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

pub later. How he took that oddball, Jeanie Seeder, to live on some dirty no-man’s-land. She won’t give anything away; she won’t cry out. She waits until he walks off for another load to do that.

The caravan must have once been white but is now more of a mottled green, darker on the roof where leaves have fallen and decayed to slime. About ten feet long, it has one window—also green—on the side facing Jeanie, beside the open door. Both ends are propped up on bricks and there is another small stack in front of the door, for a step. Beside it are the remains of an awning over a wooden structure half-destroyed by creeper. She remembers Nick’s mother’s caravan: white and clean. She can’t bring herself to step forwards, and she looks through the trees in case Ed might have got it wrong and there is a cottage further on.

“Stu said your brother gave it a clean,” she hears Ed call. She goes to the step and looks in. The smell assaults her: fungal, damp wood, and the urine stink of animal, maybe even human. Through the murky underwater light, she sees dirty plywood, a curved ceiling, lino curling at the edges of the floor, green mould in the corners. This can’t be the place. She goes to step up, and before she can stop her, Maude jumps inside, running the few feet between a table with bench seats at one end and a single fitted couch at the other. When Jeanie steps in after her, the caravan rocks. The bench seats have fitted cushions, stained and torn—showing their foam insides—and on the table is the dented metal dustpan and balding brush from the cottage. Above the fitted couch is another window the width of the room, also with a greenish tinge. Maude jumps on the couch, sniffing and pawing at the cushion, her claws ripping the already decayed fabric, and it is clear from the smell and the crumbs of stuffing that something has been nesting here. “Off! Off!” Jeanie clicks her fingers at Maude and the dog jumps down but stuffs her nose in the cushion. Jeanie leans past her and the foul smell to pull back the curtain—the fabric is yellowed but its repeating 1970s pattern of a boy on a tractor is just discernible—and she is left with a ragged corner of material between her fingers. She flicks it off in disgust. Through the window a mossy-coloured Ed is already on his third journey.

She looks behind her. They can’t live here. Along the side opposite the door is a laminated countertop, and she lifts half of it to find a filthy two-ring stove. Cautiously, she lifts the adjacent flap and screams. Inside, lying in a plastic sink, is a burnt hand, cut off at the wrist and curled in on itself. She drops the flap, stumbles backwards into Maude, who yelps and dances around her, and then Jeanie bends, hands on knees, slowing her breathing. She makes herself lift the sink lid again and, looking closer, sees a workman’s glove, stained and empty.

Ed is back and she stays in the caravan to avoid him. Can she tell him now that she doesn’t want him to collect the rest of their belongings from outside the cottage, and that of course she doesn’t want him to fetch the piano? She remembers his grin and the long drawn-out way he said done. She will not tell him she’s changed her mind; she’ll have him collect everything and the piano too.

But how will she and Julius stay here even for a few days? Most of their belongings, certainly the furniture, won’t fit, and there’s only one bed. What will they do for water, for the toilet? When Ed has gone for what must be the final box, Jeanie goes outside and turns away from the caravan, following a track which might be used by badgers, ducking under branches, pushing through bushes until she comes up against a wire fence. On the other side is a back garden with a shed, a new wheelbarrow propped against it. There is a compost heap with perhaps the first grass cuttings of the year dumped on top, and beyond this is a lawn and, at the end, a brick house. A woman enters a downstairs room, holding a cat over her shoulder. Jeanie puts her fingers through the wire, gripping tight enough to feel it digging into her skin. The woman dances with the cat, turning one way and then the other to some unheard music, until together they dance out of the room.

22

For an hour or more Jeanie sits on a broken wall which must once have been part of a small building—an electricity substation or an outhouse. Maude runs about, nose down, following smells and rustles in the undergrowth, returning every few minutes to check Jeanie hasn’t moved. There is the almost constant undertone of cars on the main road, and when Jeanie closes her eyes the sound might be waves on shingle. She went to the seaside once on a day trip organized by the social club her father had belonged to. An act of charity she supposes now, since Frank had died the previous year. It seemed to take all day to drive there in the coach, and although she was disappointed that the beach was made of pebbles rather than the golden sand she’d imagined, she and Julius huddled under towels to change out of their clothes in the raw wind. While her brother hobbled as fast as he could to the water and charged straight in, Dot insisted that Jeanie stay close and only paddle in the shallows.

When finally Jeanie hears men’s voices—Ed and his mate with the rest of the stuff, she presumes—she dusts off her skirt and returns to the caravan, Maude bouncing along ahead. Inside, she hums a tune, loud enough for the men to hear, while she sweeps thoroughly. She opens the