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.