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

  Karl comes in to pick up a parcel. Sits down at a table in the corner and has a cup of coffee beside the men with caps and beards. They continue to intentionally ignore Britt-Marie, as if this might make her disappear. Vega comes in with the soccer ball under her arm, as dirty as only a child can get in the short distance between her older brother’s car and a pizzeria. Omar comes in behind her and, when he sees Britt-Marie’s newly assembled balcony furniture, immediately tries to sell her some furniture polish.

  When Britt-Marie walks out to go to the training session, Sven stands up with his police cap in his hands, but he doesn’t say anything and she speeds up to make sure he doesn’t have the opportunity.

  Ben’s mother is standing outside the door. She is wearing her hospital clothes and holding something in her hands.

  “Hello, Britt-Marie. We haven’t met, but I’m Ben’s mo—”

  “I’m aware of who you are,” says Britt-Marie guardedly, as if preparing to be spattered with mud again by a passing truck.

  “I just wanted to say thank you for, well . . . for seeing Ben. Not many grown-ups do,” says Ben’s mother, and holds out what she has in her hands.

  It’s a bottle of Faxin. Britt-Marie is dumbstruck. Ben’s mother clears her throat awkwardly.

  “I hope it doesn’t seem silly. Ben asked Omar what you liked and Omar said you liked this. He gave us a special deal, so we . . . well, Ben and I, we wanted to say thanks. For everything.”

  Britt-Marie holds the bottle as if she’s afraid of dropping it. Ben’s mother takes a step back, then stops and adds:

  “We want you to know there’s another Borg than the one with a couple of old blokes sitting in a pizzeria boozing all day. There are the rest of us as well. Those of us who haven’t given up.”

  With that she turns around before Britt-Marie has a chance to respond, gets into a little car and drives off. The training begins and Britt-Marie calls the register and makes a note on her list, and the children do the Idiot, because that’s the next item on Britt-Marie’s list after “Take register.”

  The children hardly complain at all, the one exception being when Vega asks if they’ve practiced enough, and Britt-Marie says they have, and Vega immediately gets stirred up and yells something about how this team will never improve if their coach goes easy on them!

  Children are beyond understanding, this much is abundantly clear. So Britt-Marie writes in her list how they have to “do the Idiot” more and that’s precisely what they do. After that they gather in a ring around Britt-Marie and look like they expect her to say something, and Britt-Marie goes to Sami, who’s sitting on the hood of his black car, and asks him what sort of thing this might be.

  “Ah, you know. They’ve been running and now they want to play. Give them a pep talk and just toss the ball to them.”

  “A pep talk?”

  “Something encouraging,” he clarifies.

  Britt-Marie thinks about it for a while, then turns to the children and says with all the encouragement she can muster:

  “Try not to get too dirty.”

  Sami laughs. The children look utterly perplexed, and start a practice match. Toad, who’s the goalkeeper at one end, lets in more goals than anyone else. Seven or eight, one after the other. Every time it happens his face turns completely scarlet and he roars: “Come on now! Let’s turn this thing around!”

  Sami laughs about that every time. This makes Britt-Marie nervous, so she asks:

  “Why is he behaving like that?”

  “He has a dad who supports Liverpool,” Sami answers, without elaboration.

  He grabs two cans from the back of the car, and gives one of them to Britt-Marie. “If you have a dad who supports Liverpool you always fucking think you can turn anything around. You know! Ever since that Champions League final.”

  Britt-Marie sips her soft drink from the can and thinks that, by doing this, she is finally beyond all limits of honor and decency. So she decides she might as well say what she feels:

  “I don’t want to be unpleasant in any way, Sami, because you have a quite impeccable cutlery drawer. But by and large I find everything you say utterly mystifying!”

  Sami guffaws.

  “You too, Britt-Marie. You too.”

