Britt-Marie Was Here (19 page)

“I should just like to inform you that there’s no urgency, at the moment, to have my car repaired.”

Somebody looks out of the door at the children and their soccer pitch. She nods. Britt-Marie also nods. It’s the first time for as long as Britt-Marie can remember that she has had a friend. The children take off their dirty jerseys and drop them off in the recreation center, without Britt-Marie even having offered to wash them. There’s no one left in the parking area by the time she’s washed and tumble-dried the jerseys and put them in a neat pile, ready for tomorrow’s
training. Borg is empty except for a lone silhouette by the bus stop on the road. Britt-Marie didn’t even know there was a bus stop there until she saw someone waiting by the streetlight.

She doesn’t recognize Pirate until she’s just a few feet away. His red hair is tangled and muddy and he stands motionless as if trying to ignore that she’s there. Her common sense tries to make her walk away. But instead she says:

“I was under the impression that you lived in Borg.”

He keeps a firm grip on the note that Britt-Marie handed out at the start of the training session.

“It says here you have to have both your parents’ signatures. So I have to go and ask my father to sign it.”

Britt-Marie nods.

“Ha. Have a good evening, then,” she says and starts walking towards the darkness.

“You want to come with me?” he calls out after her.

She turns around as if he’s out of his mind. The paper in his hands is stained with sweat.

“I . . . it . . . I think it would feel better for me if you were there,” he manages to say.

It’s obviously wholly ludicrous. Britt-Marie is scrupulous about telling him that throughout the whole bus journey.

Which takes almost an hour. And ends abruptly in front of an enormous white building. Britt-Marie is holding on to her handbag so tightly that she gets a cramp in her fingers. She is, in spite of everything, a civilized person with a normal life to get on with.

Civilized people with normal lives are actually not in the habit of visiting prisons.

B
loody gangsters,” Kent always used to call them, the people who were responsible for things such as street violence, extortionate taxes, pickpocketing, graffiti in public toilets, and hotels where all the deck chairs were occupied when Kent came down to the pool. All things of this kind were caused by “gangsters.” It was an effective system, always having people there to blame for everything without ever having to define who they really were.

Britt-Marie never found out what he really wanted. What would have satisfied him? Would a lot of money have been enough, or was every last penny required? One time when David and Pernilla were teenagers, they gave him a coffee mug with a message on it: “He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins.” They said it was “ironic” but Kent seemed to take it as a challenge. He always had a plan, there was always a “bloody big deal” just round the corner. His company was just about to strike bigger and bigger deals in Germany; the flat they inherited from Britt-Marie’s parents could finally be converted to a freehold so they could sell it for more money. Just a few more months. Just a few years. They got married because Kent’s accountant said it made sense from a “tax-planning perspective.” Britt-Marie never had a plan, she hoped it would be enough if you were faithful and in love. Until the day came when it wasn’t enough.

“Bloody gangsters,” Kent would have said if he’d been sitting with Britt-Marie this evening, in the little waiting room in the prison. “Put the criminals on a deserted island with a pistol each, and they’ll clean up the sorry mess themselves.” Britt-Marie never liked him talking like that, but she never said anything. Now when she thinks about it she has difficulties remembering the last time she said anything at all, until one day she left him without a word. Because of this, it always feels as if the whole thing was her fault.

She wonders what he’s doing now. If he feels well and wears clean shirts. If he takes his medicine. If he looks for things in kitchen drawers and yells out her name before he remembers that she’s no longer there. She wonders if he is with her, the young and beautiful woman, and if she likes pizza. Britt-Marie wonders what he would say if he knew she was sitting in a waiting room in a prison full of gangsters. If he’d be worried. If he’d tell a joke at her expense. If he’d touch her and whisper that everything would be all right, like he used to do in the days after she had buried her mother.

They were very different people in those days. Britt-Marie doesn’t know if it was Kent or herself who changed first. Or how much of it was her fault. She was ready to say “everything” if she could only have her life back.

Pirate sits next to her, holding her hand, and Britt-Marie clutches his very hard in return.

“You mustn’t tell my mum we were here,” he whispers.

“Where is she?”

“At the hospital.”

“Was she in an accident?”

“No, no, she works there,” says Pirate, before adding as if explaining a law of nature: “All the mums in Borg work at the hospital.”

Britt-Marie doesn’t know what to say to that.

“Why do they call you Pirate?” she asks instead.

“Because my father hid the treasure.”

As soon as she hears this, she decides she’ll never call him Pirate again.

A thick metal door opens and Sven stands in the doorway, sweaty and red-nosed, with his police cap in his hands.

“Is Mum livid again?” says Ben at once, with a sigh.

Sven slowly shakes his head. Puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

Meets Britt-Marie’s eyes.

“Ben’s mother is on the night shift. She called me as soon as they called from here. I came as quick as I could.”

Britt-Marie would like to hug him, but she’s a sensible person. The guards won’t let Ben see his father because it isn’t visiting hours, but after much persuasion Sven manages to get them to agree to take the paper into the prison. They come back with a signature. Next to the signature his father has written: “LOVE YOU!”

Ben holds the paper so hard on their way back that it’s illegible by the time they get to Borg. Neither he, Britt-Marie, nor Sven utter a single word. There’s not much you can say to a teenager who has to ask strangers in uniforms for permission to see his father. But when they drop Ben off outside his house and his mother comes out, Britt-Marie feels it’s appropriate to say something encouraging, so she makes an attempt with:

“It was very clean, Ben, I have to say. I have always imagined prisons to be dirty places, but this one certainly seemed very hygienic. That is something to be pleased about at least.”

