My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(18)

The creature didn’t answer, but Elsa felt its warm breath when it sniffed at the door.

“Tell him my granny sends her regards and apologizes,” she whispered.

And then she put the letter in her backpack and took the bus back to school. And when she looked out of the bus window she thought she saw him again. The thin man who’d been standing outside the undertaker’s yesterday while Mum was talking to the whale-woman. Now he was in the shadows on the other side of the street. She couldn’t see his face behind the cigarette smoke, but a cold, instinctual terror wrapped itself around her ribs.

And then he was gone.

Elsa reckons this may have been why she couldn’t make herself invisible when she got to school. Invisibility is the sort of superpower you can train yourself to have, and Elsa practices it all the time, but it doesn’t work if you are angry or frightened. When she got to school Elsa was both. Afraid of men turning up in the shadows without her knowing why, and angry at Granny for sending a letter to a monster, and both angry at and afraid of monsters. Normal monsters have the decency to live deep inside black caves or at the bottoms of ice-cold lakes. Normal, terrifying monsters don’t actually live in flats and get their mail delivered.

And anyway Elsa hates Monday. School is always at its worst on Monday mornings, because people who like chasing you have had to hang about all weekend with no one to chase. The notes in her locker are always the worst on Mondays. Which could also be why the invisibility thing is not working.

Elsa starts fidgeting with the headmaster’s globe again. Then she hears the door opening behind her and the headmaster stands up, looking relieved.

“Hello! Sorry I’m so late! It’s the traffic!” Elsa’s mum pants, out of breath, and Elsa feels her fingers brushing her neck.

Elsa doesn’t turn around. She also feels Mum’s telephone brushing against her neck, because Mum always carries it. As if she were a cyborg and it was a part of her organic tissue.

Elsa fingers the globe a little more demonstratively. The headmaster sits down in his chair, then leans forward and discreetly tries to move the globe out of her reach. He turns hopefully to Mum.

“Shall we wait for Elsa’s father, perhaps?”

The headmaster prefers Dad to be present at these types of meetings, because he seems to find dads easier to reason with when it comes to this sort of thing. Mum doesn’t look especially pleased.

“Elsa’s father is away and unfortunately he won’t be back until tomorrow.” The headmaster looks disappointed.

“Of course, there’s no intention on our part to create a sense of panic here. Especially not in your condition. . . .”

He nods at Mum’s belly. Mum looks like she needs to control herself quite a lot not to ask exactly what he’s driving at. The headmaster clears his throat and pulls the globe even further from Elsa’s reaching fingers. He looks as if he’s going to impress on Mum that she should think of the child, which is what people try to impress on Mum when they’re nervous that she may get angry.

“Think about the child.” They used to mean Elsa when they said that. But now they mean Halfie.

Elsa straightens her leg and kicks the wastepaper basket. She can hear the headmaster and Mum talking, but she doesn’t listen. Deep inside, she’s hoping Granny will come storming in at any moment with her fists raised, like in a boxing match in an old film. The last time Elsa was called in to see the headmaster, he only called Mum and Dad, but Granny came along all the same. Granny was not the sort of person you had to call.

Elsa had sat there spinning the headmaster’s globe on that occasion too. The boy who’d given her a black eye had been there with his parents. The headmaster had turned to Elsa’s father and said: “There’s an element of a typical boyish prank about this. . . .” And then he had to devote quite a long time to explaining to Granny what a typical girlish prank might be, because Granny really wanted to know.

The headmaster had tried to calm Granny by telling the boy who’d given Elsa the black eye that “only cowards hit girls,” but Granny was not the least bit calmed by that.

“It’s not bloody cowardly to hit girls!” she had roared at the headmaster. “This kid isn’t a little asswipe for hitting a girl, he’s an asswipe for hitting anyone!” And then the boy’s father got upset and started being rude to Granny for calling his son an asswipe, and then Granny had replied that she was going to teach Elsa how to “kick boys in the fuse box” and then they’d see “how much bloody fun it is fighting with girls!” And then the headmaster had asked everyone to compose themselves a little. And then they all tried that for a bit. But then the headmaster wanted the boy and Elsa to shake hands and apologize to each other, and then Granny sprang out of her chair asking, “Why the hell should Elsa apologize?” The headmaster said that Elsa must take her share of the guilt because she had “provoked” the boy and one had to understand that the boy had experienced difficulties in “controlling himself.” And that was when Granny had tried to throw the globe at the headmaster, but Mum managed to catch hold of Granny’s arm at the very last moment, so that the globe ended up hitting the headmaster’s computer instead and smashing the screen. “I WAS PROVOKED!” Granny had roared at the headmaster while Mum tried to drag her into the corridor, “I COULDN’T CONTROL MYSELF!”