My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(91)

The woman stares at Maud. Stares at the boy. Stares at the nose. And then she steals his nose. And he laughs so loudly that the windows start rattling. He falls asleep in her lap, wrapped up in the blanket. When his mother, with an apologetic smile, tries to lift him off, observing as she does so that “it’s actually not at all like him to be so direct,” the woman in the black skirt touches her hand tremulously and whispers: “If . . . if it’s all right I . . . could I hold him a little longer . . . ?”

The boy’s mother puts both her hands around the woman’s hand and nods. The woman puts her forehead against the boy’s hair and whispers: “Thanks.”

George makes more mulled wine and everything feels almost normal and not at all frightening. After the police have thanked them for their hospitality and headed back down the stairs, Maud looks unhappily at Elsa and says she can understand it must have been frightening for a child to have police in the house on Christmas Eve. But Elsa takes her by the hand and says: “Don’t worry, Maud. This is a Christmas tale. They always have a happy ending.”

And it’s clear that Maud believes it.

Because you have to believe.





30





PERFUME


Only one person collapses with a heart attack late on Christmas Eve. But two hearts are broken. And the house is never quite the same again.

It all starts with the boy waking up late in the afternoon and feeling hungry. The wurse and Samantha come flopping out of the wardrobe because the mulled wine is finished. Elsa marches in circles around Alf and intimates that it’s time to get the Santa suit. Elsa and the wurse follow Alf down to the garage. He gets into Taxi. When Elsa opens the passenger door and sticks her head in and asks what he’s doing, he turns the ignition key and grunts: “If I have to impersonate Santa for the rest of the day, I’m nipping out for a newspaper first.”

“I don’t think my mum wants me to go anywhere.”

“No one invited you!”

Elsa and the wurse ignore him and jump in. When Alf starts railing at her that you can’t just jump into people’s cars like that, Elsa says that this is actually Taxi and that is precisely what one does with Taxi. And when Alf grumpily taps the meter and points out that taxi journeys cost money, Elsa says that she’d like to have this taxi journey as her Christmas present. And then Alf looks very grumpy for a long time, and then they go off for Elsa’s Christmas present.

Alf knows of a kiosk that’s open even on Christmas Eve. He buys a newspaper. Elsa buys two ice creams. The wurse eats all of its own and half of hers. Which, if one knows how much wurses like ice cream, shows how immensely considerate it is being. It spills some of it in the backseat, but Alf only shouts at it for about ten minutes. Which, if one knows how much Alf dislikes wurses spilling ice cream in the backseat of Taxi, shows how immensely considerate he was being.

“Can I ask you something?” asks Elsa, even though she knows full well that this is also a question. “Why didn’t Britt-Marie spill the beans about the wurse to the police?”

“She can be a bit of a nagbag sometimes. But she’s not bloody evil,” Alf clarifies.

“But she hates dogs,” Elsa persists.

“Ah, she’s just scared of them. Your granny used to bring back loads of strays to the house when she moved in. We were just little brats back then, Britt-Marie and Kent and me. One of the mutts bit Britt-Marie and her mum made a hell of a commotion about it,” Alf says, a shockingly lengthy description given that it’s coming from Alf.

Taxi pulls into the street. Elsa thinks of Granny’s stories about the Princess of Miploris.

“So you’ve been in love with Britt-Marie since you were ten years old?” she asks.

“Yes,” Alf replies as if it’s absolutely self-evident. Bowled over by this, Elsa looks at him and waits, because she knows that only by waiting will she get him to tell the whole story. You know things like that when you’re almost eight.

She waits for as long as she needs to.

Then after two red lights Alf sighs resignedly, like you do while preparing yourself to tell a story even though you don’t like telling stories. And then he recounts the tale of Britt-Marie. And himself. Although the latter part may not be his intention. There are quite a lot of swearwords in it, and Elsa has to exert herself quite a lot not to correct the grammar. But after a lot of “ifs” and “buts” and quite a few “damneds,” Alf has explained that he and Kent grew up with their mother in the flat where Alf now lives. When Alf was ten, another family moved into the flat above theirs, with two daughters of the same age as Alf and Kent. The mother was a renowned singer and the father wore a suit and was always at work. The elder sister, Ingrid, apparently had an outstanding singing talent. She was going to be a star, her mother explained to Alf and Kent’s mother. She never said anything about the other daughter, Britt-Marie. Alf and Kent caught sight of her anyway. It was impossible not to.

No one remembers exactly when the young female medical student first showed up in the house. One day she was just there in the enormous flat that took up the entire top floor of the house in those days, and when Alf and Kent’s mother interrogated her about why she lived by herself in such a big flat, the young female medical student replied that she’d “won it in a game of poker.” She wasn’t at home a great deal, of course, and whenever she was, she was always accompanied by outlandish friends and, from time to time, stray dogs. One evening she brought home a large black cur that she’d apparently also won in a game of poker, Alf explains. Alf and Kent and the daughters of the neighboring family only wanted to play with it; they didn’t understand that it was sleeping. Alf was quite certain it never meant to bite Britt-Marie, it was just caught unawares. She was too.