When the Snow Fell

Two

On the way home from school Joel bought some black pudding.

He was nearly always the one who had to do the shopping, as Samuel got back home so late from the forest. Joel did the cooking, the washing-up and the shopping day after day. But Samuel did the cleaning and washed all the clothes. He did that on Saturday evenings before they sat down to listen to the wireless.

Joel didn’t like shopping for food. At the grocer’s, Ehnströms Livs, he had to jostle with old women who could never make up their minds what they wanted to buy. If he was unlucky he might bump into the mother of one of his classmates. It was at moments like that he felt annoyed with his own mum, Jenny, who had gone away and left Joel and Samuel. Even if she didn’t want to stay with her family, she could at least have made sure they had all the food they would need. She could have filled the house up to the rafters with food. Then Joel wouldn’t have needed to keep running to the shops and coping with all those women.

The previous year, however, he had made a big change to the routine. He started shopping only every other day. In addition, he bought the same food for the same weekday every week. Anything to speed things up.

On Mondays they always had black pudding and potatoes. With lingonberries that he and Samuel would pick in the autumn and make into jam.

But this particular Monday, things were not the same as usual at Ehnström’s.

Joel noticed that the moment he entered the shop.

There was a new assistant. It was usually Mr. Ehnström himself, or his wife, Klara, who did the serving. Now there was a different woman behind the counter. She was much younger than most of the other women in the shop. Joel had never seen her before. That put him off slightly.

“Black pudding,” he said in a firm voice when it was his turn.

The girl behind the counter smiled.

“How much?” she asked.

“Enough for two people,” said Joel, his usual response.

“Just think — the lad lives alone with his dad and does all the housework himself,” said somebody behind his back.

Joel whipped round. It was a big, fat woman; her face was sweaty. She was the mother of one of the girls in Joel’s class. At that moment he hated both the mother and the daughter. It was his classmate who had blabbed about Joel’s not having a mother, of course. And then, naturally, this fatty stands here sweating and tells the new shop assistant something that has nothing to do with her.

Joel could feel himself blushing. He always did when he was angry.

“Isn’t he a little marvel?” said the fat woman.

Joel hoped she would explode and die on the spot.

The girl behind the counter smiled. But she made no comment. She served the black pudding. Joel paid. All the time he was afraid the fat woman standing behind him and nudging him in the back with her fat belly would say something else about him.

But she didn’t.

When Joel emerged into the street, he was still embarrassed. He didn’t want to go shopping anymore. He didn’t want to be his own mother. But he did want revenge. Needless to say, the fat woman hadn’t dropped dead as he’d hoped. It was as he had always said: grown-ups just didn’t know what was best for them.

He crossed the street and stood between two lamp-posts where it was murky. His hands were cold because he didn’t have his mittens with him. He stuffed the paper bag containing the black pudding inside his jacket. He should really hurry up now. Dinner ought to be ready by the time Samuel got home. Besides, it was New Year’s Eve. He had a lot to prepare before going out that evening.

But he couldn’t forget that fat woman who had put him to shame in front of the new shop assistant.

He wondered who the girl was. Could it be Ehnström’s daughter? When Joel was handed the black pudding and he paid for it, he’d looked surreptitiously at her. She was younger than he’d first thought. About twenty-five, he’d have said. Although he was bad at guessing people’s ages. He sometimes thought that Miss Nederström was ninety, but somebody had told him, to his great surprise, that she wasn’t even fifty.

There was something else about the new shop assistant that had made him curious. She sounded different when she talked. She wasn’t a local. Although he couldn’t be certain, he thought she probably came from Stockholm. The previous summer, a traveling circus had come to town. As usual, Joel had helped to erect the fence and carry chairs in order to get a free ticket. He’d run an errand for one of the circus workers, and bought some coffee. The worker came from Stockholm, and spoke a very distinctive dialect. The new shop assistant at the grocer’s spoke in a similar way. As far as he could tell.

His train of thought was broken when the fat woman came out of the shop. Joel gritted his teeth and hoped as hard as he could that she would slip on the steps and kill herself. But she didn’t, of course. It was only innocent people who slipped and got hurt. Really bad criminals never did. Nor did fat women who talked about things that didn’t concern them.

Joel saw her hang her shopping bag on the handle of a kick sledge. He thought it looked like a Walker on runners. It was painted brown, and there were fancy upturned points at the front of the runners, which was a bit unusual.

Joel memorized what the sledge looked like. He knew where the woman lived. On one of his evening expeditions through the town, he would pee all over it.

He watched her disappear round the corner. She still hadn’t burst. Joel hurried home. He felt cold. His hands were white. He thought about the new shop assistant at Ehnström’s.

He wasn’t quite sure exactly what he thought.

