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.
‘Why do you have two kitchens?’ Joel had asked, the first time he’d seen it.
‘Because I’m so lazy,’ Gertrud had said. ‘In the mornings when I wake up, I don’t have the strength to go as far as the big kitchen. So I make myself some coffee in here.’
That made Joel suspect that Gertrud wasn’t all there. But as there was nothing dangerous or frightening about her way of being different, he’d decided that it was just exciting.
Exciting and strange.
He had even gone so far as to invent a word to describe Gertrud. None of the words he knew was good enough, and so he’d joined together exciting and strange to make a new word.
Gertrud was strangeiting.
But he’d never told her that. Perhaps it was forbidden to invent new words? Perhaps there was a committee of stern-faced old men in grey suits somewhere or other, deciding what words could exist and which ones were forbidden?
Joel even had a secret word for forbidden words.
He called them unwords.
Gertrud dragged him over to the big mirror in the middle room. It was the biggest of the three rooms. It was also the most fascinating one. There were so many things in it that it was almost impossible to pick your way through it. There was a big birdcage hanging from the ceiling. But Gertrud kept a stuffed hare inside it. There was an aquarium next to one of the walls. A lamp attached to the side of it lit it up — but there were no fish swimming around in the warm water. Instead, there was a toy locomotive on the sandy bottom. A big sofa in the middle of the floor was crammed full of books. Hanging on the walls were carpets like the ones Joel was used to seeing on the floor. But Gertrud’s floor was made up of piles of sand and stones, and sometimes in the winter she would cover it in fir branches brought in from the forest.
There was a big mirror in one corner of the room. They stood in front of it, and laughed at each other.
‘Good,’ said Gertrud. ‘Now we’re not usual any longer. So we can begin.’
Joel looked at her in surprise. To be honest, he felt a bit odd in the yellow trousers and the checked shirt. There again, he couldn’t help being curious to know what she was going to think of next.
Gertrud sat down on the floor, and Joel followed suit.
‘Just look at that,’ she said.
‘Look at what?’ Joel wondered.
Gertrud pointed at a lamp dangling on a flex hanging from the ceiling.
‘Just look at that lamp,’ she said. ‘It looks so usual. A normal lamp hanging on a normal flex from a normal ceiling. We’ll have to do something about that. What can we turn it into?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Joel. ‘I mean, a lamp is a lamp?’
‘But it doesn’t have to look normal,’ said Gertrud. ‘Just think if it looked like a mushroom instead!’
‘A mushroom?’ said Joel.
‘You must know what a mushroom is? Now you’ll find out what a mushroomlamp looks like.’
‘A mushroom,’ said Joel.
Gertrud laughed and nodded.
Joel watched her disconnect the plug, which was high up on one of the walls, and take down the lamp. She was balancing precariously on the pile of books on the big sofa. Then she fetched a broken sweeping brush handle from the scullery, and fixed it in an old Christmas tree foot. She produced some Sellotape and fastened the bulb to the top of the brush handle, and covered it with an old lampshade. She found some yellow fabric in the pile of clothes on the floor, and spread it carefully over the lampshade. Then she reconnected the plug.
To his surprise, Joel had to admit that the lamp really did look like a mushroom.
Now the penny had dropped. He joined in on the fun as well. He transformed the radiator under one of the windows into a tiger. He painted stripes onto it, and gave it a tail. He turned a wastepaper basket into a car by attaching to it a circle of bent wire to make a steering wheel. Meanwhile, Gertrud was busy turning a heavy chest of drawers into a sailing boat.
Then they sat down on the floor to get their breath back.
‘That’s better,’ said Gertrud, sounding very pleased with herself. ‘But we really ought to redecorate this room. Maybe we ought to board up the windows and paint new windows on the walls.’
‘But you wouldn’t be able to air the room then,’ said Joel.