A Bridge to the Stars (14 page)

He thinks it's Ture who's been following him, but
when he turns to look he sees that it's No-Nose. She
has a big parcel under one arm.

'You've come at just the right time,' she says. 'Hold
this parcel while I open the door. Make sure you don't
drop it.'

She produces a large bunch of keys and picks one
out. Joel thinks there must be at least fifty keys on the
ring. She unlocks the door, and when they get into the
hall he hands back the parcel.

'Joel,' she says. 'I thought you would come.'

Joel doesn't like it when other people know in
advance what he's going to do. It's as if they can read
his thoughts. They invade his most secret hiding place.
His head.

'I just happened to be passing,' he says, and regrets
it before he's even finished saying it. Nobody just
happens to be passing in a cul-de-sac.

He decides to come straight to the point, and give
her his explanation.

'I don't know why I did it,' he mumbles.

He'd really meant to say it in a loud, firm voice, but
something gives way in his throat. His voice breaks.

'That's all right,' she says. 'I know you won't do it
again. Let's not speak any more about it. Take your
shoes off and I'll show you what I've got inside this
parcel.

She sneezes.

She puts her hand over her face and sneezes twice,
three times.

How can you sneeze when you don't have a nose?
Joel wonders. Does she sneeze through her mouth?

He follows her into the kitchen, which smells of
heat. She carefully unwraps the parcel. It contains a
globe.

'I found this in the attic at church,' she says.
'Nobody knows how it got there. Just look at this,
though.'

She points at something on the surface of the globe.

Somewhere in Africa, Joel sees. Somebody has made a
little hole in Africa.

'I think that whoever made that hole used to live
there,' she says. 'Maybe a missionary, a long, long time
ago.'

Joel runs a finger over the globe, tracing seas and
sounds and coasts.

'Samuel has been to all these places,' he says. 'I'm
going there as well when I grow up. Samuel is my
dad.'

'Do you know what it smells like there?' she asks.

She stands on a chair and unhooks a little leather
pouch hanging over the cooker. She holds it under his
nose, and he can smell the pungent aroma.

'Caraway seeds,' she says. 'They come from
Zanzibar.'

She points at the globe, an island off the east coast
of Africa.

Something suddenly occurs to him. How can she
know what it smells like? She hasn't got a nose.

Once again she reads his thoughts.

'I can't smell anything any longer,' she says. 'But I
can remember the smell of caraway seeds from when I
was a child. Every time I see that pouch I remember
the smell. You can smell things even if you don't have
a nose.'

She lifts up the globe.

They both hear at the same time that there's something
inside it.

A gold coin, Joel thinks. Or a pearl. Or a lion's
tooth . . .

The globe can be unscrewed into two halves.

'What do you think it is?' asks Gertrud.

Joel shakes his head. He doesn't know. But he hopes
it's something exciting.

When Gertrude divides the two halves they find
something that looks like a grain of sand. She picks it
up and examines it under the kitchen light.

'A seed,' says Gertrud.

Joel is disappointed, but he doesn't show it. Gertrud
laughs, as if she'd discovered the loveliest of pearls.

'It might be a seed from an orange tree,' she says.

'Or a tiny little flower . . . '

On the kitchen window ledge, the window through
which they'd tipped in the ants, she has a flower pot.
She pushes the seed gingerly into the soil.

'Perhaps it's still alive,' she says. 'Perhaps it will
grow up and become a ginormous tree that eventually
grows through the roof and spreads out its crown way
above all the wooded hillsides . . . '

Joel starts telling her about his dad and all his
travels. He tells the story of the water lilies on
Mauritius, and the never-ending Congo River.

He wishes he could tell the stories as well as his dad
can, but he can't find all the words he needs. Even so,
he can see that she's listening intently, as if it had been
Joel himself who'd experienced all the things he was
talking about. Last of all he tells her about
Celestine
.

'You must show her to me one of these days,' she
says.

