My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (38 page)

Elsa nods, as if this confirms what she already knew.

“It was you and Mum, wasn’t it—the golden knights who saved the Telling Mountain from the Noween and the fears. And built Miaudacas. It was you and Mum.”

The policewoman raises her eyebrows imperceptibly.

“We were many things in your grandmother’s fairy tales, I think.”

Elsa opens the door, puts her foot in the opening, and stops there.

“Did you know my mum first or my granny?”

“Your grandmother.”

“You’re one of the children on her bedroom ceiling, aren’t you?”

Green-eyes looks directly at her. She smiles again in the real way.

“You’re smart. She always said you were the smartest girl she ever met.”

Elsa nods. The door closes behind her. And it ends up being a beautiful Christmas Eve. Despite everything.

She looks for the wurse in the cellar storage unit and in Renault, but they are both empty. She knows the wardrobe in Granny’s flat is also empty, and the wurse is definitely not in Mum and George’s flat because no healthy being can stand being there on a Christmas morning. Mum is even more efficient than usual at Christmas.

She normally starts her Christmas shopping in May each year. She says it’s because she’s “organized,” but Granny used to disagree and say it was actually because she was “anal,” and then Elsa used to have to wear her headphones for quite a long time. But this year Mum decided to be a bit free-spirited and crazy, so she waited until the first of August before asking what Elsa wanted for Christmas. She was very angry when Elsa refused to tell her, even though Elsa expressly asked if she understood how much someone changes as a person in half a year when they’re almost eight. So Mum did what Mum always does: she went and bought a present on her own initiative. And it went as it usually went: to hell. Elsa knew that because she knew where Mum hid her presents. What do you expect when you buy an almost-eight-year-old her present five months early?

So this year, Elsa is getting three books that are about different themes in some way or other touched upon by various characters in the Harry Potter books. They’re wrapped in a paper that Elsa likes very much. Elsa knows that because Mum’s first present was utterly useless and when Elsa informed her of that in October they argued for about a month and then Elsa’s mum gave up and gave Elsa money instead, so she could go and buy “what you want, then!” And then she wrapped them in a paper she liked very much. And put the parcel in Mum’s not-so-secret place and praised Mum for again being so considerate and sensitive that she knew exactly what Elsa wanted this year. And then Mum called Elsa a “Grinch.”

Elsa has become very attached to this tradition.

She rings Alf’s bell half a dozen times before he opens. He’s got his dressing gown on, his irritated expression, and his Juventus coffee cup.

“What’s the matter?” he barks.

“Merry Christmas!” says Elsa without answering the question.

“I’m sleeping,” he grunts.

“It’s Christmas Eve morning,” Elsa informs him.

“I do know that,” he says.

“Why are you sleeping, then?”

“I was up late last night.”

“Doing what?”

Alf takes a sip of his coffee.

“What are you doing here?”

“I asked first,” Elsa insists.

“I’m not the one standing at your door in the middle of the night!”

“It’s not the middle of the night. And it’s
Christmas
!”

He drinks some more coffee. She kicks his doormat irritably.

“I can’t find the wurse.”

“I know that as well.” Alf nods casually.

“How?”

“Because it’s here.”

Elsa’s eyebrows shoot up as if they just sat down in wet paint.

“The wurse is here?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“I just bloody did.”

“Why is it here?”

“Because Kent came home at five this morning, and it couldn’t sit on the stairs. Kent would have bloody called the police if he’d found out it was still in the house.”

Elsa peers into Alf’s flat. The wurse is sitting on the floor, lapping at something in a big metal bowl in front of it. It says Juventus on it. The metal bowl, that is.

“How do you know what time Kent came home?”

“Because I was in the garage when he arrived in his bastard BMW,” says Alf impatiently.

“What were you doing in the garage?” asks Elsa patiently.

Alf looks as if that is an incredibly stupid question.

“I was waiting for him.”

“How long did you wait?”

“Until five o’clock, I bloody said,” he grunts.

