The Fredrik Backman Collection_A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here

by Fredrik Backman

  It smells of soap.

  10

  ALCOHOL

  The sound of splintering wood fills the stairwell as the police drive the crowbar into the doorframe.

  Elsa stands in the hall in The Monster’s flat and watches them through the spyhole. Technically, her feet aren’t touching the floor, though, because the wurse has sat down on the hall mat so that she’s wedged between the rear end of the enormous animal and the inside of the door. The wurse looks extremely irritated. Not threatening, just irritated. As if there’s a wasp in its bottle of lemonade.

  It occurs to Elsa that she’s more panicked by the police on the other side of the door than by the two creatures in the hall with her. Maybe it doesn’t seem so very rational, but she’s decided to trust more in Granny’s friends than Britt-Marie’s. She rotates carefully by the door until she’s facing the wurse, then whispers in the secret language:

  “You mustn’t bark now, please be good. Or they’ll kill you!”

  The wurse doesn’t look entirely convinced that it would come off worse if she opened the door and let it out among the police, and turns away dismissively. It stays silent, though seemingly more for Elsa’s sake than its own.

  Outside on the landing, the police have almost forced the door open. Elsa hears them yelling command words at each other, about being “ready.”

  She looks around the hall and into the living room. It’s a very small flat but the tidiest one of any description she has ever set foot in. There is hardly any furniture, and the few items that there are have been arranged face-to-face, looking as if they’ll commit furniture hara-kiri if a single speck of dust lands on them. (Elsa knows that because she had a samurai phase about a year ago.)

  The Monster disappears into the bathroom. The tap runs in there for a long time before he comes out again. He dries his hands elaborately on a small white towel, which he then folds neatly and goes to put in a laundry basket. He has to stoop to fit through the doorway. Elsa feels as Odysseus must have felt when he was with that giant, Polyphemus, because Elsa recently read about Odysseus. Apart from the fact that Polyphemus probably didn’t wash his hands as carefully as The Monster. And apart from Elsa thinking she’s not as high-and-mighty and self-righteous as Odysseus seems to be in the book. Obviously. But apart from that, sort of like Odysseus.

  The Monster looks at her. He doesn’t look angry. More confused, actually. Almost startled. Maybe that’s what gives Elsa the courage to blurt right out:

  “Why did my granny send you a letter?”

  She says it in normal language. Because, for reasons not yet entirely clear to her, she doesn’t want to talk to him in the secret language. The Monster’s eyebrows sink under his black hair so that it’s difficult to make out any facial expressions at all behind it, and the beard and the scar. He’s barefoot, but wears those blue plastic shoe covers you get at a hospital. His boots are neatly placed just inside the door, very precisely in line with the edge of the doormat. He hands Elsa another two blue plastic bags, but jerks back his hand once she touches them, as if worried that Elsa might also touch him. Elsa bends down and puts the plastic bags over her muddy shoes. She notices that she has slightly stepped off the mat and left two halves of her footprints in melted snow on the parquet floor.

  The Monster bends down with impressive fluidity and starts wiping the floor with a fresh white towel. When he has finished, he sprays the area with a small bottle of a cleaning agent that makes Elsa’s eyes smart, and wipes it with another small white towel. Then he stands up and neatly puts the towels in the laundry basket, and places the spray bottle very exactly on a shelf.

  Then he stands for a very long time and stares uncomfortably at the wurse. It lies splayed across the hall, covering the floor almost in its entirety. The Monster looks like he’s about to hyperventilate. He disappears into the bathroom and comes back and starts carefully arranging towels in a tight ring around the wurse while taking extreme care not to touch any part of it. Then he goes back to the bathroom and scrubs his hands so hard under the tap that the basin vibrates.

  When he comes back he’s got a little bottle of antibacterial alcogel. Elsa recognizes it, because she had to rub that sort of stuff into her hands every time she was visiting Granny at the hospital. She peers into the bathroom through the gap under The Monster’s armpit when he reaches out. There are more bottles of alcogel in there than she could imagine there would be in Mum’s entire hospital.

