31
PEANUT CAKE
The fifth letter drops into Elsa’s lap. Literally.
She wakes the next morning in Granny’s magic wardrobe. The boy sleeps surrounded by his dreams, with the moo-gun in his arms. The wurse has dribbled a bit on Elsa’s sweater and it’s set like cement.
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.
And Dad is standing on the stairs behind her. He’s out of breath.
Which is not at all like Dad.
Elsa’s eyes open wide when she sees him, and then she looks at Alf’s flat. At the radio. Because there’s no coincidence in fairy tales. And there’s a Russian playwright who once said that if there’s a pistol hanging on the wall in the first act, it has to be fired before the last act is over. Elsa knows that. And those who can’t understand by now how Elsa understands things like that just haven’t been paying attention. So Elsa understands that the whole thing with the radio and the accident on the highway must have something to do with the fairy tale they’re in.
“Is it . . . Mum?” she manages to say.
Dad nods and throws a nervous glance at Alf. Elsa’s face trembles.
“Is she at the hospital?”
“Yes, she was called in this morning to take part in a meeting. There was some kind of cri —” Dad starts, but Elsa interrupts him:
“She was in the car accident, wasn’t she? The one on the highway?”
Dad looks spectacularly puzzled.
“What accident?”
“The car accident!” Elsa repeats, quite beside herself.
“No . . . no!” And then he smiles. “You’re someone’s big sister now. Your mum was at the meeting when her water broke!”
It doesn’t quite go into Elsa’s head, it really doesn’t. It’s quite obvious. Although she’s very familiar with what happens when the water breaks.
“But the car accident? What’s it got to do with the car accident?” she mumbles.
Dad looks breathtakingly tentative.
“Nothing, I think. Or, I mean, what do you mean?”
Elsa looks at Alf. Looks at Dad. Thinks about it so hard that she feels the strain right inside her sinuses.
“Where’s George?” she asks.
“At the hospital,” answers Dad.
“How did he get there? They said on the radio all traffic on the highway is stuck!”
“He ran,” says Dad, with a small twinge of what dads experience when they have to say something positive about the new guy.
And that’s when Elsa smiles. “George is good in that way,” she whispers.
“Yes,” Dad admits.
And she decides that maybe the radio by now has in some way earned its place in this fairy tale, in spite of it all. Then she bursts out anxiously:
“But how are we going to get to the hospital if the highway is blocked?”
“You take the old bloody road,” Alf says impatiently. Dad and Elsa look at him as if he’d just spoken to them in a make-believe language. Alf sighs. “The old road, damn it. Past the old slaughterhouse. Where that factory used to be where they made heat exchangers before the bastards moved everything to Asia. You can take that road to the hospital. Young people today, I tell you—they think the whole bloody world is a highway.”
And there’s the moment right there when Elsa is thinking that she and the wurse will go in Taxi. But then she changes her mind and decides they’ll go in Audi instead, because she doesn’t want Dad to be upset. And if she hadn’t changed her mind it’s possible that the day wouldn’t have ended up as loathsome and terrible as it will soon become. Because when terrible things happen one always thinks, “If I only hadn’t . . .” And, afterwards, this will turn out to be one of those moments.
Maud and Lennart also decide to come along to the hospital. Maud has brought cookies and Lennart decides when he gets to the house’s entrance to bring the coffee percolator, because he’s worried they may not have one at the hospital. And even if they do, Lennart has the feeling it will probably be one of those modern coffeemakers with a lot of buttons. Lennart’s percolator only has one button. Lennart is very fond of that button.
The boy with a syndrome and his mother are also coming along. Also the woman in jeans. Because they’re sort of a team now, which Elsa is very pleased about. Mum told her yesterday that now, when so many people are living in Granny’s flat, the whole house feels like that house Elsa always goes on about where all the X-Men live. She rings at Britt-Marie’s door as well. But no one opens it.
In retrospect, Elsa will recall that she paused briefly by the locked stroller in the stairwell. The notice with the crossword was still on the wall above it. And someone had solved it. All the squares were filled. In pencil.