Ben folds the paper with his father’s signature without meeting her eyes, and then hands it to her. Sven quickly says:

“You should keep that, Ben.”

Ben nods and smiles and holds the paper even more tightly.

“Is there training tomorrow?” he murmurs.

Britt-Marie fumbles for her list in her bag, but Sven calmly assures him:

“Of course there’s training tomorrow, Ben. Usual time.”

Ben peers at Britt-Marie. She tries to nod affirmatively. Ben starts up the path, then turns, smiles faintly and waves. They wait until he’s buried his face in his mother’s arms. Sven waves, but she doesn’t see, just presses her face into her boy’s hair and whispers something.

Sven drives slowly through Borg. Clears his throat uncomfortably as you do when you have a bad conscience.

“They haven’t had such an easy time, Ben and her. She’s working triple shifts so they can keep the house. He’s a good boy, and his dad wasn’t a bad man. Well, sure, I know what he did was wrong, tax evasion is a crime. But he was desperate. Financial crises can make people desperate, and desperation makes people foolish. . . .”

He goes silent. Britt-Marie doesn’t say anything about the financial crisis being over. For various reasons it doesn’t strike her as appropriate on this particular occasion.

Sven has cleaned up the police car. All the pizza boxes have been removed from the floor, she notes. They drive past the patch of asphalt where Sami and Psycho are playing soccer again this evening with their friends.

“Ben’s father is not like them. I just want you to understand that he isn’t a criminal. Not in the same way as those boys,” explains Sven.

“Sami is not like those boys either!” protests Britt-Marie, and the words slip out of her quickly: “He’s no gangster, he has a spectacularly well-organized cutlery drawer!”

Sven’s laughter comes abruptly, deep and rolling, like a lit fire to warm your hands.

“No, no, there’s nothing wrong with Sami. He just keeps bad company. . . .”

“Vega seems to be of the opinion that he owes people money.”

“Not Sami, but Psycho does. Psycho always owes people money,” says Sven, and his laughter fades, spills onto the floor, and disappears.

The police car slows down. The boys playing soccer see it, but they hardly react. There’s a certain swagger about their disregard for the police. Sven narrows his eyes by half.

“Sami didn’t have an easy time growing up either. More disasters have hit that family than you’d consider fair by anyone’s reckoning, if you ask me. He’s both mother and father as well as older brother to Vega and Omar, and that’s not a responsibility anyone should put on the shoulders of a kid who hasn’t even turned twenty.”

Possibly Britt-Marie wants to ask what this means, the bit about “both mother and father,” but she manages not to, so he continues:

“Psycho is his best friend, and has been since they were big enough to kick that ball around. Sami could have been a really good player; everyone saw his talent, but he was too busy surviving, perhaps.”

“What does that mean?” asks Britt-Marie, slightly wounded by the way Sven says it, as if she should understand without an explanation.

Sven holds up his palm apologetically.

“Sorry, I . . . was thinking out loud. He, they, how should I explain it? Sami, Vega, and Omar’s mother did all she could but their father, he . . . he was not a good man, Britt-Marie. When he came home and had his anger attacks, people heard him all over Borg. And Sami was hardly old enough to go to school back then, but he took his younger siblings’ hands and ran for it. Psycho met them outside their door, every time. Psycho carried Omar on his back and Sami carried Vega, and then they ran into the forest. Until their dad fell into a drunken stupor. Night after night, until their dad
just cleared out one day. And then that thing happened with their mother . . . it . . .”

He falls silent, as you do when you realize once again that you’re thinking out loud. He doesn’t try to hide that he’s hiding something, but Britt-Marie doesn’t stick her nose in. Sven smooths the back of his hand over his eyebrows.

“Psycho grew into a properly dangerous lunatic, Sami knows that, but Sami’s not the sort of person to turn his back on someone who once carried his younger siblings on his back. Maybe in a place like Borg you don’t have the luxury of being able to choose your best friend.”

The police car once again starts rolling slowly down the road. The boys’ soccer match continues. Psycho scores, roars something into the night, and runs around the pitch with his arms extended as if he were an aircraft. Sami laughs so much that he keels over, hands on his knees. They look happy.

Britt-Marie doesn’t know what to say, or what to believe.

She has never met a gangster with a correctly organized cutlery drawer.

Sven’s gaze loses itself in some place where the headlights end and darkness begins.

“We do what we can in Borg. We always have done. But there’s a fire burning in those boys, and sooner or later it will consume everyone around them, or themselves.”

“That was nicely put,” says Britt-Marie.

He smiles bashfully.

She looks down into her handbag. Then she dismays herself by going further:

“Do you have any children yourself?”

He shakes his head. Looks out of the window as you do if you don’t
have any children, yet in spite of all have a whole village full of children.

“I was married, but . . . ah. She never liked Borg. She said it was a place where you came to die, not live.”

He tries to smile. Britt-Marie wishes she had brought the bamboo screen along.

He bites his lip. When they should turn off by Bank’s house, he seems to hesitate, then summons his courage and says:

“If it isn’t, I mean, if it’s not inconvenient to you I’d like to show you something.”

She doesn’t protest. He smiles in a way you’d hardly notice. She smiles in a way no one could ever notice.

He drives the police car through Borg and out the other side. Turns off down a gravel track. It apparently goes on forever, but when they finally stop it suddenly seems inconceivable that they were just in a built-up area. The car is surrounded by trees, and the silence is of a sort that only exists where there are no people.

“It’s . . . well . . . ah. It’s probably ridiculous, of course, but this is my . . . well, my favorite place on earth. . . .” mumbles Sven.

He blushes. Looks like he wants to turn the car around and drive away fast and never mention it again. But Britt-Marie opens her door and gets out.