But she has only seen it once, in Granny’s flat, a few days before Granny got taken ill. She couldn’t have imagined feeling more afraid, even if facing a shadow eye-to-eye in the Land-of-Almost-Awake.
It was a Saturday and Granny and Elsa were going to an exhibition about dinosaurs. That was the morning Mum put the Gryffindor scarf in the wash without asking and made Elsa take another scarf—a vomit-green one. Mum knows Elsa hates green. She really lacks empathy sometimes, that woman.
Our Friend had been lying on Granny’s bed, like a sphinx outside a pyramid. Elsa stood transfixed in the hall, staring at that gigantic black head and the terrifying, depthless eyes. Granny had come out of the kitchen and was putting on her coat as if it were the most natural thing in the whole universe to have the biggest thing ever lying on her bed.
“What is . . . that thing?” Elsa had whispered. Granny carried on rolling her cigarette and replied indifferently: “That’s Our Friend. It won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt it.”
Easy for her to say, Elsa thought—how was she supposed to know what would provoke one of those? Once, one of the girls at school had hit her because she had “an ugly scarf.” That was apparently all Elsa had done to her, and she got hit for it.
And so Elsa stood there, her usual scarf in the wash and in its place an ugly scarf chosen by her mother, worrying that vomit-green might provoke the beast. In the end Elsa had explained that it was her mum’s scarf, not hers, and her mum had terrible taste, before backing away towards the door. Our Friend just stared at her. Or at least that was what Elsa thought, if she was right in thinking those were its eyes. And then it also bared its teeth, Elsa was almost sure of it. But Granny just muttered something about “kids, you know” and rolled her eyes at Our Friend. Then she went to find the keys to Renault and then she and Elsa went to the dinosaur exhibition. Granny left the front door wide open, Elsa remembers, and when they sat in Renault and Elsa asked what Our Friend was doing in Granny’s flat, Granny just answered: “Visiting.” When Elsa asked why it was always barking behind its door, Granny answered cheerily, “Barking? Ah, it only does that when Britt-Marie goes past.” And when Elsa asked why, Granny grinned from ear to ear and answered: “Because that’s what he likes doing.”
And then Elsa had asked who Our Friend lived with, and then Granny said: “Not everyone needs to live with someone, good God. For instance, I don’t live with anybody.” And even though Elsa insisted that this might have some connection with the fact that Granny was not a dog, Granny never explained anything else about it.
And now here Elsa stands, on the landing, peeling off wrappers from the Daim chocolate. She throws in the first one so quickly that the flap slams when she lets go of it. She holds her breath and feels her heart thumping in her whole head. But then she remembers Granny saying that this needs to be done quickly, so Britt-Marie doesn’t get suspicious during the residents’ meeting downstairs.
Britt-Marie really hates Our Friend. Elsa tries to remind herself that, in spite of it all, she is a knight of Miamas, and after that she opens the mail slot with more courage.
She hears its breath. It sounds like there’s an avalanche going on in its lungs. Elsa’s heart thumps until she’s sure Our Friend will feel the vibrations through the door.
“My granny says to tell you she’s sorry for not bringing you any sweets for such a long time!” she says diligently through the mail slot, removing fistfuls of wrappers and dropping them on the floor.
Then she hears it moving and snatches back her hand, startled. There’s silence for a few seconds. She hears the abrupt crunch of Our Friend taking the chocolate in its jaws.
“Granny’s ill,” Elsa explains while it’s eating.
She isn’t prepared for the way the words tremble as they come out of her. She convinces herself that Our Friend is breathing more slowly. She empties in more chocolate.
“She has cancer,” whispers Elsa.
Elsa has no friends, so she isn’t quite sure of the normal procedure for these types of errands. But she imagines that if she did have friends, she’d want them to know if she had cancer. Even if they happened to be the biggest things of anything. “She sends her best and says sorry,” she whispers into the darkness and drops in the rest of the chocolate and gently closes the flap.
She stays there for a moment, looking at Our Friend’s door.
And then at The Monster’s. If this wild animal can be hiding behind one of the doors, she doesn’t even want to know what might be behind the other.
Then she jogs down the stairs to the front entrance.
George is still in the laundry. In the meeting room, they are all drinking coffee and arguing.
Because it’s a normal house.
By and large.
4
BEER
The room in the hospital smells as bad and feels as cold as hospital rooms tend to when it is barely above freezing outside and someone has hid beer bottles under her pillow and opened a window to try to get rid of the smell of cigarette smoke. It hasn’t worked.
Granny and Elsa are playing Monopoly. Granny doesn’t say anything about cancer, for Elsa’s sake. And Elsa doesn’t say anything about death, for Granny’s sake. Because Granny doesn’t like talking about death, especially not her own. So when Elsa’s mum and the doctors leave the room to talk in low, serious voices in the corridor, Elsa tries not to look worried. That doesn’t really work either.
Granny grins secretively.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I fixed a job for the dragons in Miamas?” she asks in their secret language.
It’s good to have a secret language in the hospital, because hospitals have ears in their walls, says Granny. Especially when the walls have Elsa’s mum as their boss.
“Duh—obviously!”
Granny nods as a courtesy and tells the whole story anyway. Because no one ever taught Granny how not to tell a story. And Elsa listens, because no one ever taught her how not to.
That’s why she knows that one of the things people say about Granny most often when she’s not around is, “This time she’s really crossed the line.” Britt-Marie is always saying it. Elsa assumes this is why Granny likes the kingdom of Miamas so much: you can’t cross the line in Miamas, because the kingdom is endless. And not like on television when people toss their hair about and say that they “have no boundaries,” but properly, without any limits, because no one knows for certain where Miamas begins and ends. This is partly because unlike the other five kingdoms in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, which are mainly built of stone and mortar, Miamas is wholly made of imagination. It could also be slightly because the Miamas city wall has an insanely moody temperament and may suddenly one morning have the idea of moving itself a mile or two into the forest because it needs a bit of “me time.” Only to move twice as far back in the opposite direction the next morning, because it has decided to wall in some dragon or troll that for one reason or another it has decided to be grumpy with. (Usually because the dragon or the troll has been up all night drinking schnapps and weeing on the wall while sleeping, Granny suggests.)
There are more trolls and dragons in Miamas than in any other of the five kingdoms in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, you see, because the main export industry in Miamas is fairy tales. Trolls and dragons have excellent employment prospects in Miamas because stories need villains. “Of course, it hasn’t always been like this,” Granny sometimes muses. “There was a time when the dragons had been almost forgotten by Miamas’s storytellers, particularly the ones who’d grown a little long in the tooth.” Then she recounts the whole story about how the dragons were causing too much trouble in Miamas, drifting about without jobs, drinking schnapps and smoking cigars and getting involved in violent confrontations with the city wall. So in the end the people of Miamas begged Granny to help them come up with some kind of practical job-creation scheme. And that’s when Granny had the idea that dragons should guard treasures at the ends of the tales.
Up until t
hat point, it had actually been a massive narrative problem, the fact that heroes in fairy tales looked for a treasure and, once they had located it in some deep cave, only had to nip inside to pick it up. Just like that. No epic closing battles or dramatic apexes or anything. “All you could do was play worthless video games afterwards,” Granny said, nodding somberly. Granny knows all about it, because last summer Elsa taught her how to play a game called World of Warcraft and Granny played it around the clock for several weeks until Mum said she was beginning to “exhibit disturbing tendencies” and banned her from sleeping in Elsa’s room from then on.
But anyway, when the storytellers heard Granny’s idea the whole problem was solved in an afternoon. “And that’s why all fairy tales nowadays have dragons at the end! It’s my doing!” Granny chortles. Like she always does.
