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

  Because Granny actually liked those newspapers, she used to stuff them into her shoes when it had been raining. But one day when Elsa read on the Internet how many trees it took to make just one edition of a newspaper, she put up “No junk mail ever, thanks!” notices on both Mum’s and Granny’s doors, because Elsa is a big fan of the environment. The newspapers kept coming, and when Elsa called the company they just laughed at her. And they shouldn’t have done that. Because no one laughs at Granny’s grandchild.

  Granny hated the environment, but she was the kind of person you brought along when you were going to war. So she became a terrorist for Elsa’s sake. Elsa is furious at Granny for that, in fact, because Elsa wants to be furious at Granny. For everything else. For the lies and for abandoning Mum and for dying. But it’s impossible to stay angry at someone who’s prepared to turn terrorist for the sake of her grandchild. And it makes Elsa furious that she can’t be furious.

  She can’t even be angry at Granny in a normal way. Not even that is normal about Granny.

  She stands in silence next to Alf and blinks until her head hurts. Alf tries to look unconcerned, but Elsa notices that he’s scanning the darkness, as if looking for someone. He watches their surroundings much like Wolfheart and the wurse. As if he’s also on guard duty. She squints and tries to fit him into Granny’s life, like a piece of a puzzle. She can’t recall Granny ever talking very much about him, except that he never knew how to lift his feet, which was why the soles of his shoes were always so worn down.

  “How well did you know Granny?” she asks.

  The leather jacket creaks.

  “What do you mean, ‘knew’? We were bloody neighbors, that’s all,” Alf answers evasively.

  “So what did you mean when you picked me up in the taxi, when you said Granny would never have forgiven you if you’d left me there?”

  More creaking.

  “I didn’t mean anything, not a blo—nothing. I just happened to be in the area. Bloody . . .”

  He sounds frustrated. Elsa nods, pretending to understand in a way that Alf clearly doesn’t appreciate at all.

  “Why are you here, then?” she asks teasingly.

  “What?”

  “Why did you follow me outside? Shouldn’t you be driving your taxi now or something?”

  “You don’t have a blo— you don’t have exclusive rights to taking walks, you know.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “I can’t let you and the mutt run loose here at night on your own. Your granny would have blo—”

  He interrupts himself. Grunts. Sighs.

  “Your granny would never have forgiven me if something happened to you.”

  He looks as if he already regrets saying that.

  “Did you and Granny have an affair?” Elsa asks, after waiting for what seems a more than adequate length of time. Alf looks like she just threw a yellow snowball in his face.

  “Aren’t you a bit young to know what that means?”

  “There are loads of things I’m too young to know about, but I know about them anyway.” She clears her throat and carries on: “Once when I was small, Mum was going to explain what her work was, because I’d asked Dad and he didn’t really seem to know. And then Mum said she worked as an economist. And then I said, ‘What?’ and then she said, ‘I work out how much money the hospital has, so we know what we can buy.’ And then I said, ‘What, like in a shop?’ And then she said that, yeah, sort of like in a shop, and it wasn’t hard to get it at all and so really Dad was being a bit thick about it.”

  Alf checks his watch.

  “But then, anyway, I saw a TV series where two people had a shop. And they had an affair, or at least I think they did. So now I get what it means, sort of thing. And I thought that was kind of how you and Granny knew each other! So . . . did you or didn’t you?”

  “Is that mutt done now or what? Some of us have jobs to go to,” Alf mutters, which isn’t much of an answer. He turns towards the bushes.

  Elsa scrutinizes him thoughtfully.

  “I just thought you could be Granny’s type. Because you’re a bit younger than she is. And she always flirted with policemen who were about your age. They were sort of too old to be policemen but they were still policemen. Not that you’re a policeman, I mean. But you’re also old without being . . . really old. Get what I mean?”

  Alf doesn’t look like he really gets it. And he looks like he’s got a bit of a migraine.

