Unsettled Ground

by Claire Fuller

  She hurries past the farm—she hasn’t seen Rawson in the week and a half that she’s been sleeping in the old dairy. The grass is long down the middle of the track but now she sees that it has been swept forwards, showing its shiny undersides like the nap on a strip of velour and pointing towards the cottage. Stu’s van is parked outside, and with a lurch of her heart she is sure he must have brought Bridget over with news from the hospital. She thinks about turning round and going somewhere else, but she carries on, past the van and its open driver’s window. Neither Stu nor Bridget is inside. She knows too that her time is up sleeping in the old dairy—they will have discovered that the cottage is locked and empty, may even have seen her bed made out of the two long seat cushions which she brought from the caravan.

  Jeanie goes round the back of the cottage and hears a sound, a yawn perhaps or a cough. Before she is in the yard a dog is running at her, jumping up and making her stagger backwards, a rope leash trailing from the collar. Stu is there, in the yard, waiting for her, sitting on an upturned bucket. He stands and smiles.

  “Maude?” Jeanie says. “Is it Maude?” The dog whimpers and pants with excitement, rear end pulled from one side to the other with the swinging of her tail, until Jeanie collapses to her knees and Maude—rangy legs, big head—tries to climb on her lap.

  “One of my mates found her,” Stu says. “Near Devizes, hanging around an old barn. I brought her straight over, reckoned you could do with some good news. By the look of her, she’s been surviving on what she could catch.”

  “Did you run away?” Jeanie says. “Where have you been, you silly dog? Where have you been?” She laughs and the dog licks Jeanie’s mouth, her eyes, and the tears from her cheeks. Skinnier, smellier, dirty fur matted, but without doubt, Maude.

  33

  At the end of September of the following year, the sun shines for more than a week. It crisps the topsoil and hardens the skins of the harvested squash: Crown Prince and Sweet Dumpling strung like heavy washing on a length of rope between two posts. The light bleaches the wooden planks laid between the vegetable beds and ripens the heads of the couch grass which has burrowed its white fingers under the fencing. The sun turns the tomatoes a deep red, stretching the skins until they split, while its heat dries out the cottage thatch and drives the mice and insects further in, searching for damp shade. There is a tear in the netting of the fruit cage and twice Jeanie has to chase out birds. She needs to repair it. She needs to do a lot of things. She winds her way through the raspberry canes, collecting berries in a bowl she holds in the crook of her arm. When it’s full, she takes it and her trug down through the garden. She passes the apple trees, where grass and wildflowers have grown and only a slight rise in the earth shows that anything might be buried there. She passes through the gate into the yard, scattering chickens. Beside the back door, the rosemary bush is leggier and in need of a trim. Maude lies on her side, panting in the narrow shade thrown down by the cottage, raising her head wearily and lowering it as Jeanie passes by on her way into the scullery.

  Jeanie puts the trug on the drainer: beetroots, tomatoes—the ugly-shaped ones which Max won’t take for the deli—the last of the peas, the first of the leeks. There are voices in the other room, a low, measured conversation. She washes her hands at the sink and calls out, “You okay in there?” There’s no response. She takes a few raspberries and goes through to the old kitchen and turns off the voices on the radio. Only the dresser and the range remain from what was in the room when Jeanie lived here last. The grate is clear and the fire permanently out now that there is a boiler and cooker in the scullery, the room she calls the new kitchen. Stu turned up on the day she moved back in, seven weeks ago, bringing a smaller table than the previous one but with a wipe-clean top—the surface chipped and scratched—and three upright chairs from a house clearance, as well as a mattress which he heaved upstairs. She’s sure that he saw her makeshift bed on the floor of the old dairy the day he returned Maude, and she thinks that perhaps these gifts stem from an unexpressed guilt at his son’s involvement in her predicament. Jeanie prefers to believe this is the reason, rather than pity.

  Stu came again the next day too.

  “Got something else for you in the van,” he said.

  Jeanie followed him out to the track. He opened the back doors and inside was her old chicken coop, dismantled, and some of her chickens.

  “Five of them’s gone,” Stu said. “Ed’s missus wrung a few necks for their Sunday dinners.”

  A week after that, Dr. Holloway arrived with a wing-backed chair in his jeep. He carried it into the cottage and put it by the window where the sofa used to be.

  Now, Julius is sitting in it, facing the front garden.

  “It’s too hot for September,” Jeanie says to him. “I’m going to have to do the watering later or the leaves will fry. At least you’ve got a little breeze coming in.”

  Julius makes a guttural sound, his mouth crooked and working hard.

  “Hot, yes.” She perches on the arm of the chair. “Look what I’ve got for you.” She holds out her hand and shows him the red jewels cupped in her palm. She puts a raspberry between his lips and watches as he rolls it around with his tongue and crushes it against the roof of his mouth.

  A higher-pitched grunt, of surprise and pleasure. His language hasn’t returned yet although she can usually interpret what he means.

  “More?” She laughs. “Here you are then.” She pops in another and another. “That’s it, all gone.” She shows him her empty hands. “I’m going to make us some lunch. Last night’s leftover mashed potatoes fried with leeks and peas, and a bit of scrambled egg? All right?” Jeanie continues to worry about money and bills—the electric, the council tax, how much seed she will be able to afford for next year, the rent which must become due at some point, the rest of the money owing to Stu. Bridget has said she doesn’t need to pay it back, but Jeanie’s never accepted cash handouts and she isn’t going to start now. At least she’s caught up on the debt owed to Max and is earning money from the vegetables he sells, and from working for Saffron.

