The Funny Thing about Norman Foreman Julietta Henderson (short books for teens .TXT) 📖

it, wearing lipstick), he was still fascinated by how deeply he could sleep. He asked me once if I thought it was how being dead felt.

‘Like you go off to sleep and one day you just don’t feel anything ever again, Mum? You reckon?’

In the bad-parenting manual I’m thinking of writing I’d have to say I’ve never been able to give Norman a definitive answer on death, because, frankly, I still haven’t worked out where I stand on it myself. You’d think after both my parents dying by the time I was twenty I would have formulated some kind of theory to pass on to my son, just in case. But after hauling up a few stuttering ‘maybe’s, a very lame ‘quite possibly’ and the grand finale of ‘I don’t really know’, I had nothing. Nada. Niente. Nyet.

Whenever I came into Norman’s room after Jax died, I’d find him just lying there, sheets and blankets spread smoothly over the mini-dune of his body. Not reading, not writing down a joke that had suddenly popped into his head; just staring at the wall where my father’s shabby old mulberry-coloured velvet suit jacket hung. All gussied up in that jacket, with his polished shoes and a rainbow Lurex cravat, Norman had been the perfect complement to Jax in his performance outfit of baggy trousers, T-shirt and braces.

Now the mulberry jacket hung in a semi-open-armed stance, straining its wire hanger shoulders, slowly sagging into a depressing shrug and, if I wasn’t mistaken, taking Norman with it. And those sheets stayed smooth all night.

The other thing that happened was that Norman stopped telling me his nightly joke. Every night, for as long as I could remember, bedtime was when he’d try out his new material on me.

‘Mum! Hey, Mum!’ he’d call out as I passed by on my way to the bathroom. ‘Why did the scarecrow get promoted?’ I’d stop and pretend to have a think, but he’d never give me any time before shouting out the answer. ‘Because he was outstanding in his field, Mum!’ Or whatever the punchline was, before whacking the bed with a flourish. ‘I reckon Jax’ll love that one!’

And while it might seem pretty par for the course for a boy who’s lost his best friend to stop making jokes, when it went from Norman, you should understand it was a lot to lose. Two weeks after his twelfth birthday, which made it four weeks after Jax died, as I passed Norman’s room I slowed down, giving him time and hoping for even the faintest ‘Hey, Mum!’ to stop me in my tracks. It didn’t come, like I knew it wouldn’t come, like it hadn’t come for the past month. His bedside lamp was dimmed down as low as it could go and he looked like a sad little bat blinking in the bed.

‘Hey, Norman,’ I whispered into the doorway. ‘You still awake?’

‘Still awake, Mum.’

I took the deepest breath I could and prepared to launch the joke I’d been silently deliberating on for ten minutes at the top of the stairs. Go, Sadie, go.

‘I . . . I was just wondering. What do porcupines say when they kiss?’ I thought I saw the corner of the bat’s mouth curl up a little in the half-dark. But I couldn’t be sure.

‘I dunno, Mum. What do porcupines say when they kiss?’ I could imagine the cogs and wheels moving beneath his flattened fringe and I wished I could see them grinding. Anything to show he was still there.

‘Ouch!’ I saw a flash of teeth as Norman’s lips opened slightly, mouthing the punchline, miraculously getting there at almost the same time I did. I’d said it too loudly, though, and the word was left hanging out on an uncomfortable limb in the silence. But he managed a snuffle into his chest in a pretend laugh anyhow.

‘That’s a good one, Mum.’ The hanging ouch breathed a sigh of relief, but my heart ached at the distance in Norman’s voice. It was like someone throwing it back over his shoulder as he walked away down a long hallway with a heavy suitcase, not like someone who’d just been treated to a reasonably funny joke. I was about to concede defeat and continue my trek to the bathroom when he spoke again.

‘Hey, Mum?’ His voice was very soft and it sounded like he’d reached the end of the hallway but not turned back around. I held my breath. Hoping for anything. ‘Do you think Jaxy’s in heaven?’

My heart leapt and dropped at the same time and I had to put my hand up against the doorframe to stop myself from doubling over with its hijinks. Whatever was coming didn’t feel like it could possibly go well, bearing in mind my lack of answers on death and, consequently, beyond.

It didn’t help that I hadn’t believed in God since I was about eight, coinciding with the death of my mother and the ensuing six months of constant prayers down on my knees, joined by Camper Van Barbie and a posse of three adoring Kens, begging him to bring her back. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we knew it was a big ask, but prior to that I always had faith that the God sold to me by my teachers, the local priest and my mother herself was actually up to the job.

So when after those six months my mother hadn’t returned and there hadn’t been so much as a stink of rotting evidence that she was ‘with you every day watching over you from heaven’, as promised by my father and everyone else I encountered, I decided God was free to dwell in his own house in the Anglican church down the road but he wasn’t coming anywhere near mine. Not unless he showed up accompanied by my mother and a damn good reason for keeping me, Barbie and the Kens waiting so long.

Even so, there was no way I wanted