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

would be helpful or a disruption. He imagines them playing in a bigger venue, touring or headlining a folk festival, and when he looks out at the crowd there’s a woman in the front row with freckled skin, and they can’t take their eyes off each other. A couple of evenings, he cycles to the pub after work and has a few pints, spending his milking money, and on another he visits Shelley Swift in her flat.

Julius returns to the caravan with plank offcuts and a sheet of corrugated iron that he has come across and stashes them away, together with the old wheelbarrow which he drags out of the nettles, thinking that he’ll buy a new tyre for it, patch up the rusting bottom. One evening he uses Jenks’s smartphone to find out about the law on adverse possession, and imagines living in the spinney for twelve years and claiming it as their own. He decides not to mention this to Jeanie yet, but thinks he must get around to painting the word Private on a board and nailing it to a tree near to the lay-by. Jeanie no longer talks about looking for somewhere else to live and he thinks she’s getting used to their place in the woods. Although she often goes to the cottage to work in the garden, she also scrubs the caravan, sweeps the little clearing they’ve made in front, and cooks on the two-ring stove. One lunchtime when they have a moment to stop, they sit outside on two plastic garden chairs he’s salvaged from a skip, and as though he hasn’t looked at his sister for a long time, he is surprised at how content she appears. He remembers the same expression on his mother’s face at intervals which sometimes seemed to last years. There had been periods though when Dot had clearly been unhappy, and he’d never thought to ask her about it. What went on in people’s heads was a mystery to him. He remembered his parents speaking to each other through him and Jeanie: “Ask your mother to pass the butter.” “Tell your father to take his boots off in the house.” And another time his mother had sent him to the field where his father was working, with a note folded in half. Julius shoved it in his pocket and dawdled. He was looking for a burst of feathers in the long grass that would show where a bird had been caught by a predator. If he was lucky, the head would have been left and he’d take it home to boil up and add to his collection. When he finally reached the field where his father was supposed to be working, he wasn’t there. Julius took out the note and read his mother’s message: If you don’t get back here now and mend the yard gate like you promised, I’m going to leave you. Julius felt sick. He ran all the way home, ready to explain to his mother that it was his own fault for taking so long. In the kitchen, Jeanie was playing the piano and his parents were dancing together around the table and laughing. Later, after his father died, Julius took his collection of bird skulls, all thirty-three of them, each neatly labelled with the species and where it had been found, and threw them away.

Jeanie keeps the radio on while she works, listening to a dramatization of Vanity Fair, a piece about the evolution of the earliest language, an interview about the impact of Brexit on organic milk prices. She makes new curtains and seat covers, sewing them by hand from a patchwork of fabric scraps. She listens and she sews and tries not to think about what winter will be like in the caravan with no heating, the outside latrine, the mud and the wet. By then she will have found a way to get them home, she’s sure of it. She doesn’t mention her thoughts to Julius. Only during the nights when she can’t sleep does her anger towards him return. Then she refuses to use the latrine and instead clumps out of bed and pees hard and furiously into a bucket behind the curtain she’s hung across the middle of the caravan, knowing the noise will wake him.

Most days she goes with Maude to the cottage. Nothing really is changed since Ed took the chickens, except that someone—Rawson, she assumes—must have been inside because the back door is bolted again. She can’t stop herself from peering through the windows and remembering her life as it once was.

The garden demands her attention, everything ripening together: thumb-sized radishes, the white clouds of early summer cauliflowers, hairy gooseberries, beetroots strangely chilly with their damp, tapered bottoms. If she can find a few glass jars from somewhere, she will boil the beetroots and pickle them with some eggs. Digging up the first early potatoes is her greatest joy every year. Pushing the fork into the soft soil around the yellowing potato plant and unearthing a hoard of pale treasure. She sits on the warmed ground with a dozen in her hands remembering how her mother would have nudged her playfully with the fork and said there was plenty more work to be done and she should stop dreaming over a few new potatoes. She starts taking vegetables to Max again; there are too many for her and Julius to eat, and at some point she will have paid off the debt her mother accrued.

She goes to Saffron’s house two afternoons as agreed, and although Jeanie stops to have a cup of tea with her and her daughter, she doesn’t tell Saffron about where she’s living. Saffron continues to write Jeanie cheques which she takes home in her plastic bag that she uses instead of the handbag she’s never found.

Jeanie learns the topography of the spinney and walks its triangular boundary in fifteen minutes. The caravan is about in the middle, the lay-by and