A Bridge to the Stars

  He gets out of bed and watches him through the half-open kitchen door.

  Samuel is splattering water all over the floor and the walls. Steam is rising from the glowing stove and his face is sweaty and shiny. He's scrubbing away like mad at stains and specks of dirt that only he can see. He throws a whole bucketful of sizzling water into the hood over the stove. He squelches around the floor in his soaking wet woollen socks and scrubs so hard, it seems that doing so relieves him of a great pain.

  Joel can't make up his mind if his dad is scared or if he's angry.

  What kind of dirt is it that he can see, but nobody else can?

  He can hear Samuel muttering and chuntering about spiders' webs and clusters of snakes. But surely there aren't any spiders making webs in the kitchen in the middle of winter? And how could there be a cluster of snakes in the hood over the stove? There aren't any snakes at all in this part of northern Sweden.

  Joel watches him through the half-open door and realises that his father is scrubbing away something that only he can see. Something that makes him both scared and angry.

  When Samuel has finished, he lies on his bed without moving. He groans and doesn't open the curtains even though it's broad daylight. He's still on the bed when Joel goes to school, and he's still there when Joel comes back home in the afternoon.

  When Joel has boiled the potatoes and asks his father if he wants to eat, he just groans and shakes his head. A few days later everything is back to normal, as if it had simply been a dream. His father gets up at five o'clock again, has his coffee and goes off into the forest. Joel can breathe freely again. It will be a long time before he's woken up by his father sitting at the kitchen table muttering away to himself.

  It's easiest to think about all the things that happen and make him wonder what's going on when he's sitting in the crack in his rock down by the river.

  One day he sits down at the kitchen table with a pen and some paper and writes down all the things he thinks about. He lists the questions he's going to ask his father. Questions he wants answering before the first snow has fallen in the autumn. When he writes down his questions it's still the middle of winter. There are big mounds of snow thrown up by the ploughs at street corners and by the wall of the church. It's bitterly cold when he goes to school in the morning. But spring will come one of these days.

  His first question will be why they don't live by the sea. That might not be the most important question, but he wants to start with something that isn't too hard.

  For every question he writes down, he also tries to work out what possible answers there might be, and what answer he would most like to hear.

  Then he wants to know why he was born in Sundsvall.

  And why Jenny, his mother, went off in a train and left him with Mrs Westman.

  That's also difficult because he never knows what to say whenever anybody asks him why he doesn't have a mother.

  He's the only one. The only person he knows who doesn't have a mother.

  Being the only one can often be a good thing.

  Being the only one with a model aeroplane made of balsa wood, or having a bike with a steel-studded tyre on the back wheel.

  But being the only one without a mother is a bad thing.

  It's worse than wearing glasses.

  It's even worse than stuttering.

  Being without a mother is the worst thing there is.

  The only mum allowed not to be there is a mum who's died.

  He sometimes thinks he will give that answer when somebody asks, or is taunting him. He's tested it to hear what it sounds like.

  'My mum died.'

  But there are lots of ways of saying that. You can say it to make it sound as if she died in a dramatic plane crash in some far distant country, when she was on some urgent mission. Or you can say it to suggest that she was attacked by a lion.

  'My mother's dead' is another way he could say it.

  That makes it sound as if he doesn't really care.

  But when he finds the photograph that morning, when his dad's asleep with his head on the kitchen table, he knows that his mother isn't dead. And he knows that he has to find out what happened.

  Every night before he goes to sleep he thinks up a story with her in it, something he can lie and fantasise about before he dozes off. The one he likes best is when he imagines she is a figurehead on the bows of a ship with three tall masts and lots of billowing sails.

  Sometimes he's the captain of the ship, sometimes it's his father. They always very nearly capsize but manage to make their way through the submerged rocks and sandbanks in the end. It's a good dream because he can think up lots of different endings.

  But sometimes when he's in a bad mood he allows the ship to sink and the figurehead is buried two thousand fathoms deep. The exhausted crew manage to scramble onto a desert island, but he lets Jenny, his mother, disappear for ever at the bottom of the sea.

  Samuel Island or Joel Island. The desert island they eventually land on is never called Jenny Island.

  It's usually when he's been annoyed by Otto that he lets the ship sink.

  Even if he's generally on his guard, always ready for somebody in the school playground to start asking awkward questions, Otto has a way of creeping up on him on the sly and catching him out when he's forgotten to have an answer ready.

  Otto is older than Joel and is repeating a year because he has some illness or other and nobody understands what it is. Sometimes he's off school for months on end, and if he misses any more this year he'll have to repeat the year yet again. Otto's father is a fireman with the railway, and if you're lucky you can go with Otto and see what goes on in the engine sheds.

  But Joel isn't one of those allowed to go along. He and Otto are usually at each other's throats.

  'If I'd have been a mum and had a son like you, I'd have run away as well,' says Otto out of the blue, loud enough for everybody in the school yard to hear.

  Joel doesn't know what to say.

  'My mum's a figurehead,' he says. 'But I don't suppose you know what that is.'

  The answer he hasn't prepared at all seems to be a good one, because Otto doesn't respond.

