“What funeral home are you using?” the man asks, looking at her over the top of his glasses.
Jeanie stares at him, seeing Dot in her sliced dress on the table in the parlour.
“If you haven’t decided yet, that’s no problem. Do you know which crematorium or church?”
She thinks of the plot near the apple trees which she and Julius marked out the night before, and which he says he might be able to start digging today.
“I can put it down as undecided, but you do need to let us know as soon as you’ve reached a decision. I’ll be giving you a green form today which you must pass on to the person who buries or cremates your mother’s body, and they must return the bottom part to us.”
He touches a few more keys on the keyboard while Jeanie waits, until eventually he says, “I just need you to check that everything I’ve entered is correct.” A printer behind the desk starts sucking in paper. He puts the sheet in front of Jeanie and she stares at it, the words incomprehensible. Surreptitiously she presses the fingers of her right hand under her left breast, feeling for the tapping of the creature. Can she be suddenly ill? she wonders. Unexpectedly indisposed? A mist gathers in between the paper and her eyes and she blinks to refocus.
“Sorry?” Jeanie says.
The man points and reads, upside down. Upside down! thinks Jeanie. He goes through each line and she nods. “If you’re happy with that, I sign here.” He takes the paper back and signs, and then turns it to her once more. “And you sign here.” She peers at the page and then back up at him. He is holding out his ink pen. “Careful with it, it can be temperamental.”
“Sorry?” Jeanie repeats.
He moves the pen towards her, and she takes it. She looks again at the page: the printed words, the man’s signature. They swim around, dancing and merging. She puts the nib on the paper, conscious of the watching registrar. Her fingers are too far back, the pen held too lightly; it slips but before it can fall she moves her hand, pressing so that the ink spits, and from the corner of her eye she sees the registrar wince, but a line comes out which zigzags and sputters across the page. She keeps her head lowered and lifts the pen from the paper, waiting to be accused of incompetence, but the registrar takes the pen from her and turns the paper back to himself. He makes no comment about the signature.
“Would you like a copy of the death certificate?” he asks.
“Isn’t that what I came to get?” she says, confused.
All Jeanie hears is that a copy of the certificate costs eleven pounds. She doesn’t have that on her. Julius might have some change from the twenty pounds, and doesn’t Shelley Swift owe him some money? He’s working today, cleaning gutters, but when will he be paid? A trickle of sweat runs down her back, her thighs and buttocks are hot, she’s afraid that when she stands, she will leave a line of condensation on the seat. She wants to get out of there, her mother was right about officialdom always trying to get something out of you. The registrar explains that another form which doesn’t cost anything will do the same job. And then he says it’s all done and hands her a folder containing various bits of paper and shows her to the door. She is on the pavement outside breathing real air, high on her success, as though she has got away with it, escaped, and then someone calls her name. When she turns, the registrar is coming towards her with a glossy leaflet in his hand. “I forgot to include this in your folder,” he says. “It’s about what you need to do next. Do you have someone at home who can read it to you, or we could—” She snatches the leaflet, and without looking at him, she shoves it in her bag and strides away.
When she gets back to the car a bird has made a mess on the windscreen and Bridget isn’t there. Jeanie hovers nearby but not too close, worrying that a traffic warden will come and tell her she needs to drive away or buy another ticket. Bridget finally arrives, trotting in bursts and breathlessly apologizing, carrying bags. Jeanie hasn’t managed to do her food shopping. In the car, Bridget puts the windscreen wipers on, and the bird shit smears across Jeanie’s side, worsening with each swish of the blade.
“I was thinking about getting a job,” Jeanie says when they’re on the road home.
“What about the garden and the chickens?” Bridget says, sucking on a Polo.
“Didn’t you tell me I should get a job?”
“I don’t see how you’re going to manage that enormous garden on your own. All those vegetables. I never knew how you and Dot did it, the weeding, the digging, it’s no wonder—”
Jeanie stops her. “Something that pays more regularly than supplying vegetables to the deli and the B&B.”
