Sami is standing on the balcony, smoking, when she comes out.
“Very nice dinner, Sami. Thanks for that,” she says, one hand firmly clasped in the other.
He nods.
“Sometimes it’s nice if someone says it tastes good without your having to ask every time, you get what I mean?”
“Yes,” she says. Because she does get it.
Then she feels that it would be in order to say something polite, so she says:
“You have a very nice cutlery drawer.”
He looks at her for a long time, and then grins.
“You’re okay, Coach.”
“Ha. Ha. You’re also . . . okay. Sami.”
He drives them all to their practice session in his black car. Vega argues loudly with him all the way—which, in Borg, is not very far. Britt-Marie doesn’t understand what the argument is about, but it seems to have something to do with that Psycho fellow. Something about money. When they stop, Britt-Marie has a sense that something ought to be done to change the subject, because this Psycho makes her nervous in much the same way as too much talk about poisonous spiders. So she says:
“Do you also have a team, Sami? You and those boys you were playing with the other night?”
“No, we don’t have a . . . team,” says Sami, and looks as if it was a bit of a strange question.
“So why do you play soccer, then?” asks Britt-Marie, puzzled.
“What do you mean, ‘why’?” asks Sami, just as puzzled.
Neither of them are able to come up with a good answer.
The car stops. Vega, Omar, and Dino jump out. Britt-Marie checks the contents of her bag to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anything.
“Are you ready, Britt-Marie?” asks Vega, as if she’s already bored.
Britt-Marie nods with a good deal of concentration and points at her bag.
“Yes, yes, obviously I’m ready. I should like to tell you that I have made a list!”
Sami parks the car with the engine running, so that the headlights illuminate the parking area. The children put out four fizzy-drink cans as goalposts. Fizzy-drink cans are magical in this way—they can transform parking areas into soccer pitches by their mere existence.
Britt-Marie holds up her list.
“Vega?” she asks, loud and clear, while the children run about kicking the ball with varying degrees of success.
“What?” says Vega, who’s standing right in front of her.
“Is that a ‘yes’?”
“What are you talking about?”
Britt-Marie taps her pen against the list with extreme patience.
“My dear, I am reading the register. What one does is, one reads out the names and then each respective person says ‘yes.’ It’s common practice.”
Vega squints disapprovingly.
“You can see I’m standing here!”
Britt-Marie nods considerately.
“My dear, if we could just tick people off in any old way there wouldn’t be any point doing the register, you have to understand.”
“Never mind about your bloody register! Let’s just play!” Vega says and kicks the ball.
“Vega?”
“Yes?! Jesus . . .”
Britt-Marie nods intently and ticks Vega’s name off on the list. Once she’s done the same with the other children, she distributes handwritten notes to them with a short, very formal message followed by two neat lines at the bottom, where it is written “Parental signature.” Britt-Marie is very proud of the notes. She has written them in ink. Anyone who knows Britt-Marie understands what an outstanding achievement it is for Britt-Marie to control her compulsion never to write anything in ink. People really do change when they travel.
“Do both parents have to sign?” asks Pirate, who has arranged his hair so neatly that it really pains Britt-Marie when, in the next second, a ball strikes his head.
“Sorry! I was aiming at Vega!” yells Omar.
Vega and Omar end up having a fight. The other children fling themselves into the chaos. Britt-Marie walks around in circles, trying to figure out how to give Vega and Omar their notes among all the flying fists, but in the end she gives up and walks determinedly across the parking area and hands their slips to Sami instead. He’s sitting on the hood of the black car, drinking one of the goalposts.
Britt-Marie brushes dust off every part of herself. Soccer is certainly not very hygienic.
“You need help?” asks Sami.
“I’m not familiar with what a soccer coach is supposed to do when the players fight like wild dogs,” Britt-Marie admits.
“You let them run—you know, idiot!” Sami grins.
“I’m certainly not an idiot!” protests Britt-Marie.
“No, it’s an exercise. It’s called ‘Idiot.’ I’ll show you.”
