“Don’t worry about it now, Sadie, we can talk about all that later. I promise. Right now, it’s just important for me to get back there to Norman, look after him and make sure he’s ready for tomorrow. You’re not to worry about a thing, my dear. This time, you just take care of yourself and I’ll take care of Norman. Trust me.”

Even in my much-reduced state I knew my body was very clearly telling me I needed to stay put in the hospital for the time being. And even if he was going a bit dotty, I had seen the way Leonard had taken Norman under his wing on this trip so I had no doubt he would indeed take the very best of care. And what choice did I have? But as for being ready, I still wasn’t sure Norman was ever going to be ready for what could be coming his way.

You just don’t trust your son.

Goth girl’s accusation hung in the air and amused itself by throwing rocks at me. Why didn’t I trust Norman to get up on stage and still be okay, when it appeared everybody else did? Leonard, Kathy, Tony, Big Al, even bloody Adam—none of them seemed in the least bit doubtful about sending my beautiful, heartbroken, unprepared son out there to throw himself on the mercy of an audience. Why was I?

As I drifted in and out on the gentle tides of pethidine I got to thinking about chances and what seemed to happen when you took them. After all the years you didn’t. I washed up on a beach and felt the warmth of two kind hands held tight behind my head and heard the resonant, lingering voice of a beardy poet. With eyes wide-open to the sky, I saw the wrinkly wink of a gentle-hearted old man and the true and beautiful smile of the boy I thought would never smile again.

Maybe Goth girl was right and what mattered wasn’t whether Norman was going to put every pause in its right place and get every joke perfect but that he got up there at all. Because maybe nobody ever got anywhere good without taking a chance, and maybe one never knows.

But as hard as I tried, and as many pethidine waves as I rode, I still couldn’t think about Norman standing up on a stage in my father’s moth-eaten jacket without seeing the emptiness around him. All that space that Jax used to fill with his laughter, his noise, his badness, his goodness and his funniness. And the space that my father could have—should have—filled in his life.

Come on, love. Let’s go home.

In my life.

48

Norman

FIRST RULE OF COMEDY:
Find your groove and stay in it.

THE FIRST NIGHT I ever did a break and enter and got to escape on the back of a moped with a guy that might be my dad was also the first night I ever met a man called Lucy who lived on a houseboat. Lucy is short for Lucien and he’s James’s dad, who just happens to be nearly as cool as James.