It was further than she expected. Her large backpack weighed on her shoulders. Maggie laughed at herself. She looked like a long-distance walker but she was only walking ten minutes along the coast path.
‘Morning.’
She passed a group of chatty people walking in the other direction. She noticed their Geordie accents. Probably on a day-trip from Newcastle. A man with a dog was stuck behind them. His tanned face and lack of any equipment marked him out as a local.
The path rose up a slight hill and twisted through tall dune grass. She was surprised to see a couple just ahead of her walking in the same direction. She hadn’t seen them before. Where had they come from? Maybe they’d stopped for a lunch break and she’d caught up with them. Or maybe they had stopped to gaze at the sea.
Or maybe they were just walking much slower than her. The man carried a gym-bag. The woman wore ordinary shoes with a slight heel. Both looked dressed for the high street.
Couples were her thing. She got near and then slowed her pace so that she could hear what they were saying.
‘Did you inform Peter?’ said the woman.
‘He knows what we’re doing,’ said the man, and then he looked around in a way that Maggie would describe as furtive.
He nodded to her and stepped off the path making it clear that she should walk on passed them.
Maggie smiled. ‘Lovely view, isn’t it? Have you been here before?’
‘Aye. It’s grand.’
The man stared out to sea, refusing eye contact and making further conversation difficult.
The straps on Maggie’s backpack urged her to keep moving. The sooner she reached the hut the sooner she could take it off.
*
The hut was everything Simon had promised. It was almost a stereotype. Blue flaking paint on wooden boards, a veranda surrounded by a post-and-rail banister. Inside were plain wooden floors, a bed, a desk, a comfortable armchair and cupboards full of provisions. All she needed to add were the milk, bread and fresh vegetables that had weighed her down.
Behind the rustic façade there were hidden layers of modern technology. Solar panels, a small wind turbine, a battery system, an electric induction cooker, a very sophisticated coffee machine and a hidden laptop-sized safe.
The desk chair looked out of place. It was a modern gaming chair, real leather and enough levers to distort it to match any body shape, even hers.
Maggie placed her laptop on the desk and sat in the chair that was going to be her home for the next few weeks. The chair welcomed her with a gentle sigh and Maggie instantly knew this was a place she could write. She was confident that she would have the bones, and quite a bit of flesh, on her next romance novel before she made the trek back to meet Simon and his car.
She was tempted to start right away but knew that she was more creative in the mornings. She span around on the desk chair and smiled. She loved this moment. Some people were scared of the blank page but she never saw it as blank. To her it was filled and overflowing with endless possibilities.
She would start early. If she was lucky the coffee machine would wake before her and deliver a perfect flat-white. She’d wrap her hands around the warm mug and inhale the fumes while ideas fought each other for dominance. It might only take a few seconds for one idea to emerge triumphant and Maggie’s fingers would struggle to keep up as it poured onto her screen.
*
The day started even better than she had hoped. The coffee was perfect, the sky was clear and the view was amazing. The desk was in the right spot. She’d feel the sun on her back as she faced the blank wall with no distractions.
Her familiar screen welcomed her and her fingers sat comfortably on the keys but the page remained blank. A few words were typed and then un-typed.
She had ideas. Plenty of them but none of them seemed to want to go anywhere. Usually an idea would gallop across the page. Usually the heroine (always a heroine) would demand attention.
Maggie found herself doing something she’d never done before. She connected to the internet in the middle of her morning writing session. She searched up writer’s block. Being unable to write for two hours didn’t qualify. But maybe this was the start of writer’s block. Maybe it was the first symptom. Like a sore throat foreshadowing a serious cold.
‘Damn it.’
Maggie hit the desk and stood so quickly that the chair rolled back across the room and bumped into the door. She stomped across and pushed it back where it belonged.
She sat in the swing chair facing the sea. The too-and-throe calmed her. In the distance was Dunstanburgh Castle. A picturesque skeleton poking three fingers into the clear blue sky. Maybe her heroine could meet her lover there. She couldn’t see how to make it work, and she’d done castles before. Living castles not dead ones.
A troop of walkers filed passed below. Too far away to discern any words. Maybe her couple could meet on a trek. It could work – except that trekking was too far out of Maggie’s experience. She laughed. It wasn’t as if she had experience of living in a castle. But she hadn’t minded researching castles. There was no way she was trekking.
