***
Ten minutes later, Robyn was sitting at a corner table in The Green Man pub with a large glass of red wine in her hand and her laptop set up on the table.
“You know we’ve got no Wi-Fi in here, love?”
She looked over at the short, plump bartender and nodded. “I’m not going online; I’m only looking at my documents.”
The bartender just grunted and moved off down the other end of the bar. So much for service with a smile.
Of course, that wasn’t the biggest thing on Robyn’s mind at the moment.
She stared at the folder that was open on her laptop – ‘The Crickley Bay Chronicles’ – and knocked back a large quantity of wine.
The folder was full of documents, each with their own name that referred to either a place or a character or a group of characters that she’d created for Crickley Bay.
As she’d told Maggie, she didn’t exactly remember every single person or place that she’d typed up – there were literally hundreds of each – but there were a few names that were coming back to her now, and for good reason.
She stared at the first document. She took another large gulp of wine.
The first document in the folder was entitled: ‘The Church B&B’. She looked around the room before clicking on it, almost certain that she was being watched. However, on inspection, there were only a few men dotted here and there, obviously locals and obviously regulars. None of them were looking at her; they were all staring down into the bottoms of their pints.
Taking another drink, Robyn double clicked on the B&B file, opening the document that she was dreading looking at.
The word processor started up and before she knew it, she was staring at her notes for ‘The Church B&B’. She took a deep breath and read the first few lines:
‘The Church B&B (located a stone’s throw from the coast), so called because it’s run by the Church family. Father: Aled Church. Mother: Katherine Church. Son: Ryan Church. Daughter: Sue Church, now Jones. They have a dog: a lurcher named Sookie, and a cat: a ginger tabby named Rowan.
‘The Church family have run the B&B for twenty years, and the kids, though no longer living at home, pitch in when they can. The B&B itself has an old-fashioned rustic feel to it, with many candles, fireplaces and decorative knick-knacks filling up its rooms. The B&B has six guest rooms altogether, all priced at £90 a night. The room on the top floor – while actually the biggest of the guest rooms – is only priced at £70 a night. Aled Church tells the guests this is because of its inconvenient location, at the top of an old staircase that is difficult to get up with lots of luggage etc. The real reason for its cheapness is because Aled believes it’s haunted, and guests are less likely to complain of strange noises and bumps in the night if they believe they’re getting a good deal on the room.
‘The B&B does well due to the welcoming nature of Aled and Katherine, but they hide a secret behind their happily-married façade. Aled sports a rather nasty facial scar, the result of a domestic row with Katherine, when she had attacked him with a large kitchen knife. That was a couple of years ago, and the gossip about the couple has mostly died down now, but the strange noises in the top bedroom aren’t the only disturbing sounds that customers of the B&B hear: sometimes, late at night, they can hear the couple rowing…’
Robyn finished reading and gawped at the page for at least a full minute before remembering her wine. She downed the rest of the merlot, making her cringe, and signalled the bartender for another one. Her raging alcoholism in the middle of the day didn’t seem to bother him. She supposed he was used to it.
She waited as he came over with her new wine, took her old glass, and then returned to the bar, before looking back at the screen.
So it was true, then. She’d somehow been booked into a B&B that she’d made up only days before, in great detail, down to the names of the family and even their pets. Not that she’d met Sookie or Rowan yet, but she was sure she would soon.
How could this be happening? Was she dreaming? Hallucinating? How could this possibly be explained?
She downed some more wine.
After a few seconds of thought, Robyn took her phone out of her bag and found Maggie’s number in her contacts list.
She answered on the third ring. “How’s Wales?”
Robyn took a sip of wine before answering. “Not really sure yet. Look, can I ask you about the B&B you booked for me?”
“Sure. Why, is it rubbish?”
“No… no, actually, it’s lovely. But is it where you stayed when you were here?”
Robyn could hear noises coming from the other end of the phone, as if she were rifling through pieces of paper.
“No, it’s not. I stayed at… ‘Ivy Cottage’, but it’s since closed. I kind of just picked the Church one at random; it seemed to have a good location.”
“It does. Look, Maggie, when you came here before, was the town called Crickley Bay?”
“Crickley Bay? No… it’s some Welsh name with a load of L’s. Why, where are you?”
“Never mind. Thanks.”
“No problem. So where are you now? Relaxing somewhere, I hope?”
