Lewis stares about him, dazed from sleep. He stands and dozily picks up a kitchen chair, and Tom takes another. “Here,” Tom calls and throws the chair to Nathan, high across the table. Nathan’s reaction is slow, but he catches it.
“Wait,” Julius says. “Where are you going with those?”
“Should have got rid of this shit earlier,” Tom says.
“Your dad’s coming to move us out today,” Jeanie says to Nathan, although it hasn’t been arranged. As Jeanie positions herself between him and the front door, she hears Maude fussing under the table. Nathan wavers. “We’re going to be staying with him and your mum for a while.” She hopes this is still possible.
“Are you running this geriatric eviction, Nath?” Tom picks up another chair. “Or am I?” He manoeuvres himself around Julius.
Nathan puts his shoulders back, hardens his face. “Rather you than me,” he says to Jeanie. She wants to grab the chair from him and smash it over his head.
“Surely you can wait until he arrives with the van?” she says.
“I don’t want nothing to do with that old git, never again. I work for who I like, when I like.”
“Let’s put them out on the track, lads,” Tom says, and the men lift the chairs above their heads and Jeanie finds herself backed against the range so that Nathan can pass.
“He did speak to you then?” Jeanie says to him. “Tell you not to do this?” He ignores her.
Julius, near the door, steps in and takes hold of Lewis’s chair, trying to wrestle it from him. There’s a tussle and swearing, and one of the chair’s stretchers comes loose.
“Now, now,” Tom says from where he stands on the doorstep. “We’re just doing our job, Mr. Seeder.” There’s laughter in the way he speaks as if it’s a joke and in a moment he might put the chair back and say, Only pulling your leg.
Suddenly Julius lets go of the chair and Lewis falls, pushing the parlour door open and landing heavily on his back. There’s a tangle of man and chair until Julius steps across Lewis and into the parlour. Jeanie whistles for Maude and follows her brother. Just as she is closing the parlour door on the men, Tom smiles at her, his square little teeth stained, and with his index finger draws a line slowly across his neck.
“Phone Stu,” Jeanie says to Julius. “Tell him to come straight away.” Through the parlour window they see the men chucking the chairs over the gate and walking back up the path.
“I haven’t got any sodding charge,” Julius says.
“For goodness’ sake, why not?”
“Because we haven’t paid the electricity bill, remember?” He’s shouting. “Because I couldn’t charge the phone when I was milking because they’ve bloody got their eye on me the whole time. And I didn’t go to the fucking pub after work because I knew you’d be on at me. All right?”
“All right,” she says softly. “All right. I’m sorry.” She’s trembling and she sits in the armchair so that she can press down on her thighs. “I packed some stuff yesterday. I’ve just got to get our clothes together. We’ll manage. It’ll be okay.” She’s saying things for the sake of speaking, to make everything seem normal, solvable.
Julius crouches, grips her upper arms, and looks into her eyes. “I’m going to get dressed and then I’m going to find Stu and tell him he needs to come right now. Maybe he can try again to stop Nathan.” Julius did speak to Bridget about Nathan, then, Jeanie thinks. She doesn’t believe it will work a second time, not now she’s seen Tom, but she nods. “Stay in here with Maude and you’ll be fine.”
While Julius is upstairs, Jeanie is drawn to the window where she sees their belongings being manhandled down the path and dumped on the track: the kitchen table, which the men have removed the legs from, the piano stool, the sofa cushions, one of the dresser drawers, and then the sofa itself. The wind is getting up, pulling at fabric and bits of paper. From beside her on the parlour chest, she takes the framed photograph of her parents and shoves it into her cardigan pocket. She takes the Toby jug too and squeezes it into a skirt pocket, splitting the seam. An unused ashtray held in the paws of a carved wooden bear with beads for eyes she puts in a third pocket, and then she stares out of the window once more.
Before he leaves, Julius holds her tightly. “I’ll be as quick as I can.” She watches him pass the men on the path, and there is more shouting and pushing and then he gets on his bicycle and rides off. After he’s gone, she and Maude climb the right-hand stairs to Julius’s bedroom. On the sloping floorboards the two single beds from Jeanie’s childhood are still here. She slept in the left-hand one until their father died, when Dot said she was too old to be sharing a room with her brother and she moved into the double bed beside her mother. Jeanie knew it was because Dot was afraid to be alone. Where would Jeanie have slept if her father had lived? And why didn’t Julius move to the double bed on his own? These things, like her father’s murder, were never discussed. She looks out of the window, remembering the row of birds’ skulls Julius used to keep here—always falling off the sill when she closed the curtains. The men have taken the armchair from the parlour, and with Tom directing, Nathan and Lewis are carrying it down the path. The cushion falls off the bottom, and Lewis staggers over it in his muddy boots.
