The Fredrik Backman Collection_A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here

by Fredrik Backman

  “I would like to propose a working arrangement. For your part, it would mean that a dinner would be arranged for you every evening at six o’clock.”

  She makes an explanatory gesture at the chocolate.

  “The arrangement, if we find it mutually beneficial, would mean that, if you die, I won’t let you lie and smell bad in the wall. And you will do the same for me. In case people don’t know we are here.”

  The rat takes a tentative step towards the chocolate. Stretches its neck and sniffs it. Britt-Marie brushes invisible crumbs from her knee.

  “It’s the sodium bicarbonate that disappears when one dies, you have to understand. That’s why people smell. I read that after Ingrid had died.”

  The rat’s whiskers vibrate with skepticism. Britt-Marie clears her throat apologetically.

  “Ingrid was my sister, you have to understand. She died. I was worried she’d smell bad. That’s how I found out about sodium bicarbonate. The body produces sodium bicarbonate to neutralize the acidic substances in the stomach. When one dies, the body stops producing the sodium bicarbonate, so the acidic substances eat their way through the skin and end up on the floor. That’s when it smells, you have to understand.”

  She thinks about adding that she has always found it reasonable to assume that the human soul is found in the sodium bicarbonate. When it leaves the body, there’s nothing left. Only complaining neighbors. But she doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t want to cause bother.

  The rat eats its dinner but doesn’t comment on whether or not it enjoyed it.

  Britt-Marie doesn’t ask.

  9

  Everything begins in earnest this evening. The weather is mild, the snow turns to rain as it falls from sky to earth. The children play soccer in the dark, but neither the dark nor the rain seems to concern them in the least. The parking area is only blessed with light here and there, where it’s cast by the neon sign of the pizzeria, or from the kitchen window where Britt-Marie stands hidden behind the curtain watching them, but, to be quite honest, most of them are so bad at soccer that more light would only have a marginal effect on their ability to hit the ball.

  The rat has gone home. Britt-Marie has locked the door and washed up and cleaned the whole recreation center one more time. She is standing by the window looking out at the world. From time to time, the ball bounces through the puddles onto the road, and then the children play Rock, Paper, Scissors to decide who has to go and fetch it.

  Kent used to tell David and Pernilla when they were small that Britt-Marie couldn’t play with them because she “didn’t know how,” but that isn’t true. Britt-Marie knows perfectly well how to play Rock, Paper, Scissors. She just doesn’t think it sounds very hygienic to keep stones in paper bags. As for the scissors, it’s not even worth thinking about. Who knows where they’ve been?

  Of course Kent is always saying Britt-Marie is “so darned negative.” It’s a part of her social incompetence. “Darn it! Just be happy instead!” Kent fetches the cigars and takes care of the guests and Britt-Marie does the washing-up and takes care of the home, and that’s how they have divided up their lives. Kent is a bit happy, darn it, and Britt-Marie is darned negative. Maybe that’s how it goes. It’s easier to stay optimistic if you never have to clear up the mess afterwards.

  The two siblings, Vega and Omar, play on opposing sides. She is calm and calculating, gently moving the ball with the insides of her feet, as you might twiddle your toes against someone you love while sleeping. Her brother, on the other hand, is angry and frustrated, hunting the ball down as if it owes him money. Britt-Marie doesn’t know the first thing about soccer, but anyone can see that Vega is the best player in the parking area. Or at least the least bad one.

  Omar is constantly in his sister’s shadow. They are all in her shadow. She reminds Britt-Marie of Ingrid.

  Ingrid was never negative. As always with people like this, it’s difficult to know whether everyone loved Ingrid because she was so positive, or if she was so positive because everyone loved her. She was one year older than Britt-Marie and five inches taller—it doesn’t take much to put someone in your shadow. It never mattered to Britt-Marie that she was the one who receded into the background. She never wanted much.

  Sometimes she actually yearned to want something, so much that she could hardly bear it. It seemed so vital, wanting things. But usually the feeling passed.

