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

body and dizzy after her walk to the cottage and around the fields looking for Maude. There’s nothing for dinner apart from these carrots. No milk, no bread for the morning or for Julius’s sandwiches, no eggs, and she doesn’t care. She waits and she washes carrots.

She hears Julius coming, recognizes the siss of his bicycle as he wheels it through the spinney. The way his feet snap twigs.

“Hello,” he says.

“Hello.” The word is barely there and she won’t look at him.

“Okay, let’s just get the apologies over and done with. I’m sorry.” He props his bike against the caravan and squats beside her with a quiet groan of tiredness. “I’m sorry I stayed away all night. I’m sorry I didn’t let you know.”

She can hear the smile in his voice. The carrots are clean, but she swills them and watches the dirt settle. She can smell the sweat on him and the fetid, shitty stink of cows. There’s no water on for his wash. “You can do what you like, Julius,” she says finally, her words seething. “I’m not your mother and you’re fifty-one.” She is the pot of water on the stove, bubbles forming on the bottom, coming to the boil.

“What’s for tea?” Julius says, still trying to mend it. He stands, stretches.

“I don’t know, what is for tea?”

“Don’t be like that. I’ve been at work all day. I’m starving. I want to wash, eat, and go to bed.”

“You didn’t get enough to eat last night? Enough sleep?” She speaks under her breath.

“What’s that?”

“Either you live here or you don’t.”

“We live here.”

“While you are living here, Nathan and his two bullies came around on their dirt bikes, making threats and tearing the place up. They thought we had some money hidden away. Money!”

“Oh, Jeanie.” He takes the bowl from her, sets it down, and gently lifting her hands, makes her stand. If she lets him put his arms around her she knows that all her anger will seep away. She isn’t going to cry.

She feels with her foot for the step up behind her and withdraws her hands from his. “No more ‘Oh, Jeanie’! You also wouldn’t know that Maude has gone. I think she must have been run over or else they’ve poisoned her. Shot her, maybe. I thought those bloody men were going to kill me too!” She didn’t know she thought this, but now, in the way her hands are shaking, she sees it’s true.

“You should have come and got me.”

“Where from? Shelley Swift’s?”

“You know I was at Stockland’s.”

“And what good would that have done?” She grips the sides of the doorway, her heart’s excited little punches goading her on.

“Well, either you think I can help or you think I can’t.”

“I don’t care any more. I really don’t care. I thought we were in this together, but we’re not.”

From the bottom of the steps he reaches up for her, a moment of contrition or guilt. “We are, we are. We’ll always look out for each other.”

“Not if you’re not here! How will we look out for each other if you’re not here?”

“Jeanie, please.”

Suddenly her energy for anger is spent. “Go back to Shelley Swift. Really. I think you should go now. I’m fine here. I managed without you last night and I’ll manage again.” She reaches to grab the door. Its side scrapes against him as she pulls it closed, and he wrenches back on it, but she slams the door and for a second his fingers are jammed, and he swears as he yanks them out. She bolts the door quickly and stands with her back to it, head up.

“Jesus! Jeanie, don’t be stupid. Open the door.”

She presses against her heart while he hammers, the same beat Lewis made on the washing-up bowl.

“Go away, Julius. I don’t need you.”

She sees him at an angle, peering through the window beside the door. Before he can move to the window at the far end, she draws the curtains closed and sits on the couch. She puts her head in her hands, dizzy, hoping she isn’t going to faint. Julius comes back to the door and she jumps at his thumping.

“You know what?” he shouts. “You’re just like your mother. Why shouldn’t I spend some time with a woman? One that isn’t my mother or my sister? What’s wrong with that? It’s completely normal. She always had something to say about anyone I liked, listing all the things she thought was wrong with them, putting me off. It was just a way of keeping me at home. Like she kept you at home too, Jeanie! Well, now she’s gone and there is no bloody home any more, so why shouldn’t I have a life? Find someone to love? You said it yourself, we’re fifty-one. Fifty-one! Bloody hell. You should get out, Jeanie, leave home, finally. You might find you enjoy yourself.”

When she doesn’t reply or open the door, she hears him go. There is a pain in her throat, a constriction which travels down her chest. She stands, one hand on the counter for balance, and calls her brother’s name, but he has already gone.

Julius cycles recklessly to the village in the dusk and arrives hot and sweaty. He sits for an hour next to Jenks at the bar in the Plough. He buys the last bag of pork scratchings hanging from a cardboard display and a packet of salted peanuts, washing them down with a second pint of bitter. Working on the farm always makes him hungry and thirsty. He’s angry with Jeanie for locking him out, even if she has good reason. And then, feeling guilty, he thinks that tomorrow he will phone the police or the RSPCA about the dog, although he still needs to get his damn charger from the caravan. Tomorrow he will go and see Stu about Nathan and the others, in fact he will bloody go round to wherever it is Nathan lives and have a word.

Jenks talks to Julius