  Then he tells her about a soccer game, almost a decade ago, at a time when Vega and Omar were hardly out of their diapers, yet nonetheless sat there with him and Psycho in the pizzeria. Liverpool were up against Milan in the Champions League final. Britt-Marie asks whether this is a competition, and Sami answers that it’s a cup, and Britt-Marie asks what a cup is, and Sami says it’s a sort of competition, whereupon Britt-Marie points out that he could just have said that from the start instead of giving himself airs and graces.

  Sami gives a deep breath, which is not at all a sigh.

  Then he explains that Milan were in the lead by 3–0 at half-time, and no team in any final of any soccer competition for as long as Sami can remember had ever been so exposed and outplayed as Liverpool in this match. But in the changing rooms, one of the players from the Liverpool team stood yelling like a madman at the others, because he would not go along with a world where there were certain things that could not be turned around. In the second half he headed in a goal to make it 3–1, then waved his arms like crazy and ran back down the pitch. When his team scored again to make it 3–2 he was on his way to heaven, because he and all the others saw it now, saw that there was an avalanche in motion and no one could stop them from turning it around. Not with walls, moats, and ten thousand wild horses would it be possible to hold them back.

  They tied to make it 3–3, survived extra time, then won on penalties.

  You can’t tell someone with a father who supports Liverpool that everything can’t be turned around after that.

  He looks at Vega and Omar and smiles.

  “Or an older brother, I suppose. It could be an older brother too.”

  Britt-Marie sips her goalpost. “It sounds almost poetic, the way you describe it.”

  Sami grins.

  “Soccer is poetry for me, you know. I was born in the summer of 1994, right in the middle of the World Cup.”

  Britt-Marie doesn’t have a clue what that’s supposed to mean, but she doesn’t ask because she thinks there has to be some limit to the anecdotes, even if they happen to be poetic.

  “Does Toad’s dad come here to watch him play?” she asks.

  “He’s standing right there,” says Sami, pointing at the pizzeria.

  Karl stands in the doorway drinking coffee. He has a red cap on his head. Looks almost happy. It’s a very remarkable day for Britt-Marie. A remarkable game.

  Sven is waiting for her in the pizzeria at the end of the session. He offers her a lift home, but she insists that there’s no need. Then he asks her if he can drive her balcony furniture back instead, and at long last she agrees to that. He’s carried it out and loaded it and almost got into the driver’s seat when she closes her eyes and summons all the energy she has in order to blurt out:

  “I have dinner at six.”

  “Sorry?” says Sven after his head has popped up on the other side of the police car.

  She digs her heels into the mud.

  “It’s not as if I have to have a white tablecloth on the table. But I want cutlery and I want us to eat at six.”

  “Tomorrow?” he says effervescently.

  She nods grimly and gets her list out.

  When the police car has disappeared down the road, Vega, Omar, and Sami call out to her from the other side of the parking area. Sami is grinning. Vega shoots the ball all the way across the gravel and mud, and it comes to a stop a few feet away from her. Britt-Marie puts her list in her handbag and holds on to the latter so hard that her knuckles turn white, as you do when you have waited a whole life for something to begin.

  Then she takes a few very small steps forward and kicks the soccer ball as hard as she can.

  Because she no longer knows how not to.

&nbs
p; 20

  Today is the day after, and it’s one of the absolute worst days of Britt-Marie’s life. She has a bump on her head and apparently she has broken two fingers. At least that is what Ben’s mother tells her, and Ben’s mother is a nurse, after all, so Britt-Marie has to assume she is qualified to comment on such matters. They are sitting on a little bench behind a curtain at a hospital in town. Britt-Marie has a Band-Aid on her forehead and her hand in a bandage, and she’s doing her absolute utmost not to cry. Ben’s mother keeps her hand on her sore wrist, but she doesn’t ask how all this happened. Britt-Marie is grateful for that, because she’d rather no one ever found out.

