“Granny always said there were ghosts down here,” she says firmly. “You mustn’t scare them, d’you hear?”
The wurse lies unconcerned on its side on the floor, its hatchet-sized incisors glinting through the darkness.
“I’ll bring more chocolate tomorrow if you’re nice,” she promises.
The wurse looks as if it is taking this concession into consideration. Elsa leans forward and kisses it on the nose. Then she darts up the stairs and closes the cellar door carefully behind her. She sneaks up without turning on the lights, to minimize the risk of anyone seeing her, but when she comes to Britt-Marie and Kent’s flat she crouches and goes up the last flight in big leaps. She’s almost sure that Britt-Marie is standing inside, peering out of the spyhole.
The next morning both The Monster’s flat and the cellar storage unit are dark and empty. George drives Elsa to school. Mum has already gone to the hospital because, as usual, there’s some emergency going on there and it’s Mum’s job to sort out emergencies.
George talks about his protein bars the whole way. He bought a whole box of them, he says, and now he can’t find them anywhere. George likes talking about protein bars. And various functional items. Functional clothes and functional jogging shoes, for example. George loves functions. Elsa hopes no one ever invents protein bars with functions, because then George’s head will probably explode. Not that Elsa would find that such a bad thing, but she imagines Mum would be upset about it, and there’d be an awful lot of cleaning. George drops her off in the parking area after asking her one more time if she’s seen his missing protein bars. She groans with boredom and jumps out.
The other children keep their distance, watching her guardedly. Rumors of The Monster’s intervention outside the park have spread, but Elsa knows it will only last a short while. It happened too far from school. Things that happen outside school may as well be happening in outer space, because she is protected in here anyway. She may have a respite of a couple of hours, but those who are chasing her will keep testing the boundaries, and once they drum up the courage to have another pop at her they’ll hit her harder than ever.
And she knows that The Monster will never get anywhere near the fence even for her sake, because schools are full of children and children are full of bacteria, and there’s not enough alcogel in the whole world for The Monster after that.
But she enjoys her freedom that morning in spite of all. It’s the second-to-last day before the Christmas holidays and after tomorrow she can have a couple of weeks of rest from running. A couple of weeks without notes in her locker about how ugly she is and how they’re going to kill her.
In the first break she allows herself a walk along the fence. She tightens her backpack straps from time to time, to make sure it isn’t hanging too loose. She knows they won’t be chasing her now, but it’s a difficult habit to break. You run slower if your backpack’s loose.
Eventually she lets herself drift off in her own thoughts. That is probably why she doesn’t see it. She’s thinking about Granny and Miamas, wondering what plan Granny had in mind when she sent her out on this treasure hunt; that is, if she had any plan at all. Granny always sort of made her plans as she went along, and now that she’s no longer there Elsa is having problems recognizing what the next step of the treasure hunt is supposed to be. Above all she wonders what Granny meant when she said she was worried that Elsa would hate her when she found out more about her. Up until now Elsa has only found out that Granny had some pretty dodgy friends, which was hardly a shock, you might say.
And Elsa obviously understands that Granny’s statement about who she was before she became a granny must have something to do with Elsa’s mum, but she’d rather not ask Mum unless she has to. Everything Elsa says to Mum these days seems to end in an argument. And Elsa hates it. She hates that one can’t be allowed to know things unless one starts arguing.
And she hates being as alone as one can only be without Granny.
So it must be for that reason that she doesn’t notice it. Because she’s probably no more than two or three yards away when she finally sees it, which is an insane distance not to see a wurse from. It’s sitting by the gate, just outside the fence. She laughs, surprised. The wurse seems to be laughing as well, but internally.
“I looked for you this morning,” she says, and goes into the street, even though this is not allowed during breaks. “Were you nice to the ghosts?”
