“Turn off the water, I said! No bathing at night!!!” the drunk stammers from below at no one in particular, whacking her shoehorn against the banister.
That’s what the drunk always does. Roars and screams and bashes things with that shoehorn. Then sings that same old song of hers. Of course, no one ever comes out and quiets her down, not even Britt-Marie, for in this house drunks are like monsters. People think if they ignore them they’ll cease to exist.
Elsa sits up into a squatting position and peers down through the gap between the stairs. She can only make out a glimpse of the drunk’s socks as she shambles past, swinging the shoehorn as if scything tall grass. Elsa can’t quite explain to herself why she does it, but she heaves herself up on her tiptoes and sneaks down the first flight of stairs. Out of pure curiosity, perhaps. Or more likely because she is bored and frustrated about no longer being able to get to Miamas.
The door of the drunk’s flat is open. There’s a faint light cast by an overturned floor lamp. Photos on all the walls. Elsa has never seen so many photos—she thought Granny had a lot of them on her ceiling, but these must be in the thousands. Each of them is framed in a small white wooden frame and all are of two teenage boys and a man who must be their father. In one of the photos, the man and the boys are standing on a beach with a sparkling green sea behind them. The boys are both wearing wetsuits. They smile. They are bronzed. They look happy.
Under the frame is one of those cheap congratulatory cards, the kind you buy in a gas station when you’ve forgotten to get a proper card. “To Mum, from your boys,” it says on the front.
Beside the card hangs a mirror. Shattered.
The words reverberating over the landing are so sudden and so filled with fury that Elsa loses her balance and slips down the bottom four or five steps, right into the wall. The echo throws itself at her, as if determined to claw her ears.
“WHATAREYOUDOINGHERE?”
Elsa peers up through the railings at the deranged person wielding the shoehorn at her, looking simultaneously incandescent and terrified. Her eyes flicker. That black skirt is full of creases now. She smells of wine, Elsa can feel it all the way from the floor below. Her hair looks like a bundle of string in which two birds have got themselves tangled up during a fight. She has purple bags under her eyes.
The woman sways. She probably means to yell, but it comes out as a wheeze:
“You’re not allowed to bathe at night. The water . . . turn off the water. Everyone will drown. . . .”
The white cable she always talks into sits in her ear, but the other end just dangles against her hip, disconnected. Elsa realizes there has probably never been anyone there, and that’s not an easy thing for an almost-eight-year-old to understand. Granny told many fairy tales about many things, but never about women in black skirts pretending to have telephone conversations while they went up the stairs, so their neighbors wouldn’t think they’d bought all that wine for themselves.
The woman looks confused. As if she has suddenly forgotten where she is. She disappears and, in the next moment, Elsa feels her mum gently plucking her from the stairs. Feels her warm breath against her neck and her “ssshhh” in her ear, as if they were standing in front of a deer and had got a bit too close.
Elsa opens her mouth, but Mum puts her finger over her lips.
“Shush,” whispers Mum again, and keeps her arms tight around her.