Tidy Ending

by Joanna Cannon

Genres: Women's Fiction; Thrillers

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep and Three Things About Elsie, a delightfully sinister novel about a married woman living a nice, quiet suburban life—but things aren’t always what they seem…

Linda has lived in a quiet neighborhood since fleeing the dark events of her childhood in Wales. Now she sits in her kitchen, wondering if this is all there is: pushing the vacuum around and cooking fish sticks for dinner, a far cry from the glamorous lifestyle she sees in the glossy magazines coming through the mail slot addressed to the previous occupant, Rebecca.

Linda’s husband Terry isn’t perfect—he picks his teeth, tracks dirt through the house, and spends most of his time in front of the TV. But that seems fairly standard—until he starts keeping odd hours at work, at around the same time young women in the town start to go missing.

If only Linda could track down and befriend Rebecca, maybe some of that enviable lifestyle would rub off on her and she wouldn’t have to worry about what Terry is up to. But the grass isn’t always greener and you can’t change who you really are. And some secrets can’t stay buried forever…

Release date: August 2, 2022

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 352

Sample

Now

NOW
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. Not like some. You know what people are like, though, and newspapers always make something out of nothing, even keeping yourself to yourself. It’s what you get for not following the crowd, I suppose. For not joining in. Even if people are pressed a bit harder, they will still find it difficult to dredge up a little anecdote, to pull some distant memory from the back of their minds to single me out. The reporters will want a picture, but they’ll struggle to find one. No, people will say, Linda isn’t in any of those—she was never very big on parties or No, I don’t think Linda was there that day. Then someone will have a brainwave and dig out an old school photograph from the loft, one that’s faded and curled where time has eaten into us all, and they’ll climb down from the stepladder and cough and brush the dust from their clothes, and they’ll say, There she is, look, I’ve found her—she’s the one at the back, and they’ll have to point to make it clear: No, no, that one—the one you can’t see very well.

That would be me. Linda. The one looking down when everyone else is staring straight ahead. The girl you can’t quite remember. The one who kept herself to herself.

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

I wonder how Terry would describe me. He’d probably say, She’s Welsh or She’s five foot nine because Terry doesn’t really deal in anything other than facts. He’d have our wedding photograph to show people, of course, although I’d really rather no one else saw that. Even when I dust, I don’t look at it. I’ve never liked pictures of myself and I dislike that one more than any of them. It lives on the mantelpiece, with a carriage clock and a pair of candlesticks that will never find themselves being introduced to any candles. There it waits, trapped in a silver frame, watching me live my life and pointing out all my mistakes. When I do catch sight of myself, stood next to Terry with flowers stuck in my hair, I always think I look surprised. As though I stumbled into the day by accident and didn’t realize I was expected to be the bride. I only put it out because Mother would have something to say if it wasn’t on show.

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.

Newspapers will always sniff around, asking their questions, wanting answers and photographs and rummaging in everyone else’s business. It’s started, even now. All those people who walked at the edges of my life over the years have begun to reappear. All those passersby and all those silent voices have suddenly found something they want to say. Everyone is trying very hard to work out who they think I am, which is odd because they were never very interested in who I was before any of this happened. I suppose they want to make sense of it all, and they’ll struggle because no one has all the pieces of the story, except for me. It won’t stop them, though. 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.

Mother’s already had reporters yelling through her letter box.

Give us a quote about your Linda, Mrs. Sykes, they shout. We’ll make it worth your while.

She doesn’t, of course, because as much as Mother enjoys drama, she has always thought of it as more of a spectator sport. The journalists have kept at it, though. Very persistent, they are, standing outside the house all hours of the day and night, ringing the doorbell, climbing garden walls, and knocking on windows. I told her to put some music on really loud and sing along with it so she can’t hear them. That’s what I’ve always done when I want something to go away, ever since I was a child. I don’t know how I would have got through some days without my songs to drown out the world. Terry says I’m forever misunderstanding the lyrics, but he doesn’t realize that there are always two ways to interpret everything in life. All you need to do is pick the version that suits you better. In the end, Mother stuffed the letter box up with a pair of old socks. Now all they get when they shout at her is a mouth full of Marks & Spencer.

There are no letter boxes to shout through here, of course. No garden wall to stand on and no doorbell to ring. All the tiny details, all the quiet, unnoticed edges of the world have been taken away, and it’s only when they’re gone you realize how much you depended on them to make sense of everything else. There are newspapers lying around, but every time I pick one up it has holes in the pages where articles have been removed. Things that might distress people or make them feel uncomfortable. Although one person’s distress is another person’s couldn’t-care-less, so I don’t know how they decide which bits to take out.

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

She didn’t reply. Sometimes, they don’t. Sometimes, it’s as though you haven’t spoken at all, as if your world and their world are running quite happily side by side, but there isn’t any way of moving between one and the other.

At least it means there’s no sign of it here. No one knows who I am, because any mention of what happened has been deleted. It’s all been cut away, leaving nice clean margins. I have been disappeared. The only problem is, you try to carry on reading, away from the gap where a story has once been, but—of course—the other side of the page is missing too, so that doesn’t make any sense either.

You can’t take a pair of scissors to one thing and leave the rest undamaged.

It’s impossible.