My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (2 page)

“A-p-p-a-r-t-e-i-d,” Granny spells.

Elsa immediately Googles it on Granny’s phone. It takes her a few attempts—Granny’s always been a terrible speller. Meanwhile the policeman explains that they’ve decided to let them go, but Granny will be called in at a later date to explain the burglary and “other aggravations.”

“What aggravations?”

“Driving illegally, to begin with.”

“What do you mean, illegally? That’s my car! I don’t need permission to drive my own car, do I?”

“No,” replies the policeman patiently, “but you need a driver’s license.”

Granny throws out her arms in exasperation. She’s just launched into another rant about this being a Big Brother society when Elsa whacks the phone sharply against the table.

“It’s got NOTHING to do with that apartheid thing!!! You compared not being able to smoke with apartheid and it’s not the same thing at all. It’s not even CLOSE!”

Granny waves her hand resignedly.

“I meant it was . . . you know, more or less like that—”

“It isn’t at all!”

“It was a metaphor, for God’s sake—”

“A bloody crap metaphor!”

“How would you know?”

“WIKIPEDIA!”

Granny turns in defeat to the policeman. “Do your children carry on like this?” The policeman looks uncomfortable.

“We . . . don’t let the children surf the Net unsupervised. . . .”

Granny stretches out her arms towards Elsa, a gesture that seems to say “You see!” Elsa just shakes her head and crosses her arms very hard.

“Granny, just say sorry for throwing turds at the police, and we can go home,” she snorts in the secret language, though still very expressly upset about that whole apartheid thing.

“Sorry,” says Granny in the secret language.

“To the police, not me, you muppet.”

“There’ll be no apologizing to fascists here. I pay my taxes. And
you’re
the muppet.” Granny sulks.

“Takes one to know one.”

Then they both sit with their arms crossed, demonstratively looking away from each other, until Granny nods at the policeman and says in normal language:

“Would you be kind enough to let my spoilt granddaughter know that if she takes this attitude she’s quite welcome to walk home?”

“Tell
her
I’m going home with Mum and
she’s
the one who can walk!” Elsa replies at once.

“Tell HER she can—”

The policeman stands up without a word, walks out of the room and closes the door behind him, as if intending to go into another room and bury his head in a large, soft cushion and yell as loud as he can.

“Now look what you did,” says Granny.

“Look what YOU did!”

Eventually a heavyset policewoman with piercing green eyes comes in instead. It doesn’t seem to be the first time she’s run into Granny, because she smiles in that tired way so typical of people who know Granny, and says: “You have to stop doing this, we also have real criminals to worry about.” Granny just mumbles, “Why don’t you stop, yourselves?” And then they’re allowed to go home.

Standing on the pavement waiting for her mother, Elsa fingers the rip in her scarf. It goes right through the Gryffindor emblem. She tries as hard as she can not to cry, but doesn’t make much of a success of it.

“Ah, come on, your mum can mend that,” says Granny, trying to be cheerful, giving her a little punch on the shoulder.

Elsa looks up anxiously.

“And, you know . . . we can tell your mum the scarf got torn when you were trying to stop me climbing the fence to get to the monkeys.”

Elsa nods and runs her fingers over the scarf again. It didn’t get torn when Granny was climbing the fence. It got torn at school when three older girls who hate Elsa without Elsa really understanding why got hold of her outside the cafeteria and hit her and tore her scarf and threw it down the toilet. Their jeers are still echoing in Elsa’s head. Granny notices the look in her eyes and leans forward before whispering in their secret language:

“One day we’ll take those losers at your school to Miamas and throw them to the lions!”

Elsa dries her eyes with the back of her hand and smiles faintly.

“I’m not stupid, Granny,” she whispers. “I know you did all that stuff tonight to make me forget about what happened at school.”

Granny kicks at some gravel and clears her throat.

“I didn’t want you to remember this day because of the scarf. So I thought instead you could remember it as the day your Granny broke into a zoo—”

“And escaped from a hospital,” Elsa says with a grin.

“And escaped from a hospital,” says Granny with a grin.

“And threw turds at the police.”

“Actually, it was soil! Or mainly soil, anyway.”

“Changing memories is a good superpower, I suppose.”

Granny shrugs.

“If you can’t get rid of the bad, you have to top it up with more goody stuff.”

“That’s not a word.”

“I know.”

“Thanks, Granny,” says Elsa and leans her head against her arm.

And then Granny just nods and whispers: “We’re knights of the kingdom of Miamas, we have to do our duty.”

Because all seven-year-olds deserve superheroes.

And anyone who doesn’t agree needs their head examined.

2

MONKEY

M
um picked them up at the police station. You could tell that she was very angry, but she was controlled and full of composure and never even raised her voice, because Mum is everything Elsa’s granny is not. Elsa fell asleep almost before she’d fastened her seat belt. By the time they were on the highway, she was already in Miamas.

Miamas is Elsa and Granny’s secret kingdom. It is one of six kingdoms in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. Granny came up with it when Elsa was small and Mum and Dad had just got divorced and Elsa was afraid of sleeping because she’d read on the Internet about children who died in their sleep. Granny is good at coming up with things. So when Dad moved out of the flat and everyone was upset and tired, Elsa sneaked out the front door every night and scampered across the landing in her bare feet into Granny’s flat, and then she and Granny crawled into the big wardrobe that never stopped growing, and then they half-closed their eyes and set off.

