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Back The Funny Thing About Norman Foreman Save as PDF
Contents ( 68)
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  3. Norman
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  66. Norman
  67. Notes for next year’s Fringe
  68. Acknowledgments

And then just as I was getting a little bit excited about working out that I was probably never going to get anywhere by trying to be like Jax and maybe everywhere by trying be a bit more like Dave Allen, I noticed James leaning back in his seat with his hands behind his head and looking at me a bit funny. And then he goes, hey, Norman, just why did your mother want to look me up when she got to Edinburgh?

And even though I’d only known James for one super-fun-fantastic-cool night, I could tell by the look on his rock-star face that the piggin’ jig was up. Again.

49

FIRST RULE OF COMEDY:
It’s fun when you’re funny.

IT’S FUNNY, BUT it wasn’t even hard to tell James that he was the last guy on Leonard’s Finding Fathers spreadsheet. When I came clean about it, he totally didn’t seem to mind and he just smiled said, well, what dae ye ken? quite a few times. But what was properly funny in the comedy way was that when I said that James could maybe be my dad Beano let out a big, long woo-hoo, and then he slapped James on the back so hard that he knocked another full glass of Guinness into his own lap all over again.

After everybody finished cracking up at that, which took a while, James said that it was almost midnight and we should probably try and get a bit of shut-eye so we could be up early in the morning to get back to the Soft Fudge and find Mum. And then I swear, not even one second after he said it his phone rang. He started going, aye, mmm-hmm, aye, aye, is that right? Okay, nae bother. Then he looked over at me and goes, Norman, it’s for you. And I tell you what, after the night I’d just had I wasn’t even that surprised.

The only person I would have been happier to hear from at that moment was Mum, but Leonard was almost as good. Straight up he told me that Mum had found him, which I knew she would. But that even though she had tried her hardest to get back to the Soft Fudge by six at the latest like she’d promised, the universe had conspired against her.

When he explained exactly what he meant and that Mum was in hospital, it was scary at first, but then he said I wasn’t to be worried because he promised everything was going to be okay, especially Mum. And I knew it was true because Leonard wouldn’t lie to me about that, not even if it did turn out that he’d actually told us a pretty big fat lie so he could come on the trip.

It turned out the universe had also conspired against Leonard when he tried to come back to look after me, because there was a lorry rollover on the road and the bus he was on was held up for more than two hours. Then when he finally did get back to Edinburgh the traffic was so bad because of the Fringe it took him almost another whole hour on the number 16 bus to get back to the Soft Fudge. When I said I thought I was the one with bad timing, Leonard laughed so much I wondered if being funny was like being brave and the more you did it, the better you got.