Elsa thinks about giving him a hug, but leaves it. The wurse peers up from the metal bowl, looking enormously pleased. Something black is dripping from its nose. Elsa turns to Alf.

“Alf, did you give the wurse . . . coffee?”

“Yes,” says Alf, and looks as if he can’t understand what could reasonably be wrong about that.

“It’s an ANIMAL! Why did you give it COFFEE?”

Alf scratches his scalp, which, for him, is the same thing as scratching his hair. Then he adjusts his dressing gown. Elsa notices that he has a thick scar running across his chest. He sees her noticing and looks grumpy about it.

Alf goes into his bedroom and closes the door, and when he comes out again he is wearing his leather jacket with the taxi badge. Even though it’s Christmas Eve. They have to let the wurse pee in the garage, because there are even more police outside the building now, and not even a wurse can hold out for very long after drinking a bowl of coffee.

Granny would have loved that one. Peeing in the garage. It will drive Britt-Marie to distraction.

When they come up, Mum and George’s flat smells of Swiss meringues and pasta gratin with béarnaise sauce, because Mum has decided that everyone in the house is having Christmas together this year. No one disagreed with her, partly because it was a good idea, and partly because no one ever disagrees with Mum. And then George suggested that everyone should make their own favorite dish for a Christmas buffet. He’s good like that, George, which infuriates Elsa.

The boy with a syndrome’s favorite food is Swiss meringue, so his mum made it for him. Well, his mum got out all the ingredients and Lennart picked all the meringues up off the floor and Maud made the actual Swiss meringue while the boy and his mother were dancing.

And then Maud and Lennart thought it was important that the woman in the black skirt also felt involved, because they’re good like that, so they asked if she wanted to prepare anything in particular. She just sat glued to her chair at the far end of the flat and looked very embarrassed and mumbled that she hadn’t cooked any food for several years. “You don’t cook very much when you live alone,” she explained. And then Maud looked very upset and apologized for being so insensitive. And then the woman in the black skirt felt so sorry for Maud that she made a pasta gratin with béarnaise sauce. Because that was her boys’ favorite dish. So they all have Swiss meringue and pasta gratin with béarnaise sauce, because that’s the sort of Christmas it is. In spite of it all.

The wurse gets two buckets of cinnamon buns from Maud, and George goes to the cellar to fetch up the bathing tub Elsa had when she was a baby and fills it with mulled wine. With this as an incentive, the wurse agrees to hide for an hour in the wardrobe in Granny’s flat, and then Mum goes down and invites the police up from outside the house. Green-eyes sits next to Mum. They laugh. The summer intern is there too; he eats the most Swiss meringue of them all and falls asleep on the sofa.

The woman in the black skirt sits in silence at the table, in the far corner. After they’ve eaten, while George is washing up and Maud wiping down the tables and Lennart sitting on a stool with a standby cup of coffee, waiting for the percolator and making sure it’s not going to get up to any tricks, the boy with a syndrome goes through the flat and crosses the landing and goes into Granny’s flat. When he comes back he has cinnamon bun crumbs all around his mouth and so many wurse hairs on his sweater that he looks like someone invited him to a fancy dress party and he decided to dress up as a carpet. He gets a blanket from Elsa’s room and walks up to the woman in the black skirt, looks at her for a long time, then reaches up, standing on his tiptoes, and pinches her nose. Startled, she jumps, and the boy’s mother makes the sort of scream that mothers make when their children pinch complete strangers’ noses and rushes towards him. But Maud gently catches hold of her arm and stops her, and when the boy holds up his thumb, poking out between his index finger and his middle finger, while looking at the woman in the black skirt, Maud explains pleasantly:

“It’s a game. He’s pretending he stole your nose.”

The woman stares at Maud. Stares at the boy. Stares at the nose. And then she steals his nose. And he laughs so loudly that the windows start rattling. He falls asleep in her lap, wrapped up in the blanket. When his mother, with an apologetic smile, tries to lift him off, observing as she does so that “it’s actually not at all like him to be so direct,” the woman in the black skirt touches her hand tremulously and whispers:

“If . . . if it’s all right I . . . could I hold him a little longer . . . ?”