  The wurse finishes, and the three of them head back inside, Elsa in the middle. It’s not a big army, but it’s an army, thinks Elsa and feels a little less afraid of the dark. When they part ways in the cellar between the door to the garage and the door to the storage units, Elsa scrapes her shoe against the floor and asks Alf, “What was that music you were listening to in the car when you came to pick me up? Was it opera?”

  “Holy Christ, enough questions!”

  “I was only asking!”

  “Blo— yeah. It was a bastard opera.”

  “What language was it in?”

  “Italian.”

  “Can you talk Italian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For real?”

  “What other bloody way is there to know Italian?”

  “But, like, fluently?”

  “You have to find another hiding place for that thing, I told you,” he says, gesturing at the wurse, clearly trying to change the subject. “People will find it sooner or later.”

  “Do you know Italian or not?”

  “I know enough to understand an opera. You got any other bast— questions?”

  “What was that opera about in the car, then?” she persists.

  Alf pulls open the garage door.

  “Love. They’re all about love, the whole lot.”

  He pronounces the world “love” a little as one would say words like “refrigerator” or “two-inch screw.”

  “WERE YOU IN LOVE WITH MY GRANNY, THEN?” Elsa yells after him, but he’s already slammed the door.

  She stays there, grinning. The wurse does too, she’s almost sure about that. And it’s much more difficult being afraid of shadows and the dark while grinning.

  “I think Alf is our friend now,” she whispers.

  The wurse looks like it agrees.

  “We’re going to need all the friends we can get. Because Granny didn’t tell me what happens in this fairy tale.”

  The wurse snuggles up against her.

  “I miss Wolfheart,” Elsa whispers into its fur.

  Reluctantly, the wurse seems to agree with that too.

  20

  CLOTHES SHOP

  Today’s the day. And it starts with the most terrible night.

  Elsa wakes with her mouth wide open but her scream fills her head rather than the room. She roars silently and reaches out with her hand to toss aside the bedclothes, but they’re already on the floor. She walks into the flat—it smells of eggs. George smiles carefully at her from the kitchen. She doesn’t smile back. He looks upset. She doesn’t care.

  She has a shower so hot her skin feels as if it’s about to come away from her flesh like clementine peel. Walks out into the flat. Mum left home hours ago. She’s gone to fix everything, because that is what Mum does.

  George calls out something behind Elsa, but she neither listens nor answers. She puts on the clothes that Mum has put out for her and crosses the landing, locking the front door behind her. Granny’s flat smells wrong. It smells clean. The towers of packing boxes throw shadows across the entry hall, like monuments to everything that is now absent.

  She stands inside the door, incapable of going any farther. She was here last night, but it’s more difficult by daylight. It’s harder work remembering things when the sun is forcing its way in through the blinds. Cloud animals soar past in the sky. It’s a beautiful morning but a terrible day.

  Elsa’s skin is still burning after her shower. It makes her think of Granny, because Granny’s shower hasn’t worked in over a y
ear, and instead of calling the landlord and asking him to fix the problem, she just used Mum and George’s shower. And sometimes she forgot to do up her dressing gown when she went back through the flat. And sometimes she forgot her dressing gown altogether. Once, Mum shouted at her for what must have been fifteen minutes because she didn’t show any respect about George also living in Mum and Elsa’s flat. But that was soon after Elsa had starting reading the collected works of Charles Dickens. Granny was not much use at reading books, so Elsa used to read them to her while they were driving Renault, because Elsa wanted to have someone she could discuss them with afterwards. Especially A Christmas Carol, which Elsa had read several times, because Granny liked Christmas stories.

  So when Mum said that thing about how Granny shouldn’t run about naked in the flat, out of respect for George, then Granny, still naked, turned to George and said, “What’s all this respect rubbish? You’re cohabiting with my daughter, for goodness sake.” And then Granny bowed very deeply and very nakedly and added ceremoniously: “I am the spirit of future Christmases, George!”

