20
CLOTHES SHOP
Today’s the day. And it starts with the most terrible night.
Elsa wakes with her mouth wide open but her scream fills her head rather than the room. She roars silently and reaches out with her hand to toss aside the bedclothes, but they’re already on the floor. She walks into the flat—it smells of eggs. George smiles carefully at her from the kitchen. She doesn’t smile back. He looks upset. She doesn’t care.
She has a shower so hot her skin feels as if it’s about to come away from her flesh like clementine peel. Walks out into the flat. Mum left home hours ago. She’s gone to fix everything, because that is what Mum does.
George calls out something behind Elsa, but she neither listens nor answers. She puts on the clothes that Mum has put out for her and crosses the landing, locking the front door behind her. Granny’s flat smells wrong. It smells clean. The towers of packing boxes throw shadows across the entry hall, like monuments to everything that is now absent.
She stands inside the door, incapable of going any farther. She was here last night, but it’s more difficult by daylight. It’s harder work remembering things when the sun is forcing its way in through the blinds. Cloud animals soar past in the sky. It’s a beautiful morning but a terrible day.
Elsa’s skin is still burning after her shower. It makes her think of Granny, because Granny’s shower hasn’t worked in over a year, and instead of calling the landlord and asking him to fix the problem, she just used Mum and George’s shower. And sometimes she forgot to do up her dressing gown when she went back through the flat. And sometimes she forgot her dressing gown altogether. Once, Mum shouted at her for what must have been fifteen minutes because she didn’t show any respect about George also living in Mum and Elsa’s flat. But that was soon after Elsa had starting reading the collected works of Charles Dickens. Granny was not much use at reading books, so Elsa used to read them to her while they were driving Renault, because Elsa wanted to have someone she could discuss them with afterwards. Especially A Christmas Carol, which Elsa had read several times, because Granny liked Christmas stories.
So when Mum said that thing about how Granny shouldn’t run about naked in the flat, out of respect for George, then Granny, still naked, turned to George and said, “What’s all this respect rubbish? You’re cohabiting with my daughter, for goodness sake.” And then Granny bowed very deeply and very nakedly and added ceremoniously: “I am the spirit of future Christmases, George!”
Mum was very angry at Granny about that, but she tried not to show it, for Elsa’s sake. So, for Mum’s sake, Elsa tried not to show how proud she was of Granny for being able to quote Charles Dickens.
Elsa goes into the flat without taking off her shoes. She’s wearing the kind of shoes that scratch the parquet flooring, so Mum has told her she can’t wear them inside, but it doesn’t matter in Granny’s place, because the floor already looks as if someone went skating on it. Partly because it’s old, and partly because Granny actually once went skating on it.
Elsa opens the door of the big wardrobe. The wurse licks her face. It smells of protein bars and sponge cake mix. Elsa had just gone to bed last night when she realized that Mum would most likely send George down to the cellar storage unit today to get the spare chairs, because everyone is coming here afterwards for coffee. Because today is the day, and everyone drinks coffee somewhere after days like this.
Mum and George’s cellar unit is next to Granny’s unit, and it’s the only storage unit you can see the wurse from now that Alf has put up the plywood sheets. So Elsa sneaked down in the night, unable to decide whether she was more afraid of shadows or ghosts or Britt-Marie, and brought the wurse upstairs.
“There would be more space to hide you in here if Granny wasn’t dead,” says Elsa apologetically, because then the wardrobe wouldn’t have stopped growing. “Then again, if Granny hadn’t died, you wouldn’t need to hide in the first place.”
The wurse licks her face again and squeezes its head through the opening and looks for her backpack. Elsa runs to fetch it from the hall and pulls out three tins of dreams and a quart of milk.
“Maud left them with Mum last night,” Elsa explains, but when the wurse immediately starts snuffling her hands as if about to eat the cookies with the tin still around them, she raises an admonishing forefinger.
“You can only have two tins! One is for ammunition!”
