My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (12 page)

Elsa looks up. The Monster stares down at her through the shadow of the upturned hood and that beard, which never seems to end. His chest heaves a few times. Elsa hunches up instinctively, terrified that his huge hands are going to grab her and toss her into the traffic like a giant flicking a mouse with a single finger. But he just stands there breathing heavily and looking angry and confused. At last he raises his hand, as if it’s a heavy mallet, and points back at the school.

When Elsa turns around she sees the girl who doesn’t read Harry Potter and her friends scattering like bits of paper thrown into the wind.

In the distance she sees Audi turning into the parking area. Elsa takes a deep breath and feels air entering her lungs for what seems like the first time in several minutes.

When she turns around again, The Monster has gone.

9

SOAP

T
here are thousands of stories in the real world, but every single one of them is from the Land-of-Almost-Awake. And the very best are from Miamas.

The other five kingdoms have produced the odd fairy tale now and then of course, but none of them are anywhere near as good. In Miamas, fairy tales are still produced around the clock, lovingly handmade one by one, and only the very, very finest of them are exported. Most are only told once and then they fall flat on the ground, but the best and most beautiful of them rise from the lips of their tellers after the last words have been spoken, and then slowly hover off over the heads of the listeners, like small, shimmering paper lanterns. When night comes they are fetched by the enphants. The enphants are very small creatures with decorous hats who ride on cloud animals (the enphants, not the hats). The lanterns are gathered up by the enphants with the help of large golden nets, and then the cloud animals turn and rise up towards the sky so swiftly that even the wind has to get out of the way. And if the wind doesn’t move out of the way quickly enough, the clouds transform themselves into an animal that has fingers, so the cloud animals can give the finger to the wind. (Granny always bellowed with laughter at this; it was a while before Elsa worked out why.)

And at the peak of the highest mountain in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, known as the Telling Mountain, the enphants open their nets and let the stories fly free. And that is how the stories find their way into the real world.

At first when Elsa’s granny started telling her stories from Miamas, they only seemed like disconnected fairy tales without a context, told by someone who needed her head examined. It took years before Elsa understood that they belonged together. All really good stories work like this.

Granny told her about the lamentable curse of the sea-angel, and about the two princelings who waged war on each other because they were both in love with the princess of Miploris. She also talked about the princess engaged in a fight with a witch who had stolen the most valuable treasure in the Land-of-Almost-Awake from her, and she described the warriors of Mibatalos and the dancers of Mimovas and the dream hunters of Mirevas. How they all constantly bickered and nagged at each other about this or that, until the day the Chosen One from Mimovas fled the shadows that had tried to kidnap him. And how the cloud animals carried the Chosen One to Miamas and how the inhabitants of the Land-of-Almost-Awake eventually realized that there was something more important to fight for. When the shadows amassed their army and came to take the Chosen One by force, they stood united against them. Not even when the War-Without-End seemed unlikely to end in any other way than crushing defeat, not even when the kingdom of Mibatalos fell and was leveled to the ground, did the other kingdoms capitulate. Because they knew that if the shadows were allowed to take the Chosen One, it would kill all music and then the power of the imagination in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. After that there would no longer be anything left that was different. All fairy stories take their life from the fact of being different. “Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”

And then she used to talk about the wurses. And Elsa should have understood this from the beginning. She really should have understood everything from the beginning.

Dad turns off the stereo just before she jumps into Audi. Elsa is glad that he does, because Dad always looks very downhearted when she points out to him that he listens to the worst music in the world, and it’s very difficult not pointing it out to him when you have to sit in Audi and listen to the worst music in the world.

“The belt?” Dad asks as she takes a seat.

Elsa’s heart is still thumping in her chest.

“Well, hi there, you old hyena!” she yells at Dad. Because that’s what she would have yelled if Granny had picked her up. And Granny would have bellowed back, “Hello, hello, my beauty!” And then everything would have felt better. Because you can still feel scared while you’re yelling “Well, hi there, you old hyena!” to someone, but it’s almost insane how much more difficult it is.

Dad looks unsure about it. Elsa sighs and straps herself in and tries to slow her pulse by thinking about things she isn’t afraid of. Dad looks even more hesitant.

“Your mum and George are at the hospital again. . . .”

“I know,” says Elsa, as you do when something has not succeeded in allaying your fears.

Dad nods. Elsa throws her backpack between the seats and it lands lying across the backseat. Dad turns around and straightens it up very neatly.

“You want to do something?” he says, sounding slightly anxious when he says “something.”

Elsa shrugs.

“We can do something . . . fun?”

Elsa knows he’s only offering to be nice. Because he has a bad conscience about seeing her so seldom and because he pities Elsa because her granny has died and because this Wednesday thing was rather sudden for him. Elsa knows this because Dad would never usually suggest doing something “fun,” because Dad doesn’t like having fun. Fun things make Dad nervous. One time when they were on holiday when Elsa was small, he went with Elsa and Mum to the beach, and then they had so much fun that Dad had to take two ibuprofen and lie down all afternoon for a rest at the hotel. He had too much fun once, said Mum.

“A fun overdose,” said Elsa, and then Mum laughed for a really long time.

