But no matter how many times he said he was all right, I knew Norman was so far from all right you’d have needed a three-day hike to catch sight of the tail end of it disappearing around the corner. He even slept differently. He’d always had a habit of winding his top sheet around his legs as he read in bed, as if he was trying to dig in his heels and get as deep into the story world as possible. Every night after he fell asleep I’d creep into his room to turn off his light, retrieve whatever book he’d been reading and untangle the knot of bed linen. When he was younger he could never believe I was able to do it without disturbing him and was convinced some kind of nocturnal sheet-straightening aliens were at work.

To prove it was me, I’d get one of my lipsticks and, every night, gently draw a small red kiss X on his forehead as he slept. In the morning Norman would rush to the bathroom mirror to check for the mark and squeal in a five-, seven-, or eight-year-old muddle of delight and frustration.

“I didn’t feel a thing, Mum!” he’d say. “Nothing, nada, niente, nyet! How’d you do it?” Even when he got older and I eventually stopped doing the kiss (and, come to think of it, wearing lipstick), he was still fascinated by how deeply he could sleep. He asked me once if I thought it was how being dead felt.

“Like you go off to sleep and one day you just don’t feel anything ever again, Mum? You reckon?”

In the bad-parenting manual I’m thinking of writing I’d have to say I’ve never been able to give Norman a definitive answer on death, because, frankly, I still haven’t worked out where I stand on it myself. You’d think after both my parents died by the time I was twenty I would have formulated some kind of theory to pass on to my son, just in case. But after hauling up a few stuttering “maybe’s,” a very lame “quite possibly” and the grand finale of “I don’t really know,” I had nothing. Nada. Niente. Nyet.

Whenever I came into Norman’s room after Jax died, I’d find him just lying there, sheets and blankets spread smoothly over the minidune of his body. Not reading, not writing down a joke that had suddenly popped into his head; just staring at the wall where my father’s shabby old mulberry-colored velvet suit jacket hung. All gussied up in that jacket, with his polished shoes and a rainbow Lurex cravat, Norman had been the perfect complement to Jax in his performance outfit of baggy trousers, T-shirt and braces.

Now the mulberry jacket hung in a semi-open-armed stance, straining its wire hanger shoulders, slowly sagging into a depressing shrug and, if I wasn’t mistaken, taking Norman with it. And those sheets stayed smooth all night.

The other thing that happened was that Norman stopped telling me his nightly joke. Every night, for as long as I could remember, bedtime was when he’d try out his new material on me.