My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (17 page)

Later that night Elsa sits on the top step outside Granny’s flat until the ceiling lights switch themselves off. Runs her finger over Granny’s writing on the envelope again and again, but doesn’t open it. Just puts it in her backpack and stretches out on the cold floor and mostly keeps her eyes closed. Tries one more time to get off to Miamas. She lies there for hours without succeeding. Stays there until she hears the main door at the bottom of the house opening and closing again. She lies on the floor and mostly keeps her eyes closed until she feels the night embracing the windows of the house and hears the drunk start rattling around with something a couple floors farther down.

Elsa’s mum doesn’t like it when she calls the drunk “the drunk.” “What do I call her then?” Elsa used to ask, and then Mum used to look very unsure and sound a bit smarmy, while managing to suggest something like: “It’s . . . I mean, it’s someone who’s . . . tired.” And then Granny used to chime in, “Tired? Hell yeah, of course you get tired when you’re up boozing all night!” And then Mum used to yell, “Mum!” and then Granny used to throw out her hands and ask, “Oh, good God, what did I say wrong
now
?” and then it was time for Elsa to put on her headphones.

“Turn off the water, I said! No bathing at night!!!” the drunk stammers from below at no one in particular, whacking her shoehorn against the banister.

That’s what the drunk always does. Roars and screams and bashes things with that shoehorn. Then sings that same old song of hers. Of course, no one ever comes out and quiets her down, not even Britt-Marie, for in this house drunks are like monsters. People think if they ignore them they’ll cease to exist.

Elsa sits up into a squatting position and peers down through the gap between the stairs. She can only make out a glimpse of the drunk’s socks as she shambles past, swinging the shoehorn as if scything tall grass. Elsa can’t quite explain to herself why she does it, but she heaves herself up on her tiptoes and sneaks down the first flight of stairs. Out of pure curiosity, perhaps. Or more likely because she is bored and frustrated about no longer being able to get to Miamas.

The door of the drunk’s flat is open. There’s a faint light cast by an overturned floor lamp. Photos on all the walls. Elsa has never seen so many photos—she thought Granny had a lot of them on her ceiling, but these must be in the thousands. Each of them is framed in a small white wooden frame and all are of two teenage boys and a man who must be their father. In one of the photos, the man and the boys are standing on a beach with a sparkling green sea behind them. The boys are both wearing wetsuits. They smile. They are bronzed. They look happy.

Under the frame is one of those cheap congratulatory cards, the kind you buy in a gas station when you’ve forgotten to get a proper card. “To Mum, from your boys,” it says on the front.

Beside the card hangs a mirror. Shattered.

The words reverberating over the landing are so sudden and so filled with fury that Elsa loses her balance and slips down the bottom four or five steps, right into the wall. The echo throws itself at her, as if determined to claw her ears.

“WHATAREYOUDOINGHERE?”

Elsa peers up through the railings at the deranged person wielding the shoehorn at her, looking simultaneously incandescent and terrified. Her eyes flicker. That black skirt is full of creases now. She smells of wine, Elsa can feel it all the way from the floor below. Her hair looks like a bundle of string in which two birds have got themselves tangled up during a fight. She has purple bags under her eyes.

The woman sways. She probably means to yell, but it comes out as a wheeze:

“You’re not allowed to bathe at night. The water . . . turn off the water. Everyone will drown. . . .”

The white cable she always talks into sits in her ear, but the other end just dangles against her hip, disconnected. Elsa realizes there has probably never been anyone there, and that’s not an easy thing for an almost-eight-year-old to understand. Granny told many fairy tales about many things, but never about women in black skirts pretending to have telephone conversations while they went up the stairs, so their neighbors wouldn’t think they’d bought all that wine for themselves.

The woman looks confused. As if she has suddenly forgotten where she is. She disappears and, in the next moment, Elsa feels her mum gently plucking her from the stairs. Feels her warm breath against her neck and her “ssshhh” in her ear, as if they were standing in front of a deer and had got a bit too close.

Elsa opens her mouth, but Mum puts her finger over her lips.

“Shush,” whispers Mum again, and keeps her arms tight around her.

Elsa curls up in her arms in the dark, and they see the woman in the black skirt drifting back and forth down there like a flag that’s torn itself free in the wind. Plastic bags lie scattered on the floor of her flat. One of the wine boxes has toppled over. A few last drops of red are dripping onto the parquet floor. Mum makes a gentle movement against Elsa’s hand. They stand up quietly and go back up the stairs.

And that night Elsa’s mum tells Elsa what everyone except Elsa’s parents was talking about on the day Elsa was born. About a wave that broke over a beach five thousand miles away and crushed everything in its path. About two boys who swam out after their father and never came back.

Elsa hears how the drunk starts singing her song. Because not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside.

14

TIRES

S
o many hearts broke the day Elsa was born. Shattered with such force by the wave that the shards of glass were dispersed all around the world. Improbable catastrophes produce improbable things in people, improbable sorrow and improbable heroism. More death than human senses can comprehend. Two boys carrying their mother to safety and then turning back for their father. Because a family does not leave anyone behind. And yet, in the end, that is precisely what they did, her boys. Left her alone.

Elsa’s granny lived in another rhythm from other people. She operated in a different way. In the real world, in relation to everything that functioned, she was chaotic. But when the real world crumbles, when everything turns into chaos, then people like Elsa’s granny can sometimes be the only ones who stay functional. That was another of her superpowers. When Granny was headed for some far-off place, you could only be sure of one thing: that it was a place everyone else was trying to get away from. And if anyone asked her why she was doing it, she’d answer, “I’m a doctor, for God’s sake, and ever since I became one I’ve not allowed myself the luxury of choosing whose life I should be saving.”

