A Tidy Ending

by Joanna Cannon

When people are asked to describe me, they’ll probably say I keep myself to myself. It’s a silly way of putting it, really, because it makes it sound as if you’ve got something to hide, and I don’t think there’s anything about me that’s interesting enough to be hidden.

Except people forget that keeping yourself to yourself isn’t always a decision you make on your own.

I’m not really sure how Mother would describe me. All I know is you’d have to find yourself a seat, because she’d definitely take her time over it.

‘Poor Linda,’ they’ll say, ‘she always was soft in the head’ or ‘Poor Linda, I often thought she was a little bit strange’, because we like to cast the heroes and the villains quite early on in a story, and then everyone knows where they are.

‘It would be nice,’ I said to a woman sitting next to me in the day room, ‘if life was like that. If you could just cut around the pieces you didn’t care for.’

because he didn’t seem to want someone else’s misery interfering with his egg and chips.

It would’ve been that community support officer, interfering. I thought they were supposed to solve crimes, not send innocent people to learn woodwork.

I’d never thought about murders being seasonal, like daffodils and trips to the seaside.

I remembered it distinctly because it made me anxious. Not because I was worried about not having the extra money, but because I was worried about having the extra Terry.

it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen. I heard one of them say that to a student. It’s an interesting way to look at life, but if that’s the case then most of my own life didn’t happen at all. Although there are definitely parts of it that happened just a little too much.

I’ve done all of those things at home. Every single one of them. The only difference is, no one ever noticed.

That’s the trouble with stopgaps, though. They always end up being not very easy to stop.

‘They always say that,’ I told her. ‘They say something’s routine, but before you know it they’ve put you in the back of their panda car in front of the whole street and taken you in for questioning.’

I’ve never taken anything stronger than an aspirin, but they give out all sorts from that trolley. Things to make you more happy, things to make you less happy. Except it’s someone else deciding exactly how happy you need to be, which is a flaw in the system no one else seems to acknowledge.

Perhaps Mother had spent so much time looking over her shoulder at the past, she’d managed to embroider the whole thing into something she wanted it to be, rather than the thing that it actually was.

The trouble is, if you tell yourself something for long enough, if you apologise for yourself before you’ve even started, if you fasten a few words onto every opinion telling people to ignore anything you might happen to say, before you realise, it becomes knitted into the very soul of who you are and it’s a devil of a job to try and unpick it all.

And besides, I still hadn’t decided yet if I hated them or if I wanted to be one of them.

‘You take care of yourself, Linda,’ he said, and it’s so strange because out of all the words they said to me that afternoon, even including the bit about Wales, those were the ones that bothered me the most.

When you’ve finished filling out the yellow form and you’ve answered all the questions and the questions within the questions, it presents you with a score, just like the quizzes in my magazines, and with that score in mind you are supposed to decide whether to go ahead with your risk or not. Whether to roll the dice. Whether to stick or twist. I wish I’d had one of those forms when I married Terry.

‘It’s an “Enjoy the difference” product.’ I pointed to the little sticker on the front. ‘Don’t you want to enjoy the difference, Terry? Just for once?’ ‘It’s twice the bloody price, Linda,’ he said, and put it straight back on the shelf. ‘I don’t want to be that different.’

They ask about how you see the future, about whether you feel positive when you think about what lies ahead. ‘Do you feel good about the way things are going?’ they say. ‘Do you feel optimistic about the future?’ which is a bit of a daft question really, because if the first half of a film is rubbish, it’s a pretty safe bet to assume the second half of it will be as well.

Not long ago, there was a big strapping lad in here. Six foot four, very upset about something. They gave him three. Three people, following you around all day, watching your every move. If he wasn’t paranoid when he arrived, he certainly was after that.