Elsa is silent for a long while. Then she nods soberly.
“Did she have many boyfriends?”
“Yes,” says Mum cautiously.
“There’s someone in my school who has many boyfriends,” states Elsa.
“Oh, well I wouldn’t want to suggest that the girl in your school is a—” says Mum, feverishly backtracking.
“He’s a boy,” Elsa corrects.
Mum looks confused.
Elsa shrugs. “It’s complicated,” she says.
Even though it really isn’t. But Mum doesn’t look massively less confused.
“Your granddad loved your granny very much. But they were never a . . . couple. Do you understand?”
“I get it,” says Elsa, because she has the Internet.
Then she reaches out and takes Mum’s index fingers and squeezes them in her hands.
“I’m sorry that Granny was a crappy mum, Mum!”
“She was a fantastic grandmother, Elsa. You were all her second chances,” says Mum and caresses Elsa’s hair as she goes on: “I think your grandmother functioned so well in chaotic places because she was herself chaotic. She was always amazing in the midst of a catastrophe. It was just all this, everyday life and normality, that she didn’t quite know how to handle.
“And it was just . . . I mean . . . the reason there aren’t any old photos of Granny is partly because she wasn’t home very often. And slightly because I tore up all the ones there were.”
“Why?”
“I was a teenager. And angry. The two belong together. There was always chaos at home. Bills that didn’t get paid and food that went off in the fridge when we actually had food, and sometimes no food at all, and . . . God. It’s hard to explain, darling. I was just angry.”
Elsa crosses her arms and leans back in her seat and glares out of the window.
“People shouldn’t have children if they don’t want to take care of them.”
Mum reaches out, touches her shoulder with her fingertips.
“Your granny was old when she had me. Or, what I mean is, she was as old as I was when I had you. But that was old in Granny’s times. And she didn’t think she could have children. She’d had herself tested.”
Elsa presses her chin down over her wishbone.
“So you were a mistake?”
“An accident.”
“In that case, I’m an accident as well.”
Mum’s lips fold in on themselves.
“No one has ever wanted something as much as your father and I wanted you, darling. You’re about as far from an accident as anyone can get.”
Elsa looks up at Kia’s ceiling and blinks the haziness out of her eyes.
“Is that why order is your superpower? Because you don’t want to be like Granny?”
Mum shrugs. “I taught myself to fix things on my own, that’s all. Because I didn’t trust your grandmother. In the end, things were even worse when she was actually here. I was angry at her when she was away, and even angrier when she was home.”
“I’m angry too. . . . I’m angry because she lied about being sick and no one told me and now I know and I still miss her and THAT makes me angry!!!”
Mum shuts her eyelids tight and puts her forehead against Elsa’s forehead.
Elsa’s jaw is trembling.
“I’m angry with her for dying. I’m angry with her for dying and disappearing from me,” she whispers.
“Me too,” whispers Mum.
And that is when the summer-intern policeman comes charging out of the emergency doors. He has two nurses with a stretcher running behind him.
Elsa turns a couple of inches towards Mum. Mum turns a couple of inches towards Elsa.
“What do you think your granny would have done now?” asks Mum calmly.
“She would have cleared out,” says Elsa, still with her forehead against Mum’s forehead.
The summer-intern policeman and the nurses with the stretcher are only a few yards from the car when Mum slowly nods. Then she puts Kia into gear and, with the tires spinning in the snow, skids out into the road and drives off. It’s the most irresponsible thing Elsa has ever seen her mother do.
She’ll always love her for it.
