A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon

A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon

Author:Joanna Cannon [Cannon, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2022-02-08T17:00:00+00:00


20

I decided not to mention the police visits to Terry.

I could tell the police had started to rattle him, even if he tried his best to hide it. Anyway, I didn’t see the point. They were only casual, after all, so there wasn’t any need to bother him. Plus, Terry always gets this look on his face whenever I talk about the police. He rolls his eyes and makes a pfffttth noise like whales do when they come up for air, and I wasn’t in the mood for his eye-rolling and his whale-blowing noises, and so I kept quiet. I couldn’t have said for certain, but I’m sure the police knocked on every door in the street before they got to ours. It wasn’t as though they’d singled us out.

The next morning, Terry was up with the lark, off on a fishing trip like every Saturday morning. Each weekend, he went fishing with his work friends, although who those friends were, I couldn’t tell you, because he never brought them home. ‘They’d only mess up your kitchen, Linda,’ he always said. ‘Make a nuisance of themselves and get marks all over your clean surfaces.’

I’ve never known anyone so enthusiastic about fish. Tearing round the house getting ready, whistling to himself, and there was no point attempting to have any kind of conversation with him because he was too busy living in a world of his own. I wouldn’t have minded, but that loose carpet was getting looser by the minute and all the glass in the front door might go through if that crack wasn’t fixed. Had I let those policemen come in, and one of them had tripped, we might even have litigation on our hands. You see the adverts all the time on the telly, because Mother writes the numbers down in case she ever goes head first on a wet floor.

I set to as soon as he was through the back door. Terry thought housework was a piece of cake, but that’s because he never did any. For a start, he made more mess than he thought he did – he never rinsed out the sink properly when he’d had a shave, footprints all over the kitchen floor, and I was forever hoovering bits of him up. Hair, muck, grease. You could follow a trail of him around the house like breadcrumbs in a children’s story. Heaven forbid if he decided to have a bath, because it always took me a good hour afterwards to get everything back to the way it should be. I always tried to put him off. ‘Have a shower,’ I’d say. ‘It’s much quicker.’ He never took a blind bit of notice. Although he had recently begun to make more of an effort, in all fairness. He’d started going for a shower as soon as he got in. Even put his own clothes in the washing machine. It was like most things in life – it probably just takes a bit of time for people to come around to your way of thinking.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.