“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 positive 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: