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

While Julius is upstairs, Jeanie is drawn to the window where she sees their belongings being manhandled down the path and dumped on the track: the kitchen table, which the men have removed the legs from, the piano stool, the sofa cushions, one of the dresser drawers, and then the sofa itself. The wind is getting up, pulling at fabric and bits of paper. From beside her on the parlour chest, she takes the framed photograph of her parents and shoves it into her cardigan pocket. She takes the Toby jug too and squeezes it into a skirt pocket, splitting the seam. An unused ashtray held in the paws of a carved wooden bear with beads for eyes she puts in a third pocket, and then she stares out of the window once more.

Before he leaves, Julius holds her tightly. “I’ll be as quick as I can.” She watches him pass the men on the path, and there is more shouting and pushing and then he gets on his bicycle and rides off. After he’s gone, she and Maude climb the right-hand stairs to Julius’s bedroom. On the sloping floorboards the two single beds from Jeanie’s childhood are still here. She slept in the left-hand one until their father died, when Dot said she was too old to be sharing a room with her brother and she moved into the double bed beside her mother. Jeanie knew it was because Dot was afraid to be alone. Where would Jeanie have slept if her father had lived? And why didn’t Julius move to the double bed on his own? These things, like her father’s murder, were never discussed. She looks out of the window, remembering the row of birds’ skulls Julius used to keep here—always falling off the sill when she closed the curtains. The men have taken the armchair from the parlour, and with Tom directing, Nathan and Lewis are carrying it down the path. The cushion falls off the bottom, and Lewis staggers over it in his muddy boots.

Under the bed which used to be hers, Jeanie finds an old suitcase that she stuffs with the clothes from Julius’s drawers and wardrobe: pairs of jeans and shirts pale from washing, darned socks, underpants and T-shirts, his pyjamas which he left on the floor. Tucked in amongst all the soft things she puts Julius’s unloaded gun. Next, she tips in the contents of the drawer of his bedside cabinet without noticing what odds and ends it contains. Something falls out with a clink and rolls away. When Jeanie searches for it under the bed she feels only dust balls and other rubbish. On top of the things in the case she puts the photograph, the bear ashtray, and the Toby jug, and closes the lid.

When Julius returns, he again scuffles outside with Lewis, who is stupid, but younger and more agile. They each take an end of the tin bath, pushing and shoving it against each other until Julius falls backwards into the flower bed. Laughing, Lewis tosses the bath over the garden fence where it lands, the right way up, on the track. Julius scrabbles upright and Jeanie comes out of the cottage. She brushes the dirt off his clothes, and he is embarrassed by his sister, dowdy and fussing, even in front of these men who are dismantling their home. He can’t remember feeling ashamed of her before, only protective, and with a mixture of guilt and humiliation, he pushes her hands off him. On the track Lewis clambers into the bath and pretends to scrub his back with a discarded broom while Nathan looks on and Tom jumps about in the wind like a monkey.

Julius tells Jeanie that Stu is coming as soon as he can and doesn’t say that he was only able to leave a message with Bridget who said Stu was out on a job all day, and that she didn’t believe Nathan would ever listen to his father. Julius puts his arm around his sister, red-cheeked and silent, and takes her up to the top of the garden, past the chickens still in their coop, to sit out the removal while the trees thrash about them.

“Maybe we should put it all in the old dairy,” Julius says, the idea suddenly coming to him. “Most of it would fit.”

“It’d still be on the Rawsons’ land,” Jeanie says in a dull voice. “They’ll claim it’s theirs.”

“The track belongs to them too.”

Jeanie shrugs, doesn’t look at him.

Finally, when they hear the kick of engines, they stand and walk down the garden, limping and stiff as though they have been physically injured by the actions of the day.

Julius stops at the foot of his mother’s grave. “I’ll sort something out.” He knows that the words are hollow and that Jeanie thinks he hasn’t done what he is supposed to do: keep her safe.

“Fuck it,” Jeanie says, and Julius, shocked at hearing her speak these words, watches as she goes to the head of the mound of earth and yanks out the poker which is stuck in the soil. He hasn’t seen it since before their mother died, and he feels a prickle up the back of his neck to realize that it is here, jammed into the earth as the marker for her grave, as if Dot might have taken it and placed it there herself.

In the yard, he waits for Jeanie to feed the chickens. And then he and his sister walk around the cottage and down the front path without looking inside.

In the late afternoon Stu arrives. He lowers the van window and stares at the contents of the cottage piled across the track. Everything Nathan and the others could manage or be bothered to carry has been taken outside and heaped up: pans and bowls and mismatched plates, three mattresses with their ticking stains laid bare, the cooker ripped out from the mains, the fridge which they hadn’t used for three weeks, four bedside