Shadows in the Twilight (2 page)

Joel could see that his eyes were red.

'I didn't have time to brake,' Eklund said. 'All of a
sudden, there you were in front of the bus. I never
thought you would survive. Never.'

'I think it was a miracle,' said Joel.

Eklund nodded.

'I'll have to start going to church again,' he said.
'Hell's bells, I'll have to start going to church again.'

The door opened once more. It was the Greyhound's
mum who had come back again.

'The boy's father has just arrived,' she said. 'You'll
have to go now. As you can see, there's nothing wrong
with the lad.'

'Thank God for that,' said Eklund.

'Make sure you keep a better lookout in future,' said
the Greyhound's mum. 'You bus drivers think you can
drive as if you had the roads to yourselves!'

'I never drive too fast,' said Eklund.

Joel could tell that Eklund was angry.

'We all have our own ideas about that,' said the
Greyhound's mum, shooing him out as if he'd been a cat
intruding where he'd no business to be.

Then Samuel came into the room.

Joel thought it was best to give the appearance of
being as wretched as possible.

Samuel's face was as white as a sheet. He was breathing
heavily, as if he'd run all the way from the forest to
the hospital.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, and looked at
Joel.

Joel kept his eyes closed.

There wasn't a sound in the room.

Another kind of silence, Joel thought. Not the same as
in the forest yesterday. Not like it is when I wake up in
the middle of the night. Or when we're intent on putting
Miss Nederström on the spot.

An entirely new kind of silence.

A Miracle silence.

'The potatoes are in my rucksack,' said Joel. 'But the
milk bottle broke.'

He suddenly felt frightened. He was scared stiff, in fact.

He thought about the broken milk bottle. The shards
of glass and the white milk running out.

It could have been him.

The bottle of milk could easily have been his body
that was crushed into a thousand pieces. The white milk
could have been his blood.

He felt unable to move a muscle.

Now the penny dropped, and he realised what a
narrow escape he'd had. He ought to be dead. But
instead he was lying here on the examination table under
the white blanket, and he hadn't suffered a single
scratch.

But even though he hadn't been injured, he started to
feel the pain.

It was a totally silent pain.

He closed his eyes, and heard the Greyhound's mum
enter the room.

'The boy's tired,' she said in a low voice.

'Is it absolutely sure that he hasn't been injured?'
Samuel asked.

'Dr Stenström is certain about that,' said the Greyhound's mum.
'But naturally, he had a bit of a scare. That's
why we're keeping him in overnight for observation.'

Joel felt himself being lifted from the examination
table onto a trolley.

He peered through half-closed eyes and noted that he
was being wheeled down a corridor. A door opened, and
he was transferred into a bed.

'Can I stay here with him?' he heard his dad asking.

'Of course,' said the Greyhound's mum. 'Ring the
bell if there's anything you want.'

A miracle, Joel thought.

Jesus walked on water. And I was run over by a
Ljusdal bus but escaped without a single scratch.

He half-opened his eyes again.

Samuel was sitting on a chair by the window.

Joel knew what he was thinking about.

Jenny. His mum Jenny who'd simply vanished carrying
a suitcase, and left them to get by on their own.

Joel knew that Samuel thought about her every time
something unusual or unexpected happened. His dad
might be sitting on the kitchen bench, or on the edge of
Joel's bed, but he just stared into space. Joel would try
to think the same thoughts as his father. Sometimes he
had the feeling that he succeeded. But not always.

And now he was much too tired. Despite the fact that
it was only afternoon. He could make out the sun
through the window. The shadows were lengthening in
the room, and he knew that twilight was falling.

Joel fell asleep, and didn't wake up until next morning.

Samuel stayed at the hospital all night. He didn't go
to work in the forest. They drove home in a black taxi.

'Shouldn't I go to school?' asked Joel.

'Not today. Tomorrow,' said Samuel.

'Shouldn't you go to work in the forest?'

'Not today. Tomorrow. Here we are, we're at home
now.'

Joel went to his room.

This is where he lived. He would continue to live
here, even though he'd experienced a miracle.

Samuel made him a pork pancake. It got burnt, but
Joel didn't complain.

'What's a miracle?' he asked.

Samuel seemed surprised by the question.

'You'll have to ask the vicar about that.'

'But I was run over by a bus? And I didn't suffer a
single scratch?'

'You were lucky,' said Samuel. 'Incredibly lucky. It's
only people who believe in divine powers that talk about
miracles.'

