Shadows in the Twilight

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.

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.

‘Maybe not,’ said Gertrud. ‘But only maybe. Perhaps we could do it even so?’

It seemed to Joel that when you thought about it, what Gertrud was doing was no more chaotic than things sometimes were back home with Samuel. The only difference was that Gertrud never bothered to tidy up. As far as she was concerned, there was no such thing as untidiness.

All these were thoughts flashing through Joel’s mind as the bells were ringing after he’d pulled the string outside Gertrud’s door.

In just a few seconds, he’d managed to think about what had taken several hours to happen in reality.

That was one of the unanswered questions he’d noted down on the last page of his logbook.

How could you remember things so quickly?

He tugged at the string again.

Perhaps Gertrud wasn’t at home?

Sometimes she went to prayer meetings at her church in the evening. She also used to work her way through the town, knocking on doors and trying to sell a religious magazine. She had told Joel that this was how she earned her living. And he’d heard other people say that Gertrud No-Nose was very poor.

But she’s not poor, Joel thought.

If she didn’t have any money, she would have no trouble in inventing ways of making some.

Eventually he heard her shuffling up to the door in her slippers.

He quickly changed his face so that he looked like somebody who had just experienced a miracle.

The door opened, and there was Gertrud.

Her face was bright blue. As blue as the bluest of summer skies.

‘Joel!’ she exclaimed.

Then she pulled him into the porch and flung her arms around him.

Joel noticed that his face turned blue as well.

That’s torn it, he thought angrily.

There aren’t any blue people who have experienced a miracle. There aren’t any blue people at all, full stop.

Gertrud looked solemnly at him.

‘I’ve heard what happened,’ she said. ‘Thank God things turned out all right.’

She ushered him into the kitchen, where it was very warm. The old wood-burning stove was crackling away.

On the kitchen table was a large dish full of blue paint.

‘What are you doing?’ Joel asked.

‘I’d intended painting that white china tea service,’ said Gertrud. ‘But it was so boring that I decided to paint myself instead.’

Joel took off his hat and unbuttoned his jacket. He could see in the little mirror on the kitchen table that his nose and one cheek were blue.

He looked at Gertrud, at her blue face. Even the handkerchief stuffed into the hole where her nose should be was blue.

He suddenly felt very annoyed by the obvious fact that she was out of her mind.

She ought to have realised that he would come to see her when he had just experienced a miracle.

In which case she could have avoided painting herself blue!

She sat down opposite him and eyed him solemnly.

‘I was so frightened when I heard what had happened,’ she said. ‘I nearly had a heart attack! Just think if you’d been killed, and I never saw you again, Joel.’

Joel felt a lump in his throat. He was forced to bite the inside of his lip to prevent himself from bursting into tears.

He tried to think of something else. Of the rucksack he’d hung from a branch in the forest. That Sunday afternoon, when he’d abandoned the big Geronimo puzzle and gone out into the forest instead, to prove that you could get lost on purpose.

That seemed so long ago! Such an incredibly long time ago!

Gertrud still looked very serious. It struck Joel that it was very odd for a person with a blue face to look so serious.

And especially Gertrud! Mad Gertrud!

‘It must have been a miracle,’ said Joel. ‘What else could it be?’

‘God performs miracles,’ said Gertrud. ‘He performed one for me.’

Joel knew what she meant. Gertrud had once tried to commit suicide. It was just after her operation had gone wrong and she’d lost her nose. She didn’t think she could live without a nose. She would be too ugly to face up to life. She had filled her pockets with old-fashioned heavy irons, and jumped into the freezing cold river. But she hadn’t drowned. She had got stuck in an uprooted tree in such a way that her head was above the water. Nor had she frozen to death. Mr Under, the horse dealer, had been walking along the river bank looking for a horse that had escaped from a paddock. He saw her face and thought it was the horse that had fallen into the water. He ran to fetch a rowing boat, pulled her out, and she survived.

She’d told all that to Joel herself. Not so very long ago. One evening they’d been building an igloo out of white sheets in the middle room, and telling each other True Stories. Joel had told her about Mummy Jenny who’d gone away and left Joel and Samuel on their own. And Gertrud had told him about the time when she threw herself into the river.

That’s good, Joel thought. She knows what a miracle is.

‘What do you do?’ he asked.

‘Do?’

‘When you’ve been on the receiving end of a miracle? Do you have to say thank you?’

Gertrud smiled.

‘You don’t have to say thank you,’ she said. ‘But you can be grateful.’

Joel wasn’t satisfied by that answer.

‘I don’t want the miracle to be reversed,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be run over by the Ljusdal bus again.’

Gertrud eyed him thoughtfully.

‘Do you believe in God?’ she asked. ‘Like I do?’

Joel shrugged.

