I’ve always run at the first sign of trouble, but not Norman. Everything had gone to shit, chaos reigned around him, but he’d dug in and there it was. Job done. As I looked up at my brave, beautiful, much cleverer than me boy and tried to find some meaningful words, from behind my right shoulder came a quavering, joyful shout.

“Bravo, Norman! Bravo, bravo, you bloody little beauty!”

I turned around to look at Leonard, and a wink and a smile nearly broke my heart.

I’m fairly sure the grammatically dubious Cozy Tree Café had never had such a good day. Even though the rest of Swansea’s Got Talent was officially canceled, some kind of show was apparently destined to go on. It looked like nearly the entire audience had migrated across to the Cozy Tree for tea, cake and a reliving of the afternoon’s events. Us included. A few mini pop stars and their mothers were bonding over cupcakes, possibly working on forming a supergroup, but generally there seemed to be one thing on everyone’s minds, and two distinct camps. Bad Frank’s supporters and Not Half Bad Frank’s supporters. Everybody had an opinion and they were all determined to voice it. Who’d have thought Swansea history would be made according to the division of Frank Sinatras? You’d have thought it’d be Tom Joneses, if anything.

Our own little supergroup was squeezed into a booth right by the front door of the café and, somehow, I managed to end up between Tony and Kathy again. I know. But something about the way Tony hesitated and stood back when we went to sit down made it feel like it was a bit more on purpose this time.

The two of them held hands across the back of the booth behind me and it felt quite nice to be protected by that little force field when Tony told us that he was really sorry, but he definitely wasn’t Norman’s father. Because he and Kathy had been trying to have a baby for years, and when they finally got tested a while back it turned out the problem wasn’t Kathy’s uncooperative eggs, it was Tony’s lazy sperm. More than likely caused by a serious bout of chicken pox when he was eleven. He had virtually zero sperm count, the lowest the specialist had ever seen in someone who wasn’t a woman, apparently. Or something like that. I really didn’t listen to the details too closely because I was too busy watching my son.

Even though Norman’s face was pretty unreadable, when Tony softly dropped his bomb it seemed to me like the empty shoulders of that jacket collapsed just a little more into the space around him. But if I know myself, and I think I’m getting close, it’s a safe bet my own face said it all.

It felt like Tony was breaking up with me thirteen years later and he’d brought his lovely girlfriend along to let me down gently. After the way I’d behaved back then I figured it was only fair, though. Break up with me, Tony, I can take it. But I wish you didn’t have to break up with Norman.