“What if he... Leonard, what if, without Jax, Norman never gets to be as funny as he so desperately wants to be? As he...as he thinks he should be.”

That’s what I’m scared of. In fact, it terrifies me to the very core of whoever the hell I am now that I’m not the world’s best daughter. So how do you like them apples, Leonard?

Leonard’s breathing was measured and heavy like he was considering his answer carefully again, but it was also somewhat loud and nasal. I snuck a sideways glance at him for the first time since I’d started talking, and it shouldn’t have surprised me, but somewhere between the M&S chicken-tikka dinner and my father’s bad-joke death, Leonard had dropped off.

As the gentle whistling from his hairy old nostrils followed my story out on the Swansea coastal breeze, down on the beach I saw Norman stop, half turn and lift his nose to the wind. For a moment I thought he was going to look in my direction and I raised my arm, but his tousled head bent slowly into his chest and he turned his body down the beach and kept walking.

I dropped my arm back down to my side, but not quickly enough, and I was standing in the street outside my student digs waving my father goodbye, double thumbs-up as he drove away. Back to his first gig in a month after a twelve-hour round-trip drive to Edinburgh in a hired van with me, my bed and six months’ worth of tea bags and toilet paper. My hilarious leaving-home present from the man who always knew how to make me laugh, even when nobody else did. Hold on tight, Sadie. I’ve got you. I shook my head, but not quickly enough, and I was at his funeral, red-eyed and furious that my father was dead and I still had two months’ worth of toilet paper and tea bags to get through. It made me wonder if he’d already known how the story ended. If I could have known. If I could have held on tighter to a disappearing man.

Down on the beach, the slow-moving speck of Norman kept moving.

I left Leonard dozing and went inside to the suite to retrieve my phone out of my bag. I scrolled through the contacts and there it was, in its handy little alphabetical order. Of course. Leonard’s perfect system made perfect sense. T for Tony Simmons, Swansea, last known phone number. When I tried to remember the last time I’d been able to find what I was looking for on the first try, I had to give up on the first try. I was starting to see the benefits of an organized life.

25

I DON’T KNOW if it was the talk with Leonard or because I was genuinely better at it after the practice run with Dan McLachlan, but calling Tony Simmons wasn’t anywhere near as hard as I’d expected. And really, it should have been worse, because he answered on the first ring.