“From home,” mutters Alf.
“You have O’boy at home?” Elsa asks skeptically.
“I can bloody go to the shop, can’t I?” says Alf sourly.
Elsa grins at him. She’s thinking of calling Alf the Knight of Invective because she’s read about invective on Wikipedia and she feels all in all there are too few knights of it. Then she takes a deep gulp and comes close to spitting it out all over Alf’s leather jacket.
“How many spoonfuls of O’boy did you put in this?”
“I don’t know. Fourteen or fifteen, maybe?” Alf mutters defensively.
“You’re supposed to put in, like, three!”
Alf looks indignant. Or at least Elsa thinks so. She put “indignant” in Dad’s word jar one time, and she imagines that’s what it looks like.
“It should bloody taste of something, shouldn’t it?”
Elsa eats the rest with a spoon.
“So you also know who was chasing me in the churchyard, don’t you?” she asks Alf, with half of the cup’s contents in the corners of her mouth and on the tip of her nose.
“It’s not you he’s after.”
“Err, hello? He was chasing me.”
Alf just slowly shakes his head.
“Yes. But you’re not the one he’s hunting.”
23
DISHCLOTH
Elsa has a thousand questions about what Alf just said, but doesn’t ask any of them because Mum is so tired once they’ve gone up into the flat that she and Halfie have to go straight to bed. Mum gets like that these days, tired as if someone pulled the plug. It’s Halfie’s fault, apparently. George says that to compensate for Halfie keeping them awake for the next eighteen years, Halfie is making Mum fall asleep all the time for the first nine months. Elsa sits on the edge of the bed stroking her hair; Mum kisses her hands, whispering, “It will get better, darling. It will be fine.” Like Granny used to say. And Elsa wants so, so much to believe that. Mum smiles sleepily.
“Is Britt-Marie still here?” she says, with a nod towards the door.
Britt-Marie’s nagging voice emanates from the kitchen, so the question immediately becomes rhetorical. She’s demanding “a decision” from George on Renault, which is still parked in Britt-Marie’s slot in the garage. (“We can’t live without rules, George! Even Ulrika has to understand that!”) George answers cheerfully that he can understand that well enough, because George can understand everyone’s point of view. It’s one of the annoying things about him, and, sure enough, seems to be getting Britt-Marie into a huff. And then George offers her some eggs, which she ignores, insisting instead that all tenants “submit to a full investigation” regarding the stroller, which is still locked up at the bottom of the stairs.
“Don’t worry, darling, we’ll find a better hiding place for your friend tomorrow,” Mum mumbles half in her sleep, and then adds with a smile: “Maybe we can hide it in the stroller?”
Elsa laughs. But only a little. And she thinks that the mystery of the locked stroller is like the opening of an insanely awful Agatha Christie novel. Elsa knows that because almost all of Agatha Christie’s novels can be read on the iPad, and Agatha Christie has never had such a stereotypical villain as Britt-Marie. More likely she’d be a victim, because Elsa can imagine a murder mystery in which someone has bludgeoned Britt-Marie to death with a candlestick in the library, and then everyone who knew her would be a suspect because everyone would have a motive: “The hag was a nightmare!” And then Elsa feels a bit ashamed for thinking along these lines. But only a little.
“Britt-Marie doesn’t mean any harm, she just needs to feel important,” Mum tries to explain.
“She’s still just a nagging old busybody,” Elsa mutters.
Mum smiles.
And then she gets comfortable on the pillows and Elsa helps her push one of them under her back, and Mum strokes her cheek and whispers: