As soon as he said it, I knew where I’d heard that before. Jax and Norman often talked about how that exact phrase could sum up everything about the world. The idea that if none of us can ever know what’s going to happen next, then wasn’t absolutely anything possible? Even two teenage, nobody, would-be comedians getting to the Edinburgh Fringe and making the whole world laugh. Because one just never knows. Oh, Jax.

But Leonard hadn’t finished.

“On the other hand, my dear, you’ve also got to consider the ramifications of this trip for you. What would finding Norman’s father mean for you?” I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going. Correction. I knew I didn’t like where it was going.

“And Sadie, I know I’m old, my dear, but... I see things...in you. I can see that you want to make Norman’s dream come true more than anything else in the world. I see that. But my question is, just what is it you’re so scared of?” Bloody hell. Monday evenings in May, Psychology for Beginners? I decided it was entirely possible.

In the ensuing silence, I took a good, long look at Mr. Leonard-all-learning-is-good-learning Cobcroft. He was gazing out to sea with a faraway expression, possibly reliving a border clash with ten thousand charging Chinese soldiers, or maybe just creaming butter and sugar to ice a cake.

Then it could have been the way his neatly trimmed eyebrows raised and lowered in time with his breathing, or the kindly glint in his dusty blue eyes as they turned back and locked on to mine, or perhaps it was simply the right moment. I don’t know. But it appeared Leonard had a bit of a knack for making me talk, and this time it was a story I hadn’t told to anyone in thirteen years. Not even Norman, the one person in this world I actually trusted. And after all those years of carrying around that hot stone of truth in the pit of my stomach it rose to the surface with surprising ease.

I told Leonard about the countless Monday, Wednesday or Tuesday nights (oh, but never the big-ticket Fridays or Saturdays) that I’d spent waiting around in pubs and clubs for my father after my mum died.

Making a dinner of lemonade and salt-and-vinegar crisps drag out as long as I could while he tried his damnedest to get a laugh in some seedy venue in Eastbourne or Margate or the outskirts of Brighton. Too young to stay at home alone and old enough to know a broken man when I saw one break.

How on one particularly memorable night, a Thursday as it goes, the manager of the Grand Hotel Eastbourne found ten-year-old me crouched on the floor in a corner of the back bar, with my fingers in my ears and my eyes screwed so tightly shut I could see the stars and every single planet as sharp as a pin. Silently, desperately, willing the audience to laugh at my dad and apparently breaking all kinds of liquor laws in the process.