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

  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.

  Bank stops abruptly with her foot on the ball. Points with her stick at Omar and mutters:

  “At least I know what a dummy shot is. And even if I’m almost blind I’d bet quite a lot of money you’re standing in dog pee right now. So maybe we could agree that at least I know more about soccer than you do?”

  Vega stands at the edge of the wee pool, fascinated by all this.

  “How did you teach the dog to do that?”

  Bank whistles for the dog. Scratches its nose. Opens her jacket pocket and lets it have what’s inside.

  “The dog knows lots of tricks. I had it before I went blind. I know how to train things.”

  Britt-Marie is already on her way to the recreation center to fetch baking soda.

  When she comes back to the parking area, the children are playing soccer so you can hear it. It has to be experienced before you can understand it, the difference between silent and nonsilent soccer. Britt-Marie stops in the darkness and listens. Every time one of the children gets the ball, their teammates are shouting: “Here! I’m here!”

  “If you can be heard then you exist,” mutters hungover Bank, massaging her temples.

  The children play. Call out. Explain where they are. Britt-Marie squeezes her container of baking soda until it has dents in it.

  “I’m here,” she whispers, wishing that Sven was here so she could tell him.

  It’s a remarkable club. A remarkable game.

  They part ways at the end of the training session. Toad goes back with his dad in the truck, Sami picks up Vega, Omar, and Dino. Max wanders home on his own, along the road. Ben is met by his mother. She waves at Britt-Marie and Britt-Marie waves back. Bank doesn’t say a word on the way home and Britt-Marie feels it’s inappropriate to challenge destiny. Above all she does not believe it is appropriate to challenge a stick that has been both in the mud and inside at least one person’s mouth this evening. So she makes do with silence.

  Back at the house, Bank opens the cellophane around the beer and drinks it straight from the bottle. Britt-Marie goes and fetches a glass and a coaster.

  “Enough’s enough, actually,” she says firmly to Bank.

  “You’re a bloody nag-bag, did anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Many times,” says Britt-Marie and, depending on what sort of system you are using, you cou
ld say that Britt-Marie finds her second real girlfriend tonight.

  On her way to the stairs, she changes her mind, turns around, and asks:

  “You said your father supports Tottenham. If it’s not too much trouble, what does that mean?”

  Bank drinks her beer from the glass. Slumps in her chair. The dog lays its head in her lap.

  “If you support Tottenham you always give more love than you get back,” she says.

  Britt-Marie cups her uninjured hand over the bandage on the other. There’s certainly an awful lot of unnecessary complication about liking soccer.

  “I assume what you mean by that is that it’s a bad team.”

  The corners of Bank’s mouth bounce up.

  “Tottenham is the worst kind of bad team, because they’re almost good. They always promise that they’re going to be fantastic. They make you hope. So you go on loving them and they carry on finding more and more innovative ways of disappointing you.”

  Britt-Marie nods as if this sounded reasonable. Bank stands up and states:

  “In that sense his daughter was always like his favorite team.”

  She puts the empty bottle on the kitchen counter and, without relying on the stick, walks past Britt-Marie into the living room.

  “The beer was nice. Thanks.”

  Britt-Marie sits on the edge of her bed for hours that evening. She stands on the balcony, waiting for a police car. Then back to the bed. She doesn’t cry, isn’t despondent; in fact it’s almost the other way around. She’s almost eager. Just doesn’t know what to do with herself. Like a sort of restlessness. The windows are polished, the floors have been scoured, and the balcony furniture wiped down. She’s poured baking soda into the flowerpots and onto the mattress. She rubs the fingers of her uninjured hand across the bandages that cover the white mark that used to be covered by the wedding ring. So in a way she did achieve the desired result of her visit to the tanning salon, even if not in the exact way she had thought. Nothing has gone as she thought it would since she came to Borg.

  For the first time since she got here, she accepts it may not be something altogether bad.

  When she hears the knock at the front door she has been hoping for it for so long that at first she thinks it must be a figment of her imagination. But then there’s another knock, and Britt-Marie jumps out of bed and stumbles down the stairs like a complete lunatic. It’s obviously not at all like her, highly uncivilized in every possible way. She has not run down the stairs like this since she was a teenager, when your heart reaches the front door before your feet. For a moment she stops and summons all the common sense at her disposal, in order to fix her hair and adjust all the invisible creases in her skirt.

  “Sven! I . . .” she has time to say, holding on to the door handle.

  Then she just stands there. Trying, but failing, to breathe. She feels her legs giving way beneath her.

  “Hello, my darling,” says Kent.

  23

  Sweet boys don’t get to kiss pretty girls,” Britt-Marie’s mother sometimes used to say. Even though what she really meant was that pretty girls should not kiss sweet boys, because when dealing with sweet boys there’s absolutely no certainty of being able to look forward to a reliable income.

  “We have to pray that Britt-Marie finds a man who can support her, otherwise she’ll have to live in the gutter, because she has absolutely no talents of her own,” Britt-Marie used to hear her mother say into the telephone. “I got her for my sins,” she also used to say, into the telephone if she was drunk, or pointedly at Britt-Marie after tippling sherry.

  It’s impossible to be good enough for a parent after losing a sister who, in all important respects, was a better version of yourself. Britt-Marie did try, nonetheless. But with a father who came home later and later and, in the end, not at all, she did not have very many options. Instead, Britt-Marie learned not to have any expectations of her own, and to put up with her mother’s skepticism about her prospects.

