“Won’t we all make money? You and Mum and George and all of us?”
“If we sell the flats and move, yeah,” grunts Alf.
Elsa ponders. Alf creaks his leather jacket.
“And that’s what Kent wants, the bastard. He’s always wanted to move out of here.”
That is why she’s having all these nightmares, she realizes. Because if the creatures from the Land-of-Almost-Awake turn up in the house now, then maybe the house will start to become a part of the Land-of-Almost-Awake, and if they all want to sell their flats, then . . .
“Then we won’t be escaping Miamas. We’ll be leaving of our own free will,” says Elsa out loud to herself.
“What?”
“Nothing,” mumbles Elsa.
The door slamming at the bottom of the house echoes through the stairwell. Then discreet footsteps, heading up. It’s the accountant.
Britt-Marie drowns out Kent’s voice in the kitchen. She doesn’t get any response from Kent insofar as the shirt change goes, so she compensates with a lot of indignation about other things. There is a rich supply of such topics. It’s difficult for her to decide which is most upsetting, of course, but she has time to run through several matters, including her threat to call the police if Elsa’s mum doesn’t immediately move Granny’s car from Britt-Marie’s space in the garage, and also that Britt-Marie will make the police break the lock of the stroller that’s still chained up by the entrance, and that she won’t hesitate to put pressure on the landlord to put up cameras on the stairs, so they can stop the vile malpractice of people coming and going as they please and putting up notices without first informing the head of information. She’s interrupted by the very short man with the very friendly face now standing in the doorway, knocking tentatively against the doorframe.
“I’m the accountant,” he says amicably.
And when he catches sight of Elsa, he winks at her. As if they share a secret. Or at least Elsa thinks that’s what he means.
Kent steps authoritatively out of the kitchen with his hands on his hips over his overcoat and looks the accountant up and down.
“Well, well? What about these leaseholds, then?” he demands at once. “What price per square foot are you offering?”
Britt-Marie storms out of the kitchen from behind and points at the accountant accusingly.
“How did you get in?”
“The door was open,” says the accountant amicably.
Kent breaks in impatiently. “So about the leaseholds: What’s your price?”
The accountant points amicably at his briefcase and makes an amicable gesture towards the kitchen.
“Should we sit down, perhaps?”
“There’s coffee,” Lennart says expansively.
“And cookies,” Maud says with a nod.
“And eggs!” George hollers from the kitchen.
“Please excuse the mess, they’re all so preoccupied with their careers in this family,” says Britt-Marie well-meaningly. Mum does her absolute best to pretend she didn’t hear that. As they all head into the kitchen, Britt-Marie stops, turns to Elsa, and clasps her hands together.
“You do understand, dear, I would obviously never ever think you and your grandmother’s friends had anything to do with junkies. Obviously I’m not to know if the gentleman who was looking for you yesterday took drugs or not. That’s not at all what I mean to say.”
Elsa gawks at her, puzzled.
“What? What friends? Who was asking for me yesterday?”
She almost asks, “Was it Wolfheart?” and then stops herself, because she can’t imagine how Britt-Marie could possibly know that Wolfheart is her friend.
“Your friend who was here looking for you yesterday. The one I jettisoned from the premises. There’s a smoking ban on the stairs, you can tell him that. That is not how we behave in this leaseholders’ association. I understand that you and your granny have very curious acquaintances, but rules apply to everyone, they really do!” She straightens an invisible wrinkle in her skirt and clasps her hands on her stomach before continuing: “You know who I mean. He was very slim and stood here smoking on the stairs. He was looking for a child, a family friend, he said, and then he described you. He looked exceedingly unpleasant, actually, so I told him that in this leaseholders’ association we do not allow smoking indoors.”
Elsa’s heart shrinks. Consumes all the oxygen in her body. She has to hold on to the doorframe to stop herself collapsing. No one sees her, not even Alf. But she understands what’s about to happen in this adventure now.
Because every fairy tale has a dragon.
19
SPONGE CAKE MIX
Fairy tales from Miamas tell of an infinite number of ways to defeat a dragon. But if this dragon is a shadow, the most evil kind of being one can possibly imagine, and yet it looks like a human, then what? Elsa doubts that even Wolfheart could defeat something like that, even when he was the most renowned warrior in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. And now? When he’s afraid of snot and can’t wash away the thought of blood from his own fingers?
Elsa doesn’t know anything about the shadow. Only that she has seen it twice, the first time at the undertaker’s and then from the bus that day on her way to school. And that she’s dreamed of it, and now it’s come to the house looking for her. And there’s no coincidence in Miamas. In fairy tales everything is always exactly as it’s meant to be.
So this must have been what Granny meant by “protect your castle, protect your friends.” Elsa only wishes that Granny had given her an army to do it with.
She waits until late at night, when it’s dark enough for a child and a wurse to pass unseen under Britt-Marie’s balcony, before she goes down to the cellar. George is out jogging; Mum is still out preparing everything for tomorrow. Since the meeting with the accountant this morning she’s been talking endlessly on the telephone with the whale-woman from the undertaker’s and the florist and the vicar and then with the hospital and the vicar again. Elsa has been sitting in her room reading Spider-Man, doing her best not to think of tomorrow. It hasn’t gone very well.
She brings the wurse some cookies she got from Maud and, once the contents have been mopped up, she has to snatch back the tin so quickly that she almost gets an incisor manicure. Granny always said that wurse saliva was bloody hard to get off in the washing-up, and Elsa is planning to give the tin back to Maud. But the wurse, who in all ways is a typical wurse, rummages quite ravenously in her backpack, apparently having considerable difficulty understanding how she could have come down with just one paltry tin for it.
“I’ll try to get you some more cookies, but for now you’re going to have to eat this.” She opens a thermos. “This is sponge cake mix. I don’t know how to mix it properly though,” she mumbles apologetically. “I found it in the cupboard in the kitchen and it said ‘ready sponge cake mix’ on the packet, but it was only powder. So I added water. It’s more like gunk than proper mix.”
The wurse looks skeptical, but its towel-sized tongue immediately licks all the gunk out of the thermos anyway. Just to be on the safe side. An insanely flexible tongue is one of the most prominent superpowers of wurses.
“There’s been a man here looking for me,” whispers Elsa into its ear, trying to sound brave. “I think he’s one of the shadows. We have to be on our guard.”
The wurse buffets its nose against her throat. She throws her arms around it, and feels the taut muscles under its fur. It tries to seem playful, but she understands that it’s doing what wurses do best: preparing for battle. She loves it for that.
“I don’t know where it comes from, Granny never told me about those kinds of dragons.”
The wurse buffets her throat again and looks at her with large, empathic eyes. It seems to be wishing it could tell her everything. Elsa wishes Wolfheart were here. She rang his bell just now but there was no answer. She didn’t want to call out, in case Britt-Marie smelled a rat, but she made a loud sniffing sound through the mail slot to
clearly signal she was about to sneeze the kind of sticky sneeze that instantly covers everything in camouflage paint. It had no effect.
“Wolfheart has disappeared,” she finally admits to the wurse.
Elsa tries to be brave. It goes quite well while they are walking through the cellar. And it’s quite okay while they go up the cellar stairs. But when they’re standing in the vestibule inside the main door, she senses the smell of tobacco smoke, the same kind of tobacco that Granny used to smoke, and a lingering fear from her nightmare paralyzes her. Her shoes weigh a thousand tons. Her head thumps as if something has worked itself loose and is rattling around in there.
It’s strange how quickly the significance of a certain smell can change, depending on what path it decides to take through the brain. It’s strange how close love and fear live to each other.
She tells herself she’s just imagining it, but it doesn’t help. The wurse stands patiently next to her, but her shoes won’t budge.
