Nobody knows this, but I didn’t for one minute think I was actually going to get to go to the Fringe on my own. Not really. If Mum hadn’t seen the poster that Jax might or might not have changed while I was sleeping, I’m pretty sure I would still have been sitting back on my bed in Penzance staring at the walls and missing him. Instead of sitting on a bed in Edinburgh all by myself trying to do jokes and talking to invisible Jax. And missing him.

When I looked over at the clock beside the bed I didn’t need Jax talking in my ear to tell me I had exactly twenty-seven hours and twenty-three minutes before I was going to be up on stage at the Duke, most likely being the opposite of funny. Because maths is one thing I am good at.

42

Sadie

AS I BOUNCED along on the bus on the next leg of my mission to rescue Leonard I had to admit that the job of ignoring the regular eye-watering jabs to my stomach was becoming quite considerable. I’d managed reasonably well up to that point by telling myself that as soon as Norman’s show was over and we were safely back in our lovely boring little lives my very next task would be getting to a doctor. Or a therapist. Whatever it turned out I needed most. Definitely. Absolutely. But now, what with the pain, the unexpected reminiscing about my father, the worry of both Norman and Leonard being on their own, and the regret of never having known how damn beautiful the countryside was just ten minutes out of Edinburgh, my mood wasn’t exactly what you’d call upbeat.

So it was never going to take much. When the bus hit a pothole half an hour into the journey my head jerked back with a snap. At first it just made me blink a couple of times, but then it was like the shock had loosened some kind of internal valve and, out of nowhere, my chest started contracting uncontrollably. Before I even knew what was happening I was sobbing into both fists, very much in view of a teenage Goth girl with a small dog on her lap sitting across the aisle.

The burst water main only lasted about thirty seconds, but it was long enough that I definitely wasn’t going to be able to pass it off as a bad case of hiccups. When I’d managed to compose myself the young girl leaned over and patted my hand gently, tilting her head to one side and giving me an enigmatic penciled-in-eyebrow raise. Her dog did exactly the same, and to me it looked like they were saying, “Tell us, don’t tell us, it’s up to you.”

But there was something comforting about that small, smooth hand with its bitten-down black fingernails and the motion of the bus trundling through the majestic Scottish countryside that made me think, well, all right then. And when she plonked the warm little animal on my lap then climbed over and slipped into the empty seat next to me, I really couldn’t find a reason not to tell a girl and her dog something that had been chewing me up from the inside out for this entire trip. And way before that. I hoped they were ready.