My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (31 page)

The flat smells of dishcloth, and George is collecting used coffee cups. The strangers were all here today drinking coffee after the funeral. They smiled sympathetically at Elsa and Elsa hates them for it. Hates that they knew Granny before she did. She goes into Granny’s flat and lies on Granny’s bed. The streetlight outside plays against the photos on the ceiling, and, as she watches, Elsa still doesn’t know if she can forgive Granny for leaving Mum on her own so she could save other children. She doesn’t know if Mum can forgive it either. Even if she seems to be trying.

She goes out the door, into the stairwell, thinking to herself that she’ll go back to the wurse in the garage. But instead, she sinks listlessly onto the floor. Sits there forever. Tries to think but only finds emptiness and silence where usually there are thoughts.

She can hear the footsteps coming from a couple floors down—soft, padding gently, as if they’re lost. Not at all the self-assured, energetic pacing the woman in the black skirt used to have when she was still smelling of mint and talking into a white cable. She wears jeans now. And no white cable. She stops about ten steps below Elsa.

“Hi,” says the woman.

She looks small. Sounds tired, but it’s a different kind of tiredness than usual. A better tiredness, this time. And she smells of neither mint nor wine. Just shampoo.

“Hello,” says Elsa.

“I went to the churchyard today,” says the woman slowly.

“You were at the funeral?”

The woman shakes her head apologetically. “I wasn’t there. Sorry. I . . . I couldn’t. But I . . .” She swallows the words. Looks down at her hands. “I went to my . . . my boys’ graves. I haven’t been there in a very long time.”

“Did it help?” asks Elsa.

The woman’s lips disappear.

“I don’t know.”

Elsa nods. The lights in the stairwell go out. She waits for her eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. Finally the woman seems to gather all her strength into a smile, and the skin around her mouth doesn’t crack quite as much anymore.

“How was the funeral?” she asks.

Elsa shrugs.

“Like a normal funeral. Far too many people.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to share one’s sorrow with people one doesn’t know. But I think . . . there were many people who were very fond of your grandmother.”

Elsa lets her hair fall over her face. The woman scratches her neck.

“It’s . . . I understand it’s hard. To know that your granny left home to help strangers somewhere else. . . . Me, for instance.”

Elsa looks slightly suspicious. It’s as if the woman read her thoughts.

“It’s known as ‘the trolley problem.’ In ethics. I mean, for students. At university. It’s . . . it’s the discussion of whether it’s morally right to sacrifice one person in order to save many others. You can probably read about it on Wikipedia.”

Elsa doesn’t respond. The woman seems to become ill at ease.

“You look angry.”

Elsa shrugs and tries to decide what she’s most angry about. There’s a fairly long list.

“I’m not angry at you. I’m just angry at stupid Britt-Marie,” she decides to say in the end.

The woman looks slightly confused and glances down at what she’s holding in her hands. Her fingers drum against it.

“Don’t fight with monsters, for you can become one. If you look into the abyss for long enough, the abyss looks into you.”

“What are you talking about?” Elsa bursts out, secretly pleased that the woman speaks to her as if Elsa is not a child.

“Sorry, that’s . . . that was Nietzsche. He was a German philosopher. It’s . . . ah, I’m probably misquoting him. But I think it could mean that if you hate the one who hates, you could risk becoming like the one you hate.”

Elsa’s shoulders shoot up to her ears.

“Granny always said: ‘Don’t kick the shit, it’ll go all over the place!’ ”

And that’s the first time Elsa hears the woman in the black skirt, who now wears jeans, really burst out laughing.

“Yes, yes, that’s probably a better way of putting it.”

She’s beautiful when she laughs. It suits her. And then she takes two steps towards Elsa and reaches out as far as she can to give her the envelope that she’s holding, without having to move too close.

“This was on my boys’ . . . on their . . . it was on their headstone. I don’t . . . don’t know who put it there. But your granny—maybe she figured out that I’d come. . . .”

Elsa takes the envelope. The woman in jeans has disappeared down the stairs before she has time to look up from the envelope. On it, it says, “To Elsa! Give this to Lennart and Maud!”

And that is how Elsa finds Granny’s third letter.

Lennart is holding a coffee cup in his hand when he opens the door. Maud and Samantha are behind him, both looking very sweet. They smell of cookies.

“I have a letter for you,” Elsa declares.

Lennart takes it and is just about to say something, but Elsa goes on:

“It’s from my granny! She’s probably sending her regards and saying sorry, because that’s what she’s doing in all the letters.”

Lennart nods meekly. Maud nods even more meekly.

“We’re so terribly sad about this whole thing with your grandmother, dear Elsa. But it was such a wonderfully beautiful funeral, we thought. We’re so glad that we were invited. Come in and have a dream—and Alf brought over some of that chocolate drink as well.” Maud beams.

Samantha barks. Even her bark sounds friendly. Elsa takes a dream from the proffered tin, filled to the top. She smiles cooperatively at Maud.

“I have a friend who likes dreams very much. And he’s been on his own all day. Do you think it would be all right to bring him up?”

Maud and Lennart nod as if it goes without saying.

24

DREAMS

M
aud doesn’t look quite as convinced once the wurse is sitting on her kitchen rug a few moments later. Especially as it’s literally sitting on the entire kitchen rug.

“I told you it likes dreams, didn’t I?” says Elsa cheerfully.

Maud nods mutely. Lennart sits on the other side of the table, with an immeasurably terrified-looking Samantha on his lap. The wurse eats dreams, a dozen at a time.

“What breed is that?” says Lennart very quietly to Elsa, as if he’s afraid the wurse may take offense.

“A wurse!” says Elsa with satisfaction.

Lennart nods like you do when you don’t have a clue what something means. Maud opens a new tin of dreams and carefully pushes it across the floor with the tips of her toes. The wurse empties it in three slavering bites, then lifts its head and peers at Maud with eyes as big as hubcaps. Maud takes down another two tins and tries not to look flattered. It doesn’t go so very well.

Elsa looks at the letter from Granny. It’s lying unfolded and open on the table. Lennart and Maud must have read it while she was in the cellar getting the wurse. Lennart notices her looking, and he puts his hand on her shoulder.

“You’re right, Elsa. Your grandmother says sorry.”

“For what?”

Maud gives the wurse some cinnamon buns and half a length of sweet cake.

“Well, it was quite a list. Your grandmother was certainly—”

“Different,” Elsa interjects.

Maud laughs warmly and pats the wurse on the head.

Lennart nods at the letter.

“First of all she apologizes for telling us off so often. And for being angry so often. And for arguing and causing problems. It’s really nothing to apologize about, all people do that from time to time!” he says, as if apologizing for Granny apologizing.

“You don’t,” says Elsa and likes them for it. Maud starts giggling. “And then she apologized about that time she happened to shoot Lennart from her balcony with one of those, what are they called, paint-bomb guns!”

Suddenly she looks embarrassed.

“Is that what it’s called? Paint-bomb?”

Elsa nods. Even though it isn’t. Maud looks proud.

“Once your grandmother even got Britt-Marie—there was a big pink stain on her floral-print jacket, and that’s Britt-Marie’s favorite jacket and the stain wouldn’t even go away with Vanish! Can you imagine?”

Maud titters. And then she looks very guilty.

“What else does Granny apologize about?” Elsa asks, hoping for more stories about someone shooting that paintball gun at Britt-Marie. But Lennart’s chin drops towards his chest. He looks at Maud and she nods, and Lennart turns to Elsa and says:

“Your granny wrote that she was sorry for asking us to tell you the whole story. Everything you have to know.”

“What story?” Elsa’s about to ask, but she suddenly becomes aware of someone standing behind her. She twists round in her chair, and the boy with a syndrome is standing in the bedroom doorway with a cuddly lion in his arms.

