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.
3
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.