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

This is the moment when the police decide to go back into town.

  Britt-Marie mops the floor again. So hard that in the end Somebody has to stop her.

  “Careful with mop, Britt-Marie, expensive mop for God’s sake!” She grins.

  Britt-Marie does not think this is the best of days to roll about in your wheelchair, grinning at people, she certainly doesn’t. But Somebody makes sure she drinks her beer and eats a bit of pizza, and then she hands over her car keys.

  “I was under the distinct impression that the car had not been repaired yet!” Britt-Marie bursts out.

  Somebody shrugs, ashamed of herself.

  “Ah, you know. Been ready many days, huh, but . . . you know.”

  “No. I absolutely don’t know at all.”

  Somebody guiltily rubs her hands in her lap.

  “The car is ready many days. But if Britt has no car: can’t drive off and leave Borg, huh?”

  “So you pulled the wool over my eyes? You lied to my face?” Britt-Marie says in an injured tone of voice.

  “Yes,” Somebody admits.

  “Might I ask why you did that?”

  Somebody shrugs. “I like you. You’re, what’s-it-called? A breath of fresh air! Borg is boring without Britt, huh?”

  Britt-Marie doesn’t have a particularly good answer on hand for this, it has to be said. So Somebody fetches another beer and calls out, as if in passing:

  “But Britt, you know, let me put question to you: how do you feel about blue car?”

  “What do you mean by that?” pants Britt-Marie.

  Then they spend a fairly lengthy amount of time on the soccer pitch, arguing about this, because Somebody is quite persistent about explaining that she could without any trouble respray Britt-Marie’s car the same color as the new blue door. It wouldn’t be any trouble at all. In fact, Somebody is almost a hundred percent sure that at some point she registered a paint-shop business with the local authority.

  In the end Britt-Marie gets so worked up about this that she takes her notebook and tears out her list for the whole day, and starts one completely fresh. She has never done this in her whole life, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

  She walks back through Borg with Vega and Omar, because Britt-Marie has by this point consumed half a can of beer, meaning it’s quite out of the question for her to get behind the wheel. Especially not in a car with a blue door. What would people think? Omar stays absolutely silent until they get home, which is more minutes of silence than Britt-Marie has ever heard from him since they first got to know each other.

  Vega keeps calling Sami without getting an answer. Britt-Marie tries to convince her that Sami may not have heard news of the robbery, but Vega tells her that this is Borg. Everyone knows everything about everyone in Borg. So Sami knows and Sami isn’t answering because he’s busy tracking Psycho down and killing him.

  Under these circumstances, Britt-Marie can’t bring herself to leave the children on their own, so she goes up to the flat with them and starts making dinner. They have it at exactly six o’clock. The children eat staring down at their plates, as children do who have learned to expect the worst. When Britt-Marie’s telephone rings the first time they bounce up, but it’s only Kent so Britt-Marie doesn’t answer. When Sven calls a minute later she doesn’t answer either, and when the girl from the unemployment office calls three times in a row she switches off the telephone.

  Vega calls Sami again. Gets no answer. That’s when she starts washing up, without anyone having asked her, and then Britt-Marie realizes the situation is really serious.

  “I’m sure nothing serious has happened,” says Britt-Marie.

  “The hell you know about it?” Vega says.

  Omar mumbles from the table:

  “Sami is never late for dinner. He’s a dinner-Nazi.”

  Then he puts his plate in the dishwasher. Voluntarily. Which is the point at which Britt-Marie understands something extremely drastic has to be done, so she concentrates on breathing in and out half a dozen times, and then she hugs the children hard. When they burst into tears she does the same.

  When the doorbell finally rings they’re stumbling over one another to get there. None of them gives a second thought to the fact that if this was Sami coming back he would just have opened the door with his key, so when they tug at the door handle only to find the white dog sitting outside, Omar feels disappointed, Vega is angry, and Britt-Marie anxious. Because these seem to be their most basic emotions in life.

  “You can’t come in with dirty paws,” Britt-Marie informs the dog.

