My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(95)

She lies in the darkness for a long time. Breathing in the smell of wood shavings. She thinks about the Harry Potter quotation that Granny nicked for one of her stories from the Land-of-Almost-Awake. It’s from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which is obviously ironic, and to understand this one would need to be fairly well informed about the differences between the Harry Potter books and Harry Potter films, as well as fairly well informed about the meaning of “ironic.”

Because Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the Harry Potter film Elsa likes the least, in spite of it having one of the Harry Potter quotations Elsa likes best. The one where Harry says that he and his friends have one advantage in the approaching war with Voldemort, because they have one thing that Voldemort doesn’t have: “Something worth fighting for.”

It’s ironic because that quotation isn’t in the book, which Elsa likes a lot more than the film, though the book is not one of her favorite Harry Potter books. Now when she thinks of it, possibly it isn’t ironic after all. She has to Wikipedia this properly, she thinks, sitting up. And that is when the letter drops into her lap. It’s been taped to the wardrobe ceiling. She has no idea how long it’s been there.

But this sort of thing is logical in fairy tales.

A minute later, Alf is standing in his doorway. He’s drinking coffee and looks like he hasn’t slept all night. He looks at the envelope. It just says “ALF” on it, in unnecessarily large letters.

“I found it in the wardrobe. It’s from Granny. I think she wants to say sorry about something,” Elsa informs him.

Alf makes a shush sound and points to the radio behind him, which she really doesn’t appreciate. There’s the traffic news on the radio. “There’s been some damned accident up on the highway. All city-bound traffic has been stuck for hours,” he says, as if this is something that will interest Elsa. It doesn’t—she’s too interested in the letter. Alf only reads it after a lot of nagging.

“What does it say, then?” Elsa demands the second he seems to have finished.

“It says sorry.”

“Yes, but sorry for what?”

Alf sighs in the way he’s generally been sighing at Elsa lately.

“It’s my damned letter, isn’t it?”

“Does she write sorry for always saying that you didn’t lift your feet when you walked and that’s why you have such worn-out shoes?”

“What’s wrong with my shoes?” says Alf, looking at his shoes. This doesn’t seem to have been one of the themes of the letter.

“Nothing. There’s nothing at all wrong with your shoes,” mumbles Elsa.

“I’ve had these shoes for more than five years!”

“They’re very nice shoes,” Elsa lies.

Alf doesn’t quite look as if he trusts her. Again, he looks down at the letter skeptically.

“Me and your grandmother had a bloody row before she died, all right? Just before she had to go to the hospital. She’d borrowed my electric screwdriver and never bloody bothered to give it back, but she said she bloody had given it back even though I knew damned well she never bloody did.”

Elsa sighs in that way she’s started generally sighing at Alf lately.

“Did you ever hear about the bloke who swore himself to death?”

“No,” says Alf, as if the question was seriously meant.

Elsa rolls her eyes.

“What does Granny write about the electric screwdriver, then?”

“She just writes sorry for losing it.”

He folds up the letter and puts it back in the envelope. Elsa stubbornly stays where she is.

“What else? I saw there was more than that in the letter. I’m not an idiot, you know!”

Alf puts the envelope on the hat shelf.

“It says sorry about loads of things.”

“Is it complicated?”

“There wasn’t a crap in your grandmother’s life that wasn’t complicated.”

Elsa presses her hands farther into her pockets. Peers down her chin at the Gryffindor emblem on her scarf. At the stitches, where Mum mended it after the girls at school had torn it. Mum still thinks it tore when Granny climbed the fence at the zoo.

“Do you believe in life after death?” she asks Alf, without looking at him.

“Haven’t got a bloody clue,” says Alf, not unpleasantly and not all pleasantly, just in a very Alf-like way.

“I mean, like, do you believe in . . . paradise . . . sort of thing,” mumbles Elsa.

Alf drinks his coffee and thinks about it.

“It would be bloody complicated. Logistically, I mean. Paradise must be where there aren’t so many damned people,” he mutters at last.

Elsa considers this. Realizes the logic of it. Paradise for Elsa is, after all, a place where Granny is, but paradise for Britt-Marie must probably be a place totally dependent on Granny not being there.

“You’re quite deep sometimes,” she says to Alf.

He drinks coffee and looks as if he finds that a bit of a bloody mouthful for an almost-eight-year-old.

Elsa is intending to ask him something else about the letter, but she never has time. And when she looks back she will think that if she’d made some different choices, this day would not have worked out as terribly as it did in the end. But by then it’s too late for that.