My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(90)

“I do know that,” he says.

“Why are you sleeping, then?”

“I was up late last night.”

“Doing what?”

Alf takes a sip of his coffee.

“What are you doing here?”

“I asked first,” Elsa insists.

“I’m not the one standing at your door in the middle of the night!”

“It’s not the middle of the night. And it’s Christmas!”

He drinks some more coffee. She kicks his doormat irritably.

“I can’t find the wurse.”

“I know that as well.” Alf nods casually.

“How?”

“Because it’s here.”

Elsa’s eyebrows shoot up as if they just sat down in wet paint.

“The wurse is here?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“I just bloody did.”

“Why is it here?”

“Because Kent came home at five this morning, and it couldn’t sit on the stairs. Kent would have bloody called the police if he’d found out it was still in the house.”

Elsa peers into Alf’s flat. The wurse is sitting on the floor, lapping at something in a big metal bowl in front of it. It says Juventus on it. The metal bowl, that is.

“How do you know what time Kent came home?”

“Because I was in the garage when he arrived in his bastard BMW,” says Alf impatiently.

“What were you doing in the garage?” asks Elsa patiently.

Alf looks as if that is an incredibly stupid question.

“I was waiting for him.”

“How long did you wait?”

“Until five o’clock, I bloody said,” he grunts.

Elsa thinks about giving him a hug, but leaves it. The wurse peers up from the metal bowl, looking enormously pleased. Something black is dripping from its nose. Elsa turns to Alf.

“Alf, did you give the wurse . . . coffee?”

“Yes,” says Alf, and looks as if he can’t understand what could reasonably be wrong about that.

“It’s an ANIMAL! Why did you give it COFFEE?”

Alf scratches his scalp, which, for him, is the same thing as scratching his hair. Then he adjusts his dressing gown. Elsa notices that he has a thick scar running across his chest. He sees her noticing and looks grumpy about it.

Alf goes into his bedroom and closes the door, and when he comes out again he is wearing his leather jacket with the taxi badge. Even though it’s Christmas Eve. They have to let the wurse pee in the garage, because there are even more police outside the building now, and not even a wurse can hold out for very long after drinking a bowl of coffee.

Granny would have loved that one. Peeing in the garage. It will drive Britt-Marie to distraction.

When they come up, Mum and George’s flat smells of Swiss meringues and pasta gratin with béarnaise sauce, because Mum has decided that everyone in the house is having Christmas together this year. No one disagreed with her, partly because it was a good idea, and partly because no one ever disagrees with Mum. And then George suggested that everyone should make their own favorite dish for a Christmas buffet. He’s good like that, George, which infuriates Elsa.

The boy with a syndrome’s favorite food is Swiss meringue, so his mum made it for him. Well, his mum got out all the ingredients and Lennart picked all the meringues up off the floor and Maud made the actual Swiss meringue while the boy and his mother were dancing.

And then Maud and Lennart thought it was important that the woman in the black skirt also felt involved, because they’re good like that, so they asked if she wanted to prepare anything in particular. She just sat glued to her chair at the far end of the flat and looked very embarrassed and mumbled that she hadn’t cooked any food for several years. “You don’t cook very much when you live alone,” she explained. And then Maud looked very upset and apologized for being so insensitive. And then the woman in the black skirt felt so sorry for Maud that she made a pasta gratin with béarnaise sauce. Because that was her boys’ favorite dish. So they all have Swiss meringue and pasta gratin with béarnaise sauce, because that’s the sort of Christmas it is. In spite of it all.

The wurse gets two buckets of cinnamon buns from Maud, and George goes to the cellar to fetch up the bathing tub Elsa had when she was a baby and fills it with mulled wine. With this as an incentive, the wurse agrees to hide for an hour in the wardrobe in Granny’s flat, and then Mum goes down and invites the police up from outside the house. Green-eyes sits next to Mum. They laugh. The summer intern is there too; he eats the most Swiss meringue of them all and falls asleep on the sofa.

The woman in the black skirt sits in silence at the table, in the far corner. After they’ve eaten, while George is washing up and Maud wiping down the tables and Lennart sitting on a stool with a standby cup of coffee, waiting for the percolator and making sure it’s not going to get up to any tricks, the boy with a syndrome goes through the flat and crosses the landing and goes into Granny’s flat. When he comes back he has cinnamon bun crumbs all around his mouth and so many wurse hairs on his sweater that he looks like someone invited him to a fancy dress party and he decided to dress up as a carpet. He gets a blanket from Elsa’s room and walks up to the woman in the black skirt, looks at her for a long time, then reaches up, standing on his tiptoes, and pinches her nose. Startled, she jumps, and the boy’s mother makes the sort of scream that mothers make when their children pinch complete strangers’ noses and rushes towards him. But Maud gently catches hold of her arm and stops her, and when the boy holds up his thumb, poking out between his index finger and his middle finger, while looking at the woman in the black skirt, Maud explains pleasantly: “It’s a game. He’s pretending he stole your nose.”