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

“Is he alive?” she says. “Is he alive?”

She sits waiting at a table in a small room with only a clock and a few posters on the walls with warnings she tries to read but can’t focus on. A man puts his head around the door and says they’ll be with her as soon as possible.

“How’s my brother?” she asks. “Do you know?”

“I’ll find out,” the man says, but he doesn’t return.

She shouldn’t have agreed to go with the police, she thinks. Should have insisted that she travel in the back of the ambulance with Julius. “You’re not under arrest,” they said. “We’d just like to ask you a few more questions and it might be more comfortable in the station. We’ll keep you updated about your brother as soon as we know anything. You can leave at any time.”

The clock says it’s just after twelve, but her body can’t work out whether that’s midnight or noon. She leans over the table, pulling her cardigan around her; she didn’t stop to put a coat on when she left the caravan. She wants to go, but she doesn’t know where they have taken Julius or how she might get there. So, she waits. There’s no window in the room. There is a pain behind her eyes and all her limbs and muscles ache, and her internal organs are heavy; she needs to sleep but thinks sleep will never come again. Finally, the door opens a second time and she stands. A woman and man introduce themselves, and the word detective is all she can remember. They put a mug of tea in front of her and apologize for keeping her waiting.

“How’s my brother?” she asks, and the woman says, “That’s just what we were trying to ascertain. I’ve asked someone to come in and tell us as soon as there’s any news. Have a seat.”

The man puts a notepad and pen on the table as though he expects Jeanie to write. There was a time when these objects would have sent her into a panic but they don’t scare her now. The detectives sit opposite her and ask about what happened, and the man writes things in the notebook.

Jeanie’s story is jumbled at first, out of sequence and complicated. She tells them about Shelley Swift who lives above the fish and chip shop, and about Nathan, and Lewis, and Tom; she tells them about the cutlery and the eviction. She says that her dog is missing and she cries, and the woman passes a box of tissues from her end of the table. “Has a stray dog been handed in?” she asks. The male detective says that the police don’t deal with stray dogs, she’ll have to contact the dog warden at the council. She explains that she’s been visiting the cottage to tend the garden and that Rawson came to the caravan to talk about it. She tells them she thought she was having a heart attack and she got Jenks to send a message for her brother to come home. The female detective asks her if she needs a doctor, but it’s too late for that. She has to explain who Jenks is. She says that Bridget Clements came to the caravan yesterday and picked up the cutlery from the floor. She says she spilled some potatoes which got trampled and she had to wash them again. They tell her to stick to the important information. She wants to say that potatoes are important, but instead she tells them about the sound of the dirt bike and the two men’s voices, arguing, and Tom’s pretend shooting of Maude. They ask if she knows his full name and where he lives, and for a while they both leave the room. When they return, she tells them about the poker, that she lay on the floor of the caravan, and about the awful noise of the shot in the dark.

She tells them everything except what Rawson told her about his relationship with her mother.

The woman explains that they need Jeanie to write a statement in chronological order about everything she’s just told them. The man pushes a form and the pen across the table. Jeanie pushes them back. “I find it difficult to read or write,” she says, chin up, expecting them to argue. A glance passes between them and then laboriously they go through the sequence of events once more with the man writing Jeanie’s words, and then reading them out to her.

“Sign here,” he says.

“A cross will do,” the woman says.

Jeanie sniffs, picks up the pen, and signs her name, using the same scrawl she used at the register office.

They ask if they can take her fingerprints and she wonders whether they will want to swab the inside of her mouth with a long cotton bud, and if they will ask her to undress so they can take her clothes away in a plastic bag. Julius would have been shouting about his rights and his liberty by now, but she lets them roll her fingers in the ink and across the paper. When they say she is free to leave, she remains in her chair and they have to say it again.

In the reception area the lights are painfully bright. A policeman comes out from behind the desk and sits next to her on the moulded plastic seats. “We’ve heard from an officer who’s been waiting at the hospital,” he says gently. She imagines a cold tiled floor, the folding back of a sheet. She remembers her mother’s body on the door in the parlour, and then suddenly, ridiculously, feels a pang of concern about what underwear Julius is wearing. “Your brother’s having surgery at the John Radcliffe in Oxford,” the policeman says. “There’s no more information at the moment, but your friend telephoned. Mrs. Clements? She’s on her way, she says she’ll take you.”

Bridget arrives twenty minutes later, bursting into the reception area. She opens her arms and