When Jax and Norman came home, green around the gills from their beer-drinking experiment, they stood there with the flowers they’d picked for me along the way and waited for their medicine. When I didn’t say anything Jax even asked if I’d heard from Mrs. Sorrenson lately. No, I said. Not a peep. Because part of me loved the fact that those boys had gone out and sat in some old cow paddock and done some secret beer drinking together. I mean, actually, half their bloody luck.

But this was different, and I knew it. All those other times I hadn’t said or done the right thing might be forgiven if I could just say and do the right thing, here and now, leaning over the fence behind the Little Creek Arms, slightly west of the middle of nowhere. Only the truth of it was that I still didn’t know what the right thing was. Because making the choice between protecting Norman from what might happen and mending him from what had already happened felt way beyond my skills.

Norman scuffed the ground with his trainers, silently waiting for me to be the parent.

“Norman, I... You...you know none of this... I mean, we can still... If you don’t think you...” My words were whipped up by the wind, clipping into disjointed syllables. Everything I wanted to say was right there waiting in the wings, but something had a hold of my larynx and was strangling the life out it.

Why couldn’t we just have a bit more time to work it out? A couple more years for him to get over the loss of the funny one. To grow out of his dream. To change his mind and want to be a teacher or a doctor or even a used-car salesman. Anything other than the person he thought he wanted to be. Because doesn’t he know it’s hands down the saddest bloody job in the world, spending your life trying to make people laugh? Ask my dad why don’t you? It doesn’t matter, love, let’s go home.

“I... Look, what I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t feel like... I mean, you could wait till next year and we... I just think maybe you’re not...not quite... Norman, please don’t do it.”

My voice was so quiet by the end I wasn’t even sure I’d really said it. I hoped I hadn’t, but I already knew I’d done it all wrong anyhow. I should have eased him into it, let him think it was his idea. Told him it would all be okay, that Jax would have understood if he couldn’t do it. Played dirty.

But wind or no wind, Norman hadn’t missed a thing. He looked down at his hand on the fence next to mine, turning it over to pick at an errant loose scab on the shiny pink palm. He bent his body forward and laid his forehead gently on the back of my hand. I felt the smoothness of his new skin and the breath caught in the back of my throat. I could have died happy right there and then with that silky small-boy forehead on my hand, but the moment was gone all too soon.