Britt-Marie Was Here Read online

  She gets out the cell phone that Kent gave her five years ago, and uses it for the first time. “Hello?” says the girl at the unemployment office.

  “Is that how people answer the phone nowadays?” says Britt-Marie. Helpfully, not critically.

  “What?” says the girl, for a few moments still blissfully unaware that Britt-Marie has not necessarily walked out of the girl’s life just because she’s walked out of the unemployment office.

  “I’m here now, in this place, Borg. But something is making an awful racket and my car has blown up. How far is it to the post office?”

  “Britt-Marie, is that you?”

  “I can hardly hear you!”

  “Did you say blown up? Are you okay?”

  “Of course I am! But what about the car?”

  “I don’t know the first thing about cars,” tries the girl.

  Britt-Marie releases an extremely patient exhalation of air.

  “You said I should call you if I had any questions,” she reminds her. Britt-Marie feels it would be unreasonable for her to be expected to know everything about cars. She has only driven on very few occasions since she and Kent were married—she never goes anywhere in a car unless Kent is there, and Kent is an absolutely excellent driver.

  “I meant questions about the job.”

  “Ha. That’s the only important thing, of course. The career. If I’m killed in an explosion, that’s not important of course,” states Britt-Marie. “Maybe it’s even good if I die. Then you’ll have a job to spare.”

  “Please Britt-Mar—”

  “I can hardly hear you!!” bellows Britt-Marie, in a very helpful way, and hangs up. Then she stands there, on her own, sucking in her cheeks.

  Something is still thumping on the other side of the recreation center, which is still standing only because at the last councillors’ meeting in December, there were so many other things already scheduled for closure. The local authority representatives were concerned it might cause a postponement of their annual Christmas dinner. In view of the importance of the Christmas dinner, the closure was pushed back to the end of January, after the holiday period of the local authority councillors. Obviously the communications officer of the local authority should have been responsible for communicating this to the personnel department, but unfortunately the communications officer went on holiday and forgot to communicate it. As a result, when the personnel department found that the local authority had a building without anyone to take care of it, a vacancy for a caretaker of the recreation center was advertised with the unemployment office in early January. That was the long and the short of it.

  Anyway, the job is not only exceptionally badly paid, but also temporary and subject to the decision regarding the closure of the recreation center to be reached at the councillors’ meeting in three weeks’ time. And to top it all, the recreation center is in Borg. The number of applicants for the position were, for these reasons, fairly limited.

  But it just so happened that the girl at the unemployment office, who very much against her will ate salmon with Britt-Marie the day before yesterday, promised Britt-Marie that she would really try to find her a job. The next morning at 9:02, when Britt-Marie knocked on the girl’s door to learn how this was going, the girl tapped her computer for a while then eventually said: “There is one job. But it’s in the middle of nowhere and so badly paid that if you’re receiving unemployment benefits you’ll probably lose money on it.”

  “I don’t get any benefits,” said Britt-Marie, as if they were a disease.

  The girl sighed again and tried to say something about “retraining courses” and “measures” that Britt-Marie might be eligible for, but Britt-Marie made it clear that she certainly wouldn’t welcome any of those measures.

  “Please, Britt-Marie, this is just a job for three weeks, it’s not really the kind of thing you want to be applying for at your . . . age . . . plus you’d have to move all the way to this place. . . .”

  Now Britt-Marie is in Borg and her car has blown up. It’s hardly the best possible first day in her new job, one might say. She calls the girl back.

  “Where can I expect to find the cleaning equipment?” asks Britt-Marie.

  “What?” asks the girl.

  “You said I should call if I had any questions about the job.”

  The girl mutters something unintelligible, her voice sounding as if it’s coming from inside a tin can.

  “Now you have to listen to me, my dear. I fully intend to find the post office you have informed me about and pick up the keys to the recreation center, but I am not putting one foot inside the recreation center until you inform me of the whereabouts of the cleaning equip—!” Once again she is interrupted by the ball rolling across the parking area. Britt-Marie dislikes this. It’s nothing personal, she hasn’t decided to pick on this ball in particular. It’s just that she just dislikes all soccer balls. Entirely without prejudice.