Joel didn't bother to ask any more questions. He
could tell from Samuel's tone of voice that his dad
preferred not to talk about miracles.

Joel knew that his father didn't believe in God. Once
when Samuel had been drunk, he'd hurled a bucket at
the wall and cursed and shouted that there were no such
things as gods. If Miss Nederström was right, that meant
that Samuel was a lost soul.

Mind you, Joel had no idea what a lost soul was.

But he realised that he would have to give serious
thought to what he believed in connection with God,
now that the Ljusdal bus had enabled him to experience
a miracle.

After dinner, when Samuel had fallen asleep on the
kitchen bench, Joel took his logbook out of the showcase
containing the
Celestine
. On the last page, where he
used to list all his unanswered questions, there was
hardly any space left. There was only just enough room
for one word and a question mark.

'
God?'

If you had experienced a miracle, you ought to thank
God for it.

But if Joel was in the same category as Samuel, a lost
soul, how should he go about that?

How do you thank a God that you might not believe in?

And what would happen if you didn't say thank you?

Would the miracle be withdrawn, so that you would
be run over by the Ljusdal bus again?

Joel sighed. There were too many questions. And the
questions were too big. He wished there was one day
every week when all questions were banned.

He replaced his logbook, went to his room and started
to cut up an old map he had. Now he would start
inventing his new Around The World game.

Samuel had woken up and suddenly appeared in the
doorway.

'What are you doing?' he asked.

'Making a game,' said Joel.

'You're not sitting here and thinking about the
accident, I hope?'

'It wasn't an accident.'

'What was it, then?'

'I didn't get a single scratch. So it can't have been an
accident, can it?'

Samuel looked as if he didn't know what to say.

'You must try to stop thinking about it,' he said. 'If
you have nightmares, wake me up.'

Samuel went to his room and switched on the radio.
The evening news programme was on. Joel stood in the
doorway. Perhaps they would say something about the
miracle that had taken place.

But there was no mention of it.

No doubt the miracle was too small to report.

*

The next day he went to school as usual. He avoided
going past the bar and seeing the damaged lamppost. He
was also a little bit worried that the bus might come
back and run him over again.

He must find a way of saying thank you for the
miracle.

And he must do so quickly.

When he got to school Miss Nederström gave him a
hug.

That had never happened before.

She squeezed him so hard that he had difficulty in
breathing.

She used a very strong-smelling perfume and Joel
didn't like being hugged at all. His classmates looked
very solemn, and Joel had the feeling that they were
afraid of him, as if he were a ghost. A walking
phantom.

It was both good and bad.

It was good that everybody was paying attention to
him. But it was bad that he had to be a ghost for that to
happen.

Things weren't made any better when Miss
Nederström told him that he should thank God for
having survived.

I hope she doesn't ask me to do that here in the
classroom, Joel thought.

I'm not going to do that.

But she left him in peace. He could start breathing
again.

It was hard to concentrate on the lessons. And in the
breaks it seemed as if his classmates were avoiding him.
Even Otto left him alone.

Joel didn't like all this at all.

If people thought he had a contagious disease just
because a miracle had happened to him, he'd rather it
hadn't done.

It was all that confounded Eklund's fault, of course, the
man with the big red hands who hadn't been driving carefully.
If you were driving a bus you had to expect somebody
to run over the road because he was in a hurry to say
thank you for two packs of pastilles. Didn't they teach bus
drivers anything before giving them their driving licence?

After school Joel trudged back home.

He would have to find a good way of saying thank
you for the miracle.

And he would have to be quick about it.

No doubt there was an aura around him telling everybody
that he still hadn't said thank you to God.

Feeling in a bad mood, he went down to the river and
sat down on his rock.

He felt he had to talk to somebody about this miracle.

Not Samuel. That wouldn't be any good. His father
didn't like people talking about God.

Who should he talk to, then?

The Old Bricklayer, Simon Windstorm?

Or Gertrud, who lived on the other side of the river
and didn't have a nose?

It occurred to him that he didn't have a real friend. A
best friend.

That was something he'd have to get.

That was the most important of all the things he'd
have to solve this autumn.

You couldn't celebrate your twelfth birthday without
having a real friend.

He made up his mind to pay a visit to Gertrud No-Nose that very same evening.

He left his rock, went home and put the potatoes on
to boil.

When Samuel had finished his dinner, it was time to
tell him that Joel was going out. He'd prepared for this
carefully.

