“No, no. Nothing like that. Just... Look, can you just pull over as soon as you can? I... I need to talk to Norman, that’s all. I just need a few minutes.”

As luck would have it, when we rounded the next corner there was a pub a couple hundred yards up on the left. The Little Creek Arms seemed all but deserted and I was reminded of the night at the Noble Goat. It had only been five days ago, but it seemed so much longer. And even though now we were only a few hours away from our final destination, suddenly I really didn’t feel like I’d come much distance at all.

Norman’s little head had popped up when he heard me ask Leonard to slow down, and he leaned forward and touched my arm as we pulled into the car park.

“What’s up, Mum?”

I smiled what I hoped was a reassuring smile and patted his hand.

“I just need... I... I just want to stop for a minute, Norman.”

When we got out Leonard tactfully wandered off away from the car. I saw him take out his phone and squint at the screen, and his face immediately got that same worried expression I now knew hadn’t been a coincidence. I made a mental note to try and get to the bottom of it next time I had a chance, but right now I had other fish to fry.

Norman and I walked toward a fence overlooking a narrow channel of fast-flowing water. I hazarded a guess that this was the Little Creek of the Little Creek Arms and thought about how simple some things in life were and how difficult others could be.

Why couldn’t being a good mother be as easy as referring to the Good Mother chapter of a Manual of Life? Thumb through a few pages and come up with a solution to the latest problem: apply cream X to remove all traces of psoriasis, apply cream Y to remove all traces of sadness. Follow up with a liberal rubbing of cream Z to erase all traces of history and bad judgment and emerge as the best mother in the world.

But there was no such manual and, as I looked at my beautiful boy looking slightly worriedly back at me, I marveled at just how useless my talent for spotting the important parenting moments was, when I could never quite get there when it came to saying or doing the right thing.

Like the time that Mrs. bloody stuck-up Sorrenson from the post office called to tell me she’d just seen Jax and Norman drinking cans of beer in somebody’s cow paddock. Seen them with her own eyes, she had. I know I should have confronted them about the beer drinking, grounded Norman and banned Jax from coming over for two weeks. But instead I made a crack about how it was lucky she hadn’t been looking with someone else’s eyes then, or else she might have missed something. You nosy old bag. I was pretty sure that was the reason my electricity bill and two reminders went missing so I didn’t even know it was overdue until they cut it off.