My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (35 page)

“I . . . I’m not so good at meeting people.”

“I know. But you don’t seem so good at being on your own either.”

The woman looks at her for a long time, drags her hand slowly through her hair. Elsa stares back determinedly.

“I . . . maybe I can come. A . . . short while.”

“We can buy pizza! If you don’t, you know, like Christmas food,” says Elsa hopefully.

The woman smiles. Elsa smiles back.

Alf comes out of Granny’s flat just as Elsa’s climbing the stairs. The boy with a syndrome is circling him happily, doing a little dance, and Alf has an enormous toolbox in one hand, which he tries to hide when he catches sight of Elsa.

“What are you doing?” asks Elsa.

“Nothing,” Alf says evasively.

The boy jumps into Mum and George’s flat and heads towards a large bowl of chocolate Santas. Alf tries to get past Elsa on the stairs but Elsa stands in his way.

“What’s that?” she asks, pointing at the toolbox.

“Nothing!” Alf repeats and tries to hide it behind his back.

He smells strongly of wood shavings, Elsa notices.

“Sure it’s nothing!” she says grumpily.

She tries to stop feeling like an idiot. It doesn’t go so very well.

She looks into the flat at the boy. He looks happy in the way that only an almost-seven-year-old can look happy when standing in front of a whole big bowl of chocolate Santas. Elsa wonders if he’s waiting for the real Santa, who isn’t made of chocolate. Obviously, Elsa doesn’t believe in Santa, but she has a lot of faith in people who do believe in him. She used to write letters to Santa every Christmas, not just wish lists but whole letters. They weren’t very much about Christmas, mainly about politics. Because Elsa mostly felt that Santa wasn’t involving himself enough in social questions, and believed he needed to be informed about that, in the midst of the floods of greedy letters that she knew he must be receiving from all the other children every year. Someone had to take a bit of responsibility. One year she’d seen the Coca-Cola ad, and that time her letter was quite a lot about how Santa was a “soulless sellout.” Another year she’d seen a TV documentary about child labor and, immediately after that, quite a few American Christmas comedies, and because she was unsure whether Santa’s definition of “elf” should be classified as the same as the elves that exist in Old Norse mythology or the ones that live in forests in Tolkien’s world, or just in the general sense of a short person, sort of thing, she demanded that Santa immediately get back to her with a precise definition.

Santa never did, so Elsa sent another letter that was very long and angry. The year after, Elsa had learned how to use Google, so then she knew the reason for Santa never answering was that he didn’t exist. So she didn’t write any more letters. She mentioned to Mum and Granny the next day that Santa didn’t exist, and Mum got so upset that she choked on her mulled wine, and when Granny saw this she immediately turned dramatically to Elsa and pretended to be even more upset, and burst out: “DON’T you talk like that, Elsa! If you do, you’re just reality-challenged!”

Mum didn’t laugh at all about that, which didn’t bother Granny, but on the other hand Elsa did laugh a good deal, and that pleased Granny immeasurably. And the day before Christmas, Elsa had a letter from Santa in which he gave her a right ticking-off because she’d “got herself an attitude,” and then there followed a long haranguing passage that started with “you ungrateful bloody brat” and went on to say that because Elsa had stopped believing in Santa, the elves hadn’t been able to reach a proper collective agreement on salaries that year.

“I know you wrote this,” Elsa had hissed at Granny.

“How?” Granny asked with exaggerated outrage

“Because not even Santa is so dumb that he spells ‘collective’ with a double ‘t’!”

And then Granny had looked a little less outraged and apologized. And then she tried to get Elsa to run to the shop to buy a cigarette lighter, in exchange for Granny “timing her.” But Elsa didn’t fall for that one.

And then Granny had grumpily got out her newly purchased Santa suit, and they went to the children’s hospital where Granny’s friend worked. Granny went around all day telling fairy tales to children with terrible diseases and Elsa followed behind her, distributing toys. That was Elsa’s best-ever Christmas. They would make a tradition of it, Granny promised, but it was a really crappy tradition because they only had time to do it one year before she went and died.