  Mum was very angry at Granny about that, but she tried not to show it, for Elsa’s sake. So, for Mum’s sake, Elsa tried not to show how proud she was of Granny for being able to quote Charles Dickens.

  Elsa goes into the flat without taking off her shoes. She’s wearing the kind of shoes that scratch the parquet flooring, so Mum has told her she can’t wear them inside, but it doesn’t matter in Granny’s place, because the floor already looks as if someone went skating on it. Partly because it’s old, and partly because Granny actually once went skating on it.

  Elsa opens the door of the big wardrobe. The wurse licks her face. It smells of protein bars and sponge cake mix. Elsa had just gone to bed last night when she realized that Mum would most likely send George down to the cellar storage unit today to get the spare chairs, because everyone is coming here afterwards for coffee. Because today is the day, and everyone drinks coffee somewhere after days like this.

  Mum and George’s cellar unit is next to Granny’s unit, and it’s the only storage unit you can see the wurse from now that Alf has put up the plywood sheets. So Elsa sneaked down in the night, unable to decide whether she was more afraid of shadows or ghosts or Britt-Marie, and brought the wurse upstairs.

  “There would be more space to hide you in here if Granny wasn’t dead,” says Elsa apologetically, because then the wardrobe wouldn’t have stopped growing. “Then again, if Granny hadn’t died, you wouldn’t need to hide in the first place.”

  The wurse licks her face again and squeezes its head through the opening and looks for her backpack. Elsa runs to fetch it from the hall and pulls out three tins of dreams and a quart of milk.

  “Maud left them with Mum last night,” Elsa explains, but when the wurse immediately starts snuffling her hands as if about to eat the cookies with the tin still around them, she raises an admonishing forefinger.

  “You can only have two tins! One is for ammunition!”

  The wurse barks at her a bit about that, but in the end recognizes its poor bargaining position and only polishes off two of the tins and half of the third. It is a wurse, after all. And these are cookies.

  Elsa takes the milk and goes looking for her moo-gun. She’s a bit slow on the uptake today. Because she hasn’t had any nightmares in years, she’s only realizing now that she may need it. The first time the shadow came to her in the nightmare, she tried to shake it all off the next morning. As you do. Tried to persuade herself that “it was only a nightmare.” But she should have known better. Because everyone who has ever been in the Land-Of-Almost-Awake knows better.

  So last night when she had the same dream, she realized where she had to go to fight the nightmares. To reclaim her nights from them.

  “Mirevas!” she calls out firmly to the wurse, when it comes out of one of Granny’s smaller wardrobes followed by an unnameable jumble of things that Mum has not yet had time to put into boxes.

  “We have to go to Mirevas!” announces Elsa to the wurse, waving her moo-gun.

  Mirevas, one of the kingdoms adjoining Miamas, is the smallest principality in the Land-of-Almost-Awake and for that reason almost forgotten. When children in the Land-of-Almost-Awake are learning geography and have to reel off the names of the six kingdoms, Mirevas is the one they always forget. Even those who live there. Because the Mirevasians are incredibly humble, kindly, and cautious creatures who go to great lengths to avoid taking up unnecessary space or causing the slightest inconvenience. Yet they have a very important task, actually one of the most important tasks in a kingdom where imagination is the most important thing you can have: for it is in Mirevas that the nightmare hunters are trained.

  Only smart-asses in the real world who don’t know any better would say something as idiotic as “it was only a nightmare.” There are no “only” nightmares—they’re living creatures, dark little clouds of insecurity and anguish that come sneaking between the houses when everyone is asleep, trying all the doors and windows to find some place to slip inside and start causing a commotion. And that is why there are nightmare hunters. And anyone who knows anything about anything knows one has to have a moo-gun to chase a nightmare. Someone who doesn’t know better might mistake a moo-gun for a quite ordinary paintball gun customised by someone’s granny with a milk carton at the side and a catapult glued to the top. Elsa, though, knows what she’s got in her hands. She loads the carton with milk and puts a cookie in the firing chamber in front of the rubber band on the cookie gun.

