Britt-Marie Was Here (23 page)

Sami nods gratefully.

“Thanks, Coach. I could do with a few pointers. I mean the stains on these kids’ clothes, anyone would think they live in the fucking trees.”

Britt-Marie waits until he has left with Psycho before she goes to the recreation center. The stains do go away with baking soda. She also washes towels and aprons for Somebody, even though Somebody insists there’s no need. Not that Somebody has a problem with Britt-Marie doing the washing for her; it’s more because she really doesn’t think the laundry needs doing. They have a brief dispute about this. Somebody calls Britt-Marie “Mary Poppins” again and Britt-Marie retorts that she’s a “filthy little piglet.” Somebody bursts out laughing about this, at which point the argument runs out of steam.

Britt-Marie puts out some Snickers for the rat. She doesn’t wait until it appears, because she doesn’t want to explain how things went with her date. Not that she’s sure the rat will be keen to know about it, but either way she’s not ready to talk about it yet. Afterwards, she goes back to the pizzeria to have her dinner with Somebody, because Somebody seems to care either too little or too much about Britt-Marie to ask.

Sven doesn’t pass by the pizzeria that evening, but Britt-Marie catches herself leaping out of her chair, and also her heart racing, every time there’s a tinkle from the door. It wouldn’t have annoyed her even if he showed up in the middle of their meal. But it’s never Sven. Just one or other of the children, until they’re all assembled, with crisp, clean soccer jerseys, because the children seem to have someone at home taking care of that.

This fills Britt-Marie with a sort of hope for Borg. That there are still people here who understand the value of a freshly washed soccer jersey.

The children are on their way out to start their training when the boy turns up in the doorway. He is wearing his tracksuit top with “Hockey” written on it, but there’s no sign of his dad.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Vega wants to know.

The boy pushes his hands deep into his pockets and nods at the soccer ball in her hands.

“I was hoping to play with you—can I?”

“You can clear off to town and play there!” hisses Vega.

The boy’s chin is resting against his collarbone, but he doesn’t back off.

“The soccer team in town trains at six o’clock. That’s when I have my hockey training. But I noticed that you train later. . . .”

Britt-Marie has a clear perception of needing to defend that decision, so she says:

“You actually can’t train in the middle of dinner!”

“Not in the middle of hockey either,” says the boy.

“You don’t belong here, bloody rich kid,” sneers Vega as she elbows past him. “We’re not as good as the team in town, anyway, so why don’t you clear off and play with them if you want to play soccer!”

Still he doesn’t back off. She stops. He raises his chin.

“I couldn’t give a shit if you’re good. I just want to play. That’s how a team is made.”

Vega pushes her way outside with a choice of words that, as far as Britt-Marie is concerned, is far from civilized, but Omar gives the boy a soft shove in the back and says:

“If you can get the ball off her you’re in. I don’t think you’ve got the guts to do it, though.”

The boy has rushed across the parking area before the sentence comes to an end. Vega elbows him in the face. He stumbles onto his knees with blood in his nostrils, but at the same time he sticks out his
foot and scoops out the ball, in a long hook. Vega falls and scrapes her entire body through the gravel, a warlike expression in her eyes. Omar nudges Britt-Marie, standing in the pizzeria doorway, and points at them with excitement: “Check it out now, when Vega gives him, like, the worst sliding tackle!”

“What does that mean?” asks Britt-Marie, but she soon finds out when Vega darts across the pitch and, a few feet behind the boy, catapults herself through the air with both legs stretched out, sliding across the gravel until she collides with the boy’s feet, and sends his body into a wild half somersault through the gloom.

That is how Britt-Marie comes to realize why all the children in Borg have jeans that are ripped across their thighs. Vega stands up and puts her foot on the ball in a gesture not so much of ownership but of domination. The boy brushes himself off a bit, displaying an alarming need for baking soda, and digs sharp pebbles out of the skin of his face. Vega looks at Britt-Marie, shrugs her shoulders, and snorts:

“He’s okay.”

Britt-Marie gets out the list from her handbag.

“Would you be good enough to state your name?” she asks.

“Max,” says the boy.

Omar, with great seriousness, points first at Vega and then at Max.

“You
cannot
play in the same team when we’re playing two-goals!”

Then they do the Idiot. Play two-goals. And they are a team. Sami couldn’t come tonight to light up the field with his headlights, but there’s another vehicle in the same place with its headlights turned on. It’s Karl’s truck, with such an impressive amount of rust down its sides it seems unlikely that such a length of time could have passed since the invention of trucks.

W
hen the woman and the man in the red car stop at the far end of the parking area, neither Britt-Marie nor the children react at first, because they’re starting to get used to new players and spectators turning up at Borg soccer team’s training sessions as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Only when Max points at them and says, “They’re from town, aren’t they? She’s the head of the district soccer association. My dad knows her,” does play stop and the players and coach wait suspiciously for the strangers to present themselves.

“Are you Britt-Marie?” asks the woman as she comes closer.

She is neatly dressed, as is the man. The red car is extremely clean, notes Britt-Marie with an initial sense of approval from her old life, which is quickly replaced by an instinctual skepticism that she has picked up in Borg for all things that seem neat and clean. “I am,” answers Britt-Marie.

“I dropped off a document for you earlier today, have you had time to look through it?” asks the woman, with a gesture at the pizzeria.

“Ha. Ha. No, no, I haven’t. I have been otherwise engaged.”

The woman looks at the children. Then at Britt-Marie.

“It’s about the rules of the competition, the January Cup, for which this . . .
team
 . . . has been entered.”

She says the word “team” in much the same way as Britt-Marie says “cup” when she’s got a plastic mug in her hand.