Joel is surprised. How come that she seems to have
forgotten all about the ants that he and Ture had
tipped in through her kitchen window? Or the varnish
that had ruined so many of her currant bushes? How
was this possible?

And then he thinks that maybe he understands after
all.

She's lonely. Everybody she meets in the street looks
the other way. All she has is the women who go to the
Pentecostal church.

How many people have ever sat in her kitchen in the
evening and talked to her about seas and rivers that are
far, far away?

It's hard to look at her face. The handkerchief she's
stuffed into the hole where her nose ought to be is like
a magnet. An eye magnet.

Even though he tries to look at her eyes or her forehead,
all he seems to be able to see is the white
handkerchief.

'It's OK, you can look,' she says. Then she stands up
and goes to another room.

When she comes back she's taken the handkerchief
away and replaced it with a red clown's nose. She's
holding a lighted cigar.

'The only living steam engine in the world,' she
says, taking a drag from the cigar.

When she exhales the smoke pours out of her red
nose with a hissing sound.

Joel is astonished. Then he bursts out laughing. He
can't help it.

She pulls a face and looks so funny that he has to
laugh. It's the best kind of laughter there is. Laughter
that simply has to burst out.

When he prepares to leave, she asks him if he'd like
to come again.

He nods. He thinks she's like The Old Bricklayer.
Different. Somebody who does the unexpected.

Now he knows two people like that, he thinks as he
walks home. And now that Ture is no longer around,
he'll let them become members of The Secret Society.

When he gets home he finds
Celestine
standing on
the kitchen table.

The logbook, he thinks. Now his dad has discovered
the logbook! But Samuel just smiles at him.

'I know what you're thinking,' he says. 'I lifted her
down because I thought she needed a good dusting.
Then I saw that there was a book underneath her. I
gathered it must be yours. It's still there. I promise you
that I haven't opened it. We all have our secrets. If you
take your boots off and sit down, I'll tell you one of my
secrets. You should only reveal secrets when you really
want to.'

He stretches out on the kitchen bench.

Joel unlaces his boots and sits down on his chair.
'That night when I was woken up and you were
stuck on top of the bridge arch,' he says, 'it set me
thinking about what it was like when I was eleven
years old. That's a long time ago, many, many years
ago. It took me some time to remember, but the
memories came back in the end. When I was eleven my
father, your grandad, was already dead. I've told you
about that, how he drowned in a severe storm when his
fishing boat capsized and sank. When I had my
eleventh birthday, in December, it was terrible weather.
There was a gale blowing, nearly a hurricane. When
everybody had gone to bed I got dressed and sneaked
out. We lived by the sea. The wind was howling and I
was nearly blown over as I clambered over the rocks in
the darkness. I remember thinking there was something
very special about that night. Something was quite
certainly going to happen. I climbed out onto the rocks
nearest the sea. I lay down in a crevice and waited for
something special to happen. I hadn't the slightest idea
what it would be. Nor whether it would come from the
sea or from the land or from the stars. I remember
shivering with cold. And the only thing that happened
was that I got colder and colder. In the end I had to
stand up and go home. I recall being very disappointed.
But when I snuggled down into bed I realised that
something very special had happened, in fact. The
special thing was that I'd ventured out onto the rocks in
a hurricane. I'd done something I would never forget.
I'd been lying in a crevice with a hurricane blowing,
waiting for something special to happen. That was a
big secret. I remember it now. And I've never
mentioned it to a soul.'

'Not even to my mum?' asks Joel.

'Not even to Jenny.'

It seems to Joel that he's never talked to his dad like
this before. Something has happened.

Something great, something important. Something
that grows and burns inside him, and makes him so
excited that his face turns bright red.

Something that he can't note down in his logbook.
Something that has nothing to do with words.

He knows now that he can ask awkward questions
about Jenny, his mum. Or about Sara.

