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

His hands find each other and his fingers twist. “I’m afraid I haven’t expressed this well.” He looks at Jeanie suddenly, directly, and they stare at each other in the candlelight. “What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Jeanie is shouting. “I think you want a ready-made family. A bit lonely are you, now your wife’s gone and your mistress is dead?”

Rawson pulls back. “I want to help you. You’re Dot’s children—and Frank’s, of course—and I just want some connection to her. Only that.”

“Get out.”

He doesn’t move.

“Get out!” She throws the screwed-up envelope, but it doesn’t even touch him, only falls at his feet.

Rawson remains motionless while Jeanie, keeping her eyes on him, edges towards the kitchen drawer. She yanks it open and delves inside with her hand. Her movement rocks him from his rooted state as though a great wind had come towards him and abruptly he is released, and he pushes on the caravan door, fumbling with the bolt, as Jeanie turns towards the drawer and finds the poker. She pulls it out and spins round, the point raised and forwards. Rawson is gone into the dark spinney, leaving the door swinging open. The rain has stopped but all about there is the pattering of drops falling from the leaves and, again, the bike’s engine. She steps back inside, bolts the door once more, and rests her forehead against it, holding the poker with both hands.

Thirty-eight years, she thinks. The man who killed her father. She doesn’t believe it. She can’t. She won’t.

For several minutes the dirt bike circles the spinney and with each lap it seems to draw closer to the caravan. And then the engine is switched off and she hears men’s voices shouting. She kneels by the door, straining to listen, the poker still with her. She can’t make out the words, but she understands the tone. Rawson, she thinks, and one other—Nathan? There is silence for one, two, three breaths, and a yell which might be a name. Then a single gunshot. So loud and close that she jumps, knocking against the table leg and ending curled on the floor with her arms wrapped around her head. She is all heart and pumping blood. From outside comes the kick of the bike’s engine, a rev, and it is away, growing quieter until she thinks she hears it on the lane, and then it’s gone. Still she lies curled on the caravan floor, waiting.

Nothing else comes, except drops of water plunking on the caravan roof. She gets to her hands and knees and, finally, stands. Listens again. Silence. With the poker in one hand she unlocks and pushes the door open: the firepit, the lean-to shelter with the tarpaulin, leaves shifting in the blackness, the smell of damp earth. In the dark, nothing seems changed.

29

As she stands in the doorway, Jeanie thinks of Tom and how he raised his arm to shoot at her dog, and then she sees a vision of Maude lying out there somewhere, like a heap of wet cardboard. Tom can turn the caravan upside down looking for the non-existent money, he can take every belonging she has left, she doesn’t care, as long as she doesn’t find Maude injured or dead in the undergrowth. If it is Rawson, well, it will bloody serve him right. Jamming on her wellingtons, she is quickly down the steps, poker brandished, and standing in front of the caravan, listening. She goes around the side, creeping out into the spinney, placing each foot carefully so as not to rustle a leaf, snap a twig. The dirt bike may have gone, but has the man with the gun? The layout of the spinney is clear in her head even in the dark, and as each shape looms she knows it: the trunk of the single beech, the holly—higher and wider than the caravan—the fallen tree, the stumps and mounds of hidden rubble. She holds the poker aloft as though she might have to use it to hack her way through a jungle. Whistling for Maude and hoping that anyone out there will think the sound is an animal, she stays off the main path, inching her way through the ivy.

Near the tipped-over piano an indistinct form lies in the ground elder: she feels instant relief that it’s not dog-shaped. Instead it is long, stretched out on its back, legs splayed. A man. She moves closer, head low, wary that it might be a trap and he could suddenly rise up, gun in hand. With the poker ready, she approaches him from the feet, seeing the soles of his boots, jeans, coat flapped open, arms down. For another moment in the gloom she can’t identify the body, the features, isn’t able to arrange them. Then she covers her mouth with her hand, drops the poker, and kneels beside her brother. She can smell his odour of soap, tobacco, and sweat, mixed with scuffed humus and leaf mould. Her shadow covers him and she shifts to see him better. His right cheek and forehead are peppered with holes: the face of a mediaeval church carving, singular and stately, punctured by woodworm. There is very little blood.

“What have I done?” she whispers, thinking of the text she made Jenks send. “Julius!” She shakes his shoulder and presses her fingertips to his neck but in her anxiety can’t work out where his pulse is meant to be—she who feels for her own every day. She presses his wrist—nothing—remembers the picture of the figure on the yellow defibrillator where the public telephone used to be, leaning over the person on the ground. Something to do with pushing on their chest but in what way and for how long? Her thoughts fumble from one idea to the next. She rummages in Julius’s coat and jeans pockets for his mobile and pulls the phone out along with a scattering of coins. The phone remains dark even when she jabs at the numbers