Was it him?
If it was him, why wasn’t he dead?
He wasn’t dead, surely? Everything was as usual, except that he was lying on his back on the wet street, and oil was dripping onto his face.
There must surely be a difference between being alive and being dead?
Then he felt somebody taking hold of his arm. A face edged its way closer to him. He recognised it. It was Nyberg’s face. Nyberg was the bouncer in the bar where Sara worked.
‘Are you all right, milad?’ said the face. ‘For Christ’s sake, I do believe you’re alive.’
‘Yes,’ said Joel. ‘I think so.’
That was the moment he started to feel frightened, and it slowly dawned on him that he had experienced a Miracle.
A bus had run him over. But at precisely the right moment he’d slipped and landed between the wheels. In addition the satchel with his school things and the milk and the potatoes had slid down by his side. If it had stayed on his back, his face would have been hit by the bus’s chassis.
The Ljusdal bus, he thought. It has to be the bus to Ljusdal.
The Ljusdal bus had presented him with his Miracle.
He closed his eyes. Hands began to take hold of him, carefully, as if he were dead after all. Voices were whispering and shouting on all sides. He felt himself being dragged over the wet asphalt. Then somebody lifted him up onto a bed that was swaying back and forth. Metal doors closed and an engine started turning.
Somebody was sitting beside him, holding his hand.
He looked cautiously, hardly opening his eyes. He’d often practised that in front of Samuel’s shaving mirror. Looking in such a way that nobody could see he was looking.
The woman holding his hand was Eulalia Mörker, who ran a hairdressing business next to the ironmonger’s. Eulalia spoke with a foreign accent and chased away children when they were too noisy outside her shop door. She would come running out brandishing a pair of curling tongs, shouting and threatening, and everybody was a bit scared of her, because you could never be sure what she was saying in her peculiar language.
Now she was sitting beside Joel, holding his hand.
Joel looked again, to make certain his eyes hadn’t deceived him.
He turned his head slowly to see what sort of a car it was he was travelling in.
An ambulance. The only vehicle with a bed.
When he was transferred onto another stretcher at the hospital, he thought it would be best if he groaned. Not a lot, just a little one. Perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to let people know too quickly that he’d experienced a Miracle.
He was examined by Dr Stenström. Joel didn’t like it when the nurses took off all his clothes. He was especially worried about them discovering that he had a large hole in his underpants. And he wasn’t sure that his feet were properly clean. Somebody who had just experienced a Miracle maybe ought to have just got out of the bath?
Then he heard Stenström’s authoritative voice.
‘This young boy has been incredibly lucky,’ he said. ‘He’s fallen under a bus but hasn’t got a single scratch. It can only be described as a miracle.’
A Miracle!
It was true. Dr Stenström had realised.
Joel opened his eyes.
A bright light was shining down on him. There was something smelly stuck up his nose. The lamp was as hot as the sun. He could make out faces gathered round him, looking like white shadows, staring at him.
He suddenly thought about Jesus walking on water. That was Miss Nederström’s favourite Bible story. He had no idea how many times she’d read it for them, but often enough for him to recall it almost by heart.
What had the people on the shore shouted when Jesus walked over the waves?
What was that long, difficult, incomprehensible word?
‘Hallelujah!’ he shouted when he remembered what it was.
‘You can say that again,’ said Dr Stenström. ‘Let’s see if you can stand up.’
A nurse helped him up. He sat on the examination table, dangling his legs. He could see his underpants on a chair, with the big hole in them.
Then he jumped down onto the floor.
‘Not a scratch,’ said Dr Stenström. ‘Guess who’s going to be overjoyed.’
‘My dad Samuel,’ said Joel, who thought he’d been asked a question.
‘I’m sure he will be,’ said Dr Stenström, ‘but I bet the bus driver is at least as glad.’
Joel made as if to start getting dressed.
‘We’ll keep you in overnight,’ said Dr Stenström. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’
‘I have to go home and prepare some potatoes,’ said Joel. ‘My dad will wonder what’s going on if I don’t.’
‘He’s on his way here,’ said one of the nurses. Joel suddenly recognised her voice. She was the mother of one of his classmates. Eva-Lisa, who could run faster than anybody else in the class. She was like a greyhound.
Joel lay down on the examination table again.
All he wanted just now was to be left in peace. He still wasn’t quite sure what had happened.
As if everybody in the room had read his mind, they all left. He quickly jumped down and hid his underpants beneath his shirt, so that the hole couldn’t be seen. Then he checked to see if his feet were clean.
They weren’t. He took some balls of cotton wool from a glass dish and poured onto them some liquid with a strong smell from out of a brown bottle. Then he rubbed his feet until they were clean. He had only just crept back under the blanket on the examination table when the door opened.
It was the bus driver.
Joel recognised him. His name was Eklund and a year or two ago he had shot a bear. He was always the one who drove the Ljusdal bus.
‘Well, milad,’ he said. ‘If only you knew. If only you knew how pleased I am.’
‘I wasn’t looking where I was going,’ said Joel. ‘I hope the bus isn’t broken.’
‘Who cares about the bus,’ said Eklund, wiping his runny nose with the back of his big, red hand.
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.