The wurse doesn’t look as if it was, but she throws her arms around its neck all the same, buries her hands deep in its thick black fur, and exclaims: “Wait, I’ve got something for you!” The wurse greedily sticks its nose into her backpack, but looks remarkably disappointed when it pulls it back out again.
“They’re protein bars,” says Elsa apologetically. “We don’t have any sweets at home because Mum doesn’t want me to eat them, but George says these are mega-tasty!”
The wurse doesn’t like them at all. It only has about nine of them. When the bell goes, Elsa hugs it hard, hard, hard one more time and whispers, “Thanks for coming!”
She knows that the other children in the playground see her do it. The teachers may be able to avoid noticing the biggest, blackest wurse appearing out of nowhere in the morning break, but no child in the entire universe could.
No one leaves any notes in Elsa’s locker that day.
12
MINT
Elsa stands alone on the balcony of Granny’s flat. They used to stand here often. It was here that Granny first pointed at the cloud animals and talked about the Land-of-Almost-Awake, just after Mum and Dad had got divorced. That night Elsa got to see Miamas for the first time. She stares out blindly into the darkness and misses her more than ever. She has been lying on Granny’s bed, looking up at the photos on the ceiling and trying to figure out what Granny was talking about at the hospital when she said Elsa mustn’t hate her. And also, “it’s a grandmother’s privilege never to have to show her grandchild who she was before she became a grandmother.” Elsa has spent hours trying to work out what this treasure hunt is for, or where the next clue can be found. If there even is one.
The wurse sleeps in the storage unit in the cellar. In the midst of all this it’s good to know that the wurse is close at hand. It makes Elsa feel a little bit less lonely.
She peers over the balcony railing. Has a sense of something moving down there on the ground, in the darkness. She can’t see anything, obviously, but she knows The Monster is there. Granny has planned the fairy tale in this way. The Monster is guarding the castle. Guarding Elsa.
She’s just angry with Granny for never explaining what he’s guarding it from.
A voice farther off saws through the silence.
“ . . . Yeah, yeah, I’ve got all the booze for the party, I’m only just getting back home now!” the voice declares irritably as it draws closer.
It’s the woman in the black skirt, talking into the white cord. She’s heaving four heavy plastic bags along, and they knock into each other and then against her shins at every step. The woman swears and fumbles with her keys by the door.
“Oh there’ll be at least twenty of us—and you know how well the guys in the office hold their drink. Not that they had any time to help, mind. . . . Yeah, isn’t it? I know! As if I didn’t have a full-time job as well?” is the last thing Elsa hears before the woman marches into the house.
Elsa doesn’t know much at all about the woman in the black skirt, except that everything smells of mint and she always has very well-ironed clothes and always seems to be stressed-out. Granny used to say it was “because of her boys.” Elsa doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean.
Inside, Mum is sitting on a high stool in the kitchen, talking on the telephone and fiddling restlessly with one of Granny’s tea towels. She never seems to have to listen very much to what the person at the other end of the line is saying. No one ever disagrees with Mum. Not that she raises her voice or interrupts; she’s just not the sort of perso
n anyone wants to get on the wrong side of. Mum likes to keep it like this, because conflict is bad for efficiency and efficiency is very important to her. George sometimes jokes that Mum will give birth to Halfie during her lunch break, to avoid any negative effect on the hospital’s general efficiency. Elsa hates George for making all those stupid jokes. Hates him because he thinks he knows Mum well enough to make jokes about her.
Of course, Granny thought efficiency was rubbish, and she couldn’t give a crap about the negative effect of conflict. Elsa heard one of the doctors at Mum’s hospital saying that Granny “could start a fight in an empty room,” but when Elsa told Granny she just looked miffed and said, “What if it was the room that started it?” And then she told the fairy tale about the girl who said no. Even though Elsa had already heard it at least an eternity of times.