Elsa looks at the boy, then at Alf, and locks eyes with him. When the boy catches sight of a bowl of chocolate Santas and disappears from view, Elsa slips into the flat’s front hall, opens the chest in there, and pulls out the Santa suit. She goes back onto the landing and presses it into Alf’s arms.

Alf looks at it as if just tried to tickle him.

“What’s that?”

“What does it look like?” asks Elsa.

“Forget it!” says Alf dismissively, pushing the costume back towards Elsa.

“Forget that you can forget about it!” says Elsa, and pushes the costume back even more.

“Your grandmother said you don’t even believe in bloody Santa,” mutters Alf.

Elsa rolls her eyes.

“No, but not everything in the world is about me, right?”

She points into the flat. The boy is sitting on the floor in front of the TV. Alf looks at him and grunts.

“Why can’t Lennart be Santa?”

“Because Lennart couldn’t keep a secret from Maud,” Elsa answers impatiently.

“What’s the bloody relevance of that?”

“The relevance is that Maud can’t keep a secret from anyone!”

Alf squints at Elsa. Then he reluctantly mutters that that’s true enough. Because Maud really couldn’t keep a secret even if it was glued to the insides of her hands. While George was playing hide-the-key with Elsa and the boy with a syndrome earlier, Maud had walked behind them and repeatedly whispered, “Maybe you should look in the flowerpot in the bookshelf,” and when Elsa’s mum explained to Maud that the whole point of the game was sort of to find out for yourself where the key was hidden, Maud looked disconsolate and said, “The children look so sad while they’re searching, I don’t want them to be sad.”

“So you have to be Santa,” Elsa says conclusively.

“What about George?” Alf tries.

“He’s too tall. And anyway it’ll be too obvious, because he’ll wear his jogging shorts on the outside of the Santa suit.”

Alf doesn’t look as if that would make much of a difference to him. He takes a couple of dissatisfied steps across the landing and into the hall, where he peers over the edge of the chest as if hoping to find a better option. But the only things he sees there are bedsheets and then Elsa’s Spider-Man suit.

“What’s that?” asks Alf, and pokes at it, as if it might poke him back.

“My Spider-Man suit,” grunts Elsa, trying to close the lid.

“When do you get to wear that?” wonders Alf, apparently expecting to know the exact date of the annual Spider-Man day.

“I was supposed to be wearing it when school starts again. We’ve got a class project.” She closes the chest with a slam. Alf stands there with the Santa suit in his hand and doesn’t seem interested. At all, actually. Elsa groans.

“If you
haaave
to know, I’m not going to be Spider-Man, because apparently girls aren’t allowed to be Spider-Man! But I don’t care because I haven’t got the energy to fight with everyone all the bloody time!”

Alf has already started walking back to the stairs. Elsa swallows her tears, so he doesn’t hear them. Maybe he hears them all the same, though. Because he stops by the corner of the railing. Crumples up the Santa suit in his fist. Sighs. Says something that Elsa doesn’t hear.

“What?” Elsa says irritably.

Alf sighs again, harder.

“I said I think your grandmother would have wanted you to dress up as any bloody thing you like,” he repeats brusquely, without turning around.

Elsa pushes her hands into her pockets and glares down at the floor.

“The others at school say girls can’t be Spider-Man . . .”

Alf takes two dragging steps down the stairs. Stops. Looks at her.

“Don’t you think a lot of bastards said that to your grandmother?”

Elsa peers at him.

“Did she dress up as Spider-Man?”

“No.”

“What are you talking about, then?”

“She dressed up as a doctor.”

“Did they tell her she couldn’t be a doctor? Because she was a girl?”

Alf shifts something in the toolbox and then stuffs in the Santa suit.

“Most likely they told her a whole lot of damned things she wasn’t allowed to do, for a range of different reasons. But she damned well did them all the same. A few years after she was born they were still telling girls they couldn’t vote in the bleeding elections, but now the girls do it all the same. That’s damned well how you stand up to bastards who tell you what you can and can’t do. You bloody do those things all the bloody same.”

