“It’s good to be different.”
“I know.”
They drive up the highway while Elsa tells Alf that Iron Man, who’s a kind of superhero, has a type of pacemaker. But really it’s more of an electromagnet, because Iron Man has shrapnel in his heart and without the magnet the shrapnel would cut holes in it and then he’d die. Alf doesn’t look as though he entirely understands the finer points of the story, but he listens without interrupting.
“But they operate on him and remove the magnet at the end of the third film!” Elsa tells him excitedly, then clears her throat and adds, slightly shamefaced: “Spoiler alert. Sorry.”
Alf doesn’t look as if this is concerning him very much. To be entirely honest, he doesn’t look as if he knows exactly what a “spoiler” is, unless it’s a part of a car.
It’s snowing again, and Elsa decides that even if people she likes have been shits on earlier occasions, she has to learn to carry on liking them. You’d quickly run out of people if you had to disqualify all those who at some point have been shits. She thinks that this will have to be the moral of this story. Christmas stories are supposed to have morals.
Alf’s telephone rings from the compartment between the seats. He checks the display, but doesn’t answer. It rings again.
“Aren’t you going to answer?” wonders Elsa.
“It’s Kent. I suppose he wants to mouth off about some crap to do with the accountant and those leasehold conversion bastards, that’s all he ever thinks about. He can bloody go on about it tomorrow,” mutters Alf.
The telephone rings again; Alf doesn’t answer. It rings a third time. Elsa picks it up, irritated, and answers even though Alf swears at her. There’s a woman at the other end. She’s crying. Elsa hands the phone to Alf. It trembles against his ear. His face becomes transparent.
It’s Christmas Eve. The taxi makes a U-turn. They go to the hospital.
Alf doesn’t stop for a single red light.
Elsa sits on a bench in a corridor talking to Mum on the telephone, while Alf is in a room talking to a doctor. The nurses think Elsa is a grandchild, so they tell her that he had a heart attack but he’s going to be all right. Kent is going to survive.
There’s a young woman standing outside the room. She’s crying and she’s beautiful. Smells strongly of perfume. She smiles faintly at Elsa and Elsa smiles back. Alf steps out of the room and nods without smiling at the woman; the woman disappears out the door without meeting his eyes.
Alf doesn’t say a word, just marches back to the entrance and out into the parking lot, with Elsa behind him. And only then does Elsa see Britt-Marie. She’s sitting absolutely still on the bench, wearing her floral-print jacket although it’s below freezing. She’s forgotten her brooch. The paintball stain is shining. Britt-Marie’s cheeks are blue and she’s spinning her wedding ring on her finger. She has one of Kent’s shirts in her lap; it smells freshly laundered and has been perfectly ironed.
“Britt-Marie?” Alf’s voice rasps out in the evening gloom, and he stops a yard from her.
She doesn’t answer. Just lets her hand wander over the shirt collar in her lap. Gently brushes away something invisible from a fold. Carefully folds one cuff link under the other. Straightens out a wrinkle that isn’t there.
Then she lifts her chin. Looks old. Every word seems to leave a little track on her face.
“I’ve actually been absolutely brilliant at pretending, Alf,” she whispers firmly.
Alf doesn’t answer. Britt-Marie looks down into the snow and spins her wedding ring.
“When David and Pernilla were small, they always said I was so bad at coming up with stories. I always wanted to read the ones that were in books. They always said, ‘Make one up!’ but I don’t understand why one should sit there and make things up just like that, when there are books where everything has been written down from the very start. I really don’t.”
She has raised her voice now. As if someone needed convincing.
“Britt-Marie—” Alf says quietly, but she interrupts him coldly.
“Kent told the children I couldn’t make up stories because I didn’t have any imagination, but it isn’t true. It’s not. I have an absolutely excellent imagination. I am very good at pretending.” Alf runs his fingers across his head and blinks for a long time. Britt-Marie caresses the shirt in her lap as if it were a baby about to go to sleep. “I always bring a newly washed shirt if I’m meeting him somewhere. Because I don’t use perfume.”
Her voice grows muted. “David and Pernilla never came for Christmas dinner. They were busy, they said. I can understand they’re busy, they’ve been busy for years. So Kent called and said he was staying at the office for a few hours. Just a few hours, he was having another conference call with Germany. Even though it’s actually Christmas in Germany as well. But he never came home. So I tried calling him. He didn’t answer. I left a message. Eventually the telephone rang, but it wasn’t Kent.”
Her lower lip trembles.
“I don’t use perfume, but she does. So I always see to it that he has a fresh shirt. That’s all I ask, that he should put his shirt directly in the washing machine when he comes home. Is that so much to ask?”
“Please, Britt-Marie . . .”
She swallows spasmodically and spins her wedding ring.
“It was a heart attack. I know that because she called and told me, Alf. She called me. Because she couldn’t stand it, she couldn’t. She said she couldn’t sit there in the hospital and know that maybe Kent would die without my knowing. She simply couldn’t stand it. . . .” She puts one hand in the other, closes her eyes and adds in a quivering voice:
“I have an excellent imagination, actually. It is excellently good. Kent always said he was going for dinners with the Germans or that the plane was delayed by snow or that he was just passing by the office for a bit. And then I pretended I believed it. I pretended so brilliantly that I believed it myself.”
She rises from the bench, turns around, and hangs the shirt elaborately on the edge of the bench. As if she cannot allow herself even now to take out her feelings on something freshly ironed.
“I’m very good at pretending,” she whispers.
“I know that,” whispers Alf.
And then they leave the shirt on the bench and go home.
It has stopped snowing. They travel in silence. Mum comes to meet them at the front entrance. She hugs Elsa. Tries to hug Britt-Marie. Britt-Marie keeps her at a distance. Not vehemently, just with determination.
“I don’t hate her, Ulrika,” she says.
“I know,” Mum says with a slow nod.
“I don’t hate her and I don’t hate the dog and I don’t hate her car.”
Mum nods and takes her hand. Britt-Marie closes her eyes.
“I don’t hate at all, Ulrika. I actually don’t. I only wanted you to listen to me. Is that so much to ask? I just didn’t want you to leave the car in my place. I actually just didn’t want you to come and take my place.” She spins her wedding ring.
Mum leads her up the stairs, her hand firmly but lovingly around the floral-print jacket. Alf never shows up in the flat, but Santa does. The boy with a syndrome’s eyes light up as children’s eyes do when someone tells them about ice cream and fireworks and climbing trees and splashing about in puddles.
Maud sets an extra place at the table and gets out more gratin. Lennart puts on more coffee. George washes up. After the parcels have been handed around, the boy and the woman in the black skirt sit on the floor and watch Cinderella on the TV.
Britt-Marie sits slightly ill at ease next to Elsa on the sofa. They peer at one another. They don’t say anything, but probably this is their cessation of hostilities. So when Elsa’s mum tells her she has to stop eating chocolate Santas now or she’ll get a stomachache, and Elsa keeps eating them, Britt-Marie doesn’t say anything.
And when the evil stepmother turns up in Cinderella, and Britt-Marie discreetly gets up and straightens out a crease
in her skirt and goes into the front hall to cry, Elsa follows her.
And they sit on the chest together and eat chocolate Santas.
Because you can be upset while you’re eating chocolate Santas. But it’s much, much, much more difficult.
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 po
sitive 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.
The Fredrik Backman Box Set Page 57
