To be honest, I didn’t need a therapist (or even a girl and a dog) to tell me I hadn’t ever dealt with my father’s death. Although several of them have, thanks for coming and that’s seventy-five pounds you’ll never see again. But that I’d allowed my son to build a dream, a life, a plan around the premise that he came from comedy royalty was a whole other issue.

“The thing is...all of this is my fault. The whole reason Norman even wanted to be a comedian so much is because I... I’ve always...” I stopped for a hiccup and blinked hard to stave off another flood. “I just couldn’t bear to tell him the truth about his grandfather...my father. He’s got no idea that the person he’s been trying so hard to live up to his entire life was just a mediocre comedian and big old bloody fraud who chose to end his life rather than go on with the show.”

I took a deep breath, and the pain in my stomach felt like it might be about to shoot out through my eyeballs, along with the other stuff.

“But I... I couldn’t... I didn’t want to take him away from Norman, too, so... I mean, I’ve only ever shown him...told him the good stuff. The things I...”

“The things you want to remember about your dad. You gave him the story you wish you’d had, right?”

Jesus. Ten solid minutes of spilling my guts and it only took Goth girl two seconds to wipe the floor with me. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the seat, because I didn’t have to hand over seventy-five pounds to know there was only one place to go from here. What I really wanted to do was crawl back under my Penzance-shaped rock and go back to the way my life used to be. I wanted my teapot, I wanted my Tesco sofa and I wanted my direct access to endless reruns of Come Dine with Me. But it was pretty clear that wasn’t an option, so in the end I told a complete stranger my biggest truth despite myself, which, coincidentally (although probably not), turned out to include the answer to the very question Leonard had asked me back in Swansea.

Because the truth was that when I looked at Norman I saw the same hopeful, desperate look in his eyes that filled the still frames of my childhood. The snapshots of my father. And what I was so terrified of, thank you very much, Leonard, was that Norman was about to get up on a stage in just over twenty-four hours and embark on a journey that would eventually drive him full tilt into the same wall that broke my dad.

I’d been resolutely staring out the window of the bus for the entire conversation, and in the silence that followed my final revelation I wondered if perhaps Goth girl had peaked early and I’d managed to put another person to sleep with the story of my father’s death. The dog had long ago nodded off on my lap and the only noise was the sound of the engine and the soft, springy pings coming from the bus seats. But when I turned to check, she was wide-awake and looking back at me, forehead creased in concentration. Her waxy, deadpan face somehow made me feel like her reply was going to be a doozy. A nugget of truth and wisdom and an assurance that maybe everything was going to be okay after all. It’s all right, Sadie, love, let’s go home.