  “You’ve got a visitor coming this afternoon.” Jeanie pushes herself upright. “Well, better get on.” She speaks as much to herself as to Julius, needing to hear voices in the house, a conversation, even if it is one-sided.

  Later, she sits with him while he feeds himself with a spoon and tries not to intervene when he misses his mouth, only wiping with the dampened muslin after he’s finished. She combs his hair which has grown back apart from along the line of the scar where the bit of his skull was removed and replaced. This morning Jeanie gave him a shave but she’s not good at it yet and she sees a patch of stubble under his jaw, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. The three pitted marks across his face have faded to almost the same colour as the rest of his skin, but his bad eye has a temporary eyeball fitted—a watery pink, the colour of the socket. It no longer holds any horror for Jeanie, and an appointment has been made for him to have his artificial eye fitted, but Jeanie wonders whether in the meantime she should make him a patch. It’s another item on the long list of things she needs to do which she keeps in her head.

  Shelley Swift knocks on the door at five. She’s wearing a polka-dot summer dress with a flared skirt, like something from the fifties, and her lips and eyes are made up, and Jeanie wonders if she thinks she’s going on some sort of date. A while ago, Shelley Swift sent a note to the cottage addressed to Julius, and Saffron read it out to Jeanie. In it, she said she was sorry to hear about his accident—that was the word she used—and she apologized for not visiting him before but she understood that he would be home soon and she would love to come and see him. Dictating a reply via Saffron, Jeanie tried to warn Shelley Swift about what to expect but who is she to deny Julius a visitor?

  “He’s in his chair, sleeping,” Jeanie says. “Come in.”

  Maude, inside now, sniffs and licks their visitor’s hand and then goes to check on Julius.

&n
bsp; Jeanie watches Shelley Swift looking around the old kitchen, holding on to the gold chain of her handbag, and with her orange lips stuck in a smile. If she takes anything in, she would see the wedding photo of Dot and Frank propped up on the dresser beside the bear with the bead eyes holding the ashtray in its paws, and the Toby jug with its handle glued back on, hanging from a hook.

  “Pull up a chair,” Jeanie says. “I’ll make us a cup of tea in a minute. Let me just wake him up.”

  “Is he all right?” Shelley Swift says, still standing.

  “All right?” Jeanie says, pausing to look behind her while she’s bending towards Julius. “He’s had a good day, if that’s what you mean.” She turns back to her brother and strokes his arm. “Time to wake up.”

  Julius makes his moaning deep in his throat, lustful and uninhibited. Jeanie is embarrassed by it and doesn’t look at Shelley Swift. She knows that Julius’s noises sound sexual even if she has never heard another man make a noise like this. She wants to shush him but she knows it’s her problem, this shame, not her brother’s. His good eye flickers open and rolls around, trying to get a look at the body it’s a part of.

  “Shelley Swift has come to see you,” Jeanie says loudly. The doctors are unsure how much his hearing has been affected. Jeanie looks back at the woman and sees that the smile has gone and unmasked horror shows on her face—her mouth is open, her eyes are wide. Afraid that Shelley Swift might scream or faint, Jeanie pulls over an upright chair. “Have a seat,” she repeats, and the woman plonks herself down. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

  Jeanie goes towards the new kitchen but before she has taken a couple of steps, Julius wails and starts to thrash. His head moves from side to side, elbows bent and arms punching. He slides down in his seat until his bottom is hanging off the edge, and Shelley Swift jumps up, her chair screeching back along the stone floor. Maude, who is under the table, gripes, while Jeanie straddles Julius’s waist and puts her arms around his chest, trying to stop him from falling too heavily.

  “Help me, will you,” she says to Shelley Swift, who looks from one side of the room to the other as though hoping Jeanie might be asking someone else.

  “Do you have a cushion?” Shelley Swift says. “A pillow?”

  “Next door.” Jeanie nods towards the parlour. “On his bed.” She lowers her brother to the floor as his seizure starts, cradling his skull until Shelley Swift returns 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 was; she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. In the old k
itchen, DS Kapoor hovered awkwardly with her back against the dresser, not seeming to know where to put her hands—finally settling on clasping them together in front of her skirt. Jeanie wondered how long she’d been in the job. There had been a programme on the radio about problems with fast-tracking detectives: too green, too naive. She accepted a cup of tea—black, no sugar—asked them to call her Alisha, and sat at the table with Jeanie and Bridget, her hands safely in her lap.

  “I’ve come to tell you that Tom has pleaded—” she said to Jeanie and then, seeming to realize that it was Julius she should be talking to, quickly turned to him and added, “guilty.”

  Bridget laid her palms on the table and breathed out a long breath. “Oh, that’s great news.” Jeanie tried to think of what terrible news she must have been expecting.

  “You need to speak up,” Jeanie said to Alisha. “My brother can understand a lot, but his hearing’s not good.”

  Alisha plucked at her shirt collar with her tiny fingers—no bigger than a child’s—and, louder and more slowly, she repeated what she’d said. Julius rocked his head, mashed his teeth and lips together, and made an incoherent noise. Alisha smiled and looked at Jeanie.

  “I don’t think he thinks it is good news,” Jeanie said.

  Alisha cleared her throat. “It’s good news in the sense that it means there won’t be a trial. You won’t have to face that stress. You and Julius won’t see Tom in court, you won’t have to be questioned or relive that night.”

  “And bad in the sense that . . . ?” Jeanie asked.

  “Not bad,” she said. “But it means there will be no opportunity to hear an explanation of what happened. I know some victims and their families want this. And your brother . . .” She looked at Julius, looked away. Jeanie wondered if she was actually going to say that they would never be able to learn it from him.