'I'm going to call on Eva-Lisa for a bit,' he said.

Samuel put down the newspaper he'd been reading.

'Who?' he said.

'Eva-Lisa.'

'Who's she?'

'Come on, you must know. She's in my class. Her
mum's that nurse at the hospital. The one you met.'

'Oh, her,' said Samuel. 'But shouldn't you stay at
home tonight?'

'But I didn't have a single scratch!'

Samuel nodded. Then he smiled.

'Don't be late, then,' he said. 'And make sure you
stick to the pavements.'

'I will, don't worry,' said Joel. 'I shan't be late. Just a
couple of hours.'

A few minutes later he was hurrying over the river.
The arch of the bridge towered over his head.

He remembered clinging on to the very top of it, when
Samuel had come to help him down. He ran over the
bridge as fast as he could.

He was forced to pause outside Gertrud's gate and get
his breath back. The cold autumn wind was tearing at his
chest.

But the light was on in her kitchen. And he could see
her shadow outlined against the curtains.

She was at home. Maybe she could help him to find a
good way of saying thank you for the miracle, and
getting quits with God, or whoever it was that prevented
the Ljusdal bus from killing him.

He opened her squeaky gate.

He glanced up at the starry sky. But there was no sign
of the dog.

There was only one thing Joel could be certain about as far
as Gertrud was concerned. That she didn't have a nose.

But that was all. Gertrud had lost her nose as a result
of an operation that went wrong, and Joel couldn't make
her out. Nearly everything she did was Contrary.
Although she attended the Pentecostal chapel where the
minister was known as Happy Harry, she didn't look
like the other ladies in his congregation. They all
dressed in black and wore flat hats with a little black net
over their faces. They wore galoshes and carried brown
handbags. But Gertrud didn't. Never. She made her own
clothes. Joel had spent several evenings in her kitchen,
watching her at work on her sewing machine. She made
new clothes out of old ones. She sometimes cut two old
coats down the middle, then sewed them together to
make a new one. Joel used to help her to pin the seams,
She never had a proper hat, although she often wore an
old army fur cap pulled down over her ears. Once upon
a time it had been yellowish white, but Gertrud liked
bright colours and had dyed it red.

Joel thought that Gertrud was a difficult person. He
could never be sure what she was going to do or say.
That could be exciting, but also annoying. She
sometimes wanted Joel to accompany her on some frolic
or other, and made him feel embarrassed. But at other
times he thought she was the most fascinating person in
the whole world.

Gertrud was grown-up. Nearly thirty. Three times as
old as Joel. Even so, she could act like a child on
occasions. Like a child even younger than Joel.

She was a grown-up childperson. And that could be
difficult to cope with.

Joel stood outside the kitchen door and listened.
Sometimes Gertrud was feeling sad, and would sit
sobbing on a chair in the kitchen. She had a special
Weeping Chair in the corner next to the cooker. She
seemed to have arranged a punishment corner for herself.

Joel didn't like it when Gertrud was crying. She
sobbed far too loudly. It wasn't as if she had stomach
ache, or had fallen and hit herself; but it sounded as if
she were in pain.

In Joel's view, when you were feeling sad you should
cry quietly. You should cry so quietly that nobody could
hear you. Not bawl your head off and bring the world to
a standstill. You could do that if you were in pain, but
not just because you were sad.

On several occasions Joel had run over the bridge to
pay a visit to Gertrud, only to find her sobbing in the
kitchen. So he had turned and gone back home again.

But now there wasn't a sound to be heard from the
kitchen.

Joel pressed his ear against the cold door and listened
hard.

Then he pulled a string hanging next to the door.

Immediately, lots of bells started playing a tune.

That was what Joel liked most about Gertrud. Nothing
in her house was usual. She didn't even have a normal
doorbell with a button to press. Instead, she had a string
to pull, and that set off lots of bells, like a musical box.

Gertrud had invented it herself. She had taken an old
wall clock to pieces and attached to the parts several
little bells she'd bought from Mr Under, the horse dealer
– the kind that ring when his horses pull sledges through
the snow. And she'd made the contraption work.

The rest of her house was the same.

Once he had been helping Gertrud to do an
uninspiring jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen table when she
suddenly jumped to her feet and brushed all the pieces
onto the floor. They'd almost finished the puzzle, there
were only a few pieces left.

'I have an idea,' Gertrud had shouted.

'Aren't we going to finish the puzzle?' Joel had asked.

