My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (5 page)

Alf comes in, in a very bad mood, wearing his creaking leather jacket with a taxi logo on its chest. He has an evening newspaper in his hand. Checks his watch. It’s seven o’clock sharp.

“Bloody says seven on the note,” he grunts across the room at no one in particular.

“Kent is a little late,” says Britt-Marie, and smiles and clasps her hands together over her stomach again. “He has an important group meeting with Germany,” she goes on, as if Kent is meeting the entire population of Germany.

Fifteen minutes later Kent comes storming into the room, his jacket flapping like a mantle around him, and yelling, “Ja, Klaus! Ja! We will dizcuzz it at ze meeting in Frankfurt!” into his telephone. Alf looks up from his evening newspaper and taps his wristwatch and mutters, “Hope we didn’t cause you any inconvenience by being here on time.” Kent ignores him and instead claps his hands excitedly towards Lennart and Maud and says, with a grin, “Shall we kick things off, then? Eh? It’s not like we’re getting any babies made here, are we?” And then he turns quickly to Mum and points at her belly and laughs: “At least no more than we’ve already got!” And when Mum doesn’t immediately laugh, Kent points at her belly again and repeats, “At least no more than we’ve already got!” in a louder voice, as if his levels weren’t quite right the first time.

Maud brings in cookies. Mum serves coffee. Kent takes a gulp, pauses, and announces that it’s rather strong. Alf sweeps down the whole cup in one go and mutters, “Just right!” Britt-Marie takes a tiny, tiny mouthful and rests the cup in the palm of her hand before offering her verdict: “I do think it’s a little strong, personally.” Then she throws a furtive glance at Mum and adds, “And you’re drinking coffee, Ulrika, even though you’re pregnant.” And before Mum has time to answer, Britt-Marie immediately excuses herself: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, obviously. Obviously not!”

And then Kent declares the meeting open and then everyone argues for two hours about what they argued about at the last meeting. Which is when Elsa sneaks out without anyone noticing.

She tiptoes up the stairs to the mezzanine floor. She peers at the door to The Monster’s flat, but calms herself with the thought that there is still daylight outside. The Monster never goes outside while it’s still light.

Then she looks at the door of the flat next to The Monster’s, the one without a name on the mail slot. That is where Our Friend lives. Elsa stands a few feet from it, holding her breath because she’s afraid it will smash the door and come charging out of the splintered remains and try to close its jaws around her throat if it hears her coming too close. Only Granny calls it Our Friend; everyone else says “the hound.” Especially Britt-Marie. Elsa doesn’t know how much fight there is in it, but either way she’s never seen such a big dog in her life. When you hear it barking from behind the door it’s like being whacked in the stomach by a medicine ball.

But she has only seen it once, in Granny’s flat, a few days before Granny got taken ill. She couldn’t have imagined feeling more afraid, even if facing a shadow eye-to-eye in the Land-of-Almost-Awake.

It was a Saturday and Granny and Elsa were going to an exhibition about dinosaurs. That was the morning Mum put the Gryffindor scarf in the wash without asking and made Elsa take another scarf—a vomit-green one. Mum knows Elsa hates green. She really lacks empathy sometimes, that woman.

Our Friend had been lying on Granny’s bed, like a sphinx outside a pyramid. Elsa stood transfixed in the hall, staring at that gigantic black head and the terrifying, depthless eyes. Granny had come out of the kitchen and was putting on her coat as if it were the most natural thing in the whole universe to have the biggest thing ever lying on her bed.

“What is . . . that thing?” Elsa had whispered. Granny carried on rolling her cigarette and replied indifferently: “That’s Our Friend. It won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt it.”

Easy for her to say, Elsa thought—how was she supposed to know what would provoke one of those? Once, one of the girls at school had hit her because she had “an ugly scarf.” That was apparently all Elsa had done to her, and she got hit for it.

And so Elsa stood there, her usual scarf in the wash and in its place an ugly scarf chosen by her mother, worrying that vomit-green might provoke the beast. In the end Elsa had explained that it was her mum’s scarf, not hers, and her mum had terrible taste, before backing away towards the door. Our Friend just stared at her. Or at least that was what Elsa thought, if she was right in thinking those were its eyes. And then it also bared its teeth, Elsa was almost sure of it. But Granny just muttered something about “kids, you know” and rolled her eyes at Our Friend. Then she went to find the keys to Renault and then she and Elsa went to the dinosaur exhibition. Granny left the front door wide open, Elsa remembers, and when they sat in Renault and Elsa asked what Our Friend was doing in Granny’s flat, Granny just answered: “Visiting.” When Elsa asked why it was always barking behind its door, Granny answered cheerily, “Barking? Ah, it only does that when Britt-Marie goes past.” And when Elsa asked why, Granny grinned from ear to ear and answered: “Because that’s what he likes doing.”

And then Elsa had asked who Our Friend lived with, and then Granny said: “Not everyone needs to live with someone, good God. For instance, I don’t live with anybody.” And even though Elsa insisted that this might have some connection with the fact that Granny was not a
dog
, Granny never explained anything else about it.

And now here Elsa stands, on the landing, peeling off wrappers from the Daim chocolate. She throws in the first one so quickly that the flap slams when she lets go of it. She holds her breath and feels her heart thumping in her whole head. But then she remembers Granny saying that this needs to be done quickly, so Britt-Marie doesn’t get suspicious during the residents’ meeting downstairs.

Britt-Marie really hates Our Friend. Elsa tries to remind herself that, in spite of it all, she is a knight of Miamas, and after that she opens the mail slot with more courage.

She hears its breath. It sounds like there’s a rockfall going on in its lungs. Elsa’s heart thumps until she’s sure Our Friend will feel the vibrations through the door.

