Britt-Marie Was Here (20 page)

They are standing on a rock over a lake held tight by trees on all sides.

Britt-Marie peers down over the edge until she feels a queasiness in her stomach. The sky is clear and bright with stars. Sven opens his door and comes up behind her and clears his throat.

“I . . . ah. It’s silly, but I wanted you to see that Borg can be beautiful as well,” he whispers.

Britt-Marie closes her eyes. She feels the wind in her hair.

“Thank you,” she whispers back.

They don’t speak on the way back. He gets out of the car outside Bank’s house, runs around, and opens Britt-Marie’s door. Then he opens the door of the backseat and fumbles with something, coming back with a well-thumbed plastic folder.

“It’s . . . ah, it’s just . . . something,” he manages to say.

It’s a drawing. Of the recreation center and the pizzeria, and in between the children playing soccer. Britt-Marie in the middle of the picture. Everything done in pencil. Britt-Marie holds on to it a little too hard, and Sven removes his police cap a little too suddenly.

“Well, it’s probably silly, of course, of course it is, but I was thinking . . . there’s a restaurant in town . . .”

When Britt-Marie doesn’t answer at once he adds briskly:

“A proper restaurant, I mean! Not like the pizzeria here in Borg, but a nice one. With white tablecloths. And cutlery.”

It will be quite a long time before Britt-Marie realizes that he tries to hide his insecurity with jokes, rather than the other way around. But when she does not immediately seem to understand, he holds up his palm and apologizes:

“Not that there’s anything wrong with the pizzeria, of course not, of course not, but . . .”

He’s holding his police cap in both hands now, and looking like considerably younger men do when they want to ask considerably younger women something specific. There is so much inside Britt-Marie that yearns to know what it is. But the sensible part inside her has already gone into the hall and closed the door.

T
he other woman” is what it’s called, but Britt-Marie always had difficulties viewing Kent’s other woman as that. Maybe because she herself knew how it felt to be that woman. Admittedly Kent had already divorced when he came back to the house that day, a lifetime earlier, after Britt-Marie had buried her mother, but his children never saw it that way. Children never see it that way. As far as David and Pernilla were concerned, Britt-Marie was the other woman regardless of how many fairy tales she read them and how many dinners she cooked—and maybe Kent also regarded her as such. And despite the number of shirts she had washed, maybe Britt-Marie never quite felt like the primary woman herself.

She sits on the balcony watching the morning dawdling over Borg, as mornings in Borg have a habit of doing in January. Daylight comes apparently without any need for the sun to rise. She is still holding Sven’s drawing.

He is not an especially good drawer, far from it, and if she’d been more critical by nature she might have had reservations about what the blurred contours and irregular silhouettes were saying about the way he saw her. But at least he saw her. It’s difficult to steel oneself against that.

She fetches her cell phone and calls the girl at the unemployment office.

The girl’s voice answers very gaily, so Britt-Marie understands it has to be the telephone answering machine. Obviously she intends to hang up, because she doesn’t find it appropriate to be leaving messages on answering machines unless you’re calling from a hospital or selling narcotics. But for some reason or other she doesn’t hang up; instead she sits in silence after the beep and declares at last:

“This is Britt-Marie. One of the children in the soccer team hit something he was aiming for today. I felt you might be interested to hear that.”

She feels silly when she hangs up. Obviously the girl won’t be interested in that. Kent would have laughed at her if he was here.

Bank is sitting in the kitchen having soup when Britt-Marie comes down the stairs. The dog is sitting next to the table, waiting. Britt-Marie stops in the hall and looks at the soup plate. She wonders how the soup was cooked, because she sees no saucepan and the kitchen doesn’t have a microwave. Bank is slurping.

“Did you have something to say, or is it just that you never saw a blind person having soup before?” she asks without lifting her head.

“I was under the impression you had
impaired
vision
.”

Bank slurps loudly by way of an answer. Britt-Marie presses the palms of her hands against her skirt.

“You like soccer, I understand,” she says, nodding at the photographs on the walls.

“No,” says Bank.

Britt-Marie clasps her hands together over her stomach and looks at the rows of photographs on the wall, each one of them of Bank and her father and at least one soccer ball.

“I’ve become a sort of coach for a team.”

“I heard.” She starts slurping again. Doesn’t raise her head. Britt-Marie brushes some specks of dust from various objects in the hall.

“Ha. At any rate I noticed all the photographs, so I felt it was appropriate under the circumstances, bearing in mind your obvious experience of soccer, that I asked you for a piece of advice.”

“A piece of advice about what?”

“About soccer.” She doesn’t know if Bank rolls her eyes, but it certainly feels as if she does. The dog goes into the living room. Bank walks behind, running her stick along the walls.

“Where are these photos you’re talking about?” she asks.

“Higher up.”

Bank’s stick taps the glass of one of the framed photos, in which a younger version of her is standing, wearing a jersey so badly stained that not even baking soda would have helped. Bank leans towards the photo until her nose is almost touching the glass. Then she moves around the room and taps systematically at all the photos, as if memorizing where they are.

Britt-Marie stands in the hall and waits for what she considers to be an appropriate length of time, until the whole thing stops being merely uncomfortable and starts getting downright odd. Then she puts on her coat and opens the door. Just before it closes, Bank grunts behind her:

“You want some good advice? That team can’t play. Nothing you do will make any difference.”