  The Monster looks infinitely vexed. He puts down the bottle and smears his fingers with alcogel, as if they were covered in a layer of extra skin that he had to try to rub off. Then he demonstratively holds up his two palms, each the size of a flatbed dolly, and nods firmly at Elsa.

  Elsa holds up her own palms, which are more tennis ball–size. He pours alcogel on them and does his best not to look too disgusted. She quickly rubs the alcogel into her skin and wipes off the excess on her trouser legs. The Monster looks a little as if he’s about to roll himself up in a blanket and start yelling and crying. To compensate, he pours more alcogel on his own hands and rubs, rubs, rubs. Then he notices that Elsa has knocked one of his boots out of position in relation to the other. He bends down and adjusts the boot. Then more alcogel.

  Elsa tilts her head and looks at him.

  “Do you have compulsive thoughts?” says Elsa.

  The Monster doesn’t answer. Only rubs his hands together, as if trying to get a fire started.

  “I’ve read about it on Wikipedia.”

  The Monster’s chest heaves up and down, taking frustrated breaths. He disappears into the bathroom and she hears the sound of gushing water again.

  “My dad is sort of slightly compulsive as well!” Elsa calls out behind him, adding quickly, “But, God, not like you. You’re properly barmy!”

  Only afterwards does she realize it sounded like an insult. That was not at all how she meant it. She just didn’t mean to compare Dad’s amateurish compulsive behavior with The Monster’s obviously professional obsessions.

  The Monster returns to see the wurse nibbling at her backpack, where it clearly believes there are some Daim bars. The Monster looks as if he’s trying to go to a happier place inside his head. And there they stand, all three of them: a wurse, a child, and a monster with a need for cleanliness and order that clearly is not at all well suited to the company of wurses and children.

  On the other side of the door, the police and Animal Control have just broken into a flat where there’s a lethal hound, only to discover the telling absence of said hound.

  Elsa looks at the wurse. Looks at The Monster.

  “Why do you have the key to . . . that . . . flat?” she asks The Monster.

  The Monster seems to start breathing more heavily.

  “You left letter. From Granny. In envelope,” he replies at long last, deep-throated.

  Elsa tilts her head the other way.

  “Did Granny write that you should take care of it?”

  The Monster nods reluctantly.

  “Wrote ‘protect the castle.’ ”

  Elsa nods. Their eyes meet fleetingly. The Monster looks a great deal as one does when wishing that people would just go home and filthify their own halls. Elsa looks at the wurse.

  “Why does it howl so much at night?”

  The wurse doesn’t look as if it greatly appreciates being spoken of in the third-person singular. That is, if it counts as a third person; the wurse seems unsure about the grammatical rules of the case. The Monster is getting tired of all the questions.

  “Has grief,” he says in a low voice towards the wurse, rubbing his hands together although there is nothing left to rub in.

  “Grief about what?” asks Elsa.

  The Monster’s gaze is fixed on his palms.

  “Grief about your grandmother.”

  Elsa looks at the wurse. The wurse looks at her with black, sad eyes. Later, when she thinks about it, Elsa assumes this is when she really, really starts liking it a lot. She lo
oks at The Monster again.

  “Why did my granny send you a letter?”

  He rubs his hand harder.

  “Old friend,” he mutters from behind his mountain of black hair.

  “What did it say?”

  “Just said sorry. Just sorry . . .” he says, disappearing even deeper into his hair and beard.

  “Why is my granny saying sorry to you?”

  She is starting to feel very much excluded from this story, and Elsa hates feeling excluded from stories.

  “Not matter for you,” says The Monster quietly.

  “She was MY granny!” Elsa insists.

  “Was my ‘sorry.’ ”

  Elsa clenches her fists.

  “Touché,” she admits at last.

  The Monster doesn’t look up. Just turns around and goes back into the bathroom. More running of water. More alcogel. More rubbing. The wurse has picked up Elsa’s backpack now with its teeth and has its whole snout inserted into it. It growls with great disappointment when it finds there is a palpable absence of chocolate-related materials in it.