Under the bed which used to be hers, Jeanie finds an old suitcase that she stuffs with the clothes from Julius’s drawers and wardrobe: pairs of jeans and shirts pale from washing, darned socks, underpants and T-shirts, his pyjamas which he left on the floor. Tucked in amongst all the soft things she puts Julius’s unloaded gun. Next, she tips in the contents of the drawer of his bedside cabinet without noticing what odds and ends it contains. Something falls out with a clink and rolls away. When Jeanie searches for it under the bed she feels only dust balls and other rubbish. On top of the things in the case she puts the photograph, the bear ashtray, and the Toby jug, and closes the lid.
When Julius returns, he again scuffles outside with Lewis, who is stupid, but younger and more agile. They each take an end of the tin bath, pushing and shoving it against each other until Julius falls backwards into the flower bed. Laughing, Lewis tosses the bath over the garden fence where it lands, the right way up, on the track. Julius scrabbles upright and Jeanie comes out of the cottage. She brushes the dirt off his clothes, and he is embarrassed by his sister, dowdy and fussing, even in front of these men who are dismantling their home. He can’t remember feeling ashamed of her before, only protective, and with a mixture of guilt and humiliation, he pushes her hands off him. On the track Lewis clambers into the bath and pretends to scrub his back with a discarded broom while Nathan looks on and Tom jumps about in the wind like a monkey.
Julius tells Jeanie that Stu is coming as soon as he can and doesn’t say that he was only able to leave a message with Bridget who said Stu was out on a job all day, and that she didn’t believe Nathan would ever listen to his father. Julius puts his arm around his sister, red-cheeked and silent, and takes her up to the top of the garden, past the chickens still in their coop, to sit out the removal while the trees thrash about them.
“Maybe we should put it all in the old dairy,” Julius says, the idea suddenly coming to him. “Most of it would fit.”
“It’d still be on the Rawsons’ land,” Jeanie says in a dull voice. “They’ll claim it’s theirs.”
“The track belongs to them too.”
Jeanie shrugs, doesn’t look at him.
Finally, when they hear the kick of engines, they stand and walk down the garden, limping and stiff as though they have been physically injured by the actions of the day.
Julius stops at the foot of his mother’s grave. “I’ll sort something out.” He knows that the words are hollow and that Jeanie thinks he hasn’t done what he is supposed to do: keep her safe.
“Fuck it,” Jeanie says, and Julius, shocked at hearing her speak these words, watches as she goes to the head of the mound of earth and yanks out the poker which is stuck in the soil. He hasn’t seen it since before their mother die
d, and he feels a prickle up the back of his neck to realize that it is here, jammed into the earth as the marker for her grave, as if Dot might have taken it and placed it there herself.
In the yard, he waits for Jeanie to feed the chickens. And then he and his sister walk around the cottage and down the front path without looking inside.
In the late afternoon Stu arrives. He lowers the van window and stares at the contents of the cottage piled across the track. Everything Nathan and the others could manage or be bothered to carry has been taken outside and heaped up: pans and bowls and mismatched plates, three mattresses with their ticking stains laid bare, the cooker ripped out from the mains, the fridge which they hadn’t used for three weeks, four bedside tables, candlesticks, teapots, jugs and jars, threadbare rugs, and all the things that a house’s poorly lit corners can hide the wear of. The chest from the parlour is on its side and the contents have fallen out: what remains of the linen is muddy, and the family papers and documents kept at the bottom are scattered. Many pieces of paper have been picked up by the wind and distributed across the hedges and surrounding fields. A sowing of words. Jeanie and Julius sit in their coats on kitchen chairs, the legs sinking into the mud.
“Bloody hell,” Stu says. “Bridget told me it’d be two suitcases. I don’t think it’ll all fit in the back and it’s never going to fit in the house.” He gets out and stands with his hands on his hips. He’s wearing his usual shorts and boots; in between, a stretch of hairy calves.
