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

dropped this lot off, I’d like you to collect some things from outside the cottage too. Things that were put outside when we were evicted.” And before he can say no, she adds, “I’ll pay you.” She still hasn’t told Julius that she found the money or that she visited Mrs. Rawson. Julius will have other ideas on how to spend what’s left of it: some idiotic business plan to open a cocktail bar in the village or divert the Ink and grow watercress, but if she can’t have the cottage, Jeanie wants her things around her.

Ed pulls the key out and leans back but doesn’t say anything. In the moment where neither of them speaks she worries he is going to say no, that he’s too busy. “I have the money,” she blurts out. “It’ll be three trips, I think.”

“Outside the cottage, is it?”

“On the track. The rest of our things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Kitchen things, clothes, some furniture.”

“Furniture, is it?”

“A sofa and a few chairs, not much.”

“But I’ll need someone to help me, see. With the lifting, if there’s a sofa.” He smiles and she sees that he’s missing some of his back teeth. His voice is gummy, she can hear his tongue filling his mouth.

“A hundred, I was thinking,” Jeanie says, and Ed seems to mull it over.

“Stu won’t be able to help me, not with him laid up in bed, like. I’ll have to find someone else who’s free today and they’ll want paying, of course.”

“A hundred and fifty then.” She wants to save some of the three hundred she has left for emergencies, for food, for the electricity and gas and council tax for the new place. Talking about money makes her palms sweat, her heart tick too fast. She needs him to say yes.

He eyes her.

“Two hundred,” she says. “And I want you to bring our piano from inside the cottage,” she adds quickly, as though dropping it in at the last moment will make the task insignificant, a simple extra. If Dot’s banjo is coming, she wants Frank’s piano. “The back door should be unbolted.”

“Collect a piano for two hundred quid?” Ed scoffs. “Do you know how heavy those things are? I don’t reckon I’ll have time to get any of it. I’m only doing this one trip because Stu did a favour for me a while back. I’m supposed to be on another job after this and I’ll have to rent a dolly to move a piano.”

“Two hundred and fifty,” Jeanie says, and suddenly worried that he won’t do any of it, she adds rashly, “Plus the chickens. Ten hens, the coop, and the run.” She hates the thought of her chickens living with this man but taking care of Maude and worrying about Julius already feels too much.

He weighs up her offer. “I s’pose whoever I get to help might take them in part payment but they’ll still want some cash. It’ll have to be three hundred.”

“Done,” Jeanie says. It’s all the rest of the money.

“Done,” Ed says with a smile, and she knows she’s made a bad deal. “I’ll need the money now,” he adds.

She takes the envelope out from her coat pocket and turns away from him to count the cash. She knows the remaining three hundred is all there, but she counts it to make sure. She takes it out, the envelope empty, and hands it over. As she puts the envelope back in her pocket, she feels like weeping. Julius can’t ever know about it now. Ed counts the money, puts the folded notes in the top pocket of his shirt, and starts the pickup.

Maude rests her head on Jeanie’s knee as they drive out of the estate and through Inkbourne, past the village green. They go north on the main road for four miles and turn onto a lane Jeanie has never been along before.

“This is it,” Ed says.

He pulls into a lay-by and she stares out of the passenger window. The cracked concrete of the small parking area is studded with common plantains and the perimeter is overrun with nettles and thistles. Scrambling through it is old man’s beard.

“Here?” Jeanie says. There’s no house.

Ed reverses the pickup a short way down a rutted track between straggly alders and past scattered heaps of rubbish. Jeanie can see the faded colours of a paddling pool, a broken plastic bread crate, decaying sheets of what might be plasterboard piled on top of a disembowelled armchair. Further in, sticking out of the ground elder, is a wheelbarrow with a flat tyre, and the handlebars of a child’s bike.

“It can’t be here,” she says, thinking that Ed must be dropping something off, fly-tipping, except that all the things in the back are hers. He gets out and lets down the tailgate while she stays in the front, waiting. A cushion is propped against the back of the driver’s seat so that Ed can reach the pedals and the steering wheel. When she looks behind, he’s scooping several bags into his arms and walking into the scrubby woodland.

She lets Maude out and the dog runs off, nose lowered, and then she gets out herself. The narrow path of trampled weeds that Ed went down leads further into the thicket, dense with holly and more alders and nettles. There is birdsong: blackbird and robin, and the football rattle of a magpie. In the distance Jeanie can hear the intermittent drone of wheels on tarmac from the main road. She passes a scorched circle with a couple of logs for seats and a few blackened cans. People come here, she thinks. Drinkers, down-and-outs, druggies, the homeless.

Above the top of more scrubby bushes she sees a greenish-white roof.

“That’s it,” Ed shouts from a little way ahead.

When she sees it fully, she thinks again that there must be some mistake. This can’t be the place. Ed puts down the bags and smirks, as though waiting for her reaction so he can tell the story in the