Another free newspaper tumbles past in the wind. It gets caught on her foot for a moment, before it tears itself free and keeps rolling like an angry little starfish. It makes Elsa furious again. Gets her thinking about how much Granny was willing to fight to get them to stop putting newspapers in her letter box. It makes Elsa furious because it was a typical Granny thing to do, because Granny was only doing it for Elsa’s sake. Granny things were always like that. For Elsa’s sake.
Because Granny actually liked those newspapers, she used to stuff them into her shoes when it had been raining. But one day when Elsa read on the Internet how many trees it took to make just one edition of a newspaper, she put up “No junk mail ever, thanks!” notices on both Mum’s and Granny’s doors, because Elsa is a big fan of the environment. The newspapers kept coming, and when Elsa called the company they just laughed at her. And they shouldn’t have done that. Because no one laughs at Granny’s grandchild.
Granny hated the environment, but she was the kind of person you brought along when you were going to war. So she became a terrorist for Elsa’s sake. Elsa is furious at Granny for that, in fact, because Elsa wants to be furious at Granny. For everything else. For the lies and for abandoning Mum and for dying. But it’s impossible to stay angry at someone who’s prepared to turn terrorist for the sake of her grandchild. And it makes Elsa furious that she can’t be furious.
She can’t even be angry at Granny in a normal way. Not even that is normal about Granny.
She stands in silence next to Alf and blinks until her head hurts. Alf tries to look unconcerned, but Elsa notices that he’s scanning the darkness, as if looking for someone. He watches their surroundings much like Wolfheart and the wurse. As if he’s also on guard duty. She squints and tries to fit him into Granny’s life, like a piece of a puzzle. She can’t recall Granny ever talking very much about him, except that he never knew how to lift his feet, which was why the soles of his shoes were always so worn down.
“How well did you know Granny?” she asks.
The leather jacket creaks.
“What do you mean, ‘knew?’ We were bloody neighbors, that’s all,” Alf answers evasively.
“So what did you mean when you picked me up in the taxi, when you said Granny would never have forgiven you if you’d left me there?”
More creaking.
“I didn’t mean anything, not a blo—nothing. I just happened to be in the area. Bloody . . .”
He sounds frustrated. Elsa nods, pretending to understand in a way that Alf clearly doesn’t appreciate at all.
“Why are you here, then?” she asks teasingly.
“What?”
“Why did you follow me outside? Shouldn’t you be driving your taxi now or something?”
“You don’t have a blo—you don’t have exclusive rights to taking walks, you know.”
“Sure, sure.”
“I can’t let you and the mutt run loose here at night on your own. Your granny would have blo—”
He interrupts himself. Grunts. Sighs.
“Your granny would never have forgiven me if something happened to you.”
He looks as if he already regrets saying that.
“Did you and Granny have an affair?” Elsa asks, after waiting for what seems a more than adequate length of time. Alf looks like she just threw a yellow snowball in his face.
“Aren’t you a bit young to know what that means?”
“There are loads of things I’m too young to know about, but I know about them anyway.” She clears her throat and carries on: “Once when I was small, Mum was going to explain what her work was, because I’d asked Dad and he didn’t really seem to know. And then Mum said she worked as an economist. And then I said, ‘What?’ and then she said, ‘I work out how much money the hospital has, so we know what we can buy.’ And then I said, ‘What, like in a shop?’ And then she said that, yeah, sort of like in a shop, and it wasn’t hard to get it at all and so really Dad was being a bit thick about it.”
Alf checks his watch.
“But then, anyway, I saw a TV series where two people had a shop. And they had an affair, or at least I think they did. So now I get what it means, sort of thing. And I thought that was kind of how you and Granny knew each other! So . . . did you or didn’t you?”