‘I don’t know. I suppose I’m the same as Samuel.’

‘What’s he, then?’

‘A lost soul.’

Gertrud burst out laughing. She laughed so much that the blue paint ran down her face and onto her white blouse.

‘Who said that?’ she asked. ‘Who said your dad is a lost soul?’

Joel shrugged again. He always did that when he wasn’t sure what to say.

‘Miss Nederström is always talking about lost souls,’ he mumbled.

Gertrud shook her head.

‘God’s not like that,’ she said. ‘But if you want to show that you are grateful for the miracle, you can do a good deed.’

That was it! Of course! He would do a good deed. Why hadn’t he thought of that himself? He’d read about it in books. People who had been in great danger but survived expressed their gratitude by doing a good deed.

Now he knew.

He nodded to Gertrud.

‘I’ll think of something,’ he said. ‘I shall do a good deed.’

Gertrud suddenly looked sad.

That was probably the hardest thing about Gertrud to cope with, the fact that she was always changing her mood. Joel could also become angry or sad very quickly, but something had to happen to cause his mood change. As usual, it was different with Gertrud. She could be sitting there laughing, and suddenly her laughter could change into tears. Joel simply couldn’t understand how laughter and tears could be inside a person at the same time.

He was never quite sure what to do when Gertrud’s mood changed. It wasn’t possible to talk to her, and he always wondered if he had said or done something wrong. But then it would pass just as quickly as it had happened.

He sat there, trying not to make it obvious that he was looking at her.

A sad, blue face.

Blue Gertrud.

Noseless Blue Gertrud.

He squirmed a little bit on his chair, and thought he ought to go home. Before going to sleep he could think up some good deed or other he could do the very next day.

But he didn’t want to leave until Gertrud looked happy again.

Not tonight.

He tried to think of something that would make her happy.

Should he make her a cup of tea?

No, that wouldn’t be enough.

Did he have a funny story he could tell her? Gertrud liked listening to stories about what he’d been doing. It didn’t matter if he made it up, as long as it was exciting.

But he couldn’t think of anything. His mind was a blank.

Then he noticed the dish full of blue paint.

He dipped his finger into it and started to write on his forehead. It wasn’t easy, because the little mirror on the kitchen table he was using made everything look back to front. But with great difficulty he managed to write a couple of words on his forehead. Gertrud wasn’t watching him. She was staring out of the window.

Eventually, he was ready. He saw that he had spelt one word wrongly, but it wasn’t possible to change it. It would have to do.

Gertrud was still staring out of the window. Joel could tell by the back of her neck that she was still sad.

The back of your neck can look sad, not just your face.

‘Gertrud,’ he said tentatively, as if he was afraid she would become happy too quickly.

She didn’t hear him.

‘Gertrud,’ he said again, a bit louder this time.

She slowly turned round to look at him. It was a few seconds before she could read what he had written on his forehead.

‘GERTRUD HAPPY,’ it should have said.

But he had spelt it wrongly.

What it actually said was: ‘GERRUD HAPPY.’

‘I got it a bit wrong,’ he said. ‘But it’s not easy to write backwards.’

Gertrud was still looking serious. Joel hoped he hadn’t made a mess of it.

He was just going to wipe the words off his forehead with the palm of his hand when that grim, blue face in front of him suddenly lit up and her white teeth shone through all the blue.

‘I was only thinking,’ she said. ‘Now I’m happy again.’

Joel couldn’t help but smile broadly himself. The urge came from deep down inside him. Even though he was keeping his mouth tightly closed, he had started smiling.

Sometimes happiness just welled up inside you. Keeping your mouth tightly closed could do nothing to stop it.

‘I’d better be going home now,’ he said.

Gertrud moistened a towel and wiped his forehead clean.

Joel closed his eyes and thought about Mummy Jenny’s dress hanging at the back of Samuel’s wardrobe.

Sometimes Gertrud had real mummy-hands.

Then he walked back home. It wasn’t quite so hard to cope with the miracle any longer. He knew now what to do. He needed to think up some good deed or other that wouldn’t take too long to do. Then he might be able to forget about that confounded bus. And about Eklund, who was good at shooting bears but wasn’t careful enough when driving his bus.

Joel hurried up to the railway bridge. When he reached the other side, he paused and looked up at the stars.

But he didn’t see a dog.

He wondered why Gertrud had become sad.

There again, it wasn’t really surprising. Who wouldn’t be sad if they didn’t have a nose?

Or perhaps Gertrud was sad because she wasn’t married and didn’t have any children?

Joel put his hands in his pockets and started to trudge home.

He could think more about Gertrud and her blue face tomorrow morning. Right now he needed to think about a good deed he could do.

And also think about what to say if Samuel asked him what he and Eva-Lisa had been doing all evening...