My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(59)

On the way back home, Granny and Elsa had stopped at a gas station to buy ice cream. A few days later Granny called the newspaper once again, and after that she never received a single free copy.



“Coming in or going?”

Alf’s voice cuts through the gloom of the stairwell like laughter. Elsa turns around and instinctively wants to throw herself into his arms, but she stops herself because she realizes he would probably dislike that almost as much as Wolfheart would. He shoves his hands in his pockets with a creak of his leather jacket and nods sharply at the door.

“In or out? There are others apart from you who fancy a bloody walk, you know.”

Elsa and the wurse give him blank looks. He mutters something and goes past them and opens the door. Immediately they fall into step just behind him, though he never asked for their company. When they’ve gone around the corner of the house, out of sight from Britt-Marie’s balcony, the wurse backs into a bush and growls at them as politely as can be expected of a wurse in need of a bit of concentration. They turn away. Alf looks unamused in every possible way by his uninvited company. Elsa clears her throat and tries to think of something to make small talk about, to keep him there.

“The car’s going well, is it?” she bursts out, because that’s what she’s heard her dad say when he’s at a loss.

Alf nods. Nothing more. Elsa breathes loudly.

“What did the accountant say at the meeting?” she asks instead, in the hope that this might make Alf as upset and talkative as he gets at the residents’ meetings. It’s easier to get people talking about things they dislike than things they like, Elsa has noticed. And it’s easier not to get frightened of shadows in the dark when someone is talking, whatever they’re talking about.

“That accountant bastard said the owners had decided to sell the bloody flats to the residents’ association bastards, if everyone in the house agrees.”

Elsa observes the corners of his mouth. He almost seems to be smiling.

“Is that funny?”

“Are you living in the same house as me? They’ll solve the Israel-Palestine conflict before people in this house agree about anything.”

“Will anyone want to sell their flat if the house is converted to leaseholds?” she asks.

The corners of Alf’s mouth flatten into a more Alf-like shape.

“I don’t know about wanting, most will bloody well have to.”

“Why?”

“Good area. Expensive bloody flats. Most people in the house won’t be able to afford that kind of bastard bank loan.”

“Will you have to move?”

“Probably.”

“Mum and George and me, then?”

“I don’t bloody know, do I?”

Elsa thinks.

“What about Maud and Lennart?”

“You’ve got a bloody lot of questions.”

“Well, what are you doing out here if you don’t want to talk?”

Alf’s jacket creaks towards the wurse in the bush.

“I was only going for a bloody walk. No one bloody invited you and that thing.”

“It’s just insane how much you swear, did anyone ever tell you that? My dad says it’s a sign of a bad vocabulary.”

Alf glares at her and shoves his hands in his pockets.

“Maud and Lennart will have to move. And the girl and her kid on the first bloody floor as well, most likely. The psychologist wench you went to yesterday, I don’t know, she probably has a hell of a lot of money—”

He stops himself. Summons some kind of self-restraint.

“That . . . lady. She probably has a . . . heck of a lot of money, that . . . woman,” he self-corrects.

“What did my granny think about the leasehold?”

There’s another brief twitch at the corners of Alf’s mouth.

“Usually the diametric opposite of what Britt-Marie thought.”

Elsa draws miniature snow-angels with her shoe.

“Maybe it’ll be good? If there are leaseholds, then maybe everyone can move somewhere . . . good?” she says tentatively.

“It’s good here. We’re doing fine here. This is our bloody home.”

Elsa doesn’t protest. This is her home too.

Another free newspaper tumbles past in the wind. It gets caught on her foot for a moment, before it tears itself free and keeps rolling like an angry little starfish. It makes Elsa furious again. Gets her thinking about how much Granny was willing to fight to get them to stop putting newspapers in her letter box. It makes Elsa furious because it was a typical Granny thing to do, because Granny was only doing it for Elsa’s sake. Granny things were always like that. For Elsa’s sake.

Because Granny actually liked those newspapers, she used to stuff them into her shoes when it had been raining. But one day when Elsa read on the Internet how many trees it took to make just one edition of a newspaper, she put up “No junk mail ever, thanks!” notices on both Mum’s and Granny’s doors, because Elsa is a big fan of the environment. The newspapers kept coming, and when Elsa called the company they just laughed at her. And they shouldn’t have done that. Because no one laughs at Granny’s grandchild.

Granny hated the environment, but she was the kind of person you brought along when you were going to war. So she became a terrorist for Elsa’s sake. Elsa is furious at Granny for that, in fact, because Elsa wants to be furious at Granny. For everything else. For the lies and for abandoning Mum and for dying. But it’s impossible to stay angry at someone who’s prepared to turn terrorist for the sake of her grandchild. And it makes Elsa furious that she can’t be furious.