  The dog glances at its paws, and seems overwhelmed by a lack of self-confidence.

  Next to it stands Bank, and next to her stand Max, Ben, Dino, and Toad.

  Bank points her stick, gently poking Britt-Marie in the stomach.

  “Hi there, Rambo!”

  “How dare you!” protests Britt-Marie instinctively.

  “You scared off the robber,” explains Toad. “Like Rambo. That means you’re an ice-cool motherfucker!”

  Britt-Marie patiently puts her bandaged hand in the other and turns her eyes to Ben. He smiles and nods encouragingly.

  “And that’s, like, good.”

  Britt-Marie absorbs this information and then her eyes wander all the way back to Bank.

  “Ha. Very nice of you to say so.”

  “Don’t mention it,” mutters Bank impatiently and makes a gesture at her wrist, as if she was wearing a watch: “What about training?”

  “What training?” asks Britt-Marie.

  “The training!” answers Max, who’s wearing his national hockey team jersey and dancing up and down as if he needs the bathroom.

  Britt-Marie uncomfortably rocks back and forth from her heels to her toes.

  “I assumed it was self-evident that it had been canceled. In view of the circumstances.”

  “What circumstances?”

  “The robbery, my dear.”

  Max looks as if he’s working his brain hard to bring clarity to what these two separate things could feasibly have to do with each other. Then he comes to the only possible logical conclusion: “Did the robber nick the ball?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “If he didn’t nick the ball we can still play, can’t we?”

  The group gathered on the landing takes this conclusion into consideration, and when none of them seems able to come up with any rational line of argument to oppose it, there’s not much else to do.

  So they play. In the yard outside the apartment block, between the refuse room and the bicycle stand, using three gloves and a dog as the goalposts.

  Max tackles Vega just as she’s about to score, and she takes two swings at him with both fists. He backs off. She roars: “Don’t touch me, rich kid!” They all shuffle away. Omar avoids the ball as if it’s frightening to him.

  The black car stops on the road just as Toad has hit one of the goalposts on the nose for the third time, and it’s refusing to take part anymore. Omar rushes into Sami’s arms, and Vega turns around and marches into the house without a word.

  The goalpost is having some sweets from Bank’s pocket and getting scratched behind its ears as Sami draws closer.

  “Hey there, Bank,” he says.

  “Did you find him?” asks Bank.

  “No,” says Sami.

  “Lucky for Psycho!” yells Toad excitedly, waving his thumb and index finger like a pistol, then cutting this activity short when Britt-Marie gives him a look as if he just refused to use a coaster.

  Bank pokes Sami’s stomach with her stick.

  “Lucky for Psycho. But mainly lucky for you, Sami.”

  She heads for home with Max, Dino, Toad, and Ben in tow. Before they go around the corner Ben stops and calls out to Britt-Marie:

  “You’re still coming tomorrow, aren’t you?”

  “Coming to what?” Britt-Marie wants to know, and is met by a collective stare from the group as if she’s lost her reason.

&nb
sp; “To the cup! Tomorrow’s the cup!” thunders Max.

  Britt-Marie brushes her skirt so they don’t see she’s got her eyes closed and is sucking her cheeks in.

  “Ha. Ha. Obviously I will. Obviously.”

  She doesn’t say anything about how it will be her last day in Borg. They don’t say anything either.

  She sits in the kitchen until Sami comes out of Vega and Omar’s bedroom.

  “They’re sleeping,” he says with a somewhat forced smile.

  Britt-Marie stands up, collects herself, and informs him coolly:

  “I don’t want to stick my nose in, because I’m certainly not the sort of person who does that, but if it’s true that you were intending to do away with this Psycho tonight for the sake of Vega and Omar, I should like to clarify to you that it’s not suitable for a gentleman to run around doing away with people.”

  He raises his eyebrows. She closes her fingers around her handbag.

  “I’m not a gentleman,” he says with a smile.

  “No, but you could become one!”