Granny has a story from Miamas for every situation. One of them is about Miploris, the kingdom where all sorrow is kept in storage, and its princess who was robbed of a magical treasure by an ugly witch whom she’s been hunting ever since. Another story is about two princeling brothers, both in love with the princess of Miploris, and practically breaking the Land-of-Almost-Awake into pieces in their furious battle for her love.
One story was about the sea-angel, burdened by a curse that forced her to drift up and down the coast of the Land-of-Almost-Awake after losing her beloved. And another story was about the Chosen One, the most universally loved dancer in Mimovas, which is the kingdom all music comes from. In the fairy tale the shadows tried to abduct the Chosen One in order to destroy Mimovas, but the cloud animals saved him and flew him all the way back to Miamas. And when the shadows came after them, all the inhabitants of the six kingdoms of the Land-of-Almost-Awake—the princes, princesses, knights, soldiers, trolls, angels, and the witch—agreed to protect the Chosen One. And that was when the War-Without-End started. It raged for an eternity of ten thousand fairy tales, until the wurses and Wolfheart came out of the forest and led the good army into the last battle and forced the shadows back across the sea.
Of course, Wolfheart is a whole fairy tale in his own right, because he was born in Miamas but just like all other soldiers he grew up in Mibatalos. He has a warrior’s heart but the soul of a storyteller, and he’s the most invincible fighter ever seen in any of the six kingdoms. He had been living deep in the dark forests for many eternities of fairy tales, but he came back when the Land-of-Almost-Awake needed him most.
Granny has been telling these fairy tales for as long as Elsa can remember. In the beginning they were only to make Elsa go to sleep, and to get her to practice Granny’s secret language, and a little because Granny is just about as nutty as a granny should be. But lately the stories have another dimension as well. Something Elsa can’t quite put her finger on.
“Put ‘Pennsylvania Railroad’ back,” says Elsa tersely.
“I bought it . . . ?” Granny tries.
“Mmm, sure you did. Put it back.”
“This is how it must have been playing bloody Monopoly with Hitler!”
“Hitler would only have wanted to play Risk,” mutters Elsa, because she’s checked out Hitler on Wikipedia, after there were some rows between her and Granny about her use of Hitler as a metaphor.
“Touché,” mutters Granny.
And then they play in silence for about a minute. Because that is about the usual length of time they can be bothered to keep feuding.
“Did you give the chocolate to Our Friend?” asks Granny.
Elsa nods. But she doesn’t mention how she told it about Granny’s cancer. A little bit because she thinks Granny would be annoyed, and quite a bit because she doesn’t want to talk about cancer. She checked it on Wikipedia yesterday. And then she checked what a will is and then she was so angry that she couldn’t sleep all night.
“How did you and Our Friend become friends?” she asks instead.
Granny shrugs. “The usual way.”
Elsa doesn’t know what the usual way is, because she has no friends other than Granny. But she doesn’t say anything, because she knows Granny would be upset if she heard that.
“Anyway, the mission is done,” she says in a low voice.
Granny nods keenly and throws a searching look at the door, as if concerned someone could be watching them. Then she reaches under her pillow. The bottles clink against each other and she swears when she spills some beer on the pillowcase, but then she hauls out an envelope and presses it into Elsa’s hand.
“This is your next mission, my knight Elsa. But you mustn’t open it until tomorrow.”
Elsa looks at the envelope skeptically.
“Haven’t you heard of e-mail?”
“You can’t e-mail something this important.”
Elsa weighs the envelope in her hand, presses the lumpy bit at the bottom of it.
“What is it?”
“A letter and a key,” says Granny. And then she looks both serious and frightened, both of which are very rare emotions in Granny. She reaches out and grabs hold of Elsa’s index fingers. “Tomorrow I’m going to send you out on the biggest treasure hunt you’ve ever seen, my brave little knight. Are you ready for that?”
Granny has always loved treasure hunts. In Miamas, treasure hunting is considered a sport. You can compete in it, because it’s an approved Olympic field event. But in Miamas it’s not called the Olympic Games, it’s actually known as the Invisible Games, because all the participants are invisible. Not exactly a spectator sport, as Elsa pointed out when Granny told her about it.
