Britt-Marie Was Here (12 page)

Britt-Marie rubs her ring finger in front of the mirror. The white line there is like a tattoo. Taunting her. There’s a knock on the bathroom door.

Pirate is standing outside.

“Ha . . . Did you win?”

“Two to zero!” Pirate nods blissfully.

“Because actually I have only stayed in here all this time because you told me so. I have no intestinal problems,” says Britt-Marie very seriously.

Pirate nods, in some confusion, mumbles, “
Okay
,” and points at the front door, which is open.

“Sven is here again.”

The policeman stands on the threshold and lifts his hand in a fumbling wave. Britt-Marie draws back, deeply affronted but not sure why, and closes the bathroom door behind her. Once she has fixed her hair properly she takes a deep breath and reemerges.

“Yes?” she says to the policeman.

The policeman smiles and holds out a piece of paper, which he drops just as he’s giving it to Britt-Marie.

“Whoops, whoops, sorry, sorry, I just thought I’d give you this. Well, I thought, or we, we thought . . .”

He makes a gesture towards the pizzeria. Britt-Marie assumes he means he has spoken to Somebody. He smiles again. Clasps his hands together on top of his stomach, then changes his mind and crosses his arms just below his chin.

“We were thinking you need somewhere to live, of course, of course, and I understood you didn’t want to stay at the hotel in town . . . Not that you can’t live anywhere you want to. Of course! We just thought this might be a good alternative for you. Perhaps?”

Britt-Marie looks at the paper. It’s a handwritten, misspelled advertisement for a room that’s available for rent. At the bottom is an image of a little man wearing a hat, who appears to be dancing. The relationship between the man and the advertisement is extremely unclear.

“I’m the one who helped her make the ad,” says the policeman enthusiastically. “I did a course in it, in town. She’s a very nice lady, the one who’s letting the room, I mean, she’s just moved back to Borg. Or, I mean, it’s just temporary, of course, she’s selling the house. But it’s here in Borg, not far at all . . . it’s walkable but I can give you a lift, if you like?”

Britt-Marie’s eyebrows inch closer together. There’s a police car parked outside.

“In that?”

“Yes, I heard your car’s at the workshop. But I can drive you, it’s no trouble at all!”

“It’s obviously not a problem for you. Whereas I’m supposed to be driven around this community in a police car, am I, so everyone thinks I’m a criminal, is that what you are telling me?”

The policeman looks ashamed of himself.

“No, no, no. Of course, you wouldn’t want that.”

“I certainly would not,” says Britt-Marie. “Was there anything else?”

He shakes his head despondently and turns to leave. Britt-Marie closes the door.

The children stay in the recreation center until she has tumble-dried their clothes.

Clothes that cannot be tumble-dried she hangs up to dry, so the children can pick them up the next day. Most of them go home in their soccer jerseys. In a certain sense this is how Britt-Marie turns into their team coach. It’s just that no one has told her about it yet.

None of the children thank her for doing their laundry. The door closes behind them and the recreation center is steeped in the sort of silence that only children and soccer balls can fill. Britt-Marie puts away plates and soft-drink cans from the sofa table. Omar and Vega have left their plates on the dish rack. They haven’t washed them up or put them in the dishwasher, haven’t even rinsed them off. All they’ve done is put them there.

Kent also used to do that sometimes as if expecting to be thanked for it. As if he wanted Britt-Marie to know that when the plate was back in its place, washed and dried, in the cupboard tomorrow, he had certainly done his allotted share of the task.

There’s a knock at the front door of the recreation center. It’s not
a civilized hour, so Britt-Marie assumes that it’s one of the children who’s forgotten something. She opens with a:

“Ha?”

Then she sees that it’s the policeman standing outside again. He smiles awkwardly. Britt-Marie immediately changes the tone to a:

“Ha!”

Which is something quite different. At least the way Britt-Marie says it. The policeman swallows and seems to be drumming up some courage. A little too abruptly he whips out a bamboo curtain, almost smacking it into Britt-Marie’s forehead.

“Sorry, yes, well, I just wanted to . . . this is a bamboo screen!” he says and almost drops it into the mud.

“Ha . . .” says Britt-Marie, more guarded now.

He nods enthusiastically.

“I made it! I did a course in town. ‘Far Eastern Home Design.’ ”

He nods again. As if Britt-Marie is supposed to say something. She doesn’t. He holds the bamboo screen in front of his face.

“You can hold it against the window. So no one sees it’s you.”

He points cheerfully at the police car. Then at the bamboo screen.

Then at the rain that has started falling again. As rain does in Borg. Which must obviously be quite pleasant for the rain, not having anything better to do with its time.

“And you can keep it over your head when we go out to the car, like an umbrella, so you don’t ruin your hair.” He swallows again and fingers the bamboo.

“You don’t have to, of course, of course. I was just thinking that you have to live somewhere while you’re in Borg. I was thinking, so to speak, well, hmm, you understand. That it’s hardly suitable for a lady to live in a recreation center, so to speak.”

They stand in silence for a long time after that. Britt-Marie
switches her hands the other way, and then at long last exhales deeply with immeasurable patience. Not at all a sigh. Then she says:

“I need to get my things.”

He nods eagerly. She closes the door and leaves him out there in the rain.

That is how it goes on—the thing that has started.

B
ritt-Marie opens the door. He gives her the bamboo screen and she gives him the balcony boxes.

“I was told there was a large flat-pack from IKEA in the backseat of your car, should I load it into my car?” he asks helpfully.

“You certainly shall not!” answers Britt-Marie, as if he had suggested setting fire to it.

“Of course not, of course not,” he says apologetically.