If Elsa had stopped and reflected a little on it, maybe things would have turned out differently. But she didn’t. So they didn’t. It’s possible that the wurse hesitated for a moment outside Britt-Marie’s door. Elsa would have understood if it had done that, just like she supposes that wurses hesitate sometimes when they’re unsure about who in this fairy tale they’ve really been sent to protect. Wurses actually guard princesses in normal fairy tales, and even in the Land-of-Almost-Awake Elsa was never more than a knight. Yet if the wurse had any hesitation, it didn’t show it. It went with Elsa. Because that’s the sort of friend it is.
If it hadn’t gone with Elsa, maybe things would have worked out differently.
Alf convinces the police to make a pass around the block “to make sure everything is safe.” Elsa never finds out exactly what he says to them, but Alf can be quite persuasive when he wants to be. Maybe he says that he’s seen footprints in the snow. Or heard someone in the house on the other side of the street tell him something. Elsa doesn’t know, but she sees the summer-intern policeman get into the car, and sees Green-eyes do the same after lengthy deliberation. Elsa meets her gaze for a second, and if she had only told Green-eyes the truth about the wurse, then maybe everything would have ended up differently. But she didn’t. Because she wanted to protect the wurse. Because that’s the sort of friend she is.
Alf goes back into the house and down into the garage to fetch Taxi.
When the police car swings around the corner at the end of the street, Elsa and the wurse and the boy with a syndrome scurry out of the front entrance and across the street and into Audi, which is parked there. The children jump in first.
The wurse stops midstep. Its hackles rise.
Probably only a few seconds go by, but it feels like forever. Afterwards Elsa will remember that it felt both as if she had time to think a billion thoughts and as if she didn’t have time to think at all.
There’s a smell inside Audi that makes her feel surprisingly peaceful. She doesn’t quite know why. She looks at the wurse through the open door, and before she has time to realize what is about to happen, she wonders if maybe it doesn’t want to jump into the car because it’s in pain. She knows it is feeling pain, pain the way Granny had pain everywhere in her body at the end.
Elsa starts getting out a cookie from her pocket. Because no real friend of a wurse would leave home nowadays without at least one cookie for emergencies. But she doesn’t have time, of course, because she realizes what is causing that smell in Audi.
Sam comes darting out from behind the backseat, Elsa feels the coldness against her lips when his hand closes over her mouth. His muscles tense around her throat; she feels the hairs on his skin scraping like gravel through the gaps in the Gryffindor scarf. She has time to see the brief confusion in Sam’s eyes when he sees the boy. It’s the moment when he realizes he’s been hunting the wrong child. She has time to understand that the shadows in the fairy tale didn’t want to kill the Chosen One. Only steal him. Make him their own. Kill whoever stood in their way.
And then the wurse’s jaws close around Sam’s other wrist, just as he’s making a grab for the boy. Sam roars. Elsa has a split second to react, when he lets go of her. She sees the knife in the rearview mirror.
And everything after that is black.
Elsa can feel herself running, she feels the boy’s hand in hers, and she knows that they have to make it to the front entrance. They have to have time to scream so Dad and Alf can hear them.
Elsa sees her feet moving, but she’s not guiding them herself. Her body is running by instinct. She thinks that she and the boy have had time to make half a dozen steps when she hears the wurse howling in horrendous pain, and she doesn’t know if it’s the boy who lets go of her hand or if she lets go of his. Her pulse is beating so hard that she can feel it in her eyes. The boy slips and falls to the ground. Elsa hears the back door of Audi opening and sees the knife in Sam’s hand. Sees the blood on it. She does the only thing she can do: picks the boy up as best she can and runs as fast as possible.
She’s good at running. But she knows it won’t be enough. She can hear Sam straining behind her, feels the tug at her arm as the boy is torn from her grasp; her heart lurches, she closes her eyes, and the next thing she remembers is the pain in her forehead. And Maud’s scream. And Dad’s hands. The hard floor in the stairwell. The world spins until it lands, swaying upside down in front of her, and she thinks that this must be how it is when you die. Like falling inwards, towards who-knows-what.
