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

Lived with his mother, and then his sister. Worked hard, but never made enough money. Never did anything with his life. Never went anywhere. Engines made him throw up. His thoughts drift away from the conversation and then Shelley Swift is beside him. She’s wearing a dress that his mother would have said was too low-cut for a wake, curving around her body. Christ, what does it matter what his mother would have thought? She is in the ground, under the apple tree. What would they say if they knew? He almost laughs. He feels light-headed, on his way to being drunk but at that easy, slack stage. He bends towards Shelley Swift, looking at her tremendous breasts swelling at the top of her dress, and inhales the smell of her lemon soap.

“Thanks for coming,” he says, and she smiles up at him. “You’re right. She was,” he says to the man who puts up the market stalls.

Jeanie is past the farmhouse, cycling faster than she knows she should, the trailer rattling along behind. Anything could happen: she could fly over the handlebars or the animal in her heart might burst out, but right now she doesn’t give a monkey’s. If Rawson or his wife appeared, she would run them both down and not stop. Past the large barn, across the concrete slabs and the bumps where they were poured and joined, she turns the bend onto the track, where she sees the first parked car, and then another and another, pulled up in a row along the verge. Half a dozen or more. Stu’s van is there but she doesn’t recognize any of the others—she never remembers cars, they are only ever silver or black or some different colour. Immediately she knows that Julius has invited people over while she was out of the way. The track is too narrow now to stay on the bike with the trailer joggling along behind. She gets off and pushes. At the front gate she sees a few people moving about in the kitchen, their bodies cut off below the thighs and their heads and shoulders vanished because of the low window. She won’t go in, instead she storms around the back of the cottage, up the garden where Maude has been put, and into the greenhouse.

In the warm, scented air she scoops compost into a dozen clay pots, the soil running between her fingers, much looser than the clotted pile of earth she stood beside a few hours before. Did Julius finish filling in the grave before he was stupid enough to let these people into their house? She dibs a hole in the compost, turns a young tomato plant out into her palm, and buries its roots in the earth. Like cooking, it is a job she did beside her mother for nearly fifty years, and now the lack of her, the empty space, is tangible: the way Dot shifted from one hip to the other when she had to stand for long periods, how she flicked her head when her hair fell in her eyes, the way she would catch a bee in her cupped hands without being stung.

The greenhouse is the place where mother and daughter talked or were contentedly silent. It is the place where they stood side by side while Dot explained things when Jeanie was young. It is here that Dot taught her how to listen to her own heartbeat, how to take her pulse with her fingers on her throat or wrist, to breathe slowly.

Now, Jeanie works angrily, potting on the tomatoes, shoving the delicate roots too hard into the soil, knowing they will grow crooked, and not caring. Pot after pot she rushes until she picks one up, ready to hurl it through a pane of glass, but with her arm raised, she hears a bray of voices as someone opens the back door of the cottage and goes into the privy. She puts the pot down. She lifts her head, listening, wondering if she can simply walk out of the garden, down the lane, and disappear. Then she wipes her earth-blackened fingers on her skirt, leaves the greenhouse, and goes into the cottage.

Through the scullery, she slips into the dark end of the kitchen, letting Maude in with her. The dog looks at the people, turns around, and slinks out. The room is more crowded than Jeanie anticipated: a dozen or so people crammed in around the kitchen table and sitting on the sofa, the buzz of multiple conversations, the haze of cigarette smoke turned orange by the oil lamps; the oil they can’t afford to waste. No one was allowed to smoke in the house when Dot was alive.

In the gaps between the bodies she sees the bottles of beer on the dresser, as well as a half-empty bottle of port, and when she sees the label, she realizes that someone must have taken it out of her own dresser. On the table are plates of food—Bridget’s involvement she presumes. There is the big brown teapot they never use, and on the end closest to her, the remains of the rabbit pie. Maybe, with any luck, it will make someone ill—it was baked three days ago and hasn’t been refrigerated. She wants to shout for them to leave, to drive them out like cattle. She wants only the fire, the dog, and her brother. The packed room and the people are overwhelming; sweat prickles her hairline. Bridget is talking to Kate, and Jeanie tries to hear what they are saying, thinks it might be something about fifty-one-year-olds still living with their mother, until recently, of course; never having a proper job; never learning to read or write as well as everyone else. But it is something about life being too short and how you should accept love from wherever you can find it, no matter what other people think. Jeanie watches the doctor, standing with Max and eating a piece of