  Alf and Kent lived on the same floor, and they fought, as brothers tend to do. Sooner or later they both wanted the same girl. Whether they wanted Britt-Marie because they really did want her, or because brothers always want what their brother wants, she was never quite sure. If Ingrid had been there they would have courted her instead, Britt-Marie had no illusions about that. You tend not to if you’re used to living in someone’s shadow. But the boys were persistent, competed, fought for her attention in very different ways.

  One of the brothers was too insensitive to her, always going on about how much money he was going to make; the other was too kind. Britt-Marie didn’t want to disappoint her mother, so she chose Alf and ruled out Kent.

  Kent stood in the stairwell with flowers in his hands and his eyes closed when she walked off with his brother. By the time she came back, he had gone.

  She was only with Alf for a short length of time. He was weary, she remembers. Already bored. Like a victor after the adrenaline has worn off. One morning he left her to go and do his military service and was gone for months.

  The morning that he was due back, Britt-Marie spent hours in front of the mirror for the first time in her life and tried on a new dress. Her mother gave her a look, and said:

  “I see you’re trying to make yourself look cheap. Well, mission accomplished.” Britt-Marie tried to explain that this was modern. Her mother told her not to raise her voice, it made her sound very ordinary. Britt-Marie tried to gently explain that she wanted to surprise Alf at the train station, and her mother snorted: “Oh, he’ll be surprised all right.” She was right.

  Britt-Marie turned up in an old dress and with sweaty hands and her heart clattering like horse’s hooves on cobblestones. Obviously she had heard the stories of how soldiers have a girl in every town, she had just never thought this would be true of Alf. At least she’d never thought he’d have two girls in the same town.

  She’d been sitting all night in the kitchen weeping into a towel when her mother finally got out of bed and scolded her for making too much noise. Britt-Marie told her about the other girl she’d seen Alf with. “Ha, what did you expect when you picked a man like that?” hissed her mother before going back to bed. She got up later than usual the following day. In the end she didn’t get up at all. Britt-Marie found a job as a waitress instead of getting herself an education, so she could take care of things at home. Brought dinner into the bedroom for her mother, who had stopped talking, yet was capable now and then of sitting up in the bed and saying, “Ha, working as a waitress—it must be nice for you not to feel you owe more to your parents after all the advantages we’ve given you. I don’t suppose any education was good enough for you, you obviously prefer to stay here at home and live off my savings instead.”

  The flat grew increasingly quiet. And finally absolutely silent. Britt-Marie polished the windows and waited for something new to begin.

  One day, Kent was just standing there on the landing. The day after her mother’s funeral. He spoke of his divorce and his children.

  Britt-Marie had been hoping for so long that she thought this must be a figment of her imagination, and when he smiled at her it felt like sunlight on her skin. She made his dreams her own. His life became her life. She was good at this, and people want to do the things they’re good at. People want someone to know they are there.

  Now Kent stands in her doorway in Borg, holding flowers. He smiles. Sunlight on her skin. It’s hard not to want to go back to your normal life once you know how difficult it is to start again.

  “Were you waiting for someone?” asks Kent insecurely, and once again he is like that boy on the landing.

  Britt-Marie shakes her head in shock. He smiles.

  “I got your postcard. And I . . . well . . . the accountant checked your cash withdrawals,” he says almost with embarrassment and gestures at the road towards town.

  When Britt-Marie doesn’t know what to say he goes on:

  “I asked for you in the pizzeria. That woman in th
e wheelchair didn’t want to say where you were, but a couple of old blokes drinking coffee there were pretty keen to tell me. Do you know them?”

  “No,” whispers Britt-Marie, unsure whether he’s making that up.

  Kent holds out the flowers.

  “Darling . . . I . . . damn it, I’m sorry! Me, her, that woman, it never meant a thing. It’s over. You’re the one I love. Damn it. Darling!”

  Britt-Marie looks with concern at the stick he’s using to prop himself up.

  “What on earth’s happened to you?”

  He waves dismissively at her.

  “Ah, don’t make a fuss about that, the doctors just wanted me to have it for a while after the heart attack, that’s all. The chassis has rusted up a bit, after it’s been parked up in the garage for half the winter!” He grins, with a nod at his legs.

  She wants to hold his hand.

  It doesn’t feel natural to have to invite him in. It never did, not even when they were teenagers. At her mother’s she wasn’t allowed to bring boys into the bedroom, so the first time Britt-Marie brought a boy in there, it was Kent. After her mother’s death. That boy stayed. Made her home his own and his life hers. So now it seems very natural to them both to be driving around Borg in their BMW, because in many ways they were always at their best when they were in the car. He in the driver’s seat, she the passenger. At this moment they can pretend they have only been passing through, and leave Borg, as you do with places you send postcards from.

  They drive into town and back. Kent keeps his hand on the gearstick, so that Britt-Marie can carefully reach out with the tips of her fingers of the hand that is not injured, and put them on top of his. Just to feel that they are both heading in the same direction. His shirt is creased and has coffee stains over his stomach. Britt-Marie remembers Sami talking about how some children look as if they live in the trees, and Kent does look as if he fell out of a tree in his sleep, hitting every branch on his way down. He smiles apologetically.