Britt-Marie Was Here (32 page)

“Bloody lemon arse,” mutters Vega and gets out of the backseat.

Britt-Marie follows on behind. Max opens the door before they have even pressed the doorbell, barges his way out and, looking stressed out, closes the door behind him. He’s still wearing the tracksuit top with “Hockey” printed across the chest, but he has a soccer ball under his arm.

“No need to bring a ball, Vega has already put one in the car,” Britt-Marie informs him.

Max blinks uncomprehendingly.

“Surely you don’t need more than one ball?” Britt-Marie goes on.

Max looks at the ball. Looks at Britt-Marie.

“Need?”

As if that’s a word that bears any relation to soccer balls.

“Well
I
need to use your bathroom,” moans Vega, moving impatiently towards the door. Max’s hand catches her shoulder; she instantly slaps it away.

“You can’t!” he says, looking worried. “Sorry!”

Vega peers suspiciously at him.

“Are you worried I’ll see how bloody over-the-top your house is? You think I care if you’re millionaires?”

Max tries to push her away from the door, but she’s too quick; she slips under his arm and goes in. He bundles in after her, then they stand there, both rooted to the spot. She with her mouth wide open, he with his eyes closed.

“I . . . what the hell . . . where’s your furniture?”

“We had to sell it,” mumbles Max after a moment, closing the door without looking at the room.

Vega peers at him.

“Don’t you have any money?”

“No one has any money in Borg,” says Max, opening the door and stepping out, heading towards the car.

“So why doesn’t your dad just sell his bloody BMW, then?” Vega calls out after him.

“Because then everyone will know he’s given up,” says Max with a sigh, and climbs into the backseat.

“But . . . what the . . .” Vega starts saying as she climbs in after him, until she’s stopped by a hard shove from Omar.

“Drop it, sis, what are you? A cop or something? Leave him alone.”

“I only want to kn—” she protests, but Omar gives her another shove.

“Leave it! He talks like one of them but he plays soccer like one of us. You got it? Leave him alone.”

Max doesn’t say a word on the way into town. When they stop outside the leisure center, he gets out of the backseat with his soccer ball tucked under his arm, drops it onto the asphalt, and drills a shot into the wall that is just about the hardest Britt-Marie has ever seen a ball
being struck. Britt-Marie lets out the dog and Toad from the trunk. Bank follows them inside. Dino, Omar, and Vega come behind. Sven is at the back. Britt-Marie counts them several times and tries to work out who’s missing, then hears Ben’s voice, sounding rather pathetic, from somewhere around the far corner of the backseat.

“Sorry, Britt-Marie. I didn’t mean to.”

When she can’t immediately locate the voice he manages to say:

“I’ve never played in a cup before. I got so . . . nervous. I didn’t want to say anything when we were at the petrol station.”

Britt-Marie still isn’t quite sure she can hear what he’s saying, so she sticks her head into the car. Sees the dark patch on his trousers and the seat where he’s sitting.

“Sorry,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut.

“Oh . . . I . . . sorry. Don’t worry about it! It’ll come off with baking soda!” Britt-Marie stutters, and goes to dig out some spare clothes from the trunk.

Because that’s the sort of person she’s become in Borg, she realizes. Someone who goes to soccer competitions with spare clothes in the trunk.

She holds the bamboo screen over the window while Ben gets changed inside. Then she covers the seat with baking soda. Brings his trousers into the sports hall and rinses them in a sink in a dressing room.

He stands beside her with an embarrassed pout around his mouth, but his eyes are sparkling, and when she’s done he blurts out:

“Mum’s coming here to watch today. She’s taken the day off work!”

The way he says it, it’s as if the building they’re in is made of chocolate.

The other children are kicking two soccer balls around the corridor outside, and Britt-Marie has to exert considerable self-control
not to rush out and give them a stern talking to about the unsuitability of kicking balls around indoors. She actually feels it’s inappropriate even having sports arenas indoors, but she has no intention of being looked at as if
she’s
the one with crazy opinions on the matter, so she keeps silent about it.