15
WOOD SHAVINGS
Perhaps the most curious of all the curious creatures in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, even by Granny’s yardstick, are the regretters. They are wild animals living in herds, whose grazing areas are just outside Miamas, where they forage widely, and really nobody knows how they survive, considering the circumstances. At first sight, regretters look more or less like white horses, although they are far more ambivalent and suffer from the biological defect of never being able to make up their minds. This obviously causes certain practical problems, because regretters are flock animals, and one regretter therefore almost always crashes into another when heading off in one direction and then changing its mind. For this reason regretters always have enormous, oblong swellings on their foreheads, which, in various fairy tales from Miamas that have ended up in the real world, has made people consistently get them confused with unicorns. But in Miamas the storytellers learned the hard way not to cut costs by hiring a regretter to do the job of a unicorn, because, whenever they did, the fairy tales had a tendency never to get to the point. And also no one, really no one at all, feels good after standing behind a regretter in the line for the lunch buffet.
“So there’s no point changing your mind, all you get is a headache!” Granny used to say, smacking herself on her forehead. Elsa thinks about that now, sitting in Kia outside school and looking at Mum.
She wonders if Granny ever regretted all the times she left Mum. She wonders if Granny’s head was full of bumps. She hopes so.
Mum is massaging her temples and swearing repeatedly through gritted teeth. She is obviously regretting speeding away from the hospital like that, since the first thing she has to do after dropping Elsa off at school is drive straight back to the hospital so she can go to work. Elsa pats her on the shoulder.
“Maybe you can blame it on your baby brain?”
Mum shuts her eyes in resignation. She’s had rather too much baby brain lately. So much so that she could not even find Elsa’s Gryffindor scarf when they looked for it this morning, and so much so that she keeps putting her telephone in strange places. In the refrigerator and in the trash bin and the laundry basket and on one occasion in George’s jogging shoes. This morning Elsa had to call Mum’s telephone three times, which is not entirely uncomplicated as the display on Elsa’s telephone is quite fuzzy after its encounter with the toaster. But in the end they found Mum’s telephone ringing inside Elsa’s backpack. The Gryffindor scarf was also there.
“You see!” Mum tried to say. “Nothing is really gone until your mum can’t find it!” But Elsa rolled her eyes and then Mum looked ashamed of herself and mumbled, “It’s my baby brain, I’m afraid.”
She looks ashamed of herself now as well. And full of regret.
“Darling, I don’t think they’ll let me be the head of a hospital if I tell them I had a police escort to the emergency entrance”
Elsa reaches out and pats Mum on the cheek.
“It’ll get better, Mum. It’ll be fine.”
Granny used to say that, Elsa realizes as soon as she says it. Mum puts her hand on Halfie and nods with fake self-assurance in order to change the subject.
“Your dad will pick you up this afternoon, don’t forget. And George will take you to school on Monday. I have a conference then and—”
Elsa patiently gives Mum’s head a scratch.
“I’m not going to school on Monday, Mum. It’s the Christmas holidays.”
Mum puts her hand on Elsa’s hand and inhales deeply from the point where they are touching, as if trying to fill her lungs with Elsa. As mums do with daughters who grow up too fast.
“Sorry, darling. I . . . forget.”
“It doesn’t matter,” says Elsa.
Even though it does a
little.
They hug each other hard before Elsa hops out of the car. She waits until Kia has disappeared before she opens her backpack and gets out Mum’s cell phone, then scrolls to Dad’s name in the address book and sends him a text: ACTUALLY: THERE IS NO NEED FOR YOU TO PICK UP ELSA THIS AFTERNOON. I CAN MANAGE IT! Elsa knows this is how they talk about her. She is something that needs to be “picked up” or “sorted.” Like doing the laundry. She knows they mean no harm by it, but come on! No seven-year-old who has seen films about the Italian Mafia wants to be “sorted” by her family.
Mum’s phone vibrates in Elsa’s hand. She sees Dad’s name on the display. And underneath, I UNDERSTAND. Elsa deletes it. And deletes the text she sent to Dad from the outgoing messages. Then stands on the pavement, counting down from twenty. When she’s got to seven, Kia screeches back into the parking area and Mum, slightly out of breath, winds down the window. Elsa gives her the phone. Mum mumbles, “It’s my baby brain.” Elsa kisses her on the cheek.
