“I can’t find the wurse.”
“I know that as well.” Alf nods casually.
“How?”
“Because it’s here.”
Elsa’s eyebrows shoot up as if they just sat down in wet paint.
“The wurse is here?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“I just bloody did.”
“Why is it here?”
“Because Kent came home at five this morning, and it couldn’t sit on the stairs. Kent would have bloody called the police if he’d found out it was still in the house.”
Elsa peers into Alf’s flat. The wurse is sitting on the floor, lapping at something in a big metal bowl in front of it. It says Juventus on it. The metal bowl, that is.
“How do you know what time Kent came home?”
“Because I was in the garage when he arrived in his bastard BMW,” says Alf impatiently.
“What were you doing in the garage?” asks Elsa patiently.
Alf looks as if that is an incredibly stupid question.
“I was waiting for him.”
“How long did you wait?”
“Until five o’clock, I bloody said,” he grunts.
Elsa thinks about giving him a hug, but leaves it. The wurse peers up from the metal bowl, looking enormously pleased. Something black is dripping from its nose. Elsa turns to Alf.
“Alf, did you give the wurse . . . coffee?”
“Yes,” says Alf, and looks as if he can’t understand what could reasonably be wrong about that.
“It’s an ANIMAL! Why did you give it COFFEE?”
Alf scratches his scalp, which, for him, is the same thing as scratching his hair. Then he adjusts his dressing gown. Elsa notices that he has a thick scar running across his chest. He sees her noticing and looks grumpy about it.
Alf goes into his bedroom and closes the door, and when he comes out again he is wearing his leather jacket with the taxi badge. Even though it’s Christmas Eve. They have to let the wurse pee in the garage, because there are even more police outside the building now, and not even a wurse can hold out for very long after drinking a bowl of coffee.
Granny would have loved that one. Peeing in the garage. It will drive Britt-Marie to distraction.
When they come up, Mum and George’s flat smells of Swiss meringues and pasta gratin with béarnaise sauce, because Mum has decided that everyone in the house is having Christmas together this year. No one disagreed with her, partly because it was a good idea, and partly because no one ever disagrees with Mum. And then George suggested that everyone should make their own favorite dish for a Christmas buffet. He’s good like that, George, which infuriates Elsa.
The boy with a syndrome’s favorite food is Swiss meringue, so his mum made it for him. Well, his mum got out all the ingredients and Lennart picked all the meringues up off the floor and Maud made the actual Swiss meringue while the boy and his mother were dancing.
And then Maud and Lennart thought it was important that the woman in the black skirt also felt involved, because they’re good like that, so they asked if she wanted to prepare anything in particular. She just sat glued to her chair at the far end of the flat and looked very embarrassed and mumbled that she hadn’t cooked any food for several years. “You don’t cook very much when you live alone,” she explained. And then Maud looked very upset and apologized for being so insensitive. And then the woman in the black skirt felt so sorry for Maud that she made a pasta gratin with béarnaise sauce. Because that was her boys’ favorite dish. So they all have Swiss meringue and pasta gratin with béarnaise sauce, because that’s the sort of Christmas it is. In spite of it all.
The wurse gets two buckets of cinnamon buns from Maud, and George goes to the cellar to fetch up the bathing tub Elsa had when she was a baby and fills it with mulled wine. With this as an incentive, the wurse agrees to hide for an hour in the wardrobe in Granny’s flat, and then Mum goes down and invites the police up from outside the house. Green-eyes sits next to Mum. They laugh. The summer intern is there too; he eats the most Swiss meringue of them all and falls asleep on the sofa.
