The Writer

  THE WRITER

  R.B. Banfield

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2013 R.B. Banfield

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ISBN: 9781310264191

  www.storiesfrommyhead.com

  Special thanks for all the help and assistance from those nice, if somewhat unsuspecting, people of Gendry.

  Contents

  Part One: Craigfield

  Part Two: Ironwright

  PART ONE

  CRAIGFIELD

  CHAPTER ONE

  “This isn’t writer’s block.”

  Sophie stretched her arms, yawned and then stood up from the small wooden chair. She walked away from the desk that once looked inspiring with its roller-top and cute drawers that always stuck when they opened. It felt both good to get away for a break, and yet also regretful that so little had been done. For almost an hour she had sat there, thinking, dreaming, then singing to herself. The pristine white sheet of paper that she had aligned with care into the typewriter went untouched. At first it felt like an empty canvass waiting for her artwork. Now it felt like a solid, cold concrete wall blocking her way to her dreams. All she had to do was write something and the words and ideas would start to flow. Something. Anything. After an hour it was nothing.

  She went to the window and placed her hands on the sill that was wide enough to comfortably sit back and relax on. The view outside was not as interesting as had it appeared an hour before. In just that short time the thought of looking out over the wonders of the small town of Gendry had become familiar, far from providing her with inspiration.

  “I’m just not in the right mood.”

  Her grandmother was not a rich woman. She had done well for herself to the point where the way that she lived might seem lavish to an outsider. She had never had an official bonafide job. The farmland that surrounded her house had been left unused for the entire time she had lived there, reinforcing the opinion of people who thought she was eccentric and not entirely trustworthy.

  The farmland itself was a mess. A discarded tractor from a bygone generation was almost entirely hidden by bleak tall grass. Something that might have once been a plough now sat like rusted artwork entertaining a host of weeds. Various patches of nasty dead land were here and there, where chemicals had once been dumped and nothing else wanted to grow. Only three ancient fruit trees remained on the land; none of them able to give up anything edible. They had been there so long that no one was sure what kind of fruit they produced.

  The house itself was one-hundred-and-twenty-years old, but not all three storeys were the same age. Each level was of a different design, the product of three different builders. It started off with brick, and then became something resembling Tudor, but not really. The top story was added some fifty years later by a man who claimed to be a builder but was more a failed cabinet maker. Subsequent owners either liked the strange effect of a three-designed house, or just didn’t really care that much. Sophie’s grandmother was always more concerned with what happened inside her house rather than without.

  Susan Tyle’s ample money came from the inheritance of her second husband, who was from a well-to-do family with little regard for her. Susan herself came from the wrong side of the tracks, as her in-laws described it. It did not help that controversy seemed to follow her everywhere she went. Wealthy Rupert Lomasney was murdered and the killer was never found, and almost everyone suspected it was his wife Susan. Killed him for the money, they said. Told her friends that was what she would do to him one day, they said. Made plans to leave the country, they said. She was arrested with minuscule evidence against her, and none of her rumoured utterances proved true. The trial and all the media attention that went with it lasted six months. Susan was found innocent but the Lomasney family never accepted the verdict and she found life easier after she left the big city and started again in a small country town like Gendry. Residents there were somewhat backward, and they knew that and did not mind. They enjoyed their gossip and held no grudges, and everyone would give everyone else a friendly wave in the street whether they knew them or not. Susan was treated the same, and she became respected as one of the town’s leading citizens.

  There she met Sam Tyle, husband number three. He was an unsuspecting and honest repairman who never charged any of his customers as much as he should have. Together they had three children and lived in the strange three-toned house. Sam died naturally one night at Sal’s bar while on his favourite stool, with an empty beer glass in his hand and a smile on his face. They buried his stool with him as a tribute to his many years as a patron. That was why there was a space at the bar, four stools down on the right.

  Sophie’s mother Jenny was the product of Susan’s first marriage, to Ken Trent, a man who also happened to die in unusual circumstances. No one close to Sophie remembered her father, and Susan agreed that perhaps it was best that they kept it that way. The Trent’s were a family of car thieves, untrustworthy bookies, con artists and general hoodwinkers, and Sophie did not resemble any of them.

  Sophie herself cared little for the family problems and controversy. She loved her grandmother and thought of her as her only real family. Sophie herself had her own problems to deal with. A truck owned by the firm We Are Your Moving Men didn’t see her boyfriend Leo’s speeding motorbike one foggy October morning, and didn’t stop until it was trapped underneath, dragging him along for a few terrifying seconds. Sophie, who had been the helpless passenger, got away with only shock and nausea; no broken bits and only a few scratches. But poor Leo came desperately close to having his skull crushed. He nearly lost his right ear but doctors were able to save it after the truck’s driver found it stuck to one of the back wheels.