“Ha,” says Britt-Marie, picking up her notebook and pen, as if arming herself.

“You are named as the soccer coach in the application. Do you have a license for that?”

“I beg your pardon?” says Britt-Marie, while at the same time writing “license” in her notebook.

“
License
,” the woman repeats, pointing at the man beside her as if he was someone Britt-Marie ought to recognize: “The District Soccer Association and the County Council only allow teams to participate in the January Cup if they have a coach with a local authority coaching license.”

Britt-Marie writes, “Acquire local authority coaching license” in her notebook.

“Ha. Might I trouble you to tell me how I can get my hands on such a license? I will immediately see to it that my contact at the unemployment office ensures th—”

“But good Lord, it’s not something you just
pick up
! You have to do an entire
course
in it!” the man next to the woman in front of the red car bursts out a touch hysterically.

Angrily he waves his hand over the parking area. “You’re not a proper team! You don’t even have a pitch to train on!”

At this stage Vega gets fed up, because Vega’s patience is quite clearly of the very shortest kind, and she hisses back at him:

“Hey, you miserable old sod, are we playing soccer here or not?”

“What?” says the old sod.

“Are you deaf? I said: are we playing bloody soccer here or are we bloody not?” roars Vega.

“Well?” says the old sod with a mocking smile, throwing out his arms.

“If we’re playing soccer here then it
is
a bloody soccer pitch,” Vega establishes.

The old sod looks at Britt-Marie in shock, as if he feels she ought to say something. Britt-Marie actually feels this would not be so appropriate, because just for once, apart from her use of language, she feels that Vega is absolutely right. So she stays silent. The woman next to the old sod clears her throat.

“There’s an absolutely excellent soccer club in town, I’m quite sure that—”

“We have an absolutely excellent soccer club here!” Vega interrupts.

The woman is breathing spasmodically through her nostrils.

“We have to have rules and regulations for the January Cup. Otherwise more or less anyone could turn up and play. That would be chaotic, you have to understand that. If you don’t have an accredited trainer we can’t let you participate, unfortunately; in that case you’ll have to reapply next year and then we’ll process the—”

The voice that interrupts her, somewhere in the dark between the red car and Karl’s truck, is hungover and in no mood to be talked back to, this much is amply clear.

“I have a license. Write my name on the paper if it’s so damned important.”

The woman stares at Bank. All the others do the same. Where Bank is staring, without being at all prejudicial about it, is unclear. But the dog is at least looking at Britt-Marie. Britt-Marie peers back at it shiftily, as a conspiring criminal type might do.

“Good God, is
she
back in Borg?” hisses the old codger to the woman as soon as he catches sight of Bank.

“Shush!” shushes the woman.

Bank steps out of the shadows and waves her stick in the direction of the woman and the old codger, so that she accidentally strikes the old codger quite hard on his thigh. Twice.

“Oh, dear,” Bank says apologetically, then points the stick at the woman.

“Put my name down. I suppose you haven’t forgotten it,” she says, and happens to strike the old codger fairly hard across one of his arms three or possibly four times.

“I didn’t even know you were back in Borg,” the woman says with a cold smile.

“Now you do.”

“We . . . I mean . . . the regulations of the competition stipulate that . . .” the woman tries to say.

Bank groans, loud and hungover.

“Shut your mouth will you, Annika, just shut your mouth. The kids just want to play. There used to be a time when we also just wanted to play, and old blokes like this one tried to stop us.”

Bank thrusts her stick in the direction of the old sod when she says that last bit, but this time he manages to jump out of the way. The woman stands there for a good while, and seems to be pondering a variety of answers. She looks younger and younger for every moment that passes. She opens her mouth, then closes it again. Finally, in a resigned sort of way, she writes down Bank’s name in her papers. The old sod is still spitting and hissing when they get into the red car and leave Borg behind as they head back to town.

Bank doesn’t waste any time on superficialities. In her hungover condition, her patience seems comparable to Vega’s. She waves her stick menacingly at the children and mutters:

“If you’re not blind you must have noticed by now that I am, pretty well. But I have no need to watch you play to get the fact that you’re useless. We have a few days until their idiotic cup, so we have to use that time as well as we can to make you as un-useless as possible.”

She thinks about this for a moment and then adds:

“You should probably keep your expectations low.”

It’s not an excellent pep talk, far from it. Possibly, Britt-Marie has a sense that she liked Bank better when she hardly did any talking. But of course Omar is the first of them to drum up enough courage to disagree with her, partly because he dares say what the whole team is thinking, and partly because he’s dumb enough to do it.

“Shit! Fat chance we’ve got with a blind coach!”

Britt-Marie clasps her hands together.

“You’re not supposed to say things like that, Omar. It’s incredibly uncivilized.”

“She’s blind! What can she know about soccer?”

“It’s actually more a case of impaired vision,” Britt-Marie points out, adding with a slight note of outrage: “It has nothing to do with corpulence.”

Omar swears. Bank just nods calmly. She points her stick at the soccer ball with a precision that makes even Omar feel slightly caught out.

“Give the ball here,” she says, and at the same time whistles to her dog. The dog shuffles off at once and positions itself immediately behind Omar.

Omar’s eyes flick nervously between the dog behind him and Bank in front of him.

“Right . . . what I . . . hold on, I didn’t mean . . .”

Bank runs forward with a surprising turn of speed to claim the ball. At the same time the dog, behind Omar, places itself with its legs wide apart and starts peeing. The dog pee forms itself into a neat, round puddle in the gravel. Bank’s foot caresses the leather soccer ball and makes a sudden movement as if about to kick it hard at Omar’s head. He ducks and throws himself back, startled, stumbling over the dog and stepping neatly into the puddle.