The sports hall consists of a tall spectators’ stand and a flight of stairs of equal height, leading down to a rectangular surface full of colorful lines running to and fro, which Britt-Marie assumes is where the soccer matches will be played. Indoors.

Bank gathers the children in a circle at the top of the stairs and tells them things that Britt-Marie does not understand, but she comes to the conclusion this is another one of those pep talks they’re all so taken with.

After Bank has finished she waves her stick in the air towards where she’s figured out Britt-Marie is standing, and then says:

“Do you have anything you want to say before the match, Britt-Marie?”

Britt-Marie has not prepared for this sort of eventuality, it’s not on her list, so she grips her handbag firmly and thinks it over for a moment before saying:

“I think it’s important that we try to make a good first impression.”

She doesn’t know what exactly she’s driving at with this; it’s just something Britt-Marie finds a good general rule in life. The children watch her, with their eyebrows at varying heights. Vega keeps eating fruit from the bag and nodding sourly at the spectators in the stands.

“A good impression on who? That lot? They hate us, don’t you get it?”

Britt-Marie has to admit that most of the people in the stands, many of them wearing jerseys and scarfs emblazoned with the name of their own team from their own town, are looking at them as you
might look at a stranger on the underground who just sneezed in your face.

Halfway down the stairs stands the old codger from the council and the woman from the soccer association, the same ones that paid a visit to the training session in Borg a couple of days ago. The woman looks concerned, the old codger has his arms full of papers, and next to them stands a very serious man wearing a jersey on which it says “Official,” and another person with long hair and a tracksuit top with the name of the team from town printed on one side and the word “Coach” on the other. He’s pointing at Team Borg and bellowing something about how this is “a serious competition, not a nursery!”

Britt-Marie doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but when Toad hauls out a soft-drink can from his pocket she decides that this is certainly not a way of making a good first impression, so she cautions him not to open it. Toad immediately insists that his blood sugar is a bit on the low side, whereupon Vega gets involved and shoves his shoulder, while hissing:

“Are you deaf or what? Don’t open that can!” Unfortunately she catches Toad off balance and he falls backwards helplessly. He tumbles halfway down the stairs, shrieking with every step, until his body thumps into the legs of the woman from the soccer association, the old codger from the local council, the official, and the coach person.

“
Don’t open that can!
” roars Vega.

Upon which he decides to open the can.

It’s not what you’d in any way describe as a top-notch first impression, it really isn’t.

By the time Britt-Marie and Bank have reached the section of the stairs where Toad came to a stop, the coach person is yelling with even greater indignation, for reasons already described. The
old codger and the woman and the papers are whirling about in a persistent rain of lemonade. The coach person has such an amount of lemonade in his hair, on his face, and over his clothes that the amount of lemonade in the can must in some way have bypassed the natural laws of physics. The coach person points at Bank and Britt-Marie, so angry by this stage that the pointing action is executed by both hands, which, at this kind of distance, makes it difficult to determine whether he’s actually pointing at all, or just demonstrating the approximate size of a badger.

“Are you the
coach
of this so-called
team
?”

He makes deranged quotation marks in the air when he says “coach” and “team.” Bank’s stick pokes at the coach person by accident the first time, and possibly a little less by accident the following five times. The woman looks concerned. The old codger with the papers moves behind her and, chastened by experience, keeps his hand over his mouth.

“We’re the coaches,” Bank confirms.

The coach person grins and looks angry at the same time.

“An old biddy and a blind person,
seeeriously
? Is this a
seeerious
competition? Huh?”

The official shakes his head gravely. The woman, more concerned than ever, peers at Bank.

“One of the players in your team, this Patrik Ivars . . .”

“What about me?” Toad bursts out anxiously from the floor.

“What about him?” growls Bank.

“Yeah, what about Patrik?” asks a third voice.

Toad’s father is standing behind Britt-Marie now. He has combed his hair neatly, and dressed up. There’s a red tulip tucked into the lapel of his jacket. Kent stands next to him in a wrinkled shirt. He smiles at Britt-Marie, and she immediately wants to take him by the hand.

