My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(57)

“I’m the accountant,” he says amicably.

And when he catches sight of Elsa, he winks at her. As if they share a secret. Or at least Elsa thinks that’s what he means.

Kent steps authoritatively out of the kitchen with his hands on his hips over his overcoat and looks the accountant up and down.

“Well, well? What about these leaseholds, then?” he demands at once. “What price per square foot are you offering?”

Britt-Marie storms out of the kitchen from behind and points at the accountant accusingly.

“How did you get in?”

“The door was open,” says the accountant amicably.

Kent breaks in impatiently. “So about the leaseholds: what’s your price?”

The accountant points amicably at his briefcase and makes an amicable gesture towards the kitchen.

“Should we sit down, perhaps?”

“There’s coffee,” Lennart says expansively.

“And cookies,” Maud says with a nod.

“And eggs!” George hollers from the kitchen.

“Please excuse the mess, they’re all so preoccupied with their careers in this family,” says Britt-Marie well-meaningly. Mum does her absolute best to pretend she didn’t hear that. As they all head into the kitchen, Britt-Marie stops, turns to Elsa, and clasps her hands together.

“You do understand, dear, I would obviously never ever think you and your grandmother’s friends had anything to do with junkies. Obviously I’m not to know if the gentleman who was looking for you yesterday took drugs or not. That’s not at all what I mean to say.”

Elsa gawks at her, puzzled.

“What? What friends? Who was asking for me yesterday?”

She almost asks, “Was it Wolfheart?” and then stops herself, because she can’t imagine how Britt-Marie could possibly know that Wolfheart is her friend.

“Your friend who was here looking for you yesterday. The one I jettisoned from the premises. There’s a smoking ban on the stairs, you can tell him that. That is not how we behave in this leaseholders’ association. I understand that you and your granny have very curious acquaintances, but rules apply to everyone, they really do!” She straightens an invisible wrinkle in her skirt and clasps her hands on her stomach before continuing: “You know who I mean. He was very slim and stood here smoking on the stairs. He was looking for a child, a family friend, he said, and then he described you. He looked exceedingly unpleasant, actually, so I told him that in this leaseholders’ association we do not allow smoking indoors.”

Elsa’s heart shrinks. Consumes all the oxygen in her body. She has to hold on to the doorframe to stop herself collapsing. No one sees her, not even Alf. But she understands what’s about to happen in this adventure now.

Because every fairy tale has a dragon.





19





SPONGE CAKE MIX


Fairy tales from Miamas tell of an infinite number of ways to defeat a dragon. But if this dragon is a shadow, the most evil kind of being one can possibly imagine, and yet it looks like a human, then what? Elsa doubts that even Wolfheart could defeat something like that, even when he was the most renowned warrior in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. And now? When he’s afraid of snot and can’t wash away the thought of blood from his own fingers?

Elsa doesn’t know anything about the shadow. Only that she has seen it twice, the first time at the undertaker’s and then from the bus that day on her way to school. And that she’s dreamed of it, and now it’s come to the house looking for her. And there’s no coincidence in Miamas. In fairy tales everything is always exactly as it’s meant to be.

So this must have been what Granny meant by “protect your castle, protect your friends.” Elsa only wishes that Granny had given her an army to do it with.

She waits until late at night, when it’s dark enough for a child and a wurse to pass unseen under Britt-Marie’s balcony, before she goes down to the cellar. George is out jogging; Mum is still out preparing everything for tomorrow. Since the meeting with the accountant this morning she’s been talking endlessly on the telephone with the whale-woman from the undertaker’s and the florist and the vicar and then with the hospital and the vicar again. Elsa has been sitting in her room reading Spider-Man, doing her best not to think of tomorrow. It hasn’t gone very well.

She brings the wurse some cookies she got from Maud and, once the contents have been mopped up, she has to snatch back the tin so quickly that she almost gets an incisor manicure. Granny always said that wurse saliva was bloody hard to get off in the washing-up, and Elsa is planning to give the tin back to Maud. But the wurse, who in all ways is a typical wurse, rummages quite ravenously in her backpack, apparently having considerable difficulty understanding how she could have come down with just one paltry tin for it.

“I’ll try to get you some more cookies, but for now you’re going to have to eat this.” She opens a thermos. “This is sponge cake mix. I don’t know how to mix it properly though,” she mumbles apologetically. “I found it in the cupboard in the kitchen and it said ‘ready sponge cake mix’ on the packet, but it was only powder. So I added water. It’s more like gunk than proper mix.”

The wurse looks skeptical, but its towel-sized tongue immediately licks all the gunk out of the thermos anyway. Just to be on the safe side. An insanely flexible tongue is one of the most prominent superpowers of wurses.