The strange thing about Dad is that no one brings out the fun in Mum as much as he does. It’s as if Mum is always the opposite pole of a battery. No one brings out order and neatness in Mum like Granny, and no one makes her as untidy and whimsical as Dad. Once when Elsa was small and Mum was talking on the phone with Dad, and Elsa kept asking, “Is it Dad? Is it Dad? Can I talk to Dad? Where is he?” Mum finally turned around and sighed dramatically: “No, you can’t talk to Dad because Dad is in heaven now, Elsa!” And when Elsa went absolutely silent and just stared at her mum, Mum grinned. “Good God, I’m only joking, Elsa. He’s at the supermarket.”

She grinned just like Granny used to do.

The morning after, Elsa came into the kitchen with shiny eyes when Mum was drinking coffee with loads of lactose-free milk, and when Mum, looking worried, asked why Elsa was looking so upset, Elsa replied that she had dreamed that Dad was in heaven. And then Mum went out of her mind with guilt and hugged Elsa hard, hard, hard and said sorry over and over and over, and then Elsa waited almost ten minutes before she grinned and said: “Good God, I was only joking. I dreamed he was at the supermarket.”

After that, Mum and Elsa often used to joke with Dad and ask him what it was like in heaven. “Is it cold in heaven? Can one fly in heaven? Is one allowed to meet God in heaven?” asked Mum. “Do you have cheese-graters in heaven?” asked Elsa. And then they laughed until they couldn’t sit straight. Dad used to look really quite hesitant when they did that. Elsa misses it. Misses when Dad was in heaven.

“Is Granny in heaven now?” she says to him and grins, because she means it as a joke, and she imagines he’ll start laughing.

But he doesn’t laugh. He just looks
that way
, and Elsa feels ashamed of saying something that makes him look
that way
.

“Oh, never mind,” she mumbles and pats the glove compartment. “We can go home, it’s cool,” she adds quickly.

Dad nods and looks relieved and disappointed.

They see the police car from a distance, in the street outside the house. And Elsa can already hear the barking as they are getting out of Audi. The stairs are full of people. Our Friend’s furious howling from inside its flat is making the whole building shake.

“Do you have . . . a key?” asks Dad.

Elsa nods and gives him a quick hug. Stairwells filled with people make Dad very tentative. He gets back into Audi and Elsa goes inside by herself. And somewhere beyond that ear-splitting noise from Our Friend she hears other things too. Voices.

Dark, composed, and threatening. They have uniforms and they move about outside the flat where the boy with a syndrome and his mother live.

Eyeing Our Friend’s door intently but clearly afraid of getting too close, they press themselves to the wall on the other side. One of the policewomen turns around. Her green eyes meet Elsa’s—it’s the same policewoman she and Granny met at the station that night Granny threw the turds. She nods morosely at Elsa, as if trying to apologize.

Elsa doesn’t nod back, she just pushes past and runs.

She hears one of the police talking into a telephone, mentioning the words “Animal Control” and “to be destroyed.” Britt-Marie is standing halfway up the stairs, close enough to be able to give the police suggestions about what they should do, but at a safe distance in case the beast manages to get out the door. She smiles in a well-meaning way at Elsa. Elsa hates her. When she reaches the top floor, Our Friend starts baying louder than ever, like a hurricane of ten thousand fairy tales. Looking down the shaft between the flights of stairs, Elsa can see that the police are backing away.

And Elsa should have understood it all from the beginning. She really should have.

There is an absolutely unimaginable number of very special monsters in the forests and mountains of Miamas. But none were more legendary or more deserving of the respect of every creature in Miamas (even Granny) than the wurses.

They were as big as polar bears, moved as fluidly as desert foxes, and were as quick on the attack as cobras. They were stronger than oxen, with the stamina of wild stallions and jaws more ferocious than tigers’. They had lustrous black pelts as soft as a summer wind, but underneath, their hides were thick as armor. In the really old fairy tales they were said to be immortal. These were the tales from the elder eternities, when the wurses lived in Miploris and served the royal family as castle guards.

It was the Princess of Miploris who banished them from the Land-of-Almost-Awake, Granny used to explain, a sense of guilt lingering in the silences between her words. When the princess was still a child she’d wanted to play with one of the puppies while it was sleeping. She tugged its tail and it woke in a panic and bit her hand. Of course, everyone knew that the real blame lay with her parents, who had not taught her never ever to wake the wurse that’s sleeping. But the princess was so afraid and her parents so angry that they had to put the blame on someone else, so they could live with themselves. For this reason the court decided to banish the wurses from the kingdom forever. They gave a particularly merciless group of bounty-hunting trolls permission to hunt them with poison arrows and fire.

Obviously the wurses could have hit back; not even the assembled armies of the Land-of-Almost-Awake would have dared face them in battle, that was how feared the animals were as warriors. But instead of fighting, the wurses turned and ran. They ran so far and so high into the mountains that no one believed they would ever be found again. They ran until the children in the six kingdoms had grown up without seeing a single wurse in their entire lives. Ran for so long that they became legendary.

It was only with the coming of the War-Without-End that the Princess of Miploris realized her terrible mistake. The shadows had killed all the soldiers in the warrior kingdom of Mibatalos and leveled it to the ground, and now they pressed in with terrific power against the rest of the Land-of-Almost-Awake. When all hope seemed lost, the princess herself rode away from the city walls on her white horse. She rode like a storm into the mountains and there, after an almost endless search that made her horse succumb to exhaustion and almost crushed her too, the wurses found her.