  The next time I'll hold my tongue and just thump him one, Joel thinks. I'm bound to get beaten up because he's older and bigger than me. But maybe I'll be able to bite him. . .

  The next class is geography. Miss Nederström emerges from the staff room where she makes tea and solves crossword puzzles during the lesson breaks. She has a club foot and she's been Joel's teacher ever since he started school.

  Once he put on an act to amuse the rest of the pupils by walking behind her, imitating her limp.

  She suddenly turned round and smiled.

  'You're very good,' she said. 'That's exactly how I walk.'

  If she hadn't had a club foot Joel could well imagine having her as a mum. But Miss Nederström is in fact a Mrs and has children of her own with the surveyor she's married to.

  Geography is Joel's best subject. He never forgets what his father tells him, and he has a diary with maps of all the countries of the world in it. He knows where Pamplemousse and Bogamaio are, although he's not at all sure how to pronounce them.

  Nobody else in the class knows as much about the world as Joel. Perhaps he doesn't know all that much about Sweden, but he knows more than anybody else about what lies beyond the dark forests and over the sea.

  No sooner have they sat down than Otto puts his hand up. Joel doesn't realise he's done so because Otto sits in the row behind him.

  Miss Nederström nods at him.

  'Do you want to go home?' she asks. 'Don't you feel well?'

  Otto rarely puts his hand up unless he's feeling ill. But this time he has a question.

  'What is a figural head?' he asks.

  Joel gives a start and feels his heart beginning to pound. He might have known. That bastard Otto! He's going to be shown up now. Everybody heard what he said about his mother being a figurehead.

&n
bsp; 'Come again,' said Miss Nederström. 'What did you say it was?'

  'A figural head,' said Otto again.

  'No, it's called a figurehead,' said Miss Nederström.

  Don't tell him, thought Joel. Don't tell him. . .

  And she doesn't.

  'Is there anybody in the class who knows what a figurehead is?' she asks.

  Nobody answers, least of all Joel, the only one who knows.

  Then Otto puts his hand up again.

  'Joel knows,' he said. 'His mum is a figural . . . one of those things . . . '

  Miss Nederström looks at Joel.

  'Where on earth did you get that from?' she said. 'A figurehead is a wooden carving attached to the bows of a ship. Not nowadays, but in the old days when they had sailing ships. Nobody can have a mum made of wood.'

  Joel has time to swear that he hates both Miss Nederström and Otto before the whole class bursts into cruel laughter.

  'You know a lot about all kinds of unusual things,' says Miss Nederström, 'but I must say you sometimes get carried away by your imagination.'

  Joel stares down at his desk lid, feels his face turning red, and he hates and hates as hard as he can.

  'Joel,' says Miss Nederström. 'Look at me!'

  He slowly raises his head that feels as heavy as a block of stone,

  'There's nothing wrong with having imagination and making things up,' she says, 'but you must distinguish between what is fantasy and what is real. You remember that time about the water-lilies?'

  The water lilies! Of course he remembers, even though he's been trying to forget. The outsize water lilies on Mauritius that his father had once told him about. As big as the centre circle of the ice-hockey pitch they create every winter on the flat, sandy space outside the school by spraying water onto it and allowing it to freeze – the temperature never rises above zero, and they can play on it for months.

  One day everybody in the class was asked to talk about something exciting they'd read about or heard somebody talking about.

  Joel had told the story of the water lilies on Mauritius.

  'I don't suppose they are really as big as that,' Miss Nederström had said when he'd finished his piece.

  He had been silly enough to insist he was right.

  'They are as big as that,' he said. 'Maybe even bigger.'

  'Who told you that?' asked Miss Nederström.

  'My dad saw them when he was a sailor,' said Joel, 'and he bloody well knows what he's talking about.'

  He didn't know where the swearword had come from. But Miss Nederström was angry and sent him out of the classroom.

  After that he'd made up his mind never to say anything about far-distant lands again in class. How are they supposed to know what reality looks like? All they've ever seen is snow and the endless forests.

  He trudges home from school through the snow flurries. It's started to get dark already even though it's only early afternoon.

  I'm eleven years old now, he thought. One of these days I'll be an old man, and eventually I shall die. But by then I'll be a long way away from here, a long way away from all this snow and that Otto who can never keep his mouth shut.

  His nose is running, and he hurries on home.

  He collects a kilo of potatoes from Svenson's, the grocer's; a pack of butter and a loaf of bread. Svenson, who's never fully sober and has grease stains on his jacket, notes the items down in his notebook.

  I go shopping like a bloody mum, he thought angrily. First I buy the goods on tick, then I boil the potatoes. I'm like a mother to myself.

  As he passes through the garden gate, hanging skewwhiff from its hinges, it dawns on him that this house will never float away down the river. There will never be a suitable wind. It might have been better to smash the house up, like his dad had told him they did to old tubs past their sell-by date.

  He runs up the dark, creaking staircase, opens the door to their flat and lights a fire in the stove before he's even started to take his boots off.

  Something has to happen, he thinks. I don't want to wait any longer.

