The Slightly More Muddled and Not Quite so Happy Ending
You know if you open up a clock and you take all the innards out and twiddle around with them and you put them back in again, in roughly reverse order and in what you hope are the places you found them in, and screw it all back together again and then you find that there is a short spring, a thing that looks like an elastic band only stronger, and a squashed object that might or might not be a petrified bluebottle, or possibly an overcooked currant with legs, still left on the kitchen table? The clock works and ticks and everything, but what about the leftover bits? That’s what this chapter has in it, the petrified bluebottles of the story. Properly constructed stories written by grown-ups who know what they are doing don’t have any bits left over at the end, or if they do, the grown-ups are better at sweeping them away with a quick flick so nobody notices. But I am new to this game, and I always think honesty is the best policy, so I have decided to add in a few explanations about how the happy ending was a bit messier in real life.
Everything in the last chapter is true. Gillian did say that thing about dedicating the piece to me, and I suppose that is much the same as saying she was sorry about what a bad friend she’d been before, so I decided to forgive her, because I am a large-hearted person. Also, you have to make allowances for the fact that her parents are so awful, even if she doesn’t think they are all that bad. She has to look on the bright side, doesn’t she? These are the only parents she’s got, so she has to make the best of them, I suppose.
It is also true that Mr. Regan did come and sit beside Tim and Zelda at the recital, but you mustn’t think that because that happens at the end of the story it means they are getting back together or something. It just means that on this one very special occasion, when Gillian was strutting her stuff, they felt they should put their best foot forward and behave like a family.
You are probably wondering about the money. I wonder about that part too. Gillian’s father was very clear that he couldn’t possibly afford to send Gillian to that school, and then Tim casually announced it wasn’t such a big problem after all. I don’t know whom to believe. At least, I do believe Tim that it is not as expensive as his father let on, but I don’t understand how Mr. R. can have changed his mind so radically that he is now suddenly going to let her go after all. Maybe Tim is right when he says it has to do with this competition that is going on between their parents. They are both trying to prove to Gillian and Tim that they are the nicer one, and so they are vying with each other to find ways of making it possible for Gillian to take up her place in the school, even though neither of them really wants her to go. I find that hard to believe, but my mother says that you never know what goes on in other people’s families, no matter how well you think you know them.
Anyway, Gillian has just started in the Yahooey-Menooey school (I will always call it that), and I have started in my new school in Ballymore, but we have vowed to be pen pals during term time, and Tim has decided that he does like being a forester and when he has finished at school and got his Leaving Cert and all, he is going to study forestry.
Lorna has a tooth, which is unheard of at her age, and which proves of course that she is ridiculously advanced and will probably be an inventor or a rocket scientist when she grows up.
“Loony” Len doesn’t exist. At least, he does, but he’s not loony and he’s not called Len. He is a proper bus driver. He drives the school bus in term time. I am very haughty when I see him, because of that time he never told me about the summer timetable and I had to walk ten miles home. (Miles are more dramatic than kilometers, aren’t they? I wonder why.)
And my mother. You mustn’t think just because she and Don were holding hands that evening, that they are going to get married or anything. It just means that they are getting on very well at the moment, and you never know. You never do know anything, really, about anything until after it has happened, and even then you don’t know much either, which is why life is so confusing and why books are usually better than life, because in books, it is the author’s job to make things less confusing for the reader.
The other thing you may be wondering about is how I feel about Don and my mother maybe getting together. Mum said the thing is not to think about it as having anything to do with Dad. She says this is a separate thing, and it doesn’t affect how she feels about Dad or about me, and even if she did decide to marry Don, Dad would always be her First Love and he would have a special place in her heart and all sorts of palaver like that that made me want to cry, including stuff about life must go on, which sounds to me as if she is going to marry him after all, even though she says she isn’t, or not just yet, anyway.
I have decided that I am not going to worry about it for the moment, because it might not happen, and even if it does, by the time it happens, I may have gotten used to the idea. The main thing is, Don is OK. He’s not specially good at playing Frisbee or fishing or putting on funny voices or remembering the exact amount of milk you like in your tea or any of those things a dad is supposed to do, but then he says he is not trying to be anyone’s dad, which is fine by me. He makes the most fantastic brownies, though, which is a definite plus, because Mum never makes anything fattening.
I think that is everything, except for Grandpa, who is the same as ever. He says isn’t it just as well he didn’t move in with us, because now look, whatever that is supposed to mean.
Copyright © 2006 by Siobán Parkinson
Published by Roaring Brook Press
Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership
143 West Street, New Milford, Connecticut 06776
First published in the United Kingdom in 2006 by Puffin Books, London
All rights reserved.
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First American Edition April 2007
eISBN 9781466892941
First eBook edition: February 2015
Second Fiddle Page 13