Mum touches her throat and asks if Elsa has seen her scarf.
“In your right-hand coat pocket,” says Elsa.
Mum pulls the scarf out. Takes Elsa’s head in her hands and pulls her closer and kisses her forehead very hard. Elsa closes her eyes.
“Nothing is really gone until your daughter can’t find it,” she whispers into Mum’s ear.
“You’re going to be a fantastic big sister,” Mum whispers back.
Elsa doesn’t answer. She just stands there waving as Kia drives off. She couldn’t answer because she doesn’t want Mum to know that she doesn’t want to be a big sister. Doesn’t want anyone to know that she is this horrible person who hates her own half sibling, just because Halfie is going to be more loved by them than Elsa. Doesn’t want anyone to know she’s afraid they’ll abandon her.
She turns around and looks into the playground. No one has seen her yet. She reaches into her backpack and gets out the letter she found in Renault. She doesn’t recognize the address, and Granny was always terrible at giving directions. Elsa isn’t even sure this address exists in real life, because quite often when Granny was explaining where things were, she used landmarks that were no longer there. “It’s right by where those morons with the budgerigars lived, past the old tennis club down where the old rubber factory or whatever it was used to be,” she’d ramble on, and when people didn’t get exactly what she was talking about, Granny got so frustrated that she had to smoke two cigarettes one after the other, lighting the second by the embers of the first. And then when someone said she couldn’t do that indoors, she got so angry that it was utterly impossible after that to get any decent directions out of her, impossible in fact to get anything except her expletive middle finger.
Really what Elsa wanted to do was rip the letter into ten thousand pieces and let the wind blow it all away. That was what she had decided last night. Because she was angry at Granny. But now, after Mum has told her the whole story and Elsa has seen all that brokenness in Mum’s eyes, she’s made the decision not to do that. Elsa is going to deliver the letter, this and all the other letters Granny has left for her. This is going to be a grand adventure and a monstrous fairy tale, just as Granny planned it. But Elsa isn’t doing it for Granny’s sake.
First of all she’s going to need a computer.
She looks at the playground again. And at the precise moment when the bell goes and everyone turns away from the street, she runs past the fence towards the bus stop. Gets off a few stops later, runs into the shop, and goes straight to the ice cream counter, then back to the house, where she sneaks into the cellar storage unit and buries her face in the wurse’s fur. It’s her new favorite place on earth.
“I’ve got ice cream in the bag,” she says at last when she lifts her head.
The wurse points its nose with interest.
“It’s Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk—my favorite,” Elsa elaborates.
The wurse has eaten more than half the ice cream before she reaches the end of that sentence. She caresses its ears.
“I just have to get hold of a computer. Stay here and . . . you know . . . try to stay out of sight!”
The wurse looks at her like a very big wurse that has just been told to behave like a considerably smaller wurse.
Elsa promises to find it a much better hiding place. Soon.
She runs up the stairs. Checks carefully that Britt-Marie is not lurking anywhere, and once she’s sure she’s not, rings The Monster’s doorbell. He doesn’t open. She rings the bell again. Everything is silent. She groans and opens his mail slot and peers inside. All of the lights are out, but that doesn’t dissuade her.
“I know you’re there!” she calls out.
No one answers. Elsa takes a deep breath.
“If you don’t open, I’ll sneeze right inside! And I’ve got a mega-col—” she starts to say threateningly, before from behind her interrupts a hiss, like someone trying to make a cat jump down from a table.
She spins around. The Monster steps out of the shadows on the stairs. She can’t understand how such a huge person can make himself invisible all the time. He’s rubbing his hands together, turning the skin around his knuckles red.
“Don’t sneeze, don’t sneeze,” he implores anxiously.
“I need to borrow your computer, because I think George could be at home and I can’t surf on my cell phone because the display is screwed because Granny had a Fanta-and-toaster-related incident with it. . . .”
The hood over The Monster’s head moves slowly from side to side.
