My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(58)

“There’s been a man here looking for me,” whispers Elsa into its ear, trying to sound brave. “I think he’s one of the shadows. We have to be on our guard.”

The wurse buffets its nose against her throat. She throws her arms around it, and feels the taut muscles under its fur. It tries to seem playful, but she understands that it’s doing what wurses do best: preparing for battle. She loves it for that.

“I don’t know where it comes from, Granny never told me about those kinds of dragons.”

The wurse buffets her throat again and looks at her with large, empathic eyes. It seems to be wishing it could tell her everything. Elsa wishes Wolfheart were here. She rang his bell just now but there was no answer. She didn’t want to call out, in case Britt-Marie smelled a rat, but she made a loud sniffing sound through the mail slot to clearly signal she was about to sneeze the kind of sticky sneeze that instantly covers everything in camouflage paint. It had no effect.

“Wolfheart has disappeared,” she finally admits to the wurse.

Elsa tries to be brave. It goes quite well while they are walking through the cellar. And it’s quite okay while they go up the cellar stairs. But when they’re standing in the vestibule inside the main door, she senses the smell of tobacco smoke, the same kind of tobacco that Granny used to smoke, and a lingering fear from her nightmare paralyzes her. Her shoes weigh a thousand tons. Her head thumps as if something has worked itself loose and is rattling around in there.

It’s strange how quickly the significance of a certain smell can change, depending on what path it decides to take through the brain. It’s strange how close love and fear live to each other.

She tells herself she’s just imagining it, but it doesn’t help. The wurse stands patiently next to her, but her shoes won’t budge.

A newspaper blows past outside the window. It’s the kind of newspaper you get through the mail slot even if you have a “No junk mail, please!” sticker on the door. It reminds Elsa of Granny. She stands there, still frozen, and the newspaper makes her angry, because it’s Granny who put her in this situation. It’s all Granny’s fault.

Elsa remembers the time Granny called the newspaper office and gave them a roasting for putting the paper in her mail slot even though she had a “No junk mail, ever. Thanks!” message in surprisingly clear letters on the door. Elsa had thought a lot about why it said “Thanks!” because Elsa’s mum always said that if one can’t say thanks as if one means it, one may as well not bother. And it didn’t sound like the note on Granny’s door meant it at all.

But the people answering the telephone at the office of the newspaper told Granny their newspaper wasn’t in the business of advertising but in fact “social information,” which can be put in people’s mailboxes irrespective of whether people thank them not to do so. Granny had demanded to know who owned the company that produced the newspaper, and after that she demanded a word with him. The people at the other end of the telephone line said that surely Granny could understand that the owner did not have time for this sort of nonsense.

Of course, they shouldn’t have said that, because there were actually an awful lot of things that Granny didn’t “surely understand” at all. Also, unlike the man who owned the company that produced the free newspaper, she had a lot of spare time. “Never mess with someone who has more spare time than you do,” Granny used to say. Elsa used to translate that as, “Never mess with someone who’s perky for her age.”

In the following days Granny had picked up Elsa as usual from school, and then they’d patrolled the block with yellow IKEA carrier bags, ringing all the doorbells. People seemed to find it a bit weird, especially since everyone knows you’re actually not allowed to take those yellow IKEA bags from the store. If anyone started asking too many questions, Granny just said they were from an environmental organization collecting recyclable paper. And then people didn’t dare make any more fuss. “People are afraid of environmental organizations, they think we’ll storm the flat and accuse them of not handling their waste properly. They watch too many films,” Granny had explained as she and Elsa loaded the stuffed carrier bags into Renault. Elsa never quite understood what kinds of films Granny had seen, and where that sort of thing would ever happen. She did know that Granny hated environmental organizations, which she called “panda fascists.”

Whatever the case, you’re actually not supposed to take those yellow carrier bags out of the store. Of course, Granny had just shrugged it off. “I never stole the bags, I just haven’t given them back yet,” she muttered, and gave Elsa a thick felt-tip pen to write with. And then Elsa said she wanted at least four tubs of Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk for this. And then Granny said, “One!” and then Elsa said, “Three!” and then Granny said, “Two!” and then Elsa said, “Three, or I’m telling Mum!” and then Granny yelled, “I’m not negotiating with terrorists!” And then Elsa pointed out that if one looked up “terrorist” on Wikipedia there were quite a lot of things in the definition of the word that applied to Granny but not a single one that applied to Elsa. “The goal of terrorists is to create chaos, and Mum says that’s exactly what you’re busy doing all day long,” said Elsa. And then Granny had agreed to give Elsa four tubs if she just took the felt-tip pen and promised to keep her mouth shut. And so that’s what Elsa did. Late into the night she’d sat in the dark in Renault on the other side of town, on guard duty, while Granny ran in and out of houses’ entrances with her yellow IKEA carrier bags. The next morning the man who owned the company that produced the free newspaper was woken by the neighbors ringing his doorbell, very upset because someone had apparently filled the lift with hundreds of copies of the free newspaper. Every mailbox was stuffed full of them, and every square inch of the large glass entrance door had been covered in taped-up copies, and outside every flat great tottering piles had been left that collapsed and fell down the stairs when the doors were opened. On every copy of the newspaper, the man’s name had been written in large, neat felt-tip letters, and just below, “Complimentry social information, for yor reading plesure!!!”