  Elsa squints at The Monster, her tone stricter and more interrogative:

  “When I gave you the letter you spoke our secret language! You said ‘stupid girl!’ Was it Granny who taught you our secret language?”

  And then The Monster looks up properly for the first time. His eyes open wide, in surprise. And Elsa stares at him, her mouth agape.

  “Not she who taught me. I . . . taught her,” says The Monster in a low voice, in the secret language.

  Now Elsa sounds out of breath.

  “You are . . . you are . . .”

  And just at that moment as she hears the police closing up the remains of the door to the wurse’s flat and walking out, while Britt-Marie protests wildly, Elsa looks directly into The Monster’s eyes.

  “You are . . . the Werewolf Boy.”

  And, a breath later, she whispers in the secret language:

  “You’re Wolfheart.”

  And The Monster nods sadly.

  11

  PROTEIN BARS

  Granny’s fairy tales from Miamas were fairly dramatic, as a rule. Wars and storms and pursuits and intrigues and stuff, because these were the sorts of action stories that Granny liked. They were hardly ever about everyday life in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. So Elsa knows very little about how monsters and wurses get along, when they don’t have armies to lead and shadows to fight.

  It turns out they don’t really get along.

  It starts with the wurse totally losing its patience with The Monster when The Monster tries to wash the floor under the wurse while the wurse is still lying on it, and then, because The Monster is extremely reluctant to touch the wurse, he accidentally spatters some alcogel in its eye. Elsa has to intervene to stop a full-blown fight, and later when The Monster with extreme frustration insists that Elsa must put one of those blue plastic bags on each of the wurse’s paws, the wurse thinks it’s gone far enough. In the end, once twilight is falling outside and she’s certain that the police are not still hanging about on the stairs, Elsa forces them both outside into the snow, to give herself a bit of peace and quiet to think over the situation and decide what to do next.

  She would have worried about being seen by Britt-Marie from the balcony, except that it’s six o’clock sharp and Britt-Marie and Kent have their dinner at exactly six o’clock because “only barbarians” eat their dinner at any other time. Elsa nestles her chin into her Gryffindor scarf and tries to think clearly. The wurse, still looking quite offended by the blue plastic bags, backs into a bush until only its nose is sticking out of the branches. It stays there, its eyes focused on Elsa with a very dissatisfied expression. It takes almost a minute before The Monster sighs and makes a pointed gesture.

  “Crapping,” mumbles The Monster, and looks the other way.

  “Sorry,” says Elsa guiltily to the wurse and turns away. They are using normal language again, because something in Elsa’s stomach turns into a dark lump when she talks in the secret language to anyone but Granny. Either way, The Monster doesn’t seem too keen on any language. Meanwhile, the wurse looks like you or I might if someone came barging in while you were attending to nature’s needs, and it took a while before they understood how inappropriate it was to stand there gawking. Only then does Elsa realize that it actually couldn’t have had a chance to relieve itself for several days, unless it did so inside its flat. Which she rules out because she can’t see how it could have maneuvered itself into using a toilet, and it certainly wouldn’t have crapped on the floor, because this is not the sort of thing a wurse would demean itself by doing. So she assumes that one of the wurse’s superpowers is clenching.

  She turns to The Monster. He rubs his hands together and looks down at the tracks in the snow as if he’d like to smooth out the snow with an iron.

  “Are you a soldier?” asks Elsa, pointing at his trousers.

  He shakes his head. Elsa continues pointing at his trousers, because she has seen this type of trousers on the news.

  “Those are soldier trousers.”

  The Monster nods.

  “Why are you wearing soldier’s trousers if you’re not a soldier, then?” she interrogates.

  “Old trousers,” The Monster replies tersely.

  “How did you get that scar?” asks Elsa, pointing at his face.

  “Accident,” The Monster replies even more tersely.

  “No shit, Sherlock—I wasn’t implying you did it on purpose.”

