Britt-Marie Was Here Read online

  Someone who came home to a newly mopped floor and a hot dinner on the table and, on the odd occasion, noticed that she had made an effort. It may be that a heart only finally breaks after leaving a hospital room in which a shirt smells of pizza and perfume, but it will break more readily if it has burst a few times before.

  Britt-Marie turns on the light at six o’clock the following morning. Not because she’s really missing the light, but because people may have noticed the light was on last night, and if they’ve realized Britt-Marie has spent the night at the recreation center she doesn’t want them thinking she’s still asleep at this time of the morning.

  There’s an old television by the sofas, which she could turn on to feel less lonely, but she avoids it because there will most likely be soccer on it. There’s always soccer nowadays, and faced with that option Britt-Marie would actually prefer to be lonely. The recreation center encloses her in a guarded silence. The coffee percolator lies on its side and no longer blinks at her. She sits on the stool in front of it, remembering how Kent’s children said Britt-Marie was “passive-aggressive.” Kent laughed in the way that he did after drinking vodka and orange in front of a soccer match, his stomach bouncing up and down and the laughter gushing forth in little snorting bursts through his nostrils, and then he replied: “She ain’t bloody passive-aggressive, she’s aggressive-passive!” And then he laughed until he spilled vodka on the shagpile rug.

  That was the night Britt-Marie decided she had had enough and moved the rug to the guest room without a word. Not because she’s passive-aggressive, obviously. But because there are limits.

  She wasn’t upset about what Kent had said, because most likely he didn’t even understand it himself. On the other hand she was offended that he hadn’t even checked to see if she was standing close enough to hear.

  She looks at the coffee percolator. For a fleeting, carefree moment the thought occurs to her that she might try to mend it, but she comes to her senses and moves away from it. She hasn’t mended anything since she was married. It was always best to wait until Kent came home, she felt. Kent always said, “women can’t even put together IKEA furniture,” when they watched women in television programs about house building or renovation. “Quota-filling,” he used to call it. Britt-Marie liked sitting next to him on the sofa solving the crossword. Always so close to the remote control that she could feel the tips of his fingers against her knee when he fumbled with it to flip the channel to a soccer match.

  Then she fetches more baking soda and cleans the entire recreation center one more time. She has just sprinkled another batch of baking soda over the sofas when there’s a knock at the door. It takes Britt-Marie a fair amount of time to open it, because running into the bathroom and doing her hair in front of the mirror without functioning lights is a somewhat complicated process.

  Somebody is sitting outside the door with a box of wine in her hands.

  “Ha,” says Britt-Marie to the box.

  “Good wine, you know. Cheap. Fell off the back of a truck, huh!” says Somebody quite smugly.

  Britt-Marie doesn’t know what that means.

  “But, you know, I have to pour into bottle with label and all that crap, in case tax authority asks about it,” says Somebody. “It’s called ‘house red’ in my pizzeria, if tax authority asking, okay?” Somebody partly gives Britt-Marie the box and partly throws it at her before she forces her way inside, the wheelchair slamming across the threshold, to have a look around.

  Britt-Marie looks at the goo of melted snow and gravel left behind by the wheels with only marginally less horror than if it had been excrement.

  “Might I ask how the repair of my car is progressing?” asks Britt-Marie.

  Somebody nods exultantly.

  “Bloody good! Bloody good! Hey, let me ask you something, Britt-Marie: do you mind about color?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You know, the door I got, huh. Bloody lovely door, huh. But maybe not same color as car. Maybe . . . more like yellow.”

  “What’s happened to my door?” Britt-Marie asks, horrified.

  “Nothing! Nothing! Just a question, huh! Yellow door? Not good? It’s, what’s-it-called? Oxidized! Old door. Almost not yellow anymore. Almost white now.”

  “I will certainly not tolerate a yellow door on my white car!”

  Somebody waves the palms of her hands in circles.

  “Okay, okay, okay, you know. Calm, calm, calm. Fix white door. No problem. Don’t get lemon in arse now. But white door will have, what’s-it-called? Delivery time!”

  She nods at the wine in a carefree manner.

  “You like wine, Britt?”

  “No,” answers Britt-Marie, not because she dislikes wine, but because if you say you like wine, people may come to the conclusion that you’re an alcoholic.

  “Everyone likes wine, Britt!”

  “My name is Britt-Marie. Only my sister calls me Britt.”

  “Sister, huh? There’s, what’s-it-called? Another one of you? Nice for the world!”

  Somebody grins as if this is a joke. At Britt-Marie’s expense, Britt-Marie assumes.

  “My sister died when we were small,” she informs Somebody, without taking her eyes off the wine box.

  “Ah . . . what the hell . . . I . . . what’s-it-called? Condole,” says Somebody sadly.

  Britt-Marie curls up her toes tightly in her shoes.

  “Ha. That’s nice of you,” she says quietly.

  “The wine is good but a bit, what’s-it-called? Muddy! You have to strain it a few times with a coffee filter, huh, everything okay then!” she explains expertly, before looking at Britt-Marie’s bag and Britt-Marie’s balcony boxes on the floor. Her smile grows.

  “I wanted to give to you, you know, as your congratulations-for-new-job present. But now I can see it’s more like a, what’s-it-called? Moving-in present!”

  Offended, Britt-Marie holds the box of wine in front of her as if it’s making a ticking sound.

  “I’d like to point out to you that I don’t live here.”

  “Where did you sleep last night, then?”

  “I didn’t sleep,” says Britt-Marie, looking as if she’d like to toss the wine box out of the door and cover her ears.

  “There’s one of them hotels, you know,” says Somebody.

  “Ha, I suppose you also have a hotel on your premises. I could imagine you do. Pizzeria and car workshop and post office and grocer’s shop and a hotel? Must be nice for you, never having to make up your mind.”

  Somebody’s face collapses with undisguised surprise.

  “Hotel? Why would I have one of those? No, no, no, Britt-Marie. I keep to my, what’s-it-called? Core activity!”

  Britt-Marie shifts her weight from left foot to right, and finally goes to the refrigerator and puts the wine box inside.

  “I don’t like hotels,” she announces and closes the door firmly.

  “No, damn it! Don’t put wine in fridge, you get lumps in it!” yells Somebody.

  Britt-Marie glares at her.

  “Is it really necessary to swear all the time, as if we were a horde of barbarians?”

  Somebody propels her chair forward and tugs at the kitchen drawers until she finds the coffee filters.

  “Shit, Britt-Marie! I show. You must filter. It’s okay. Or, you know, mix with Fanta. I have cheap Fanta, if you want. From China!”

  She stops herself when she notices the coffee percolator. The remains of it, at least. Britt-Marie, filled with discomfort, clasps her hands together over her stomach and looks as if she’d like to brush some invisible specks of dust from the opening of a black hole, and then sink into it herself.

  “What . . . happened?” asks Somebody, eyeing first the mop and then the mop-sized dents in the coffee percolator. Britt-Marie stands in silence, with flaming cheeks. She may quite possibly be thinking about Kent. Finally she clears her throat, straightens her back and looks Somebody right in the eye as she answers:

>   “Hit by a flying stone.”

  Somebody looks at her. Looks at the coffee machine. Looks at the mop.

  Then she starts laughing. Loudly. Then coughing. Then laughing even louder. Britt-Marie is deeply offended. It wasn’t meant to be funny. At least Britt-Marie doesn’t think it was; she hasn’t said anything that was supposed to be funny in years, as far as she can remember. So she’s offended by the laughter, because she assumes it’s at her expense and not because of the actual joke. It’s the sort of thing you assume if you’ve spent a sufficient amount of time with a husband who is constantly trying to be funny. There was not space in their relationship for more hilarity than his. Kent was funny and Britt-Marie went into the kitchen and took care of the washing-up. That was how they divided up their responsibilities.