“The Girl Who Said No” was one of the first stories Elsa ever heard from the Land-of-Almost-Awake. It was about the Queen of Miaudacas, one of the six kingdoms. In the beginning the queen had been a courageous and fair-minded princess very much liked by all, but unfortunately she grew up and became a frightened adult, as adults tend to be. She started loving efficiency and avoiding conflict. As adults do.
And then the queen simply forbade all conflict in Miaudacas. Everyone had to get along all the time. And because nearly all conflicts start with someone saying “no,” the queen also made this word illegal. Anyone breaking this law was immediately cast into a huge Naysayers’ Prison, and hundreds of soldiers in black armor who were known as Yea-Sayers patrolled the streets to make sure there were no disagreements anywhere. Dissatisfied with this, the queen had soon outlawed not only the word “no” but also other words including “not” and “maybe” and “well.” Any of these were enough to get you sent straight to prison, where you’d never again see the light of day.
After a couple of years, words like “possibly” and “if” and “wait and see” had also been made illegal. In the end no one dared say anything at all. And then the queen felt that she might as well make all talking illegal, because almost every conflict tended to start with someone saying something. And after that there was silence in the kingdom for several years.
Until one day a little girl came riding in, singing as she went. And everyone stared at her, because singing was an extremely serious crime in Miaudacas, because there was a risk of one person liking the song and another disliking it. The Yea-Sayers sprang into action to stop the girl, but they couldn’t catch her because she was very good at running. So the Yea-Sayers rang all the bells and called for reinforcements. Upon which the queen’s very own elite force, known as the Paragraph Riders—because they rode a very special kind of animal that was a cross between a giraffe and a rule book—came out to stop the girl. But not even the Paragraph Riders could lay their hands on her, and in the end the queen in person came rushing out of her castle and roared at the girl to stop singing.
But then the girl turned to the queen, stared her right in the eye, and said “No.” And as soon as she had said it, a piece of masonry fell off the wall around the prison. And when the girl said “No” one more time, another piece of masonry fell. And before long, not only the girl but all the other people in the kingdom, even the Yea-Sayers and the Paragraph Riders, were shouting “No! No! No!” and then the prison crumbled. And that was how the people of Miaudacas learned that a queen only stays in power for as long as her subjects are afraid of conflict.
Or at least Elsa thinks that was the moral of the story. She knows this partly because she checked out “moral” on Wikipedia and partly because the very first word Elsa learned to say was “no.” Which led to a lot of arguing between Mum and Granny.
They fought about a lot of other things as well, of course. Once Granny said to Elsa’s mum that she only became a manager as a way of expressing teenage rebellion—because the very worst rebellion Elsa’s mum could dream up was to “become an economist.” Elsa never really understood what was meant by that. But later that night, when they thought Elsa was sleeping, Elsa heard Mum rebuff Granny by saying, “What do you know about my teenage years? You were never here!” That was the only time Elsa ever heard Mum saying anything to Granny while holding back tears. And then Granny went very quiet and never repeated the comment about teenage rebellion to Elsa.
Mum finishes her call and stands in the middle of the kitchen floor with the tea towel in her hand, looking as if she’s forgotten something. She looks at Elsa. Elsa looks back dubiously. Mum smiles sadly.
“Do you want to help me pack some of your granny’s things into boxes?”
Elsa nods. Even though she doesn’t want to. Mum insists on packing boxes every night despite being told by both the doctor and George that she should be taking it easy. Mum isn’t very good at either—taking it easy or being told.
“Your dad is coming to pick you up from school tomorrow afternoon,” says Mum in passing as she ticks things off on her Excel packing spreadsheet.
“Because you’re working late?” asks Elsa, as if she means nothing in particular by the question.
“I’ll be . . . staying on for a while at the hospital,” says Mum, because she doesn’t like lying to Elsa.
“Can’t George pick me up, then?”
“George is coming with me to the hospital.”
Elsa packs things haphazardly into the box, deliberately ignoring the spreadsheet.
“Is Halfie sick?”
Mum tries to smile again. It doesn’t go so very well.