The wurse barks at her a bit about that, but in the end recognizes its poor bargaining position and only polishes off two of the tins and half of the third. It is a wurse, after all. And these are cookies.
Elsa takes the milk and goes looking for her moo-gun. She’s a bit slow on the uptake today. Because she hasn’t had any nightmares in years, she’s only realizing now that she may need it. The first time the shadow came to her in the nightmare, she tried to shake it all off the next morning. As you do. Tried to persuade herself that “it was only a nightmare.” But she should have known better. Because everyone who has ever been in the Land-Of-Almost-Awake knows better.
So last night when she had the same dream, she realized where she had to go to fight the nightmares. To reclaim her nights from them.
“Mirevas!” she calls out firmly to the wurse, when it comes out of one of Granny’s smaller wardrobes followed by an unnameable jumble of things that Mum has not yet had time to put into boxes.
“We have to go to Mirevas!” announces Elsa to the wurse, waving her moo-gun.
Mirevas, one of the kingdoms adjoining Miamas, is the smallest principality in the Land-of-Almost-Awake and for that reason almost forgotten. When children in the Land-of-Almost-Awake are learning geography and have to reel off the names of the six kingdoms, Mirevas is the one they always forget. Even those who live there. Because the Mirevasians are incredibly humble, kindly, and cautious creatures who go to great lengths to avoid taking up unnecessary space or causing the slightest inconvenience. Yet they have a very important task, actually one of the most important tasks in a kingdom where imagination is the most important thing you can have: for it is in Mirevas that the nightmare hunters are trained.
Only smart-asses in the real world who don’t know any better would say something as idiotic as “it was only a nightmare.” There are no “only” nightmares—they’re living creatures, dark little clouds of insecurity and anguish that come sneaking between the houses when everyone is asleep, trying all the doors and windows to find some place to slip inside and start causing a commotion. And that is why there are nightmare hunters. And anyone who knows anything about anything knows one has to have a moo-gun to chase a nightmare. Someone who doesn’t know better might mistake a moo-gun for a quite ordinary paintball gun customised by someone’s granny with a milk carton at the side and a catapult glued to the top. Elsa, though, knows what she’s got in her hands. She loads the carton with milk and puts a cookie in the firing chamber in front of the rubber band on the cookie gun.
You can’t kill a nightmare, but you can scare it. And there’s nothing so feared by nightmares as milk and cookies.
Just as she’s starting to feel more confident, though, she’s startled by the doorbell, and to the infinite chagrin of the wurse she accidentally fires loads of milk at it but no cookie, and it scurries off in a huff. For a moment she wonders how a nightmare can be ringing the doorbell, but it’s only George. He looks upset. She doesn’t care.
“I’m going down to pick up the spare chairs in the cellar storage,” he says and tries to smile at her like stepdads do on days when they have an extra-strong sense of being sidelined.
Elsa shrugs and slams the door in his face. The wurse has reappeared, so she climbs onto its back and peers out of the spyhole to see George lingering there for what must be a minute, looking upset. Elsa hates him for that. Mum always tells Elsa that George just wants her to like him because he cares. As if Elsa doesn’t get that. She knows he cares, and that’s why she can’t like him. Not because she wouldn’t like him if she tried, but rather because she knows she definitely would. Because everyone likes George. It’s his superpower.
And she knows that in this case she’ll only be disappointed when Halfie is born and George forgets she exists. It’s better not to like him from the start.
If you don’t like people, they can’t hurt you. Almost-eight-year-olds who are often described as “different” learn that very quickly.
She jumps down from the wurse’s back. The wurse closes its jaws around the moo-gun and gently but firmly takes it away from her, then shambles off and puts it on a stool out of reach of her trigger finger. But it avoids eating the cookie, which, as anyone who understands just how much wurses love cookies knows, is a significant sign of respect for Elsa.
There’s another ring at the door. Elsa throws it open and is just about to snap impatiently at George when she realizes just in time that it’s not George.
There’s a silence lasting for probably half a dozen eternities.