  But now Somebody sits here laughing so much that her wheelchair almost topples over. This makes Britt-Marie insecure, and her natural reaction to insecurity is irritation. She goes to the vacuum cleaner in a very demonstrative way—to attack the sofa covers, which are covered in baking soda.

  Somebody’s laughter slowly turns into a titter, and then into general mumbling about flying stones. “That’s bloody funny, you know. Hey, you know there’s a bloody big package in your car, huh?”

  As if this would in any way be a surprise to Britt-Marie. Britt-Marie can still hear a trace of tittering in her voice.

  “I’m well aware of that,” she says tersely. She can hear Somebody rolling her wheelchair towards the front door.

  “You want, you know, some help carrying it inside?”

  Britt-Marie turns on the vacuum cleaner by way of an answer. Somebody yells to make herself heard:

  “It’s no trouble, Britt-Marie!”

  Britt-Marie rubs the nozzle as hard as she can over the sofa cushions.

  Repeatedly, until Somebody gives up and yells: “Well, you know, have Fanta like I said if you want some for wine! And pizza!” Then the door closes. Britt-Marie turns off the vacuum cleaner. She doesn’t want to be unfriendly, but she really doesn’t want any help with the package. Nothing is more important to Britt-Marie right now than her reluctance to be helped with the package.

  Because there’s a piece of furniture from IKEA inside.

  And Britt-Marie is going to assemble it herself.

  8

  From time to time a truck drives through Borg, and whenever this happens, the recreation center shakes violently—as if, Britt-Marie thinks, it was built on the fault line between two continental shelves. Continental shelves are common in crossword puzzles, so it’s the sort of thing she knows about. She also knows that Borg is the kind of place Britt-Marie’s mother used to describe as “the back of beyond,” because that was how Britt-Marie’s mother used to describe the countryside.

  Yet another truck thunders past. A green one. The walls shake.

  Borg used to be the sort of community trucks came home to, but nowadays they only drive past. The truck makes her think of Ingrid. She remembers that she had time to see it through the back window when she was a child, on the very last day that she can recall thinking of herself as such. It was also green.

  Britt-Marie has wondered the same thing an infinite number of times over the years: whether she had time to scream. And whether it would have made a difference. Their mother had told Ingrid to put on her belt, because Ingrid never put her belt on, and for that exact reason Ingrid had not put it on. They were arguing. That’s why they didn’t see it. Britt-Marie saw it because she always put her belt on, because she wanted her mother to notice. Which she obviously never did, because Britt-Marie never had to be noticed, for the simple reason that she always did everything without having to be told.

  It came from the right-hand side. Green. That’s one of the few things Britt-Marie remembers. It came from the right and there was glass and blood all over in the backseat of their parents’ car. The last thing Britt-Marie remembered before she passed out was that she wanted to clean it up. Make it nice. And when she woke up at the hospital that is precisely what she did. Clean. Make things nice. When they buried her sister and there were strangers in black clothes drinking coffee in her parents’ home, Britt-Marie put coasters under all the cups and washed all the dishes and cleaned all the windows. When her father began to stay at work for longer and longer and her mother stopped talking altogether, Britt-Marie cleaned. Cleaned, cleaned, and cleaned.

  She hoped that sooner or later her mother would get out of bed and say, “How nice you’ve made everything,” but it never happened. They never spoke about the accident, and, because they didn’t, they also couldn’t talk about anything else. Some people had pulled Britt-Marie out of the car; she doesn’t know who, but she knows that her mother, silently furious, never forgave them for saving the wrong daughter. Maybe Britt-Marie didn’t forgive them either. Because they saved the life of a person who from that day devoted herself to just walking around being afraid of dying and being left there to stink. One day she read her father’s morning newspaper and saw an advertisement for a brand of window-cleaner. And in this way a life went by.

  Now she’s sixty-three and she’s standing at the back of beyond, looking out at Borg through the kitchen window of the recreation center, missing Faxin and her view of the world.

