My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (6 page)

Of course, Wolfheart is a whole fairy tale in his own right, because he was born in Miamas but just like all other soldiers he grew up in Mibatalos. He has a warrior’s heart but the soul of a storyteller, and he’s the most invincible fighter ever seen in any of the six kingdoms. He had been living deep in the dark forests for many eternities of fairy tales, but he came back when the Land-of-Almost-Awake needed him most.

Granny has been telling these fairy tales for as long as Elsa can remember. In the beginning they were only to make Elsa go to sleep, and to get her to practice Granny’s secret language, and a little because Granny is just about as nutty as a granny should be. But lately the stories have another dimension as well. Something Elsa can’t quite put her finger on.

“Put ‘Pennsylvania Railroad’ back,” says Elsa tersely.

“I bought it . . . ?” Granny tries.

“Mmm, sure you did. Put it back.”

“This is how it must have been playing bloody Monopoly with Hitler!”

“Hitler would only have wanted to play Risk,” mutters Elsa, because she’s checked out Hitler on
Wikipedia
, after there were some rows between her and Granny about her use of Hitler as a metaphor.

“Touché,” mutters Granny.

And then they play in silence for about a minute. Because that is about the usual length of time they can be bothered to keep feuding.

“Did you give the chocolate to Our Friend?” asks Granny.

Elsa nods. But she doesn’t mention how she told it about Granny’s cancer. A little bit because she thinks Granny would be annoyed, and quite a bit because she doesn’t want to talk about cancer. She checked it on
Wikipedia
yesterday. And then she checked what a will is and then she was so angry that she couldn’t sleep all night.

“How did you and Our Friend become friends?” she asks instead.

Granny shrugs. “The usual way.”

Elsa doesn’t know what the usual way is, because she has no friends other than Granny. But she doesn’t say anything, because she knows Granny would be upset if she heard that.

“Anyway, the mission is done,” she says in a low voice.

Granny nods keenly and throws a searching look at the door, as if concerned someone could be watching them. Then she reaches under her pillow. The bottles clink against each other and she swears when she spills some beer on the pillowcase, but then she hauls out an envelope and presses it into Elsa’s hand.

“This is your next mission, my knight Elsa. But you mustn’t open it until tomorrow.”

Elsa looks at the envelope skeptically.

“Haven’t you heard of e-mail?”

“You can’t e-mail something this important.”

Elsa weighs the envelope in her hand, presses the lumpy bit at the bottom of it.

“What is it?”

“A letter and a key,” says Granny. And then she looks both serious and frightened, both of which are very rare emotions in Granny. She reaches out and grabs hold of Elsa’s index fingers. “Tomorrow I’m going to send you out on the biggest treasure hunt you’ve ever seen, my brave little knight. Are you ready for that?”

Granny has always loved treasure hunts. In Miamas, treasure hunting is considered a sport. You can compete in it, because it’s an approved Olympic field event. But in Miamas it’s not called the Olympic Games, it’s actually known as the Invisible Games, because all the participants are invisible. Not exactly a spectator sport, as Elsa pointed out when Granny told her about it.

Elsa also loves treasure hunts, but not as much as Granny. No one in any kingdom in the eternity of ten thousand fairy tales could love them like she does. She can make anything into a treasure hunt: if they’ve been out shopping and Granny can’t remember where she parked Renault; or when she wants Elsa to go through her mail and pay her bills because Granny finds this insanely boring; or when there’s a sports day at school and Elsa knows the older children are going to lash her in the shower with rolled-up towels. Granny can make a parking area into magic mountains, and rolled-up towels into dragons that must be outsmarted. And Elsa is always the heroine.

This sounds like a different kind of treasure hunt altogether, though.

“The one who’s supposed to have the key will know what to do with it. You have to protect the castle, Elsa.”

Granny has always called their house “the castle.” Elsa always just thought it was because she’s a bit nutty. But now she’s not so sure.

“Protect the castle, Elsa. Protect your family. Protect your friends!” Granny repeats determinedly.

