The Funny Thing about Norman Foreman by Julietta Henderson (sci fi books to read .TXT) 📗

out, because you don’t see too many successful jazz musos lugging their double bass around on the back of a moped, do you?

It was mildly disappointing, because I’d kind of hoped that, if we had to do this, we’d at least end up tracking one of the possible fathers to a restored villa in Tuscany, tragically but very conveniently widowered and living with four beautiful Italian half-brothers and -sisters just dying to meet Norman. All in all, though, Leonard’s work was pretty damn impressive and the absence of a Tuscan villa certainly wasn’t down to a lack of effort on his part.

‘Leonard, I can’t believe . . . the photos, the locations and phone numbers and . . . all of it. How . . . I wouldn’t even have known where to start. I mean, I know I probably should have kept up with all that sort of stuff for . . . for Norman’s sake, but I just . . . and then, well . . .’ I trailed off, losing interest in my own excuses, but Leonard was either too excited or tactful to care.

‘Oh, well, certainly Trace Your Family History Tuesdays from back in October last year helped, but it’s all out there online these days, Sadie. Extraordinary, really. LinkedIn, Facebook, forums, BT Yellow Pages – all of it. You did the hard part by remembering the names.’ Not wrong there.

‘But after that it was just a matter of patience and persistence. I didn’t even have to leave the comfort of my desk, and now look what we’ve done! Extraordinary!’ Indeed.

Leonard and I sat there staring at Google Maps with its four little perky red flags as the dregs in our teacups went cold. I’ve absolutely no doubt we were thinking about very different things; in fact, for a few minutes there Leonard looked like he’d drifted off to somewhere else altogether. But there it was. Barnstaple, Swansea, Bournemouth, Edinburgh. As a pilgrimage, it was hardly exotic, and even as a holiday itinerary it sounded highly unlikely.

I heard a rustle of movement at the back door, and there was Norman, hair all over the place, jacket tied around his waist and forehead red raw and blazing from his nemesis and the wind. His eyes went to straight to the laptop, taking in the spreadsheet, the photos and the Google Map with its little red flags, which, for all I knew, made perfect sense to him.

‘Did we . . . did we find someone? One of the guys? My . . . the dads, Mum? Did we, Leonard?’

See what I mean? I looked over at Leonard, who all of a sudden had to tie a shoelace, then at the computer screen and back to Norman. The world ground to a halt and I knew the answer I gave here and now was going to rock both our worlds. I’ve got you, Sadie.

‘We found them all, son. We fucking found them all.’

Norman sat down hard on the floor of the kitchen with a stunned look on his face. Leonard let out an embarrassed cough and his head bounced up and hit the table. I just sat there and wondered if there was any chance of me going back to bed for the rest of my life.

19NORMAN

First rule of comedy: Easy is for pussies.

Leonard said it didn’t matter that he hadn’t heard back from any of the venues at the Fringe before we left, because it was just a matter of time before someone gave me a spot to do my show. Leave it to the universe, Norman, and the universe will oblige, is what he also said.

As soon as I met Leonard I knew that if anyone could get me and Mum to the Fringe it’d most likely be him. He reckons if you believe nothing is set in stone, then you can believe change is always possible. And I reckon that just really means that one never knows.

There were some things Leonard didn’t leave to the universe though, and he came up with a genius plan for me to get some proper practice in before the Fringe. Not just in front of the mirror or Mum or Jax like usual, but with a real audience at real pubs where they let you get up and have a go on stage. Open mics, they’re called. Leonard did a lot of googling and found one in all the places where we’re going to stop and maybe meet my dad, and even though it made our trip look a bit wonky on the map so we could end up in the right place on the right night, Leonard said that was OK because the road to success is never straight. Which makes a lot of sense, and I reckon it also proves that Leonard might be the best googler in the world.

Absolutely anyone’s allowed to get up at an open mic night, so I was thinking that maybe there’d be at least one or two other people that needed the practice as much as me. Although I knew I probably shouldn’t really count on that.

Whenever I thought about the actual standing up there and doing jokes on my own in front of a pub-load of strangers I felt pretty scared. But Leonard reckoned that was a good thing, because if I could get as much of the scared feeling out of the way as I could, by the time I got to the Fringe there wouldn’t be so much left inside me. He said that’s what he used to do when he was a soldier when he had to do stuff like sneak through the jungle in the middle of the night with a bunch of enemy soldiers asleep just a few metres away. Which sounds pretty scary. And even though secretly I was thinking that there probably wasn’t going to be enough open mics in the whole of England and Scotland put together to get rid of the amount of scared I had inside of me, I figured if