The boy’s mother puts both her hands around the woman’s hand and nods. The woman puts her forehead against the boy’s hair and whispers:

“Thanks.”

George makes more mulled wine and everything feels almost normal and not at all frightening. After the police have thanked them for their hospitality and headed back down the stairs, Maud looks unhappily at Elsa and says she can understand it must have been frightening for a child to have police in the house on Christmas Eve. But Elsa takes her by the hand and says:

“Don’t worry, Maud. This is a Christmas tale. They always have a happy ending.”

And it’s clear that Maud believes it.

Because you have to believe.

30

PERFUME

O
nly one person collapses with a heart attack late on Christmas Eve. But two hearts are broken. And the house is never quite the same again.

It all starts with the boy waking up late in the afternoon and feeling hungry. The wurse and Samantha come flopping out of the wardrobe because the mulled wine is finished. Elsa marches in circles around Alf and intimates that it’s time to get the Santa suit. Elsa and the wurse follow Alf down to the garage. He gets into Taxi. When Elsa opens the passenger door and sticks her head in and asks what he’s doing, he turns the ignition key and grunts:

“If I have to impersonate Santa for the rest of the day, I’m nipping out for a newspaper first.”

“I don’t think my mum wants me to go anywhere.”

“No one invited you!”

Elsa and the wurse ignore him and jump in. When Alf starts railing at her that you can’t just jump into people’s cars like that, Elsa says that this is actually Taxi and that is precisely what one does with Taxi. And when Alf grumpily taps the meter and points out that taxi journeys cost money, Elsa says that she’d like to have this taxi journey as her Christmas present. And then Alf looks very grumpy for a long time, and then they go off for Elsa’s Christmas present.

Alf knows of a kiosk that’s open even on Christmas Eve. He buys a newspaper. Elsa buys two ice creams. The wurse eats all of its own and half of hers. Which, if one knows how much wurses like ice cream, shows how immensely considerate it is being. It spills some of it in the backseat, but Alf only shouts at it for about ten minutes. Which, if one knows how much Alf dislikes wurses spilling ice cream in the backseat of Taxi, shows how immensely considerate he was being.

“Can I ask you something?” asks Elsa, even though she knows full well that this is also a question. “Why didn’t Britt-Marie spill the beans about the wurse to the police?”

“She can be a bit of a nagbag sometimes. But she’s not bloody evil,” Alf clarifies.

“But she hates dogs,” Elsa persists.

“Ah, she’s just scared of them. Your granny used to bring back loads of strays to the house when she moved in. We were just little brats back then, Britt-Marie and Kent and me. One of the mutts bit Britt-Marie and her mum made a hell of a commotion about it,” Alf says, a shockingly lengthy description given that it’s coming from Alf.

Taxi pulls into the street. Elsa thinks of Granny’s stories about the Princess of Miploris.

“So you’ve been in love with Britt-Marie since you were ten years old?” she asks.

“Yes,” Alf replies as if it’s absolutely self-evident. Bowled over by this, Elsa looks at him and waits, because she knows that only by waiting will she get him to tell the whole story. You know things like that when you’re almost eight.

She waits for as long as she needs to.

Then after two red lights Alf sighs resignedly, like you do while preparing yourself to tell a story even though you don’t like telling stories. And then he recounts the tale of Britt-Marie. And himself. Although the latter part may not be his intention. There are quite a lot of swearwords in it, and Elsa has to exert herself quite a lot not to correct the grammar. But after a lot of “ifs” and “buts” and quite a few “damneds,” Alf has explained that he and Kent grew up with their mother in the flat where Alf now lives. When Alf was ten, another family moved into the flat above theirs, with two daughters of the same age as Alf and Kent. The mother was a renowned singer and the father wore a suit and was always at work. The elder sister, Ingrid, apparently had an outstanding singing talent. She was going to be a star, her mother explained to Alf and Kent’s mother. She never said anything about the other daughter, Britt-Marie. Alf and Kent caught sight of her anyway. It was impossible not to.