  Having said that, this is how it all did happen:

  To begin with, Britt-Marie slept all night through for the first time since she had come to Borg. She slept the unreflective sleep of a child, and she woke up in great spirits. Another day. This alone should immediately have made her suspicious, because little good can come of waking up all enthusiastic like that. She leapt out of bed and immediately started cleaning Bank’s kitchen. Not because she needed to but rather because Bank wasn’t at home and the kitchen was just there when Britt-Marie came down the stairs. Simply put, she had never met a kitchen she did not want to clean. After this was done, she took a walk through Borg to the recreation center. Then cleaned it from top to bottom. Made sure all the pictures were hanging straight, even the ones with soccer balls in them. She stood absolutely still in front of them and looked at her reflection in the glass of the frames.

  Then she rubbed the white mark on her ring finger. People who have not worn a wedding ring for almost their entire lives are unaware of how a mark like that looks. Some people take theirs off from time to time—while doing the washing-up, for instance—but Britt-Marie had never once taken off her ring until the day she took it off once and for all. So the white mark is permanent, as if her skin had another color when she was married. As if this is what is left of her, underneath, if you scrape off everything she turned into.

  With this thought in mind Britt-Marie set off for the pizzeria, to wake up Somebody. They drank coffee and Britt-Marie inquired in a friendly way about postcards and whether Somebody happened to stock them. Somebody did indeed. They were extremely old and had the caption “Welcome to Borg” written across them. That was how you knew they were old, said Somebody; it was a long time since anyone uttered those words.

  Britt-Marie wrote a postcard to Kent. Her message was very short. “Hello. This is from Britt-Marie. Sorry for all the pain I have caused you. I hope you are feeling well. I hope you have clean shirts. Your electric shaver is in the third drawer in the bathroom. If you need to get onto the balcony to polish the windows you have to wiggle the door handle a bit, pull it towards you, and give the door a little shove. There is Faxin in the broom cupboard.” She wanted to describe how much she missed him. But didn’t. Didn’t want to cause any bother.

  “Might I ask for directions to the nearest postbox?” she asked Somebody.

  “Here,” Somebody replied and pointed to the palm of her hand.

  Britt-Marie immediately looked skeptical, but Somebody promised that her postal service was “the fastest in town!”

  Then the two women had a short discussion about the yellow jersey hanging on the wall in the pizzeria, with the word BANK emblazoned on its back, because Britt-Marie couldn’t quite manage to stop looking at it.

  As if it was a clue to some mystery. Somebody explained helpfully that Bank did not know it had been hung up there, and if she found out she would probably be so angry that Somebody thought she might behave like a person “with something shoved up her arse, like a whole bloody what’s-it-called? Lemon tree orchard!”

  “Why?”

  “You know, Bank hate soccer, huh! What’s-it-called? No one like memories of good time when times are bad, huh?”

  “I was under the impression that you and Bank were good friends.”

  “We are! We were! Best mates before, you know. The whole thing with eyes. Before Bank moved, huh.”

  “But you never talk about soccer?”

  Somebody laughed drily.

  “In the old days—Bank loved soccer, huh. Loved more than life. Then this thing with eyes, huh. Eyes took soccer from her, so now she hates soccer. You understand? That’s how life is, huh? Love, hate, one or the other. So she went away. Long, long time, huh. Bank’s old man not like Bank at all, huh, without soccer they had nothing to, what’s-it-called? Converse about! Then the old man died. Bank came here to bury and sell the house, huh. She and me now, we are more like, what’s-it-called? Drinking buddies! You could say, we talk less now. Drink more.”

  “Ha. Might one ask where she went when she left Borg?”

  “You know, here and there, when you have lemon in your arse you don’t want to sit still, do you?” laughed Somebody.

  Britt-Marie didn’t laugh. Somebody cleared her throat.

  “She was in London, Lisbon, Paris, I got one of them postcards! Have it somewhere, huh. Bank and dog, around the world. You know, sometimes I think she left because she was angry. But sometimes I think she went because this thing with eyes gets worse and worse, you know? Maybe Bank want to see the world before completely blind, you see?”

  She found the postcard from Paris. Britt-Marie wanted so badly to hold it in her hand, but she stopped herself. Instead, she tried to distract both Somebody and herself by pointing at the wall and asking:

  “Why is the jersey yellow? I was under the impression that soccer jerseys in Borg are white.”

