It took Jax less than a week to alienate every kid in his class, and most of the teachers as well, before noticing Norman and deciding that he could well be his last chance in the best-friend saloon. That was six years ago, and from the moment the deal was sealed over a shared two-week detention for switching around the contents of the entire Year 3’s schoolbags (verdict: Jax guilty as hell; Norman guilty of being an inexperienced and therefore ultimately unsuccessful lookout), you couldn’t separate those two with a scalpel. I’d lay money that there weren’t two more different boys on the planet and yet, somehow, they just clicked. They were “The bloody Rolls-bloody-Royce of bloody best friends,” as Jax so eloquently put it.

But Jax died. And so it came to be that on the kind of day sons should be out in a park kicking a football, or chasing dogs down on the beach with their mates, I sat next to my good boy in a church full of damp cheeks. Trying hard not to think about that other rude, grubby, magnificent bad boy lying just a few meters away. And even though there was no chance in hell of it coming true, I’d still half expected to hear a kicking at the lid of that coffin at any moment, and a wild-haired, laughing kid to splinter through and shout, “Gotcha, suckers!”

Because that was Jax’s approach to life, the universe and everything, really. Feetfirst, break the door down and damn the consequences. He’d arrive at our house nearly every day like that, body lengths ahead of Norman, bullying our front-door handle nearly off its thread and following up with a totally unnecessary karate kick to make sure the job was done. Then he’d charge straight down the hallway on a direct route to the biscuit tin, leaving Norman to catch hold of the twanging door and close it softly as he brought up the rear.

It used to drive me crazy every time I’d catch sight of the mortally injured wall where the front-door handle bounced, day after day. But in the weeks after Jax died I saw the way Norman glanced over at that crumbling hole in the plaster as he passed, and it made me give silent thanks for lying, no good, unreliable tradesmen who don’t know their four o’clocks from their fourth of Junes.

That hole is all that’s left of Jax in our house now, and it’s eating away at the wall like it’s got teeth.

5

Norman

FIRST RULE OF COMEDY:
Always know where the joke is going.

JAX SAYS THAT if you don’t know where you’re going you’re never going to know when you get there and you can’t argue with that, Normie boy. Not that I’d want to, because it makes pretty good sense when you think about it. I mean, imagine if you just walked out the door every morning without having any idea of where you’re on your way to. How would you know to stop walking when you got to the bus stop and not just keep going to the beach? Or even farther? Or if you didn’t know you were supposed to get off at school, how would you know not to just sit on the bus all day, doing loops around Penzance and Newlyn?