She remembered the couple she’d seen the day before. Her mind played with the words they had spoken.
Why had the woman said inform, rather than tell. It seemed an unusual choice. ‘In-form’ sound like something to do with athletes. You could split it differently ‘info-rm’. Info room. That sounded like a place that you’d go to find things out. She liked that. Info room. Maybe she could use that. A library. No. She’d done that before as well. It’s funny how often writers set their stories around books. Not too surprising really. It’s what they know.
And the man. He didn’t answer the question. He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. How did he word it?
He said, ‘He knows what we’re doing.’ Perfectly disguised non-answer. Obviously he hadn’t told Peter but he wasn’t going to admit it. He was really saying that he didn’t need to tell Peter.
Maggie managed to write a couple of hundred words set in a school. She’s never done a school before.
*
The castle ruins were bigger and further away than she realised. She’d walked for ten minutes and they didn’t seem any closer. It took over an hour to get there though the twisty dunes. She kept hoping to bump into the gym-bag carrying couple.
It took less than an hour to get back. She’d ignored the coastal path and walked along the beach, keeping to the firm damp sand.
Her evenings were usually spent editing and only afterwards would she allow herself to break open her stash of contraband – romance novels written by rivals.
That evening there were hardly any words to edit. She attacked them with her usual vigour, stripping out clichés and spurious words. Cutting complex sentences and reducing the text to make it more readable.
Her meagre crop of words shrunk from several hundred down to a single paragraph and then with two touches on the keyboard the page was blank. It hadn’t worked. She’d start again the next day. She’d pretend this day hadn’t happened.
She tried an experimental swivel in the chair but couldn’t recapture that excitement. She couldn’t help seeing the page as empty.
*
Her condition got worse and she was dangerously close to developing full-blown writer’s block. Her couples had no chemistry. Her settings flopped rather than popped.
Each day she struggled to write more than a page and each evening she striped it back and back to expose the good bits, until eventually everything was gone.
None of her couples worked. Maybe she should leave the couples for a while and find her antagonist. He (always a he) didn’t usually show up until later in the story but maybe this time he wanted to get into the action sooner.
Antagonist always arrived with a name. It’s what defined them. She liked foreign sounding names. They hinted at excitement. She’d had a Boris in her head for years until the present prime minister scuppered that.
She typed and un-typed at least ten names before Peter landed on the page. But he was too nice. His name didn’t bring enough intrigue. She un-typed him before taking her coffee out to the veranda.
*
Like every other author, Maggie was often asked where her ideas came from. Her head was usually so full of ideas that she’d just pluck one out when needed. That answer didn’t satisfy her questioners. They wanted to know how the ideas got into her head.
Dreams sometimes provided the answer. Maggie would half-wake with the taste of a dream on her lips. If she was still enough and slow enough, she could feed the dream until it was strong enough to survive the journey from her bed to her desk.
She woke with the faintest fragment of a dream. Images flashed and she realised that it was nothing – just the gym-bag carrying couple with their off-beat comments.
*
The blank page seemed to mock her and she attacked it with words that made no sense. Her angry finger jabbed the backspace key and the blank page returned untarnished.
She swore at it and someone else swore with her. She held her breath. She didn’t want to scare him off. He was hovering anxiously behind her.
There was a sound too subtle for her to hear but enough to startle him into action. He grabbed a photo and a letter and was gone.
The blank page couldn’t resist him. The words landed with no danger of being un-typed. And then she heard them.
‘Did you inform Dieter?’
‘He knows what we’re doing.’
And so did Maggie. She knew the hut they were approaching. She knew what they would find and what they would do.
Her normal routine was retired. Maggie woke with the sun and typed until well after it had departed. Editing could wait. She needed to follow the story. She needed to know why they couple had blown up the beach hut. She needed to know what happened to the man they had tried to kill. She couldn’t wait to meet Dieter, even though he scared her much more than her usual antagonist.
*
Simon was waiting to take Maggie to a five star hotel where she’d spend a couple of months completing her novel in luxury before handing him the manuscript.
She waved and could see him judging her demeanour. Hoping she would have something on her laptop that would make it all worth the costs.
She smiled and saw him relax.
‘Looks like you have it in the bag.’
He was in for a surprise. Her couples never carried gym-bags full of guns and explosives.
