Untidy minds welcome. Nobody needs fixing.

Chapter 1

Jo McRae had always suspected she wasn’t built for Earth.

Not in a whimsical, “I’m actually a fairy princess” way. More in a “someone assembled me using the wrong instruction manual and then lost the receipt” way.

Her mum liked to tell the story of her birth. How Jo entered the world not crying, but glaring, like she’d been evicted from a warm, rent-free studio flat and dumped into a fluorescent-lit branch of Poundland.

“Honestly,” her mum would say, “you looked disappointed. As if you’d expected better.”

And she had. Even as a baby, Jo had been overwhelmed by… everything. Light. Noise. Textures. People. Especially people. The carpet in her childhood home felt like it had a personal vendetta. The Hoover sounded like a demon trying to claw its way out of hell. And school? School was a social escape room designed by sadists.

While other kids instinctively understood the rules, the unspoken ones, the invisible ones. Jo spent her entire childhood thinking, “When was the assembly about this?”, “Why wasn’t I invited?”, “Where are the instructions?”

She was, as she later described it, a glitchy prototype human.

Everyone else was the latest iPhone.

She was a refurbished Blackberry with a corrupt operating system and a battery life of twenty emotionally fraught minutes.

Teachers called her “bright but unfocused,” which was teacher-speak for “she knows things but refuses to stop being a little gremlin.” She masked like her life depended on it - a one-girl theatre production called Pretending to Be Normal, performed daily to an audience who didn’t even clap.

By her teens she’d collected every label except the correct one. Weird. Moody. Dramatic. Intense. Old soul. Too much. Not enough. Her personal favourite: “She’ll grow out of it.”

Spoiler: she did not.

She grew deeper into it, like a houseplant watered exclusively with trauma and energy drinks.

It wasn’t until her late thirties, after a lifetime of feeling like she’d been dropped into the world without a walkthrough, that she finally got the words that made everything click: Autistic. ADHD. AuDHD.

Looking back, the signs of Autism and ADHD were everywhere. Flashing neon signs. Alarms. Arrows. A theme tune. But in the 90s, unless you were a little boy physically stapling your jumper to a wall, nobody gave a single diagnostic sh*t. Girls were just “Quirky,” “Creative,” “Emotional.”

Translation: “We haven’t got a clue, so we’re blaming her personality and hoping for the best.”

So, Jo went through life assuming everyone else had a secret manual.

A guidebook.

A set of instructions.

A cheat code.

A f**king walkthrough.

Meanwhile she was just pressing random buttons and hoping she didn’t accidentally set herself on fire. Again.

And that’s how it all started. A girl who wasn’t broken, just mislabelled. A girl destined to make gloriously terrible decisions, fall in love with walking red flags, drink the wrong drinks, ingest the wrong substances, and somehow still keep stumbling forward like a chaotic NPC with no save points. For those of you who aren’t video game fanatics, an NPC is a non-playable character - the one who stands around repeating the same three lines like their brain is powered by AA batteries, just programmed to exist and occasionally walk into walls.

The diagnosis explained everything and fixed nothing.

And then, just as she was starting to understand herself, life kicked her in the teeth.

Her mum got cancer. Stage 4. The news was delivered by her mum in January with the same tone she used for gas bills.

“Well… it’s stage 4. There we are.”

That was her.

Straightforward.

No nonsense.

Didn’t embellish, didn’t dramatise, didn’t even swear, because she rarely did. She didn’t need profanity. She could cut through steel with a raised eyebrow.

She was 64, opinionated in the best Enfield way, drank enough coffee to kill a lesser mortal, played the piano and cello like she’d been born between sheet music, and despised TV soaps with the fury of a thousand suns.

If reality TV came on, she’d mutter, “Honestly. Who watches this rubbish?”

Every. Single. Time.

And yet, even with stage 4 lung cancer, she still managed to send her annual August message:

“Have you sorted winter coats for your daughters yet? Don’t leave it too late. The good ones go first.”

There Jo was, sweating through a heatwave, being told to prepare for an Arctic expedition. Some things didn’t change, even while everything else was falling apart.

She agreed to chemo, not because she believed it would cure her, but because, in her blunt style, she said:

“I’m not done yet.”

