Night after night, year after year, the shows continued to go on, as they apparently must. But the spaces in between them got longer and the venues got smaller and emptier as it seemed to me my father got smaller and emptier himself.

“You know, Norman’s favorite photo of his grandfather, the one you used on the poster, Leonard, that was actually taken on a night he played a show to two barmaids, a drunken chef and me. And I was asleep under his coat as soon as I’d finished my geography homework.” Time to go home, Sadie, love.

I told Leonard how I saw so much of my father in Norman, the boy he never met. The same hopefulness, the same intelligence, the same kind of sensitive soul that would go out to get dinner and only come home with a dozen eggs and a single head of broccoli because he’d given the rest away to the homeless man who lived under the bridge. But then we’d eat two-minute noodles with egg stirred through and a side of steamed broccoli and, somehow, my father would make it feel like a Michelin-starred degustation. And he’d joke about how much that guy under the bridge would be enjoying his cold M&S chicken tikka for two washed down with a bottle of ginger beer. Ah, it’s so nice to be nice, Sadie.

I hesitated there, but then I heard Jax shouting, “In for a penny, in for a pound, Sadie,” as he convinced me to bet all my matches (and lose) on a pair of sixes in a game of three-hand poker one rainy Sunday afternoon. And so I told Leonard how my father died.

Not a heart attack at all, like I’d told Norman and anyone else who’d asked, but by hanging himself from a beam in the kitchen of the house where we’d lived my entire life. The very beam where he’d painted the words World’s Best Daughter in glitter paint for my sixth-birthday party. Bare, bony feet dangling over the table where the three of us had eaten countless breakfasts, lunches and chicken hot pot dinners before my mum got sick. Where all my little six-year-old friends had eaten cake under the words that declared I was somebody. I was the world’s best daughter.

I kept on talking because Leonard didn’t tell me to stop. So I told him that my dad hadn’t worn socks to kill himself in January and I’d never know why. That the neighbor who’d found him also found a note tucked neatly into the fruit bowl between a banana and an apple that said, I’ve already hung around too long. That even the punch line of his last joke was far from funny, and for some reason that made me even angrier than the fact he was dead.

I told Leonard that note said everything anyone ever needed to know about Robert Foreman’s comedy career, and that I was terrified of all that Dad lurking around there inside Norman, having itself a gene-pool party. Because what if history spun back around on its bungee cord and repeated itself?