Even as he spoke he realised what a silly question that
was. All the pieces were scattered over the cork floor
tiles. If they were going to finish the puzzle, they'd have
to start all over again.

Gertrud put a red clown's nose over the hole beneath
her eyes. She usually had a handkerchief stuffed into the
hole where her nose had been, but when she was going
to think, or when she was in a good mood, she would put
on the red nose.

She used to call it her Thinking Nose.

'Never mind the puzzle,' Gertrud exclaimed. 'We're
going to do something else.'

'What?' wondered Joel.

Gertrud didn't answer, but looked mysterious.

Then she opened a wardrobe and pulled out lots of
clothes in a heap on the floor.

'We're going to change,' she said.

Joel didn't know what she was talking about.

'Change?' he asked. 'Change what?'

'Everything that's normal or usual,' shouted Gertrud.
'Everything that's usual and boring.'

Joel still didn't understand what she was talking about.
And so he didn't know if what was going to happen
would be exciting, or if he would be embarrassed.

'Let's get dressed up,' said Gertrud, and started sorting
through the pile of clothes. 'Let's start by changing
ourselves.'

Joel was all for that.

He liked dressing up. When he came home from school
and was waiting for the potatoes to boil, he would often
try on some of his father's clothes. A few years ago it had
just been a game, but this last year Joel had been dressing
up in Samuel's clothes to find out what it was like to be
grown up. And he had discovered that although,
obviously, clothes for adults were bigger than clothes for
children, that was not the only difference. Lots of other
things were different. For instance, clothes for adults had
special pockets that children didn't need. Pockets to keep
a watch in. Or a little pocket inside an ordinary pocket
where you could keep small change.

Joel had noticed that he started thinking in a different
way when he was wearing Samuel's clothes. He sometimes
looked into the mirror and spoke to his reflection as
if he had been his own father. He would ask the reflection
how he'd got on at school, and if he'd remembered to call
in at the baker's and buy some bread. The reflection never
answered. But Joel used to take an invisible watch from
the appropriate pocket, sigh deeply and urge the
reflection not to forget the next day.

He had once discovered a dress right at the back of
Samuel's wardrobe. It was hanging in a special bag that
smelled of mothballs. Joel assumed it was one that
Mummy Jenny had forgotten when she walked out on
them. Who else could it belong to? Sara, the waitress in
the local bar, was much too fat to get into it. Besides, she
never stayed the night when she came to visit.

Joel had forbidden it.

He hadn't actually said anything. But he had
forbidden it even so.

He had thought it so intensively that Sara had no
doubt been able to read his thoughts.

So it must be his mum's dress.

But was it absolutely certain that she'd forgotten it
when she packed her suitcase and left?

Had she left it behind on purpose?

So that it would be there if ever she came back?

Joel had taken it carefully out of the bag. It was blue
and had a belt attached to the waist.

He had spent ages staring at the dress as it lay on the
kitchen table. He'd looked at it for so long that the
potatoes had boiled dry in the saucepan. He only
stopped staring at the dress when the kitchen started
filling with smelly smoke from the burnt potatoes.

He put it back into the wardrobe.

But a few days later he took it out again. This time, he
tried it on.

He had the feeling that he'd never been as close to
Mummy Jenny as at that moment.

He stood on a chair in front of the cracked shaving
mirror, so that he could see the belt round his waist.

Then he returned the dress to the wardrobe.

He'd never been able to make up his mind whether
his mum had forgotten it, or left it behind on purpose.

But he couldn't think about that now. Gertrud was
wading around through all the clothes scattered over
the floor.

'Put these on,' said Gertrud, handing him a pair of
yellow trousers. 'Hurry up! After eight o'clock in the
evening it's too late to change what's usual.'

'Why?' Joel wondered.

'It just is,' said Gertrud. 'Hurry up now!'

Joel put on the trousers. They were far too long for him.
He recalled that Gertrud had once made them from a few
old curtains. Then he put on a checked shirt, and Gertrud
knotted a tie round his neck, just like Joel used to do for his
father. Gertrud was wearing an old pair of overalls that
used to belong to the Fire Brigade. Joel had once asked her
how she managed to come by so many old clothes.

'That's my secret,' she'd replied. 'I suppose you
know what a secret is?'

Joel knew.

A secret was something you kept to yourself.

The house where Gertrud lived had three rooms. It
was a normal house, with nothing peculiar about it. But
what was different was that it had two kitchens. Joel
didn't know anybody at all who had two kitchens, apart
from Gertrud.

