“YES I BLOODY AM! TRY TO UNDERSTAND THAT YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO’S CAPABLE OF BEING UPSET AND STOP BEING SUCH A LITTLE BRAT!”
Mum and Elsa stare at each other. Mum covers her mouth with her hand.
“Elsa . . . I . . . darl—”
Elsa shakes her head and pulls off the entire rubber seal from the door in a single tug. She knows she’s won. When Mum loses control, Elsa wins every time.
“Cut it out. It’s not good shouting like that,” she mumbles. And then she adds without so much as glancing at her mother: “Think about the baby.”
7
LEATHER
It’s possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her.
It’s Tuesday when Elsa meets The Monster for the first time. School is better on Tuesdays. Elsa only has one bruise today, and bruises can be explained away by saying she’s been playing soccer.
She sits in Audi. Audi is Dad’s car. It’s the exact opposite of Renault. Normally Dad picks her up from school every other Friday, because that’s when she stays with Dad and Lisette and Lisette’s children. Granny used to pick her up on all the other days and now Mum will have to do it. But today Mum and George have gone to a doctor to look at Halfie, so today Dad is picking her up even though it’s a Tuesday.
Granny always came on time and stood at the gate. Dad is late and stays in Audi in the parking area.
“What did you do to your eye?” Dad asks nervously.
He came back from Spain this morning, because he went there with Lisette and Lisette’s children, but he hasn’t caught any sun because he doesn’t know how to.
“We played soccer,” says Elsa.
Granny would never have let her get away with the soccer story.
But Dad isn’t Granny, so he just nods tentatively and asks her to be good enough to put on her seat belt. He does that very often. Nods tentatively. Dad is a tentative person. Mum is a perfectionist and Dad is a pedant and that was partly why their marriage didn’t work so well, Elsa figures. Because a perfectionist and a pedant are two very different things. When Mum and Dad did the cleaning, Mum wrote a minute-by-minute breakdown of the cleaning schedule, but then Dad would sort of get caught up with descaling the coffee percolator for two and a half hours, and you really can’t plan a life with a person like that around you, said Mum. The teachers at school always tell Elsa that her problem is her inability to concentrate, which is very odd, Elsa thinks, because Dad’s big problem is that he can’t stop concentrating.
“So, what do you want to do?” asks Dad, indecisively putting his hands on the wheel.
He often does that. Asks what Elsa would like to do. Because he very rarely wants to do anything himself. And this Tuesday was very unexpected for him: Dad is not very good at dealing with unexpected Tuesdays. That’s why Elsa only stays every other weekend with him, because after he met Lisette and she and her children moved in, Dad said it was too “messy” for Elsa there. When Granny found out, she phoned him and called him a Nazi at least ten times in a minute. That was a Nazi record, even for Granny. And when she’d hung up she turned to Elsa and spluttered, “Lisette? What sort of name is that?” And Elsa knew she didn’t really mean it, of course, because everyone likes Lisette—she has the same superpower as George. But Granny was the sort of person you brought with you when you went to war, and that was what Elsa loved about her.
Dad’s always late picking Elsa up from school. Granny was never late. Elsa has tried to understand exactly what “irony” means and she’s fairly sure it’s that Dad is never late for anything other than picking up Elsa from school, and Granny was always late for everything except for that one thing.
Dad fiddles with the wheel again.
“So . . . where would you like to go today?”
Elsa looks surprised, because it sounds as if he really means they’re going somewhere. He twists in his seat.