“You’re going to be a fantastic big sister,” Mum whispers back.
Elsa doesn’t answer. She just stands there waving as Kia drives off. She couldn’t answer because she doesn’t want Mum to know that she doesn’t want to be a big sister. Doesn’t want anyone to know that she is this horrible person who hates her own half sibling, just because Halfie is going to be more loved by them than Elsa. Doesn’t want anyone to know she’s afraid they’ll abandon her.
She turns around and looks into the playground. No one has seen her yet. She reaches into her backpack and gets out the letter she found in Renault. She doesn’t recognize the address, and Granny was always terrible at giving directions. Elsa isn’t even sure this address exists in real life, because quite often when Granny was explaining where things were, she used landmarks that were no longer there. “It’s right by where those morons with the budgerigars lived, past the old tennis club down where the old rubber factory or whatever it was used to be,” she’d ramble on, and when people didn’t get exactly what she was talking about, Granny got so frustrated that she had to smoke two cigarettes one after the other, lighting the second by the embers of the first. And then when someone said she couldn’t do that indoors, she got so angry that it was utterly impossible after that to get any decent directions out of her, impossible in fact to get anything except her expletive middle finger.
Really what Elsa wanted to do was rip the letter into ten thousand pieces and let the wind blow it all away. That was what she had decided last night. Because she was angry at Granny. But now, after Mum has told her the whole story and Elsa has seen all that brokenness in Mum’s eyes, she’s made the decision not to do that. Elsa is going to deliver the letter, this and all the other letters Granny has left for her. This is going to be a grand adventure and a monstrous fairy tale, just as Granny planned it. But Elsa isn’t doing it for Granny’s sake.
First of all she’s going to need a computer.
She looks at the playground again. And at the precise moment when the bell goes and everyone turns away from the street, she runs past the fence towards the bus stop. Gets off a few stops later, runs into the shop, and goes straight to the ice cream counter, then back to the house, where she sneaks into the cellar storage unit and buries her face in the wurse’s fur. It’s her new favorite place on earth.
“I’ve got ice cream in the bag,” she says at last when she lifts her head.
The wurse points its nose with interest.
“It’s Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk—my favorite,” Elsa elaborates.
The wurse has eaten more than half the ice cream before she reaches the end of that sentence. She caresses its ears.
“I just have to get hold of a computer. Stay here and . . . you know . . . try to stay out of sight!”
The wurse looks at her like a very big wurse that has just been told to behave like a considerably smaller wurse.
Elsa promises to find it a much better hiding place. Soon.
She runs up the stairs. Checks carefully that Britt-Marie is not lurking anywhere, and once she’s sure she’s not, rings The Monster’s doorbell. He doesn’t open. She rings the bell again. Everything is silent. She groans and opens his mail slot and peers inside. All of the lights are out, but that doesn’t dissuade her.
“I know you’re there!” she calls out.
No one answers. Elsa takes a deep breath.
“If you don’t open, I’ll sneeze right inside! And I’ve got a mega-col—” she starts to say threateningly, before from behind her interrupts a hiss, like someone trying to make a cat jump down from a table.
She spins around. The Monster steps out of the shadows on the stairs. She can’t understand how such a huge person can make himself invisible all the time. He’s rubbing his hands together, turning the skin around his knuckles red.