  It was one thing to go through such a traumatic event, but another to wait through an agonising three week period for Leo to regain his senses and start making noises that were near enough to talking, to prove that he was in his right mind. Doctors already determined he did not have brain damage, but that wasn’t the same as hearing him speak normally. The first thing he said to her horrified her to the core. She knew that when he looked at her and must have noticed the lingering bruises on her face. But all he could say to her, his first words, was to ask how his bike was. While it was well known to all their friends that he considered his bike his most prized possession, with most of his money going into keeping it spruced, it was still just a motorcycle. And there he was asking her about it even before asking how she was. That said it all for her, and she walked out and never saw him again. That was three weeks ago.

  Her doctor advised her to take a break, assuring her that the constant spots that clouded her vision and spells of dizziness would soon pass, as long as she took it easy. The best place she could think to go was to Gendry and her grandmother’s house. It had been two years since her last visit and she had planned to return soon anyway. Another reason for such a break was to fulfil her ambition to write her first novel. She could get away from her job, her memory of Leo and his beloved bike, and get to the work that she secretly desired to do.

  There was no way she could have tried to write a novel in her small and constantly untidy apartment, with her attention-seeking and dribble-prone cat wanting to sit on her no matter what she was doing. Not after her long working hours and waiting through endless stop-start traffic, only to
sit down with an out-of-date laptop that kept insisting that its battery was about to die. Not when her workday was dull computer-feeding trapped inside a small-walled terminal, listening to a “Golden Oldies” radio station that her workmates insisted on hearing. No matter how many funny toy animals she glued to the top of the faded beige monitor, or adorable tiny fish to populate her little aquarium, the hours were always tedious. The facts and notes that needed to be entered always seemed like they made no shred of difference to the life of any member of the human race, and at times she thought her computer must be bored of them too.

  Her grandmother Susan had an old-fashioned typewriter and when Sophie was a girl she loved to play around with it. She tried copying pages from old books, pretending them to be her own work, dreaming that she was an author of renown. Of all the fun things she had done in Gendry during her childhood, she remembered that as the best. Her plan was to clean the typewriter up and use it to create her own original prose. She would do it in the style of the old writers, the ones who didn’t have to worry about battery warnings, upgrade updates and flickering screens, or the pull of internet entertainment and email alerts.

  Each page would need to be carefully lined up, and time taken to turn the roller bar and make sure the ribbon was still okay. Each letter would make a satisfying clunk on the paper, and now and again the dainty little arms would collide and need to be pried apart without getting her fingers dirty. It gave her the feeling of actually doing something creative and not just seeing the unreal affect of some impersonal LCD-generated image. This was hands-on writing, the way to make her feel like she was actually making something herself, and not having some fancy machine do it for her.

  The only problem was that Sophie didn’t actually have anything to write about. She had hoped to think of something during the train ride from the city up to Gendry, and then find further inspiration in the people she would meet in the town. If all else failed, she could always go ahead and write the life of her grandmother and her family. Names and faces would need to be altered, of course, but even then she worried that it might be too close to home to put into print. Some old wounds she did not want to reopen.

  She looked back at the page next to the typewriter and the two sentences she typed yesterday. When she saw them today she realised that they made no sense. It suddenly seemed like the hardest thing in the world, to type anything else. The more she tried to think of something the more blank her mind seemed to get. Eventually she started to talk to herself, trying to think of anything to kick-start her book.

  “The river was wide and deep but not deep enough to hide the body …”

  “The tree was so tall that it overshadowed the entire town …”

  “The car had been long ago abandoned and covered in grass.”

  She looked out to that buried tractor and decided that maybe she could write something about that. Maybe the main character drove it, back when it was used on the land. Perhaps he died there, after a hot day in the seat, after ignoring the warning from his doctor to never drive it again? Then she realised she could not have a main character die in the first line. Unless it was all told in flashback? She laughed to herself, thinking that she hated stories like that, that start with a dead guy and then try to entertain the reader with guessing when the big event happens. Then she thought that maybe she could get a feel for the tractor if she went out and sat on the rusting seat and surveyed the land. Anything to get her into the writing mood.

  Or maybe she could just write about life in the city.

  Kerry Tyle was so identical to his brother Jerry that no one except for their mother could tell them apart, and they knew it. Their older sister Rebecca, who had just turned fourteen but acted more like thirty, claimed that she could tell them apart but most of the time she was guessing. She knew she had a fifty-fifty chance of being right. Sophie had a strategy for when they were together: once the other said the other one’s name she would keep her eye on that one. The trouble with that plan was that the twins liked to confuse people by calling the other by the wrong name. They only did that when their mother was not around, since she never thought of them as doing anything sneaky. The reality was, at the age of ten, they were now at the peak of their troublemaking ways, and they knew it.