Because you don’t need to close your eyes to get to the Land-of-Almost-Awake. That’s the whole point of it, sort of thing. You only need to be
almost
asleep. And in those last few seconds when your eyes are closing, when the mists come rolling in across the boundary between what you think and what you just know, that’s when you set off. You ride into the Land-of-Almost-Awake on the backs of cloud animals, because that’s the only way of getting there. The cloud animals come in through Granny’s balcony door and pick her and Elsa up, and then they fly higher and higher and higher until Elsa sees all the magical creatures that live in the Land-of-Almost-Awake: the enphants and regretters and the Noween and wurses and snow-angels and princes and princesses and knights. The cloud animals soar over the endless dark forests, where Wolfheart and all the other monsters live, then they sweep down through the blindingly bright colors and soft winds to the city gates of the kingdom of Miamas.

It’s difficult to say for sure whether Granny is a bit odd because she’s spent too much time in Miamas, or Miamas is a bit odd because Granny’s spent too much time there. But this is the source of all of Granny’s amazing, monstrous, magical fairy tales.

Granny says that the kingdom has been called Miamas for an eternity of at least ten thousand fairy tales, but Elsa knows that Granny only made this up because Elsa couldn’t say “pajamas” when she was small and used to say “mjamas” instead. Except of course Granny insists that she never made up a bloody thing and Miamas and the other five kingdoms in the Land-of-Almost-Awake are not only real, but actually far
more
real than the world we’re in now, where “everyone is an economist and drinks lactose-free milk and makes a right fuss.” Granny isn’t particularly good at living in the real world. There are too many rules. She cheats when she plays Monopoly and drives Renault in the bus lane and steals those yellow carrier bags from IKEA and won’t stand behind the line when she’s at the conveyor belt at the airport. And when she goes to the bathroom she leaves the door open.

But she does tell the very best fairy tales ever, and for that Elsa can forgive quite a few character defects.

All fairy tales that are worth something come from Miamas, says Granny. The other five kingdoms in the Land-of-Almost-Awake are busy doing other things: Mirevas is the kingdom where they stand guard over dreams, Miploris is the kingdom where they store all sorrow, Mimovas is where music comes from, Miaudacas is where courage comes from, and Mibatalos is the kingdom where the bravest warriors, who fought against the fearsome shadows in the War-Without-End, were raised.

But Miamas is Granny and Elsa’s favorite kingdom, because there storytelling is considered the noblest profession of all. The currency there is imagination; instead of buying something with coins, you buy it with a good story. Libraries aren’t known as libraries but as “banks,” and every fairy tale is worth a fortune. Granny spends millions every night: tales full of dragons and trolls and kings and queens and witches. And shadows. Because all imaginary worlds have to have terrible enemies, and in the Land-of-Almost-Awake the enemies are the shadows, because the shadows want to kill the imagination. And if we’re going to talk about shadows, we must mention Wolfheart. He was the one who defeated the shadows in the War-Without-End. He was the first and greatest superhero Elsa ever heard about.

Elsa was knighted in Miamas; she gets to ride cloud animals and have her own sword. She hasn’t once been afraid to fall asleep since Granny started taking her there each night. Because in Miamas no one says girls can’t be knights, and the mountains reach up to the sky, and the campfires never go out, and no one tries to shred your Gryffindor scarf.

Of course, Granny also says that no one in Miamas closes the door when they go to the bathroom. An open-door policy is more or less legally enforceable in every situation across the Land-of-Almost-Awake. But Elsa is pretty sure she is describing another version of the truth there. That’s what Granny calls lies: “other versions of the truth.” So when Elsa wakes up in a chair in Granny’s room at the hospital the next morning, Granny is on the toilet with the door open, while Elsa’s mum is in the hall, and Granny is in the midst of telling another version of the truth. It’s not going all that well. The real truth, after all, is that Granny escaped from the hospital last night and Elsa sneaked out of the flat while Mum and George were sleeping, and they went to the zoo together in Renault, and Granny climbed the fence. Elsa quietly admits to herself that it now seems a little irresponsible to have done all this with a seven-year-old in the middle of the night.

Granny, whose clothes are lying in a pile on the floor and still very literally smelling a bit monkey-ish, is claiming that when she was climbing the fence by the monkey cage and the guard shouted at her, she thought he could have been a “lethal rapist,” and
this
was why she started throwing muck at him and the police. Mum shakes her head in a very controlled way and says Granny is making all this up. Granny doesn’t like it when people say that things are made-up, and reminds Mum she prefers the less derogatory term “reality-challenged.” Mum clearly disagrees but controls herself. Because she is everything that Granny isn’t.

“This is one of the worst things you’ve done,” Mum calls out grimly towards the bathroom.

“I find that very, very unlikely, my dear daughter,” Granny answers from within, unconcerned.

Mum responds by methodically running through all the trouble Granny has caused. Granny says the only reason she’s getting so worked up is that she doesn’t have a sense of humor. And then Mum says Granny should stop behaving like an irresponsible child. And then Granny says: “Do you know where pirates park their cars?” And when Mum doesn’t answer, Granny yells from the toilet, “In a gAAARRRage!” Mum just sighs, massages her temples, and closes the bathroom door. This makes Granny really, really, really angry because she doesn’t like feeling enclosed when she’s on the toilet.