A Bridge to the Stars, page 8
And to top it all he comes home with that slut in the red hat in tow.
Joel remembers that he has to go to the shop. As he's nearly home, he has to retrace his steps. That makes him even angrier.
I'm going to move in with Jenny, my mum, he thinks. I don't care what she looks like, I don't care what she does. Nothing can be worse than living with Samuel. The only thing he'll take with him is Celestine.
He'll take that blue stool he got for his birthday to the railway bridge and hurl it into the river.
There's a queue in the shop. Svenson smells of strong drink as usual, fumbles with the goods and has trouble in working out the bills. Joel waits and waits.
It will never be his turn. That's his dad's fault as well.
When Joel gets home he starts the fire in the stove, then lies down on the kitchen bench while he's waiting for the potatoes to boil. He falls asleep, and is woken up by his father shaking him by the shoulder.
The meal is ready and the table set. Samuel is in an extremely good mood. He's humming one of his sea shanties. He keeps smiling at Joel.
After dinner he gets shaved. That's enough to worry Joel. His dad only ever gets shaved once a week, on Saturday afternoons. It's only Wednesday today. Samuel is humming away non-stop.
Joel decides he'll have to keep a close eye on his father.
Can Sara with the red hat really put him in such a good mood? Or is it something else?
After dinner Joel takes out his thirteen tin soldiers and builds a fort out of some books. But he finds it hard to concentrate because he can hear his dad humming away in his room all the time.
In the end he gives his model soldiers a kick and they all end up under the bed.
They can stay there until they're buried in dust, he thinks.
Then he goes into his father's room. Samuel is lying on his bed, listening to the radio and wiggling his toes.
'Hi, Joel,' he says. 'What are you playing with?'
'I'm not playing,' says Joel. 'I want to know who Leonardo da Vinci is.'
'Who?'
'Leonardo da Vinci.'
'That's a name I've heard before. Why do you want to know who he is?'
'I just do.'
'Hang on, I'll have to think a bit. Leonardo da Vinci . . . '
Joel stands in the doorway, waiting. His dad wiggles his toes and thinks.
'He was an inventor, I think. And a painter. A long time ago. He knew everything. He invented cannons and aeroplanes long before anybody else.'
'I'm going to be like him.'
'Nobody can be like him. You can only be who you are.'
'Why did you never become a captain?'
'I didn't have any schooling. I just had my hands. That means you can only be an Able Seaman.'
Joel thinks he ought to tell him to stop wiggling his toes. Stop smiling, stop humming sea shanties. But he just stands in the doorway and says nothing.
'I'll go back to my room, then,' he says.
His father doesn't answer. He's closed his eyes and is humming a tune.
If he's lying there thinking of Sara, I'm off, Joel thinks. If he brings her home one more time, I'm getting out of here.
He will need to find out where his mother lives. He'll have to ask his dad about that. It's the most important of all the questions currently occupying his mind. He wishes it was the only thing he had to worry about. Most of the time nothing at all happens, he thinks, but just now far too much is happening that he needs to think through. It gets more difficult to cope with life for every year that passes, he thinks. Not the least difficult thing is understanding grown-ups, understanding his father.
He wishes he could creep into Samuel's head and sit down in the middle of all his thoughts. Then he would be able to compare what his dad says with what he actually thinks.
Perhaps being a grown-up means not saying what you really think.
Or knowing which lies are least dangerous. Learning to avoid untruths that can too easily be found out . . .
He takes his alarm clock into bed with him and wraps it inside a sock before placing it under his pillow, next to his ear. Then he switches off the light.
When Samuel sees that, he won't come in and sit on the edge of Joel's bed. He'll simply close the door and go to his own room.
It's easy to fool grown-ups, he thinks. Just because you've switched the light off, they think you're asleep.
What he would really like, in fact, is for his father to come and sit on his bed even so. Sit down and tell him about Jenny without Joel having to ask first.
It's hard to settle down to sleep. The alarm clock is rubbing against his ear. He shudders at the thought of having to get dressed in a few hours' time and go out into the night. He wonders what it is that Ture is going to show him.
