My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (28 page)

George stands by the gate looking sad. He’s also wearing a suit. Elsa runs past him and Mum catches hold of her, her mascara running, and Elsa presses her face against Halfie. Mum’s dress smells of boutique. The cloud animals are flying low.

And that’s the day they bury Elsa’s granny.

21

CANDLE GREASE

T
here are storytellers in the Land-of-Almost-Awake who say we all have an inner voice, whispering to us what we must do, and all we must do is listen. Elsa has never really believed it, because she doesn’t like the thought of someone else having a voice inside her, and Granny always said that only psychologists and murderers have “inner voices.” Granny never liked proper psychology. Though she really did try with the woman in the black skirt.

But, in spite of all, in a moment Elsa will hear a voice in her head as clear as a bell. It won’t be whispering, it will be yelling. It will be yelling, “Run!” And Elsa will run for her life. With the shadow behind her.

Of course, she doesn’t know that when she goes into the church. The quiet murmuring of hundreds of strangers rises towards the ceiling, like the hissing of a broken car stereo. The legions of smartasss point at her and whisper. Their eyes are oppressive.

She doesn’t know who they are and it makes her feel tricked. She doesn’t want to share Granny with others. She doesn’t want to be reminded of how Granny was her only friend, while Granny herself had hundreds of others.

She concentrates hard on walking straight-backed through the crush, doesn’t want them to see that she feels as if she’s going to collapse any moment and doesn’t even have the strength to be upset anymore. The church floor sucks at her feet, the coffin up there stings her eyes.

The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make the people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that. On second thought, she decides it probably comes from the Land-of-Almost-Awake, although this seems unlikely when one considers what Granny thought about death. Death was Granny’s nemesis. That’s why she never wanted to talk about it. And that was also why she became a surgeon, to cause death as much trouble as she could.

But it might also come from Miploris, realizes Elsa. Granny never wanted to ride to Miploris when they were in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, but sometimes she did it anyway because of Elsa’s nagging. And sometimes Elsa rode there on her own when Granny was at some inn in Miamas playing poker with a troll or arguing about wine with a snow-angel.

Miploris is the most beautiful of all the kingdoms of the Land-of-Almost-Awake. The trees sing there, the grass massages the soles of your feet, and there’s always a smell of fresh-baked bread. The houses are so beautiful that, to be on the safe side, you have to be sitting down when you look at them. But no one lives there, they are only used for storage. For Miploris is where all fairy creatures bring their sorrow, and where all leftover sorrow is stored. For an eternity of all fairy tales.

People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.

That is what Miploris is: a kingdom where lone storytelling travelers come slowly wandering from all directions, dragging unwieldy luggage full of sorrow. A place where they can put it down and go back to life. And when the travelers turn back, they do so with lighter steps, because Miploris is constructed in such a way that irrespective of what direction you leave it, you always have the sun up ahead and the wind at your back.

The Miplorisians gather up all the suitcases and sacks and bags of sorrow and carefully make a note of them in little pads. They scrupulously catalogue every kind of sadness and pining. Things are kept in very good order in Miploris; they have an extensive system of rules and impeccably clear areas of responsibility for all kinds of sorrows. “Bureaucratic bastards” was what Granny called the Miplorisians, because of all the forms that have to be filled out nowadays by whoever is dropping off some sorrow or other. But you can’t put up with disorder when it comes to sorrow, say the Miplorisians.

Miploris used to be the smallest kingdom in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, but after the War-Without-End it became the biggest. That was why Granny didn’t like riding there, because so many of the storehouses had her name on signs outside. And in Miploris people talk of inner voices, Elsa remembers now. Miplorisians believe that the inner voices are those of the dead, coming back to help their loved ones.

Elsa is pulled back into the real world by Dad’s gentle hand on her shoulder. She hears his voice whispering, “You’ve arranged everything very nicely, Ulrika,” to Mum. In the corner of her eye she sees how Mum smiles and nods at the programs lying on the church pews and then replies: “Thanks for doing the programs. Lovely font.”

Elsa sits at the far end of the wooden pew at the front of the chapel, staring down into the floor until the mumbling dies down. The church is so packed that people are standing all along the walls. Many of them have insanely weird clothes, as if they’ve been playing outfit roulette with someone who can’t read washing instruction tags.

Elsa will put “outfit roulette” in the word jar, she thinks. She tries to focus on that thought. But she hears languages she can’t understand, and she hears her name being squeezed into strange pronunciations, and this takes her back to reality. She sees strangers pointing at her, with varying degrees of discretion. She understands that they all know who she is, and it makes her mad, so that when she glimpses a familiar face along one of the walls she has trouble placing him at first. Like when you see a celebrity in a café and instinctively burst out,“Oh, hi there!” before you realize that your brain has had time to tell you, “Hey, that’s probably someone you know, say hi!” but not, “No, wait, it’s just that guy from the TV!” Because your brain likes to make you look like an idiot.