She wasn’t big on efficiency and economics, Granny, but everyone listened to her when there was chaos. The other doctors wouldn’t be seen dead with her on a good day, but when the world collapsed into pieces they followed her like an army. Because improbable tragedies create improbable superheroes.

Once, late one night when they were on their way to Miamas, Elsa had asked Granny about it, about how it felt to be somewhere when the world crumbles. And how it was being in the Land-of-Almost-Awake during the War-Without-End and what it was like when they saw that wave breaking over the ninety-nine snow-angels. And Granny had answered: “It’s like the very worst thing you could dream up, worked out by the most evil thing you could imagine and multiplied by a figure you can’t even imagine.” Elsa had been very afraid that night, and she had asked Granny what they would do if one day their world crumbled around them.

And then Granny had squeezed her forefingers hard and replied, “Then we do what everyone does, we do everything we can.” Elsa had crept up into her lap and asked: “But what can we do?” And then Granny had kissed her hair and held her hard, hard, hard and whispered: “We pick up as many children as we can carry, and we run as fast as we can.”

“I’m good at running,” Elsa had whispered.

“Me too,” Granny had whispered back.

The day Elsa was born, Granny was far away. In a war. She had been there for months, but was on her way to an aircraft. On her way home. That was when she heard about the wave in another place even farther away, from which everyone was in desperate flight. So she went, because they needed her. She had time to help many children escape death, but not the boys of the woman with the black skirt. So she brought home the woman with the black skirt instead.

“That was your grandmother’s last journey,” says Mum. “She came home after that.”

Elsa and Mum sit in Kia. It’s morning and there’s a traffic jam. Snowflakes as big as pillowcases are falling on the windshield.

Elsa can’t remember the last time she heard Mum tell such a long story. Mum hardly ever tells stories, but this one was so long that Mum fell asleep in the middle of it last night and had to pick it up in the car on the way to school.

“Why was it her last journey?” asks Elsa.

Mum smiles with an emotional combination of melancholy and joy that only she in the entire world has fully mastered.

“She got a new job.”

And then she looks as if she is remembering something unexpected. As if the memory just fell out of a cracked vase.

“You were born prematurely. They were concerned about your heart so we had to stay at the hospital for several weeks with you. Granny came back with her on the same day we came home. . . .”

Elsa realizes that she means the woman in the black skirt. Mum clutches Kia’s steering wheel hard.

“I’ve never spoken much to her. I don’t think anyone in the house wanted to ask too many questions. We let your grandmother handle it. And then . . .”

She sighs, and regret floods her gaze.

“. . . then the years just went by. And we were busy. And now she’s just someone who lives in our house. To be quite honest with you, I’d forgotten that was how she first moved in. You two moved in on the same day. . . .”

Mum turns to Elsa. Tries unsuccessfully to smile.

“Does it make me a terrible person that I’ve forgotten?”

Elsa shakes her head. She was going to say something about The Monster and the wurse, but she doesn’t because she’s worried Mum won’t let her see them anymore if she knows. Mums can have a lot of strange principles when it comes to social interaction between their children and monsters and wurses. Elsa understands that everyone is scared of them, and that it will take a long time to make them all understand that The Monster and the wurse—like the drunk—are not what they seem.

“How often did Granny go away?” she asks instead.

A silver-colored car behind them sounds its horn when she allows a space to develop between her and the car in front. Mum releases the brake and Kia slowly rolls forward.

“It varied. It depended on where she was needed, and for how long.”

“Was that what you meant that time Granny said you became an economist just to spite her?”

The car behind them sounds its horn again.

“What?”

Elsa fiddles with the rubber seal in the door.

“I heard you. Like a mega-long time ago. When Granny said you became an economist because you were in teenage rebellion. And you said, ‘How do you know? You were never here!’ That was what you meant, wasn’t it?”

“I was angry, Elsa. Sometimes it’s hard to control what you say, when you’re angry.”

“Not you. You never lose control.”

Mum tries to smile again.

“With your grandmother it was . . . more difficult.”

“How old were you when Grandfather died?”

“Twelve.”

“And Granny left you?”

“Your grandmother went where she was needed, darling.”

“Didn’t you need her though?”

“Others needed her more.”

“Is that why you were always arguing?”

Mum sighs deeply as only a parent who has just realized that she has strayed considerably further into a story than she was intending is capable of sighing.

“Yes. Yes, sometimes it was probably for that reason we were arguing. But sometimes it was about other things. Your grandmother and I were very . . . different.”

“No. You were just different in different ways.”

“Maybe.”

“What else did you argue about?”

The car behind Kia beeps its horn again. Mum closes her eyes and holds her breath. And only when she finally releases the hand brake and lets Kia roll forward does she release the word from her lips, as if it had to force its way through.

“You. We always argued about you, darling.”

“Why?”

“Because when you love someone very much, it’s difficult to learn to share her with someone else.”

“Like Jean Grey,” Elsa observes, as if it were absolutely obvious.

“Who?”

“A superhero. From
X-Men
. Wolverine and Cyclops both loved her. So they argued so much about her, it was totally insane.”

“I thought those X-Men were mutants, not superheroes. Isn’t that what you said last time we spoke about them?”

“It’s complicated,” says Elsa, even though it isn’t really, if one has read enough quality literature.

“So what kind of superpower does this Jean Grey have, then?”