The other kitchen, the small one, was in Gertrud's
bedroom, along one wall. There was an electric hotplate
and a little sink with hot and cold water.

'Why do you have two kitchens?' Joel had asked, the
first time he'd seen it.

'Because I'm so lazy,' Gertrud had said. 'In the mornings
when I wake up, I don't have the strength to go as far
as the big kitchen. So I make myself some coffee in here.'

That made Joel suspect that Gertrud wasn't all there.
But as there was nothing dangerous or frightening about
her way of being different, he'd decided that it was just
exciting.

Exciting and strange.

He had even gone so far as to invent a word to
describe Gertrud. None of the words he knew was good
enough, and so he'd joined together exciting and strange
to make a new word.

Gertrud was
strangeiting
.

But he'd never told her that. Perhaps it was forbidden
to invent new words? Perhaps there was a committee of
stern-faced old men in grey suits somewhere or other,
deciding what words could exist and which ones were
forbidden?

Joel even had a secret word for forbidden words.

He called them
unwords
.

Gertrud dragged him over to the big mirror in the
middle room. It was the biggest of the three rooms. It was
also the most fascinating one. There were so many things
in it that it was almost impossible to pick your way
through it. There was a big birdcage hanging from the
ceiling. But Gertrud kept a stuffed hare inside it. There
was an aquarium next to one of the walls. A lamp attached
to the side of it lit it up – but there were no fish swimming
around in the warm water. Instead, there was a toy
locomotive on the sandy bottom. A big sofa in the middle
of the floor was crammed full of books. Hanging on the
walls were carpets like the ones Joel was used to seeing
on the floor. But Gertrud's floor was made up of piles of
sand and stones, and sometimes in the winter she would
cover it in fir branches brought in from the forest.

There was a big mirror in one corner of the room.
They stood in front of it, and laughed at each other.

'Good,' said Gertrud. 'Now we're not usual any
longer. So we can begin.'

Joel looked at her in surprise. To be honest, he felt a
bit odd in the yellow trousers and the checked shirt.
There again, he couldn't help being curious to know
what she was going to think of next.

Gertrud sat down on the floor, and Joel followed suit.

'Just look at that,' she said.

'Look at what?' Joel wondered.

Gertrud pointed at a lamp dangling on a flex hanging
from the ceiling.

'Just look at that lamp,' she said. 'It looks so usual. A
normal lamp hanging on a normal flex from a normal
ceiling. We'll have to do something about that. What can
we turn it into?'

'I don't know,' said Joel. 'I mean, a lamp is a lamp?'

'But it doesn't have to look normal,' said Gertrud.
'Just think if it looked like a mushroom instead!'

'A mushroom?' said Joel.

'You must know what a mushroom is? Now you'll
find out what a mushroomlamp looks like.'

'A mushroom,' said Joel.

Gertrud laughed and nodded.

Joel watched her disconnect the plug, which was high
up on one of the walls, and take down the lamp. She was
balancing precariously on the pile of books on the big
sofa. Then she fetched a broken sweeping brush handle
from the scullery, and fixed it in an old Christmas tree
foot. She produced some Sellotape and fastened the bulb
to the top of the brush handle, and covered it with an old
lampshade. She found some yellow fabric in the pile of
clothes on the floor, and spread it carefully over the
lampshade. Then she reconnected the plug.

To his surprise, Joel had to admit that the lamp really
did look like a mushroom.

Now the penny had dropped. He joined in on the fun
as well. He transformed the radiator under one of the
windows into a tiger. He painted stripes onto it, and gave
it a tail. He turned a wastepaper basket into a car by
attaching to it a circle of bent wire to make a steering
wheel. Meanwhile, Gertrud was busy turning a heavy
chest of drawers into a sailing boat.

Then they sat down on the floor to get their breath
back.

'That's better,' said Gertrud, sounding very pleased
with herself. 'But we really ought to redecorate this
room. Maybe we ought to board up the windows and
paint new windows on the walls.'

'But you wouldn't be able to air the room then,'
said Joel.

'Maybe not,' said Gertrud. 'But only maybe. Perhaps
we could do it even so?'

It seemed to Joel that when you thought about it, what
Gertrud was doing was no more chaotic than things sometimes
were back home with Samuel. The only difference
was that Gertrud never bothered to tidy up. As far as she
was concerned, there was no such thing as untidiness.