My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(83)

“No, but not everything in the world is about me, right?”

She points into the flat. The boy is sitting on the floor in front of the TV. Alf looks at him and grunts.

“Why can’t Lennart be Santa?”

“Because Lennart couldn’t keep a secret from Maud,” Elsa answers impatiently.

“What’s the bloody relevance of that?”

“The relevance is that Maud can’t keep a secret from anyone!”

Alf squints at Elsa. Then he reluctantly mutters that that’s true enough. Because Maud really couldn’t keep a secret even if it was glued to the insides of her hands. While George was playing hide-the-key with Elsa and the boy with a syndrome earlier, Maud had walked behind them and repeatedly whispered, “Maybe you should look in the flowerpot in the bookshelf,” and when Elsa’s mum explained to Maud that the whole point of the game was sort of to find out for yourself where the key was hidden, Maud looked disconsolate and said, “The children look so sad while they’re searching, I don’t want them to be sad.”

“So you have to be Santa,” Elsa says conclusively.

“What about George?” Alf tries.

“He’s too tall. And anyway it’ll be too obvious, because he’ll wear his jogging shorts on the outside of the Santa suit.”

Alf doesn’t look as if that would make much of a difference to him. He takes a couple of dissatisfied steps across the landing and into the hall, where he peers over the edge of the chest as if hoping to find a better option. But the only things he sees there are bedsheets and then Elsa’s Spider-Man suit.

“What’s that?” asks Alf, and pokes at it, as if it might poke him back.

“My Spider-Man suit,” grunts Elsa, trying to close the lid.

“When do you get to wear that?” wonders Alf, apparently expecting to know the exact date of the annual Spider-Man day.

“I was supposed to be wearing it when school starts again. We’ve got a class project.” She closes the chest with a slam. Alf stands there with the Santa suit in his hand and doesn’t seem interested. At all, actually. Elsa groans.

“If you haaave to know, I’m not going to be Spider-Man, because apparently girls aren’t allowed to be Spider-Man! But I don’t care because I haven’t got the energy to fight with everyone all the bloody time!”

Alf has already started walking back to the stairs. Elsa swallows her tears, so he doesn’t hear them. Maybe he hears them all the same, though. Because he stops by the corner of the railing. Crumples up the Santa suit in his fist. Sighs. Says something that Elsa doesn’t hear.

“What?” Elsa says irritably.

Alf sighs again, harder.

“I said I think your grandmother would have wanted you to dress up as any bloody thing you like,” he repeats brusquely, without turning around.

Elsa pushes her hands into her pockets and glares down at the floor.

“The others at school say girls can’t be Spider-Man . . .”

Alf takes two dragging steps down the stairs. Stops. Looks at her.

“Don’t you think a lot of bastards said that to your grandmother?”

Elsa peers at him.

“Did she dress up as Spider-Man?”

“No.”

“What are you talking about, then?”

“She dressed up as a doctor.”

“Did they tell her she couldn’t be a doctor? Because she was a girl?”

Alf shifts something in the toolbox and then stuffs in the Santa suit.

“Most likely they told her a whole lot of damned things she wasn’t allowed to do, for a range of different reasons. But she damned well did them all the same. A few years after she was born they were still telling girls they couldn’t vote in the bleeding elections, but now the girls do it all the same. That’s damned well how you stand up to bastards who tell you what you can and can’t do. You bloody do those things all the bloody same.”

Elsa watches her shoes. Alf watches his toolbox. Then Elsa goes into the hall, takes two chocolate Santas, eats one of them, and throws the other to Alf, who catches it in his free hand. He shrugs slightly.

“I think your grandmother would have wanted you to dress up as any old damned thing you wanted.”

With that he shuffles off, his Italian opera music seeping out as he opens his door and closes it behind him. Elsa goes into the hall and fetches the whole bowl of chocolate Santas. Then she takes the boy’s hand and calls the wurse. All three of them go across the landing to Granny’s flat, where they crawl into the magic wardrobe that stopped growing when Granny died. It smells of wood shavings in there. And, in fact, it has magically grown to the exact dimensions needed to accommodate two children and a wurse.

The boy with a syndrome mainly keeps his eyes shut, and Elsa brings him to the Land-of-Almost-Awake. They fly over all six kingdoms, and when they turn towards Mimovas the boy recognizes where he is. He jumps off the cloud animal and starts running. When he gets to the city gates, where the music of Mimovas comes pouring out, he starts dancing. He dances beautifully. And Elsa dances with him.





27





MULLED WINE


The wurse wakes Elsa up later that night because it needs a pee. She mumbles sleepily that maybe the wurse shouldn’t have drunk so much mulled wine and tries to go back to sleep. But unfortunately the wurse begins to look sort of like wurses do when they’re planning to pee on a Gryffindor scarf, whereupon Elsa snatches the scarf away and reluctantly agrees to take it out.