Create fear, he said. What does he mean by that?
Joel tosses and turns. The alarm clock is irritating him, and he has to check and make sure he hasn't accidentally switched it off.
He needs to do a lot of thinking about Ture.
Having met him is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good that he's going to run away in a week's time because Joel has said various things that can be found out as untrue. But at the same time, it's a bad thing that he will no longer be around. It's good having a nobleman as a friend. A nobleman who is older than Joel.
He thinks about the enormous flat. He pictures himself in all the different rooms. Looking at the paintings and books, walking on the soft carpets.
But when he comes to the suit of armour, he stops dead.
Now he's on his own, Ture is no longer in his thoughts, and he can put on the armour with no risk of being found out. Last of all he closes the visor.
Now he's on a battlefield somewhere.
Miss Nederström has told them that it was always misty when knights in armour rode into battle.
Now he's mounting his steed, the magnificent stallion he's seen at Mr Under's, the horse dealer. The black horse with the white patch under his right eye. Somewhere in the distance, invisible in the mist, the enemy is waiting . . .
He gives a start when Samuel opens the door.
It takes a long time to build up a good dream, but all it needs is for his dad to take hold of the door handle, and it's all gone.
He pretends to be asleep.
Samuel closes the door gently.
He usually listens for longer than that, Joel thinks. Tonight it happened far too quickly. As if he were hoping that I'd be asleep.
There ought to be rules for fathers, thinks Joel angrily. They shouldn't be allowed to come bursting into a dream. They should only be allowed to listen so long at the door to see if you're asleep. They shouldn't be allowed to invite certain people home for coffee.
All fathers ought to be made to sign such rules. And every time they break one, they should be punished.
The radio falls silent, Samuel has a good gargle, and his bed creaks.
What actually happened? Joel wonders.
Why was Jenny so unhappy? What happened?
When the alarm starts buzzing under his pillow, he's not sure at first what it is. It goes off when he's in the middle of a dream. Joel is surrounded by strangers, but he knows that his mother is among them somewhere. The only person he recognises is The Old Bricklayer. Then the barriers at the level crossing start ringing. It's the alarm clock under his pillow.
He lies still in the darkness, listening.
What had he been dreaming about? Was it a nasty dream? Or just an odd one?
He keeps on listening. Silence always has many sounds.
A beam creaks. He hears his own breathing. There's a rushing sound in his ears, like the wind.
Joel is afraid of the dark. Not being able to see the walls and ceiling, not being able to see his own hands. Waking up in the dark is a kind of loneliness he's scared of.
It's the nearest he can imagine to death.
A black room where the ceiling could be just above his face, but he can't see it.
When you wake up in the middle of the night there's no way of knowing if you're the only person left in the whole wide world.
He switches on the lamp standing on the blue stool. Then he switches it off again. The darkness isn't frightening any more. Not now that he knows nothing has changed while he's been asleep.
He tiptoes into the kitchen, puts on his boots then creeps silently down the stairs. Old Mrs Westman is having a coughing fit.
The stars are twinkling in a clear sky when he gets outside, and he starts running so as not to be late. Ture is waiting for him by the goods wagons, in the shadows. Once again he creeps up on Joel from behind and grabs him by the shoulder, making him jump.
I ought to have known, thinks Joel. Ture will keep on doing that for as long as he sees it makes me jump.
First they go looking for the dog. Joel shows Ture the streetlight where he last saw the dog. He'd like to tell the story of the night when he carried The Flying Horse out of the bicycle shop – but would Ture believe him? Joel has no idea what Ture thinks. And when he runs away next week it will be too late. After that he'll never get to know anything.
It strikes Joel that this is the first time he's met anybody who he knows he's soon going to be separated from, and will never see again. Never ever, as long as he lives . . .
'A dog,' says Ture without warning. 'Why are we looking for a dog?'
Joel doesn't know what to say. All he knows is that the dog is important. The dog heading for a star.
He can't explain it, he just knows . . .
Ture suddenly pokes him in the back.
