Of course, they shouldn’t have said that, because there were actually an awful lot of things that Granny didn’t “surely understand” at all. Also, unlike the man who owned the company that produced the free newspaper, she had a lot of spare time. “Never mess with someone who has more spare time than you do,” Granny used to say. Elsa used to translate that as, “Never mess with someone who’s perky for her age.”
In the following days Granny had picked up Elsa as usual from school, and then they’d patrolled the block with yellow IKEA carrier bags, ringing all the doorbells. People seemed to find it a bit weird, especially since everyone knows you’re actually not allowed to take those yellow IKEA bags from the store. If anyone started asking too many questions, Granny just said they were from an environmental organization collecting recyclable paper. And then people didn’t dare make any more fuss. “People are afraid of environmental organizations, they think we’ll storm the flat and accuse them of not handling their waste properly. They watch too many films,” Granny had explained as she and Elsa loaded the stuffed carrier bags into Renault. Elsa never quite understood what kinds of films Granny had seen, and where that sort of thing would ever happen. She did know that Granny hated environmental organizations, which she called “panda fascists.”
Whatever the case, you’re actually not supposed to take those yellow carrier bags out of the store. Of course, Granny had just shrugged it off. “I never stole the bags, I just haven’t given them back yet,” she muttered, and gave Elsa a thick felt-tip pen to write with. And then Elsa said she wanted at least four tubs of Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk for this. And then Granny said, “One!” and then Elsa said, “Three!” and then Granny said, “Two!” and then Elsa said, “Three, or I’m telling Mum!” and then Granny yelled, “I’m not negotiating with terrorists!” And then Elsa pointed out that if one looked up “terrorist” on Wikipedia there were quite a lot of things in the definition of the word that applied to Granny but not a single one that applied to Elsa. “The goal of terrorists is to create chaos, and Mum says that’s exactly what you’re busy doing all day long,” said Elsa. And then Granny had agreed to give Elsa four tubs if she just took the felt-tip pen and promised to keep her mouth shut. And so that’s what Elsa did. Late into the night she’d sat in the dark in Renault on the other side of town, on guard duty, while Granny ran in and out of houses’ entrances with her yellow IKEA carrier bags. The next morning the man who owned the company that produced the free newspaper was woken by the neighbors ringing his doorbell, very upset because someone had apparently filled the lift with hundreds of copies of the free newspaper. Every mailbox was stuffed full of them, and every square inch of the large glass entrance door had been covered in taped-up copies, and outside every flat great tottering piles had been left that collapsed and fell down the stairs when the doors were opened. On every copy of the newspaper, the man’s name had been written in large, neat felt-tip letters, and just below, “Complimentry social information, for yor reading plesure!!!”
On the way back home, Granny and Elsa had stopped at a gas station to buy ice cream. A few days later Granny called the newspaper once again, and after that she never received a single free copy.
“Coming in or going?”
Alf’s voice cuts through the gloom of the stairwell like laughter. Elsa turns around and instinctively wants to throw herself into his arms, but she stops herself because she realizes he would probably dislike that almost as much as Wolfheart would. He shoves his hands in his pockets with a creak of his leather jacket and nods sharply at the door.