My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(21)

7





LEATHER


It’s possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her.

It’s Tuesday when Elsa meets The Monster for the first time. School is better on Tuesdays. Elsa only has one bruise today, and bruises can be explained away by saying she’s been playing soccer.

She sits in Audi. Audi is Dad’s car. It’s the exact opposite of Renault. Normally Dad picks her up from school every other Friday, because that’s when she stays with Dad and Lisette and Lisette’s children. Granny used to pick her up on all the other days and now Mum will have to do it. But today Mum and George have gone to a doctor to look at Halfie, so today Dad is picking her up even though it’s a Tuesday.

Granny always came on time and stood at the gate. Dad is late and stays in Audi in the parking area.

“What did you do to your eye?” Dad asks nervously.

He came back from Spain this morning, because he went there with Lisette and Lisette’s children, but he hasn’t caught any sun because he doesn’t know how to.

“We played soccer,” says Elsa.

Granny would never have let her get away with the soccer story.

But Dad isn’t Granny, so he just nods tentatively and asks her to be good enough to put on her seat belt. He does that very often. Nods tentatively. Dad is a tentative person. Mum is a perfectionist and Dad is a pedant and that was partly why their marriage didn’t work so well, Elsa figures. Because a perfectionist and a pedant are two very different things. When Mum and Dad did the cleaning, Mum wrote a minute-by-minute breakdown of the cleaning schedule, but then Dad would sort of get caught up with descaling the coffee percolator for two and a half hours, and you really can’t plan a life with a person like that around you, said Mum. The teachers at school always tell Elsa that her problem is her inability to concentrate, which is very odd, Elsa thinks, because Dad’s big problem is that he can’t stop concentrating.

“So, what do you want to do?” asks Dad, indecisively putting his hands on the wheel.

He often does that. Asks what Elsa would like to do. Because he very rarely wants to do anything himself. And this Tuesday was very unexpected for him: Dad is not very good at dealing with unexpected Tuesdays. That’s why Elsa only stays every other weekend with him, because after he met Lisette and she and her children moved in, Dad said it was too “messy” for Elsa there. When Granny found out, she phoned him and called him a Nazi at least ten times in a minute. That was a Nazi record, even for Granny. And when she’d hung up she turned to Elsa and spluttered, “Lisette? What sort of name is that?” And Elsa knew she didn’t really mean it, of course, because everyone likes Lisette—she has the same superpower as George. But Granny was the sort of person you brought with you when you went to war, and that was what Elsa loved about her.

Dad’s always late picking Elsa up from school. Granny was never late. Elsa has tried to understand exactly what “irony” means and she’s fairly sure it’s that Dad is never late for anything other than picking up Elsa from school, and Granny was always late for everything except for that one thing.

Dad fiddles with the wheel again.

“So . . . where would you like to go today?”

Elsa looks surprised, because it sounds as if he really means they’re going somewhere. He twists in his seat.

“I was thinking maybe you’d like to do . . . something.”

Elsa knows he’s only saying it to be nice. Because Dad doesn’t like doing things, Dad is not a doing type of person. Elsa looks at him. He looks at the steering wheel.

“I think I’d just like to go home,” she says.

Dad nods and looks disappointed and relieved at the same time, which is a facial expression that only he in the whole world has mastered. Because Dad never says no to Elsa, even though she sometimes wishes he would.

“Audi is really nice,” she says when they’re halfway home and neither of them has said a word.

She pats the glove compartment of Audi, as if it were a cat. New cars smell of soft leather, the polar opposite of the smell of old split leather in Granny’s flat. Elsa likes both smells, though she prefers living animals to dead ones that have been made into car seats. “You know what you’re getting with an Audi,” Dad says, nodding. His last car was also called Audi.

Dad likes to know what he’s getting. One time last year they rearranged the shelves in the supermarket near where Dad and Lisette live, and Elsa had to run those tests she had seen advertised on the television, to make sure he hadn’t had a stroke.

Once they get home, Dad gets out of Audi and goes with her to the entrance. Britt-Marie is on the other side of the door, hunched up like a livid little house pixie on guard. It occurs to Elsa that you always know no good can come from catching sight of Britt-Marie. “She’s like a letter from the tax authorities, that old biddy,” Granny used to say. Dad seems to agree—Britt-Marie is one of the few subjects on which he and Granny were in agreement. She’s holding a crossword magazine in her hand. Britt-Marie likes crosswords very much because there are very clear rules about how to do them. She only ever does them in pencil, though—Granny always said Britt-Marie was the sort of woman who would have to drink two glasses of wine and feel really wild and crazy to be able to fantasize about solving a crossword in ink.