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

about how great the music session was, how amazing Jeanie’s playing and singing are, as though Julius wasn’t one of the musicians, wasn’t even there. Julius makes noises of agreement while thinking of Shelley Swift and wondering whether in a few months’ time they will be retelling each other the story of how they met and became lovers, girlfriend and boyfriend, partners, whatever the word is when you’re fifty-one: the stuck window, the pilot light, their first kiss on the landing, the time in the woods, and the fiddle playing. By nine thirty, Julius has had enough of Jenks’s endless chatter of football matches and dated jokes about knockers and priests. He stands in the doorway of the pub. It’s raining, and he wonders whether Jeanie will have calmed down enough to let him in. It’s a long way to cycle to the caravan in the rain just to find out that she hasn’t. He unlocks his bike and pushes it quickly up through the village.

The pain in Jeanie’s chest grows into a burning that she can’t ignore. She takes a couple of painkillers with a swig of water, holding a fist hard to the middle of her chest, and wonders if this is it. All the rests she took, all the things her mother wouldn’t let her do, all the places she didn’t go, have come to this moment. It could be hours before Julius returns, if he ever does. She imagines being found in the caravan in a day or a week. Dying or dead. She lies on the bed, crying with the pain and for Maude, and for herself. Rain patters on the caravan roof. For the first time she wishes that she had a mobile phone. After an hour when no position, standing or lying, relieves the pain and it is dark outside, she takes the torch, locks the caravan, and walks. Her coat isn’t properly waterproof, she didn’t think to pack an umbrella when they left the cottage, and the rain runs down her face and the back of her neck. Every few steps she has to rest, doubled over and groaning, the torchlight illuminating the muddy toes of her wellingtons. In the village she heads for the telephone box next to the bus stop. She will phone the police about Maude, she will phone Julius’s mobile—although she isn’t sure she can remember the number—she will phone for an ambulance. But when she opens the red door, the telephone is gone, replaced with a circular yellow box printed with an image of a heart with a lightning bolt through it, and a figure kneeling beside the body of another, hands on chest. She is reminded of Julius kneeling beside the body of their mother on the kitchen floor, only six weeks ago. Perhaps Julius will be in the Plough, sitting with a pint in the public bar, and not at Shelley Swift’s. Please, she thinks, do not make me have to knock on Shelley Swift’s door and ask for my brother; she doesn’t look up when she passes the fish and chip shop. It’s just before ten and the yellow lights from the pub shine out through the windows. It looks inviting, warm, dry. She goes into the public bar where a few tables are occupied, a slot machine jingles to itself, and the only man in there turns to look at her.

“It’s Jeanie, isn’t it?” the man says. “Jenks.” He nods a hello. “Why’ve you been walking in the rain? Let me get you a drink. You look in need of a hot toddy.”

“Is my brother here?” she says.

“You’ve just missed him. He’s gone up the road.” Jenks tilts his head, a knowing smile on his face. “You know. Up the road. What are you having?”

Jeanie holds on to the bar as another spasm grips her. She inhales and exhales slowly. “No drink, thank you. Can you phone him or text him?”

Jenks picks up his phone from beside his pint. “No problemo. Text might be best. You never know what he could be in the middle of.” He raises his eyebrows. “Run out of credit, have you? Are you all right?”

Jeanie tries to smile. “Ask him to come home, would you? To the caravan.”

“You don’t want him to come over here?” Jenks says.

“As soon as possible. It’s an emergency. To the caravan,” she repeats. Jeanie can’t wait for him in the pub, talking to Jenks, pretending everything is okay.

“Asap,” Jenks says.

“And tell him—tell him I’m sorry.”

“Right,” Jenks says, typing with an index finger into his phone.

The lights are on in the sitting room above the fish and chip shop. Julius pushes his bike into the alleyway and locks it. He knocks on Shelley Swift’s door and hears her clumping down the stairs.

“Julius,” she says, surprised. “What’re you doing here?”

“I was thinking about you,” he says.

“Really?” She laughs. A happy laugh, he thinks; a pleased-to-see-you laugh. But she stays in the doorway and doesn’t invite him upstairs and he notices that she has a book in her hand—Death in the Afternoon—closed on her index finger to mark her place. “And what were you thinking?” she says.

“This and that.”

“Yes, but what exactly?” Her smile is coy, as though there’s a secret word he needs to say before she’ll let him in.

“About how I can’t get enough of you.”

She seems pleased with this. “You’d better come in then.”

He follows her upstairs. She’s wearing a shapeless jumper and a pair of grey jogging bottoms with the word JUICY up one leg. He wants nothing more than to put his hands on her large behind and take her back to bed, but as soon as he’s in her sitting room he becomes blundering and tongue-tied, and although he didn’t notice it in the pub, he’s suddenly aware of the ripe smell of the farmyard and his own sweat coming off him. He feels a surge of anger that Jeanie didn’t let him into the caravan at least to have