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

  “Bloody gangsters,” Kent would have said if he’d been sitting with Britt-Marie this evening, in the little waiting room in the prison. “Put the criminals on a deserted island with a pistol each, and they’ll clean up the sorry mess themselves.” Britt-Marie never liked him talking like that, but she never said anything. Now when she thinks about it she has difficulties remembering the last time she said anything at all, until one day she left him without a word. Because of this, it always feels as if the whole thing was her fault.

  She wonders what he’s doing now. If he feels well and wears clean shirts. If he takes his medicine. If he looks for things in kitchen drawers and yells out her name before he remembers that she’s no longer there. She wonders if he is with her, the young and beautiful woman, and if she likes pizza. Britt-Marie wonders what he would say if he knew she was sitting in a waiting room in a prison full of gangsters. If he’d be worried. If he’d tell a joke at her expense. If he’d touch her and whisper that everything would be all right, like he used to do in the days after she had buried her mother.

  They were very different people in those days. Britt-Marie doesn’t know if it was Kent or herself who changed first. Or how much of it was her fault. She was ready to say “everything” if she could only have her life back.

  Pirate sits next to her, holding her hand, and Britt-Marie clutches his very hard in return.

  “You mustn’t tell my mum we were here,” he whispers.

  “Where is she?”

  “At the hospital.”

  “Was she in an accident?”

  “No, no, she works there,” says Pirate, before adding as if explaining a law of nature: “All the mums in Borg work at the hospital.”

  Britt-Marie doesn’t know what to say to that.

  “Why do they call you Pirate?” she asks instead.

  “Because my father hid the treasure.”

  As soon as she hears this, she decides she’ll never call him Pirate again.

  A thick metal door opens and Sven stands in the doorway, sweaty and red-nosed, with his police cap in his hands.

  “Is Mum livid again?” says Ben at once, with a sigh.

  Sven slowly shakes his head. Puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  Meets Britt-Marie’s eyes.

  “Ben’s mother is on the night shift. She called me as soon as they called from here. I came as quick as I could.”

  Britt-Marie would like to hug him, but she’s a sensible person. The guards won’t let Ben see his father because it isn’t visiting hours, but after much persuasion Sven manages to get them to agree to take the paper into the prison. They come back with a signature. Next to the signature his father has written: “LOVE YOU!”

  Ben holds the paper so hard on their way back that it’s illegible by the time they get to Borg. Neither he, Britt-Marie, nor Sven utter a single word. There’s not much you can say to a teenager who has to ask strangers in uniforms for permission to see his father. But when they drop Ben off outside his house and his mother comes out, Britt-Marie feels it’s appropriate to say something encouraging, so she makes an attempt with:

  “It was very clean, Ben, I have to say. I have always imagined prisons to be dirty places, but this one certainly seemed very hygienic. That is something to be pleased about at least.”

  Ben folds the paper with his father’s signature without meeting her eyes, and then hands it to her. Sven quickly says:

  “You should keep that, Ben.”

  Ben nods and smiles and holds the paper even more tightly.

  “Is there training tomorrow?” he murmurs.

  Britt-Marie fumbles for her list in her bag, but Sven calmly assures him:

  “Of course there’s training tomorrow, Ben. Usual time.”

  Ben peers at Britt-Marie. She tries to nod affirmatively. Ben starts up the path, then turns, smiles faintly and waves. They wait until he’s buried his face in his mother’s arms. Sven waves, but she doesn’t see, just presses her face into her boy’s hair and whispers something.

  Sven drives slowly through Borg. Clears his throat uncomfortably as you do when you have a bad conscience.

  “They haven’t had such an easy time, Ben and her. She’s working triple shifts so they can keep the house. He’s a good boy, and his dad wasn’t a bad man. Well, sure, I know what he did was wrong, tax evasion is a crime. But he was desperate. Financial crises can make people desperate, and desperation makes people foolish. . . .”

  He goes silent. Britt-Marie doesn’t say anything about the financial crisis being over. For various reasons it doesn’t strike her as appropriate on this particular occasion.

  Sven has cleaned up the police car. All the pizza boxes have been removed from the floor, she notes. They drive past the patch of asphalt where Sami and Psycho are playing soccer again this evening with their friends.

  “Ben’s father is not like them. I just want you to understand that he isn’t a criminal. Not in the same way as those boys,” explains Sven.

