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

would have done if she and Dot were working beside each other, speaking about everyday things while conscious of the other’s economical movements as they reached for bowl or spoon or knife. Jeanie rolls out the pastry, lays the lid on the pie, and cuts out rabbit shapes from the scraps. As she works, she thinks about another rabbit pie she ate, years ago.

She last saw Nick when they were eleven and now of course he must be her age—fifty-one. As she brushes the pastry with beaten egg, she laughs at the idea of him as a middle-aged man, grown up. Where might he be? Nick arrived in her class at the very end of the last year of junior school, without the right uniform, his shirt grubby and his knuckles grazed. He slouched sullenly in the seat next to hers at the back of the room. Jeanie didn’t see the point in that final month of school—the teachers weren’t bothered about teaching and the pupils brought in games from home. If they weren’t sitting around the classroom chatting, they were playing sports out on the field. She didn’t go in to school often, but one day when she and Nick were loitering at the back of a group hoping not to get selected for rounders, he said, “Bugger this, I’m going home. Wanna come?” and they moved quietly away without being seen. He lived in one of the four caravans which were parked in an old chalk pit outside the village. Jeanie knew about them because she’d heard Bridget complaining about the mess, how things went missing from sheds when gypsies were about, how it wasn’t normal to always be moving—disruptive for the children’s schooling for starters. Dot had replied that travellers had always been scapegoats, and travelling was their way of life, like living in houses was ours. Bridget didn’t answer.

Jeanie and Nick threw sticks for the dogs and rummaged through the rubbish that lay in the nettles at the bottom of the white cliff. Most of it seemed to have been there for years. Nick’s mother brought them slices of cold rabbit pie, the meat set in a savoury jelly—Jeanie wasn’t invited into their caravan although she would have liked to see how a family of three people and four dogs fitted. They sat on a chalk rock and ate the pieces of pie—better than her mother’s—and then drew white stickmen on the side of a rusting tank. She went back several times to the caravan site, and she and Nick pulled things out of the undergrowth, messed around, ate whatever his mother gave them sitting outside, although never the rabbit pie again.

The last time she went in to school after a few days away, something in the classroom had changed. Nick had been made to sit at the front of the class and wouldn’t catch her eye. A girl on the next table leaned on her chair, tipping on the two back legs, and announced to all who could hear that Jeanie was “Nicko the gypo’s girlfriend.”

“I am not,” Jeanie said, knowing that the denial in some way was a betrayal of her and Nick’s friendship, even while she didn’t want a boyfriend, didn’t understand what they were for. The next day school was over, and when she finally went back to the travellers’ site, the caravans and the dogs were gone.

The front door bangs open before Jeanie is finished preparing her own rabbit pie—Stu and Ed with the coffin, oak, as she’d agreed. Ed is a small man, heavy bags under his eyes and a lipless mouth which draws back in a leering smile. Jeanie thinks she’s seen him about the village, but she’s never spoken to him before. “All right?” he says to her. “In here, is it?” Stu, Ed, and Julius carry the coffin between them into the parlour, tipping it up to get it through the narrow doorways and around the corners. It’s much bigger than Jeanie expected, and as they manoeuvre it past her, she sees four tiny holes in the lid where a plaque was screwed to it and removed. A cancelled order. They have bought a second-hand coffin.

Ed says, “Put it on the floor, lads. Careful, careful.” The man’s tongue sounds thick, too big for his mouth, so that every word is lisped. Stu’s eyes slide away from the shrouded body on the makeshift table. But Jeanie has grown used to it being here in the house with them. Since Dot has been in the parlour, the feel of the cottage is different, the air denser, her and her brother’s actions slower, as though they were moving through smoke, feeling their way with their hands outstretched in a house that once was familiar. They are quieter when they’re in opposite ends of the cottage: neither of them call to the other from a different room or let a door slam. She knows that Ed and Stu will think they are odd, keeping their mother at home, but she doesn’t care. She is used to people considering them odd, it’s pity she hates. She starts to complain about the coffin and to tell Stu and Ed to take it away, but Stu says, with his back to the body, “Bridget was asking about when and where the service will be.”

Julius, behind the two men, shakes his head at Jeanie. “Monday,” he says. “But we’ve decided it’ll be just the two of us. Mum wouldn’t have wanted a lot of fuss. Tell Bridget thank you, though.” Julius raises his eyebrows and jerks his head at Jeanie, like when they were children and she was supposed to back him up on some minor lie.

“Yes,” Jeanie says, folding her arms. “Please thank her. And you, of course.” She directs this to Stu; she would like to shove Ed into his own bloody coffin, made for a person twice the size of their mother, but Jeanie returns to her rabbit pie. She sings to