After a bit of jiggling Tony slotted everything back into the boot and, amazingly, it only seemed to take up about half the space it had before. I had room at my feet, Norman didn’t have to balance his elbows on the just-in-case box of groceries and, all in all, it looked like it was shaping up to be a far more comfortable trip to Bournemouth than the one from Barnstaple had been.

After exchanging numbers and promising to call and let Tony and Kathy know how the show went, we drove away. When I turned and leaned out the window to wave at them, their arms were already back around each other. My stomach gave a twang when I realized that there, but for a nearly nonexistent bunch of sperm and a bad attitude, could have been my life. It could have been me and Tony waving some madwoman and her posse off to Edinburgh. Mine and Norman’s lives could have been ordered, neatly laid out, with everything fitting perfectly together like in the car boot. And maybe Kathy would just have been a kindly neighbor. Or my best friend.

But probably not, I decided, because those two were so right together I couldn’t imagine they were ever destined to be anyone’s interlocking piece but each other’s. And as Tony and Kathy blurred into smudges, after all the years of telling myself I didn’t need that kind of anchor I found myself quite surprised to have my head out a car window with watery wind-eyes, imagining just how it might feel.

I snuck a look at Norman in the wing mirror. He already had his wad of Post-it notes fanned out in his hands and was mouthing lines out the window. My own reflection loomed large and I met her surprisingly steady gaze. Your fierceness and your fearlessness. That girl. Was it possible she really had existed?

As we swerved onto the M3 toward the sign that declared Bournemouth to be thataway I focused a little closer on Norman’s lips and, while I couldn’t be sure, some of those lines looked a little bit like what the fuck, shit it all and hell’s bells. If, by some miracle, Tony was right, Norman was going to need every bit of whatever that girl had if he was going to get through this in one piece. And maybe she would, too.

30

I’D HAVE TO say that Adam Linley was the least memorable of all Norman’s paternal possibilities. And I think by now you know that’s saying something. But I don’t just mean the circumstances of our involvement, I mean the actual notion of him as a person. I had a vague recollection of lots of greasy blond hair and skintight jeans, which might or might not have been removed after a full bottle of vodka had been consumed by two people who might or might not have been him and I. But beyond that and his crime of nicking my toasted sandwich maker, it’s all pretty fuzzy.