  He laughs. She doesn’t laugh. So he stops laughing.

  “Ah, drop it, I wouldn’t have killed him. He’s my best friend. He’s just so fucking sick in the head, you get what I mean? He owes people money. The wrong kind of people. So he’s desperate. He didn’t think Vega and Omar would be there.”

  “Right,” says Britt-Marie.

  “That’s not to say you’re not important as well!” Sami corrects himself.

  “Sorry. I need a cig,” says Sami with a sigh, and only then does Britt-Marie realize his hands are trembling.

  She goes with him onto the balcony, coughing dubiously and not at all demonstratively. He blows the smoke away from her and apologizes.

  “Sorry, is this bothering you?”

  “I should like to ask if you have any more cigarettes,” says Britt-Marie without blinking an eye.

  He starts laughing.

  “I didn’t think you were a smoker.”

  “I’m certainly not,” she says defensively. “I’ve just had a long day.”

  “Okay, okay,” he smirks, handing her one and lighting it for her.

  She takes slight, shallow puffs. Closes her eyes.

  “I’d like you to know that you’re certainly not the only one with tendencies to live a wild, irresponsible existence. I smoked any number of cigarettes in my youth.”

  He laughs out loud, and she feels it’s more at her than with her, so she goes on to clarify her statement:

  “For a period in my youth I was actually employed as a waitress!”

  She nods with emphasis, just to underline that she’s by no means just making this up off the top of her head. Sami looks impressed and gestures at her to take a seat on an upside-down drinks crate.

  “You want a whiskey, Britt-Marie?”

  Britt-Marie’s common sense has obviously locked itself in its room, because suddenly Britt-Marie hears herself saying:

  “Yes, absolutely, you know what, Sami? I would like one very much!”

  And so they drink whiskey and smoke. Britt-Marie tries to blow some smoke rings, because she knows she wished she could do this at the time when she was working as a waitress. The chefs knew how to do it. It looked so very relaxing.

  “Dad didn’t leave, we chased him away, me and Magnus,” Sami tells her without any preamble.

  “Who’s Magnus?”

  “He likes ‘Psycho’ better, people don’t get as scared of a ‘Magnus,’ ” says Sami with a grin.

  “Ha,” says Britt-Marie, but it’s actually more of a “huh?” than a “ha.”

  “Dad hit Mum whenever he’d been drinking. No one knew about it, you know, but once Magnus was picking me up to go to soccer training when we were small, and he’d never seen anything like it. He comes from a right nuclear family, his dad worked for an insurance company and drove an Opel, sort of thing. But he . . . I don’t bloody know. He saw me step in between Mum and Dad, and I got a hiding from Dad as usual, and then out of fucking nowhere Magnus was standing there yelling, with a knife at Dad’s throat. And I don’t think I got it until then, that not all kids lived like we did. Not all kids were afraid every time they came home. Omar cried. Vega cried. So, you know . . . it felt like that was enough right there. See what I mean?”

  Britt-Marie coughs smoke through her nose. Sami pats her helpfully on the back and fetches water for her. Then stands by the balcony railing, peering over the edge as if he’s measuring the distance to the ground.

  “Magnus helped chase Dad away. You don’t find friends like that just anywhere.”

  “Where’s your mother, Sami?”

  “Just away for a while, she’ll be coming back soon,” Sami attempts.

  Britt-Marie collects herself and points her cigarette at him menacingly.

  “I may be many things, Sami, but I’m no idiot.”

  Sami empties his glass. Scratches his head.

  “She’s dead,” he admits at last.

  Exactly how long it takes Britt-Marie to get absolutely clear about the whole story, she can’t say. Night has fallen over Borg, and she thinks it may be snowing. When Sami, Vega, and Omar’s father left, their mother took on more driving work with the trucking company. Year after year. When the trucking company fired all its drivers, she started working for foreign companies, whenever she could find them, to the best of her ability. Year after year, as mothers do. One evening she got caught up in a traffic jam, got delayed, and her bonus hung in the balance. So she drove through the night in bad weather, in a truck that was too old. At dawn she met an oncoming car, the driver of which was reaching for his cell phone, so that he’d veered onto the wrong side of the road. She swerved, the tires of the truck lost their purchase on the road in the rain, and the whole thing overturned. There was a deluge of blood and glass, and three children sat waiting two thousand miles away for the sound of a key in the front door.