His face disappears behind a shoulder for a few moments, but when he reappears he’s looking right at Elsa. It’s the accountant who came to speak about the leasehold conversion yesterday. But he’s dressed as a priest now. He winks at her.

Another priest starts talking about Granny, then about God, but Elsa doesn’t listen. She wonders if this is what Granny would have wanted. She’s not sure that Granny liked church so very much. Granny and Elsa hardly ever talked about God, because Granny associated God with death.

And this is all fake. Plastic and makeup. As if everything’s going to be fine just because they’re having a funeral. Everything is not going to be fine for Elsa, she knows that. She breaks into a cold sweat. A couple of the strangers in the weird clothes come up to the microphone and talk. Some of them do so in other languages and have a little lady who translates into another microphone. But no one says “dead.” Everyone just says that Granny has “passed away” or that they’ve “lost her.” As if she’s a sock that’s been lost in the tumble-dryer. A few of them are crying, but she doesn’t think they have the right. Because she wasn’t their granny, and they have no right to make Elsa feel as if Granny had other countries and kingdoms to which she never brought Elsa.

So when a fat lady who looks like she’s combed her hair with a toaster starts reading poems, Elsa thinks it’s just about enough and she pushes her way out between the pews. She hears Mum whispering something behind her, but she just shuffles along the shiny stone floor and squeezes out of the church doors before anyone has time to come after her.

The winter air bites at Elsa; it feels like she’s being yanked out of a boiling hot bath by her hair. The cloud animals are hovering low and ominous. Elsa walks slowly and takes such deep breaths of the December air that her eyes start to black out. She thinks about Storm. Storm has always been one of Elsa’s favorite superheroes, because Storm’s superpower is that she can change the weather. Even Granny used to admit that as superpowers went, that one was pretty cool.

Elsa hopes that Storm will come and blow away this whole bloody church. The whole bloody churchyard. Bloody everything.

The faces from inside spiral around inside her head. Did she really see the accountant? Was Alf standing in there? She thinks so. She saw another face she recognized, the policewoman with the green eyes. She walks faster, away from the church because she doesn’t want any of them to come after her and ask if she’s okay. Because she’s not okay. None of this will ever be okay. She doesn’t want to listen to their mumbling or have to admit that they are talking about her. Over her. Around her. Granny never talked around her.

She’s gone about fifty yards between the headstones when she picks up a smell of smoke. At first there’s something familiar about it, something almost liberating. Something that Elsa wants to turn and embrace and bury her nose in, like a freshly laundered pillowcase on a Sunday morning. But then there’s something else.

And her inner voice comes to her.

She knows where the man between the headstones is before she has even turned around. He’s only a few yards away from her. Casually holding his cigarette between his fingertips. It’s too far from the church for anyone to hear Elsa scream, and with calm, cold movements he blocks her way back.

Elsa glances over her shoulder towards the gate at the road. Twenty yards away. When she looks back he’s taken a long stride towards her.

And the inner voice comes to Elsa. And it’s Granny’s voice. But it isn’t whispering. It’s yelling.

Run
.

Elsa feels his rough hand grasping her arm, but she slips out of his grip. She runs until the wind scrapes her eyes like nails against a frosty windshield. She doesn’t know for how long. Eternities. And when the memory of his eyes and his cigarette crystallizes in her brain, when every breath punches into her lungs, she realizes that he was limping; that’s why she got away. Another second of hesitation and he would have grabbed her by her dress, but Elsa is too used to running. Too good at it. She runs until she’s no longer sure whether it’s the wind or her grief that is making her eyes run. Runs until she realizes she’s almost at her school.

She slows down. Looks round. Hesitates. Then she charges right into the black park on the other side of the street, with her dress tossing around her. Even the trees look like enemies in there. The sun seems too exhausted to go down. She hears scattered voices, the wind screaming through the branches, the rumbling of traffic farther and farther away. Out of breath and furious, she stumbles towards the interior of the park. Hears voices. Hears that some of them are calling out after her. “Hey! Little girl!” they call out.

She stops, exhausted. Collapses on a bench. Hears the “little-girl” voice coming closer. She understands that it means her harm. The park seems to be creeping under a blanket. She hears another voice beside the first, slurring and stumbling over its words as if it’s put on its shoes the wrong way round. Both of the voices seem to be picking up speed as they come towards her. Realizing the danger, she’s on her feet and running in a fluid movement. They follow. It dawns on her with sudden despair that the winter gloom is making everything look the same in the park, and she doesn’t know the way out. Good God, she’s a seven-year-old girl who watches television a hell of a lot, how could she be so stupid? This is how people end up on the sides of milk cartons, or however they advertise missing children these days.