  Obviously, she stands far enough from the window for no one outside to be able to see her looking out. What sort of impression would that make! As if she just stood there all day staring out, like some criminal. But her car is still parked in the graveled courtyard. She has accidentally left her keys inside and the IKEA package is still in the backseat. She doesn’t know exactly how she’s supposed to get it inside the recreation center, because it’s so very heavy. She can’t really say why it’s so heavy because she doesn’t know exactly what’s inside. The idea was to buy a stool, not unlike the two stools in the kitchen at the recreation center, but after she had made her way to the IKEA self-service warehouse and found the appropriate shelf she found that all the stools had been sold.

  Britt-Marie had taken all morning to make the decision that she was going to buy and assemble a stool, so this anticlimax left her standing there, frozen to the spot, for such a length of time that she began to worry that someone in the warehouse would see her there looking mysterious. What would people think? Most likely, that she was planning to steal something. Once this thought was firmly established, Britt-Marie panicked and with superhuman powers managed to drag over the next available package to her cart, in almost every conceivable way conveying the impression that this was the package she had been after all along. She hardly remembers how she got it into the car. She supposes that she was overcome with that syndrome they often talk about on the TV, when mothers pick up huge boulders under which their children are lying trapped. Britt-Marie is invested with that sort of power when she starts entertaining suspicions of strangers looking at her and wondering whether she’s a criminal.

  She moves farther away from the window, just to be on the safe side. At exactly twelve o’clock she prepares the table by the sofas for lunch. Not that there’s much of either a table or a lunch, just a tin of peanuts and a glass of water, but the fact is that civilized people have lunch at twelve, and if Britt-Marie is anything in this world she’s certainly civilized. She spreads a towel on the sofa before she sits down, then empties the tin of peanuts onto a plate. She has to force herself not to try to eat them with a knife and fork. Then she washes up and cleans the whole recreation center again so carefully that she almost uses up her whole supply of baking soda.

  There’s a little laundry room with a washing machine and a tumble dryer. Britt-Marie cleans the machines with her last bit of baking soda, like a starving person putting out her last bait on her fishing line.

  Not that she was thinking of doing any washing, but she can’t bear the thought of them all dirty. In a corner behind the tumble dryer she finds a whole sack of white shirts with numbers on them. Soccer jerseys, she understands. The entire recreation center is hung with pi
ctures of various people wearing those shirts. Very likely they’re covered in grass stains, of course. Britt-Marie can’t for the life of her understand why anyone would choose to practice an outdoor sport while wearing white jerseys. It’s barbaric. She wonders whether the corner shop/pizzeria/car workshop/post office would even be likely to sell baking soda.

  She fetches her coat. Just inside the front door, next to several photos of soccer balls and people who don’t know any better than to kick them, hangs a yellow jersey with the word “Bank” printed above the number “10.” Just beneath is a photo of an old man holding up the same jersey with a proud smile.

  Britt-Marie puts on her coat. Outside the front door is a person who was clearly just about to knock on it. The person has a face and the face is full of snuff. This, in every possible way, is an awful way of establishing the very short-lived acquaintance between Britt-Marie and the face, because Britt-Marie loathes snuff. The whole thing is over in twenty seconds, when the snuff-face moves off while mumbling something that sounds distinctly like “nag-bag.”

  At this point Britt-Marie picks up her telephone and dials the number of the only person her telephone has ever called. The girl at the unemployment office doesn’t answer. Britt-Marie calls again, because actually a telephone is not a thing you decide whether or not to answer.

  “Yes?” says the girl at long last, with food in her mouth. “Sorry. I’m having my lunch.”

  “Now?” Britt-Marie exclaims, as if the girl was joking. “My dear girl, we’re not at war. Surely it’s not necessary to be having your lunch at half past one?”

  The girl chews her lunch quite hard. Bravely tries to change the topic of conversation:

  “Did the pest control man come? I had to spend hours calling around but in the end I found someone who promised to make an emergency visit, and—”

  “She was a pest control woman. Who took snuff,” Britt-Marie goes on, as if this explains everything.

  “Right,” says the girl again. “So did she deal with the rat?”