  “National team.”

  “Ha. Is that something special?”

  “It’s . . . national team,” said Somebody, as if she found the question odd.

  “Is it hard to get into that?”

  “It’s . . . national team,” answered Somebody, looking bemused.

  Britt-Marie was annoyed by this, so she didn’t ask anything else. Instead she suddenly blurted out, to her own consternation:

  “How did it happen? How did Bank lose her sight?”

  Not that Britt-Marie is the sort who sticks her nose into other people’s business, obviously, but still. She did wake up feeling enthusiastic today, and obviously anything can happen when you do. Her common sense was yelling at her inside, but by then it was already too late.

  “Disease. Bloody crap. Came, what’s-it-called? Sneaking along! Many years. Like financial crisis . . .”

  Somebody’s eyebrows sank towards her sweater. “You know, Britt-Marie, people say Bank good in spite this thing with the eyes, huh. I say Bank good because this thing with her eyes. You understand? Had to fight harder than everyone else. Therefore—she became the best. What’s-it-called? Incentive! You understand?”

  Britt-Marie wasn’t entirely sure that she did. She wanted to take the chance of asking Somebody how it had come to pass that she was in a wheelchair, but at this point the sensible part of Britt-Marie put a stop to things, and in this she was backed up by common practice, because it certainly wasn’t seemly to ask questions of this nature. So the conversation tailed off. Whereupon Somebody rolled back one full turn of the wheels, and then forward one turn.

  “I fell off one of them boats. When I was small, huh. If you wondering.”

  “I certainly wasn’t wondering!” insisted Britt-Marie.

  “I know, Britt, I know,” said Somebody, grinning. “You don’t have prejudice. You get that I am human, huh. Happen to have the wheelchair. I not wheelchair that happens to have human in it, huh.” She patted Britt-Marie on the arm and added: “That is why I like you, Britt. You are also human.”

  Britt-Marie wanted to say she also liked Somebody, but she was sensible about it.

  So they didn’t say anything else. Britt-Marie bought a Snickers for the rat and asked if Somebody happened to know of anywhere that sold flowers.

  “Flower? For who?”

  “For Bank. It strikes me as impolite when I am renting a room from her for all this time that I have never offered her so muc
h as a flower, it’s common practice to give flowers.”

  “But Bank likes beer! Take her beer instead, huh?”

  Britt-Marie didn’t find this very civilized, but she accepted that beer might be a little like flowers to someone who liked beer. She insisted on Somebody finding a bit of cellophane, which Somebody failed to do, but after a few minutes Omar showed up in the doorway and cried: “You need cellophane? I have some! Special price for a friend!”

  Because that is clearly how things happen in Borg.

  With this cellophane, which came at a price that Britt-Marie was certainly not prepared to categorize as very friendly at all, Britt-Marie wrapped up a can of beer to make it look decorative, with a little bow at the top and everything. Then she went to the recreation center, left the front door ajar, and put a plate with the Snickers on the threshold. Next to the plate she put a note, written neatly in ink: “Out on a date. Or a meeting. Or whatever it’s called nowadays. No need to put away your plate when you have finished, it’s no trouble at all for me.” She wanted to write something about how she hoped the rat would find someone else to share its dinner with, because she did not feel the rat deserved to eat alone. Loneliness is a waste of both rats and people. But her common sense ordered her not to get involved in the rat’s personal choices about social relationships, so she left it at that.

  She turned off the lights and waited for dusk, because, conveniently enough, at this time of year the sun set well in advance of dinnertime. Once she had made sure that no one could see her, she briskly set off for the bus stop on the road leading out of Borg in two directions and left in one of those two available directions on a bus. It felt like an adventure. Like freedom. Not to the extent that she was unconcerned about the state of the seat, obviously, so she tidily spread four white napkins over it before sitting down. You had to have some limits, after all, even when you were out adventuring.