My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (20 page)

“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 is?” 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.

He doesn’t answer that either.

The wurse is lying on its side with two legs comfortably stretched up into the air when Elsa walks into the storage unit, as if it has very gravely misunderstood a Pilates exercise. The Monster is standing in the passage outside, rubbing his hands. He looks very uncomfortable.

Elsa holds up the envelope to him.

“Are you coming?”

The Monster nods. The hood glides away a few inches from his face, and the big scar gleams momentarily in the fluorescent light. He doesn’t even ask where they’re going. It’s difficult not to feel a pang of affection for him.

Elsa looks first at him and then at the wurse. She knows that Mum is going to be angry with her for playing hooky and going off without permission, but when Elsa asks her why she’s always so worried about her, Mum always says, “Because I’m so bloody afraid something may happen to you.” But Elsa is having a pretty hard time thinking that anything can happen to you when you have a monster and a wurse tagging along. So she feels it should be okay, given the circumstances.

The wurse tries to lick The Monster when it walks out of the storage unit. The Monster jumps in terror and snatches back his hand and grabs a broom leaning up against another storage unit. The wurse, as if it’s teasing and having a bit of a laugh, sweeps its tongue back and forth in long, provocative movements.

“Stop it!” Elsa tells it.

The Monster holds out the broom like a lance and tries to force the wurse back by pushing the bristles into its nose.

“I said stop it!” Elsa snaps at both of them.

The wurse closes its jaws around the broom and crunches it to smithereens.

“Stop i—” Elsa begins but doesn’t have time to finish the last “it” before The Monster has thrown both broom and wurse across the cellar with all his might, sending the heavy animal crashing hard into the wall several yards away.

The wurse rolls up and flexes its body in one movement, and is in the middle of a terrifying spring before it has even landed. Its jaws are open, and rows of kitchen knife–size teeth exposed. The Monster faces it with a broad chest and the blood pumping in his fists.

“CUT IT OUT, I SAID!” Elsa roars, throwing her little body right between the two furious creatures, unprotected between claws as sharp as spears and fists probably big enough to separate her head from her shoulders. She stands her ground, armed with nothing but the indifference of an almost-eight-year-old to her own physical shortcomings. Which goes a long way.

The wurse stops itself midleap and lands softly beside her. The Monster takes a few steps back. Slowly, muscles relax and lungs release air. Neither of them meets her gaze.

“The idea here is that you’re supposed to protect
me
,” Elsa says in a quieter voice, trying not to cry, which doesn’t go so terrifically well. “I’ve never had any friends and now you two try to kill the only two I’ve ever had, just after I’ve found you!”

The wurse lowers its nose. The Monster rubs his hands, disappears into his hood, and makes a rocking motion towards the wurse.

“Started it,” The Monster manages to say.

The wurse growls back.

“Stop it!” She tries to sound angry but realizes she mainly just sounds as if she’s crying.

The Monster, concerned, moves the palm of his hand up and down along her side, as close as possible without actually touching her.

“Sor . . . ry,” he mumbles. The wurse buffets her shoulder. She rests her forehead against its nose.

“We have an important mission here, so you can’t keep messing about. We have to deliver this letter because I think Granny wants to say sorry to someone else. And there are more letters. This is our fairy tale: to deliver every single one of Granny’s sorries.”

With her face in the wurse’s fur, she inhales deeply and closes her eyes.

“We have to do it for my mum’s sake. Because I’m hoping that the last sorry will be to her.”

16

DUST

I
t turns into an epic adventure. A monstrous fairy tale.

Elsa decides they should begin by taking the bus, like normal knights on normal quests in more or less normal fairy tales when there aren’t any horses or cloud animals available. But when all the other people at the bus stop start eyeing The Monster and the wurse and nervously shuffling as far away from them as it’s possible to be without ending up at the next bus stop, she realizes it’s not going to be quite so straightforward.

On boarding the bus it becomes immediately clear that wurses are not all that partial to traveling by public transport. After it has snuffled about and stepped on people’s toes and overturned bags with its tail and accidentally dribbled a bit on a seat a little too close to The Monster for The Monster to feel entirely comfortable, Elsa decides to forget the whole thing, and then all three of them get off. Exactly one stop later.

Elsa pulls the Gryffindor scarf tighter around her face, pushes her hands into her pockets, and leads them through the snow. The wurse is so delighted about escaping the bus that it skips in circles around Elsa and The Monster like an overexcited puppy. The Monster looks disgusted. He doesn’t seem used to being outdoors by daylight, Elsa notices. Maybe it’s because Wolfheart is used to living in the dark forests outside Miamas where the daylight doesn’t dare penetrate. At least, that is where he lives in Granny’s fairy tales, so if there is any sort of order to this story, this must surely be the logical explanation.

People who see them on the pavement react as people generally do when they catch sight of a girl, a wurse, and a monster strolling along side by side: they cross the street. Some of them try to pretend that it has nothing to do with the fact that they are scared of monsters and wurses and girls, by demonstratively pretending to be having loud telephone conversations with someone who suddenly gives them different directions and tells them to go the opposite way. That is also what Elsa’s dad does sometimes when he’s gone the wrong way and he doesn’t want strangers to realize he’s one of those types who go the wrong way. Elsa’s mum never has that problem, because if she goes the wrong way she just keeps going until whoever she was supposed to be meeting has to follow her. Granny used to solve the problem by shouting at the road signs. It varies, how people deal with it.

But others who run into the adventuring trio are not as discreet, and they watch Elsa from the other side of the road as if she’s being abducted. Elsa feels that The Monster would probably be good at many things, but a kidnapper who can be put out of action by sneezing at him would probably not be a particularly effective kidnapper. It’s a curious sort of Achilles’ heel for a superhero, she feels. Snot.

The walk takes more than two hours. Elsa wishes it were Halloween, because then they could take the bus without scaring normal people, everyone would just assume they were dressed up. That’s why Elsa likes Halloween: on Halloween it’s normal to be different.

It’s almost lunchtime by the time they find the right address. Elsa’s feet hurt and she’s hungry and in a bad mood. She knows that a knight of Miamas would never whine or be afraid of a grand adventure when sent out on a treasure hunt, but whoever said a knight can’t be hungry or ill-tempered?