“What friends?”

Granny puts her hands against Elsa’s cheeks and smiles.

“They’ll come. Tomorrow I am sending you out on a treasure hunt, and it’s going to be a fairy tale of marvels and a grand adventure. And you have to promise not to hate me for it.”

Elsa blinks, and there’s a burning sensation.

“Why would I hate you?”

Granny caresses her eyelids.

“It’s a grandmother’s prerogative never to have to show her worst sides to her grandchild, Elsa. Never to have to talk about what she was like before she became a grandmother.”

“I know loads of your worst sides!”

She’s hoping to make Granny laugh with that one. But it doesn’t work. Granny just whispers in a sad voice: “It’s going to be a grand adventure and a fairy tale of marvels. But it’s my fault that you’ll find a dragon at the end, my darling knight.”

Elsa squints at her. Because she has never heard Granny talking like this. She always claims credit for the dragons at the end. It’s never her “fault.” Granny sits before her, tinier and more fragile than Elsa can remember ever having seen her. Not at all like a superhero.

Granny kisses her forehead.

“Promise you won’t hate me when you find out who I’ve been. And promise me you’ll protect the castle. Protect your friends.”

Elsa doesn’t know what any of this means, but she promises. And then Granny embraces her for longer than ever before.

“Give the letter to him who’s waiting. He won’t want to accept it, but tell him it’s from me. Tell him your granny sends her regards and says she’s sorry.”

And then she wipes the tears from Elsa’s cheeks. And Elsa points out that you’re supposed to say “to he who’s waiting,” not “him.” And they argue a bit about that, as usual. And then they play Monopoly and eat cinnamon buns and talk about who’d win a fight between Harry Potter and Spider-Man. Bloody pathetic discussion, of course, thinks Elsa. But Granny likes nattering on about these types of things because she’s too immature to understand that Harry Potter would have crushed Spider-Man.

Granny gets out some more cinnamon buns from large paper bags under another pillow. Not that she has to hide the cinnamon buns from Elsa’s mum the way she has to hide the beer from Elsa’s mum, but she likes keeping them together because she likes eating them together. Beer and cinnamon buns is Granny’s favorite snack. Elsa recognizes the name of the bakery on the bags; Granny only eats cinnamon buns from that one bakery, because she says no one else knows how to make real Mirevas cinnamon buns. In fact, it’s the national dish of the Land-of-Almost-Awake. One very bad thing about it is that one can only have the national dish on the national day. But a very good thing about it is that in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, every day is the national day. As Granny likes to put it, “In the end the problem disappears, said the old lady who crapped in the sink.” Elsa hopes with all her might that this doesn’t mean Granny is going to start using the kitchen sink with the door left open.

“Are you really going to get well?” Elsa asks with the reluctance of an almost-eight-year-old asking a question to which she already knows she doesn’t want to know the answer.

“Course I will!” Granny says with complete confidence, although she can see well enough that Elsa knows she’s lying.

“Promise,” Elsa insists.

And then Granny leans forward and whispers into her ear, in their secret language:

“I promise, my beloved, beloved knight. I promise that it will get better. I promise that everything will be fine.”

Because that is what Granny always says. That it will get better. That everything will be fine.

“But I still think that Spider-Man fellow would have wiped the floor with this Harry,” Granny adds with a grin. And, in the end, Elsa grins back at her.

They eat more cinnamon buns and play more Monopoly. And this makes it much more difficult to stay grumpy.

The sun goes down. Everything goes silent. Elsa lies very close to Granny in the narrow hospital bed. And they mainly just close their eyes, and the cloud animals come to fetch them, and they go to Miamas together.

And in an apartment block on the other side of town, everyone wakes up with a start when the hound in the first-floor flat, without any warning, starts howling. Louder and more heartrendingly than anything they have ever heard coming out of the primal depths of any animal. As if it is singing with the sorrow and yearning of an eternity of ten thousand fairy tales. It howls for hours, all through the night, until dawn.

