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

with the pillow. It’s over in a couple of minutes and afterwards they roll him onto his side.

“He’ll sleep for an hour or so. We can leave him.”

On the bench at the top of the garden, the two women drink their tea in silence, and Jeanie remembers being up here with her brother when they were young, no more than seven, sent up the garden because Dot had stuffed an old wicker basket, riddled with worm, into the fire grate. There had been a roaring in the kitchen from up the chimney, and outside she and Julius yelled and danced around the vegetable beds trying to catch the black flakes floating down. Had Dot run to Spencer Rawson to use his phone? Jeanie doesn’t remember what happened next, except that disappointingly, as they thought at the time, the thatch didn’t catch alight and they didn’t get to see a fire engine.

“I don’t suppose you’ll visit again,” Jeanie says to Shelley Swift.

“It wasn’t what I was expecting.”

They look over the cottage to the wood. A blackbird sings in an apple tree.

“No, I can see that.”

“My little brother had epilepsy,” Shelley Swift says. “He grew out of it, in the end.”

“The doctors are trying to get Julius’s medication right, little adjustments, you know. And he’s having physio and speech therapy and getting his eye sorted out, well . . .” She trails off, worrying that she sounds as though she’s trying to convince Shelley Swift that Julius will get better, when really she needs convincing herself. “The brain’s plasticity is a wonderful thing,” she says more forcefully. This is one of Bridget’s phrases and Jeanie isn’t completely clear what it means, but nearly every day she sees a change in Julius. Something he can do that he couldn’t do the day before which only she would notice: the way he helps when she lifts him from his chair, that more toothpaste goes onto his brush than in the sink, that he appears to listen to the radio for longer before falling asleep.

Shelley Swift and Jeanie drink their tea. Jeanie thinks about asking whether she and Julius had been planning on getting married, whether he gave her their mother’s wedding ring. She hasn’t seen it since it was on her mother’s finger while her body lay in the parlour. The words are forming in Jeanie’s mouth when Shelley Swift says, “Your runner beans are looking good.”

“Would you like some?” Jeanie says.

Together, they stand up.

34

A letter comes on the Monday following Shelley Swift’s visit, the same day that Jeanie has her doctor’s appointment. Very few letters are delivered to the cottage—only bills and appointments really—although the new postwoman will, for the time being, drive up to the door. This letter, like the others, comes in a white envelope with a window and no stamp, only the mark of a franking machine. Absent-mindedly, Jeanie leaves it in the new kitchen without opening it.

It’s still unseasonably hot for September, and all the doors and windows are open in the cottage to try and catch a breeze. Saffron arrives an hour early, Angel bursting in and her mother hurrying after. Maude is immediately up and dancing, and Angel laughs and pats the dog’s neck. The noise wakes Julius and he makes his guttural growl. Jeanie, still embarrassed, has found herself wanting to apologize for his noises to the occupational health woman, the district nurse, the physiotherapist, the man who came to assess Julius for his personal independence payment. Jeanie doesn’t feel quite right about Julius getting money from the government: money for a man who never paid any National Insurance in his life. But Bridget says she shouldn’t be so silly, how else are they going to afford the things that Julius needs, and besides, Jeanie looking after him in the cottage is going to cost the government a damn sight less than if he was kept in a home. She did agree to let Bridget help in completing the criminal injuries compensation form, but Jeanie isn’t sure yet about claiming carers’ allowance. Julius is her brother, she doesn’t need to be paid to look after him.

Sometimes Jeanie is furious at what has happened to him, to them both. And at others she is stoical, and if not content, then accepting. Just as she learned the terminology of the intensive therapy unit, she has learned the words and phrases used by the police: criminal prosecution service, on remand, committals, and criminal trials. The police officer in charge of the investigation went to see Julius in his rehabilitation unit, and then perhaps realizing this wasn’t helpful for anyone, telephoned Jeanie on her new mobile phone to update her on the investigation. The woman introduced herself as Detective Sergeant Alisha Kapoor and Jeanie recognized the voice of the woman who had interviewed her at the station. DS Kapoor said they were gathering evidence, that the trial wouldn’t be scheduled for many months, and that Tom would be on remand until it started. She told Jeanie to expect to be called as a witness, but that they were unlikely to call Julius, given the state of his injuries.

In the year following the shooting, while she was staying with Saffron, Jeanie thought often about Tom and what his life was like in prison; what his life was like after his mother died, and whether one thing led to the other. Bridget’s views, though, are firm and vociferous: anyone who takes a loaded shotgun to a caravan in the middle of the night has every intention of using it. And if it hadn’t been Julius, it might well have been Jeanie. Sometimes, Jeanie wishes it was.

Months went by after the phone call from DS Kapoor, and then two weeks ago last Friday, just a few days after Julius moved into the cottage and when Bridget was over, the detective came around, bumping up the track in her car. Jeanie hadn’t noticed that night at the police station how young the detective