“My granny says to tell you she’s sorry for not bringing you any sweets for such a long time!” she says diligently through the mail slot, removing fistfuls of wrappers and dropping them on the floor.

Then she hears it moving and snatches back her hand, startled. There’s silence for a few seconds. She hears the abrupt crunch of Our Friend taking the chocolate in its jaws.

“Granny’s ill,” Elsa explains while it’s eating.

She isn’t prepared for the way the words tremble as they come out of her. She convinces herself that Our Friend is breathing more slowly. She empties in more chocolate.

“She has cancer,” whispers Elsa.

Elsa has no friends, so she isn’t quite sure of the normal procedure for these types of errands. But she imagines that if she did have friends, she’d want them to know if she had cancer. Even if they happened to be the biggest things of anything. “She sends her best and says sorry,” she whispers into the darkness and drops in the rest of the chocolate and gently closes the flap.

She stays there for a moment, looking at Our Friend’s door.

And then at The Monster’s. If this wild animal can be hiding behind one of the doors, she doesn’t even want to know what might be behind the other.

Then she jogs down the stairs to the front entrance.

George is still in the laundry. In the meeting room, they are all drinking coffee and arguing.

Because it’s a normal house.

By and large.

4

BEER

T
he room in the hospital smells as bad and feels as cold as hospital rooms tend to when it is barely above freezing outside and someone has hid beer bottles under her pillow and opened a window to try to get rid of the smell of cigarette smoke. It hasn’t worked.

Granny and Elsa are playing Monopoly. Granny doesn’t say anything about cancer, for Elsa’s sake. And Elsa doesn’t say anything about death, for Granny’s sake. Because Granny doesn’t like talking about death, especially not her own. So when Elsa’s mum and the doctors leave the room to talk in low, serious voices in the corridor, Elsa tries not to look worried. That doesn’t really work either.

Granny grins secretively.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I fixed a job for the dragons in Miamas?” she asks in their secret language.

It’s good to have a secret language in the hospital, because hospitals have ears in their walls, says Granny. Especially when the walls have Elsa’s mum as their boss.

“Duh—obviously!”

Granny nods as a courtesy and tells the whole story anyway. Because no one ever taught Granny how not to tell a story. And Elsa listens, because no one ever taught her how not to.

That’s why she knows that one of the things people say about Granny most often when she’s not around is, “This time she’s really crossed the line.” Britt-Marie is
always
saying it. Elsa assumes this is why Granny likes the kingdom of Miamas so much: you can’t cross the line in Miamas, because the kingdom is endless. And not like on television when people toss their hair about and say that they “have no boundaries,” but properly, without any limits, because no one knows for certain where Miamas begins and ends. This is partly because unlike the other five kingdoms in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, which are mainly built of stone and mortar, Miamas is wholly made of imagination. It could also be slightly because the Miamas city wall has an insanely moody temperament and may suddenly one morning have the idea of moving itself a mile or two into the forest because it needs a bit of “me time.” Only to move twice as far back in the opposite direction the next morning, because it has decided to wall in some dragon or troll that for one reason or another it has decided to be grumpy with. (Usually because the dragon or the troll has been up all night drinking schnapps and weeing on the wall while sleeping, Granny suggests.)

There are more trolls and dragons in Miamas than in any other of the five kingdoms in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, you see, because the main export industry in Miamas is fairy tales. Trolls and dragons have excellent employment prospects in Miamas because stories need villains. “Of course, it hasn’t always been like this,” Granny sometimes muses. “There was a time when the dragons had been almost forgotten by Miamas’s storytellers, particularly the ones who’d grown a little long in the tooth.” Then she recounts the whole story about how the dragons were causing too much trouble in Miamas, drifting about without jobs, drinking schnapps and smoking cigars and getting involved in violent confrontations with the city wall. So in the end the people of Miamas begged Granny to help them come up with some kind of practical job-creation scheme. And that’s when Granny had the idea that dragons should guard treasures at the ends of the tales.

Up until that point, it had actually been a massive narrative problem, the fact that heroes in fairy tales looked for a treasure and, once they had located it in some deep cave, only had to nip inside to pick it up. Just like that. No epic closing battles or dramatic apexes or anything. “All you could do was play worthless video games afterwards,” Granny said, nodding somberly. Granny knows all about it, because last summer Elsa taught her how to play a game called World of Warcraft and Granny played it around the clock for several weeks until Mum said she was beginning to “exhibit disturbing tendencies” and banned her from sleeping in Elsa’s room from then on.

But anyway, when the storytellers heard Granny’s idea the whole problem was solved in an afternoon. “And that’s why all fairy tales nowadays have dragons at the end! It’s my doing!” Granny chortles. Like she always does.

Granny has a story from Miamas for every situation. One of them is about Miploris, the kingdom where all sorrow is kept in storage, and its princess who was robbed of a magical treasure by an ugly witch whom she’s been hunting ever since. Another story is about two princeling brothers, both in love with the princess of Miploris, and practically breaking the Land-of-Almost-Awake into pieces in their furious battle for her love.

One story was about the sea-angel, burdened by a curse that forced her to drift up and down the coast of the Land-of-Almost-Awake after losing her beloved. And another story was about the Chosen One, the most universally loved dancer in Mimovas, which is the kingdom all music comes from. In the fairy tale the shadows tried to abduct the Chosen One in order to destroy Mimovas, but the cloud animals saved him and flew him all the way back to Miamas. And when the shadows came after them, all the inhabitants of the six kingdoms of the Land-of-Almost-Awake—the princes, princesses, knights, soldiers, trolls, angels, and the witch—agreed to protect the Chosen One. And that was when the War-Without-End started. It raged for an eternity of ten thousand fairy tales, until the wurses and Wolfheart came out of the forest and led the good army into the last battle and forced the shadows back across the sea.