Britt-Marie whispers, “Ha,” and walks out.

She locks herself into the laundry at the recreation center. Sits on one of the stools while her skirt, still muddy from the truck incident, spins around in the washing machine. Once she has gotten dressed and fixed her hair, she stands for a long time in the kitchen observing the coffee percolator that was destroyed by flying stones.

Britt-Marie decides to assemble an entire piece of IKEA furniture that day and for some reason ends up doing so at the pizzeria. Almost completely on her own. No screwdriver is required, but it takes the best part of ten hours, because there are actually three items of furniture—one table and two chairs. Intended for balconies. Britt-Marie pushes them as far as they’ll go into a corner, puts out kitchen roll as a tablecloth, and then sits there on her own eating pizza that Somebody has baked for her. It is a remarkable day in Britt-Marie’s life, unique even among the consistently remarkable days she’s had since arriving in Borg.

Sven has his dinner at another table in the pizzeria, but they have their coffee together. Without saying anything to each other. Just trying to get used to the presence of the other person. As you do when it’s been a long time since anyone’s presence had a physical effect on you. A long time since a person could be sensed without physically touching at all.

Karl comes in to pick up a parcel. Sits down at a table in the corner and has a cup of coffee beside the men with caps and beards. They continue to intentionally ignore Britt-Marie, as if this might make her disappear. Vega comes in with the soccer ball under her arm, as dirty as only a child can get in the short distance between her older brother’s car and a pizzeria. Omar comes in behind her and, when he sees Britt-Marie’s newly assembled balcony furniture, immediately tries to sell her some furniture polish.

When Britt-Marie walks out to go to the training session, Sven stands up with his police cap in his hands, but he doesn’t say anything and she speeds up to make sure he doesn’t have the opportunity.

Ben’s mother is standing outside the door. She is wearing her hospital clothes and holding something in her hands.

“Hello, Britt-Marie. We haven’t met, but I’m Ben’s mo—”

“I’m aware of who you are,” says Britt-Marie guardedly, as if preparing to be spattered with mud again by a passing truck.

“I just wanted to say thank you for, well . . . for seeing Ben. Not many grown-ups do,” says Ben’s mother, and holds out what she has in her hands.

It’s a bottle of Faxin. Britt-Marie is dumbstruck. Ben’s mother clears her throat awkwardly.

“I hope it doesn’t seem silly. Ben asked Omar what you liked and Omar said you liked this. He gave us a special deal, so we . . . well, Ben and I, we wanted to say thanks. For everything.”

Britt-Marie holds the bottle as if she’s afraid of dropping it. Ben’s mother takes a step back, then stops and adds:

“We want you to know there’s another Borg than the one with a couple of old blokes sitting in a pizzeria boozing all day. There are the rest of us as well. Those of us who haven’t given up.”

With that she turns around before Britt-Marie has a chance to respond, gets into a little car and drives off. The training begins and Britt-Marie calls the register and makes a note on her list, and the children do the Idiot, because that’s the next item on Britt-Marie’s list after “Take register.”

The children hardly complain at all, the one exception being when Vega asks if they’ve practiced enough, and Britt-Marie says they have, and Vega immediately gets stirred up and yells something about how this team will never improve if their coach goes easy on them!

Children are beyond understanding, this much is abundantly clear. So Britt-Marie writes in her list how they have to “do the Idiot” more and that’s precisely what they do. After that they gather in a ring around Britt-Marie and look like they expect her to say something, and Britt-Marie goes to Sami, who’s sitting on the hood of his black car, and asks him what sort of thing this might be.

“Ah, you know. They’ve been running and now they want to play. Give them a pep talk and just toss the ball to them.”

“A pep talk?”

“Something encouraging,” he clarifies.

Britt-Marie thinks about it for a while, then turns to the children and says with all the encouragement she can muster:

“Try not to get too dirty.”

Sami laughs. The children look utterly perplexed, and start a practice match. Toad, who’s the goalkeeper at one end, lets in more goals than anyone else. Seven or eight, one after the other. Every time it happens his face turns completely scarlet and he roars: “Come on now! Let’s
turn this thing around
!”

Sami laughs about that every time. This makes Britt-Marie nervous, so she asks:

“Why is he behaving like that?”

“He has a dad who supports Liverpool,” Sami answers, without elaboration.

He grabs two cans from the back of the car, and gives one of them to Britt-Marie. “If you have a dad who supports Liverpool you always fucking think you can turn anything around. You know! Ever since that Champions League final.”

Britt-Marie sips her soft drink from the can and thinks that, by doing this, she is finally beyond all limits of honor and decency. So she decides she might as well say what she feels:

“I don’t want to be unpleasant in any way, Sami, because you have a quite impeccable cutlery drawer. But by and large I find everything you say utterly mystifying!”

Sami guffaws.

“You too, Britt-Marie. You too.”

Then he tells her about a soccer game, almost a decade ago, at a time when Vega and Omar were hardly out of their diapers, yet
nonetheless sat there with him and Psycho in the pizzeria. Liverpool were up against Milan in the Champions League final. Britt-Marie asks whether this is a competition, and Sami answers that it’s a cup, and Britt-Marie asks what a cup is, and Sami says it’s a sort of competition, whereupon Britt-Marie points out that he could just have said that from the start instead of giving himself airs and graces.