“I’m in the pub.”
“Sounds good to me. Look, I’ve got to go, I was actually writing for once, can you believe it?”
“Wow, that’s great, Maggie. Sorry for interrupting. Get back to your writing, I’ll speak to you soon.”
“OK, have fun, Robyn!”
“Thanks. Bye.”
Robyn hung up and put her phone back in her bag. She’d been half-tempted to tell Maggie about what happened at the B&B, but something stopped her. Fear, Robyn supposed. Fear that Maggie wouldn’t believe her, fear that she’d dismiss it as coincidence, fear that she’d send the men in white coats to take her away.
Robyn drank more wine and looked once more around the pub. There were a couple more people in here now, and she assumed that a few more would trickle in every hour or so. She assumed it because that’s how she’d pictured one of the pubs in Crickley Bay when she was creating it.
That thought made Robyn take another sip of wine before looking back at the computer. She quickly closed the B&B file and opened the file entitled ‘Public Houses’. She started reading:
‘Crickley Bay has a large number of pubs due to the roaring tourist trade, and they range from modern cocktail bars to traditional country-type pubs, then down to dark and dirty dives.
‘The most popular pub for both locals and tourists alike is the ‘World’s End’ in the centre of town. This pub is laid out over two floors, is clean, serves good food, and puts on weekly events such as quiz nights and open mic nights.
‘If people want to stay near the coast, they have a number of sea-view public houses to choose from, such as ‘The Shrew’, ‘The Mariner’ and ‘The Green Man’. All three of these pubs are middle of the road type places – not new by any means, but clean enough, and cheap. Most of the main characters in ‘TCBC’ gravitate towards these four pubs, tending to shun the more upmarket places like ‘The Lounge’ and ‘Penny’s Cocktails’.’
Robyn stopped reading and sat back. There was much more on each pub, going into great detail, but she didn’t need to read it. As soon as she’d read the words ‘The Green Man’, she knew it would be styled exactly like the pub she was sitting in now, with exactly the same bad-tempered barman and exactly the same level of mid-afternoon customers.
She could have asked the bartender his name, but she already knew the answer. It would be Ben Compton, born and bred in Crickley Bay, bitter because his wife left him, and bored because he has nothing in his life now other than this dull pub with its recurring customers and the same old chit chat.
Robyn didn’t need to hear any of that. She was freaking out enough already.
After a couple more glasses of wine, she decided she needed to leave the pub and get some air. This wasn’t due to the fact that she’d drunk too much (although she undoubtedly had), it was more because the pu
b was now filling up nicely. And it was filling up with characters she’d created and typed up onto her laptop just days earlier.
Even though she couldn’t remember a lot of the people and places she’d invented, a few characters had stuck out – for obvious reasons – and she’d noticed them as soon as they entered the pub.
For example, there was Farmer Humphries and his wife, Estelle. Humphries was a big man, both tall and wide, and he dwarfed his tiny, petite wife. He had crazy, black frizzy hair which he hid under a flat cap, giant eyebrows that looked like caterpillars, a huge nose and a wide smile. Everything about him was larger than life.
His wife, on the other hand, was short, thin, and had pointy, rodent-like features that were half-hidden by her luxurious, long brown hair. Robyn had laughed as she’d created this couple, deliberately making them as strange a match as possible.
When they’d walked, arm in arm, into the pub and shouted at the barman for their usual, Robyn had nearly choked on her wine. They were ridiculous: insane caricatures that were like something out of a cartoon.
She expected everyone in the pub to be staring at them, open-mouthed in disbelief, but of course, they weren’t. These people were locals, they were friends (although some of them were enemies), and they knew each other. They were used to it. It had clearly been this way for years. But how?
As Robyn saw it, there were only two (well, three), explanations. None of them were even remotely believable, but she’d had a few glasses of wine by now and she was willing to at least consider the possibilities of each.
One: for some reason, Robyn had been here before, and for some reason, she didn’t consciously remember any of it. However, she’d seen the places, the people, how the town fit together and how the residents interacted with each other, and it had all filed into her subconscious and been locked away tightly, all throughout the years of Hunter Bloomberg books, waiting for its moment to come pouring out of her head and onto the paper as it had done when she was planning The Chronicles. It would explain how she was able to plan the place so easily, but she could have sworn she’d never been here in her life, not even when she was younger. Maggie could have told her about her stay here while Robyn wasn’t really listening (this happened relatively often, Robyn was ashamed to admit), and the information could have entered her head then – but down to this level of detail? Robyn didn’t think so.