“Is it the cost of the funeral you’re worrying about?”
“We’re not having a funeral,” Jeanie says, but Bridget isn’t listening.
“I couldn’t believe the cost of Dad’s. Bloody rip-off, if you ask me. I could send Stu round. He’d help, sort out a decent coffin and transport maybe. His mate Ed helped with Dad’s. I’d have to ask Stu though about having a body in the back of his van. That’d be a new one.” She gives a gruff laugh and then looks at Jeanie apologetically.
Jeanie is offended—the thought of her mother in the back of Stu’s van. Tins of old paint and his other rubbish pushed to the side.
“A local job,” Jeanie says. “If you hear of anything.”
“I heard the brickworks were looking for someone to help with admin. You’d be in the same office as Shelley Swift, though. Can you type?” She laughs and then looks horrified, the implication of her question betrayed on her face. Now that Dot is dead, only Julius openly knows that Jeanie struggles to read and write. But she is sure Bridget must suspect it.
“No,” Jeanie says, nettled, remembering the registrar’s fingers pecking at the keyboard. “I can’t type.”
Bridget stares straight out through the windscreen.
Occasionally Jeanie sees these problems as her own failings and is ashamed, but most of the time she is cross that the world is designed for people who can read and write with ease. When she recovered from one bout of rheumatic fever and returned to school, it seemed that the children in her class had suddenly learned to pick up a pencil and make patterns of circles and lines that everyone else understood. She was put in the remedial class for reading and writing, but the patterns and the process never stayed still for her, and after a while she couldn’t be bothered to keep trying. History she liked, learning about how the Great Fire of London started, colouring in pictures of the houses along the Thames, her red crayon worn to a stub. At home, when she told Dot about it, her mother replied, “When I was your age I knew how to start the fire in the grate and how to bake a cake without it burning. That was good enough for me.”
A few times the school bobby came around asking questions about Jeanie’s poor attendance when her couple of days’ absence had lengthened to ten without a note from the doctor. Each time Jeanie had managed to be on the sofa tucked in under a blanket, and after a few words and a wagging finger the school bobby had gone away. There weren’t any books in the cottage, although occasionally her father read the newspaper, the old pages of which were used to stuff the window frames in winter. He tried to encourage her a few times: sitting her on his knee and holding the newspaper out in front of them. She enjoyed being enclosed in their papery tent, but she had no desire for the words, and he had little patience. Other parents may have read to their children before bed but in the Seeder cottage they played music together before she and Julius brushed their teeth at the scullery sink and went upstairs. Jeanie left school as soon as she could, at sixteen, without any qualifications.
In the car, Bridget says, “Jobs are all advertised online these days. Catering assistants and whatnot. You could always pop into a library, they’d help you do an internet search.”
Jeanie looks out of the window; they’re coming into the village. She has never been into a library and she never will—all those books snapping at her. She can’t use the internet, go online, search for work, complete an application form,
send an email. Not even, and perhaps especially not, with a librarian’s help. The keeper of the words. And besides, she would have to buy a ticket and catch the bus into Devizes or Hungerford to get to a library.
“Shall I take you back to the cottage or do you need to pick anything up from the village?” Bridget asks.
“The cottage. Thanks,” Jeanie says quietly. She’s too drained to think about what groceries they need and what they can afford.
When they’re outside, Bridget says, more kindly, “The shop has some of those cards up in the window. Old people selling stuff, like those great fat tellies that no one wants any more. Sometimes there are adverts for cleaners or gardeners.”
Jeanie knows she should invite Bridget in, to thank her for taking her to the register office, for all her help, but she also knows that if she were to make Bridget a cup of tea the milk would separate in the hot liquid and form into lumps because the fridge is no longer cold, and she doesn’t want Bridget to see the hole that Julius will hopefully have started digging. Bridget doesn’t show any inclination to get out of the car.
