My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(32)

“Crapping,” mumbles The Monster, and looks the other way.

“Sorry,” says Elsa guiltily to the wurse and turns away. They are using normal language again, because something in Elsa’s stomach turns into a dark lump when she talks in the secret language to anyone but Granny. Either way, The Monster doesn’t seem too keen on any language. Meanwhile, the wurse looks like you or I might if someone came barging in while you were attending to nature’s needs, and it took a while before they understood how inappropriate it was to stand there gawking. Only then does Elsa realize that it actually can’t have had a chance to relieve itself for several days, unless it did so inside its flat. Which she rules out because she can’t see how it could have maneuvered itself into using a toilet, and it certainly wouldn’t have crapped on the floor, because this is not the sort of thing a wurse would demean itself by doing. So she assumes that one of the wurse’s superpowers is clenching.

She turns to The Monster. He rubs his hands together and looks down at the tracks in the snow as if he’d like to smooth out the snow with an iron.

“Are you a soldier?” asks Elsa, pointing at his trousers.

He shakes his head. Elsa continues pointing at his trousers, because she has seen this type of trousers on the news.

“Those are soldier trousers.”

The Monster nods.

“Why are you wearing soldier’s trousers if you’re not a soldier, then?” she interrogates.

“Old trousers,” The Monster replies tersely.

“How did you get that scar?” asks Elsa, pointing at his face.

“Accident,” The Monster replies even more tersely.

“No shit, Sherlock—I wasn’t implying you did it on purpose.”

(“No shit, Sherlock” is one of her favorite expressions in English. Her father always says one should not use English expressions if there are perfectly good substitutes in one’s own language, but Elsa actually doesn’t think there is a substitute in this case.)

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound rude. I just wanted to know what sort of accident.”

“Normal accident,” he growls, as if that settles matters. The Monster disappears under the huge hood of his jacket. “Late now. Should sleep.”

She understands that he is alluding to her, not to himself. She points at the wurse.

“That one has to sleep with you tonight.”

The Monster looks at her as if she just asked him to get naked, roll in saliva, and then run through a postage stamp factory with the lights off. Or maybe not exactly like that. But more or less. He shakes his head, so that his hood sways like a sail.

“Not sleep there. Can’t. Not sleep there. Can’t. Can’t. Can’t.”

Elsa puts her hands on her stomach and glares at him.

“Where’s it going to sleep then?”

The Monster retracts deeper into his hood. Points at Elsa.

Elsa snorts.

“Mum didn’t even let me get myself an owl! Do you get how she’d react if I came home with that t-h-i-n-g?”

The wurse comes out of the bushes, making a lot of noise and looking offended. Elsa clears her throat and apologizes.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean ‘that thing’ in a bad sense.”

The wurse looks a bit as if it’s close to muttering, “Sure you didn’t.” The Monster rubs his hands in circles faster and faster, and starts to look as if he’s panicking, and hisses down at the ground:

“Shit on fur. Has shit on fur. Shit on fur.”

Elsa rolls her eyes, realizing that if she presses the point he’ll probably have a heart attack. The Monster turns away and looks as if he is trying to insert an invisible eraser into his brain to banish that image from his memory.

“What did Granny write in the letter?” she asks him.

The Monster breathes grimly under his hood.

“Wrote ‘sorry,’?” he says without turning around.

“But what else? It was a really long letter!”

The Monster sighs and shakes his head and nods towards the entrance of the house.

“Late now. Sleep,” he growls.

“Not until you tell me about the letter!”

The Monster looks like a very tired person being kept awake by someone thumping him at regular intervals, as hard as he can, with a pillowcase filled with yogurt. Or more or less, anyway. He looks up and frowns and evaluates Elsa, as if trying to work out how far he could fling her.

“Wrote ‘protect castle,’?” he repeats.

Elsa steps closer to show him that she’s not afraid of him. Or to show herself.

“And what else?”

He hunches up inside his hood and starts walking off through the snow.

“Protect you. Protect Elsa.”

Then he disappears in the darkness and is gone. He disappears a lot, Elsa will learn in due course. He’s surprisingly good at it for someone so large.

Elsa hears muted panting from the other side of the yard and turns around. George comes jogging towards the house. She knows it’s George because he’s wearing shorts over his leggings and the greenest jacket in the world. He doesn’t see her and the wurse, because he’s too busy bouncing up and down from a bench. George trains a lot at running and jumping up and down from things. Elsa sometimes thinks he’s in a permanent audition to be in the next Super Mario game.