The woman in the black skirt sits in silence at the table, in the far corner. After they’ve eaten, while George is washing up and Maud wiping down the tables and Lennart sitting on a stool with a standby cup of coffee, waiting for the percolator and making sure it’s not going to get up to any tricks, the boy with a syndrome goes through the flat and crosses the landing and goes into Granny’s flat. When he comes back he has cinnamon bun crumbs all around his mouth and so many wurse hairs on his sweater that he looks like someone invited him to a fancy dress party and he decided to dress up as a carpet. He gets a blanket from Elsa’s room and walks up to the woman in the black skirt, looks at her for a long time, then reaches up, standing on his tiptoes, and pinches her nose. Startled, she jumps, and the boy’s mother makes the sort of scream that mothers make when their children pinch complete strangers’ noses and rushes towards him. But Maud gently catches hold of her arm and stops her, and when the boy holds up his thumb, poking out between his index finger and his middle finger, while looking at the woman in the black skirt, Maud explains pleasantly:
“It’s a game. He’s pretending he stole your nose.”
The woman stares at Maud. Stares at the boy. Stares at the nose. And then she steals his nose. And he laughs so loudly that the windows start rattling. He falls asleep in her lap, wrapped up in the blanket. When his mother, with an apologetic smile, tries to lift him off, observing as she does so that “it’s actually not at all like him to be so direct,” the woman in the black skirt touches her hand tremulously and whispers:
“If . . . if it’s all right I . . . could I hold him a little longer . . . ?”
The boy’s mother puts both her hands around the woman’s hand and nods. The woman puts her forehead against the boy’s hair and whispers:
“Thanks.”
George makes more mulled wine and everything feels almost normal and not at all frightening. After the police have thanked them for their hospitality and headed back down the stairs, Maud looks unhappily at Elsa and says she can understand it must have been frightening for a child to have police in the house on Christmas Eve. But Elsa takes her by the hand and says:
“Don’t worry, Maud. This is a Christmas tale. They always have a happy ending.”
And it’s clear that Maud believes it.
Because you have to believe.
30
PERFUME
Only one person collapses with a heart attack late on Christmas Eve. But two hearts are broken. And the house is never quite the same again.
It all starts with the boy waking up late in the afternoon and feeling hungry. The wurse and Samantha come flopping out of the wardrobe because the mulled wine is finished. Elsa marches in circles around Alf and intimates that it’s time to get the Santa suit. Elsa and the wurse follow Alf down to the garage. He gets into Taxi. When Elsa opens the passenger door and sticks her head in and asks what he’s doing, he turns the ignition key and grunts:
“If I have to impersonate Santa for the rest of the day, I’m nipping out for a newspaper first.”
“I don’t think my mum wants me to go anywhere.”
“No one invited you!”
Elsa and the wurse ignore him and jump in. When Alf starts railing at her that you can’t just jump into people’s cars like that, Elsa says that this is actually Taxi and that is precisely what one does with Taxi. And when Alf grumpily taps the meter and points out that taxi journeys cost money, Elsa says that she’d like to have this taxi journey as her Christmas present. And then Alf looks very grumpy for a long time, and then they go off for Elsa’s Christmas present.
Alf knows of a kiosk that’s open even on Christmas Eve. He buys a newspaper. Elsa buys two ice creams. The wurse eats all of its own and half of hers. Which, if one knows how much wurses like ice cream, shows how immensely considerate it is being. It spills some of it in the backseat
, but Alf only shouts at it for about ten minutes. Which, if one knows how much Alf dislikes wurses spilling ice cream in the backseat of Taxi, shows how immensely considerate he was being.
“Can I ask you something?” asks Elsa, even though she knows full well that this is also a question. “Why didn’t Britt-Marie spill the beans about the wurse to the police?”
“She can be a bit of a nagbag sometimes. But she’s not bloody evil,” Alf clarifies.
“But she hates dogs,” Elsa persists.
“Ah, she’s just scared of them. Your granny used to bring back loads of strays to the house when she moved in. We were just little brats back then, Britt-Marie and Kent and me. One of the mutts bit Britt-Marie and her mum made a hell of a commotion about it,” Alf says, a shockingly lengthy description given that it’s coming from Alf.
