A Bridge to the Stars Read Free

is rising from the glowing stove and his
face is sweaty and shiny. He's scrubbing away like mad
at stains and specks of dirt that only he can see. He
throws a whole bucketful of sizzling water into the
hood over the stove. He squelches around the floor in
his soaking wet woollen socks and scrubs so hard, it
seems that doing so relieves him of a great pain.
    Joel can't make up his mind if his dad is scared or if
he's angry.
    What kind of dirt is it that he can see, but nobody
else can?
    He can hear Samuel muttering and chuntering about
spiders' webs and clusters of snakes. But surely there
aren't any spiders making webs in the kitchen in the
middle of winter? And how could there be a cluster of
snakes in the hood over the stove? There aren't any
snakes at all in this part of northern Sweden.
    Joel watches him through the half-open door and
realises that his father is scrubbing away something
that only he can see. Something that makes him both
scared and angry.
    When Samuel has finished, he lies on his bed
without moving. He groans and doesn't open the
curtains even though it's broad daylight. He's still on
the bed when Joel goes to school, and he's still there
when Joel comes back home in the afternoon.
    When Joel has boiled the potatoes and asks his father
if he wants to eat, he just groans and shakes his head.
A few days later everything is back to normal, as if it
had simply been a dream. His father gets up at five
o'clock again, has his coffee and goes off into the
forest. Joel can breathe freely again. It will be a long
time before he's woken up by his father sitting at the
kitchen table muttering away to himself.
    It's easiest to think about all the things that happen
and make him wonder what's going on when he's
sitting in the crack in his rock down by the river.
    One day he sits down at the kitchen table with a pen
and some paper and writes down all the things he thinks
about. He lists the questions he's going to ask his father.
Questions he wants answering before the first snow has
fallen in the autumn. When he writes down his questions
it's still the middle of winter. There are big mounds of
snow thrown up by the ploughs at street corners and by
the wall of the church. It's bitterly cold when he goes to
school in the morning. But spring will come one of these
days.
    His first question will be why they don't live by the
sea. That might not be the most important question, but
he wants to start with something that isn't too hard.
    For every question he writes down, he also tries to
work out what possible answers there might be, and
what answer he would most like to hear.
    Then he wants to know why he was born in
Sundsvall.
    And why Jenny, his mother, went off in a train and
left him with Mrs Westman.
    That's also difficult because he never knows what to
say whenever anybody asks him why he doesn't have a
mother.
    He's the only one. The only person he knows who
doesn't have a mother.
    Being the only one can often be a good thing.
    Being the only one with a model aeroplane made of
balsa wood, or having a bike with a steel-studded tyre
on the back wheel.
    But being the only one without a mother is a bad
thing.
    It's worse than wearing glasses.
    It's even worse than stuttering.
    Being without a mother is the worst thing there is.
    The only mum allowed not to be there is a mum
who's died.
    He sometimes thinks he will give that answer when
somebody asks, or is taunting him. He's tested it to
hear what it sounds like.
    'My mum died.'
    But there are lots of ways of saying that. You can say
it to make it sound as if she died in a dramatic plane
crash in some far distant country, when she was on
some urgent mission. Or you can say it to suggest that
she was attacked by a lion.
    'My mother's dead' is another way he could say it.
    That makes it sound as if he doesn't really care.
    But when he finds the photograph that morning,
when his dad's asleep with his head on the kitchen
table, he knows that his mother isn't dead. And he
knows