Britt-Marie Was Here (24 page)

Bank stops abruptly with her foot on the ball. Points with her stick at Omar and mutters:

“At least I know what a dummy shot is. And even if I’m almost blind I’d bet quite a lot of money you’re standing in dog pee right now. So maybe we could agree that at least I know more about soccer than you do?”

Vega stands at the edge of the wee pool, fascinated by all this.

“How did you teach the dog to do that?”

Bank whistles for the dog. Scratches its nose. Opens her jacket pocket and lets it have what’s inside.

“The dog knows lots of tricks. I had it before I went blind. I know how to train things.”

Britt-Marie is already on her way to the recreation center to fetch baking soda.

When she comes back to the parking area, the children are playing soccer so you can hear it. It has to be experienced before you can understand it, the difference between silent and nonsilent soccer. Britt-Marie stops in the darkness and listens. Every time one of the children gets the ball, their teammates are shouting: “Here! I’m here!”

“If you can be heard then you exist,” mutters hungover Bank, massaging her temples.

The children play. Call out. Explain where they are. Britt-Marie squeezes her container of baking soda until it has dents in it.

“I’m here,” she whispers, wishing that Sven was here so she could tell him.

It’s a remarkable club. A remarkable game.

They part ways at the end of the training session. Toad goes back with his dad in the truck, Sami picks up Vega, Omar, and Dino. Max wanders home on his own, along the road. Ben is met by his mother. She waves at Britt-Marie and Britt-Marie waves back. Bank doesn’t say a word on the way home and Britt-Marie feels it’s inappropriate
to challenge destiny. Above all she does not believe it is appropriate to challenge a stick that has been both in the mud and inside at least one person’s mouth this evening. So she makes do with silence.

Back at the house, Bank opens the cellophane around the beer and drinks it straight from the bottle. Britt-Marie goes and fetches a glass and a coaster.

“Enough’s enough, actually,” she says firmly to Bank.

“You’re a bloody nag-bag, did anyone ever tell you that?”

“Many times,” says Britt-Marie and, depending on what sort of system you are using, you could say that Britt-Marie finds her second real girlfriend tonight.

On her way to the stairs, she changes her mind, turns around, and asks:

“You said your father supports Tottenham. If it’s not too much trouble, what does that mean?”

Bank drinks her beer from the glass. Slumps in her chair. The dog lays its head in her lap.

“If you support Tottenham you always give more love than you get back,” she says.

Britt-Marie cups her uninjured hand over the bandage on the other. There’s certainly an awful lot of unnecessary complication about liking soccer.

“I assume what you mean by that is that it’s a bad team.”

The corners of Bank’s mouth bounce up.

“Tottenham is the worst kind of bad team, because they’re almost good. They always promise that they’re going to be fantastic. They make you hope. So you go on loving them and they carry on finding more and more innovative ways of disappointing you.”

Britt-Marie nods as if this sounded reasonable. Bank stands up and states:

“In that sense his daughter was always like his favorite team.”

She puts the empty bottle on the kitchen counter and, without relying on the stick, walks past Britt-Marie into the living room.

“The beer was nice. Thanks.”

Britt-Marie sits on the edge of her bed for hours that evening. She stands on the balcony, waiting for a police car. Then back to the bed. She doesn’t cry, isn’t despondent; in fact it’s almost the other way around. She’s almost eager. Just doesn’t know what to do with herself. Like a sort of restlessness. The windows are polished, the floors have been scoured, and the balcony furniture wiped down. She’s poured baking soda into the flowerpots and onto the mattress. She rubs the fingers of her uninjured hand across the bandages that cover the white mark that used to be covered by the wedding ring. So in a way she did achieve the desired result of her visit to the tanning salon, even if not in the exact way she had thought. Nothing has gone as she thought it would since she came to Borg.

For the first time since she got here, she accepts it may not be something altogether bad.

When she hears the knock at the front door she has been hoping for it for so long that at first she thinks it must be a figment of her imagination. But then there’s another knock, and Britt-Marie jumps out of bed and stumbles down the stairs like a complete lunatic. It’s obviously not at all like her, highly uncivilized in every possible way. She has not run down the stairs like this since she was a teenager, when your heart reaches the front door before your feet. For a moment she stops and summons all the common sense at her disposal, in order to fix her hair and adjust all the invisible creases in her skirt.