  Ingrid, of course, was always falling to bits with wanting things—her singing career, for instance, and the celebrity status she was predestined to achieve, and the boys out there in the world who were so much more than the usual ones on offer in their apartment block. The usual boys who, Britt-Marie realized, were infinitely too unusual to even look at Britt-Marie and yet far too usual in every way to deserve her sister.

  They were brothers, the boys on their floor. Alf and Kent. They fought about everything. Britt-Marie couldn’t understand it. She followed her sister everywhere. It never bothered Ingrid. Quite the opposite. “It’s you and me, Britt,” she used to whisper at nights when she told her the stories of how they were going to live in Paris in a palace filled with servants. That was why she called her little sister “Britt”—because it sounded American.

  Admittedly it seemed a bit odd to have an American name in Paris, but Britt-Marie had certainly never been the sort of person who opposed things needlessly.

  Vega is grim, but when her team scores in the dark yard, in the rain, in a goal made of two soft-drink cans, her laugh sounds just like Ingrid’s. Ingrid also loved to play. As with all people like that, it’s difficult to know if she was the best because she loved the games, or if she loved them because she was the best.

  A little boy with ginger hair gets hit hard in the face with the ball. He falls headlong into a muddy puddle. Britt-Marie shudders. It’s the same soccer ball they shot at Britt-Marie’s head, and when she sees the mud on it she wants to give herself a tetanus shot. Yet she has difficulties taking her eyes off the game, because Ingrid would have liked it.

  Of course, if Kent had been here he would have said the children were playing like big girls’ blouses. Kent is able to describe almost anything bad by adding, before or after, that it’s a bit of a “big girl’s blouse.” Britt-Marie is actually not especially fond of irony, but she notes a certain amount of that very thing in the fact that the only player out there not playing like a girl’s blouse is the girl.

  Britt-Marie finally comes to her senses and leaves the window before anyone out there starts getting any ideas. It’s past eight, so the recreation center is steeped in darkness. Britt-Marie waters her balcony boxes in the dark. Sprinkles baking soda over the soil. She misses her balcony more than anything. You’re never quite alone when you can stand on a balcony—you have all the cars and houses and the people in the streets. You’re among them, but also not. That’s the best thing about balconies. The second best is standing out there early in the morning before Kent has woken up, closing your eyes and feeling the wind in your hair. Britt-Marie used to do that, and it felt like Paris. Of course she has never been to Paris, because Kent doesn’t do any business there, but she has solved an awful lot of crossword clues about Paris. It’s the world’s most crossword-referenced city, full of rich and famous celebrities with their very own cleaners. Ingrid used to go on about how they’d have their own servants, which was the only bit of the dream Britt-Marie wasn’t sure about—she didn’t want them to think that Britt-Marie’s sister was so bad at cleaning that she had to employ someone to do it. Britt-Marie had heard their mother talking about those sorts of mothers with contempt, and Britt-Marie didn’t want anyone talking about Ingrid like that.

  So while Ingrid would excel at everything out there in the world, Britt-Marie imagined herself being really good at things inside of it. Cleaning. Making things nice. Her sister noticed this. Noticed her. Britt-Marie did her hair every morning, and her sister never forgot to say, “Thanks, you did that really well, Britt!” while she turned her head in front of
the mirror to a tune from one of her vinyl records. Britt-Marie never had records. You don’t need any when you have an older sister who truly sees you.

  When there’s a bang on the door Britt-Marie jumps as if someone just drove an ax through it. Vega is standing outside, but without an ax. Worse still, she’s dripping mud and rain on the floor. Britt-Marie screams on the inside.

  “Why don’t you turn on the lights?” asks Vega, squinting into the darkness.

  “They don’t work, dear.”

  “Have you tried changing the bulbs?” asks Vega with a frown, as if she has to totally control herself not to add “dear” at the end of her question.