  While the potatoes are boiling he searches tentatively through his dad's room for the photograph of his mum, Jenny. He sifts through books and clothes, and all the rolled-up sea charts, but he doesn't find anything.

  Has he taken the photo into the forest with him? he wonders. Why is he keeping it from me?

  He decides to ask his father that the moment he comes home, before he's even had time to take off his woolly hat.

  It's my mum after all, he thinks. Why is he keeping her from me?

  But when he hears his father's footsteps coming up the stairs, he knows he isn't going to ask him anything.

  He daren't. Instead he asks his dad to repeat the story about the enormous water lilies that only exist in the botanical gardens in Mauritius.

  Samuel sits down on the edge of Joel's bed.

  'Wouldn't you rather hear about something else?' he asks. 'I've told you about the water lilies so many times.'

  'Not tonight,' Joel tells him. 'Tonight I want to hear something I've heard about before.'

  Afterwards he lies down in the dark, listening to the beams twisting and creaking.

  Something's got to happen, he tells himself before he dozes off with the sheets pulled up to his chin.

  He suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night. And that's when, as he gets out of bed and tiptoes over to the window, he sees that solitary dog running off towards the stars.

  3

  There are two things Joel Gustafson wants.

  A new stove and a bicycle.

  He can't quite make up his mind which of those is the more important. He realises that two things can never be equally important at the same time, but he's unsure when it comes to choosing between the stove and the bicycle.

  He knows of nobody apart from himself and his father who cook food on an old iron, wood-burning stove.

  Everybody has an electric cooker nowadays. Nobody but him has to chop up kindling, carry in firewood and wait for ever and a day until the so-called hotplates have heated up sufficiently to boil the water for the potatoes.

  It is a real pain, having to stand by the stove every day after school, making sure the fire doesn't go out. That's the kind of thing people used to have to do. Not now, though, not in the spring of 1956.

  One day he plucks up enough courage to ask his father.

  The wood had been damp and wouldn't ignite. In addition, he'd burnt himself on the pan when the potatoes were finally ready.

  'Don't you think we should get rid of this old stove?' he says.

  Samuel looks up from the kitchen bench, where he's lying down and thumbing through a newspaper.

  'What's wrong with the stove?' he asks. 'Has it cracked?'

  What's wrong with it? Joel asks himself. Everything is wrong with it. The biggest thing wrong with it is that it's not an electric cooker.

  'Everybody has an electric cooker,' he says. 'Everybody but us.'

  His father peers at him over his reading glasses.

  'How many people do you think have a model ship called Celestine?' he asks. 'How many apart from us? Should we get rid of that as well? So that we are like everybody else?'

  Joel doesn't like it when his dad answers a question by asking another one. That makes it hard to stick to the point that really matters. But this time he's going to be insistent.

  'If I'm going to have to carry on boiling potatoes, I want an electric cooker,' he says.

  Then he says something he hadn't intended to say at all.

  'If I'm the mother in this household.'

  His father turns serious, and looks at him long and hard without responding.

  Joel wishes he could read his father's thoughts.

  'An electric cooker is quite expensive,' says Samuel in the end. 'But we'll buy one as soon as I've saved up enough money. I promise. If that's how you feel.'

  At that moment Joel loves his father. Only somebody who's been a sailor unde
rstands immediately what you mean, he thinks. Only somebody who's learnt how to make important decisions while terrible storms are raging on the seven seas understands when it's time to throw out an old wood-burning stove.

  At the same time he's a bit sorry he didn't start by mentioning the bicycle. Now it's too late. Now he'll have to wait with that for a few weeks at least. You can't ask for two things at the same time, that's one thing too many.

  He works it out in his head.

  Today is March 3rd. He won't be able to get a bike for at least a month. But there will still be snow everywhere and it would be impossible to ride it. That's good. That means he wouldn't need to be the last boy in the school with no bicycle. But he ought to have mentioned the electric cooker much earlier. I must remember that in future, he thinks. Never wait too long before asking for something.

  But more important than both the cooker and the bike is the dog.

  The night Joel asked his dad about the electric cooker, he lies in bed unable to sleep. He can hear the radio that Samuel is listening to through the wall. There's still music playing. If he's still awake when the pips sound before the news, he'll be very tired when he has to get up for school tomorrow morning.

  He listens to the cold that is making the walls creak. The rafters are groaning and sighing. Soon the days will grow longer and lighter. The snowdrifts will melt away, just as they always do. The first cowslips will eventually appear, glowing yellow by the side of the road.

  Joel decides to go looking for the dog.

  If it hasn't yet reached a star, I shall find it, he thinks.

  He decides to go looking for the dog during the night. Night after night when his dad has fallen asleep, he'll get up, get dressed and sneak out into the darkness.

  Perhaps everything is different at night-time. Perhaps the dog is only visible at night. Just think, there might be Day People and Night People. People who are only visible at night. Children who go to school at night. Parents who chop down trees in the forest or go out shopping. Night People and Night Schools, Night Cars and Night Houses, Night Churches and a Night Sun. Not the moon, but a real sun that is only visible to the people who live during the night.