Taxi pulls into the street. Elsa thinks of Granny’s stories about the Princess of Miploris.
“So you’ve been in love with Britt-Marie since you were ten years old?” she asks.
“Yes,” Alf replies as if it’s absolutely self-evident. Bowled over by this, Elsa looks at him and waits, because she knows that only by waiting will she get him to tell the whole story. You know things like that when you’re almost eight.
She waits for as long as she needs to.
Then after two red lights Alf sighs resignedly, like you do while preparing yourself to tell a story even though you don’t like telling stories. And then he recounts the tale of Britt-Marie. And himself. Although the latter part may not be his intention. There are quite a lot of swearwords in it, and Elsa has to exert herself quite a lot not to correct the grammar. But after a lot of “ifs” and “buts” and quite a few “damneds,” Alf has explained that he and Kent grew up with their mother in the flat where Alf now lives. When Alf was ten, another family moved into the flat above theirs, with two daughters of the same age as Alf and Kent. The mother was a renowned singer and the father wore a suit and was always at work. The elder sister, Ingrid, apparently had an outstanding singing talent. She was going to be a star, her mother explained to Alf and Kent’s mother. She never said anything about the other daughter, Britt-Marie. Alf and Kent caught sight of her anyway. It was impossible not to.
No one remembers exactly when the young female medical student first showed up in the house. One day she was just there in the enormous flat that took up the entire top floor of the house in those days, and when Alf and Kent’s mother interrogated her about why she lived by herself in such a big flat, the young female medical student replied that she’d “won it in a game of poker.” She wasn’t at home a great deal, of course, and whenever she was, she was always accompanied by outlandish friends and, from time to time, stray dogs. One evening she brought home a large black cur that she’d apparently also won in a game of poker, Alf explains. Alf and Kent and the daughters of the neighboring family only wanted to play with it; they didn’t understand that it was sleeping. Alf was quite certain it never meant to bite Britt-Marie, it was just caught unawares. She was too.
The dog disappeared after that. But Britt-Marie’s mother still hated the young medical student, and nothing anyone said could make her change her mind. And then came the car accident in the street just outside the house. Britt-Marie’s mother never saw the truck. The impact shook the whole building. The mother emerged from the front seat of the car with nothing worse than a few grazes, reeling and confused, but no one came out of the backseat. The mother screamed the most terrible of screams when she saw all the blood. The young medical student came running out in her nightie, her whole face full of cinnamon bun crumbs, and she saw the two girls in the backseat. She had no car of her own and she could only carry one girl. She wedged the door open and saw that one of them was breathing and the other wasn’t. She picked up the girl who was still breathing and ran. Ran all the way to the hospital.
Alf goes silent. Elsa asks what happened to the sister. Alf is silent for three red lights. Then he says, in a voice heavy with bitterness:
“It’s a terrible bloody thing when a parent loses a child. That family was never properly whole again. It wasn’t the mother’s fault. It was a bastard car accident, it was no one’s fault. But she probably never got over it. And she damned well never forgave your grandmother.”
“For what?”
“Because she thought your grandmother saved the wrong daughter.”
Elsa’s silence feels like a hundred red lights.
“Was Kent also in love with Britt-Marie?” she asks at last.
“We’re brothers. Brothers compete.”
“And Kent won?”
A sound comes from Alf’s throat; Elsa can’t quite tell if it’s a cough or a laugh.
“Like hell. I won.”
“What happened then?”
“Kent moved. Got married, too damned young, to a nasty piece of work. Had the twins, David and Pernilla. He loves those kids, but that woman made him bloody unhappy.”
“What about you and Britt-Marie?”
One red light. Another.
“We were young. People are bloody idiots when they’re young. I went away. She stayed here.”
“Where did you go?”
“To a war.”
Elsa stares at him.
“Were you also a soldier?”
Alf pulls his hand through his lack of hair.
