My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(2)

Granny is busy distributing small heaps of tobacco all over the wooden table in front of her and rolling them into rustling cigarette papers.

“I said I told you not to climb the fence!”

Granny makes a snorting sound and searches the pockets of her much-too-large overcoat for a lighter. She doesn’t seem to be taking any of this very seriously, mainly because she never seems to take anything seriously. Except when she wants to smoke and can’t find a lighter.

“It was a tiny little fence, for God’s sake!” she says breezily. “It’s nothing to get worked up about.”

“Don’t you ‘for God’s sake’ me! You’re the one who threw shit at the police.”

“Stop fussing. You sound like your mother. Do you have a lighter?”

“I’m seven!”

“How long are you going to use that as an excuse?”

“Until I’m not seven anymore?”

Granny mumbles something that sounds like “Not a crime to ask, is it?” and continues rifling through her pockets.

“I don’t think you can smoke in here, actually,” Elsa informs her, sounding calmer now and fingering the long rip in the Gryffindor scarf.

“Course you can smoke. We’ll just open a window.”

Elsa looks skeptically at the windows.

“I don’t think they’re the sort of windows that open.”

“Why not?”

“They’ve got bars on them.”

Granny glares with dissatisfaction at the windows. And then at Elsa.

“So now you can’t even smoke at the police station. Jesus. It’s like being in 1984.”

Elsa yawns again. “Can I borrow your phone?”

“What for?”

“To check something.”

“Where?”

“Online.”

“You invest too much time on that Internet stuff.”

“You mean, ‘spend.’?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What I mean is, you don’t use ‘invest’ in that way. You wouldn’t go round saying, ‘I invested two hours in reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,’ would you?”

Granny just rolls her eyes and hands her the phone. “Did you ever hear about the girl who blew up because she did too much thinking?”

The policeman who shuffles into the room looks very, very tired.

“I want to call my lawyer,” Granny demands at once.

“I want to call my mum!” Elsa demands at once.

“In that case I want to call my lawyer first!” Granny insists.

The policeman sits down opposite them and fidgets with a little pile of papers.

“Your mother is on her way,” he says to Elsa with a sigh.

Granny makes the sort of dramatic gasp that only Granny knows how to do.

“Why did you call her? Are you mad?” she protests, as if the policeman just told her he was going to leave Elsa in the forest to be raised by a pack of wolves. “She’ll be bloody livid!”

“We have to call the child’s legal guardian,” the policeman explains calmly.

“I am also the child’s legal guardian! I am the child’s grandmother!” Granny fumes, rising slightly out of her chair and shaking her unlit cigarette menacingly.

“It’s half past one in the morning. Someone has to take care of the child.”

“Yes, me! I’m taking care of the child!” she splutters.

The policeman makes a fairly strained attempt to gesture amicably across the interrogation room.

“And how do you feel it’s going so far?”

Granny looks slightly offended.

“Well . . . everything was going just fine until you started chasing me.”

“You broke into a zoo.”

“It was a tiny little fence—”

“There’s no such thing as a ‘tiny’ burglary.”

Granny shrugs and makes a brushing movement over the table, as if she thinks they’ve stretched this out long enough. The policeman notices the cigarette and eyes it dubiously.

“Oh, come on! I can smoke in here, can’t I?”

He shakes his head sternly. Granny leans forward, looks him deep in the eyes, and smiles.

“Can’t you make an exception? Not even for little old me?”

Elsa gives Granny a little shove in the side and switches to their secret language. Because Granny and Elsa have a secret language, as all grannies must have with their grandchildren, because by law that’s a requirement, says Granny. Or at least it should be.

“Drop it, Granny. It’s, like, illegal to flirt with policemen.”

“Says who?”

“Well, the police for starters!” Elsa replies.

“The police are supposed to be there for the sake of the citizens,” Granny hisses. “I pay my taxes, you know.”

The policeman looks at them as you do when a seven-year-old and a seventy-seven-year-old start arguing in a secret language in a police station in the middle of the night. Then Granny’s eyelashes tremble alluringly at him as she once again points pleadingly at her cigarette, but when he shakes his head, Granny leans back in the chair and exclaims in normal language: “I mean, this political correctness! It’s worse than apartheid for smokers in this bloody country nowadays!”