“Hello, Elsa,” says the woman in the black skirt, sounding a bit lost. She’s wearing jeans, not a black skirt, today, admittedly. And she smells of mint and looks scared. She breathes so slowly that Elsa fears she’s about to expire from a shortage of oxygen.
“I’m . . . I’m very sorry I shouted at you in my office,” she begins.
They scrutinize each other’s shoes.
“It’s cool,” Elsa manages to say at last.
The corners of the woman’s mouth vibrate gently.
“I was a bit caught off guard when you came to the office. I don’t get many people visiting me there. I’m . . . I’m not so good at visits.”
Elsa nods guiltily without looking up from the woman’s shoes.
“It doesn’t matter. Sorry for saying that about . . .” she whispers, unable to get out the last few words.
The woman waves her hand dismissively.
“It was my fault. It’s difficult for me to talk about my family. Your grandmother tried to make me do it, but it only made me . . . well . . . angry.”
Elsa pokes at the floor with the tip of her toe.
“People drink wine to forget things that are hard, right?”
“Or to have the strength to remember. I think.”
Elsa snuffles.
“You’re also broken, right? Like Wolfheart?”
“Broken in . . . in another way. Maybe.”
“Couldn’t you mend yourself, then?”
“You mean because I’m a psychologist?”
Elsa nods. “Doesn’t that work?”
“I don’t think surgeons can operate on themselves. It’s probably more or less the same thing.”
Elsa nods again. For an instant the woman in the jeans looks as if she’s about to reach out towards her, but she stops herself and absentmindedly scratches the palm of her hand instead.
“Your granny wrote in the letter that she wanted me to look after you,” she whispers.
Elsa nods.
“That’s what she writes in all the letters, apparently.”
“You sound angry.”
“She didn’t write any letters to me.”
The woman reaches into a bag on the floor and gets something out.
“I . . . I bought these Harry Potter books yesterday. I haven’t had time to get very far yet, but, you know.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“I . . . I understand Harry Potter is important to you.”
“Harry Potter is important for everyone!”
The skin around the woman’s mouth cracks again. She takes another long, deep breath, looks into Elsa’s eyes and says:
“I like him a lot too, that’s what I wanted to say. It’s been a long time since I had such an amazing reading experience. You almost never do, once you grow up, things are at their peak when you’re a child and then it’s all downhill from there . . . well . . . because of the cynicism, I suppose. I just wanted to thank you for reminding me of how things used to be.”
Those are more words than Elsa has ever heard the woman say without stuttering. The woman offers her what’s in the bag. Elsa takes it. It’s also a book. A fairy tale. The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren. Elsa knows that, because it’s one of her favorite stories that doesn’t come from the Land-of-Almost-Awake. She read it aloud to Granny many times while they were driving around in Renault. It’s about Karl and Jonatan, who die and come to Nangijala, where they have to fight the tyrant Tengil and the dragon Katla.
The woman’s gaze loses its footing again.
“I used to read it to my boys when their granny died. I don’t know if you’ve read it. You probably have.”
Elsa shakes her head and holds the book tightly.
“No,” she lies. Because she’s polite enough to know that if someone gives you a book, you owe that person the pretense that you haven’t read it.
The woman in jeans looks relieved. Then she takes such a deep breath that Elsa fears her wishbone is about to snap.
“You know . . . you asked if we met at the hospital. Your granny and I. After the tsunami I . . . they . . . they had laid out all the dead bodies in a little square. So families and friends could look for their . . . after . . . I . . . I mean, she found me there. In the square. I had been sitting there for . . . I don’t know. Several weeks. I think. She flew me home and she said I could live here until I knew where I was . . . was going.”
Her lips open and close, in turn, as if they’re electric.
“I just stayed here. I just . . . stayed.”
Elsa looks down at her own shoes this time.
“Are you coming today?” she asks.
In the corner of her eye she can see the woman shaking her head. As if she wants to run away again.
