My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(52)

“All people who have seen war are broken.”

Elsa shrugs. “He shouldn’t have become a soldier, then. It’s because of soldiers that we have wars.”

“I don’t think he was that sort of soldier. He was a peace soldier.”

“There’s only one sort of soldier,” Elsa snorts.

And she knows she’s a hypocrite for saying it. Because she hates soldiers and she hates war, but she knows that if Wolfheart had not fought the shadows in the War-Without-End, the entire Land-of-Almost-Awake would have been swallowed up by gray death. And she thinks a lot about that. Times you’re allowed to fight, and times when you’re not. Elsa thinks about how Granny used to say, “You have standards and I have double standards, and so I win.” But having double standards doesn’t make Elsa feel like a winner.

“Maybe so,” says the woman in a low voice that skims over Elsa’s thoughts.

“You don’t have very many patients here, do you?” says Elsa with a pointed nod across the room.

The woman doesn’t answer. Her hands fidget with Granny’s letter. Elsa sighs impatiently.

“What else does Granny write? Does she say sorry for not being able to save your family?”

The woman’s eyes waver.

“Yes. Among . . . among other things.”

Elsa nods.

“And for sending me here?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because she knew you’d ask a lot of questions. As a psychologist, I suppose I’m used to being the one who asks the questions.”

“What does ‘Reg. Psychoterropist’ mean?”

“Registered psychotherapist.”

“Oh, I thought it had something to do with bombs.”

The woman doesn’t quite know how to respond to that one. Elsa throws out her arm defensively, and snorts, “Well, maybe it sounds stupid now, but it seemed more logical at the time! Everything seems obvious in hindsight!”

The woman does something with the corner of her mouth that Elsa thinks might be a smile of some kind. But it’s more like a stiff twitching, as if the muscles around her mouth are new to this game. Elsa looks around the office again. There are no photos here, as there were in the woman’s flat. Only books.

“You got any good ones, then?” she asks, scanning the shelves.

“I don’t know what you think is good,” the woman answers carefully.

“Do you have any Harry Potters?”

“No.”

“Not even one?” Elsa asks, incredulous.

“No.”

“You have all these books and not a single Harry Potter? And they let you fix people whose heads are broken?”

The woman doesn’t answer. Elsa leans back and tips the chair in that exact way her mum really hates. The woman takes another mint from the tin on the desk. She makes a movement towards Elsa to offer her one, but Elsa shakes her head.

“Do you smoke?” asks Elsa.

The woman looks surprised. Elsa shrugs.

“Granny also used to have a lot of sweets when she couldn’t smoke, and she usually wasn’t allowed to indoors.”

“I’ve stopped,” says the woman.

“Stopped or taking a break? It’s not the same thing,” Elsa informs her.

The woman nods, setting a new record for slowness.

“That would be more of a philosophical question. So it’s difficult to answer.”

Elsa shrugs again.

“Where did you meet Granny? Was it after the wave? Or is that also difficult to answer?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I like long stories.”

The woman’s hands take cover in her lap.

“I was on holiday. Or . . . we . . . me and my family. We were on holiday. And it happened . . . an accident happened.”

“The tsunami,” says Elsa gently.

The woman’s gaze flies around the room and then she says, in passing, as if it only just occurred to her: “Your grandmother found . . . found me . . .”

The woman sucks so hard on the mint in her mouth that her cheeks look like Granny’s that time she was going to “borrow” petrol from Elsa’s dad’s Audi by sucking it out of a plastic tube.

“After my husband and my . . . my boys . . .” the woman begins to say. The last words stumble and fall into the chasm between the others as they pass. As if the woman had suddenly forgotten that she was in the middle of a sentence.

“Drowned?” Elsa fills in, and then feels ashamed of herself when she realizes that it’s probably very unpleasant to speak that word to someone whose family did.

But the woman just nods, without looking angry. And then Elsa switches to the secret language and asks briskly: “Do you also know our secret language?”

“Excuse me?”

“Ah, nothing,” Elsa mumbles in the usual language and looks down at her shoes.

It was a test. And Elsa is surprised that the sea-angel doesn’t know the secret language, because everyone in the Land-of-Almost-Awake knows the secret language. But maybe that’s a part of the curse, she thinks.

The woman looks at her watch.

“Shouldn’t you be at school?”

Elsa shrugs.

“It’s Christmas holidays.”