He slides off the hood and walks around the car. Britt-Marie follows him. Clasps one hand in the other and asks, not at all accusingly:
“Might I trouble you for an answer as to why you don’t train these children yourself, if you know so much about this soccer thing?”
Sami gets half a dozen soft-drink cans out of the trunk. Hands one of them to Britt-Marie.
“I don’t have time,” he says.
“Maybe you would if you didn’t spend such an inordinate amount of time buying soft drinks,” Britt-Marie notes.
Sami laughs again.
“Come on, Coach, you do get that the council wouldn’t let someone with my criminal record coach a youth team,” he says. As if it’s hardly worth mentioning. Britt-Marie keeps an extra-firm grip on her handbag after that. Not because she judges people, obviously, but because there’s a pretty strong wind in Borg tonight. No other reason.
Idiot, the way it’s done in Borg, is an exercise based on half a dozen soft-drink cans being positioned at intervals of a couple of yards. The children stand by the fence between the recreation center and the pizzeria, then they run as fast as they can to the first soft-drink can, and as fast as they can back to the fence, then as fast as they can to the second soft-drink can a little farther away, and then back as fast as they can. And then to the third soft-drink can, and so on.
“For how long are they supposed to do that?” asks Britt-Marie.
“As long as you like,” says Sami.
“For goodness’ sake, I can’t make them do that!” Britt-Marie objects.
“You’re the coach now. If they don’t do what you tell them, they can’t play in the competition.”
It sounds quite deranged, in Britt-Marie’s opinion, but Sami doesn’t go into more detailed explanations because his telephone starts ringing.
“What did you say the exercise was called?” asks Britt-Marie.
“Idiot!” says Sami and then answers “Yeah” into his telephone, as people do who have no use for either exclamation marks or question marks.
Britt-Marie mulls this over at length until at long last she manages to say:
“That’s a good name for both the exercise and the person who came up with it.”
By now, Sami has started walking back to his car with the telephone pressed to his ear, so he can’t hear her. No one can. But this doesn’t actually concern Britt-Marie so much. The children run between the soft-drink cans and Britt-Marie stands there beside them with a sort of happy fizziness in her whole body, repeating, “A good name for the exercise and the person who came up with it,” very, very quietly to herself. Over and over again.
It’s the first time for as long as she can remember that she has intentionally made a joke.
17
In the children’s defense, they didn’t do it on purpose. Or rather, it was obviously done on purpose but none of them believed Toad would actually hit the mark, so to speak. They never hit anything they aim at. Especially not Toad, who’s the youngest and worst player in an already dismal team.
It so happens that Bank, in an even blacker mood than usual, comes walking across the parking area with her white dog in the middle
of a training session.
Omar sees her go into the pizzeria or the corner shop or car workshop or whatever it is, and after a while come out again with one bag that seems to contain chocolate and another that seems to contain beer. Omar elbows Toad in the side and says:
“You think she has superpowers?”
Toad answers with a sound made by children whose mouths are full of goalpost. Omar gestures in an explanatory way to Britt-Marie, as if Britt-Marie might be more receptive to his line of reasoning, which must be reckoned as fairly exaggerated optimism.
“You know, what the hell, in films blind types get superpowers! Like Daredevil!”
“I’m not familiar with Daredevil,” explains Britt-Marie with as much amicability as she can drum up, considering how enormously stupid this conversation is.
Bank moves across the parking area with her stick in her hand, next to and slightly behind the white dog. Omar points at her exultantly:
“Daredevil! Is a superhero! Except blind! So he has super-senses instead. You think she does? Could she sort of sense it if you shot a soccer ball at her head even though she couldn’t see it?”
“She is not blind. She merely has impaired vision,” says Britt-Marie. Omar, who has long since stopped listening to Britt-Marie, turns around and says:
“Do it, Toad!”
Toad, who happens to have the ball at that moment, doesn’t seem to think it’s a very good idea. But then Omar utters those golden words that have the magical power to obliterate every child’s self-restraint anywhere in the world:
“You don’t have the guts to do it!”