  The ball is being pursued by two children. They are exceedingly dirty, all three of them if you include the ball.

  The children’s jeans are all torn down their thighs. They catch up with the ball, kick it back in the opposite direction, and once again disappear behind the recreation center. One of them loses his balance and steadies himself by putting his hand against the window, where he leaves a black handprint.

  “What’s happening?” asks the girl.

  “Shouldn’t those children be at school?” Britt-Marie exclaims, reminding herself to put an extra exclamation mark after “Buy Faxin!” on her list. If this place even has a supermarket.

  “What?” says the girl.

  “My dear girl, you have to stop saying ‘what?’ all the time, it makes you sound so untalented.”

  “What?”

  “There are children here!”

  “Okay, but please, Britt-Marie, I don’t know anything about Borg! I’ve never been there! And I’m not hearing you—I think you . . . are you sure you’re not holding the telephone upside down?”

  Britt-Marie gives the telephone a scrutinizing look. Turns it around.

  “Ha,” she says into the microphone, as if the fault lay with the person at the other end of the line.

  “Okay, I can hear you at last,” says the girl encouragingly.

  “I’ve never used this telephone. There are actually people who have other things to do than spending all day talking into their telephones, you understand.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’m just the same when I have a new telephone!”

  “I’m certainly not worrying! And this is absolutely not a new telephone, it’s five years old,” Britt-Marie corrects her. “I’ve never needed one before. I’ve had things to get on with, you see. I don’t call anyone except Kent, and I call him on the home telephone, like a civilized person.”

  “But what if you’re out?” asks the girl, instinctually unable to process what the world looked like before one could get hold of anyone, at anytime of the day.

  “My dear girl,” she explains patiently, “if I’m out, I’m with Kent.”

  Britt-Marie was probably intending to say something else, but that’s the point at which she sees the rat, more or less as big as a normal-sized flowerpot, scampering across patches of ice in the parking area. Looking back, Britt-Marie is of the firm opinion that she wanted to scream very loudly. But unfortunately she did not have time for that, because everything abruptly went black and Britt-Marie’s body lay unconscious on the ground.

  Britt-Marie’s first contact with soccer in Borg is when the soccer ball hits her very hard on the head.

  5

  Britt-Marie wakes up on a floor. Somebody is leaning over her, saying something, but Britt-Marie’s first thoughts are about the floor. She’s worried that it may be dirty, and that people might think she’s dead. These things happen all the time, people falling over and dying. It would be horrific, thinks Britt-Marie. To die on a dirty floor. What would people think?

  “Hello, are you, what’s-it-cal
led? Deceased?” Somebody asks, but Britt-Marie keeps focusing on the floor.

  “Hello, lady? Are you, you know, dead?” Somebody repeats and makes a little whistling sound.

  Britt-Marie dislikes whistling, and she has a headache.

  The floor smells of pizza. It would be awful to die with a headache while smelling of pizza.

  She’s not at all keen on pizza, because Kent smelled so much of pizza when he came home late from his meetings with Germany. Britt-Marie remembers all his smells. Most of all the smell of the hospital room. It was loaded with bouquets (it is common practice to receive flowers when you have a heart attack) but Britt-Marie can still remember that smell of perfume and pizza from the shirt by the side of his bed.

  He was sleeping, snoring slightly. She held his hand a last time, without waking him. Then she folded up the shirt and put it in her handbag. When she came home she cleaned the collar with baking soda and vinegar and washed it twice before she hung it up. Then she polished the windows with Faxin and freshened up the mattress and brought in the balcony boxes and packed her bag and turned on her cell phone for the first time in her life. For the first time in their life together. She thought the children might call and ask how things were with Kent. They didn’t. They both sent a single text message.

