My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(44)

“Me too,” whispers Mum.

And that is when the summer-intern policeman comes charging out of the emergency doors. He has two nurses with a stretcher running behind him.

Elsa turns a couple of inches towards Mum. Mum turns a couple of inches towards Elsa.

“What do you think your granny would have done now?” asks Mum calmly.

“She would have cleared out,” says Elsa, still with her forehead against Mum’s forehead.

The summer-intern policeman and the nurses with the stretcher are only a few yards from the car when Mum slowly nods. Then she puts Kia into gear and, with the tires spinning in the snow, skids out into the road and drives off. It’s the most irresponsible thing Elsa has ever seen her mother do.

She’ll always love her for it.





15





WOOD SHAVINGS


Perhaps the most curious of all the curious creatures in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, even by Granny’s yardstick, are the regretters. They are wild animals living in herds, whose grazing areas are just outside Miamas, where they forage widely, and really nobody knows how they survive, considering the circumstances. At first sight, regretters look more or less like white horses, although they are far more ambivalent and suffer from the biological defect of never being able to make up their minds. This obviously causes certain practical problems, because regretters are flock animals, and one regretter therefore almost always crashes into another when heading off in one direction and then changing its mind. For this reason regretters always have enormous, oblong swellings on their foreheads, which, in various fairy tales from Miamas that have ended up in the real world, has made people consistently get them confused with unicorns. But in Miamas the storytellers learned the hard way not to cut costs by hiring a regretter to do the job of a unicorn, because, whenever they did, the fairy tales had a tendency never to get to the point. And also no one, really no one at all, feels good after standing behind a regretter in the line for the lunch buffet.

“So there’s no point changing your mind, all you get is a headache!” Granny used to say, smacking herself on her forehead. Elsa thinks about that now, sitting in Kia outside school and looking at Mum.

She wonders if Granny ever regretted all the times she left Mum. She wonders if Granny’s head was full of bumps. She hopes so.

Mum is massaging her temples and swearing repeatedly through gritted teeth. She is obviously regretting speeding away from the hospital like that, since the first thing she has to do after dropping Elsa off at school is drive straight back to the hospital so she can go to work. Elsa pats her on the shoulder.

“Maybe you can blame it on your baby brain?”

Mum shuts her eyes in resignation. She’s had rather too much baby brain lately. So much so that she could not even find Elsa’s Gryffindor scarf when they looked for it this morning, and so much so that she keeps putting her telephone in strange places. In the refrigerator and in the trash bin and the laundry basket and on one occasion in George’s jogging shoes. This morning Elsa had to call Mum’s telephone three times, which is not entirely uncomplicated as the display on Elsa’s telephone is quite fuzzy after its encounter with the toaster. But in the end they found Mum’s telephone ringing inside Elsa’s backpack. The Gryffindor scarf was also there.

“You see!” Mum tried to say. “Nothing is really gone until your mum can’t find it!” But Elsa rolled her eyes and then Mum looked ashamed of herself and mumbled, “It’s my baby brain, I’m afraid.”

She looks ashamed of herself now as well. And full of regret.

“Darling, I don’t think they’ll let me be the head of a hospital if I tell them I had a police escort to the emergency entrance”

Elsa reaches out and pats Mum on the cheek.

“It’ll get better, Mum. It’ll be fine.”

Granny used to say that, Elsa realizes as soon as she says it. Mum puts her hand on Halfie and nods with fake self-assurance in order to change the subject.

“Your dad will pick you up this afternoon, don’t forget. And George will take you to school on Monday. I have a conference then and—”

Elsa patiently gives Mum’s head a scratch.

“I’m not going to school on Monday, Mum. It’s the Christmas holidays.”

Mum puts her hand on Elsa’s hand and inhales deeply from the point where they are touching, as if trying to fill her lungs with Elsa. As mums do with daughters who grow up too fast.

“Sorry, darling. I . . . forget.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Elsa.

Even though it does a little.

They hug each other hard before Elsa hops out of the car. She waits until Kia has disappeared before she opens her backpack and gets out Mum’s cell phone, then scrolls to Dad’s name in the address book and sends him a text: ACTUALLY: THERE IS NO NEED FOR YOU TO PICK UP ELSA THIS AFTERNOON. I CAN MANAGE IT! Elsa knows this is how they talk about her. She is something that needs to be “picked up” or “sorted.” Like doing the laundry. She knows they mean no harm by it, but come on! No seven-year-old who has seen films about the Italian Mafia wants to be “sorted” by her family.

Mum’s phone vibrates in Elsa’s hand. She sees Dad’s name on the display. And underneath, I UNDERSTAND. Elsa deletes it. And deletes the text she sent to Dad from the outgoing messages. Then stands on the pavement, counting down from twenty. When she’s got to seven, Kia screeches back into the parking area and Mum, slightly out of breath, winds down the window. Elsa gives her the phone. Mum mumbles, “It’s my baby brain.” Elsa kisses her on the cheek.