The Funny Thing about Norman Foreman, Julietta Henderson [best novels to read for students .TXT] 📗

fifteen-minute bus ride praying for an absent-minded cow to amble out on to the road and cause a pile-up just so I could run a few minutes late. Which never happened, by the way, just adding more proof, if I needed it, that my suspicions about God were true.

By the time I arrived at the car yard, the office floors would already be gleaming and Leonard would be brewing up a pot of fragrant hibiscus tea in the lunchroom. At first, I’d been doubtful, having never really strayed from PG Tips, except for a brief accidental dalliance with Tetley a few years ago, but once you start on Egyptian hibiscus tea it’s impossible to go back. It’s a taste so delectable it has the power to lift you up and transport you from a shitty used-car lot in the south-west of England to somewhere altogether more exotic.

Every morning we’d sit at the lunch table talking and drinking the crack cocaine of tea out of the silver pot Leonard had bought off a local trader under the shadow of Mount Sinai when the accompanying waft of hibiscus had reminded him of his wife’s shampoo. He’d carried that pot around in his army kit for months, craving the warm, familiar comfort of its floral notes so often that it became permanently stained.

Over the perfumed steam, Leonard told me stories about his years in the army, and how it felt to kiss your wife goodbye over and over again to go off to places like Egypt and Korea and Borneo that you might never come back from, when all you really wanted were a few more days breathing in the smell of flowers in her hair.

One morning he told me how it felt when he finally came home for good, and he and Iris headed straight for the seaside, opened up a small electrical repair shop and never left. But that even to this day, when he drank hibiscus tea, if he closed his eyes, he was back there in the desert missing his beautiful young wife. Even though Iris was right there at home cooking her famous sultana biscuits and waiting for him to finish work.

Leonard also filled in a lot of spaces talking about his 1971 teal Austin Maxi, which was, by all accounts, along with Iris, the love of his life.

‘I caught the train up to Birmingham to collect it two weeks after it rolled off the factory floor and we’ve been an item ever since,’ he’d chuckled.

But now, no matter how attentive Leonard had been, after a lifetime kept so close to the ocean, the Austin was in need of some major rust control. Leonard hadn’t been sure their pensions and savings would quite stretch to the expense, he said, hence he’d been persuaded to sign up for the over-seventies return to work scheme, winning the lottery with a part-time cleaning job at Pearl’s. Who knows, maybe compared to a couple of decades of active service, it didn’t seem quite as bad to Leonard as it did to me.

When Leonard stopped talking, which wasn’t all that often, I’d talk a little, too. Obviously, my specialist subjects of Norman and Celebrity Come Dine with Me weren’t quite as interesting as his stories, even though, having been a fairly dedicated watcher of the latter over numerous series, I have to say I’ve amassed quite a few anecdotes. After a while, though, I did start to feel bad that I knew so much about Leonard and that after six months all he knew about me was that I was a bad cook, a mediocre mother and a telly addict. But I consoled myself with the fact that there really isn’t that much more to know these days, and he never asked for any more than I was prepared to give.

Even when I’d disappeared from work without any notice, Leonard hadn’t pushed me for an explanation. On the morning I returned, eight days after Jax was buried, he simply poured me a cup of hibiscus tea like I’d never been away. Like I hadn’t just spent the past two weeks trying to hold my son’s world together with my bare hands. Like I never got my grip on that all wrong from the start.

By the time a big blue Mercedes pulled into the car park every day at 9 a.m., Leonard would be back behind his cleaning trolley, his silver pot wrapped and tucked safely away into his little backpack, ready for his daily dose of Dennis. Which arrived like clockwork.

‘Hey, Lenny, you old codger. What’s on the agenda today? Off to get a new supply of incontinence pants? Some new hearing aids, maybe? Ha ha ha.’ Every day was a delight worse than the last, but then Leonard would smile, tilt his head at me to signal it was coming and come up with some new and ingenious way to flip Dennis the bird, which got more and more daring every time. Leaving me in a desperate attempt to hide my shaking shoulders by shuffling some papers or dropping a pen, he’d glide off to finish cleaning the toilets.

At precisely eleven o’clock, Leonard would materialize at my desk with his backpack over his shoulder, wish me a very good day, then walk out the back to the car park and climb into his teal Austin Maxi to drive home to Iris and his cottage by the sea.

Those two and a half cups of hibiscus tea, the conversation and the secret flipping of the bird were the highlights of my day, and in six years of working at Pearl’s, Leonard was the only friend I’d ever made there. And if you’re wondering whose fault that is, all I can say is it takes more than a few high shelves to get to know me.

11

I dozed off easily the night I saw Norman’s new plan. And the next. The deep, dream-free rest of a mother who’d brought her