“I KNOW she’s only a child, Marcel! But she’s a damn sight smarter than all the other fools put together! And this is my will and you’re my lawyer. Just do what I say.”
Elsa stands in the hall holding her breath. And only when Granny says, “Because I don’t WANT TO tell her yet! Because all seven-year-olds deserve superheroes!”—only then does Elsa turn to quietly slip away, her Gryffindor scarf damp with tears.
And the last thing she hears Granny say on the telephone is:
“I don’t want Elsa to know that I am going to die because all seven-year-olds deserve superheroes, Marcel. And one of their superpowers ought to be that they can’t get cancer.”
3
COFFEE
There’s something special about a grandmother’s house. You never forget how it smells.
It’s a normal building, by and large. It has four floors and nine flats and the whole block smells of Granny (and coffee, thanks to Lennart). It also has a clear set of regulations pinned up in the laundry, with the heading FOR EVERYONE’S WELL-BEING in which WELL-BEING has been underlined twice. And a lift that’s always broken and rubbish separated for recycling in the yard, and a drunk, a very large animal of some sort, and, of course, a granny.
Granny lives at the top, opposite Mum and Elsa and George. Granny’s flat is exactly like Mum’s except much messier, because Granny’s flat is like Granny and Mum’s flat is like Mum.
George lives with Mum and that’s not always the easiest of things, because it means he also lives next door to Granny. He has a beard and a very small hat and is obsessed with jogging, during which he insists on wearing his shorts over the top of his tracksuit. He cooks in English, and so when he’s reading the recipes he says “pork” instead of “flask.” Granny never calls him “George,” just “Loser,” which infuriates Mum, but Elsa knows why Granny’s doing it. She just wants Elsa to know she’s on Elsa’s side, no matter what. Because that’s what you do when you’re a granny and your grandchild’s parents get divorced and find themselves new partners and suddenly tell your grandchild there’s a half sibling on its way. That it irritates the hell out of Mum is something Granny views purely as a bonus.
Mum and George don’t want to know if Halfie is a boy-half or a girl-half, even though it’s easy to find out. It’s especially important for George not to know. He always calls Halfie she/he, so he doesn’t “trap the child in a gender role.” The first time he said it, Elsa thought he said “gender troll.” It ended up being a very confusing afternoon for all involved.
Halfie is either going to be called Elvir or Elvira, Mum and George have decided. When Elsa told Granny this, she just stared at her.
“ELV-ir?!”
“It’s the boy version of Elvira.”
“Elvir, though? Are they planning to send him to Mordor to destroy the ring, or what?” (This was soon after Granny had watched all of the Lord of the Rings films with Elsa, because Elsa’s mum had expressly told Elsa she wasn’t allowed to watch them.)
Obviously Elsa knows that Granny doesn’t dislike Halfie. Or even George, really. She just talks that way because she’s Granny. One time Elsa told Granny she really did hate George, and that sometimes she even hated Halfie too. It’s very difficult not to love someone who can hear you say something as horrible as that and still be on your side.
In the flat under Granny’s live Britt-Marie and Kent. They like owning things, and Kent especially likes telling you how much everything costs. He’s hardly ever at home because he’s an entrepreneur, or a “Kentrepreneur” as he likes to joke loudly to people he doesn’t know. And if people don’t laugh right away, he repeats it even louder. As if their hearing is the problem.
Britt-Marie is almost always at home, so Elsa assumes she is not an entrepreneur. Granny calls her “a full-time nag-bag who will forever be the bane of my life.” She always looks a little like she just popped the wrong chocolate into her mouth. She’s the one who put up the sign in the laundry with that FOR EVERYONE’S WELL-BEING bit on it. Everyone’s well-being is very important to Britt-Marie, even though she and Kent are the only people in the house with a washing machine and tumble-dryer in their flat. One time after George had done some laundry, Britt-Marie came upstairs and asked to have a word with Elsa’s mum. She’d brought a little ball of blue fluff from the tumble-dryer filter, which she held out towards Mum as if it were a newly hatched chick, and said: “I think you forgot this when you were doing the laundry, Ulrika!” And then when George explained that actually he was in charge of their laundry, Britt-Marie looked at him and smiled, though she didn’t seem very genuine about it. And then she said, “How very modern,” and smiled well-meaningly at Mum and handed her the fluff and said: “For everyone’s well-being, in this leaseholders’ association we clear the dryer filter when we’ve finished, Ulrika!”
It actually isn’t a leaseholders’ association yet. But it’s going to become one, Britt-Marie is at pains to point out. She and Kent will see it done. And in Britt-Marie’s leaseholders’ association it’s going to be very important to keep to the rules. That is why she is Granny’s antagonist. Elsa knows what “antagonist” means, because you do if you read quality literature.
In the flat opposite Britt-Marie and Kent lives the woman with the black skirt. You hardly ever see her except when she scurries between the front entrance and her door early in the morning and late at night. She always wears high heels and a perfectly ironed black skirt and talks extremely loudly into a white cord trailing from her ear. She never says hello and she never smiles. Granny says that her skirt is too well-ironed and “if you were the cloth hanging off that woman you’d be terrified of getting yourself creased.”
Under Britt-Marie and Kent’s flat live Lennart and Maud. Lennart drinks at least twenty cups of coffee per day and always looks triumphantly proud every time his percolator is turned on. He is the second-nicest person in the world, and he’s married to Maud. Maud is the nicest person in the world and she has always just baked some cookies. They live with Samantha, who’s almost always asleep. Samantha is a bichon frise but Lennart and Maud talk to her as if she wasn’t. When Lennart and Maud drink coffee in front of Samantha they don’t say they’re having “coffee,” they call it “a drink for grown-ups.” Granny says they’re soft in the head, but Elsa just thinks they’re nice. And they always have dreams and hugs—dreams are a kind of cookie; hugs are just normal hugs.
Opposite Lennart and Maud lives Alf. He drives a taxi and always wears a leather jacket under a layer of irascibility. His shoes have soles as thin as greaseproof paper because he doesn’t lift his feet when he walks. Granny says he has the lowest center of gravity in the entire bloody universe.
In the flat under Lennart and Maud live the boy with a syndrome and his mum. The boy with a syndrome is a year and a few weeks younger than Elsa, and never speaks. His mother loses things all the time. Objects seem to rain from her pockets, like in a cartoon when the crook gets frisked by the police and the pile of stuff from his pockets ends up bigger than they are. Both the boy and his mother have very kind eyes, and not even Granny seems to dislike them. And the boy’s always dancing. He dances his way through his existence.