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.”
As they walk back to the caravan, Jeanie thinks she might be drunk, although she doesn’t know what being drunk feels like and she only had a couple of the drinks that were bought for them. She has a giddy, giggly excitement which makes her want to talk and laugh. She and Julius debate each song they played and the audience’s reaction, singing snippets loudly and shoving each other about. There is a full moon and by its light the wasteland is transformed into a charming spinney. The rubbish is invisible and only the trees and bushes, in black and white, remain. They stop by the piano. Rain has crazed and flaked the varnish, water has penetrated the top and the key lid; some notes don’t play and those that do have a hard quality, without resonance. But Julius puts his fingers on the keyboard and they sing nonsense songs together—“There Was a Frog Living in a Well” and “The Herring’s Head”—songs they sang as children with their parents. They belt out the words, making up those they’ve forgotten, unconcerned about the missing notes, and stopping only when Maude’s excited barking from inside the caravan becomes too frenzied to ignore.
25
In the week that follows, Julius’s exhilaration from the pub gig keeps him going, even though he learns from Holloway that the man who wanted to come and hear them play didn’t make it. Next time, Julius thinks. The job in the dairy continues but now he cycles home between milkings and works on sealing the caravan skylight and the places where the rain gets in, mending the awning and digging a pit latrine a little way off in the woods. He feels an unlimited energy buzzing through him which won’t let him sit still. While he works, he thinks up band names and wonders whether a third player would be helpful or a disruption. He imagines them playing in a bigger venue, touring or headlining a folk festival, and when he looks out at the crowd there’s a woman in the front row with freckled skin, and they can’t take their eyes off each other. A couple of evenings, he cycles to the pub after work and has a few pints, spending his milking money, and on another he visits Shelley Swift in her flat.
Julius returns to the caravan with plank offcuts and a sheet of corrugated iron that he has come across and stashes them away, together with the old wheelbarrow which he drags out of the nettles, thinking that he’ll buy a new tyre for it, patch up the rusting bottom. One evening he uses Jenks’s smartphone to find out about the law on adverse possession, and imagines living in the spinney for twelve years and claiming it as their own. He decides not to mention this to Jeanie yet, but thinks he must get around to painting the word Private on a board and nailing it to a tree near to the lay-by. Jeanie no longer talks about looking for somewhere else to live and he thinks she’s getting used to their place in the woods. Although she often goes to the cottage to work in the garden, she also scrubs the caravan, sweeps the little clearing they’ve made in front, and cooks on the two-ring stove. One lunchtime when they have a moment to stop, they sit outside on two plastic garden chairs he’s salvaged from a skip, and as though he hasn’t looked at his sister for a long time, he is surprised at how content she appears. He remembers the same expression on his mother’s face at intervals which sometimes seemed to last years. There had been periods though when Dot had clearly been unhappy, and he’d never thought to ask her about it. What went on in people’s heads was a mystery to him. He remembered his parents speaking to each other through him and Jeanie: “Ask your mother to pass the butter.” “Tell your father to take his boots off in the house.” And another time his mother had sent him to the field where his father was working, with a note folded in half. Julius shoved it in his pocket and dawdled. He was looking for a burst of feathers in the long grass that would show where a bird had been caught by a predator. If he was lucky, the head would have been left and he’d take it home to boil up and add to his collection. When he finally reached the field where his father was supposed to be working, he wasn’t there. Julius took out the note and read his mother’s message: If you don’t get back here now and mend the yard gate like you promised, I’m going to leave you. Julius felt sick. He ran all the way home, ready to explain to his mother that it was his own fault for taking so long. In the kitchen, Jeanie was playing the piano and his parents were dancing together around the table and laughing. Later, after his father died, Julius took his collection of bird skulls, all thirty-three of them, each neatly labelled with the species and where it had been found, and threw them away.
Jeanie keeps the radio on while she works, listening to a dramatization of Vanity Fair, a piece about the evolution of the earliest language, an interview about the impact of Brexit on organic milk prices. She makes new curtains and seat covers, sewing them by hand from a patchwork of fabric scraps. She listens and she sews and tries not to think about what winter will be like in the caravan with no heating, the outside latrine, the mud and the wet. By then she will have found a way to get them home, she’s sure of it. She doesn’t mention her thoughts to Julius. Only during the nights when she can’t sleep does her anger towards him return. Then she refuses to use the latrine and instead clumps out of bed and pees hard and furiously into a bucket behind the curtain she’s hung across the middle of the caravan, knowing the noise will wake him.
Most days she goes with Maude to the cottage. Nothing really is changed since Ed took the chickens, except that someone—Rawson, she assumes—must have been inside because the back door is bolted again. She can’t stop herself from peering through the windows and remembering her life as it once was.
The garden demands her attention, everything ripening together: thumb-sized radishes, the white clouds of early summer cauliflowers, hairy gooseberries, beetroots strangely chilly with their damp, tapered bottoms. If she can find a few glass jars from somewhere, she will boil the beetroots and pickle them with some eggs. Digging up the first early potatoes is her greatest joy every year. Pushing the fork into the soft soil around the yellowing potato plant and unearthing a hoard of pale treasure. She sits on the warmed ground with a dozen in her hands remembering how her mother would have nudged her playfully with the fork and said there was plenty more work to be done and she should stop dreaming over a few new potatoes. She starts taking vegetables to Max again; there are too many for her and Julius to eat, and at some point she will have paid off the debt her mother accrued.
She goes to Saffron’s house two afternoons as agreed, and although Jeanie stops to have a cup of tea with her and her daughter, she doesn’t tell Saffron about where she’s living. Saffron continues to write Jeanie cheques which she takes home in her plastic bag that she uses instead of the handbag she’s never found.
Jeanie learns the topography of the spinney and walks its triangular boundary in fifteen minutes. The caravan is about in the middle, the lay-by and the entrance are on the shortest side, and the backs of a few gardens adjoin the narrowest corner at the wire fence. No one sees her. No one is looking. She is invisible; to Julius too, she often thinks. Sometimes he is home later than she might have expected but she doesn’t ask where he’s been or who with. He attaches a bolt to the inside of the caravan door and another with a padlock, for the outside, and gradually she comes to feel safe, sitting in the evenings next to the small firepit they’ve made, on one of the plastic chairs. Jeanie waits for Bridget to visit, and at first when she doesn’t Jeanie is offended, but then she thinks that perhaps they have spent enough time in each other’s company for a while.
The steps outside the caravan are new. Julius made them from plank offcuts and by laying bricks in the ground as a foundation to keep them stable. Jeanie sits on them in a patch of sunlight with a bowl on her lap, peeling the last of the old potatoes and watching a butterfly hovering over the pink-and-white flowers of a dog rose. The radio is on in the caravan, tuned to a programme that repeats the best of the week, and she listens to a snippet about a Japanese garden designer’s favourite songs. Julius didn’t come home in between milkings today, and now
she has a pan of water on the boil for the potatoes and for him to wash with when he returns. There was a day when she was in the village shop and smelled a sour odour; perhaps, she thought, some fruit had rolled under the display and lay rotting and undiscovered. She passed a man along one of the narrow aisles and saw him turn away with his face screwed up in disgust, and she realized that the smell came from her, from her clothes. Now she washes a few items every day in the tiny sink, using hot water from the kettle, hanging the clothes on a line outside if it’s dry or draped around the caravan if not.
She stops peeling when she hears the throat-clearing cough of a couple of dirt bikes. The noise isn’t coming from the main road, whose whoosh of traffic she no longer notices unless she listens for it, but from the entrance to the spinney. The bikes don’t go past the lay-by; instead the whining becomes louder, closer, among the trees, and with it, whoops and shouting. She puts down the bowl and stands, clicking her fingers to call Maude to her. There is laughing, more shouting and the engines ticking over, and after a pause, a run of notes on the piano and then a thump which she feels through her feet, at the same time as she hears the jangle of piano strings. Her hand goes to her chest. Perhaps they, whoever they are—and she has a good idea—will stay near the piano and the old fire patch.