  “She was a bloody good mum. She was a warrior,” whispers Sami.

  Britt-Marie has to refill her glass before she manages to say:

  “I am so very, very sorry, Sami.”

  It may sound paltry and less than you might expect. But it’s all she’s got.

  Sami pats her on the arm understandingly, as if he’s the one to console her and not the other way around.

  “Vega’s afraid, even though she mainly seems angry. Omar is angry, though you’d probably think he was afraid.”

  “And you?”

  “I don’t have time to feel things, I have to take care of them.”

  “But . . . how . . . I mean . . . the authorities,” Britt-Marie starts, in a welter of disconnected thoughts.

  Sami lights her another cigarette, then one for himself.

  “We never informed anyone that Dad cleared off. He must be abroad somewhere, but he’s still registered at this address. We had his old driving license, so Omar bribed a truck driver at the petrol station to go to the police in town pretending to be him and signing some papers. We got a couple of thousand on Mum’s insurance. No one else ever asked anything about it.”

  “But you can’t just . . . Good God, Sami, this is not Pippi Longstocking, is it! Who will take care of the children—”

  “I will. I will take care of them,” he says simply, cutting her short.

  “For . . . how long?”

  “As long as I can. I get the fact they’ll catch us out pretty soon, I’m not an idiot. But I only need a bit of time, Britt-Marie. Just a bit. I have plans. I just have to show that I can support them financially, you understand? Otherwise they’ll take Vega and Omar and put them in some fucking children’s home. I can’t let them do that. I’m not the type that just walks out.”

  “They might let you take care of the children. If you explain it exactly as it is, they might—”

  “Look at me, Britt-Marie. Criminal record, unemployed, and mates with people like Psycho. Would you let me take care of two children?”

  “We can show them you
r cutlery drawer! We can explain that you have the potential to become a gentleman!”

  “Thanks,” he says and puts his hand on her shoulder.

  She leans against him.

  “And Sven knows everything?”

  Sami runs his hands over her hair to calm her.

  “He’s the one who took the international call from the police who found the truck. He came here to give us the news. Cried as much as we did. It’s like having a parent in the army, you know, when your mum drives a truck. If someone in uniform comes to your door you know what it’s about.”

  “So . . . Sven . . .”

  “He knows everything.”

  Britt-Marie’s eyes blink very hard as they stare at his shirt. It’s a curious thing to do. A grown woman on a young man’s balcony in the middle of the night, just like that. What on earth would people think about that?

  “I was under the impression that one became a policeman because one believed in rules and regulations.”

  “I think Sven became a policeman because he believes in justice.”

  Britt-Marie straightens up. Wipes her face down.

  “We’re going to need more whiskey. And if it’s not too troublesome, I should like to ask for a bottle of window-cleaner as well.”

  After a considerable amount of reflection she adds:

  “Under present circumstances I could see myself making do with any old brand.”

  29

  Britt-Marie wakes up with a headache of the most spectacular kind. She’s lying in her bed in Bank’s house. A neighbor seems to be drilling the wall. The whole room sways when she gets up. She’s sweating, her body aching and her mouth laced with a sort of sharp bitterness. Britt-Marie is obviously a woman with a certain amount of life experience, so she understands her condition immediately. The day after she has drunk more alcohol in Sami’s home than her total intake in the last forty years there can only be one reasonable conclusion:

  “I’ve got flu!” she explains to Bank in a knowing sort of way, when she comes down to the kitchen.

  Bank is making bacon and eggs. The dog sniffs the air and moves a little farther away from Britt-Marie.

  “You smell of spirits,” Bank states, without quite managing to stop herself looking amused.