And when the morning light seeps into the hospital room, Elsa wakes up in Granny’s arms. But Granny is still in Miamas.

5

LILIES

H
aving a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details. Even when you are wrong. Especially then, in fact.

A grandmother is both a sword and a shield. When they say at school that Elsa is “different,” as if this is something bad; or when she comes home with bruises and the headmaster says she “has to learn to fit in,” this is when Granny backs her up. Won’t let her apologize. Refuses to let her take the blame. Granny never says to Elsa that she shouldn’t let it get to her because “then they won’t enjoy teasing you as much.” Or that she should “just walk away.” Granny knows better than that.

And the lonelier Elsa gets in the real world, the larger her army in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. The harder the lashes of rolled-up towels in the day, the more astounding the adventures she gets to ride into in the night. In Miamas, no one says she has to learn to fit in. That’s why Elsa wasn’t especially impressed when Dad took her to that hotel in Spain and explained that it was “all-inclusive” there. Because if you have a granny, your whole life is all-inclusive.

Her teachers at school say that Elsa is having “concentration issues.” But it isn’t true. She can recite more or less all of Harry Potter by memory. She can outline the exact superpowers of all the X-Men and knows exactly which of them Spider-Man could and could not take out in a fight. And she can draw a fairly okay version of the map at the start of
The Lord of the Rings
with her eyes closed. Unless Granny is standing next to her, tugging at the paper and moaning about how this is insanely boring and how she’d rather take Renault out and “do something.” She’s a bit restless, Granny. But she has shown Elsa every corner of Miamas and all the corners of the other five kingdoms in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. Even the ruins of Mibatalos, which was sacked by the shadows at the end of the War-Without-End. Elsa has stood with Granny on the rocks by the coast, where the ninety-nine snow-angels sacrificed themselves; she has looked out over the sea, where one day the shadows will come back. And she knows all about the shadows, because Granny always says one should know one’s enemies better than oneself.

The shadows were dragons in the beginning, but they had an evil and a darkness of such strength within themselves that it made them into something else. Something much more dangerous. They hate people and their stories; they have hated for so long and with such intensity that in the end the darkness enveloped their whole bodies until their shapes were no longer discernible. That is also why they are so difficult to defeat, because they can disappear into walls or into the ground or float up. They’re ferocious and bloodthirsty, and if you’re bitten by one you don’t just die; a far more serious and terrible fate lies in store: you lose your imagination. It just runs out of your wound and leaves you gray and empty. You wither away year by year until your body is just a shell. Until no one remembers any fairy tales anymore.

And without fairy tales, Miamas and the whole Land-of-Almost-Awake die a death without imagination. The most repellent kind of death.

But Wolfheart defeated the shadows in the War-Without-End. He came out of the forests when the fairy tales needed him most and drove the shadows into the sea. And one day the shadows will come back, and maybe that is why Granny tells her all the stories now, thinks Elsa. To prepare her.

So the teachers are wrong. Elsa has no problems concentrating. She just concentrates on the right things.

Granny says people who think slowly always accuse quick thinkers of concentration problems. “Idiots can’t understand that non-idiots are done with a thought and already moving on to the next before they themselves have. That’s why idiots are always so scared and aggressive. Because nothing scares idiots more than a smart girl.”

That is what she often says to Elsa when Elsa has had a particularly concentration-challenged day at school, and they lie on Granny’s gigantic bed under all the black-and-white photographs on Granny’s ceiling, and close their eyes until the people in the photographs start dancing. Elsa doesn’t know who they are, Granny just calls them her “stars,” because when the streetlight comes through the blinds they glitter like the sky at night. Men in uniforms stand there and other men in doctors’ coats and a few men with hardly any clothes on at all. Tall men and smiling men and men with moustaches and heavyset men wearing hats, and they all stand next to Granny and they look as if she just told them a cheeky joke. None of them are looking into the camera, because none of them can tear their eyes away from her.