In fairness to Toad, he obviously never thought he’d hit her. They’re all quite surprised that he does.
Most surprised of all, obviously, is Bank.
“Whatthebloody . . . !” she roars.
The children stand still at first, their mouths agape. Like you do. Then Omar starts tittering. Then Vega follows suit. Bank storms towards them, incandescent, her stick cleaving the air.
“Was that funny? Brats!”
Britt-Marie clears her throat and almost holds out her arms.
“Please . . . Bank, he didn’t mean to, he obviously wasn’t aiming at you, he obviously wasn’t. It was obviously an accident.”
“Accident! Accident, yeah!” howls Bank, and it’s a little unclear what she means by this.
“What do you mean not on purpose? He was aiming, wasn’t he?” yells Omar confidently, while at the same time moving out of cleaving range behind Britt-Marie.
“Did you really?” Britt-Marie asks Toad in astonishment.
“Who did this?!” yells Bank, her entire face throbbing like a single thick vein emerging from her throat.
Toad, paralyzed, nods and backs away. Britt-Marie enthusiastically clasps one hand in the other, and doesn’t quite know what to do with herself.
“But . . . it’s absolutely marvelous!” she manages to blurt out.
“What are you saying, you old bat?” howls Bank.
At this stage, everything that’s reasonable inside Britt-Marie insistently tries to curb her enthusiasm, but clearly it doesn’t have much success, because Britt-Marie leans in and whispers chirpily:
“They never hit anything they aim at, you see. This is really an excellent sign of progress!”
Bank stares at Britt-Marie. At least she seems to be staring. It’s difficult to know for sure, with those sunglasses. Britt-Marie gulps hesitantly.
“It’s obviously not marvelous that he hit . . . you. That is obviously not what I mean. But it is excellent that he hit . . . anything at all.”
Bank leaves the parking area in a hailstorm of the ugliest and most colorful words Britt-Marie has ever heard. Britt-Marie actually didn’t even know it was possible to combine words for genitalia with words describing other parts of the body in that way. You don’t even come across that level of verbal innovation in crosswords.
A thoughtful silence envelops the parking area. Obviously, it’s the voice of Somebody that breaks it.
“Like I said about that one. Lemon. Up the. Arse.”
She’s sitting in the pizzeria doorway, grinning in the direction of Bank.
Britt-Marie brushes her skirt down.
“I wouldn’t want to suggest that you’re wrong, I certainly wouldn’t. But I do really think that on this occasion Bank’s problem was not a lemon in the arse, but a soccer ball in the head.”
They all laugh. Britt-Marie doesn’t get angry about it. It’s a new feeling for her.
The boy with the tracksuit jacket with HOCKEY written on it walks out of the pizzeria with a pizza box in his hands. He fails to hide his interest in the soccer training, realizes his mistake, and tries to quickly get moving, but Vega has already seen him.
“What are you doing here?” she calls out.
“Buying pizza,” says the boy in the tracksuit repentantly.
“Don’t you have pizza in town, or what?”
The boy looks down at his pizza box.
“I like the pizza here.”
Vega clenches her fists but doesn’t say anything else. The boy squeezes past Somebody in the doorway and runs out towards the road. The BMW is parked three hundred feet down the road, with its engine running.
Somebody turns to Vega with a grimace.
“He’s not his dad. Dad can be pig, kid could be good. You should know if anyone.”
Vega looks as if the words have wounded her. She turns around and kicks the ball so hard that it flies over the fence into the darkness.
Somebody rolls a few feet towards Britt-Marie, nods at the pizzeria.
“Come! Have something for you!”
By this stage, Toad has drunk all the goalposts and Vega kicks off a noisy dispute with Sami, of which Britt-Marie can only distinguish something about “Psycho” and “owes money,” by which she comes to the conclusion that the training session is over. She’s unsure whether she should be doing anything in particular, such as blowing a whistle or something similar, but she chooses not to. Mainly because she doesn’t have a whistle.
Inside the pizzeria, Somebody slides a fistful of money and a piece of paper across the counter.
“Here. This change, and this receipt, huh.”