He looks at Elsa, but when she looks back at him he lets his hair fall over his brow, like Elsa sometimes does. He’s about a year younger, but almost exactly as tall, and they have the same hairstyle and almost the same color too. The only thing that sets them apart is that Elsa is different and the boy has a syndrome, which is a very special kind of difference.

The boy doesn’t say anything, because he never does. Maud kisses his forehead and whispers, “Nightmare?” and the boy nods. Maud gets a big glass of milk and a whole tin of dreams, takes his hand, and leads him back into the bedroom, while robustly saying: “Come on, let’s chase it away at once!”

Lennart turns to Elsa.

“I think your grandmother wanted me to start at the beginning.”

And that was the day Elsa heard the story of the boy with a syndrome. A fairy tale she’d never heard before. A tale so terrible it makes you want to hug yourself as hard as you can. Lennart tells her about the boy’s father, who has more hatred in him than anyone could think would be possible to fit into one person. The father used narcotics. Lennart stops himself, and seems worried about frightening Elsa, but she straightens her back and buries her hands in the wurse’s fur and says it doesn’t matter. Lennart asks if she knows what narcotics are, and she says she’s read about them on
Wikipedia
.

Lennart describes how the father became a different creature when he used drugs. How he became dark in his soul. How he hit the boy’s mother while she was pregnant, because he didn’t want to become anyone’s father. Lennart’s eyes start blinking more and more slowly, and he says that maybe it was because the father feared the child would be as he was. Filled with hatred and violence. So when the boy was born, and the doctors said he had a syndrome, the father was beside himself with rage. He couldn’t tolerate that the child was different. Maybe it was because he hated everything that was different. Maybe because, when he looked at the boy, he saw everything that was different in himself.

So he drank alcohol, took more of that stuff on
Wikipedia
, and disappeared for entire nights and sometimes for weeks on end, without anyone knowing where he was. Sometimes he came home utterly calm and withdrawn. Sometimes he cried, explaining that he’d had to keep out of the way until he’d wrung his own anger out of himself. As if there were something dark living in him that was trying to transform him, and he was struggling against it. He could remain calm for weeks after that. Or months.

Then one night the dark took possession of him. He hit and hit and hit them until neither of them was moving anymore. And then he ran.

Maud’s voice moves gently through the silence that Lennart leaves behind him in the kitchen. In the bedroom the boy with a syndrome snores, which is one of the first sounds Elsa has ever heard him make. Maud’s fingertips scramble about among the empty cookie tins on the kitchen counter.

“We found them. We’d been trying, for such a long time, to make her take the boy and leave, but she was so afraid. We were all so afraid. He was a terribly dangerous man,” she whispers.

Elsa grips the wurse tighter.

“Then what did you do?”

Maud crumples up by the kitchen table. She has an envelope in her hand, just like the one Elsa arrived with.

“We knew your grandmother. From the hospital. We ran a café back then, you see, for the doctors, and your grandmother came there every day. A dozen dreams and a dozen cinnamon buns, every single day! I don’t know how it started, really. But your grandmother was the sort of person one told things to, if you see what I mean? I didn’t know what to do about Sam. I didn’t know who to turn to. We were so terribly frightened, all of us, but I called her. She arrived in her rusty old car in the middle of the night—”

“Renault!” Elsa exclaims, because for some reason she has a sense that he deserves his name in the fairy tale if he’s the one who came to their rescue. Lennart clears his throat with a sad smile.

“Her Renault, yes. We took the boy and his mother with us and your grandmother drove here. Gave us the keys to the flats. I can’t think how she got her hands on them, but she said she’d clear it with the owners of the building. We’ve been living here ever since.”

“And the father? What happened when he realized everyone was gone?” Elsa wants to know, although she actually doesn’t want to know.

Lennart’s hand seeks Maud’s fingers.