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

  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, loo
king 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?”

  Somebody shrugs.

  “Who will come to shop, Britt? Everyone in Borg—here!”

  Britt-Marie adjusts invisible creases in her skirt at such a speed that it looks as if she’s trying to start a fire. Somebody pats her calmingly.

  “Nervous, huh? No problem, Britt, I said to that official, huh: ‘I will sit on the sideline with Britt. Because I have one of those, what’s-it-called . . . calming effect on Britt, huh.’ The official just said ‘Forget it,’ so I said ‘Can’t see one of those disability areas here, illegal, huh.’ I said: ‘Could sue you, you know.’ So now: I sit here. Best seat, isn’t it?”

  Britt-Marie excuses herself, leaves the sideline, walks down a corridor and into a toilet, where she vomits. When she comes back to the bench, Somebody is still talking, her fingers nervously drumming against anything within reach. The dog sniffs in Britt-Marie’s direction. Bank offers her a pack of chewing gum.

  “It’s normal. You often get food poisoning just before important games.”

  Britt-Marie chews the gum with her hand covering her mouth, because people might come to the conclusion that she has tattoos (or something similar). Then the spectators burst into applause, the referee walks onto the pitch, and a team from Borg that does not even have its own pitch starts playing.

  With vocal support from an entire community where just about everything has been closed down. But only just about.

  The first thing that happens is that Dino gets tackled—or elbowed, to be more precise—by a large boy with a complicated haircut. The next time Dino gets the ball, exactly the same thing happens, only even harder. A few feet away from Britt-Marie the coach person bounces up and down in a soaking wet tracksuit jacket while yelling his encouragement:

  “Exaaactly like that! Make them respeeect you!”

  Britt-Marie is convinced she’s about to have a heart attack, but when she explains this to Bank, Bank says, “That’s how it’s meant to be when you’re watching soccer.” Who on earth would want to watch soccer, then, Britt-Marie thinks to herself. The third time Dino gets the ball the big boy accelerates from the other side of the pitch and runs at full speed with his elbow raised. The next moment he’s lying on his back. Max stands over him with his chest out and his arms straightened. He’s already walking back towards the bench before the referee has sent him off.

  “Max! Huh! You’re such a, what’s-it-called?” Somebody says, overwhelmed with joy.

  Bank taps her stick against Max’s shoes.

  “He talks like one of them. But he plays like one of us.”

  Max smiles and says something, but Britt-Marie can’t hear what.

  The match resumes, and Britt-Marie finds, to her surprise, that she’s standing up. Her mouth is hanging open and she doesn’t even know how. On the pitch, three players have collided and the ball has bounced haphazardly towards the touchline, and suddenly it’s just lying there right at Ben’s feet with a clear shot at the goal. He stares at it. The entire crowd in the sports hall stares at him.

  “Shoot,” whispers Britt-Marie.

  “Shoot!” yells a voice from the stand.

  It’s Sami. Next to him stands a red-faced woman. It’s the first time Britt-Marie has ever seen her wearing anything but a nurse’s uniform.

  “Shoooooooooooooot!!!” cries Bank, waving her stick to and fro in the air.

  So Ben shoots. Britt-Marie hides her face in the palms of her hands; Bank almost overturns Somebody’s wheelchair while she yells:

  “What’s happening? Tell me what’s happening!”

  The stands are silent as if no one can quite believe how this has happened. At first, Ben looks as if he’s going to burst into tears, then as if he’s looking for a hiding place. And he doesn’t have time to do much more than that before he finds himself at the bottom of a screaming pile of arms and legs and white shirts. Borg is in the lead by 1–0. Sami charges around in the stand with his arms held out, like an aircraft. Kent and Sven bounce up from their seats so abruptly that they accidentally start hugging each other.

  A red-faced woman makes her way out of the chaos and runs down the stairs. A couple of officials try to get in her way when they see she’s going to run onto the pitch, but they can’t stop her. They couldn’t have stopped her even if they were carrying guns. Ben dances with his mum as if no one can take this away from him.

  Borg lose the match 14–1. It makes no difference. They play as if it makes all the difference in the universe.

  It does make a difference.

  31

  At a certain age almost all the questions a person asks him or herself are really just about one thing: how should you live your life?

  If a human being closes her eyes hard enough and for long enough, she can remember pretty well everything that has made her happy. The fragrance of her mother’s skin at the age of five and how they fled giggling into a porch to get out of a sudden downpour. The cold tip of her father’s nose against her cheek. The consolation of the rough paw of a soft toy that she has refused to let them wash. The sound of waves stealing in over rocks during their last seaside holiday. Applause in a theater. Her sister’s hair, afterwards, carelessly waving in the breeze as they’re walking down the street.

  And apart from that? When has she been happy? A few moments. The jangling of keys in the door. The beating of Kent’s heart against the palms of her hands while he lay sleeping. Children’s laughter. The feel of the wind on her balcony. Fragrant tulips. True love.

  The first kiss.

  A few moments. A human being, any human being at all, has so perishingly few chances to stay right there, to let go of time and fall into the m
oment. And to love someone without measure. Explode with passion.

  A few times when we are children, maybe, for those of us who are allowed to be. But after that, how many breaths are we allowed to take beyond the confines of ourselves? How many pure emotions make us cheer out loud, without a sense of shame? How many chances do we get to be blessed by amnesia?

  All passion is childish. It’s banal and naive. It’s nothing we learn; it’s instinctive, and so it overwhelms us. Overturns us. It bears us away in a flood. All other emotions belong to the earth, but passion inhabits the universe.

  That is the reason why passion is worth something, not for what it gives us but for what it demands that we risk. Our dignity. The puzzlement of others and their condescending, shaking heads.

  Britt-Marie yells out loud when Ben scores that goal. The soles of her feet are catapulted off the floor of the sports hall. Most people are not blessed with that sort of thing in the month of January. The universe.

  You have to love soccer for that.

  It’s late at night, the cup was over several hours ago, and Britt-Marie is at the hospital. She’s rinsing the blood out of a white soccer jersey in the sink while Vega sits on the toilet next to her, her voice still euphorically effervescent. As if she can’t sit still. As if she could have run vertically.

  Britt-Marie’s heart is still beating so wildly that she still can’t understand how anyone could have the energy to live like this—that is, if it’s true what the children are saying, that it’s possible to have a soccer team that plays a match every week. Who would be willing to do this to themselves on a weekly basis?

  “I absolutely can’t understand how you could get it into your head to behave in this sort of way,” Britt-Marie manages to whisper, because her voice no longer carries, having been yelled to shreds.

  “They would have scored otherwise!” explains Vega for the thousandth time.

  “You threw yourself right in front of the ball,” hisses Britt-Marie, with a reproachful gesture from the sink and the bloodstains on the jersey.