But the engines come closer and she sees two yellow-and-black dirt bikes race past—each with a central section like a wasp’s thorax. Mud and shredded plants fly from the tyres as they turn, skidding into the clearing in front of the caravan. Maude barks, hackles and tail raised. The riders are laughing, calling out to each other as they get off and remove their helmets: Tom on one bike, Nathan on another with Lewis riding pillion. Jeanie moves closer to the caravan, and Maude scurries behind her legs.
“We heard you was out here,” Lewis says. “What a dump.”
He kicks at the washing-up bowl Jeanie has been using and it turns over, water, peelings, and potatoes spilling out. Lewis laughs. Jeanie steps towards the men and lets her anger rise, but Maude is still barking in the corner formed by the caravan and the steps. Jeanie clicks her fingers at her to stop. Now Lewis goes to the washing line where her and Julius’s underwear is pegged out, and he stands behind a pair of tights, sticking his head under the crotch, holding the legs around his chin so that he seems to be wearing a bizarre tan-coloured bonnet.
“Looks like you brought most of your shit with you though,” Tom says, strutting about. Jeanie tries to keep in mind what Bridget said about his mother.
“Or what was left of it,” Lewis says. He smiles as he speaks, and Jeanie knows for certain who has taken what remained outside the cottage.
Nathan stands in the clearing, looking around him, taking it in. He’s wearing leather trousers and a motorbike jacket. His hair is roughed up from where he removed the helmet and there is blond stubble along his jaw.
“I’d like you to leave now,” she says, low and steady.
“She’d like us to leave now.” Lewis’s poor impersonation of Jeanie has him doubled over with laughter.
“But we only just got here,” Tom says. His nose and eyes are too big for his face, as though he has some growing to do. “We want a tour of your beautiful mansion. Don’t we, Nath?” He puts a foot on the bottom step. Maude growls but it is only for effect.
Beside the plastic chairs, Nathan hesitates, and chooses to sit on a log as though he needs an invitation to take a proper seat. “Yeah,” he says, although he doesn’t sound enthusiastic. He draws his packet of tobacco from a pocket and starts to roll a cigarette.
“Just get back on your bikes and go, and we’ll say no more about it,” Jeanie says. Tom takes another step up. “You can’t go in there.” She snatches at the sleeve of his hoodie.
“Hey, lady!” Tom pulls his arm away. “What have you got in here that you’re so bothered about?” Then he’s inside and Jeanie can’t stop him. She looks from one to the other of the two men outside, trying to assess what they could do without her watching, then she follows Tom indoors.
“Like a TARDIS, innit?” He strides the two steps from Julius’s bed to the table and back, all the time looking around. She turns off the gas under the boiling water and he takes the photograph of her parents from the wall where Jeanie has hung it next to Angel’s painting, looks at it, and puts it back, tipping a corner so that it dangles crookedly. There are still voices coming from the radio, and Tom moves the dial until the conversation between the garden designer and presenter changes to a static hiss. He flicks up the long cushion on a bench seat as though they might be in the habit of keeping things tucked underneath. Below is a finger hole to access the storage space. He pulls the lid up, revealing their spare saucepans, plastic bags, wellington boots, and he lets the lid fall with a clatter. Moving around the space, he slides open a cupboard above the cooker, lifts the lid to the sink with one finger and lets it drop. “I heard you got more than cups and plates in this shithole.” Beside the cooker, he squats and opens the cupboard to look inside and, when he stands, kicks it shut. China rattles.
Jeanie turns off the radio. “My brother will be back soon, and he won’t be happy to find you here.” She doesn’t know when Julius will be home, whether he’ll come straight from work or go somewhere first.
“I wouldn’t want to make that batshit brother of yours unhappy. I see him now and then, you know, making a couple of pints last all day in the Plough.”
She will not rise to his needling. Tom takes a step towards the door and she exhales, but his move is a feint and he stops to lean against the jamb, blocking her exit.
