My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(78)

Elsa knows that because when Dad drinks a glass and a half of champagne on New Year’s Eve, he sometimes does the spruce dance in the kitchen with Lisette. But for Dad it’s just known as “dancing.”

“Sorry, Dad, I do know what day it is!” Elsa yells, hopping into her jeans, getting into her sweater and jacket, and running into the hall. “I just have to do one thing first!”

Elsa hid the wurse in Renault last night. She brought it down a bucket of cinnamon buns from Maud and told it to hide under the blankets in the backseat if anyone came down into the garage. “You have to pretend you’re a pile of clothes or a TV or something!” suggested Elsa, though the wurse didn’t look entirely convinced. So Elsa had to go and get a sack of dreams from Maud, after which the wurse gave in and crept under the blankets. It didn’t look much like a TV, though.

Elsa said good night, sneaked back up the stairs, and stood in the dark outside the flat where the mother and the boy with a syndrome live. She was going to ring at the door, but she couldn’t quite make herself do it. Didn’t want to hear any more stories. Didn’t want to know about shadows and darkness. So she just put the letter in the slot in the door and ran away.

Their door is locked and shut today. All the other doors too. Anyone who’s awake has left the house; everyone else is still asleep. So Elsa hears Kent’s voice several floors up, even though he’s whispering, because that’s how the acoustics of stairwells work. Elsa knows that because “acoustics” is a word for the word jar. She hears Kent whispering, “Yes, I promise I’ll be back tonight.” But when he comes down the last flight of stairs, past the wurse’s and Wolfheart’s flats and the boy and the mother’s flat, Kent suddenly starts talking in a loud voice and calling out, “Yes, Klaus! In Frankfurt! Yez, yez, yez!” And then he turns around and pretends that he’s only just noticed Elsa standing behind him.

“What are you doing?” asks Elsa suspiciously.

Kent asks Klaus to hold the line, as you do when there is actually no Klaus at all on the line. He is wearing a rugby shirt with numbers and a little man on a horse on his chest. Kent has told Elsa that this sort of shirt costs more than a thousand kronor, and Granny always used to say that those sorts of shirts were a good thing, because the horse functioned as a sort of manufacturer’s warning that the shirt was highly likely to be transporting a muppet.

“What do you want?” sneers Kent.

Elsa stares at him. Then at the small red bowls of meat that he’s distributing down the stairwell.

“What are those?”

Kent throws out his hands so quickly that he almost throws Klaus into the wall.

“That hound is still running around here, it reduces the value of the leasehold conversion!”

Elsa backs away watchfully, without taking her eyes off the bowls of meat. Kent seems to realize that he has expressed himself a little clumsily, so he makes another attempt, in the sort of voice that men of Kent’s age think one must put on when talking to girls of Elsa’s age, so they’ll understand:

“Britt-Marie found dog hairs on the stairs, you understand, darling? We can’t have wild animals roving around the building—it reduces the value of the leasehold conversion, you see?” He smiles condescendingly; she can see that he’s glancing insecurely at his telephone. “It’s not like we’re going to kill it! It’ll just go to sleep for a bit, okay? Now, why don’t you be a good girl and go home to your mummy?”

Elsa doesn’t feel so very good. And she doesn’t like the way Ken makes quotation marks in the air when he says “go to sleep.” “Who are you talking to on the phone?”

“Klaus, a business contact from Germany,” answers Kent as one does when doing no such thing.

“Sure,” says Elsa.

Kent’s eyebrows sink.

“Are you giving me attitude?”

Elsa shrugs.

“I think you should run home to your mummy now,” Kent repeats, a touch more menacingly.

Elsa points at the bowls. “Is there poison in them?”

“Listen, girlie, stray dogs are vermin. We can’t have vermin running about here, and rust-heaps down in the garage, and all kinds of crap. It’ll lower the value, don’t you understand? It’s better for everyone this way.”

But Elsa hears something ominous in his voice when he says “rust-heaps,” so she pushes past him and charges down the cellar stairs. Throws open the door to the garage and stands there with her hands shaking and her heartbeat thumping through her body. She knocks her knees against every step on the way back up.

“WHERE’S RENAULT! WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE WITH RENAULT!?” she yells at Kent. She waves her fists at him, but only manages to grab hold of Klaus, so she throws Klaus down the cellar stairs so the glass display and plastic cover are smashed and tumble down in a miniature electronic avalanche towards the storage units.

“Are you out of your fu—bloody . . . out of your bloody mind, you stupid kid? You know what that telephone cost?” yells Kent, and then he tells her it bloody cost eight thousand kronor.

Elsa informs him that she couldn’t give a damn what it cost. And then Kent informs her with a sadistic gleam in his eye exactly what he did with Renault.

She runs up the stairs to fetch Dad, but stops abruptly on the penultimate floor. Britt-Marie is standing in her doorway. She’s clasping her hands over her stomach, and Elsa can see that she’s sweating. The kitchen behind her smells of Christmas food, and she’s wearing her flower-print jacket with her large brooch. The pink paintball stain is hardly visible at all.