A newspaper blows past outside the window. It’s the kind of newspaper you get through the mail slot even if you have a “No junk mail, please!” sticker on the door. It reminds Elsa of Granny. She stands there, still frozen, and the newspaper makes her angry, because it’s Granny who put her in this situation. It’s all Granny’s fault.
Elsa remembers the time Granny called the newspaper office and gave them a roasting for putting the paper in her mail slot even though she had a “No junk mail, ever. Thanks!” message in surprisingly clear letters on the door. Elsa had thought a lot about why it said “Thanks!” because Elsa’s mum always said that if one can’t say thanks as if one means it, one may as well not bother. And it didn’t sound like the note on Granny’s door meant it at all.
But the people answering the telephone at the office of the newspaper told Granny their newspaper wasn’t in the business of advertising but in fact “social information,” which can be put in people’s mailboxes irrespective of whether people thank them not to do so. Granny had demanded to know who owned the company that produced the newspaper, and after that she demanded a word with him. The people at the other end of the telephone line said that surely Granny could understand that the owner did not have time for this sort of nonsense.
Of course, they shouldn’t have said that, because there were actually an awful lot of things that Granny didn’t “surely understand” at all. Also, unlike the man who owned the company that produced the free newspaper, she had a lot of spare time. “Never mess with someone who has more spare time than you do,” Granny used to say. Elsa used to translate that as, “Never mess with someone who’s perky for her age.”
In the following days Granny had picked up Elsa as usual from school, and then they’d patrolled the block with yellow IKEA carrier bags, ringing all the doorbells. People seemed to find it a bit weird, especially since everyone knows you’re actually not allowed to take those yellow IKEA bags from the store. If anyone started asking too many questions, Granny just said they were from an environmental organization collecting recyclable paper. And then people didn’t dare make any more fuss. “People are afraid of environmental organizations, they think we’ll storm the flat and accuse them of not handling their waste properly. They watch too many films,” Granny had explained as she and Elsa loaded the stuffed carrier bags into Renault. Elsa never quite understood what kinds of films Granny had seen, and where that sort of thing would ever happen. She did know that Granny hated environmental organizations, which she called “panda fascists.”
Whatever the case, you’re actually not supposed to take those yellow carrier bags out of the store. Of course, Granny had just shrugged it off. “I never stole the bags, I just haven’t given them back yet,” she muttered, and gave Elsa a thick felt-tip pen to write with. And then Elsa said she wanted at least four tubs of Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk for this. And then Granny said, “One!” and then Elsa said, “Three!” and then Granny said, “Two!” and then Elsa said, “Three, or I’m telling Mum!” and then Granny yelled, “I’m not negotiating with terrorists!” And then Elsa pointed out that if one looked up “terrorist” on Wikipedia there were quite a lot of things in the definition of the word that applied to Granny but not a single one that applied to Elsa. “The goal of terrorists is to create chaos, and Mum says that’s exactly what you’re busy doing all day long,” said Elsa. And then Granny had agreed to give Elsa four tubs if she just took the felt-tip pen and promised to keep her mouth shut. And so that’s what Elsa did. Late into the night she’d sat in the dark in Renault on the other side of town, on guard duty, while Granny ran in and out of houses’ entrances with her yellow IKEA carrier bags. The next morning the man who owned the company that produced the free newspaper was woken by the neighbors ringing his doorbell, very upset because someone had apparently filled the lift with hundreds of copies of the free newspaper. Every mailbox was stuffed full of them, and every square inch of the large glass entrance door had been covered in taped-up copies, and outside every flat great tottering piles had been left that collapsed and fell down the stairs when the doors were opened. On every copy of the newspaper, the man’s name had been written in large, neat felt-tip letters, and just below, “Complimentry social information, for yor reading plesure!!!”
On the way back home, Granny and Elsa had stopped at a gas station to buy ice cream. A few days later Granny called the newspaper once again, and after that she never received a single free copy.
“Coming in or going?”
Alf’s voice cuts through the gloom of the stairwell like laughter. Elsa turns around and instinctively wants to throw herself into his arms, but she stops herself because she realizes he would probably dislike that almost as much as Wolfheart would. He shoves his hands in his pockets with a creak of his leather jacket and nods sharply at the door.
“In or out? There are others apart from you who fancy a bloody walk, you know.”
Elsa and the wurse give him blank looks. He mutters something and goes past them and opens the door. Immediately they fall into step just behind him, though he never asked for their company. When they’ve gone around the corner of the house, out of sight from Britt-Marie’s balcony, the wurse backs into a bush and growls at them as politely as can be expected of a wurse in need of a bit of concentration. They turn away. Alf looks unamused in every possible way by his uninvited company. Elsa clears her throat and tries to think of something to make small talk about, to keep him there.
“The car’s going well, is it?” she bursts out, because that’s what she’s heard her dad say when he’s at a loss.
Alf nods. Nothing more. Elsa breathes loudly.
“What did the accountant say at the meeting?” she asks instead, in the hope that this might make Alf as upset and talkative as he gets at the residents’ meetings. It’s easier to get people talking about things they dislike than things they like, Elsa has noticed. And it’s easier not to get frightened of shadows in the dark when someone is talking, whatever they’re talking about.
“That accountant bastard said the owners had decided to sell the bloody flats to the residents’ association bastards, if everyone in the house agrees.”
Elsa observes the corners of his mouth. He almost seems to be smiling.
“Is that funny?”
“Are you living in the same house as me? They’ll solve the Israel-Palestine conflict before people in this house agree about anything.”
“Will anyone want to sell their flat if the house is converted to leaseholds?” she asks.
The corners of Alf’s mouth flatten into a more Alf-like shape.
“I don’t know about wanting, most will bloody well have to.”
“Why?”
“Good area. Expensive bloody flats. Most people in the house won’t be able to afford that kind of bastard bank loan.”
“Will you have to move?”
“Probably.”
“Mum and George and me, then?”
“I don’t bloody know, do I?”
<
br /> Elsa thinks.
“What about Maud and Lennart?”
“You’ve got a bloody lot of questions.”
“Well, what are you doing out here if you don’t want to talk?”
Alf’s jacket creaks towards the wurse in the bush.
“I was only going for a bloody walk. No one bloody invited you and that thing.”
“It’s just insane how much you swear, did anyone ever tell you that? My dad says it’s a sign of a bad vocabulary.”
Alf glares at her and shoves his hands in his pockets.
“Maud and Lennart will have to move. And the girl and her kid on the first bloody floor as well, most likely. The psychologist wench you went to yesterday, I don’t know, she probably has a hell of a lot of money—”
He stops himself. Summons some kind of self-restraint.
“That . . . lady. She probably has a . . . heck of a lot of money, that . . . woman,” he self-corrects.
“What did my granny think about the leasehold?”
There’s another brief twitch at the corners of Alf’s mouth.
“Usually the diametric opposite of what Britt-Marie thought.”
Elsa draws miniature snow-angels with her shoe.
“Maybe it’ll be good? If there are leaseholds, then maybe everyone can move somewhere . . . good?” she says tentatively.
“It’s good here. We’re doing fine here. This is our bloody home.”
Elsa doesn’t protest. This is her home too.
Another free newspaper tumbles past in the wind. It gets caught on her foot for a moment, before it tears itself free and keeps rolling like an angry little starfish. It makes Elsa furious again. Gets her thinking about how much Granny was willing to fight to get them to stop putting newspapers in her letter box. It makes Elsa furious because it was a typical Granny thing to do, because Granny was only doing it for Elsa’s sake. Granny things were always like that. For Elsa’s sake.
The Fredrik Backman Collection_A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here Page 46