When we finished Jax and Norman’s Five-Year Plan, Jax goes, Norman Foreman, you are the bee’s knees and I am the dog’s bollocks and there’s nothing in the world that can stop us now. And I knew straightaway that he was right, because not only did we know for absolute sure where we were going, we also knew exactly when we were going to get there. Which was 7:15 p.m. on the first Friday in August after two changes on National Rail.

6

Sadie

NORMAN’S BEEN DIFFERENT right from the start. It’s like he was born already knowing everything he needed to know and all the rest is just going to be gravy. He’s also got more guts than anyone I’ve ever met, and I’m not just saying that because I’m his mum. I mean, who’s braver than a shorter-than-average kid who’s spent the better part of his life covered in a solid scale of psoriasis that hurts like hell and looks like shit, and who still keeps smiling? A kid who stands up beside his naughty best mate and tries to get people to see the good in him, and keeps on trying, even when it’s pretty hard to see. A kid whose only parent can barely rustle up the enthusiasm to walk out into the world every day, even when the world’s just a half-pint town at the bum’s end of Britain. And he still manages to love her. You tell me who’s braver than that guy.

I spend a lot of my time wishing I were better. Better at cooking, better at cleaning, better at making conversation with strangers. And people I know. But mostly, when I’ve got some hours to idle away, I like to spend them wishing I was better at being Norman’s mother. That’s the one that snores away in the background and regularly wakes up to jab me with a pointy elbow when I don’t show up for parent-teacher meetings, or forget to buy ham for school lunches, or when he has to wear yesterday’s underwear because I watched six back-to-back episodes of Come Dine with Me when I got home from work instead of doing the washing. And still couldn’t cook a decent dinner.

If you could take all the thousands of random moments of poor mothering, dry dinners and crusty undies and knit them into a lovely warm blanket of denial to pull over your head for about a decade, you’d get a pretty accurate picture of where all my wishing has got me. Nowhere. And definitely not better.

But Norman’s always been okay, in spite of me. He’s polite, he’s kind to old people and animals, he’s got good hygiene (despite his poor, tortured skin and the occasional two-day-old underpants, neither of which is his fault) and he’s smart. He can usually figure people out a lot quicker than they figure him out, which is a pretty handy talent that he definitely didn’t get from me.

Being shorter, cleverer and a hell of a lot scalier than everyone else isn’t exactly a recipe for winning friends and influencing people in the schoolyard, but since Jax came along, Norman’s never needed anyone else. And as Jax always said, one really and truly best friend is a hundred times better than having a whole bunch that aren’t quite sure.