When he got home he took off his boots, and started his work by peeling the potatoes. Then he snuggled down in his bed and massaged his toes. They felt sore. His boots really were too small for him. He wondered whether he ought to limp when Samuel came home. Or maybe he ought to lie down and drag himself over the floor. As if he’d been crippled by the boots. In which case Samuel couldn’t very well refuse to buy him a new pair.

He decided to wait until the following day. The boots would still be too small then. He had too many more important things to do tonight.

While he was waiting for the potatoes to boil, he went to the bathroom and examined his face in his dad’s shaving mirror. He had got into the habit of doing this over the last year. It was a New Year’s resolution he’d made a year ago. He would examine his face in the mirror every afternoon, and see how much he’d changed. But now, after a whole year, he thought he looked exactly the same as before. The shaving mirror couldn’t tell him that he’d grown bigger and taller. Nor could it tell him that his feet had become too big for his boots. He supposed it would have been better to have examined his feet in the mirror every day, but surely nobody did that?

Joel tested the potatoes with a fork. Five more minutes. While he was waiting he laid the table. Sometimes he would put out a third plate. Just to see what it would look like. If Mummy Jenny had still been there. He wondered where she would have sat. Between him and his dad? Or in his own place, next to the stove? He decided that was it. She would have been the one to collect the food from the stove.

When everything was ready, the black pudding fried and placed under a lid to keep it warm, and the lingonberry jam fetched from the pantry and put on the table, all he had to do was to wait for Samuel. Joel did what he always did: sat on the window seat and looked down at the street. He’d done that for as long as he could remember. That was the window from which he’d seen that mysterious dog. It was also where he generally sat when he was forced to make a difficult decision. Or when he felt sad.

You could say that the window seat was Joel’s home. Just as the glass showcase was the home of the Celestine.

Joel’s showcase was the window seat. That was his house and his castle.

It was also there that he had realized that something was happening to him. He really was growing bigger. The window seat was starting to feel cramped. There had always been plenty of room, but he had difficulty sitting there now with both his feet up. Especially when he had sore toes.

He was growing up.

The Celestine was a model of a ship that would never grow any bigger.

Her master would never become too big to fit inside the case.

Joel tried to work out if it was going to start snowing again. The sky was cloudy. And heavy. Like an awning sagging as a result of all the snow that had fallen on it. It was when the awning split that the snow started to fall down to the ground.

Needless to say, Joel knew that there was no truth in any such thoughts. There was no awning up in the sky. Snow was rain that had frozen and turned into snowflakes.

Warm rain fell in the summer. Cold rain in the winter.

But the awning idea was better. Easier to understand.

Then he saw Samuel approaching. A shadow on the other side of the street.

A shadow with a hunched back.

After dinner Joel went to his room and closed the door behind him. He could hear Samuel making coffee, then switching on the wireless to hear the news.

There was a lot Joel needed to prepare. You couldn’t make your New Year’s resolutions any old way: it had to happen at dead-on midnight.

As he was going to be up late, he lay down on top of his bed and covered himself with a blanket. It would be best if he could manage to sleep for a couple of hours. To be on the safe side, he set his alarm clock for eleven o’clock and put it underneath the blanket.

He could hear a munching noise from inside the wall, right next to his ear. He pressed his cheek against the cold wallpaper. He could now hear the mouse very clearly. It was less than an inch away from him. But it had no idea that Joel’s cheek was so close.

Joel tapped on the wall with the knuckle of his hand. The mouse fell silent. Then it started munching again.

Joel continued listening. Before long he was fast asleep.

When the alarm went off, it was some considerable time before Joel came to. When he woke up he remembered his dream: he had been inside the wall, looking for the mouse in a complicated network of caves among the wooden beams and uprights.

But it was all quiet now. The mouse couldn’t be heard any longer. The only sound penetrating the wall was Samuel’s snoring.

Joel sat up. He still wasn’t wide awake. When he stood up he had to push hard with both arms. Then he started to doze off again. Just as his eyes closed he gave a start, as if he had burnt his fingers. He went to the window, opened it slightly and scraped up some snow from the windowsill. Then he took a deep breath and rubbed the snow into his face.

Now he really was awake. He looked out into the night. The sky had become completely clear while he’d been asleep. The stars were twinkling.

He closed the window carefully, got dressed and tip-toed into the kitchen with his rucksack in his hand. He put on his jacket, his scarf and his wooly hat. He had found his mittens while he was waiting for the potatoes to boil. He put on his rucksack, picked up his Wellingtons and slipped silently out the door.

Samuel was asleep. His snores came and went in waves. Joel avoided treading on the steps that creaked, the fourth, fifth and twelfth. Then he opened the front door.

It was cold outside.

He stepped out and looked up at the starry sky.

It really was a genuine New Year’s Eve.

Then he opened the gate and set off for the place he had picked out for his ceremony.

He would make his New Year’s resolutions in the churchyard.