Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller (best large ereader txt) 📕

8

In the shop, Julius dithers. He’s low on tobacco and rolling papers and he wants—no, needs—a pint in the pub. What to do with the money from the guttering job? If he wants to get any work, he’ll need credit for his mobile phone. He buys ten pounds’ worth and some tobacco. In the pub he plugs his mobile in to charge. He sits at the bar next to Jenks, sips at a pint of bitter to make it last, and rolls a thin cigarette.

“Heard about your mum.” Jenks, a scrawny Scotsman, whom Julius has rarely seen out of the public bar of the Plough, tips his glass towards his mouth and Julius sees his top lip reach out to the beer like a snail feeling its way. “What a bummer,” Jenks says when he’s swallowed.

“Yup,” Julius says, licking his cigarette paper, sticking it down. “Thanks.” He waves the cigarette at Jenks and goes out the back to smoke. He has a blister on his palm from digging and he rubs the bubble of it across his lips, feeling the fluid move beneath the skin. He considers if there’s a legal requirement for the depth of a grave; he wonders again whether they’re allowed to do what they’re doing. Sod it, he doesn’t care if they aren’t. He’s taken off the turf and has gone down a spade’s depth, which isn’t enough. Won’t be enough for Jeanie, and it would be an utter cock-up if the foxes started digging, or Maude. He rubs the bristles along his jaw, smokes his cigarette, thinks about what the Rawsons say is owing, again sees Rawson shout nothing up the stairs to his wife, remembers the contents of the envelopes in his coat pocket. Fuck it, he thinks. Fuck it all.

When he’s back at the bar and another ten minutes have passed, Jenks says, “You got a text. From that bit of totty who lives over the fish and chip shop. Something about a boiler.”

“Bloody hell, Jenks. Read everything why don’t you? Shall I bring in my diary next time?”

Jenks smirks, and after checking his phone, Julius finishes off the rest of his beer in one open-throated gulp.

Boilers aren’t his specialism—he doesn’t really have a specialism—and he doesn’t have his tool rucksack with him, but he wheels his bike through the village to Shelley Swift’s.

She’s wearing a leopard-print top and a denim skirt when she answers the door, and lilac lipstick that she surely doesn’t put on for work.

“Bloody boiler. There’s no hot water,” she says as he follows her up the stairs.

The boiler is on a wall in the kitchen, and as soon as he inspects the hole in the cover, he sees that the pilot light has gone out. He pushes two buttons, the gas ignites, a tiny blue flame shows through the hole, and they hear the boiler kick in. “You’re amazing,” Shelley Swift says and when he turns, she doesn’t move back. Her nose and mouth are out of focus, but her eyes, lashes clotted with makeup and hazel irises with a circumference of a deeper brown, catch him and hold him. He wants to kiss her but feels he is too tall, too stooped, all elbows and knees. He is unused to an encounter like this, out of practice.

“Can I use your toilet?” he says, and she laughs that husky laugh and lets him go. In the bathroom under the window is a shelf unit crammed with books. He pulls one out. Just Like Her Mother the title reads in raised silver letters. Behind the words is a close-up of some scrubby bushes and a patch of bare soil. Just visible in the earth is a woman’s ear with an earring through the lobe. He shoves the book back.

On the landing at the top of her stairs, as he is saying that she should text him if anything else goes wrong, Shelley Swift kisses him, her mouth slightly open, her tongue touching his lips, and he’s aware of the waxy greasiness of her lipstick. He doesn’t exactly kiss her in return, too shocked by the feel and the taste of her. When they pull apart, she laughs once more, and he almost runs down the stairs and out through the door. All the way home he rides his bike without holding on as though he were thirteen again, using his knees to steer so that he can hold his fingers to his nose and smell the lemony scent of Shelley Swift’s bathroom soap.

When Julius is still in the pub, Jeanie is at the end of the garden scything nettles from around the bench. She has sharpened the blade to a shine and has just bent again when she hears someone calling. A man. She stands up straight, arches her back the other way to stretch the tightness out of it, and sees Stu coming towards her. Christ, she hadn’t thought that Bridget would actually send her husband. He is already through the yard and the gate, passing the apple trees and the cherries, whose blossom has fallen in the last few days, precipitated by the snow, spreading pink and white confetti over the vegetable beds. Near the oldest apple tree—a Cox’s orange pippin which is gnarled and almost white with lichen—Julius has cut away the top layer of rough grass turf, placing it upside down in a heap. It will make fine compost. The hole is a foot deep so far and the reddish ends of the tree’s roots feather out from the straight sides. To Jeanie, it is clear that the earth hole is a grave.

Stu is a big man. Once, she’d had the misfortune to see him up a ladder with his belly, swarthy with black hair, overhanging the waistband of his shorts. He only ever wears shorts, even in winter. As he approaches, he removes his baseball cap, revealing his high forehead, the top half of which rarely sees the sun and is glaringly white.