Read Dying to Write for Free Online

team to cook Wednesday’s supper. She wanted to convene a meeting for the following morning to discuss the menu. I agreed.
    â€˜What I’d really like to do,’ she said, ‘is shock the lot of them. Did you ever see such a collection? I’ve been on a course like this every year as long as I can remember, but I’ve never met people harder to get on with. That Mr Woodhouse: do you know how many times he’s nagged that sweet Shazia about damp bedclothes? And that awful Nyree: man-mad. Old enough to know better. And that girl who says she’s going to be a publisher – did you ever see anything like those skirts of hers? With her legs, too. That coloured man – black, I suppose I should say, though of course he isn’t – he’s nice enough, and I’m glad you’ve made friends with him. He’s a bit out of it, isn’t he? But he did talk to me about his project for this week, and it seems very interesting. Have you started anything?’
    I shook my head. ‘Not quite. But I thought I’d like to write about a friend. He – he died, you see.’
    She looked at me hard, then started to talk about a story she was planning. It too was to involve death. In this case her own.
    Apparently she’d had a heart attack after routine surgery. ‘Very irritating it was, too. There I was, expecting to be in and out in two days, and they kept me in three weeks. It meant I missed a test match. The Lord’s test, too!’
    I’m happy to gossip cricket any day – my father played professionally for Durham and coached me for hours as if I’d been a boy – but just at the moment I wanted to hear more about her death.
    â€˜Oh, yes,’ she chuckled. ‘I died all right. Clinically. But whoever writes the script obviously decided I wasn’t ready for my exit just yet, and so he started my heart again. With a little help from the medics. But there’s nothing unusual about that. What is unusual, perhaps, is that I watched the whole thing happening.’
    I listened. She talked. And then, quite abruptly, she declared she was a little tired and wanted a nap before supper. So I set off for the walk Kate had prescribed.
    Eyre House has a long and impressive front drive, covered with a thin layer of tarmac. It leads, via several curves and many potholes, to an even more impressive set of front gates. Alas, however, the road they turn into is what the Ordnance Survey maps show as white – single-track and hardly used. You have to make an effort to find the place, in other words. My taxi driver had cursed the whole of the way. Yet the Japanese Brontë-lover had found it, and so, as I discovered, had another driver.
    I’d been minding my own business, walking at a moderate pace, hoping to find a path round the perimeter wall. I’d stopped to look back at the house; it was good to stand with the sun on my back – the weather had changed dramatically at about three and might well stay fine till five. I was wearing a T-shirt and lightweight jeans. If I could find a cowpat-free patch of grass, I might lie down for ten minutes and soak up some sun.
    But then I felt – knew – I was not alone.
    I turned casually. It would be natural to look from the house to its gates.
    A large red car was parked across the gateway. A man in it; just one, as far as I could see. Not looking at a map or anything; looking down the drive. Then he put the car into gear and pulled away. A BMW, 7 Series, by the look of it. And as a cloud covered the sun and turned me for home, I wondered why the driver of such a car might want to pick his way through a narrow lane hedged with prehensile brambles to look at the distant façade of an undistinguished house. And I spent so much time puzzling that I forgot to work on George’s poem. As punishment I denied myself a cup of tea and locked myself in my little hutch to stare at a blank sheet of paper.
    I