“No computer.”
“Just let me borrow it so I can check the address!” Elsa whines, waving Granny’s letter in the air.
The Monster shakes his head again.
“Fine, just give me your Wi-Fi password, then, so I can connect my iPad!” she manages to say, rolling her eyes until it feels as if her pupils are out of position when she stops. “I don’t have 3G on the iPad, because Dad bought the iPad and Mum got pissed because she didn’t want me to have such expensive stuff, and she doesn’t like Apple, so it was a compromise! It’s complicated, okay? I only need to borrow your Wi-Fi, that’s all! Good God!”
“No computer,” repeats The Monster.
“No . . . computer?” Elsa repeats with extreme disbelief.
The Monster shakes his head.
“You don’t have a computer?”
The hood moves from side to side. Elsa peers at him as if he’s having her on, is clinically insane, or both.
“How can you not have a COMPUTER?”
The Monster produces a small sealed plastic bag from one of his jacket pockets, and inside it is a small bottle of alcogel. Carefully he squeezes out some of its contents and starts rubbing it into his palms and skin.
“Don’t need computer,” he growls.
Elsa takes a deep, irritated breath and takes a look around the stairs. George may still be at home so she can’t go inside, because then he’ll ask why she’s not at school. And she can’t go to Maud and Lennart, because they’re too kind to lie, so if Mum asks if they’ve seen Elsa they’ll tell her the truth. The boy with a syndrome and his mum aren’t here in the daytime. And forget Britt-Marie.
Which doesn’t exactly leave a wealth of possibilities. Elsa collects herself and tries to think about how a knight of Miamas is never afraid of a treasure hunt, even if it’s difficult. And then she goes up the stairs.
Alf opens the door after the seventh ring. His flat smells of wood shavings. He’s wearing a sorry excuse for a dressing gown, and the remaining hairs on his head look like the last tottering bits of buildings after a hurricane. He’s holding a large white cup on which it says “Juventus” and there’s a smell of coffee, strong like Granny always drank it. “After Alf has made coffee, you have to drive standing up all morning,” she used to say, and Elsa didn’t quite know what she meant, although she understood what she was saying.
“Yes?” he grunts.
“You know where this i
s?” says Elsa, and holds out the envelope with Granny’s handwriting on it.
“Are you waking me up to ask about a bloody address?” answers Alf in every way inhospitably before taking a big gulp of coffee.
“Were you still sleeping?”
Alf takes another mouthful and nods at his wristwatch.
“I drive the late shift. This is nighttime for me. Do I come to your flat in the middle of the night to ask you random questions?”
Elsa looks at the cup. Looks at Alf.
“If you’re asleep, why are you drinking coffee?”
Alf looks at the cup. Looks at Elsa. Looks totally puzzled. Elsa shrugs.
“Do you know where this is or not?” she asks and points at the envelope.
Alf looks a little as if he’s repeating her question to himself inside his head, in a very exaggerated and contemptuous tone. Has another sip of coffee.
“I’ve been a taxi driver for more than thirty years.”
“And?” wonders Elsa.
“And so of course I bloody know where that is. It’s by the old waterworks,” he says, then drains his cup.
“What?”
Alf looks resigned.
“Young people and their lack of history, I tell you. Where the rubber factory was until they moved it again. And the brickyard.”
Elsa’s expression gives away the possibility that she doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.
Alf claws at the remains of his hair and disappears into the flat. Comes back with a topped-up cup of coffee and a map. Puts down the coffee cup with a slam on a shelf in the hall and marks the map with a thick ring using a ballpoint pen.
“Oh, theeere! That’s where the shopping center is. Why didn’t you just say?”
Alf says something that Elsa can’t quite make out and closes the door in her face.
“I’ll keep the map!” Elsa hollers cheerfully into his mail slot.
He doesn’t answer.
“It’s the Christmas holidays, if you’re wondering! That’s why I’m not at school!” she calls out.