She hears banging without understanding where it comes from. Then the echo. “Echo,” she has time to think, and realizes she is indoors. She feels as if she’s got gravel under her eyelids. She hears the light feet of the boy running up the stairs as a boy’s feet can run only when they have known for many years that this could happen. She hears the terrified voice of the boy’s mother, trying to keep herself calm and methodical as she runs after him, as only a mother can do and only when she has grown accustomed to fear as the natural state of things.
The door of Granny’s house closes and locks behind them. Elsa feels that Dad’s hands aren’t holding her up, they’re holding her back. She doesn’t know from what. Until she sees the shadow through the glass in the entrance door. Sees Sam on the other side. He’s standing still. And something about his face is so deeply uncharacteristic of him that, at first, Elsa can’t quite shake off the feeling that she is imagining the whole thing.
Sam is afraid.
In the blink of an eye another shadow descends over him, so enormous that Sam’s shadow is engulfed in it. Wolfheart’s heavy fists rain down with fury, with a violence and a darkness no fairy tale could describe. He doesn’t hit Sam, he hammers him into the snow. Not to make him harmless. Not to protect. To destroy.
Elsa’s dad picks her up and runs up the stairs. Presses her against his jacket so she can’t see. She hears the door flung open from inside and she hears Maud and Lennart pleading with Wolfheart to stop hitting, stop hitting, stop hitting. But judging by the dull thumping sounds, like when you drop milk cartons on the floor, he isn’t stopping. He doesn’t even hear them. In the tales Wolfheart fled into the dark forests long before the War-Without-End, because he knew what he was capable of.
Elsa tears herself free of Dad and sprints down the stairs. Maud and Lennart stop screaming before she has reached the bottom. Wolfheart’s mallet of a fist is raised so high above Sam that it brushes the stretched-out fingers of the cloud animals before it turns back and hurtles down.
But Wolfheart freezes in the middle of the movement. Between him and the blood-covered man stands a woman who looks so small and frail that the wind should be able to pass right through her. She has an insignificant ball of blue tumble-dryer fluff in her hand, and a thin white line on her finger where her wedding ring used to be. Every ounce of her being seems to be yelling at her to run for her life. But she stays where she is, staring at Wolfheart with the resolute gaze of someone who has nothing left to lose.
She rolls up the tumble-dryer fluff in the palm of one hand and puts that hand against her other hand and clasps them together on her stomach; then she looks with determination at Wolfheart and says, with authority:
“We don’t beat people to death in this leaseholders’ association.”
Wolfheart’s fist is still vibrating in the air. His chest heaves up and down. But his arms slowly fall down at his sides.
She is still standing between Wolfheart and Sam, between the monster and the shadow, when the police car comes skidding into their street. The green-eyed policewoman jumps out, her weapon drawn, long before the car has stopped. Wolfheart has dropped on his knees in the snow.
Elsa shoves the door open and charges outside. The police roar at Wolfheart. They try to stop Elsa, but it’s like holding water in cupped hands: she slips through their fingers. For reasons she won’t understand for many years, Elsa has time to think about what her mother said to George once when she thought Elsa was sleeping. That this is how it is, being the mother of a daughter who is starting to grow up.
The wurse lies immobile on the ground halfway between Audi and the front entrance. The snow is red. It tried to get to her. Crawled out of Audi and crept along until it collapsed. Elsa wriggles out of her jacket and the Gryffindor scarf and spreads them over the animal’s body, curling up in the snow next to it and hugging it hard, hard, feeling how its breath smells of peanut cake, and she whispers, “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid” over and over again into its ear. “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, Wolfheart has defeated the dragon and no fairy tale can end until the dragon has been defeated.”
When she feels Dad’s soft hands picking her up off the ground, she calls out loudly, so the wurse will hear her even if it’s already halfway to the Land-of-Almost-Awake:
“YOU CAN’T DIE! YOU HEAR?! YOU CAN’T DIE BECAUSE ALL CHRISTMAS TALES HAVE HAPPY ENDINGS!”