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

“Shaved head? Thin?” Bridget sucks in her cheeks.

Jeanie nods. “Tom, that was his name.”

“They live together, Nath and Tom. Tom’s always been trouble, ever since he was little. A terror he was at school, and worse since he’s grown up. His mum died when he was five, you know—breast cancer. So quick, it was.” Bridget snaps her fingers. “Here and gone, just like that.” Jeanie wonders if Bridget clicks her fingers when she tells people the story of Frank’s death. “Poor little mite. His dad was bloody useless, let the kid go feral. Apparently, when he was about ten, someone found him picking up roadkill and taking it home to eat. But I’m sorry it’s come to this. Your mum will be turning in her grave.”

Jeanie looks quickly away and picks up a fork.

“You don’t have to take them one at a time, you know. You can lift out the whole cutlery basket.” Bridget grinds out her cigarette in a full ashtray.

“So was there ever anything in writing?” Jeanie tries again.

“Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Not your mum’s style, was it? Doing things officially.”

They hear Stu laughing.

“I’ve got a job.” Jeanie empties the cutlery from the basket into a drawer where nothing appears to be in any order and crumbs clog up the corners.

“Really?” Bridget says it like she didn’t think Jeanie could have managed this.

“For a woman who lives on Cutter Hill. She wanted a female gardener. Just mowing the lawn, things like that.”

“Cutter Hill?” Bridget says. “Near the old phone box that’s been turned into a library?”

“Saffron did that.”

“Saffron? That’s her name?” Bridget sounds incredulous, and Jeanie wants to defend her new employer, her friend. Jeanie still has the cheque Saffron gave her, folded in half and tucked into her coat pocket. There’s nowhere to cash it in the village and she’s not sure she would be able to even if she caught the bus to Devizes or Hungerford.

“And her daughter’s called Angel.”

“Saffron and Angel!” Bridget puffs a dismissive breath.

Stu shouts from the lounge and Bridget seems glad of the distraction. “What?” she calls back.

He laughs. “Brilliant!”

Bridget heaves herself off the stool and goes to see. As Jeanie closes the dishwasher, she hears Bridget laughing too.

Bedtime comes and still no Julius. Bridget gives Jeanie a sheet, pillow, and duvet to make up the sofa for him, and when she’s done that she sits on the edge of Nathan’s single bed and waits until she hears Bridget and then Stu finish in the bathroom. She moves from anger at Julius for leaving her here on her own to terror that something has happened to him on his ride from the cottage to the house, imagining him in a ditch with his bicycle buckled. Perhaps he won’t ever come back, and what would she do then? How would she manage? Finally, after an hour of staring up at the wall, she hears a noise downstairs—something smashing—and she jumps up and runs to see. Julius is in the kitchen, holding on to the counter and swaying in the dark. The hall light goes on behind her and Stu is there.

“How did you bloody get in?” Stu says, putting on the kitchen light, dazzling them. He’s wearing a T-shirt and checked cotton shorts. Jeanie realises she must have left the back door unlocked. She doesn’t say anything. “Turning up in the middle of the night?” Stu continues. “Drunk, the man’s drunk.” Bridget is there too now, in her nightie, tying the belt of her dressing gown. Jeanie sees them all reflected in the kitchen window, lit up like the family on the telly.

“Sorry, sorry,” Julius slurs.

Around his feet are broken pieces of a china fruit bowl. Three old apples are lined up against the skirting board. Jeanie edges past Bridget and Stu and begins picking up the larger pieces of china.

“You’re only here because Dot was Bridget’s friend,” Stu says to Julius. “And you’d better start remembering that. If you can afford to get drunk, you can afford to find your own place.”

“Stu,” Bridget says, tugging on his T-shirt sleeve. “Their mother just died, and our son had a hand in all this, don’t forget.”

“Coming in drunk in the middle of the night, wrecking the kitchen. Waking people. It’s time you took a bit more care with the place you call home.”

On her hands and knees, Jeanie feels a wave of homesickness for the cottage, for her own bed, her own things. She stands and puts the pieces of china in the bin.

“Mind your feet,” Bridget says.

“I’ll get him to bed and then I’ll sweep the floor.” Jeanie takes Julius around the waist. “You go,” she says to Bridget and Stu. “I’ll sort this out.”

She makes Julius drink a pint of water, puts him to bed in Nathan’s room, and then gets under the duvet she’s laid out for her brother on the sofa. She tries to sleep—the first time in her life she has slept somewhere other than the cottage—but she lies with her eyes open, the clutter of the lounge around her, wondering what she and Julius are going to do now.

In the morning, Jeanie is up with the bedding folded away before Bridget and Stu stir. She has formulated the angry speech she will give Julius when she goes in to wake him, but he comes into the lounge first, dressed in yesterday’s clothes and smelling of old cigarette smoke and stale beer. His eyes are bloodshot and his skin sallow. She’d like to ask him whether he’s spent the money he earned from the milking job, but she doesn’t want to sound like Stu. Julius puts his arms around her and she is rigid for a moment, but then relaxes with the relief that he is here.

“I’m sorting out somewhere for us to live,” he says.

“I can’t stay here,” Jeanie says. “I can’t do it. I’ll camp out in the woods if I have to.”

He squeezes her tighter. “I know, I know. Another night or two, that’s