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

By seven, Julius still hasn’t arrived on his bike. Bridget and Stu have a conversation about what to eat, and Bridget takes four chicken kievs out of the freezer and puts them in the oven with a tray of chips. Jeanie brings down the food she took with her from the cottage: the remains of a jar of homemade jam, chicken Bisto, the last of the bread, eggs, vegetables from the garden, and the half-used tub of margarine.

While Bridget turns the food in the oven and puts some peas in the microwave, Jeanie loads the dishwasher with the crockery from the sink, guessing at where things go, and tries not to make a nuisance of herself. She thinks about where Julius might be—in the pub or round at Shelley Swift’s. He’s allowed to do what he wants, of course, just as she is. They dish up the food, saving some for Julius, put the plates on trays, and Stu and Bridget carry theirs into the lounge. Before she follows, Jeanie takes Bridget’s purse out from her handbag where it hangs over a chair. In the wallet section there are too many notes for her to count. Deep in her cardigan pocket is the twenty pounds she found in Dot’s coat. She takes it out, stuffs it in with the rest of Bridget’s money, and puts the purse back in the handbag.

“Come on,” Bridget calls from the lounge. “It’s starting.” Jeanie takes her own tray of food in. Bridget and Stu are each low down in an armchair with their trays on their laps. The television is on and the opening sequence of a programme is flashing on the screen. “Clear yourself a space on the end of the sofa,” Bridget says, and Jeanie puts her tray on the floor, moves what looks like a set of curtains onto the back of the sofa, and then sits. They watch a police drama about two detectives in an English seaside town and a boy who was murdered on a beach. His family spend the episode not looking at each other, not touching.

“Doesn’t she look like Jeanie?” Bridget says, watching the telly.

“Who?” Stu says.

“The policewoman.”

“Detective,” Stu corrects.

“Not so grey, of course, but a little bit toothy. Nice with it, though.” Bridget turns to look at Jeanie. “And the detective’s younger.”

Stu leans forwards in his chair, craning round Bridget to get a look. Jeanie stares back at them without speaking.

“Thinner,” Stu says.

Blue-and-white tape encloses the crime scene, guarded by a policeman whose only job seems to be to lift it high enough for the detectives to duck under. Bridget and Stu are on episode three or four and it takes half an hour for Jeanie to work out what’s going on. The detectives arrest a man, ask him to undress, and collect his belongings in a plastic bag. They swab the inside of his mouth with a giant cotton bud and take his fingerprints.

“He won’t be the murderer,” Stu says.

“Too early in the series for it to be him,” Bridget says. “No one’s ever caught that quickly.”

They eat their food without taking their eyes from the screen. Periodically one of them turns to the other when something surprising happens and says, “Oh my God!” When the programme reaches the end and the music plays, Stu says, “How about another episode, Bridgey?”

She smiles. “Go on then.” Bridget selects the next episode with the remote control while Stu stands in front of Jeanie and for a moment she can’t work out what he wants, but then he reaches down, picks up her tray from her lap, and takes it out to the kitchen.

“Cup of tea?” he calls.

“Go on then,” Bridget calls back.

Jeanie makes dinner for Maude—boiled vegetables with chicken gravy and a raw egg cracked in, the shell scrunched on top. She seems to have got used to it. Jeanie finds a trowel and collects the dog’s mess, burying it in the earth behind Stu’s garage. When she glances towards the house, Bridget is at the kitchen window, smoking and watching. In the disused greenhouse Jeanie makes a bed from some sacking, the dog whining as Jeanie pushes her nose to get the door closed. Back inside, when Jeanie opens the dishwasher to empty it, the cups and bowls are full of sludgy water and grit. She tips them out in the sink and washes the dirty items again by hand. Bridget sits on a high stool up against the kitchen counter and points with the lit end of her cigarette to one cupboard or another, indicating where everything goes. The bottom of the dishwasher is slimy with something Jeanie doesn’t want to look at too closely. Perhaps, she thinks crazily, she could clean the house, Julius could do the garden, and they can all live here together. She would like to live in a house with a bathroom, an indoor toilet and central heating, a working fridge, maybe even a television, but already she knows she can’t stay long with Bridget and Stu. Somehow, she’ll get herself and her brother back to the cottage.

“I was thinking,” Jeanie says, drying the drinking glasses, which for some reason have come out cloudy as though they’d been sandblasted, “about the agreement. The one we had with Rawson for the cottage.” She glances at Bridget, whose cigarette indicates a corner shelf beside the window.

“I can’t believe Nath was mixed up in all that stuff this morning,” Bridget says. “He could have been anything, you know, when he left school. A firefighter, electrician, anything. If he’d put his mind to it.”

“Was it ever in writing?” Jeanie places the glasses on the shelf. There is laughter from the lounge—the television audience’s and, above it, Stu’s. Jeanie thinks about the documents that were kept in the chest flying along the track and over the hedges.

“Too easily influenced by other people, that’s his trouble. Who did you say was there with him?”

“Someone called Lewis and