'There's somebody coming,' he whispers.
He points down the street, and Joel sees a figure in dark clothes approaching along the opposite pavement. Somebody lit up by a streetlamp before being swallowed up by the darkness again.
They stand next to the wall where they are sure of not being seen. The darkly clad figure has its head bowed, looking like a body that stops at the shoulders. But Joel sees who it is.
It's No-Nose. The woman with a handkerchief instead of a nose in her face.
'It's Gertrud,' he whispers into Ture's ear. 'I know who she is.'
'Why is she out in the middle of the night, walking with her head bowed?' wonders Ture.
Ture indicates that they should follow her. They sneak along in the shadow of the house walls, keeping the hunched figure in front of them.
It's not hard to follow her because she never stops and turns round to look.
Joel has always believed that people who are being followed can sense it. But evidently not Gertrud. No-Nose. People either feel sorry for Gertrud, or dislike her. But nearly everybody is frightened of her.
You can feel sorry for her because she lost her nose during an operation at the hospital. You can also dislike her because she doesn't stay indoors but wanders around in the street and doesn't cover up her deformed face.
She must be brave, and everybody's frightened of brave people.
When Joel sees her in the street he thinks it's both disgusting and exciting to see her face without a nose.
She usually has a white handkerchief stuffed into the hole where her nose should be.
Every time he sees her he tells himself he's not going to look, but he can't resist it.
She goes to the Pentecostal chapel next to the Community Centre. She patrols the streets every day, selling religious magazines. Hardly anybody dares not to stop and buy one off her.
He knows she tried to drown herself in the river when they'd cut off her nose at the hospital. But somebody saw her jump in, and rowed out in the horse dealer's boat and rescued her. She'd had a heavy iron in her pocket and a thick chain wrapped round her neck. Then Happy Harry, the Pentecostal minister, took her under his wing, and now she sells magazines for him.
She lives all alone, in a little house at Ulvkälla, on the far side of the bridge. That seems to be where she's heading for.
They follow her as far as the bridge. Then it gets hard, because there are so many lights on the bridge. They watch her disappear into the shadows.
Joel tells Ture what he knows about her. When he's finished, Ture asks a peculiar question.
'Do you know where there's an ants' nest?' he asks.
An ants' nest?
Joel knows where there are lots of ants' nests, but they are all still covered in snow. The ants don't usually emerge until May.
'We'll pay her a visit tomorrow,' says Ture. 'I want to go home now.'
'You said you were going to show me something,' says Joel.
'I have done,' says Ture. 'How to trail a person.'
Joel goes with Ture as far as his gate. He hopes Ture will invite him to call round after school, but Ture says nothing. He simply jumps over the gate and vanishes into his vast house.
Joel has the feeling that Ture is already beginning to take over The Secret Society.
That's a good thing but also a bad thing.
What is good is that Joel no longer has sole responsibility for it all. But what is bad is that everything has happened so quickly.
He hurries home. It's freezing, and he feels cold. He can hear The Old Bricklayer's lorry somewhere in the distance. When he enters the kitchen he has the same feeling as the night before. There's something amiss. This time it's even stronger.
He feels scared. What has changed?
He unlaces his boots and hangs up his jacket. Everything is the same as usual, but at the same time, it's different.
Without really knowing why, he opens the door to his father's room. He knows exactly how far he can open it before it starts creaking.
He listens for his dad's breathing. But he hears nothing.
Just for a moment he's so scared that he almost bursts into tears. Has Samuel died?
He gropes his way forward. It's pitch black, but even so he closes his eyes.
Breathe, he thinks. Breathe, breathe, breathe . . .
He knocks against the side of the bed with his knee.
He has to open his eyes now. He must face up to the most difficult task he's ever been landed with.
Face up to something he doesn't really dare face up to.
His eyes fail to respond.
His eyelids are secured by heavy padlocks.
Big dogs are running back and forth, preventing him from opening his eyes.
But in the end he forces his eyes open, as if he'd used dynamite to set himself free.
Despite the darkness he can see that the bed is empty.
His father has abandoned him.