  There was a time just after their teenage years when they still promised to come to visit at Christmas. Then they started pretending to have reasons for canceling. After a year or two they stopped pretending to have reasons for canceling. In the end they stopped pretending that they were coming at all. That’s how life went.

  Britt-Marie has always liked the theater, because she enjoys the way the actors get applauded at the end for their pretense. Kent’s heart attack and the voice of the young, beautiful thing meant there’d be no applause for her. You can’t keep pretending someone doesn’t exist when she speaks to you on the telephone. So Britt-Marie left the hospital room with a shirt smelling of perfume and a broken heart.

  You don’t get any flowers for that.

  “But, shit, are you . . . like . . . dead?” Somebody asks impatiently.

  Britt-Marie finds it extremely impolite for Somebody to interrupt her in the midst of dying. Especially with such terrible language. There are certainly a good number of alternatives to “shit,” if you have a particular need to express such a feeling. She looks up at this Somebody standing over her, looking down.

  “May I ask where I am?” asks Britt-Marie, in confusion.

  “Hi there! At the health center,” says Somebody cheerfully.

  “It smells of pizza,” Britt-Marie manages to say.

  “Yeah, you know, health center is also pizzeria,” says Somebody, nodding.

  “That hardly strikes me as hygienic,” Britt-Marie manages to utter.

  Somebody shrugs his shoulders. “First pizzeria. You know, they closed down that health center. Financial crisis. What a shit. So now, you know, we do what we can. But no worry. Have first aid!”

  Somebody, who actually seems to be a woman, points jovially at an open plastic case marked with a red cross on the lid, and “First Aid” written on it. Then she waves a stinky bottle.

  “And here, you know, second aid! You want?”

  “Excuse me?” Britt-Marie squeaks, with her hand on a painful bump on her forehead.

  Somebody, who on closer inspection is not standing over Britt-Marie but sitting over her, offers her a glass.

  “They closed down the liquor store here, so now we do what we can. Here! Vodka from Estonia or some shit like that. Letters bloody weird, you know. Maybe not vodka, but same shit, burns your tongue but you get used to it. Good when you get those, what’s-it-called? Flu blisters?”

  Tormented, Britt-Marie shakes her head and catches sight of some red stains on her jacket.

  “Am I bleeding?” she bursts out, sitting up in terror.

  It would be terribly vexatious if she left bloodstains on Somebody’s floor, whether it’s been mopped or not.

  “No! No! No shit like that. Maybe you get a bump on your head from the shot, huh, but that’s just tomato sauce, you know!” yells Somebody and tries to mop Britt-Marie’s jacket with a tissue.

  Britt-Marie notices that Somebody is in a wheelchair. It’s a difficult thing not to notice. Furthermore Somebody seems intoxicated. Britt-Marie bases this observation on the fact that Somebody smells of vodka and can’t quite manage to dab the tissue in the right place. But Britt-Marie doesn’t have any prejudices about it.

  “I was waiting here for you to stop looking deceased. Got hungry, you know, so I had a bit of lunch,” sniggers Somebody, pointing at a half-eaten pizza perched on a stool.

  “Lunch? At this time of day?” mumbles Britt-Marie, because it isn’t even eleven o’clock.

  “If you hungry? Have pizza!” Somebody explains.

  Only then does Britt-Marie register what was said.

  “What do you mean, a bump from ‘the shot’? Have I been shot?” she exclaims, fingering her scalp as if searching for a hole.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. A soccer ball in the head, you know.” Somebody nods and spills vodka on the pizza.

  Britt-Marie looks as if she may even have preferred a pistol to a pizza. She imagines that pistols are less dirty.

  Somebody, who seems to be in her forties, helps her up, assisted by a girl in her early teens who has turned up at their side. Somebody has one of the worst hairstyles Britt-Marie has ever laid eyes on, as if she’s combed her hair with a terrified animal. The girl’s hair is more respectable, but her jeans are torn to shreds across her thighs. Probably modern.

  Somebody sniggers, without a care in the world.