She gestures towards the bottom of the door, where Britt-Marie pushed the money through last night.
“Next time, you can, what’s-it-called? Come in!” She grins.
When Britt-Marie doesn’t seem to know what to say, she adds:
“You left too much money for cigarettes, Britt-Marie. You are, what’s-it-called? Either your maths is crap or you’re very generous, huh? I think: Britt-Marie is generous, huh? Not like that Fredrik, for example, he’s so mean he yells every time he takes a shit!”
She nods cheerfully. Britt-Marie mumbles “Ha” repeatedly. Neatly folds the receipt and puts it in her handbag. Takes the change and puts it in the vase for tips. Somebody rolls half a turn forward, then half a turn back.
“It looked nice, you know. Looked nice when you . . . cleaned, huh. Thanks!” she says.
“It was not my intention to hide your belongings so you could not find them,” says Britt-Marie, directing her voice into her handbag.
Somebody scratches her chin.
“The cutlery, huh. Fork, knife, spoon. That order. I can, what’s-it-called? Get used to it!”
Britt-Marie sucks in her cheeks. Goes to the door. She has reached the threshold when she stops and summons her strength and says:
“I should just like to inform you that there’s no urgency, at the moment, to have my car repaired.”
Somebody looks out of the door at the children and their soccer pitch. She nods. Britt-Marie also nods. It’s the first time for as long as Britt-Marie can remember that she has had a friend. The children take off their dirty jerseys and drop them off in the recreation center, without Britt-Marie even having offered to wash them. There’s no one left in the parking area by the time she’s washed and tumble-dried the jerseys and put th
em in a neat pile, ready for tomorrow’s training. Borg is empty except for a lone silhouette by the bus stop on the road. Britt-Marie didn’t even know there was a bus stop there until she saw someone waiting by the streetlight.
She doesn’t recognize Pirate until she’s just a few feet away. His red hair is tangled and muddy and he stands motionless as if trying to ignore that she’s there. Her common sense tries to make her walk away. But instead she says:
“I was under the impression that you lived in Borg.”
He keeps a firm grip on the note that Britt-Marie handed out at the start of the training session.
“It says here you have to have both your parents’ signatures. So I have to go and ask my father to sign it.”
Britt-Marie nods.
“Ha. Have a good evening, then,” she says and starts walking towards the darkness.
“You want to come with me?” he calls out after her.
She turns around as if he’s out of his mind. The paper in his hands is stained with sweat.
“I . . . it . . . I think it would feel better for me if you were there,” he manages to say.
It’s obviously wholly ludicrous. Britt-Marie is scrupulous about telling him that throughout the whole bus journey.
Which takes almost an hour. And ends abruptly in front of an enormous white building. Britt-Marie is holding on to her handbag so tightly that she gets a cramp in her fingers. She is, in spite of everything, a civilized person with a normal life to get on with.
Civilized people with normal lives are actually not in the habit of visiting prisons.
18
Bloody gangsters,” Kent always used to call them, the people who were responsible for things such as street violence, extortionate taxes, pickpocketing, graffiti in public toilets, and hotels where all the deck chairs were occupied when Kent came down to the pool. All things of this kind were caused by “gangsters.” It was an effective system, always having people there to blame for everything without ever having to define who they really were.
Britt-Marie never found out what he really wanted. What would have satisfied him? Would a lot of money have been enough, or was every last penny required? One time when David and Pernilla were teenagers, they gave him a coffee mug with a message on it: “He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins.” They said it was “ironic” but Kent seemed to take it as a challenge. He always had a plan, there was always a “bloody big deal” just round the corner. His company was just about to strike bigger and bigger deals in Germany; the flat they inherited from Britt-Marie’s parents could finally be converted to a freehold so they could sell it for more money. Just a few more months. Just a few years. They got married because Kent’s accountant said it made sense from a “tax-planning perspective.” Britt-Marie never had a plan, she hoped it would be enough if you were faithful and in love. Until the day came when it wasn’t enough.
The Fredrik Backman Collection: A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here Page 74