My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(3)

“How do you spell that?” asks Elsa.

“What?” Granny sighs as you do when precisely the whole world is against you, even though you pay taxes.

“That apartight thing,” says Elsa.

“A-p-p-a-r-t-e-i-d,” Granny spells.

Elsa immediately Googles it on Granny’s phone. It takes her a few attempts—Granny’s always been a terrible speller. Meanwhile the policeman explains that they’ve decided to let them go, but Granny will be called in at a later date to explain the burglary and “other aggravations.”

“What aggravations?”

“Driving illegally, to begin with.”

“What do you mean, illegally? That’s my car! I don’t need permission to drive my own car, do I?”

“No,” replies the policeman patiently, “but you need a driver’s license.”

Granny throws out her arms in exasperation. She’s just launched into another rant about this being a Big Brother society when Elsa whacks the phone sharply against the table.

“It’s got NOTHING to do with that apartheid thing!!! You compared not being able to smoke with apartheid and it’s not the same thing at all. It’s not even CLOSE!”

Granny waves her hand resignedly.

“I meant it was . . . you know, more or less like that—”

“It isn’t at all!”

“It was a metaphor, for God’s sake—”

“A bloody crap metaphor!”

“How would you know?”

“WIKIPEDIA!”

Granny turns in defeat to the policeman. “Do your children carry on like this?” The policeman looks uncomfortable.

“We . . . don’t let the children surf the Net unsupervised. . . .”

Granny stretches out her arms towards Elsa, a gesture that seems to say “You see!” Elsa just shakes her head and crosses her arms very hard.

“Granny, just say sorry for throwing turds at the police, and we can go home,” she snorts in the secret language, though still very expressly upset about that whole apartheid thing.

“Sorry,” says Granny in the secret language.

“To the police, not me, you muppet.”

“There’ll be no apologizing to fascists here. I pay my taxes. And you’re the muppet.” Granny sulks.

“Takes one to know one.”

Then they both sit with their arms crossed, demonstratively looking away from each other, until Granny nods at the policeman and says in normal language: “Would you be kind enough to let my spoilt granddaughter know that if she takes this attitude she’s quite welcome to walk home?”

“Tell her I’m going home with Mum and she’s the one who can walk!” Elsa replies at once.

“Tell HER she can—”

The policeman stands up without a word, walks out of the room and closes the door behind him, as if intending to go into another room and bury his head in a large, soft cushion and yell as loud as he can.

“Now look what you did,” says Granny.

“Look what YOU did!”

Eventually a heavyset policewoman with piercing green eyes comes in instead. It doesn’t seem to be the first time she’s run into Granny, because she smiles in that tired way so typical of people who know Granny, and says: “You have to stop doing this, we also have real criminals to worry about.” Granny just mumbles, “Why don’t you stop, yourselves?” And then they’re allowed to go home.

Standing on the pavement waiting for her mother, Elsa fingers the rip in her scarf. It goes right through the Gryffindor emblem. She tries as hard as she can not to cry, but doesn’t make much of a success of it.

“Ah, come on, your mum can mend that,” says Granny, trying to be cheerful, giving her a little punch on the shoulder.

Elsa looks up anxiously.

“And, you know . . . we can tell your mum the scarf got torn when you were trying to stop me climbing the fence to get to the monkeys.”

Elsa nods and runs her fingers over the scarf again. It didn’t get torn when Granny was climbing the fence. It got torn at school when three older girls who hate Elsa without Elsa really understanding why got hold of her outside the cafeteria and hit her and tore her scarf and threw it down the toilet. Their jeers are still echoing in Elsa’s head. Granny notices the look in her eyes and leans forward before whispering in their secret language: “One day we’ll take those losers at your school to Miamas and throw them to the lions!”

Elsa dries her eyes with the back of her hand and smiles faintly.

“I’m not stupid, Granny,” she whispers. “I know you did all that stuff tonight to make me forget about what happened at school.”

Granny kicks at some gravel and clears her throat.

“I didn’t want you to remember this day because of the scarf. So I thought instead you could remember it as the day your Granny broke into a zoo—”

“And escaped from a hospital,” Elsa says with a grin.

“And escaped from a hospital,” says Granny with a grin.

“And threw turds at the police.”

“Actually, it was soil! Or mainly soil, anyway.”

“Changing memories is a good superpower, I suppose.”

Granny shrugs.