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

guitar case, heavy when she lifts it out. She takes the guitar from the case, cradles it, and weeps, her tears falling onto the wood. After a while she begins to play.

“Then home he did run with his dog and his gun,

Crying, ‘Mother, dear Mother, have you heard what I have done?

I met my own true love, I mistook her for a swan,

And I shot her and killed her by the setting of the sun.’

She’d her apron wrapped about her and he took her for a swan,

And it’s so and alas, it was she, Polly Vaughn.”

After she’s finished, she gets up and bolts the door, finds her coat and puts it on, and lies down on Julius’s bed. Her limbs ache as though she is coming down with flu, and her head pounds. She puts her hand against her heart, but its rhythm is regular.

When she opens her eyes again, a greenish light is flowing over her from the window. There are birds singing in the holly bush and the whoosh of cars on the main road. Her teeth are woolly when she runs her tongue across them, and she gets herself up with a groan. It’s just after six. She finds a mug and holds it under the tap, pumping the water pedal with her foot. When the mug is half-filled, the water splutters and gives out. Julius was the one who brought the water and changed the gas bottle. She brushes her teeth and drinks; she would like to wash but that isn’t possible. She’ll need to get water and maybe gas on her bicycle using the trailer, but she knows before she even steps outside to look that they will have been taken. Julius’s bike, which he must have pushed through the spinney, isn’t anywhere either—did she see it when she found him in the woods? There is a tin of baked beans in a cupboard and a saucepan on the floor, and she heats the food on the gas and gobbles the beans straight from the pan with a spoon which she wipes first on the bottom of her cardigan. The beans make her thirsty. She changes her clothes and underwear, and into her plastic bag she puts her toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap, another tin of beans, and some soup. The soup doesn’t have a ring pull, so she searches until she finds the tin opener, and at the same time she comes across a pair of Julius’s pyjamas and a flannel. She shoves in as well the ashtray with the wooden bear with bead eyes. The plastic bag is full now, so she looks for Julius’s rucksack of tools but it is gone too. She finds a large carrier bag with others shoved inside, and in the biggest she crams a sleeping bag and a jumper, some clean underwear, her hairbrush, the spoon. With the bread knife she cuts open the rest of the plastic bags and wraps them around the guitar case—with the guitar inside—as best she can. Before she leaves, she pushes it below the caravan, hiding it under the disintegrating cardboard which is there.

Carrying her two plastic bags, she walks to the village and goes to the public WCs that abut one end of the village hall. The brown concrete block is covered with a filigree of ivy strands, white and dead after the council put weedkiller on the roots. In the ladies, there is a hand dryer, two sinks, and two cubicles with blue wooden doors and white toilets—one missing its seat. The walls are tiled in white, and the floor is some sort of blue poured plastic. The room smells—of pee and old water—and there is residual dirt in the corners and along the grouting.

A sign above the sinks has some words on it and a symbol of a tap crossed by a red line. She knows what it means, but still she cups her hands under the running water and drinks, then washes her face and armpits with the soap and the flannel.

31

In the ITU, nothing is changed: Julius is still being helped to breathe, still being monitored, fluids are still being pumped in and taken out. At lunchtime when Jeanie is faint with hunger, Bridget buys sandwiches and crisps, and she and Jeanie eat them in the Relatives’ Room.

“When Julius is better and home again, I thought maybe he should look for a regular job, something permanent. Learn a trade,” Jeanie says, taking a bite of her prawn mayonnaise. She wants to eat it quickly, to stuff it in, but she forces herself to go slowly so that Bridget won’t know how hungry she is. Bridget raises her eyebrows at Jeanie’s words. “What?” Jeanie says. She’s tired of Bridget, even while grateful for her help. The way Bridget considers herself the medical expert. “It’s never too late to learn something new.” The words snap out.

“It’s not that,” Bridget says. “Has anyone talked to you about Julius’s prognosis? If he recovers, and God knows I hope he does, there’ll be some damage, Jeanie.”

“His eye—”

“Brain damage.”

“You don’t know that, no one knows until he wakes up.”

“He has three bullets in his brain.” Bridget says it softly as though Jeanie is just learning this.

“Shotgun pellets,” Jeanie says pointedly.

“Whichever. They’ll have done a lot of damage. Brain damage.”

“He’ll come home though.”

“Where to?”

They look at each other.

“To the caravan?” Bridget asks, her voice a whisper. Jeanie shakes her head; she doesn’t want this conversation. “He might be in a wheelchair, he might need lots of help. How is that going to work? There isn’t even a toilet out there.”

Jeanie reaches for the other half of her sandwich, but she’s already eaten it. “I should go back.” She picks up the crisps.

“It’s a lot to take in, and you’re right, who knows?”

Jeanie doesn’t like Bridget’s patronizing tone and how, whatever she says, her voice sounds like she doesn’t think Julius will survive.

Before they leave the Relatives’ Room a temporary truce is