Inside, Jeanie calls for Julius and when she gets no reply she collapses on the sofa. Maude jumps up beside her, licking her face and hands, until Jeanie catches the dog and wraps her arms around Maude’s neck, pulling her in close, breathing in her doggy-rivery smell.
Jeanie builds up the fire in the kitchen, boils the kettle on the range, and makes herself a cup of hot water. She takes it into the parlour, the dog following. Her mother’s covered body lies on the table and the room is chilly and smells of rosemary.
“What are we going to do?” she says. She might be addressing the body, or Maude. One of them doesn’t reply, the other tilts her head and stares, waiting for Jeanie to provide the answer.
8
In the shop, Julius dithers. He’s low on tobacco and rolling papers and he wants—no, needs—a pint in the pub. What to do with the money from the guttering job? If he wants to get any work, he’ll need credit for his mobile phone. He buys ten pounds’ worth and some tobacco. In the pub he plugs his mobile in to charge. He sits at the bar next to Jenks, sips at a pint of bitter to make it last, and rolls a thin cigarette.
“Heard about your mum.” Jenks, a scrawny Scotsman, whom Julius has rarely seen out of the public bar of the Plough, tips his glass towards his mouth and Julius sees his top lip reach out to the beer like a snail feeling its way. “What a bummer,” Jenks says when he’s swallowed.
“Yup,” Julius says, licking his cigarette paper, sticking it down. “Thanks.” He waves the cigarette at Jenks and goes out the back to smoke. He has a blister on his palm from digging and he rubs the bubble of it across his lips, feeling the fluid move beneath the skin. He considers if there’s a legal requirement for the depth of a grave; he wonders again whether they’re allowed to do what they’re doing. Sod it, he doesn’t care if they aren’t. He’s taken off the turf and has gone down a spade’s depth, which isn’t enough. Won’t be enough for Jeanie, and it would be an utter cock-up if the foxes started digging, or Maude. He rubs the bristles along his jaw, smokes his cigarette, thinks about what the Rawsons say is owing, again sees Rawson shout nothing up the stairs to his wife, remembers the contents of the envelopes in his coat pocket. Fuck it, he thinks. Fuck it all.
When he’s back at the bar and another ten minutes have passed, Jenks says, “You got a text. From that bit of totty who lives over the fish and chip shop. Something about a boiler.”
“Bloody hell, Jenks. Read everything why don’t you? Shall I bring in my diary next time?”
Jenks smirks, and after checking his phone, Julius finishes off the rest of his beer in one open-throated gulp.
Boilers aren’t his specialism—he doesn’t really have a specialism—and he doesn’t have his tool rucksack with him, but he wheels his bike through the village to Shelley Swift’s.
She’s wearing a leopard-print top and a denim skirt when she answers the door, and lilac lipstick that she surely doesn’t put on for work.
“Bloody boiler. There’s no hot water,” she says as he follows her up the stairs.
The boiler is on a wall in the kitchen, and as soon as he inspects the hole in the cover, he sees that the pilot light has gone out. He pushes two buttons, the gas ignites, a tiny blue flame shows through the hole, and they hear the boiler kick in. “You’re amazing,” Shelley Swift says and when he turns, she doesn’t move back. Her nose and mouth are out of focus, but her eyes, lashes clotted with makeup and hazel irises with a circumference of a deeper brown, catch him and hold him. He wants to kiss her but feels he is too tall, too stooped, all elbows and knees. He is unused to an encounter like this, out of practice.
“Can I use your toilet?” he says, and she laughs that husky laugh and lets him go. In the bathroom under the window is a shelf unit crammed with books. He pulls one out. Just Like Her Mother the title reads in raised silver letters. Behind the words is a close-up of some scrubby bushes and a patch of bare soil. Just visible in the earth is a woman’s ear with an earring through the lobe. He shoves the book back.