Two: everything Robyn had written about Crickley Bay had come to life. The characters, the buildings, the back stories, everything: they’d all miraculously leapt off the pages of her laptop and become real.
Even with all that wine under her belt, Robyn still couldn’t get her head around this explanation. She knew weird stuff happened around the planet all the time – she was a great fan of documentaries on the ‘unexplained’ and ‘the mysteries of the world’ – but this was a little too weird. This was proper fantasy stuff; a genre, by the way, that Robyn had well and truly steered clear of all throughout her career. She just didn’t believe she had the ability to write wondrous and mystical things and make them seem real. How ironic.
And then, of course, there was the third explanation, one which Robyn really didn’t even want to consider: she’d gone mad. This was all some massive hallucination, and Robyn was actually either back in her kitchen in some kind of trance, or lying in a bed in the local psychiatric clinic while her family and friends wept at her side. Nope, Robyn wasn’t even going to entertain that idea.
It was now early evening, and the pub was getting more and more packed by the second. She sat still for a while, trying to ignore the constant chatter around her, but after a few more minutes, it all became too much.
Draining her most recent glass, Robyn quickly picked up her handbag, skirting past Estelle and Farmer Humphries – trying not to stare at them as she went by – and bursting through the door of the pub into the fresh evening air.
She breathed in deeply, smelling the salt from the sea and listening to some seagulls that were circling overhead. She assumed they were waiting for a child carrying some nice hot chips whom they could swoop down on and steal from; Robyn had written a character like this for some comic relief during the heavier parts of her book. Nine-year-old Bobby Kelly had the great misfortune to be attacked by one of these large birds whenever he was walking down the street, even if he didn’t have any food.
It had made her laugh when she wrote it. Now she didn’t feel like laughing at all.
Robyn shook her head, trying to forget about her characters for just one second.
This proved impossible. The bay was thriving with people enjoying the last few days of summer in the little seaside town, and Robyn had to actively thrust her way forward through the throngs in order to get anywhere. She tried to keep her head down but her curiosity got the better of her, and before long, she was seeing her own characters everywhere.
Peter Smith – one of the local policemen – with his son, George, and his wife, Patricia. Mr Rogers who ran a bakery in the middle of town, with his big, hairy dog, Barney. Nineteen year old Sandy Breakwell with her current boyfriend, Tim Tooley. Robyn looked at them sadly – it wasn’t destined to end well, that relationship – and then shook her head. What was she doing?
She eventually made her way down to the beach, which was emptying now that the day was turning into night. People would no doubt be going home and to hotels for a shower and some quick food before hitting one of the local pubs, and Robyn groaned at the thought; it would be a long time before she drank any more red wine, that was for certain.
Plonking herself down on the sandy beach, Robyn stared out at the undulating waves, the low sun turning the water into sparkling fluid crystals. It was calming, and after the day she’d had, it was what she needed.
She’d half convinced herself that when she woke up tomorrow, she’d either be back in her house in England, or she’d be in the same B&B but not the same B&B: it would be run by some guy called Ted instead of Aled, and he wouldn’t have a scar on his face, and the whole building would be decorated completely differently. The Green Man pub would show its true colours and would actually be called ‘The Crown’ or ‘The Fox & Hounds’. Farmer Humphries and Estelle would be a distant memory. Everything would be back to normal.
She’d only half-convinced herself of this, though, because during her reverie she was interrupted by a man in his seventies ambling over to her and asking her for change. He was dressed in blue jeans (although you couldn’t really see the blue anymore), a ragged black jacket, and a red scarf that was filled with holes. The only things on his feet were ancient flip-flops.
Robyn stared at him for almost a minute before she spoke. “Let me guess: you’re name’s Joe?”
The man stared back at Robyn, eyes wide. “Seems me reputation precedes me. That lot in the pub been talkin’ about me again?”
Robyn shook her head as she fumbled to get her bag from her purse. Standing up, she handed Joe a fiver and turned round, walking back up the beach to the road.
“Wow, thankee, Miss! I’ll eat like a king tonight!”
Robyn didn’t reply; she was too exhausted. Instead, she got to the road, turned right, and headed back to The Church B&B.
Character Building Page 5