“Sven! I . . .” she has time to say, holding on to the door handle.

Then she just stands there. Trying, but failing, to breathe. She feels her legs giving way beneath her.

“Hello, my darling,” says Kent.

S
weet boys don’t get to kiss pretty girls,” Britt-Marie’s mother sometimes used to say. Even though what she really meant was that pretty girls should not kiss sweet boys, because when dealing with sweet boys there’s absolutely no certainty of being able to look forward to a reliable income.

“We have to pray that Britt-Marie finds a man who can support her, otherwise she’ll have to live in the gutter, because she has absolutely no talents of her own,” Britt-Marie used to hear her mother say into the telephone. “I got her for my sins,” she also used to say, into the telephone if she was drunk, or pointedly at Britt-Marie after tippling sherry.

It’s impossible to be good enough for a parent after losing a sister who, in all important respects, was a better version of yourself. Britt-Marie did try, nonetheless. But with a father who came home later and later and, in the end, not at all, she did not have very many options. Instead, Britt-Marie learned not to have any expectations of her own, and to put up with her mother’s skepticism about her prospects.

Alf and Kent lived on the same floor, and they fought, as brothers tend to do. Sooner or later they both wanted the same girl. Whether they wanted Britt-Marie because they really did want her, or because brothers always want what their brother wants, she was never quite sure.
If Ingrid had been there they would have courted her instead, Britt-Marie had no illusions about that. You tend not to if you’re used to living in someone’s shadow. But the boys were persistent, competed, fought for her attention in very different ways.

One of the brothers was too insensitive to her, always going on about how much money he was going to make; the other was too kind. Britt-Marie didn’t want to disappoint her mother, so she chose Alf and ruled out Kent.

Kent stood in the stairwell with flowers in his hands and his eyes closed when she walked off with his brother. By the time she came back, he had gone.

She was only with Alf for a short length of time. He was weary, she remembers. Already bored. Like a victor after the adrenaline has worn off. One morning he left her to go and do his military service and was gone for months.

The morning that he was due back, Britt-Marie spent hours in front of the mirror for the first time in her life and tried on a new dress. Her mother gave her a look, and said:

“I see you’re trying to make yourself look cheap. Well, mission accomplished.” Britt-Marie tried to explain that this was modern. Her mother told her not to raise her voice, it made her sound very ordinary. Britt-Marie tried to gently explain that she wanted to surprise Alf at the train station, and her mother snorted: “Oh, he’ll be surprised all right.” She was right.

Britt-Marie turned up in an old dress and with sweaty hands and her heart clattering like horse’s hooves on cobblestones. Obviously she had heard the stories of how soldiers have a girl in every town, she had just never thought this would be true of Alf. At least she’d never thought he’d have two girls in the same town.

She’d been sitting all night in the kitchen weeping into a towel when her mother finally got out of bed and scolded her for making too much noise. Britt-Marie told her about the other girl she’d seen Alf with. “Ha, what did you expect when you picked a man like that?” hissed her mother before going back to bed. She got up later than usual the following day. In the end she didn’t get up at all. Britt-Marie found a job as a waitress instead of getting herself an education, so she could take care of things at home. Brought dinner into the bedroom for her mother, who had stopped talking, yet was capable now and then of sitting up in the bed and saying, “Ha, working as a waitress—it must be nice for you not to feel you owe more to your parents after all the advantages we’ve given you. I don’t suppose any education was good enough for you, you obviously prefer to stay here at home and live off my savings instead.”

The flat grew increasingly quiet. And finally absolutely silent. Britt-Marie polished the windows and waited for something new to begin.

One day, Kent was just standing there on the landing. The day after her mother’s funeral. He spoke of his divorce and his children.

Britt-Marie had been hoping for so long that she thought this must be a figment of her imagination, and when he smiled at her it felt like sunlight on her skin. She made his dreams her own. His life became her life. She was good at this, and people want to do the things they’re good at. People want someone to know they are there.

Now Kent stands in her doorway in Borg, holding flowers. He smiles. Sunlight on her skin. It’s hard not to want to go back to your normal life once you know how difficult it is to start again.

“Were you waiting for someone?” asks Kent insecurely, and once again he is like that boy on the landing.

Britt-Marie shakes her head in shock. He smiles.

“I got your postcard. And I . . . well . . . the accountant checked your cash withdrawals,” he says almost with embarrassment and gestures at the road towards town.