiously, like a joint. Across the Moss was Over the Rainbow. Utopia. The Elysian Fields.

            'Lottie likes it fine where we are. All the shops and the galleries and that. But it's not me, never was. Don't belong. No ... echoes. So. Yeah. I'm going home. Might take a year, might take ten. But that's where I'm ending up.'

            Which didn't make her feel any better. Twenty years older than her and here he was, talking about ending up. Did this happen to everybody when they turned forty?

            'This is Willie's village, up in the moors?'

            'Yeah. And Willie stayed. Willie's got family there. My lot moved to town when I was a lad. You never get rich up there, not even the farmers. But we were happy. We were part of it. Willie's still part of it. Drops down to town to play a gig or two, get his leg ...go out with a woman.'

            Moira smiled. Matt tended to be kind of proper, like a father, when they were alone.

            'But he keeps going back. And his mother ... she's never spent a night away, his ma, the whole of her life.'

            'Some place, huh?'

            'Special place.' He was staring unblinking through the windscreen and the snow. 'It's quite lonely and primitive in its way. And the Moss - biggest peatbog in the North.'