Britt-Marie sees the men with the beards and caps leave the pizzeria. They nod at the policeman, he waves back. They seem not to see Britt-Marie at all.

The policeman hurries off towards his patrol car with the balcony boxes, then he hurries back to walk alongside Britt-Marie. He doesn’t hold her arm, but he does position his arm a few inches under hers without actually touching her. So he can catch her in case she slips.

She holds the bamboo screen like an umbrella over her hair (because in fact bamboo screens work quite brilliantly as umbrellas), and keeps it in a firm grip over her head throughout the journey, so the policeman doesn’t notice that her hairstyle has been ruined.

“I should like to stop by a cash machine on the way, so I can pay for the room,” she says. “If it’s no bother to you. I obviously don’t
want to cause you any bother,” she adds in a bothered tone of voice.

“It’s no bother at all!” says the policeman, who seems free of any kind of bothered tendencies. He doesn’t mention the fact that the nearest cash machine is actually a twelve-mile detour.

He talks all the way, just as Kent used to do when they were in the car. But it was different, because Kent always told her things, whereas the policeman asks her questions. It irritates Britt-Marie. You do get irritated by someone taking an interest in you, when you’re not used to it.

“What did you think of the match, then?” he asks.

“I was in the toilet,” says Britt-Marie.

She gets incredibly irritated when she hears herself saying this. Because anyone making hasty conclusions might believe she has serious intestinal problems. The policeman doesn’t answer straight away, so she comes to the conclusion that he is indeed sitting there making hasty conclusions, and she doesn’t at all appreciate that he is doing so. So she adds sharply:

“I actually don’t have serious intestinal problems, but it was important for me to be in the toilet, otherwise apparently something would have gone wrong in the match.”

He laughs. She doesn’t know if it’s at her expense. He stops when he notices that she doesn’t much appreciate it.

“How did you end up here in Borg?”

“I was offered employment here.”

She has her feet semi-buried among empty pizza boxes and paper bags from the hamburger place. In the backseat is a painter’s easel and a jumble of brushes and canvases.

“Do you like paintings?” the policeman asks her, in an upbeat mood, when he sees her looking at them.

“No.”

He fidgets with embarrassment at the steering wheel.

“I mean, I don’t mean my own paintings, of course. I’m just a bit of a happy amateur. I’m doing a course in watercolor painting in town. No, I mean paintings in general. Real paintings. Beautiful paintings.”

There’s something inside Britt-Marie that wants to say, “Your paintings are also beautiful,” but another more down-to-earth part of her answers in its place:

“We don’t have any paintings at home. Kent doesn’t like art.”

The policeman gives her a silent nod. They drive into town, which is actually also more like a large village than a proper town. Similar to Borg, just a bit more of it. Heading in the same direction, but not as quickly. Britt-Marie stops at a cash machine next to a tanning salon, which Britt-Marie doesn’t find so very hygienic because she’s read that solariums cause cancer, and you can hardly say cancer is hygienic.

It takes a bit of time to get her money out, because she’s so careful about hiding her code that she ends up pressing the wrong buttons. She is also hardly helped along by the fact that she still has a bamboo screen on top of her head.

But the policeman doesn’t tell her to hurry up. She realizes to her own surprise that she likes this. Kent always told her to hurry up, however quickly she was doing something. She gets back into the police car, and starts feeling she ought to say something sociable. So she takes a deep breath and points at the empty takeaway boxes and bags on the floor, and says:

“I don’t suppose they were offering a cooking course in town, oh no.”

The policeman lights up.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did a sushi-making course. Have you ever made sushi?”

“Certainly not. Kent doesn’t like foreign food.”

“True, true, well, there isn’t much cooking when you make sushi. Mainly just . . . cutting. And I haven’t done it so many times, actually, to be honest with you. I mean since I did the course. It’s not much fun cooking for yourself, if you understand what I mean?”

He smiles with embarrassment. She doesn’t smile at all.

“No,” she says.

They drive back into Borg. Finally the policeman seems to build up enough courage to bring up another subject:

“Well, anyway, it’s nice of you to take on the youngsters like you have. Borg is not an easy place to grow up in these days. The young people need someone, as you know, to see them.”

“I have not taken anyone on. They are certainly not my responsibility!” protests Britt-Marie.

“I don’t mean it like that, of course, I just mean they
like
you. The young people. I haven’t seen them liking anyone since their last coach died.”

“What do you mean, their ‘last coach’?”

“I, well, yes, I suppose I just mean they are very glad you moved here,” says the policeman, opting for “they” when really he would have preferred to say “we,” and then he asks:

“What did you do before you came here?”

Britt-Marie doesn’t answer. Instead she glares out of the window at the houses they are passing. Outside almost every one of them, a “For Sale” sign has been hammered into the lawn, so she states drily:

“There don’t seem to be many people living in Borg who want to stay in Borg.”

The corners of the policeman’s mouth do what the corners of mouths do when trying to overcome wistfulness.

“The financial crisis hit hard here, after the trucking company
laid off all the drivers. Those who have signs up are the ones who still have hopes of selling. The others have given up. Young people escape to the cities, and only the oldies like us stay on, because we’re the only ones who still have jobs.”

“The financial crisis is over. My husband told me that, and he’s an entrepreneur,” Britt-Marie informs him, keeping both her hair and the white mark on her ring finger well hidden under the bamboo screen. He looks away, awkwardly, while she firmly stares out of her window at a community in which even those who live there would rather not.

“And you’re also keen on soccer, I understand,” she says at last.

“I was once told that ‘You love soccer because it’s instinctive. If a ball comes rolling down the street you give it a punt. You love it for the same reason that you fall in love. Because you don’t know how to avoid it.’ ” The policeman smiles, slightly embarrassed.