My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry Read Online Free PDF

at least twenty cups of coffee per day and always looks triumphantly proud every time his percolator is turned on. He is the second-nicest person in the world, and he’s married to Maud. Maud is the nicest person in the world and she has always just baked some cookies. They live with Samantha, who’s almost always asleep. Samantha is a bichon frise but Lennart and Maud talk to her as if she wasn’t. When Lennart and Maud drink coffee in front of Samantha they don’t say they’re having “coffee,” they call it “a drink for grown-ups.” Granny says they’re soft in the head, but Elsa just thinks they’re nice. And they always have dreams and hugs—dreams are a kind of cookie; hugs are just normal hugs.
    Opposite Lennart and Maud lives Alf. He drives a taxi and always wears a leather jacket under a layer of irascibility. His shoes have soles as thin as greaseproof paper because he doesn’t lift his feet when he walks. Granny says he has the lowest center of gravity in the entire bloody universe.
    In the flat under Lennart and Maud live the boy with a syndrome and his mum. The boy with a syndrome is a year and a few weeks younger than Elsa, and never speaks. His mother loses things all the time. Objects seem to rain from her pockets, like in a cartoon when the crook gets frisked by the police and the pile of stuff from his pockets ends up bigger than they are. Both the boy and his mother have very kind eyes, and not even Granny seems to dislike them. And the boy’s always dancing. He dances his way through his existence.
    In the flat next to theirs, on the other side of the lift that never works, lives The Monster. Elsa doesn’t know what his real name is, but she calls him The Monster because everyone is afraid of him. Even Elsa’s mum, who isn’t scared of anything in the entire world, gives Elsa’s back a little shove when they’re about to walk past his flat. No one ever sees The Monster because he never goes out in the daytime, but Kent always says “People like that shouldn’t be let loose! But that’s what happens when the authorities go for the soft option. People in this bloody country get psychiatric care instead of prison!” Britt-Marie has written letters to the landlord, demanding that The Monster be evicted in view of her firm conviction that he “attracts other substance abusers into the building.” Elsa is not sure what that means, and she’s not even sure Britt-Marie knows. She asked Granny one day, but she just went a bit quiet and said, “Certain things should be left well alone.” And this is a granny who fought in the War-Without-End, the war against the shadows in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, and who has met the most terrifying creatures that have been dreamed up in an eternity of ten thousand fairy tales.
    That’s how you measure time in the Land-of-Almost-Awake: in eternities . There are no watches in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, so time is measured according to how you feel. If it feels like an eternity, you say, “This is a lesser eternity.” And if it feels sort of like two dozen eternities, you say, “An utter eternity.” And the only thing that feels longer than an utter eternity is the eternity of a fairy tale, because a fairy tale is an eternity of utter eternities. And the very longest kind of eternity in existence is the eternity of ten thousand fairy tales. That’s the biggest number in the Land-of-Almost-Awake.
    Anyway, to get back to the point: at the bottom of the house where all these people live, there’s a meeting room, where residents’ meetings are held once every month. This is a bit more than in most buildings, but the flats are rented, and Britt-Marie and Kent really want everyone living there, by “a democratic process,” to make a request to the landlord to sell them the building so they can become flat owners. And to do that, you must have residents’ meetings. Because no one else in the house actually wants to be a flat-owner. The democratic bit of