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

no Fringe, we were definitely the only guests taking advantage of the Soft Fudge’s hospitality on that particular night, and perhaps since 1978. Of the other five doors on the upstairs level (which we discovered after I relented to Norman’s request to explore before going to bed), four of them were boarded up. The fifth was open just a crack and, when Norman pushed on it lightly, the slightly wider crack revealed a room stacked so full of furniture that it physically wouldn’t open much more than a few inches.

‘Hey, Mum?’ Norman whispered as we peered into the semi-darkness. ‘Remember when you, me and Jax watched that telly show where the old guy hoarded so much they had to take the roof off his house?’

‘Mmm. I certainly do, Norman.’

I also remembered that the real reason they’d taken the roof off was because the guy had eaten himself to forty-five stone and had fallen and couldn’t get up. A vision of Adam popped unbidden into my head and I shut the door hard and shepherded Norman back to the Caramel Suite.

Even with Norman and me occupying the bed and Leonard curled up on the lumpy window seat, the Caramel Suite was big enough not to feel awkward. The regular but indeterminable noises coming from Leonard’s creaky old body and the soft banging of the plumbing from inside the walls seemed to soothe Norman, and he fell asleep within minutes. But despite being dog-tired, I lay awake, savouring the presence of his warm, still body next to mine.

A sporadic burst of drunken shouting and the sound of cars going past every now and again even at that early hour of the morning made me realize how quiet our house in Penzance was. Most often, the first sound of my day was the guy across the road starting his delivery van at 5 a.m. If I concentrated hard, I could hear the crash of the waves on the foreshore as the noise of his motor faded away, and there were times I was tempted to get up and go for a walk. But I hadn’t walked on the beach for years, even though I knew that the sting of the salty wind on my face would probably feel quite wonderful. The thought of the sand squeezing up between my toes without my father there in his rolled-up trousers and vest seemed impossible. And so it was.

A thin ray of light from the street elbowed its way through the curtains of the Caramel Suite and in the red glow of the digital clock by the bedside table I could see the outline of Norman’s face on the pillow. His mouth hung open a little and he looked like he was about to say something. He was sleeping so deeply I was tempted to mark a cross on his forehead for old times’ sake, but it probably wouldn’t have had the same effect with my manky Vaseline chapstick.

I lay there and looked at his face for a long, long time, examining every part of it from top to bottom, then bottom to top. Left to right, then right to left. I squinted and closed one eye until the two sides of his face became far from symmetrical, then I did the same with the other eye. When he was unmasked and down the rabbit hole of sleep, I knew every inch of that face, committed to memory by the countless hours I’d done just this over the years, marvelling that such a perfect human had anything to do with me. But now I was searching for something else. Perhaps a sign of Tony on the off-chance a stray sperm might have slipped through before abandoning ship? Dan McLachlan, who didn’t want to know? God forbid, something of Adam? James Knox, who I wasn’t going to call?

I couldn’t see any of them. But I found me, I found my father, and in the sliver of street light in the early hours of the morning I caught a fleeting glimpse of my mum. But, somewhat reassuringly, there really wasn’t a sign of anybody else, and so I thought, well, maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s true, after all, and Norman really is totally and only mine. Maybe all those years ago the universe decided that Sadie Foreman had tried enough and cried enough and was done looking in all the wrong places. So here you go, here’s someone just for you. You did this. And he’s perfect. Well done, love, and that’s your lot.

By 4.04 a.m., in a fug of sleeplessness, antacid overload and nagging stomach pain, I came to the conclusion that I’d been absolutely right all along and there really was no need for the search for Norman’s other parent to continue. Then, at 4.05 I remembered that it hadn’t been my idea to look for him in the first place, it had been Norman’s. So there went that.

Somewhere in the longest, noisiest and most sleep-deprived night of my life, I must have dropped off, though, because the next thing I knew I was being shaken none too gently awake. Norman’s pink-and-white splotchy face loomed large and in living colour an inch from my nose as the Edinburgh sun jostled through the window behind him.

‘Mum, Mum, wake up. Leonard’s gone.’

39

Leonard was indeed gone. Although his overnight bag was exactly where he’d placed it the night before, his coat was hung neatly over the back of a chair and his laptop was sitting on the window-seat bed. At Norman’s insistence, we searched the house, which was just as empty in the light of day as it had been the previous night, but we couldn’t find hide nor wispy grey hair of him. We did find the kitchen, though, so for a moment I had high hopes for a cup of tea, but the chances of finding a stray teabag within a decade of its use-by date didn’t look promising.

While we were