He's also certain that he can tell his dad that he
doesn't want any sisters with Sara as their mother. He
knows that difficult questions might not be quite so
difficult any more. That doesn't mean that all the
answers he gets will be what he wants to hear. But even
so, maybe none of the answers will necessarily be
awful. Bad perhaps, but not the kind of answers that
turn his stomach over.

Today is a day he'll never forget. A special day. His
and his dad's day.

'What do you reckon?' his dad asks. 'Is spring really
on the way?'

'We must move to somewhere where we don't have
snow all the time,' says Joel.

'We'll do that,' says his dad. 'We'll move to somewhere
where the sea never ices over . . . '

Joel checks the thermometer fixed outside the
window. Minus one. That means spring can't be too far
away. Another month and the first cowslips will be
adding a touch of yellow to a dirty ditch. Only one
more month . . .

And spring duly arrives. At long last.

One day Joel sees his first cowslip beside a ditch
where the meltwater is bubbling downstream. The
days get longer, and the black waters of the river start
slowly forcing their way up through the thick
covering of ice. Cracks appear in the white lid, and
the floes start working their way free. Before long all
the snow will have disappeared from the streets. The
yellow local council lorries will sweep up the remains
of the sand and gravel, and one day the first copious
rains of spring will arrive. It will rain non-stop for at
least twenty-four hours, and afterwards, the only
remnants will be the remains of the piles at
crossroads, and up against the cemetery wall.

One day the kitchen is lit up by the glow from an
electric cooker.

The old wood-burning stove has been dumped in
the garden, and Joel almost feels sorry for it. It's now
surplus to requirements. If nobody finds a use for it, it
will disappear under a covering of grass, and slowly
disappear into the ground.

One day in the middle of April they go to the cycle
shop, and The Flying Horse is still there in the
window.

Joel sees that his dad is put out when he discovers
the price; but he doesn't say a word, just takes out his
wallet and pays up. Joel cycles home as proud as
Punch.

That night when he rode the bike into a snowdrift
and was rescued by The Old Bricklayer seems a very
long way in the past.

As the nights get lighter, all the memories of winter
fade away. Sometimes, in his dreams, Joel returns to
the arch over the bridge. But when he wakes up and
sees the faint light of dawn seeping in under the
blinds, he's in no doubt that he's lying in bed and not
clinging on to the arch.

He sometimes bumps into Ture.

They say hello, but they don't have a lot to talk
about.

On one occasion Ture asks Joel if he wants to come
and play in his big attic room. Joel says he'll come, but
never gets round to it.

Joel and his friends have started playing at the
deserted old brickworks again. They split up into
Goodies and Baddies, and chase each other through the
underground tunnels and The World of the Rusty
Machines.

One of these days, Joel thinks. One of these days I
might go round to Ture's again.

He's not going to run away. He'll stay here. He'll
start school come autumn. Then, maybe. But not
now. . .

In a month. In two. In three years.

In three years' time they'll be on their way, Joel and
his dad.

Away from the house by the river that will never
take them to the sea. Somewhere out there, perhaps, is
Jenny, Joel's mum.

Samuel tells Joel how it was.

'Maybe she was too young,' he says. 'I'd like to
think so. Maybe when she had you, when she had a
child, she was still a child herself? And maybe now,
when she's no longer a child, maybe she regrets
having run away? But she doesn't dare to come back,
can't face looking her abandoned son in the eye.

'It's up to you,' he says. 'If you want to meet her,
you have a right to do so, of course. If things are as I
suspect they are, you are the only one who can help her
to overcome her guilty conscience.'

'What about you?' asks Joel.

'It's different for me,' says his dad. 'It was so long
ago. And now I have Sara.'

Sara with the red hat!

It's easier now, when his dad doesn't keep disappearing.
Not least when Joel goes to the bar and sells
newspapers. She tells the drinkers they ought to buy, and
they do as they're told. Joel soon finds that he's saved up
fifty kronor. He's never had as much money as that
before.

Sara is fat, her breasts are too big and she has
eczema. But she's a good cook and knows when Joel
doesn't want to be patted on the cheek.