  “Bloody brats, you know. Bloody soccer. But don’t get angry, they weren’t aiming at you!”

  Britt-Marie touches the bump on her forehead.

  “Is my face dirty?” she asks, simultaneously reproachful and anxious.

  Somebody shakes her head and rolls back towards her pizza.

  Britt-Marie’s gaze falls self-consciously on two men with beards and caps, sitting at a table in a corner, with cups of coffee and morning newspapers. It seems abominable to her, lying there passed out in front of people who are trying to have their coffee. Yet neither of the men even glances at her.

  “You only passed out a little,” says Somebody breezily, while shoveling the pizza into her mouth.

  Britt-Marie gets out a small mirror from her handbag and starts rubbing her forehead. She found it very vexatious passing out, but nowhere near as vexatious as the thought of having passed out with a dirty face.

  “How do you know if they were aiming at me?” she asks, with just a touch of criticism.

  “They hit you!” laughs Somebody, throwing out her arms. “If they aim, they don’t hit. These kids bloody terrible at soccer, huh?”

  “Ha,” says Britt-Marie.

  “We’re actually not that bad. . . .” mutters the teenage girl standing next to them, looking offended.

  Britt-Marie notices that she’s holding the soccer ball in her hands. The way you hold a ball when that’s what you have to do to stop yourself from repeatedly kicking it.

  Somebody gestures encouragingly at the girl.

  “My name’s Vega. I work here!” the girl says.

  “Shouldn’t you be at school?” asks Britt-Marie, without taking her eyes off the soccer ball.

  “Shouldn’t you be at work?” answers Vega, holding the ball as you do when you’re holding on to someone you love.

  Britt-Marie grips her handbag more firmly.

  “Let me tell you something, I was on my way to work when I was hit on the head. I’m the caretaker of the recreation center, I’ll have you know. This is my first day.”

  Vega’s mouth opens in surprise. As if this, in some way, changes everything. But she remains silent.

  “Caretaker?” asks Somebody. “Why didn’t you say so, lady! I’ve got one of them, what’s-it-called? Registered letters! With the key!”

  “I’ve been
informed I’m to pick up the keys at the post office.”

  “Are here! They closed down the post office, you see!” shouts Somebody, rolling round behind the counter, still with the bottle of vodka in her hand.

  There’s a short silence. There’s a tinkle from the door and a pair of dirty boots cross the unmopped floor. Somebody yells out:

  “All right, Karl! I have packaging for you, wait!”

  Britt-Marie turns around and is almost knocked to the ground by someone crashing into her shoulder. She looks up and sees a thick beard just below an unreasonably dirty cap, the whole appendage looking back at her.

  There’s a growl from somewhere between the beard and the cap: “Look where you’re going.”

  Britt-Marie, who wasn’t even moving, is deeply puzzled. Then she grips her handbag even more firmly and says:

  “Ha.”

  “You walked into her!” Vega hisses behind her.

  Britt-Marie doesn’t like it at all. She gets confused when anyone defends her—it doesn’t happen very often.

  Somebody comes back with Karl’s packaging; Karl looks with irritation at Vega and hostility at Britt-Marie. Then he nods grumpily to the two men at the corner table. They nod back even more grumpily. The door tinkles merrily behind Karl as he lopes out.

  Somebody pats Britt-Marie encouragingly on the shoulder.

  “Never bloody mind about him. Karl has . . . like . . . what do you say? A lemon up his arse, you know what I mean? Pissed off at life and the universe and everything. People around here don’t like visitors from the city,” she says to Britt-Marie, and nods at the men by the table when she says “people.” They keep reading their newspapers and drinking their coffee as if neither of the women are there.

  “How did he know I was from the city?”

  Somebody rolls her eyes. “Come on! I’ll show you the recreation center, huh!” she shouts and rolls off towards the door.

  Britt-Marie looks at a section that leads off the pizzeria, health care center, post office, or whatever it is. There are shelves of groceries in there. As if it were a mini market.