Of course, Granny also says that no one in Miamas closes the door when they go to the bathroom. An open-door policy is more or less legally enforceable in every situation across the Land-of-Almost-Awake. But Elsa is pretty sure she is describing another version of the truth there. That’s what Granny calls lies: “other versions of the truth.” So when Elsa wakes up in a chair in Granny’s room at the hospital the next morning, Granny is on the toilet with the door open, while Elsa’s mum is in the hall, and Granny is in the midst of telling another version of the truth. It’s not going all that well. The real truth, after all, is that Granny escaped from the hospital last night and Elsa sneaked out of the flat while Mum and George were sleeping, and they went to the zoo together in Renault, and Granny climbed the fence. Elsa quietly admits to herself that it now seems a little irresponsible to have done all this with a seven-year-old in the middle of the night.
Granny, whose clothes are lying in a pile on the floor and still very literally smelling a bit monkey-ish, is claiming that when she was climbing the fence by the monkey cage and the guard shouted at her, she thought he could have been a “lethal rapist,” and this was why she started throwing muck at him and the police. Mum shakes her head in a very controlled way and says Granny is making all this up. Granny doesn’t like it when people say that things are made-up, and reminds Mum she prefers the less derogatory term “reality-challenged.” Mum clearly disagrees but controls herself. Because she is everything that Granny isn’t.
“This is one of the worst things you’ve done,” Mum calls out grimly towards the bathroom.
“I find that very, very unlikely, my dear daughter,” Granny answers from within, unconcerned.
Mum responds by methodically running through all the trouble Granny has caused. Granny says the only reason she’s getting so worked up is that she doesn’t have a sense of humor. And then Mum says Granny should stop behaving like an irresponsible child. And then Granny says: “Do you know where pirates park their cars?” And when Mum doesn’t answer, Granny yells from the toilet, “In a gAAARRRage!” Mum just sighs, massages her temples, and closes the bathroom door. This makes Granny really, really, really angry because she doesn’t like feeling enclosed when she’s on the toilet.
She’s been in the hospital for two weeks now, but absconds almost every day and picks up Elsa, and they have ice cream or go to the flat when Mum isn’t home and make a soapsud slide on the landing. Or break into zoos. Basically whatever appeals to her, whenever. But Granny doesn’t consider this an “escape” in the proper sense of the word, because she believes there has to be some basic aspect of challenge to the whole thing if it’s to count as an escape—a dragon or a series of traps or at least a wall and a respectably sized moat, and so on. Mum and the hospital staff don’t quite agree with her on this point.
A nurse comes into the room and quietly asks for a moment of Mum’s time. She gives Mum a piece of paper and Mum writes something on it and returns it, and then the nurse leaves. Granny has had nine different nurses since she was admitted. Seven of these she refused to cooperate with, and two refused to cooperate with her, one of them because Granny said he had a “nice ass.” Granny insists it was a compliment to his ass, not to him, and he shouldn’t make such a fuss about it. Then Mum told Elsa to put on her headphones, but Elsa still heard their argument about the difference between “sexual harassment” and “basic appreciation of a perfectly splendid ass.”
They argue a lot, Mum and Granny. They’ve been arguing for as long as Elsa can remember. About everything. If Granny is a dysfunctional superhero, then Mum is very much a fully operational one. Their interaction is a bit like Cyclops and Wolverine in X-Men, Elsa often thinks, and whenever she has those types of thoughts she wishes she had someone around who could understand what she means. People around Elsa don’t read enough quality literature and certainly don’t understand that X-Men comics count as precisely that. To such philistines Elsa would explain, very slowly, that X-Men are indeed superheroes, but first and foremost they are mutants, and there is a certain academic difference. Anyway, without putting too fine a point on it, she would sum it up by saying that Granny’s and Mum’s superhero powers are in direct opposition. As if Spider-Man, one of Elsa’s favorite superheroes, had an antagonist called Slip-Up Man whose superpower was that he couldn’t even climb onto a bench. But in a good way.