My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(61)
“I think Alf is our friend now,” she whispers.
The wurse looks like it agrees.
“We’re going to need all the friends we can get. Because Granny didn’t tell me what happens in this fairy tale.”
The wurse snuggles up against her.
“I miss Wolfheart,” Elsa whispers into its fur.
Reluctantly, the wurse seems to agree with that too.
20
CLOTHES SHOP
Today’s the day. And it starts with the most terrible night.
Elsa wakes with her mouth wide open but her scream fills her head rather than the room. She roars silently and reaches out with her hand to toss aside the bedclothes, but they’re already on the floor. She walks into the flat—it smells of eggs. George smiles carefully at her from the kitchen. She doesn’t smile back. He looks upset. She doesn’t care.
She has a shower so hot her skin feels as if it’s about to come away from her flesh like clementine peel. Walks out into the flat. Mum left home hours ago. She’s gone to fix everything, because that is what Mum does.
George calls out something behind Elsa, but she neither listens nor answers. She puts on the clothes that Mum has put out for her and crosses the landing, locking the front door behind her. Granny’s flat smells wrong. It smells clean. The towers of packing boxes throw shadows across the entry hall, like monuments to everything that is now absent.
She stands inside the door, incapable of going any farther. She was here last night, but it’s more difficult by daylight. It’s harder work remembering things when the sun is forcing its way in through the blinds. Cloud animals soar past in the sky. It’s a beautiful morning but a terrible day.
Elsa’s skin is still burning after her shower. It makes her think of Granny, because Granny’s shower hasn’t worked in over a year, and instead of calling the landlord and asking him to fix the problem, she just used Mum and George’s shower. And sometimes she forgot to do up her dressing gown when she went back through the flat. And sometimes she forgot her dressing gown altogether. Once, Mum shouted at her for what must have been fifteen minutes because she didn’t show any respect about George also living in Mum and Elsa’s flat. But that was soon after Elsa had starting reading the collected works of Charles Dickens. Granny was not much use at reading books, so Elsa used to read them to her while they were driving Renault, because Elsa wanted to have someone she could discuss them with afterwards. Especially A Christmas Carol, which Elsa had read several times, because Granny liked Christmas stories.
So when Mum said that thing about how Granny shouldn’t run about naked in the flat, out of respect for George, then Granny, still naked, turned to George and said, “What’s all this respect rubbish? You’re cohabiting with my daughter, for goodness sake.” And then Granny bowed very deeply and very nakedly and added ceremoniously: “I am the spirit of future Christmases, George!”
Mum was very angry at Granny about that, but she tried not to show it, for Elsa’s sake. So, for Mum’s sake, Elsa tried not to show how proud she was of Granny for being able to quote Charles Dickens.
Elsa goes into the flat without taking off her shoes. She’s wearing the kind of shoes that scratch the parquet flooring, so Mum has told her she can’t wear them inside, but it doesn’t matter in Granny’s place, because the floor already looks as if someone went skating on it. Partly because it’s old, and partly because Granny actually once went skating on it.
Elsa opens the door of the big wardrobe. The wurse licks her face. It smells of protein bars and sponge cake mix. Elsa had just gone to bed last night when she realized that Mum would most likely send George down to the cellar storage unit today to get the spare chairs, because everyone is coming here afterwards for coffee. Because today is the day, and everyone drinks coffee somewhere after days like this.
Mum and George’s cellar unit is next to Granny’s unit, and it’s the only storage unit you can see the wurse from now that Alf has put up the plywood sheets. So Elsa sneaked down in the night, unable to decide whether she was more afraid of shadows or ghosts or Britt-Marie, and brought the wurse upstairs.
“There would be more space to hide you in here if Granny wasn’t dead,” says Elsa apologetically, because then the wardrobe wouldn’t have stopped growing. “Then again, if Granny hadn’t died, you wouldn’t need to hide in the first place.”
The wurse licks her face again and squeezes its head through the opening and looks for her backpack. Elsa runs to fetch it from the hall and pulls out three tins of dreams and a quart of milk.
“Maud left them with Mum last night,” Elsa explains, but when the wurse immediately starts snuffling her hands as if about to eat the cookies with the tin still around them, she raises an admonishing forefinger.
“You can only have two tins! One is for ammunition!”
The wurse barks at her a bit about that, but in the end recognizes its poor bargaining position and only polishes off two of the tins and half of the third. It is a wurse, after all. And these are cookies.
Elsa takes the milk and goes looking for her moo-gun. She’s a bit slow on the uptake today. Because she hasn’t had any nightmares in years, she’s only realizing now that she may need it. The first time the shadow came to her in the nightmare, she tried to shake it all off the next morning. As you do. Tried to persuade herself that “it was only a nightmare.” But she should have known better. Because everyone who has ever been in the Land-Of-Almost-Awake knows better.