  (“No shit, Sherlock” is one of her favorite expressions in English. Her father always says one should not use English expressions if there are perfectly good substitutes in one’s own language, but Elsa actually doesn’t think there is a substitute in this case.)

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound rude. I just wanted to know what sort of accident.”

  “Normal accident,” he growls, as if that settles matters. The Monster disappears under the huge hood of his jacket. “Late now. Should sleep.”

  She understands that he is alluding to her, not to himself. She points at the wurse.

  “That one has to sleep with you tonight.”

  The Monster looks at her as if she just asked him to get naked, roll in saliva, and then run through a postage stamp factory with the lights off. Or maybe not exactly like that. But more or less. He shakes his head, so that his hood sways like a sail.

  “Not sleep there. Can’t. Not sleep there. Can’t. Can’t. Can’t.”

  Elsa puts her hands on her stomach and glares at him.

  “Where’s it going to sleep, then?”

  The Monster retracts deeper into his hood. Points at Elsa.

  Elsa snorts.

  “Mum didn’t even let me get myself an owl! Do you get how she’d react if I came home with that t-h-i-n-g?”

  The wurse comes out of the bushes, making a lot of noise and looking offended. Elsa clears her throat and apologizes.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean ‘that thing’ in a bad sense.”

  The wurse looks a bit as if it’s close to muttering, “Sure you didn’t.” The Monster rubs his hands in circles faster and faster, and starts to look as if he’s panicking, and hisses down at the ground:

  “Shit on fur. Has shit on fur. Shit on fur.”

  Elsa rolls her eyes, realizing that if she presses the point he’ll probably have a heart attack. The Monster turns away and looks as if he is trying to insert an invisible eraser into his brain to banish that image from his memory.

  “What did Granny write in the letter?” she asks him.

  The Monster breathes grimly under his hood.

  “Wrote ‘sorry,’ ” he says without turning around.

  “But what else? It was a really long letter!”

  The Monster sighs and shakes his head and nods towards the entrance of the house.

  “Late now. Sleep,” he growls.

  “Not until you tell me about the letter!”

  The Monster looks like a
very tired person being kept awake by someone thumping him at regular intervals, as hard as he can, with a pillowcase filled with yogurt. Or more or less, anyway. He looks up and frowns and evaluates Elsa, as if trying to work out how far he could fling her.

  “Wrote ‘protect castle,’ ” he repeats.

  Elsa steps closer to show him that she’s not afraid of him. Or to show herself.

  “And what else?”

  He hunches up inside his hood and starts walking off through the snow.

  “Protect you. Protect Elsa.”

  Then he disappears in the darkness and is gone. He disappears a lot, Elsa will learn in due course. He’s surprisingly good at it for someone so large.

  Elsa hears muted panting from the other side of the yard and turns around. George comes jogging towards the house. She knows it’s George because he’s wearing shorts over his leggings and the greenest jacket in the world. He doesn’t see her and the wurse, because he’s too busy bouncing up and down from a bench. George trains a lot at running and jumping up and down from things. Elsa sometimes thinks he’s in a permanent audition to be in the next Super Mario game.

  “Come!” whispers Elsa quickly to the wurse to get it inside before George catches sight of it. And to her surprise, the mighty animal obeys her.

  The wurse brushes past her legs so its coat tickles her all the way up to her forehead, and she’s almost knocked down by the force of it.

  She laughs. It looks at her and seems to be laughing as well.

  Apart from Granny, the wurse is the first friend Elsa has ever had.

  She makes sure Britt-Marie is not prowling about on the stairs and that George still hasn’t seen them, and then she leads the wurse down into the cellar. The storage units are each assigned to a flat, and Granny’s unit is unlocked and empty.

  “You have to stay here tonight,” she whispers. “Tomorrow we’ll find you a better hiding place.”

  The wurse doesn’t look hugely impressed, but it lies down and rolls onto its side and peers nonchalantly into the parts of the cellar that still lie steeped in darkness. Elsa checks where it’s looking, then focuses on the wurse.