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

seeing her at the last second, blast out their horns and flash their lights. She trudges back to the caravan and lies on Julius’s bed, fully clothed, with her boots on and the heavy torch beside her. She sees three o’clock come and go on her wristwatch and falls asleep.

Just a quick pint, Julius thinks as he cycles through the village on the way back from his day at the dairy. There is more relief milking coming up and he reflects that apart from the stink of the shit and the early mornings, he likes the cows and he’s probably pretty good at this job. Maybe he could do it full-time, perhaps he’d be able to save enough for a deposit so he and Jeanie can rent somewhere decent, buy his own herd of cows, lease a field. How hard can it be? When he comes out of the pub, he can’t resist wheeling his bicycle past the fish and chip shop. He props it against the window and writes Shelley Swift a text: What you up to? He imagines he can hear the ping of her phone above his head. Reading, comes back immediately. You home? he asks. Why? she texts. Look out your window, he writes just before his phone’s battery dies.

He always means to go back to the caravan; Jeanie will have cooked for him, and she isn’t used to being there on her own after dark. But she has Maude, he thinks, she’s fine. Shelley Swift invites him in for a drink, and then to stay for supper—which turns out to be fish and chips from downstairs which he pays for—and supper leads to her bed. Even when he wakes in the middle of the night he has the intention of leaving, but rests in the dim light thinking about the effort of finding his clothes, which lie in a trail from the sitting room to the bedroom, like a seduction scene in a romance novel, except that Shelley Swift was the one doing the seducing. He strokes her back and they make love again. In the morning when he wakes fully, he reaches out to touch her once more, but she laughs and elbows him away, saying she has to get to work. He hears the shower, then the kettle boiling in the kitchen, and the smell of toast reaches him. He’s still in bed when she comes back in to shed her dressing gown and choose underwear from a drawer. She balances half a slice of toast and Marmite on a pile of paperbacks. As she passes the bed, he makes a grab for her and she falls backwards, laughing. He kisses her and the taste of Marmite is awful, but he wants her.

“Don’t you have a job to go to?” she says, escaping. She picks up his underpants and flings them at him. He was meant to be at Stockland’s Farm three hours ago but he doesn’t care. “Come on, lazy bum, time to get up and out.”

He raises himself on his elbows and watches her get dressed. “Can I see you tonight?” he asks.

“Tonight?” She folds the rest of the toast into her mouth and lights up her phone. He remembers that his is dead and his charger in the caravan. “I’m not sure,” she says, her mouth full. “I’ll probably be catching up on the sleep I missed.” She winks at him and then stares at something on the screen, types fast with both thumbs, and only when she’s finished does she give him her attention. “I’ve got to go. Make sure the front door is locked when you leave.” She blows him a kiss from the bedroom doorway.

Just after six, the morning sun hits Jeanie’s eyelids and wakes her. Outside, everything is as it had been before she fell asleep: the firepit, the plastic chairs, the washing line. Last night’s dinner has been disturbed by a fox or some other creature, but it can’t have been Maude because she would have eaten the lot. The air is fresh and cool, and the weak sun warming as she turns her face up towards it. She whistles for Maude and listens: only birdsong and the early traffic on the road. For no reason, except that she didn’t think of it the night before, she crouches to look below the caravan. At one end are planks and corrugated iron that Julius has salvaged, but in the middle the grass is long and yellow, tangled with bramble. A brownish lump lies amongst the plants, unmoving. Jeanie’s breath catches and she is down on her stomach, scrabbling forwards, saying, “No, no.” She pulls herself towards it—dog-shaped now, she’s sure—unaware of the thorns tearing her skin and clothes. It is a cardboard box, one they left out in the rain when they first arrived and must have emptied and shoved under there out of the way. Jeanie lies flat, her feet in wellingtons sticking out beside the steps, her head resting on the rotting cardboard, and cries.

27

All day, as Julius shovels cow shit—the job he’s been given because he arrived so late for his shift—details of the previous night with Shelley Swift return in flashes to jolt him. The coffee-coloured mole at the top of one thigh, the pinkness of her unpainted toenails, the hollow where the back of her head meets her neck, hair dark with sweat. She, in return, seemed to enjoy his attention and was a much more enthusiastic and vocal lover than any of the three women he slept with when he was younger. When he cycles home from the dairy to the caravan there is a Shelley Swift buzz running through his veins.

In the early evening, Jeanie sits on the top step with another bowl of water on her lap, carrots in the bottom this time, swirling them with her hand, trying to remember what she’s supposed to be doing. Her head feels too large for the rest of her