  “Sami is not like those boys either!” protests Britt-Marie, and the words slip out of her quickly: “He’s no gangster, he has a spectacularly well-organized cutlery drawer!”

  Sven’s laughter comes abruptly, deep and rolling, like a lit fire to warm your hands.

  “No, no, there’s nothing wrong with Sami. He just keeps bad company. . . .”

  “Vega seems to be of the opinion that he owes people money.”

  “Not Sami, but Psycho does. Psycho always owes people money,” says Sven, and his laughter fades, spills onto the floor, and disappears.

  The police car slows down. The boys playing soccer see it, but they hardly react. There’s a certain swagger about their disregard for the police. Sven narrows his eyes by half.

  “Sami didn’t have an easy time growing up either. More disasters have hit that family than you’d consider fair by anyone’s reckoning, if you ask me. He’s both mother and father as well as older brother to Vega and Omar, and that’s not a responsibility anyone should put on the shoulders of a kid who hasn’t even turned twenty.”

  Possibly Britt-Marie wants to ask what this means, the bit about “both mother and father,” but she manages not to, so he continues:

  “Psycho is his best friend, and has been since they were big enough to kick that ball around. Sami could have been a really good player; everyone saw his talent, but he was too busy surviving, perhaps.”

  “What does that mean?” asks Britt-Marie, slightly wounded by the way Sven says it, as if she should understand without an explanation.

  Sven holds up his palm apologetically.

  “Sorry, I . . . was thinking out loud. He, they, how should I explain it? Sami, Vega, and Omar’s mother did all she could but their father, he . . . he was not a good man, Britt-Marie. When he came home and had his anger attacks, people heard him all over Borg. And Sami was hardly old enough to go to school back then, but he took his younger siblings’ hands and ran for it. Psycho met them outside their door, every time. Psycho carried Omar on his back and Sami carried Vega, and then they ran into the forest. Until their dad fell into a drunken stupor. Night after night, until their dad just cleared out one day. And then that thing happened with their mother . . . it . . .”

  He falls silent, as you do when you realize once again that you’re thinking out loud. He doesn’t try to hide that he’s hiding something, but Britt-Marie doesn’t stick her nose in. Sven smooths the back of his hand over his eyebrows.

  “Psycho grew into a properly dangerous lunatic, Sami knows that, but Sami’s not the sort of person to turn his back on someone who once carried his younger siblings on his back. Maybe in a place like Borg you don’t have the luxury of being able to choose your best friend.”

  The police car once again starts rolling slowly down the road. The boys’ soccer match continues. Psycho scores, roars something into the night, and runs around the pitch with his arms extended as if he were an aircraft. Sami laughs so much that he keels over, hands on his knees. Th
ey look happy.

  Britt-Marie doesn’t know what to say, or what to believe.

  She has never met a gangster with a correctly organized cutlery drawer.

  Sven’s gaze loses itself in some place where the headlights end and darkness begins.

  “We do what we can in Borg. We always have done. But there’s a fire burning in those boys, and sooner or later it will consume everyone around them, or themselves.”

  “That was nicely put,” says Britt-Marie.

  He smiles bashfully.

  She looks down into her handbag. Then she dismays herself by going further:

  “Do you have any children yourself?”

  He shakes his head. Looks out of the window as you do if you don’t have any children, yet in spite of all have a whole village full of children.

  “I was married, but . . . ah. She never liked Borg. She said it was a place where you came to die, not live.”

  He tries to smile. Britt-Marie wishes she had brought the bamboo screen along.

  He bites his lip. When they should turn off by Bank’s house, he seems to hesitate, then summons his courage and says:

  “If it isn’t, I mean, if it’s not inconvenient to you I’d like to show you something.”

  She doesn’t protest. He smiles in a way you’d hardly notice. She smiles in a way no one could ever notice.

  He drives the police car through Borg and out the other side. Turns off down a gravel track. It apparently goes on forever, but when they finally stop it suddenly seems inconceivable that they were just in a built-up area. The car is surrounded by trees, and the silence is of a sort that only exists where there are no people.

  “It’s . . . well . . . ah. It’s probably ridiculous, of course, but this is my . . . well, my favorite place on earth. . . .” mumbles Sven.

  He blushes. Looks like he wants to turn the car around and drive away fast and never mention it again. But Britt-Marie opens her door and gets out.

  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.

  19

  The 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.