Read Online My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman - Free Book Online Page B

waiting for Mum and fully aware that she’ll demand to know what’s happened.
    She spins the globe at one end of the desk. The headmaster looks particularly vexed when she does it. So she keeps doing it.
    “Well?” the headmaster asks, pointing at her cheek, “Are you ready to tell me what happened?”
    She doesn’t even grace him with an answer.
    It was smart of Granny, Elsa has to admit it. She’s still insanely irritated about this stupid treasure hunt, but it was smart of Granny to write “Miamas” in normal characters in the letter. Because Elsa had stood there earlier on the landing, summoning her courage for at least a hundred eternities before she rang the doorbell. And if Granny hadn’t known that Elsa would read the letter even though one mustn’t read other people’s letters, and if she hadn’t written “Miamas” in normal characters, Elsa would just have thrown the envelope in The Monster’s mail slot and run away. Instead, she stood there ringing the doorbell, because she had to press The Monster for some answers.
    Because Miamas belongs to Granny and Elsa. It’s only theirs. Elsa’s fury at the thought of Granny bringing along some random muppet was bigger than any fear she might have of monsters.
    Okay, not much bigger than her monster fear, but big enough.
    Our Friend was still howling in the flat next door, but nothing happened when she rang at The Monster’s door. She rang again and banged on the door until the wood was creaking and then peered inside through the mail slot, but it was too dark to see anything. Not a movement. Not a breath. All she could feel was an acrid smell of cleaning agents, the sort of smell that rushes up your nasal membranes and starts kicking the back of your eyeballs when you breathe it in.
    But no sign of a monster. Not even a little one.
    Elsa took off her backpack and got out the four bags of Daim and emptied them through Our Friend’s mail slot. For a few brief, brief moments the creature stopped howling in there. Elsa has decided to call it “the creature” until she has figured out what it really is, because, irrespective of what Britt-Marie says, Elsa is pretty damn sure that this is no mere dog.
    “You have to stop howling; Britt-Marie will call the police and they’ll come here and kill you,” she whispered through the slot.
    She didn’t know if the creature understood. But at least it was being quiet and eating its Daim. As any rational creature does, when offered Daim.
    “If you see The Monster, tell him I have mail for him,” said Elsa.
    The creature didn’t answer, but Elsa felt its warm breath when it sniffed at the door.
    “Tell him my granny sends her regards and apologizes,” she whispered.
    And then she put the letter in her backpack and took the bus back to school. And when she looked out of the bus window she thought she saw him again. The thin man who’d been standing outside the undertaker’s yesterday while Mum was talking to the whale-woman. Now he was in the shadows on the other side of the street. She couldn’t see his face behind the cigarette smoke, but a cold, instinctual terror wrapped itself around her ribs.
    And then he was gone.
    Elsa reckons this may have been why she couldn’t make herself invisible when she got to school. Invisibility is the sort of superpower you can train yourself to have, and Elsa practices it all the time, but it doesn’t work if you are angry or frightened. When she got to school Elsa was both. Afraid of men turning up in the shadows without her knowing why, and angry at Granny for sending a letter to a monster, and both angry at and afraid of monsters. Normal monsters have the decency to live deep inside black caves or at the bottoms of ice-cold lakes. Normal, terrifying monsters don’t actually live in flats and get their mail delivered.
    And anyway Elsa hates Monday. School is always at its worst on Monday mornings, because people who like chasing you have had to hang about all weekend