  Omar pops up next to her. He has mud in his nostrils. Inside his nostrils. Britt-Marie cannot get her head around how something like that could happen. Surely there’s such a thing as gravity.

  “You need to buy lightbulbs. I have the baddest low-energy bulbs! Special price!” he says eagerly, producing a rucksack from somewhere.

  Vega kicks him on the shin and looks at Britt-Marie with the strained diplomacy of the teenager.

  “Can we watch the match here?” she asks.

  “What . . . match?” asks Britt-Marie.

  “The match!” Vega replies, not entirely unlike how you’d say “the Pope” if someone asked, “what Pope?”

  Britt-Marie switches her hands around on her stomach, and then reclasps them together.

  “The match in what?”

  “Soccer!” Vega and Omar burst out.

  “Ha,” mutters Britt-Marie and looks with revulsion at their muddy clothes. Not at the children, obviously. At their clothes. Britt-Marie is obviously not revolted by children.

  “He always let us watch it here,” says Vega and points at the photo on the wall inside the door of the elderly man with the “Bank” jersey in his hands.

  In another photo just next to it stands the same man in front of a truck, and he’s wearing a white jacket on which BORG SC is written on one of his breast pockets and COACH on the other. It could have done with a wash, Britt-Marie notes.

  “I have not been informed about this. You’ll have to contact the man, in that case.”

  The silence depletes the air between them of oxygen.

  “He’s dead,” says Vega at long last, looking down at her shoes.

  Britt-Marie looks at the man in the photo. Then at her hands.

  “That’s . . . ha. Very sad to hear it. But I actually can’t be held responsible for it,” she says.

  Vega peers at her with hate. Then shoves Omar in the side and hisses:

  “Come on, Omar, let’s get out of here. Never bloody mind about her.”

  She has already turned around and started walking away when Britt-Marie notices the other children, three of them, waiting a few feet away. All in their early teens. One with ginger hair, one with black, and another with high cholesterol. She senses the accusation in their eyes.

  “Can I ask why you don’t watch the soccer in the pizzeria or the car workshop or whatever it is, if it’s so important?” asks Britt-Marie in a polite and not at all confrontational manner.

  Omar kicks his ball across the parking area and says in a quiet voice:

  “They drink in there. If they lose.”

  “Ha. And if they win?”

  “Then they drink even more. So he always let us watch in here.”

  “And I suppose in these parts you wouldn’t have homes of your own to go to, with televisions in them? Would you?”

  “There isn’t space for the whole team at anyone’s house,” snaps Vega suddenly, “and besides, we watch the matches together. Like a team.”

  Britt-Marie brushes some dust off her skirt.

  “I was under the impression that you didn’t have a team anymore.”

  “We have a team!” roars Vega and stamps back towards Britt-Marie.

  “We’re here, aren’t we? We’re here! So we are a team! Even if they take our bloody pitch and our bloody club and our trainer has a bloody heart attack and goes and bloody dies on us we’re a team!”

  Britt-Marie is practically shaking as the child’s furious eyes focus on her. This is certainly no suitable way for a human being to express herself. But tears are now running down Vega’s cheeks, and Britt-Marie can’t properly determine whether the child is going to give her a hug or a wallop.

  Britt-Marie looks as if she would find either alternative similarly threatening.

  “I have to ask you to wait here,” she says in a panic, and closes the door.

  That’s how it all happens before everything begins in earnest.

  Britt-Marie stands inside the door, breathing in the smell of wet potting soil and baking soda. She remembers the smell of alcohol and the sound of Kent’s soccer matches. He never went onto the balcony, so the balcony belonged to Britt-Marie and no one else, which was something quite unique. She always lied and said she had bought the plants, because she knew he’d say something horrible if she told him she’d found them in the garbage room and sometimes in the street, left behind by some neighbors when they moved away. Plants reminded her of Ingrid, because Ingrid loved things that were alive. And for this reason Britt-Marie repeatedly saved homeless plants, to give her the strength to remember a sister whose life she was not even able to save once. You couldn’t explain things like this to Kent.