Julius picks up the suitcases which Jeanie packed—one for him and another for her. “Let’s go,” he says sullenly. He has no fury left, only humiliation. They load the van with the boxes of crockery and food, and another of bedding. Julius’s rucksack of tools is shoved in, as well as the three instrument cases. Julius loads Dot’s—now Jeanie’s—bike into the van. The trailer won’t fit, so he hitches it to the back of his own bike. Jeanie whistles for Maude, who has been running between the piles, sniffing excitedly.
“What about the rest?” Stu says. “You’re not going to leave it here, are you?”
“Let’s go,” Julius repeats. Everything he does feels like an effort, as though he had aged twenty years over this one day. Jeanie sits in the front seat of the van and drags Maude into the footwell by her collar. Julius tries to catch his sister’s eye to smile at her; it’s a false smile, to make her think that he has some confidence in himself and a plan, but she looks straight ahead, lips stuck together, as if she spoke her last words when they were in the garden. He sees she still has the poker in her hand, and he imagines that it’s him she’d like to use it on.
Fuck you too, he thinks, the effort of trying to keep positive finally failing him.
“I’ll see you there,” he says, and slams the passenger door.
17
Nathan’s bedroom is painted blue with a repeating pattern of a white sailing boat stencilled around the walls, across the headboard of the single bed, and on the open door of the wardrobe. Some of his child-sized clothes are hanging inside, and on top are boxes of toys and half a dozen jigsaws. On the wall is a framed certificate for what Jeanie thinks says hockey, with a length of Christmas tinsel around the top. There’s a desk with a computer monitor and keyboard, both with clothes heaped over them. Stacks of DVDs and CDs crowd the windowsill. A giant orange plastic ball is wedged into the corner together with what looks like a small trampoline.
Bridget hugs Jeanie, while Stu makes another journey to the van for the boxes and cases. The house, a pebble-dashed 1950s ex–council house in between two others, has been swallowed up by the new estate built on the edge of Inkbourne. Once, the view from the windows would have been of fields, but now from Nathan’s bedroom window, Jeanie can see other people’s neat gardens and the same modern house repeated over and over, only the colour of the doors distinguishing one from another.
“I tried to reason with him,” Bridget says. Jeanie slides her eyes away. “He wouldn’t bloody listen.” Bridget shakes her head. “And then when Stu had a go, ranting and raving at him, Nathan just dug his heels in. Said he wasn’t going to do what his dad told him to do, ever again. Why doesn’t it surprise me that he’s mixed up in this? Working for the Rawsons?” Jeanie looks at the carpet, which is also blue and in need of a vacuum. “He used to be such a lovely little boy.”
Upstairs in Bridget’s house there are two bedrooms and a green-tiled bathroom—“Be careful with the hot water,” Bridget says as she shows Jeanie around. “It doesn’t last long.” Downstairs is a lounge with a sofa and two peach-coloured armchairs with enormous padded cushions attached to the arms, all crowding round a giant flat-screen television. Beyond this room, at the back of the house, is the kitchen and an area which Bridget calls the sunroom. It’s hard to see what furniture and carpeting there is in here and the rest of the house because every surface, other than the lounge armchairs, is covered with celebrity magazines, stacks of the local paper, unopened post, jam jars with paintbrushes sticking out of them, plastic storage boxes filled with unknown things, electric fans and portable radiators, an airer collapsing under the weight of the bedding piled on it, an ironing board with a plastic washing basket on top filled with what looks like a dismantled chainsaw.
“That’s us,” Bridget says, lighting a cigarette when they reach the kitchen, the only room Jeanie has been in before. “Stu reckons I should retire this year, but what for? Cleaning and ironing? No thank you.” They stand together at the kitchen sink; a frying pan and plates smeared with egg fill the washing-up bowl. They watch Maude outside, digging in what once might have been flower beds, now overgrown with weeds. Bridget puts her cigarette in her mouth and raps hard on the window. “Oy!” she calls, and Maude stops to look at them and then goes back to her digging. “Best keep her outside,” Bridget says.
When Stu has finished unloading the van, he comes into the kitchen and says, “Fancy a cup of tea, love?” He puts his arm around Bridget and gives one of her breasts an affectionate squeeze with a loud honking.
She laughs and pushes him off. “I could murder a cup of tea, Stu-pot,” she says.