“I don’t think I . . . I think your grandmother was very disappointed in me.”
“Maybe she was disappointed in you because you’re so disappointed in yourself.”
There’s a choking sound in the woman’s throat. It takes a while before Elsa understands it’s probably laughter. As if that part of her throat has been in disuse and has just found the key to itself and flicked some old electrical switch.
“You’re really a very different little child,” says the woman.
“I’m not a little child. I’m almost eight!”
“Yes, sorry. You were a newborn. When I moved in here. Newborn.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being different. Granny said that only different people change the world.”
“Yes. Sorry. I . . . I have to go. I just wanted to say . . . sorry.”
“It’s okay. Thanks for the book.”
The woman’s eyes hesitate, but she looks straight at Elsa again.
“Has your friend come back? Wolf—what was it you called him?”
Elsa shakes her head. There’s something in the woman’s eyes that actually looks like genuine concern.
“He does that sometimes. Disappears. You shouldn’t worry. He . . . gets scared of people. Disappears for a while. But he always comes back. He just needs time.”
“I think he needs help.”
“It’s hard to help those who don’t want to help themselves.”
“Someone who wants to help himself is possibly not the one who most needs help from others,” Elsa objects.
The woman nods without answering.
“I have to go,” she repeats.
Elsa wants to stop her but she’s already halfway down the stairs. She has almost disappeared on the floor below when Elsa leans over the railing, gathers her strength and calls out:
“Did you find them? Did you find your boys in the square?”
The woman stops. Holds the banister very hard.
“Yes.”
Elsa bites her lip.
“Do you believe in life after death?”
The woman looks up at her.
“That’s a difficult question.”
“I mean, you know, do you believe in God?” asks Elsa.
“Sometimes it’s hard to believe in God,” answers the woman.
“Because you wonder why God didn’t stop the tsunami?”
“Because I wonder why there are tsunamis at all.”
Elsa nods.
“I saw someone in a film once say, ‘Faith can move mountains,’ ” Elsa goes on, without knowing why, maybe mainly because she doesn’t want to lose sight of the woman before she has time to ask the question she really wants to ask.
“So I hear,” says the woman.
Elsa shakes her head.
“But you know that’s actually true! Because it comes from Miamas, from a giant called Faith. She was so strong it was insane. And she could literally move mountains!”
The woman looks as if she’s trying to find a reason to disappear down the stairs. Elsa takes a quick breath.
“Everyone says I may miss Granny now but it’ll pass. I’m not so sure.”
The woman looks up at her again. With her empathic eyes.
“Why not?”
“It hasn’t passed for you.”
The woman half-closes her eyes.
“Maybe it’s different.”
“How?”
“Your granny was old.”
“Not to me. I only knew her for seven years. Almost eight.”
The woman doesn’t answer. Elsa rubs her hands together like Wolfheart does.
“You should come today!” Elsa calls out after her, but the woman has already disappeared.
Elsa hears the door of her flat closing and then everything is silent until she hears Dad’s voice from the door at the bottom.
She collects herself and wipes her tears and forces the wurse to hide in the wardrobe again with half of the moo-gun ammunition as a bribe. Then she closes the door of Granny’s flat without locking it and runs down the stairs, and a few moments later she’s lying in Audi with the seat reclined as far as it’ll go, staring out of the glass ceiling.
The cloud animals are soaring lower now. Dad is wearing a suit and is also silent. It feels strange, because Dad hardly ever wears a suit. But today is the day.
“Do you believe in God, Dad?” asks Elsa, in the way that always catches him unaware like water balloons thrown from a balcony. Elsa knows that because Granny loved water balloons and Dad learned never to walk right beneath her balcony.
“I don’t know,” he answers.
Elsa hates him for not having an answer but she loves him a bit for not lying. Audi stops outside a black steel gate. They sit for a while, waiting.
“Am I like Granny?” says Elsa without taking her eyes off the sky.
“You mean in physical appearance?” asks Dad hesitantly.