  Kent doesn’t believe in death, he believes in evolution. “That’s evolution,” he said, nodding approvingly, on one occasion when he was watching a nature program in which a lion killed an injured zebra: “It’s sorting out the one that’s weak, right? It’s about the survival of the species, you have to get that. If you’re not the best from the start, you have to accept the consequences and leave space for someone stronger, right?”

  You can’t discuss balcony plants with a person like that.

  Or the feeling of missing someone.

  Britt-Marie’s fingertips are trembling slightly when she picks up the cell phone.

  The girl from the unemployment office answers on the third attempt.

  “Hello?” says the girl in a panting voice.

  “Is that how you answer the phone? Out of breath?”

  “Britt-Marie? I’m at the gym!”

  “That must be very nice for you.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “There are some children here. They say they want to see some sort of match here.”

  “Oh yeah, the match! I’m going to watch it as well!”

  “I wasn’t notified that my range of duties included taking care of children. . . .”

  The girl at the other end of the line groans in what is, to be honest, quite an uncalled-for way.

  “Britt-Marie, sorry, but I’m not supposed to talk on the phone in the gym.”

  Then she exclaims, without a thought:

  “But . . . you know . . . it’s a good thing, isn’t it? If the children are there watching the soccer and you drop dead, they’ll know all about it!”

  Britt-Marie laughs curtly. Then there’s a silence for a very, very long time.

  The girl inhales grimly, and there’s a sound of a jogging machine stopping.

  “Okay, sorry Britt-Marie, I was joking. It was a silly thing for me to say. I didn’t mean it that way . . . hello?”

  Britt-Marie has already hung up. She opens the door half a minute later with the newly washed soccer jerseys neatly folded into a pile in her arms.

  “But you’re not coming in with those muddy clothes, I have just mopped the floors!” she says to the children before she stops herself.

  There’s a policeman standing among them. He’s small and chubby and has a head of hair like a lawn the day after an impromptu barbecue.

  “What have you done now?” Britt-Marie hisses at Vega.

  The policeman looks ambivalent. The woman who stands in front of him is very different to the one the children described. Fussy, yes, and bossy, clearly, but something else as well. Determined, immaculately neat, and somehow . . . unique. He s
tares dumbly for a moment while he tries to think of something to say to her, but in the end decides the most civic thing he can do is to hold out a big glass jar towards Britt-Marie.

  “My name is Sven. I just wanted to welcome you to Borg. This is jam.”

  Britt-Marie looks at the jam jar. Vega looks at Sven. At a loss, Sven scratches himself on various parts of his police uniform.

  “Blueberry jam. I made it myself. I did a course. In town.”

  Britt-Marie gives him a careful once-over from top to bottom and back again. She stops in both directions when she comes to the uniform shirt, which is tight over his stomach.

  “I don’t have a jersey in your size,” she informs him.

  Sven blushes.

  “No, no, no, of course, that’s not what I meant. I want . . . just welcome to Borg, just that. That’s all I wanted to say.”

  He presses the jam jar into Vega’s hands and totters away from the threshold into the parking area, heading towards the pizzeria. Vega looks at the jam jar. Omar looks at Britt-Marie’s bare ring finger and grins.

  “Are you married?” he asks.

  Britt-Marie is shocked at herself when she notices how quickly she blurts out:

  “I’m divorced.”

  It’s the first time she’s said it out loud. Omar’s grin widens as he nods at Sven.

  “Sven is free, just so you know!”

  Britt-Marie hears the other children tittering. She presses the jerseys into Omar’s arms, snatches the jam jar from Vega, and disappears into the gloom of the recreation center. About half a dozen children remain on the threshold, rolling their eyes.

  That’s how it all begins.

  10

  Soccer is a curious game, because it doesn’t ask to be loved. It demands it.

  Britt-Marie wanders about inside the recreation center like a confounded spirit whose grave someone has opened in order to start a discotheque.