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

the scullery and putting his baseball cap on, tugging the peak down. She walks behind him like she’s herding an animal towards the front door. “What about beer for the wake? I can get you a few crates for a lot less than the Plough would charge.”

“We’re not having a wake,” Jeanie says firmly.

At the front door, when he is out on the threshold, she says, “I’ve forgotten how much Mum borrowed. Can you remind me?”

Stu narrows his eyes and she wonders whether he’s trying to work out if she knows the amount or not. “Eight hundred pounds,” he says.

After he’s gone, Jeanie searches the house for the money. Stu can be unscrupulous, she can imagine him upping the amount Dot borrowed by fifty pounds, or a hundred, but not even Stu would completely invent the debt. Perhaps she should argue that this isn’t in fact her and Julius’s debt, why should they take it on. But she knows this will never wash with Stu or Bridget. She leafs through postcards and articles and pictures cut from magazines stuffed into the dresser’s drawers, she opens the storage tins in the scullery and looks inside, searches through the clutter under her and Dot’s shared bed, and stuffs her hand under the mattress and claws about. She sits at the kitchen table and thinks of the places her mother could have hidden an amount of cash. If she borrowed the money to pay the Rawsons and it never reached them, then her mother, this good and honest woman, must have hidden money in a place she thought Jeanie would never look. The old dairy is full of broken objects and ancient gardening equipment, baskets and boxes, there is Julius’s bedroom and the gaps beneath every wonky floorboard in the house. There are too many places.

9

Jeanie is making a rabbit pie from a recipe she knows by heart. Julius shot the animals on the meadow yesterday, this time in anger, after she told him that their mother borrowed money from Stu. When Julius asked how much it was, she lied and said it was a thousand pounds, adding that Stu was including the coffin for free. She isn’t sure that Julius believes her, but he raved about the amount and where it could be, pulling out the drawers and looking in cupboards which Jeanie had already searched. He didn’t understand why she had ordered a coffin—now he’d have to dig a bigger hole. She tried to calm him but he took two creased envelopes from his coat pocket and slammed them on the table, his big thumbs pinning them down. The crinkle of the see-through address windows as he flattened them worried her.

“What are they?” she asked.

“This” —he picked one up and waggled it at her— “is a notice to say that our electricity is being disconnected. Dated more than a week ago. And this” —he picked up the other— “is a letter from the council to say that our latest council tax bill is late. I paid some of it at the post office counter with the money from the guttering job, but there’s still loads owing.”

“You paid the council tax bill but not the electricity? And here I am cooking by sodding lamplight on a range that hasn’t been used in thirty years.”

“You weren’t there. I had to decide. There’s a reconnection fee to get the electricity back on. Admin charges or something, and that’s before you start paying off the bill. I had to make a choice.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

Julius leaned forwards, shaking his head. “Christ, Jeanie. These debts. I’m out of ideas. What are we going to do?”

Julius has always been the one with ideas, hare-brained, ridiculous—building an oven in the garden and starting a business delivering cakes, leasing the meadow from the Rawsons and turning it over to asparagus, or putting a yurt on it and renting it out as an Airbnb. Schemes that failed before they started because he needed a computer, the internet, a website, so he could send emails to those beardy types in London. Julius has never stuck with any of his schemes. But this brother without an escape plan frightened her.

“Craig will give you more work,” she said.

“Craig isn’t going to give me any work, ever again,” Julius shouted. He fished in his trouser pockets, brought out his loose change, and slammed it on the table. Three pound coins and three pennies. “This is it.”

“We can contact the electricity company. Pay in instalments or something.”

“What with? How will we pay the next instalment and the one after that? How will we do that, Jeanie? And what about Stu? How are we going to pay Stu back?” His hands became fists, the knuckles white. “Fuck.” He picked up a kitchen chair and thumped all four legs on the ground. “What was she thinking?” Neither mentioned the Rawsons’ debt, and Jeanie hadn’t asked where he had been all afternoon and evening because she had been able to smell the beer on his breath and the perfume on his coat.

Now, in the kitchen, Jeanie guts, skins, and joints the rabbits, checking for any gun pellets. Julius is usually a good shot, getting them in the head and killing them instantly. But this time the pellets have gone into the meat and she has to poke at the holes with a pair of old tweezers to remove the lead. She stews the rabbit pieces with an onion and a wrinkled apple which she unwraps from last year’s newspaper. At the kitchen table she makes the pastry, bringing the flour and suet together with tablespoons of water, all the time aware of her mother’s book of recipes behind her on the dresser. For years she’s seen Dot’s finger move under each ingredient and instruction as she read them out, hesitating over her own cramped letters. Without needing to think about what she is doing, Jeanie shreds the cooked rabbit meat from the bones in the way she