“I’m old, Elsa. I’ve been a hell of a lot of things.”
“What happened to Britt-Marie, then?”
“I was on my way home. She was going to come and give me a surprise. And she saw me with another woman.”
“You had an affair?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because people are bloody idiots when they’re young.”
Red light.
“Then what did you do?” asks Elsa.
“Went away,” he answers.
“For how long?”
“Bloody long.”
“And Kent?”
“He got divorced. Moved back in with Mum. Britt-Marie was still there. Yeah, what the hell, he’d always loved her. So when her parents died they moved into their flat. Kent had got wind of the owners maybe selling the whole place as leasehold flats. So they stayed on and waited for the dough. They got married and Britt-Marie probably wanted children but Kent thought the ones he already had were bloody enough. And now things are the way they are.”
Elsa opens and closes Taxi’s glove compartment.
“Why did you come home from the wars, then?”
“Some wars finish. And Mum got ill. Someone had to take care of her.”
“Didn’t Kent do that?”
Alf’s nails wander around his forehead like nails do when wandering among memories and opening doors that have long been closed.
“Kent took care of Mum while she was still alive. He’s an idiot but he was always a good son, you can’t take that away from the bastard. Mother never lacked for anything while she was alive. So I took care of her while she was dying.”
“And then?”
Alf scratches his head. Doesn’t seem to know the exact answer himself.
“Then I just sort of . . . stayed on.”
Elsa looks at him with seriousness. Takes a deep, concluding breath and says:
“I like you very much, Alf. But you were a bit of a shit when you went away like that.”
Alf coughs or laughs again.
After the next red light he mutters:
“Britt-Marie took care of your mother when her father died. While your grandmother was still traveling a lot, you know. She wasn’t always the nagbag she is now.”
“I know,” says Elsa.
“Did your grandmother tell you that?”
“In a way. She told me a story about a princess in a kingdom of sorrow, and two princes who loved her so much that they began to hate each other. And the wurses were driven into exile by the princess’s parents, but then the princess fetched them back when the war came. And about a witch who sto
le a treasure from the princess.”
She goes silent. Crosses her arms. Turns to Alf.
“I was the treasure, right?”
Alf sighs.
“I’m not so big on fairy tales.”
“You could make an effort!”
“Britt-Marie has given her whole life to being there for a man who is never home, and trying to make someone else’s children love her. When your grandfather died and she could be there for your mother, it was perhaps the first time she felt . . .”
He seems to be looking for the right word. Elsa gives it to him.
“Needed.”
“Yes.”
“And then Mum grew up?”
“She moved away. Went to university. The house went bloody quiet, for a bloody long time. And then she came back with your father and was pregnant.”
“I was going to be all of Britt-Marie’s second chances,” Elsa says in a low voice, nodding.
“And then your grandmother came home,” says Alf, and stops by a stop sign.
They don’t say a lot more about that. Like you don’t when there’s not a great deal more to be said. Alf briefly puts his hand on his chest, as if something is itching under his jacket.
Elsa looks at the zip.
“Did you get that scar in a war?”
Alf’s gaze becomes somewhat defensive. She shrugs.
“You’ve got a massive scar on your chest. I saw it when you were wearing your dressing gown. You really should buy yourself a new dressing gown, by the way.”
“I was never in that sort of war. No one ever fired at me.”
“So that’s why you’re not broken?”
“Broken like who?”
“Sam. And Wolfheart.”
“Sam was broken before he became a soldier. And not all soldiers are like that. But if you see the shit those boys saw, you need some help when you get back. And this country’s so bloody willing to put billions into weapons and fighter jets, but when those boys come home and they’ve seen the shit they’ve seen, no one can be bothered to listen to them even for five minutes.”
He looks gloomily at Elsa.
“People have to tell their stories, Elsa. Or they suffocate.”
The Fredrik Backman Collection: A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here Page 56