Chemo hit her hard.

Silver-haired and stubborn as ever, she endured it with the same determination she applied to everything: whether it was learning a Bach prelude, shouting at badly umpired cricket matches, or insisting TCP could cure any ailment (coughs, cuts, heartbreak, existential dread.)

By the time they reached autumn, though, things started to slide.

Not gradually, more like the universe pushed her off a metaphorical cliff and shouted, “Good luck!” after her. The cancer reached her brain, and suddenly dementia arrived like an uninvited guest who immediately starts rearranging your furniture.

One week she was telling me about a beautiful passage in a Bach suite.

The next, she was convinced she’d already been to the hospital twice that day and demanded proof.

And toilet trips… they became a team sport. She couldn’t go alone anymore. She hated that. Jo hated that. The whole thing felt like watching the strongest woman she knew shrinking in fast-forward.

For Jo, as an AuDHD adult, it was a sensory and emotional demolition derby.

The unpredictability. The sudden noises. The changes in her face, her voice, her personality. The routines disappearing. The structure collapsing like wet cardboard. Jo kept trying to mask, trying to be “fine,” trying to stay functional while her brain was basically screaming, none of this is okay and nothing makes sense.

But Jo loved her. So, she kept going.

One meltdown at a time.

One quiet cry in the car at a time.

One deep breath before opening the front door at a time.

Caregiving is brutal for anyone, but when your brain is wired like Jo’s, it’s like doing an emotional marathon while juggling knives and being electrocuted. She coped badly. She coped strangely. She coped the only way she could: by showing up. Even when she was shaking. Even when she was overwhelmed. Even when she felt like a badly programmed robot trying to run an impossible app.

And then by November, finally, painfully, inevitably...

she was gone.

Jo’s mum had decided on cremation. Not a surprise as it was the option with the least fuss.

People expected the service to be cold, clinical, awkward.

But there was Jo’s dad, a performance poet, guitar player, and charismatic as always, leading the service like we were at some surreal blend of memorial and open mic night.

He stood there with his guitar, steadying his voice, speaking about her honesty, her music, her love of cricket, her fierce practicality, her habit of phoning at bizarre times to say things like, “You’re not buying that, are you?”

He had once been asked to go to the supermarket to buy a box of Rice Crispies and an hour later had come back with a full-sized keyboard, no cereal in sight! Jo had loved that…her mum…not so much! So, it’s no wonder that Jo’s mum had kept such a close eye on him when he was let out by himself.

His memorial to her was beautiful.

And gut-wrenching.

And entirely them, a strange duet even in goodbye.

Jo’s speech came next.

She walked up there with shaking hands, heart in her throat, trying to honour a woman who never minced her words, never pretended to be anything she wasn’t, and absolutely never wanted anyone making a fuss.

Jo began with the standard bits, her strength, her humour, her music, her ability to sniff out nonsense like a sniffer dog. The crowd nodded. People dabbed their eyes. It was all very solemn.

And then Jo said,

“And, as many of you know my mum wouldn’t take any bad behaviour from any of us… when I was naughty, Mum called me Fanny Fishface.”

The intake of breath from the room was hilarious.

Even the crematorium staff looked up.

And then people laughed.

Not polite laughter.

Not awkward titters.

Real, honest, belly laughter, the kind that comes from somewhere deep and cracked.

Because of course this straightforward woman, this Enfield matriarch of coffee and TCP and Bach and cricket, would give her child a nickname like that.

Of course she would.

Jo’s dad chuckled behind her.

Jo’s sister leant over and whispered to her, “and her choice of funeral music sounded like it was from a 70s porno!”

The whole room warmed, softened, shifted. The tension let go for a moment.

And in that moment, she was there.

Not in the coffin.

Not in the flowers.

Not in the music.

But in the laughter.

In the honesty.

In the refusal to let the day become a dark, dramatic soap opera, because she hated those.

She left the world the way she lived in it:

straightforward,

uncomplicated,

no theatrics,

no nonsense.

And Jo stood there in the crematorium, grieving and laughing at once. The ugliest, purest combination, and she thought:

She would’ve approved.

Not the fuss, not the crowd, not the tissues…

But the truth.

The honesty.

The laughter.

