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

Bridget wags her head and says, “Intensive Therapy Unit, ITU.”

The man feigns a smile. Bridget doesn’t notice. “He’s being monitored and he’s having help with his breathing, but we’ll hopefully be able to remove his breathing tube soon and have a go at waking him up, and we’ll keep an eye on how well he responds.”

“Can I see him?” Jeanie says.

There are four beds in the Neuro ITU, and more women and men in blue clothes checking monitors and charts, writing things. Julius is furthest from the door, and when Jeanie walks past the other beds with Bridget, she doesn’t look in them, but she sees the weak smiles that each visitor beside each bed gives her. Julius is in a hospital gown with a sheet pulled up to his chest. Most of his head is bandaged and a wodge of dressing covers his left eye, a yellow stain showing around the edge. A man in a similar blue uniform as the rest introduces himself as Julius’s nurse, and explains what each of the tubes, wires, and monitors is for. Jeanie doesn’t take any of it in. The room is hot, airless. The person in the bed doesn’t look like Julius and she wonders if she’s been brought to the correct bed, or perhaps it wasn’t Julius in the spinney after all, and they have picked up and operated on someone else. Perhaps her brother is in the caravan now, waiting for his dinner and complaining about where the hell she is.

“I should have brought his pyjamas,” she says. Bridget shushes her and puts an arm around her shoulders. The nurse is speaking but his voice is distant. When she looks down, she sees that she’s holding an information leaflet with a picture of the hospital on the front. When was she given that? She’s cold but her forehead is sweating. She presses her fingers to her chest, and the egg inside her cracks.

“Oh!” she says.

When she comes around, she is lying on the floor in the corridor, a pillow under her head and her feet on a chair. Bridget and nurses surround her. Shouldn’t they be looking after Julius? “She’s got a heart condition.” Jeanie can hear Bridget’s voice. “Rheumatic heart disease. She had rheumatic fever when she was a child.”

I’m alive, Jeanie thinks, and touches her chest above her heart. There is no blood, nothing has burst out of her.

They want her to go to A&E, and a wheelchair is brought. She sits in it but refuses to go, although she knows that Bridget is disappointed at missing the opportunity to push her through the hospital. Instead Bridget sits beside her and tells her how it’s now thought best to elevate the legs rather than lower the head to the knees when someone faints. The nurse who helped her up isn’t happy that Jeanie won’t go to A&E and has her promise that she will make an appointment with her GP as soon as possible. Bridget wheels her back to Julius.

In the car on the way home, Jeanie rests her head against the window and tries to sleep but still sleep won’t come although she’s never been so tired. She watches silhouettes of the drivers who overtake them on the A34, their headlights sweeping the verges. She looks for a bulky shape motionless by the side of the road, and then squeezes her eyes closed against the thought. She misses Maude with a physical pain which aches in time with the beat of her heart. That dog could listen without talking back. She thinks of the things that Rawson told her about her mother and how he has turned everything she knows on its head.

“Rawson said something about Dad too,” Jeanie says.

“I thought you were asleep,” Bridget says, reaching for her cigarettes.

“It was about how Dad died,” Jeanie continues. “Something else that Mum insisted we shouldn’t be told. I’ve been trying to work out what it could be.”

Jeanie tries to get her thoughts in order, make herself wake up. “Julius and I have always thought that Rawson made the tractor’s hitch pins, that he was the one who insisted on making new ones out of nuts and bolts. When they broke, Julius was thrown into the hedge and Dad died.”

Bridget fumbles for a lighter in the storage compartment in front of the gear stick and drops it.

“And to stop Mum telling the police or the health and safety people about Rawson and what he did, we were allowed to stay in the cottage, rent-free. That’s what we assumed, that’s what she let us believe. But I’m not sure that’s right.” Jeanie scrabbles for the lighter amongst the rubbish in her footwell and lights the cigarette. Bridget’s face glows orange.

“The reason we were able to stay in the cottage wasn’t because Mum agreed to keep quiet about Rawson making the hitch pins. We were able to stay in the cottage because they were”—Jeanie falters, searching for the words—“having an affair. So that must mean she had nothing to keep quiet about, there wasn’t anything she was keeping from the police or the health and safety people. Or not about Rawson, anyway.”

A speck of red ash falls on Bridget’s skirt and goes out.

Jeanie is following her thoughts now, one after the next, each making a path in front of her: a line of stepping stones she has never walked across before. “If there was nothing for her to keep from the police about Rawson, that means he didn’t make the hitch pins. He didn’t kill Dad.

“It was just a story to make it seem believable that we could stay in the cottage. Mum insisted on that lie, so that we wouldn’t find out about them, about their affair. It must have been one of her conditions. That’s the word Rawson used in the caravan: conditions. Julius and I have hated Rawson for years because we thought he killed