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

and pushes the button on the side, holding it down like she’s seen Julius do. In a panic of indecision, she stands quickly, drops the phone, and immediately kneels again, shaking him hard this time. “Julius!” His head jiggles loosely.

Then she runs through the spinney, galumphing past the fallen piano, not caring about the racket she’s making, the way her heart is leaping and the pain in her lungs. She follows the tyre track of a single bike to the lay-by where Rawson’s car, if that’s where he parked it, is now gone. Here she hesitates—left to the village over the fields and whichever house she comes to first? She turns right. On the main road cars roar past every few minutes in both directions, headlights glaring. As one comes towards her, she puts a boot onto the tarmac, waving her arms and yelling, but the car is faster and closer than she anticipates and it swerves, sending her stumbling back into the ditch. Its horn blares and fades as the car disappears. After three or four minutes, as another comes towards her, she waves again and this one stops a little further on. Its hazard lights flash, and she runs to it. The driver has lowered the passenger window and she can hear him shouting.

“You flipping idiot. You can’t hitch-hike here. Do you want to get yourself killed?” He is leaning across the empty passenger seat and he quietens when she looks in, perhaps having expected a teenage boy, not an older woman. Jeanie grips the edges of the door with both hands. The man is old, maybe in his eighties, bald, long-faced. “Get in.” He stretches to open the door. “Quick. I can’t stop here. It’s too dangerous.” Jeanie gets in, closes the door. Her seat is low, cradling. “Put your seat belt on. I nearly didn’t see you, really, you’ll cause a crash hitch-hiking at night like that. Where is it you’re trying to get to?” The man indicates and pulls out.

Jeanie is oddly calm and polite when she says, “My brother’s been shot. I think he’s dead. Do you have a mobile phone?”

“What?” The man looks at her as though she might have her own gun shoved into a pocket or tucked into a belt.

“In the spinney.” Jeanie flaps a hand behind her. “In the spinney,” she shouts like he might know the place. The car accelerates too fast and they lurch forwards, and when the man overcompensates with the brake, they bounce back against their seats. His glasses slide to the end of his nose, but he doesn’t push them back up, only hunches over the wheel nervously.

“I’ll find somewhere safe to stop,” he says, although they go past one turning and then another, and she wonders if he’s driving her to a police station to report her and hand her over as a carjacking maniac. Finally, he pulls into a floodlit industrial unit where forklift trucks are loading crates into the back of an articulated lorry. It’s the man who makes the emergency call in the end. Jeanie’s hands won’t hold the phone steady, her index finger doesn’t seem to have the strength to press nine three times. The person on the other end wants a location for the emergency and Jeanie gives the man who has driven her here the name of the lane, and she tries to describe the lay-by with the track that leads into the spinney, while the man repeats the information into his phone. Jeanie clamps her hands between her knees and clenches her jaw to stop herself from shaking and stares out at the illuminated forecourt and the people who work all night doing jobs she has never imagined. They have to reverse into a corner of the yard so that the lorry has enough space to turn and leave. A man in a high-vis jacket comes over, the foreman, and raps on the driver’s window.

“No private vehicles,” he says loudly.

“Sorry, sorry,” the driver of the car says, waving, smiling, but not putting down the window. He pulls out after the lorry, heading in the opposite direction to the spinney.

“I have to go back,” Jeanie says. “Will you take me back?”

“That’s where we’re going, isn’t it?”

“It’s the other way.” She turns in her seat, looks over her shoulder, wonders if this man is too old to be driving.

They have to find another place where he can turn the car, and he drives slowly, prudently, like Bridget, and cars overtake them, even in the dark. He twitches and shuffles in his seat as though he feels they should be making conversation, and casts sidelong glances at her. At last, he says, “I’ve got a brother. He lives in Australia. He was a bloody pain in the backside when we were young, but I miss him.” She doesn’t have anything to say to that.

They overshoot the turning to the lane and only realize when they pass an ambulance with its blue light flashing, going in the opposite direction. Again, like some awful comedy radio play, they have to find yet another place for the man to turn the car round.

When they reach the lay-by, two police cars are already there, along with the ambulance. Jeanie has the car door open before the man has turned off the ignition, and she runs towards the spinney, but a couple of police officers steer her away, and in the headlights of the man’s car they ask her who she is, who Julius is, their relationship. There are lights in the woods, voices, orders being given.

She pushes at the police officers. “He’s my brother for God’s sake. Let me through.”

They tell her to calm herself down, that the paramedics are with him. They make her sit in the back of a police car and carry on asking her questions, but she sees two people bumping a stretcher up the track and she tugs on the door handle, which won’t open, and twists in her