The refusal to let things get too sentimental.

And maybe, in some strange cosmic way, the fact that her final send-off included Jo saying Fanny Fishface into a microphone.

The woman drank coffee at midnight, played instruments like she was arguing with the notes, and believed TCP could cure a personality flaw.

Of course she’d leave them with one last laugh.

Of course she would.

And that’s how she stayed with Jo,

not as a dramatic ghost,

not as a tragic memory,

but as the straightforward, music-playing, coffee-fuelled heartbeat of her family.

Still telling her, somewhere,

“It’s August soon. Don’t forget the coats.”

But even with that, after the funeral - Jo found herself drifting. Grief does that. It unplugs you from yourself.

She needed a job. Something simple. Something quiet. Something that didn’t require her to be a fully functioning human being.

So naturally, she ended up in a breakdown recovery call centre, the emotional equivalent of being repeatedly slapped with a wet sock.

But before the call centre, before the headset, before the endless parade of men explaining spark plugs to her, there was Maggie.

If Jo had a sanctuary, and “sanctuary” was a generous word for a place that smelled permanently of pickled onions and despair, it was Maggie’s little shop.

Calling it a shop was optimistic. It was more like a storage cupboard that had given up on its dreams. A narrow, fluorescent-lit cave wedged between a vape shop and a nail salon that had never once produced a symmetrical nail.

Maggie worked there four days a week, mostly because nobody else would. The owner, Mr Patel, was 82, half-deaf, and convinced the shop was still in its “golden era,” which Jo suspected was sometime around 1974.

Jo visited often. Sometimes for milk. Sometimes for crisps. Mostly because Maggie was the only person who could tolerate Jo’s brain at full volume without flinching.

The shop had regulars. The kind of regulars who made you question whether the town was built on an ancient burial ground.

The Rabbit Woman

Every day at 3pm, the eccentric seventy-five-year-old would shuffle in with a lop-eared creature named Mr Nibbles, who looked like he’d seen things. Traumatic things. Things no rabbit should ever have to process.

“Ten bags of carrot sticks, please,” she’d say, as if this were a perfectly normal sentence in a perfectly normal world.

Mr Nibbles would stare at Jo with the hollow eyes of someone who’d accepted their fate.

The World’s Worst Shoplifter

Arthur Denham. Eighty years old. Four foot ten (probably taller but he walked as though he’d been born hunched over). A man who shoplifted with the subtlety of a fire alarm.

He’d pick up a packet of biscuits, look directly at Maggie, and then slowly - painfully slowly - slide them into his pocket while maintaining eye contact like a toddler testing boundaries.

“Arthur,” Maggie would sigh, “we can see you.”

He’d blink innocently. “Can you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Right.”

And he’d put them back.

Every. Single. Time.

The Devil Twins

Fifteen years old. Identical. Dead behind the eyes.

When their mum was present, they were angelic, polite, helpful, practically glowing with innocence.

The moment she stepped outside?

Demon boys.

They’d knock over displays. Whisper Jo’s name from behind shelves like they were summoning her soul. Rearrange the chewing gum into rude words. Once, one of them hissed at Maggie like a feral cat.

Their mum, meanwhile, was always half drunk. Always wearing a dressing gown that had definitely seen court appearances. Always popping in for “just one more bottle of dry white.”

She’d stagger in, grab the cheapest wine on the bottom shelf, and say, “They’re good kids, really.”

Jo and Maggie would exchange a look that said, “Are they? Are they really?”

Maggie was Jo’s opposite in all the right ways - calm where Jo was chaotic, grounded where Jo was spiralling, and blessed with the kind of deadpan humour that could defuse a bomb.

Whenever Jo’s brain was too loud, too fast, too everything, she’d wander into the shop and lean on the counter like a Victorian orphan seeking refuge.

Maggie would slide her a can of Coke and say, “You look like you’ve been emotionally mugged.”

“I work in a call centre,” Jo would reply. “I’m emotionally mugged hourly.”

Sometimes they’d talk. Sometimes they’d sit in silence. Sometimes they’d watch the Devil Twins attempt to set fire to a packet of Monster Munch using only the power of their minds.

It was the closest thing Jo had to peace.

A tiny, weird, dimly-lit peace.