Britt-Marie Was Here (16 page)

The rat is one hour and six minutes late for dinner. It rushes in and lunges at the biggest possible piece of Snickers that it could carry, stops for a second and stares at Britt-Marie, then runs back outside into the darkness. Britt-Marie wraps the rest of the chocolate in plastic wrap and puts it in the fridge. Washes up the plate. Washes and tumble-dries the towel and hangs it in its place. Through the window she sees Sven emerging from the pizzeria. He stops by the police car and looks over at the recreation center. Britt-Marie hides behind the curtain. He gets in the car and drives off. For a short moment she was afraid he was going to come over and knock on the door. Then she got disappointed when he didn’t.

She turns off all the lights except in the bathroom. The sheen of the lone lightbulb finds its way out from under the door and lights up the exact area of the wall where Somebody hung up the information chart, slightly too low but obviously not too low. “Welcome to Borg,” Britt-Marie reads, while she sits on a stool in the darkness and looks at the red dot that first made her fall in love with the picture. The reason for her love of maps. It’s half worn away, the dot, and the red color is bleached. Yet it’s there, flung down there on the map halfway between the lower left corner and its center, and next to it is written, “You are here.”

Sometimes it’s easier to go on living, not even knowing who you are, when at least you know precisely where you are while you go on not knowing.

P
eople sometimes refer to darkness as something that falls, but in places like Borg it doesn’t just fall, it collapses. It engulfs the streets in an instant. In cities there are so many people who don’t want to sit at home all night that you can open dedicated premises and run entertainment industries that are open only at these times. But in Borg, life is encapsulated once darkness falls.

Britt-Marie locks the door of the recreation center and stands on her own in the parking area.

Her pockets are full of neatly folded toilet paper, because she did not find an envelope. The sign above the pizzeria is turned off, but she can make out the shadow of Somebody moving around inside. Something in Britt-Marie wants to go and talk to her, possibly to buy something. Another considerably more rational something orders her to do no such thing. It’s dark outside. It’s not civilized to walk into shops when it’s dark outside.

She stands by the door listening to the radio inside, which is playing some sort of pop music. Britt-Marie knows this because she’s not at all unfamiliar with pop music. There are many crossword questions about it, and Britt-Marie likes to keep herself informed. But this particular song is new to her; a young man is singing in a cracked voice about how you can either be “someone” or “no one at all.”

Britt-Marie is still holding on to the carton of cigarettes covered in foreign letters. She doesn’t know how much foreign cigarettes cost, but she gets out a considerably larger than reasonable amount of money from her handbag and folds it in the toilet paper until it looks like a small envelope with a phenomenal capacity for water absorption. Then she carefully tucks it under the door.

The young man keeps singing on the radio. As hard as he can. About nothing much.

“Love has no mercy,” he sings. Again and again. Love has no mercy. Kent wells up in Britt-Marie’s chest until she can’t breathe.

Then she walks by herself along a road that heads out of the community in two directions. As darkness collapses. Towards a bed and a balcony that are not her own.

The truck comes up on her right, from behind. Too close. Too fast.

That’s why she throws herself across to the other side of the road. The human brain has a monstrous ability to re-create memories of such clarity that the rest of the body loses all sense of time. An approaching truck can make the ears believe they are hearing a mother screaming, can make the hands believe they are cutting themselves on glass, can make the lips taste blood. Deep inside, Britt-Marie has time to yell Ingrid’s name a thousand times.

The truck thunders by, so close that her heart can’t tell whether it’s been run over or not, in a rain of hard lumps of mud gouged out of the road surface. Britt-Marie takes a few tottering steps; her coat is wet and dirty, and there’s a howling in her ears. Maybe a single second passes and maybe a hundred. She blinks at the headlights with a growing awareness that the howling is not coming from inside. There’s actually a car sounding its horn. She hears someone yelling. She holds up her hand to shield her eyes from the headlights of the BMW. Fredrik, the man who came to the café earlier, is standing in front of her, shouting furiously.

“Are you bloody senile or what, you old bat?! What are you doing walking in the middle of the fucking road! I almost killed you!”

The way he puts it, it’s as if her death would have been an inconvenience to him more than anyone else. She doesn’t know what to say. Her heart is racing so frantically that it’s giving her a stitch. Fredrik throws out his arms.

“Can you hear what I’m saying or are you a spastic?”

He takes two steps towards her. She doesn’t know why. Looking back on it, she’s unsure whether he was intending to hit her, but neither of them ever find out because he’s interrupted by another voice. A different kind of voice. Cold.

“Problem?”

Fredrik turns around first, so that Britt-Marie has time to see his eyes register the danger before she has time to see what he’s worried about. He swallows.

