My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(64)

“Yes.”

Elsa bites her lip.

“Do you believe in life after death?”

The woman looks up at her.

“That’s a difficult question.”

“I mean, you know, do you believe in God?” asks Elsa.

“Sometimes it’s hard to believe in God,” answers the woman.

“Because you wonder why God didn’t stop the tsunami?”

“Because I wonder why there are tsunamis at all.”

Elsa nods.

“I saw someone in a film once say, ‘Faith can move mountains,’?” Elsa goes on, without knowing why, maybe mainly because she doesn’t want to lose sight of the woman before she has time to ask the question she really wants to ask.

“So I hear,” says the woman.

Elsa shakes her head.

“But you know that’s actually true! Because it comes from Miamas, from a giant called Faith. She was so strong it was insane. And she could literally move mountains!”

The woman looks as if she’s trying to find a reason to disappear down the stairs. Elsa takes a quick breath.

“Everyone says I may miss Granny now but it’ll pass. I’m not so sure.”

The woman looks up at her again. With her empathic eyes.

“Why not?”

“It hasn’t passed for you.”

The woman half-closes her eyes.

“Maybe it’s different.”

“How?”

“Your granny was old.”

“Not to me. I only knew her for seven years. Almost eight.”

The woman doesn’t answer. Elsa rubs her hands together like Wolfheart does.

“You should come today!” Elsa calls out after her, but the woman has already disappeared.

Elsa hears the door of her flat closing and then everything is silent until she hears Dad’s voice from the door at the bottom.

She collects herself and wipes her tears and forces the wurse to hide in the wardrobe again with half of the moo-gun ammunition as a bribe. Then she closes the door of Granny’s flat without locking it and runs down the stairs, and a few moments later she’s lying in Audi with the seat reclined as far as it’ll go, staring out of the glass ceiling.

The cloud animals are soaring lower now. Dad is wearing a suit and is also silent. It feels strange, because Dad hardly ever wears a suit. But today is the day.

“Do you believe in God, Dad?” asks Elsa, in the way that always catches him unaware like water balloons thrown from a balcony. Elsa knows that because Granny loved water balloons and Dad learned never to walk right beneath her balcony.

“I don’t know,” he answers.

Elsa hates him for not having an answer but she loves him a bit for not lying. Audi stops outside a black steel gate. They sit for a while, waiting.

“Am I like Granny?” says Elsa without taking her eyes off the sky.

“You mean in physical appearance?” asks Dad hesitantly.

“No, like, as a person,” sighs Elsa.

Dad looks as if he’s fighting his hesitation for a moment, like you do when you have daughters aged about eight. It’s almost as if Elsa has just asked him to explain where babies come from. Again.

“You must stop saying ‘like’ and ‘sort of’ all the time. Only people with a bad vocabulary—” he begins to say instead, because he can’t stop himself. Because that’s the way he is. One of those who find it very important to say “one of those” and not “one of them.”

“So bloody leave it then!” Elsa snaps, much more vehemently than she means to, because she’s not in the mood for his corrections today.

Usually it’s their thing, correcting one another. Their only thing. Dad has a word jar, where Elsa puts difficult words she has learned, like “concise” and “pretentious,” or complex phrases like “My fridge is a taco sauce graveyard.” And every time the jar is full she gets a gift voucher for a book to download on the iPad. The word jar has financed the entire Harry Potter series for her, although she knows Dad is ridiculously dubious about Harry Potter because Dad can’t get his head around a story unless it’s based on reality.

“Sorry,” mumbles Elsa.

Dad sinks into his seat. They compete at seeing who can feel most ashamed. Then he says, slightly less tentatively: “Yes. You’re very much like her. You got all your best qualities from her and your mother.”

Elsa doesn’t answer, because she doesn’t know if that was the answer she wanted. Dad doesn’t say anything either, because he’s unsure whether that was what he should have said. Elsa wants to tell him she wants to stay with him more. Every other weekend is not enough. She wants to yell at him that once Halfie comes along and is quite normal, George and Mum won’t want to have Elsa at home anymore, because parents want normal children, not different children. And Halfie will stand next to Elsa and remind them of all the differences between them. She wants to yell that Granny was wrong, that different is not always good, because different is a mutation and almost no one in X-Men has a family.

She wants to yell out the whole thing. But she doesn’t. Because she knows he’d never understand. And she knows he wouldn’t want her to live with him and Lisette because Lisette has her own children. Undifferent children.