  You can’t kill a nightmare, but you can scare it. And there’s nothing so feared by nightmares as milk and cookies.

  Just as she’s starting to feel more confident, though, she’s startled by the doorbell, and to the infinite chagrin of the wurse she accidentally fires loads of milk at it but no cookie, and it scurries off in a huff. For a moment she wonders how a nightmare can be ringing the doorbell, but it’s only George. He looks upset. She doesn’t care.

  “I’m going down to pick up the spare chairs in the cellar storage,” he says and tries to smile at her like stepdads do on days when they have an extra-strong sense of being sidelined.

  Elsa shrugs and slams the door in his face. The wurse has reappeared, so she climbs onto its back and peers out of the spyhole to see George lingering there for what must be a minute, looking upset. Elsa hates him for that. Mum always tells Elsa that George just wants her to like him because he cares. As if Elsa doesn’t get that. She knows he cares, and that’s why she can’t like him. Not because she wouldn’t like him if she tried, but rather because she knows she definitely would. Because everyone likes George. It’s his superpower.

  And she knows that in this case she’ll only be disappointed when Halfie is born and George forgets she exists. It’s better not to like him from the start.

  If you don’t like people, they can’t hurt you. Almost-eight-year-olds who are often described as “different” learn that very quickly.

  She jumps down from the wurse’s back. The wurse closes its jaws around the moo-gun and gently but firmly takes it away from her, then shambles off and puts it on a stool out of reach of her trigger finger. But it avoids eating the cookie, which, as anyone who understands just how much wurses love cookies knows, is a significant sign of respect for Elsa.

  There’s another ring at the door. Elsa throws it open and is just about to snap impatiently at George when she realizes just in time that it’s not George.

  There’s a silence lasting for probably half a dozen eternities.

  “Hello, Elsa,” says the woman in the black skirt, sounding a bit lost. She’s wearing jeans, not a black skirt, today, admittedly. And she smells of mint and looks scared. She breathes so slowly that Elsa fears she’s about to expire from a shortage of oxygen.

  “I’m . . . I’m very sorry I shouted at you in my office,” she begins.

  They scrutinize each other’s shoes.

  “It’s cool,” Elsa manages to say at last.
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  The corners of the woman’s mouth vibrate gently.

  “I was a bit caught off guard when you came to the office. I don’t get many people visiting me there. I’m . . . I’m not so good at visits.”

  Elsa nods guiltily without looking up from the woman’s shoes.

  “It doesn’t matter. Sorry for saying that about . . .” she whispers, unable to get out the last few words.

  The woman waves her hand dismissively.

  “It was my fault. It’s difficult for me to talk about my family. Your grandmother tried to make me do it, but it only made me . . . well . . . angry.”

  Elsa pokes at the floor with the tip of her toe.

  “People drink wine to forget things that are hard, right?”

  “Or to have the strength to remember. I think.”

  Elsa snuffles.

  “You’re also broken, right? Like Wolfheart?”

  “Broken in . . . in another way. Maybe.”

  “Couldn’t you mend yourself, then?”

  “You mean because I’m a psychologist?”

  Elsa nods. “Doesn’t that work?”

  “I don’t think surgeons can operate on themselves. It’s probably more or less the same thing.”

  Elsa nods again. For an instant the woman in the jeans looks as if she’s about to reach out towards her, but she stops herself and absentmindedly scratches the palm of her hand instead.

  “Your granny wrote in the letter that she wanted me to look after you,” she whispers.

  Elsa nods.

  “That’s what she writes in all the letters, apparently.”

  “You sound angry.”

  “She didn’t write any letters to me.”

  The woman reaches into a bag on the floor and gets something out.

  “I . . . I bought these Harry Potter books yesterday. I haven’t had time to get very far yet, but, you know.”

  “What made you change your mind?”