On the landing at the top of her stairs, as he is saying that she should text him if anything else goes wrong, Shelley Swift kisses him, her mouth slightly open, her tongue touching his lips, and he’s aware of the waxy greasiness of her lipstick. He doesn’t exactly kiss her in return, too shocked by the feel and the taste of her. When they pull apart, she laughs once more, and he almost runs down the stairs and out through the door. All the way home he rides his bike without holding on as though he were thirteen again, using his knees to steer so that he can hold his fingers to his nose and smell the lemony scent of Shelley Swift’s bathroom soap.
When Julius is still in the pub, Jeanie is at the end of the garden scything nettles from around the bench. She has sharpened the blade to a shine and has just bent again when she hears someone calling. A man. She stands up straight, arches her back the other way to stretch the tightness out of it, and sees Stu coming towards her. Christ, she hadn’t thought that Bridget would actually send her husband. He is already through the yard and the gate, passing the apple trees and the cherries, whose blossom has fallen in the last few days, precipitated by the snow, spreading pink and white confetti over the vegetable beds. Near the oldest apple tree—a Cox’s orange pippin which is gnarled and almost white with lichen—Julius has cut away the top layer of rough grass turf, placing it upside down in a heap. It will make fine compost. The hole is a foot deep so far and the reddish ends of the tree’s roots feather out from the straight sides. To Jeanie, it is clear that the earth hole is a grave.
Stu is a big man. Once, she’d had the misfortune to see him up a ladder with his belly, swarthy with black hair, overhanging the waistband of his shorts. He only ever wears shorts, even in winter. As he approaches, he removes his baseball cap, revealing his high forehead, the top half of which rarely sees the sun and is glaringly white. What remains of his hair sticks out at crazy angles. The cap, which Jeanie knows has Stu Clements Painter and Decorator printed across it, is greasy around the rim. Stu doesn’t only keep to painting and decorating, he will do most things if the money is right. Now, he dips his head and says he’s sorry to hear about her mother, and he doesn’t mention the plot of bare soil, it’s probably just another vegetable bed to him. Maude gets up from where she’s lying, sniffs at Stu’s hand, and then goes back to her place—she knows Stu.
“Bridget asked me to call in,” he says.
Jeanie nods. She doesn’t want to have to talk to this man, wants to get rid of him as soon as possible. Leaving the scythe behind, she walks to the house, keeping him on her left so that he won’t see the grave.
“I’ll be able to get a coffin to you on Friday if I can take the measurements now. It’s my mate Ed who sells them, but I can sort it for you,” he says. “She’s here still, isn’t she?”
“I’m not sure—” Jeanie starts.
“Or tomorrow if that works better.”
“We might use
a funeral director after all,” she says. She takes him through the gate into the yard, a couple of chickens clucking and scattering. “Sorry if you’ve had a wasted journey.”
“Is that right?” he says from behind her. “Only, Bridget said you’re having some problems. She said things are a bit tight, what with the funeral and everything.”
Jeanie feels her cheeks flush at the thought that Bridget would discuss their financial situation with anyone, including her husband. Who else is she telling that they can’t afford to bury their mother? The whole village must know. Jeanie presses her thumb to her opposite wrist and pushes down hard. “I don’t know what she meant by that,” she says, not turning. She was planning on taking Stu round the front of the cottage and showing him on his way, but now, affronted and needing to prove that she has no idea what he’s talking about, she goes in through the back door, Stu following and Maude coming along behind.
“She’s in the parlour,” Jeanie says, taking him through the kitchen and past the front door. For a moment she watches him standing beside the covered body, and then she returns to the kitchen. After a few minutes she hears a cough in the doorway.
Jeanie is stabbing at the fire with a stick—they have mislaid the poker—so that she appears busy when Stu comes in and not as though she has been listening and imagining him with his tape measure. She stands upright.
“Ed’s got a nice bit of pine in his workshop,” Stu says, tucking a small notebook and pencil into a back pocket of his shorts. The soft part of his baseball cap is stuffed into the other. He comes to stand beside the range to warm himself.
Unsettled Ground Page 6