“Don’t worry, darling.”
“That’s the quickest way for me to know that I should be mega-worrying,” answers Elsa.
“It’s complicated.” Mum sighs.
“Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you.”
“It’s just a routine checkup.”
“No it isn’t, no one has so many routine checkups in a pregnancy. I’m not that stupid.”
Mum massages her temples and looks away.
“Please, Elsa, don’t you start making trouble about this as well.”
“What do you mean, ‘as well?’ What ELSE have I been making trouble with you about?” Elsa hisses, as one does when one is almost eight and feels slightly put upon.
“Don’t shout,” says Mum in a composed voice.
“I’M NOT SHOUTING!” shouts Elsa.
And then they both look down at the floor for a long time. Looking for their own ways of saying sorry. Neither of them knows where to begin. Elsa thumps down the lid of the packing crate, stomps off into Granny’s bedroom, and slams the door.
You could hear a pin drop in the flat for about thirty minutes after that. Because that is how angry Elsa is, so angry that she has to start measuring time in minutes rather than eternities. She lies on Granny’s bed and stares at the black-and-white photos on the ceiling. The Werewolf Boy seems to be waving at her and laughing. Deep inside, she wonders how anyone who laughs like that can grow up into something as incredibly doleful as The Monster.
She hears the doorbell go and then a second ring following incredibly fast, much faster than would be feasible for a normal person when ringing a doorbell. So it can only be Britt-Marie.
“I’m coming,” Mum answers politely. Elsa can tell by her voice that she’s been crying.
The words come flowing out of Britt-Marie, as if she’s fitted with a windup mechanism and someone has cranked it up using a key on her back.
“I rang your bell! No one opened!”
Mum sighs.
“No. We’re not home. We’re here.”
“Your mother’s car is parked in the garage! And that hound is still loose on the property!” She’s talking so quickly it’s clear she can’t prioritize her various upsets.
Elsa sits up in Granny’s bed, but it takes almost a minute before she manages to take in what Britt-Marie just said. Then she bounces out of bed and opens the door, and has to muster all her self-control to stop herself dashing off down the hall, because she doesn’t want to make the old b
usybody suspicious.
Britt-Marie stands on the landing with one hand very firmly inserted into the other, smiling at Mum in a well-meaning way, nattering on about how in this leaseholders’ association they can’t have rabid dogs running around.
“A sanitary nuisance, a sanitary nuisance is what it is!”
“The dog is probably far away by now, Britt-Marie. I wouldn’t worry about it—”
Britt-Marie turns to Mum and smiles well-meaningly.
“No, no, of course you wouldn’t, Ulrika. Of course you wouldn’t. You’re not the type to worry yourself about other people’s safety, even your own child’s, are you? It’s something you’ve inherited, I see. Putting the career before the children. That is how it’s always been in your family.”
Mum’s face is utterly relaxed. Her arms hang down, apparently relaxed. The only thing that gives her away is that she’s slowly, slowly clenching her fists. Elsa has never seen her do that before.
Britt-Marie also notices. Again she switches the position of her hands on her stomach. Looks as if she’s sweating. Her smile stiffens.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that, Ulrika, obviously. Obviously not. You make your own choices and prioritizations, obviously!”
“Was there anything else on your mind?” says Mum slowly, but something in her eyes has changed hue, which makes Britt-Marie take a small, small step back.
“No, no, nothing else. Nothing else at all!”
Elsa sticks out her head before Britt-Marie has time to turn around and leave.
“What was that you said about Granny’s car?”
“It’s in the garage,” she says curtly, avoiding Mum’s eye. “It’s parked in my space. And if it isn’t moved at once, I’ll call the police!”
“How did it get there?”
“How am I supposed to know?!” Then she turns to Elsa’s mum again, with renewed courage. “The car has to be moved at once, otherwise I’m calling the police, Ulrika!”
The Fredrik Backman Collection_A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here Page 39