“I used to come to these woods years ago,” he says. “Before they chopped down the trees and built them new houses. Shooting rabbits, pigeons, whatever I could find. I might come out here again one of these days with my gun. Still some things worth shooting, I reckon.” He straightens his right arm and points it at her, forming his hand into the shape of a gun—two fingers out, two curled in, thumb cocked—and then he turns and aims out of the door at Maude. He jerks his arm. “Pkwoo, pkwoo,” he says, firing. Jeanie flinches and Tom puts his arm down and casually looks around. “So, you can tell me where it is and we can bugger off.”
“Where what is?”
He yanks at a drawer and it comes all the way out, the contents—cutlery, potato masher, spoons, and the poker—crashing to the floor. “Whoops,” he says. “What a mess.”
“Get out!” Jeanie grabs the drawer from him and holds it up in front of her like a shield.
“I’ve heard you’ve got a big wad of money stashed away somewhere in here. A brown envelope full of cash.”
She thinks about when she gave the money to Ed in the pickup, how she’d turned away. Perhaps not far enough. Or when she waved the envelope at Mrs. Rawson across her kitchen island. “We haven’t got any money, you idiot. Do you think we’d be living here if we did?”
“Takes all sorts. I thought maybe you get a kick out of shitting in the woods.”
From outside she hears a beat, a regular hollow rhythm, and she pushes past him to the door, pressing the drawer to her chest. Lewis is sitting on a plastic chair with the upturned washing-up bowl between his knees. With straight fingers he is beating out a steady tempo. “Where’s the money? Where’s the money? Where’s the money?” he chants. Nathan is still sitting on the log smoking his cigarette and looking at the ground.
“Stop that,” Jeanie says to Lewis. “Stop it! There isn’t any money.” She goes up to him and pulls the bowl away so that she’s holding it in one hand and the drawer in the other, as though these are the only things she’s managed to save from a burning house or a sinking ship. Tom comes down the steps and Maude backs herself into the space under the caravan.
“Jeanie? Hello, Jeanie?” a woman’s voice calls, and a second later, Bridget, shiny-faced and with her handbag over her shoulder, arrives in front of the caravan. “So, this is where you’ve been hiding for the past two weeks,” she says as though she’s been practising what to say, uneasy with the fact
that she hasn’t visited before. In the next instant she takes in everything else: the shabby caravan, the bikes, the two young men, and, lastly, her son. Her expression moves through surprise, to confusion, to something that Jeanie struggles to read, suspicion perhaps.
“Mum,” Nathan says. He throws down his cigarette and squashes it under a boot.
“What are you doing here?” she says. “And Lewis? And you too, Tom.” She turns her head one way and then the other. Nathan’s friends nod to her, mumble their greetings. Only then does Bridget notice that Jeanie is holding a washing-up bowl and a drawer. “What’s going on?”
Tom moves to his bike, puts on his helmet which he left on the seat, swings a leg over, and starts it up. “I’ve got to get off, Mrs. Clements,” he says above the noise of the engine.
“Wait a minute,” Bridget says.
Tom turns to Jeanie and smiles. “Very kind of you to let us come and see your new place, Miss Seeder. I’ll definitely be back soon.”
Jeanie clutches the bowl and the drawer closer. They watch him leave.
“Jeanie?” Bridget says. “Are you okay?” She goes towards her, but on the ground in front of the caravan’s steps the six peeled potatoes make her stop. Their pale exposed insides are smeared with dirt and two of them have been crushed into the earth by a heel. She looks from Jeanie to the mess, to Nathan.
“I’d better be off too,” Lewis says, and when he’s beside the bike seems surprised that he needs Nathan in order to leave.
Nathan stands and walks around Jeanie and Bridget, leaving a wide gap, as though he thinks his mother might reach out and grab him.
“Nathan,” Bridget says. “What’s going on here? Why have you come to see Jeanie?”
“Let him go,” Jeanie says. She wants it over with.
“See you, Mum.” Nathan tugs his helmet on, climbs on the bike, and starts it up.
“What have you and Tom been up to? You get off that thing and tell me right now.” Her voice rises.
Unsettled Ground Page 18