“No, like, as a person,” sighs Elsa.
Dad looks as if he’s fighting his hesitation for a moment, like you do when you have daughters aged about eight. It’s almost as if Elsa has just asked him to explain where babies come from. Again.
“You must stop saying ‘like’ and ‘sort of’ all the time. Only people with a bad vocabulary—” he begins to say instead, because he can’t stop himself. Because that’s the way he is. One of those who find it very important to say “one of those” and not “one of them.”
“So bloody leave it then!” Elsa snaps, much more vehemently than she means to, because she’s not in the mood for his corrections today.
Usually it’s their thing, correcting one another. Their only thing. Dad has a word jar, where Elsa puts difficult words she has learned, like “concise” and “pretentious,” or complex phrases like “My fridge is a taco sauce graveyard.” And every time the jar is full she gets a gift voucher for a book to download on the iPad. The word jar has financed the entire Harry Potter series for her, although she knows Dad is ridiculously dubious about Harry Potter because Dad can’t get his head around a story unless it’s based on reality.
“Sorry,” mumbles Elsa.
Dad sinks into his seat. They compete at seeing who can feel most ashamed. Then he says, slightly less tentatively:
“Yes. You’re very much like her. You got all your best qualities from her and your mother.”
Elsa doesn’t answer, because she doesn’t know if that was the answer she wanted. Dad doesn’t say anything either, because he’s unsure whether that was what he should have said. Elsa wants to tell him she wants to stay with him more. Every other weekend is not enough. She wants to yell at him that once Halfie comes along and is quite normal, George and Mum won’t want to have Elsa at home anymore, because parents want normal children, not different children. And Halfie will stand next to Elsa and remind them of all the differences between them. She wants to yell that Granny was wrong, that different is not always good, because different is a mutation and almost no one in X-Men has a family.
She wants to yell out the whole thing. But she doesn’t. Because she knows he’d never understand. And she knows he wouldn’t want her to live with him and Lisette because Lisette has her own children. Undifferent children.
Dad sits in silence like you do when you don’t feel like wearing a suit. But just as Elsa opens Audi’s door to jump out, he turns to her hesitantly and says in a low voice:
“. . . but there are moments when I sincerely hope that not ALL your best traits come from Granny and Mum, Elsa.”
And then Elsa squeezes her eyes together tightly and puts her forehead against his shoulder and her fingers into her jacket pocket and spins the lid of the red felt-tip pen that he gave her when she was small, so she could add her own punctuation marks, and which is still the best present he’s ever given her. Or anyone.
“You gave me your words,” she whispers.
He tries to blink his pride out of his eyes. She sees that. And she wants to tell him that she lied to him last Friday. That she was the one who sent the text from Mum’s phone about how he didn’t have to pick her up from school. But she doesn’t want to disappoint him, so she stays quiet. Because you hardly ever disappoint anybody if you just stay quiet. All almost-eight-year-olds know that.
Dad kisses her hair. She raises her head and says as if in passing, “Will you and Lisette have children?”
“I don’t think so,” Dad replies sadly, as if it’s quite self-evident.
“Why not?”
“We have all the children we need.”
And it sounds as if he stops himself from saying “more than we need.” Or at least that’s how it feels.
“Is it because of me you don’t want more children?” she asks, and hopes he’ll say “no.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Because I turned out different?” she whispers.
He doesn’t answer. And she doesn’t wait. But just as she’s about to slam the door of Audi from the outside, Dad reaches across the seat and catches her fingertips, and when she meets his eyes he looks back tentatively, like he always does. But then he whispers:
“Because you turned out to be perfect.”
She’s never heard him so nontentative. And if she’d said that aloud, he would have told her that there’s no such word. And she loves him for that.
George stands by the gate looking sad. He’s also wearing a suit. Elsa runs past him and Mum catches hold of her, her mascara running, and Elsa presses her face against Halfie. Mum’s dress smells of boutique. The cloud animals are flying low.
And that’s the day they bury Elsa’s granny.