Elsa watches her shoes. Alf watches his toolbox. Then Elsa goes into the hall, takes two chocolate Santas, eats one of them, and throws the other to Alf, who catches it in his free hand. He shrugs slightly.

“I think your grandmother would have wanted you to dress up as any old damned thing you wanted.”

With that he shuffles off, his Italian opera music seeping out as he opens his door and closes it behind him. Elsa goes into the hall and fetches the whole bowl of chocolate Santas. Then she takes the boy’s hand and calls the wurse. All three of them go across the landing to Granny’s flat, where they crawl into the magic wardrobe that stopped growing when Granny died. It smells of wood shavings in there. And, in fact, it has magically grown to the exact dimensions needed to accommodate two children and a wurse.

The boy with a syndrome mainly keeps his eyes shut, and Elsa brings him to the Land-of-Almost-Awake. They fly over all six kingdoms, and when they turn towards Mimovas the boy recognizes where he is. He jumps off the cloud animal and starts running. When he gets to the city gates, where the music of Mimovas comes pouring out, he starts dancing. He dances beautifully. And Elsa dances with him.

27

MULLED WINE

T
he wurse wakes Elsa up later that night because it needs a pee. She mumbles sleepily that maybe the wurse shouldn’t have drunk so much mulled wine and tries to go back to sleep. But unfortunately the wurse begins to look sort of like wurses do when they’re planning to pee on a Gryffindor scarf, whereupon Elsa snatches the scarf away and reluctantly agrees to take it out.

When they get out of the wardrobe, Elsa’s mum and the boy with a syndrome’s mum are still up making up the beds.

“It needs a pee,” Elsa explains wearily. Mum nods reluctantly but says she has to take Alf with her.

Elsa nods. The boy with a syndrome’s mum smiles at her.

“I understand from Maud that it might have been you that left your grandmother’s letter in our mailbox yesterday.”

Elsa fixes her gaze on her socks.

“I was going to ring the bell, but I didn’t want to, you know. Disturb. Sort of thing.”

The boy’s mum smiles again.

“She wrote sorry. Your grandmother, I mean. Sorry for not being able to protect us anymore. And she wrote that I should trust you. Always. And then she asked me to try to get you to trust me.”

“Can I ask you something that could be sort of impolite?” ventures Elsa, poking at the palm of her hand.

“Absolutely.”

“How can you stand being alive and being afraid all the time? I mean, when you know there’s someone like Sam out there hunting you?”

“Darling, Elsa . . .” whispers Elsa’s mum and smiles apologetically at the boy’s mother, who just waves her hand dismissively to show that it doesn’t matter at all.

“Your grandmother used to say that sometimes we have to do things that are dangerous, because otherwise we aren’t really human.”

“She nicked that from
The Brothers Lionheart
,” says Elsa.

The boy’s mother turns to Elsa’s mum and looks as if she’d like to change the subject. Maybe more for Elsa’s sake than her own. “Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”

Mum grins almost guiltily and shakes her head.

“We want to wait until the birth.”

“It’s going to be a she/he,” Elsa informs her. Her mum looks embarrassed.

“I didn’t want to know either until he was born,” says the boy’s mother warmly, “but then I wanted to know everything about him immediately!”

“Yes, exactly, that’s how I feel. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s healthy!”

Guilt wells up in Mum’s face as soon as the last word has escaped her lips. She glances past Elsa towards the wardrobe, where the boy lies sleeping.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to—” she manages to say, but the boy’s mum interrupts her at once.

“Oh, don’t say sorry. It’s fine. I know what people say. But he is healthy. He’s just a bit of extra everything, you could say.”

“I like extra everything!” Elsa exclaims happily, but then she also looks ashamed and mumbles: “Except veggie burgers. I always get rid of the tomato.”

And then both the mothers laugh so hard that the flat echoes. And that’s what they both seem to be most in need of. So even though it wasn’t her intention, Elsa decides to take the credit for that.