“No . . . she was wal—”

Sami is standing a few feet away, with his hands in his pockets. He is twenty years old at most, but judging by the suffocating grip of his presence in the darkness, you might describe him as a “spirit of violence.” Britt-Marie wonders whether in a crossword this might be rendered as “God of aggression.” Vertical, fifteen letters. People have time to think of all sorts of things while they face up to what they imagine is their imminent violent death, and this happens to be the first thing that comes to Britt-Marie’s mind. Fredrik stutters indecipherably. Sami says nothing. Another young man is moving up behind him. He’s taller. It’s not at all difficult to guess why he’s known as Psycho. His mouth is grinning, but it’s not so much a grin as a display of teeth.

Britt-Marie has heard tell of this sort of thing on the natural history programs Kent used to watch when there was no soccer on the TV. Human beings are the only animals that smile as a gesture
of peace, whereas other animals show their teeth as a threat. This is perfectly understandable now; she can see the animal inside the human being.

Psycho’s smile grows wider. Sami doesn’t take his hands out of his pockets. Doesn’t even raise his voice.

“Don’t you touch her,” he says, nodding towards Britt-Marie while keeping his gaze fixed on Fredrik.

Fredrik totters back to his BMW. His self-confidence seems to grow with every step he takes towards it, as if the car is giving him superpowers. But he waits until he’s standing right by the door before he hisses:

“Spastic! This whole bloody place is completely spastic!”

Psycho takes half a step forward. The BMW does a wheelspin in the mud and gravel and makes its escape in the rain. Britt-Marie has time to see the boy in the passenger seat, the one who’s the same age as Ben and Vega and Omar, but taller and more grown up. Wearing the tracksuit top on which it says “Hockey.” He looks scared.

Psycho looks at Britt-Marie. Displays his teeth. Britt-Marie turns around and does her absolute best to walk briskly without breaking into a run, because in the natural history programs they always say you shouldn’t try to run away from wild animals. She hears Sami calling out behind her, without anger or menace, in fact almost softly:

“See you around, Coach!”

She’s three hundred feet away when she finally has the courage to stop and catch her breath. When she turns around the two men have gone back to a group of other young men on a patch of asphalt between some apartment blocks and a cluster of trees. The black car is there, with its engine running and the headlights on. The young men are moving about in the beams of light. Sami yells something and surges forward, kicking his right leg into the air. Then he punches his fists up and cheers loudly at the sky.

It takes Britt-Marie a minute to understand what they are doing.

They’re playing soccer.

Playing.

The temperature drops below freezing in the night. Rain turns to snow.

Britt-Marie stands on the balcony watching all this happening. She finds herself spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about sushi and how you make it.

She cleans the mattress. Hangs up her coat. When she hears Bank coming back and closing the door downstairs, she paces around the room three times and thumps her feet as hard against the floor as she can. Just to clarify that she’s there. Then she sleeps the dreamless sleep of exhaustion, because she couldn’t even begin to say whose dreams she might have.

The sun is already up when she wakes. She almost falls out of bed when she realizes. Waking up long after the late-rising January sun! What will people think? Still half asleep, she’s making her way to her clothes when she realizes why she’s woken up. Someone is knocking on the door. The whole thing is terribly vexatious, actually, waking up at an hour when people are actually quite entitled to knock on your door.

She fixes her hair as quickly as she can, then stumbles down almost the entire length of the stairs, very nearly breaking her neck. It’s the sort of thing that happens every few minutes—people falling down stairs and killing themselves. She just about manages to land on her two feet at the bottom, in the hall, and then sets about gathering her wits. After a certain amount of hesitation she rushes into the kitchen, which is obviously as dirty as you can possibly imagine, and then looks in all the drawers until she finds an apron.

She puts this on.

“Ha?” she says with raised eyebrows when she opens the door.

She adjusts her apron, as you do when you are interrupted by someone knocking at your door while you are busy with the washing-up. Vega and Omar are standing there.

“What are you doing?” asks Vega.

“I’m busy,” Britt-Marie answers.

“Were you asleep?” asks Omar.

“Certainly not!” Britt-Marie protests, while adjusting both her hair and her apron.

“We heard you coming down the stairs,” says Vega.

“That’s not a crime, is it?”

“Cool it, will you? We only asked if you were asleep!”

Britt-Marie clasps her hands together.

“It’s possible that I may have overslept. It’s not something that happens often.”

“Did you have something you had to get up for?” asks Omar.

Britt-Marie doesn’t have a convincing answer to that one. There’s a silence for a few moments, until Vega’s patience runs out and she gets to the point with a frustrated groan:

“We were wondering if you wanted to eat with us tonight.”

Omar nods energetically.

“And then we’re wondering if you want to be our new coach, for our team!”

Then Omar shrieks, “Ouch!” and Vega hisses, “Idiot!” and tries to kick him again on the shin, but this time he gets out of the way.