Fredrik Backman - Britt-Marie Was Here [Britt-Marie var här]

So while Ingrid would excel at everything out there in the world, Britt-Marie imagined herself being really good at things inside of it. Cleaning. Making things nice. Her sister noticed this. Noticed her. Britt-Marie did her hair every morning, and her sister never forgot to say, “Thanks, you did that really well, Britt!” while she turned her head in front of the mirror to a tune from one of her vinyl records. Britt-Marie never had records. You don’t need any when you have an older sister who truly sees you.

When there’s a bang on the door Britt-Marie jumps as if someone just drove an ax through it. Vega is standing outside, but without an ax. Worse still, she’s dripping mud and rain on the floor. Britt-Marie screams on the inside.

“Why don’t you turn on the lights?” asks Vega, squinting into the darkness.

“They don’t work, dear.”

“Have you tried changing the bulbs?” asks Vega with a frown, as if she has to totally control herself not to add “dear” at the end of her question.

Omar pops up next to her. He has mud in his nostrils. Inside his nostrils. Britt-Marie cannot get her head around how something like that could happen. Surely there’s such a thing as gravity.

“You need to buy lightbulbs. I have the baddest low-energy bulbs! Special price!” he says eagerly, producing a rucksack from somewhere.

Vega kicks him on the shin and looks at Britt-Marie with the strained diplomacy of the teenager.

“Can we watch the match here?” she asks.

“What… match?” asks Britt-Marie.

“ The match!” Vega replies, not entirely unlike how you’d say “ the Pope” if someone asked, “what Pope?”

Britt-Marie switches her hands around on her stomach, and then reclasps them together.

“The match in what?”

“Soccer!” Vega and Omar burst out.

“Ha,” mutters Britt-Marie and looks with revulsion at their muddy clothes. Not at the children, obviously. At their clothes. Britt-Marie is obviously not revolted by children.

“He always let us watch it here,” says Vega and points at the photo on the wall inside the door of the elderly man with the “Bank” jersey in his hands.

In another photo just next to it stands the same man in front of a truck, and he’s wearing a white jacket on which “Borg SC” is written on one of his breast pockets and “Coach” on the other. It could have done with a wash, Britt-Marie notes.

“I have not been informed about this. You’ll have to contact the man, in that case.”

The silence depletes the air between them of oxygen.

“He’s dead,” says Vega at long last, looking down at her shoes.

Britt-Marie looks at the man in the photo. Then at her hands.

“That’s… ha. Very sad to hear it. But I actually can’t be held responsible for it,” she says.

Vega peers at her with hate. Then shoves Omar in the side and hisses:

“Come on, Omar, let’s get out of here. Never bloody mind about her.”

She has already turned around and started walking away when Britt-Marie notices the other children, three of them, waiting a few feet away. All in their early teens. One with ginger hair, one with black, and another with high cholesterol. She senses the accusation in their eyes.

“Can I ask why you don’t watch the soccer in the pizzeria or the car workshop or whatever it is, if it’s so important?” asks Britt-Marie in a polite and not at all confrontational manner.

Omar kicks his ball across the parking area and says in a quiet voice:

“They drink in there. If they lose.”

“Ha. And if they win?”

“Then they drink even more. So he always let us watch in here.”

“And I suppose in these parts you wouldn’t have homes of your own to go to, with televisions in them? Would you?”

“There isn’t space for the whole team at anyone’s house,” snaps Vega suddenly, “and besides, we watch the matches together. Like a team.”

Britt-Marie brushes some dust off her skirt.

“I was under the impression that you didn’t have a team anymore.”

“We have a team!” roars Vega and stamps back towards Britt-Marie.

“We’re here, aren’t we? We’re here! So we are a team! Even if they take our bloody pitch and our bloody club and our trainer has a bloody heart attack and goes and bloody dies on us we’re a team!”

Britt-Marie is practically shaking as the child’s furious eyes focus on her. This is certainly no suitable way for a human being to express herself. But tears are now running down Vega’s cheeks, and Britt-Marie can’t properly determine whether the child is going to give her a hug or a wallop.

Britt-Marie looks as if she would find either alternative similarly threatening.

“I have to ask you to wait here,” she says in a panic, and closes the door.

That’s how it all happens before everything begins in earnest.

Britt-Marie stands inside the door, breathing in the smell of wet potting soil and baking soda. She remembers the smell of alcohol and the sound of Kent’s soccer matches. He never went onto the balcony, so the balcony belonged to Britt-Marie and no one else, which was something quite unique. She always lied and said she had bought the plants, because she knew he’d say something horrible if she told him she’d found them in the garbage room and sometimes in the street, left behind by some neighbors when they moved away. Plants reminded her of Ingrid, because Ingrid loved things that were alive. And for this reason Britt-Marie repeatedly saved homeless plants, to give her the strength to remember a sister whose life she was not even able to save once. You couldn’t explain things like this to Kent.

Kent doesn’t believe in death, he believes in evolution. “That’s evolution,” he said, nodding approvingly, on one occasion when he was watching a nature program in which a lion killed an injured zebra: “It’s sorting out the one that’s weak, right? It’s about the survival of the species, you have to get that. If you’re not the best from the start, you have to accept the consequences and leave space for someone stronger, right?”

You can’t discuss balcony plants with a person like that.

Or the feeling of missing someone.

Britt-Marie’s fingertips are trembling slightly when she picks up the cell phone.

The girl from the unemployment office answers on the third attempt.

“Hello?” says the girl in a panting voice.

“Is that how you answer the phone? Out of breath?”

“Britt-Marie? I’m at the gym!”

“That must be very nice for you.”

“Has something happened?”

“There are some children here. They say they want to see some sort of match here.”

“Oh yeah, the match! I’m going to watch it as well!”

“I wasn’t notified that my range of duties included taking care of children….”

The girl at the other end of the line groans in what is, to be honest, quite an uncalled-for way.

“Britt-Marie, sorry, but I’m not supposed to talk on the phone in the gym.”

Then she exclaims, without a thought:

“But… you know… it’s a good thing, isn’t it? If the children are there watching the soccer and you drop dead, they’ll know all about it!”

Britt-Marie laughs curtly. Then there’s a silence for a very, very long time.

The girl inhales grimly, and there’s a sound of a jogging machine stopping.

“Okay, sorry Britt-Marie, I was joking. It was a silly thing for me to say. I didn’t mean it that way… hello?”

Britt-Marie has already hung up. She opens the door half a minute later with the newly washed soccer jerseys neatly folded into a pile in her arms.

“But you’re not coming in with those muddy clothes, I have just mopped the floors!” she says to the children before she stops herself.