My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(11)

She isn’t prepared for the way the words tremble as they come out of her. She convinces herself that Our Friend is breathing more slowly. She empties in more chocolate.

“She has cancer,” whispers Elsa.

Elsa has no friends, so she isn’t quite sure of the normal procedure for these types of errands. But she imagines that if she did have friends, she’d want them to know if she had cancer. Even if they happened to be the biggest things of anything. “She sends her best and says sorry,” she whispers into the darkness and drops in the rest of the chocolate and gently closes the flap.

She stays there for a moment, looking at Our Friend’s door.

And then at The Monster’s. If this wild animal can be hiding behind one of the doors, she doesn’t even want to know what might be behind the other.

Then she jogs down the stairs to the front entrance.

George is still in the laundry. In the meeting room, they are all drinking coffee and arguing.

Because it’s a normal house.

By and large.





4





BEER


The room in the hospital smells as bad and feels as cold as hospital rooms tend to when it is barely above freezing outside and someone has hid beer bottles under her pillow and opened a window to try to get rid of the smell of cigarette smoke. It hasn’t worked.

Granny and Elsa are playing Monopoly. Granny doesn’t say anything about cancer, for Elsa’s sake. And Elsa doesn’t say anything about death, for Granny’s sake. Because Granny doesn’t like talking about death, especially not her own. So when Elsa’s mum and the doctors leave the room to talk in low, serious voices in the corridor, Elsa tries not to look worried. That doesn’t really work either.

Granny grins secretively.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I fixed a job for the dragons in Miamas?” she asks in their secret language.

It’s good to have a secret language in the hospital, because hospitals have ears in their walls, says Granny. Especially when the walls have Elsa’s mum as their boss.

“Duh—obviously!”

Granny nods as a courtesy and tells the whole story anyway. Because no one ever taught Granny how not to tell a story. And Elsa listens, because no one ever taught her how not to.

That’s why she knows that one of the things people say about Granny most often when she’s not around is, “This time she’s really crossed the line.” Britt-Marie is always saying it. Elsa assumes this is why Granny likes the kingdom of Miamas so much: you can’t cross the line in Miamas, because the kingdom is endless. And not like on television when people toss their hair about and say that they “have no boundaries,” but properly, without any limits, because no one knows for certain where Miamas begins and ends. This is partly because unlike the other five kingdoms in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, which are mainly built of stone and mortar, Miamas is wholly made of imagination. It could also be slightly because the Miamas city wall has an insanely moody temperament and may suddenly one morning have the idea of moving itself a mile or two into the forest because it needs a bit of “me time.” Only to move twice as far back in the opposite direction the next morning, because it has decided to wall in some dragon or troll that for one reason or another it has decided to be grumpy with. (Usually because the dragon or the troll has been up all night drinking schnapps and weeing on the wall while sleeping, Granny suggests.)

There are more trolls and dragons in Miamas than in any other of the five kingdoms in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, you see, because the main export industry in Miamas is fairy tales. Trolls and dragons have excellent employment prospects in Miamas because stories need villains. “Of course, it hasn’t always been like this,” Granny sometimes muses. “There was a time when the dragons had been almost forgotten by Miamas’s storytellers, particularly the ones who’d grown a little long in the tooth.” Then she recounts the whole story about how the dragons were causing too much trouble in Miamas, drifting about without jobs, drinking schnapps and smoking cigars and getting involved in violent confrontations with the city wall. So in the end the people of Miamas begged Granny to help them come up with some kind of practical job-creation scheme. And that’s when Granny had the idea that dragons should guard treasures at the ends of the tales.

Up until that point, it had actually been a massive narrative problem, the fact that heroes in fairy tales looked for a treasure and, once they had located it in some deep cave, only had to nip inside to pick it up. Just like that. No epic closing battles or dramatic apexes or anything. “All you could do was play worthless video games afterwards,” Granny said, nodding somberly. Granny knows all about it, because last summer Elsa taught her how to play a game called World of Warcraft and Granny played it around the clock for several weeks until Mum said she was beginning to “exhibit disturbing tendencies” and banned her from sleeping in Elsa’s room from then on.

But anyway, when the storytellers heard Granny’s idea the whole problem was solved in an afternoon. “And that’s why all fairy tales nowadays have dragons at the end! It’s my doing!” Granny chortles. Like she always does.

Granny has a story from Miamas for every situation. One of them is about Miploris, the kingdom where all sorrow is kept in storage, and its princess who was robbed of a magical treasure by an ugly witch whom she’s been hunting ever since. Another story is about two princeling brothers, both in love with the princess of Miploris, and practically breaking the Land-of-Almost-Awake into pieces in their furious battle for her love.