  Old Man Hudson had grown so tired of the twins and not knowing who is who that he would threaten to grab one and with an erasable black marker pen put a dirty big “K” on the forehead of one of them. He had a fifty-fifty chance of being right. He lived next door and kept to himself; a hermit who used every space of his property, and several rooms of his house, to grow vegetables and then complain about them. Although Susan had warned him that she would call Sheriff Handisides if he made any further threatening noises against the twins, he was only echoing the general thought of the town towards them.

  Sophie saw them busy in conversation under the impressive veranda that decorated the front of the house. It had four comfortable seats, each one with a different design. Another veranda sat on the other side of the house, but it was only half the size and nobody really liked to sit there since it was always in the shade and caught the wind when it was cold.

  The boy’s clothes were dirty and their hands were dark with soil, and the last person they wanted to see while in such a state was their mother. They were pleased to see it was Sophie and not Susan.

  “Hi, guys,” she greeted. What are you two up to now?”

  “We’re making Walks,” either Kerry or Jerry answered.

  “Don’t tell me,” Sophie said with a knowing laugh. “You’re ripping the wings off flies? No one thinks you’re funny, doing that, you know. It’s just cruel. If you were a fly, how would you feel if some giant boy came along and took your wings off? Not so good? It’s not like they grow back. I don’t think they do, anyway. It would be like someone ripping your legs off, and then laughing at your agony.”

  “We’re inventing tracks through the forest for tourists to follow,” said the other one.

  “Nature walks,” said the first.

  “For the scenery too,” said the other.

  “Not flies?” she asked, feeling ridiculous.

  “Why would people want to look at flies?” asked the first.

  “We could tell them they’re special flies, to get more people,” said the other.

  “I’ll tell your mother how funny you are,” said Sophie. “Couple of comedians in the family, I see?”

  “No, we’re serious,” said Kerry or Jerry. “Gendry needs more tourists, if we’re to develop as a community.”

  “Keep up with the times,” said the other one.

  “Gendry has done all right without hordes of tourists dropping in,” said Sophie.

  “But if we’re to avoid falling victim to the economic climate, we need to be reactive—“

  “Proactive,” corrected the other.

  “Proactive, to thwart becoming a ghost town.”

  “To keep with the times.”

  “Although some would argue the rot had already set in.”

  “And once it sets in, that’s it for the town.”

  “Are you guys serious?” she asked.

  “But would you think of it if it was a real ghost town,” Kerry or Jerry said to his brother with delight.

  “With real ghosts,” the other agreed.

  “How cool would that be?” said the first, his mind running at the thought of being chased by scary things, and how much fun that would be.

  Sophie relaxed a little, seeing that they were indeed still children. “Hey, I think I see some ghosts over there,” she said as she pointed at a nest of trees.

  They jumped off the veranda and charged away to the trees, yelling for the ghosts to stop so they can grab one, and shrieked with voices so high-pitched that any real ghost would be scared off. Sophie thought that when she was a child she would have run the opposite direction.

  The car was on the right side of the road, then it was on the left, then it didn’t know where it wante
d to be. So quick it changed lanes that had there been any other traffic in either direction no one would have been able to avoid a collision. A certain letterbox that always sat too close to the road was struck hard and bounced off the front of the car. It landed against a tree three houses away. If the driver had known what he caused then he would have laughed hysterically and probably tired to hit more. Everything was funny to him at that moment. It was late and dark and there was nobody around, so what difference did it make if he bumped off a few things? What would it matter if a few people woke to find tread marks through their manicured front lawn? Or a mangled carcass of one of those pesky stray cats that haunted the town? The streets were straight and wide and no one was ever out this late. He could take both hands off the wheel, or shut his eyes, or take another mouthful of that whiskey, or all three at once, and it wouldn’t matter. Or go as fast as he could, and no one would notice. They would all hear him, and do nothing more than turn up their televisions, or roll over in their beds and push their pillow over their ears. No one liked to complain much in Gendry.

  He completed a circuit of the town and decided that the only way it could be better was if he did it all again faster. After the second lap he knew he could take a good minute off his time if he really tried. The third time around didn’t go so well, with a couple of corners misjudged, so he tried to go even faster the next time. Then he came across another car, right in his way, maybe not even noticing him. From the looks of it a local, since it was going slow, obeying the local speed rules, in no hurry at all. He tooted, then nearly rammed it, then went around it, still tooting his displeasure. He glimpsed the frightened faces of two elderly people, terrified at even the thought of being harassed, and it made him roar with laughter. It was a good night he was having.