Elsa also loves treasure hunts, but not as much as Granny. No one in any kingdom in the eternity of ten thousand fairy tales could love them like she does. She can make anything into a treasure hunt: if they’ve been out shopping and Granny can’t remember where she parked Renault; or when she wants Elsa to go through her mail and pay her bills because Granny finds this insanely boring; or when there’s a sports day at school and Elsa knows the older children are going to lash her in the shower with rolled-up towels. Granny can make a parking area into magic mountains, and rolled-up towels into dragons that must be outsmarted. And Elsa is always the heroine.
This sounds like a different kind of treasure hunt altogether, though.
“The one who’s supposed to have the key will know what to do with it. You have to protect the castle, Elsa.”
Granny has always called their house “the castle.” Elsa always just thought it was because she’s a bit nutty. But now she’s not so sure.
“Protect the castle, Elsa. Protect your family. Protect your friends!” Granny repeats determinedly.
“What friends?”
Granny puts her hands against Elsa’s cheeks and smiles.
“They’ll come. Tomorrow I am sending you out on a treasure hunt, and it’s going to be a fairy tale of marvels and a grand adventure. And you have to promise not to hate me for it.”
Elsa blinks, and there’s a burning sensation.
“Why would I hate you?”
Granny caresses her eyelids.
“It’s a grandmother’s prerogative never to have to show her worst sides to her grandchild, Elsa. Never to have to talk about what she was like before she became a grandmother.”
“I know loads of your worst sides!”
She’s hoping to make Granny laugh with that one. But it doesn’t work. Granny just whispers in a sad voice: “It’s going to be a grand adventure and a fairy tale of marvels. But it’s my fault that you’ll find a dragon at the end, my darling knight.”
Elsa squints at her. Because she has never heard Granny talking like this. She always claims credit for the dragons at the end. It’s never her “fault.” Granny sits before her, tinier and more fragile than Elsa can remember ever having seen her. Not at all like a superhero.
Granny kisses her forehead.
“Promise you won’t hate me when you find out who I’ve been. And promise me you’ll protect the castle. Protect your friends.”
Elsa doesn’t know what any
of this means, but she promises. And then Granny embraces her for longer than ever before.
“Give the letter to him who’s waiting. He won’t want to accept it, but tell him it’s from me. Tell him your granny asked you to tell him she’s sorry.”
And then she wipes the tears from Elsa’s cheeks. And Elsa points out that you’re supposed to say “to he who’s waiting,” not “him.” And they argue a bit about that, as usual. And then they play Monopoly and eat cinnamon buns and talk about who’d win a fight between Harry Potter and Spider-Man. Bloody pathetic discussion, of course, thinks Elsa. But Granny likes nattering on about these types of things because she’s too immature to understand that Harry Potter would have crushed Spider-Man.
Granny gets out some more cinnamon buns from large paper bags under another pillow. Not that she has to hide the cinnamon buns from Elsa’s mum the way she has to hide the beer from Elsa’s mum, but she likes keeping them together because she likes eating them together. Beer and cinnamon buns is Granny’s favorite snack. Elsa recognizes the name of the bakery on the bags; Granny only eats cinnamon buns from that one bakery, because she says no one else knows how to make real Mirevas cinnamon buns. In fact, it’s the national dish of the Land-of-Almost-Awake. One very bad thing about it is that one can only have the national dish on the national day. But a very good thing about it is that in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, every day is the national day. As Granny likes to put it, “In the end the problem disappears, said the old lady who crapped in the sink.” Elsa hopes with all her might that this doesn’t mean Granny is going to start using the kitchen sink with the door left open.
“Are you really going to get well?” Elsa asks with the reluctance of an almost-eight-year-old asking a question to which she already knows she doesn’t want to know the answer.
“Course I will!” Granny says with complete confidence, although she can see well enough that Elsa knows she’s lying.
The Fredrik Backman Collection: A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here Page 32