“Patrik is two years younger than the others. He’s too young to play in this competition without exemption being granted,” says the woman, coughing down at the floor.

“So organize the exemption then!” snorts Bank.

“Rules are rules!”

“Really?
Really! Come here you little
 . . .” yells Bank, striking furiously at the coach person with her stick, whereupon the coach person tries to grab her stick in order to avoid falling, and at the same time manages to pull her with him down the stairs, whereupon they both lose their footing and drop over the ledge, before a big hand in a single, forcible movement closes like a handcuff around the tracksuited arm and stops their fall.

The coach person hovers, leaning backwards over the stairs, with eyes wide open as he looks at Kent, who keeps his implacable grip on his arm and leans forward and declares in that clear and straightforward way of his, which he makes use of when explaining to people that he’s actually going to do business with Germany:

“If you try to push a blind woman down a staircase I’ll sue you in the courts until your family is buried in debt for the next ten generations.”

The coach person stares at him. Bank regains her balance by happening to put her stick in the coach person’s stomach two or maybe three times. The concerned woman, trying a different tack, holds out a piece of paper.

“There has also been a protest from your opponents concerning this ‘Viga’ in your team. We can see by her social security number that . . .”

“My name is
Vega
!” snarls Vega from farther up the stairs.

The woman scratches her earlobe self-consciously. Then smiles, as if after a local anaesthetic. And turns to Britt-Marie, who by now seems to be the only reasonable person in the assembled company.

“You have to have an exemption before girls and younger players can take part.”

“So you’re going to ban Patrik and Vega, purely because this town team is too scared to play against a girl and a kid who’s two years younger!!” says Kent.

“
You’re scared!
” yells Bank and accidentally pokes her stick into the tracksuit top and a bit into the old codger with papers.

“We’re not bloody sc—” mumbles the coach person.

And that is how Vega and Patrik get their exemptions so they can play. Patrik goes down the stairs to the pitch with his dad’s arms around his shoulders, looking so happy you’d think he’d sprouted wings.

The other children run onto the pitch and start taking some warm-up shots at the goal, which admittedly looks as if they’re taking general warm-up shots at everything except the goal.

Britt-Marie and Kent stay there on the stairs, just the two of them. She picks up a hair from the shoulder of his shirt, and adjusts a crease on his arm so softly that it’s as if she never even touched him.

“How did you know to say that thing about them being scared?” she asks.

Kent laughs in a way that makes Britt-Marie also start laughing inside.

“I have an older brother. It always worked for me. You remember when I jumped off the balcony and broke my leg? All the dumbest things I ever did started with Alf telling me he didn’t think I had the guts to do them!”

“It was nice of you. And you were sweet to leave the tulips,” whispers Britt-Marie, without asking if she was also one of those dumb things he did.

Kent laughs again.

“I bought them off that Toad boy’s dad. He’s growing them in a
greenhouse in the garden. What a lunatic, eh? He nagged the heck out of me about how I had to get the red ones instead because they’re ‘better,’ but I told him you like the purple ones.”

She brushes some invisible dust from his chest. Controls herself.

In a commonsense approach, she clasps one hand in the other and says:

“I have to go. They’ll be on soon.”

“Good luck!” says Kent, leaning forward and kissing her on the cheek so warmly she has to grasp the metal banister to avoid falling down the stairs.

When he goes to sit in the last empty seat in the away section, she realizes that this is the first time Kent is somewhere for her sake. The first time in their lives that he has to present himself as being in her company, rather than the other way around.

In the seat next to him sits Sven. With his eyes fixed on the floor.

Britt-Marie breathes in deeply with each step. Bank and the dog are waiting for her on a bench next to the pitch. Somebody as well, with a particularly satisfied expression on her face.

“How did you get here?” asks Britt-Marie.

“Drove, you know,” Somebody answers casually.

“What about the pizzeria and the grocery store and the post office, then? What about the opening hours?”