Jeanie moves out of their way and Stu fills the kettle.
By seven, Julius still hasn’t arrived on his bike. Bridget and Stu have a conversation about what to eat, and Bridget takes four chicken kievs out of the freezer and puts them in the oven with a tray of chips. Jeanie brings down the food she took with her from the cottage: the remains of a jar of homemade jam, chicken Bisto, the last of the bread, eggs, vegetables from the garden, and the half-used tub of margarine.
While Bridget turns the food in the oven and puts some peas in the microwave, Jeanie loads the dishwasher with the crockery from the sink, guessing at where things go, and tries not to make a nuisance of herself. She thinks about where Julius might be—in the pub or round at Shelley Swift’s. He’s allowed to do what he wants, of course, just as she is. They dish up the food, saving some for Julius, put the plates on trays, and Stu and Bridget carry theirs into the lounge. Before she follows, Jeanie takes Bridget’s purse out from her handbag where it hangs over a chair. In the wallet section there are too many notes for her to count. Deep in her cardigan pocket is the twenty pounds she found in Dot’s coat. She takes it out, stuffs it in with the rest of Bridget’s money, and puts the purse back in the handbag.
“Come on,” Bridget calls from the lounge. “It’s starting.” Jeanie takes her own tray of food in. Bridget and Stu are each low down in an armchair with their trays on their laps. The television is on and the opening sequence of a programme is flashing on the screen. “Clear yourself a space on the end of the sofa,” Bridget says, and Jeanie puts her tray on the floor, moves what looks like a set of curtains onto the back of the sofa, and then sits. They watch a police drama about two detectives in an English seaside town and a boy who was murdered on a beach. His family spend the episode not looking at each other, not touching.
“Doesn’t she look like Jeanie?” Bridget says, watching the telly.
“W
ho?” Stu says.
“The policewoman.”
“Detective,” Stu corrects.
“Not so grey, of course, but a little bit toothy. Nice with it, though.” Bridget turns to look at Jeanie. “And the detective’s younger.”
Stu leans forwards in his chair, craning round Bridget to get a look. Jeanie stares back at them without speaking.
“Thinner,” Stu says.
Blue-and-white tape encloses the crime scene, guarded by a policeman whose only job seems to be to lift it high enough for the detectives to duck under. Bridget and Stu are on episode three or four and it takes half an hour for Jeanie to work out what’s going on. The detectives arrest a man, ask him to undress, and collect his belongings in a plastic bag. They swab the inside of his mouth with a giant cotton bud and take his fingerprints.
“He won’t be the murderer,” Stu says.
“Too early in the series for it to be him,” Bridget says. “No one’s ever caught that quickly.”
They eat their food without taking their eyes from the screen. Periodically one of them turns to the other when something surprising happens and says, “Oh my God!” When the programme reaches the end and the music plays, Stu says, “How about another episode, Bridgey?”
She smiles. “Go on then.” Bridget selects the next episode with the remote control while Stu stands in front of Jeanie and for a moment she can’t work out what he wants, but then he reaches down, picks up her tray from her lap, and takes it out to the kitchen.
“Cup of tea?” he calls.
“Go on then,” Bridget calls back.
Jeanie makes dinner for Maude—boiled vegetables with chicken gravy and a raw egg cracked in, the shell scrunched on top. She seems to have got used to it. Jeanie finds a trowel and collects the dog’s mess, burying it in the earth behind Stu’s garage. When she glances towards the house, Bridget is at the kitchen window, smoking and watching. In the disused greenhouse Jeanie makes a bed from some sacking, the dog whining as Jeanie pushes her nose to get the door closed. Back inside, when Jeanie opens the dishwasher to empty it, the cups and bowls are full of sludgy water and grit. She tips them out in the sink and washes the dirty items again by hand. Bridget sits on a high stool up against the kitchen counter and points with the lit end of her cigarette to one cupboard or another, indicating where everything goes. The bottom of the dishwasher is slimy with something Jeanie doesn’t want to look at too closely. Perhaps, she thinks crazily, she could clean the house, Julius could do the garden, and they can all live here together. She would like to live in a house with a bathroom, an indoor toilet and central heating, a working fridge, maybe even a television, but already she knows she can’t stay long with Bridget and Stu. Somehow, she’ll get herself and her brother back to the cottage.
Unsettled Ground Page 13
