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

There’s a policeman standing among them. He’s small and chubby and has a head of hair like a lawn the day after an impromptu barbecue.

“What have you done now?” Britt-Marie hisses at Vega.

The policeman looks ambivalent. The woman who stands in front of him is very different to the one the children described. Fussy, yes, and bossy, clearly, but something else as well. Determined, immaculately neat, and somehow… unique. He stares dumbly for a moment while he tries to think of something to say to her, but in the end decides the most civic thing he can do is to hold out a big glass jar towards Britt-Marie.

“My name is Sven. I just wanted to welcome you to Borg. This is jam.”

Britt-Marie looks at the jam jar. Vega looks at Sven. At a loss, Sven scratches himself on various parts of his police uniform.

“Blueberry jam. I made it myself. I did a course. In town.”

Britt-Marie gives him a careful once-over from top to bottom and back again. She stops in both directions when she comes to the uniform shirt, which is tight over his stomach.

“I don’t have a jersey in your size,” she informs him.

Sven blushes.

“No, no, no, of course, that’s not what I meant. I want… just welcome to Borg, just that. That’s all I wanted to say.”

He presses the jam jar into Vega’s hands and totters away from the threshold into the parking area, heading towards the pizzeria. Vega looks at the jam jar. Omar looks at Britt-Marie’s bare ring finger and grins.

“Are you married?” he asks.

Britt-Marie is shocked at herself when she notices how quickly she blurts out:

“I’m divorced.”

It’s the first time she’s said it out loud. Omar’s grin widens as he nods at Sven.

“Sven is free, just so you know!”

Britt-Marie hears the other children tittering. She presses the jerseys into Omar’s arms, snatches the jam jar from Vega, and disappears into the gloom of the recreation center. About half a dozen children remain on the threshold, rolling their eyes.

That’s how it all begins.

Soccer is a curious game, because it doesn’t ask to be loved. It demands it.

Britt-Marie wanders about inside the recreation center like a confounded spirit whose grave someone has opened in order to start a discotheque.

The children sit on the sofa, wearing the white jerseys and drinking soft drinks. Britt-Marie has obviously ensured that they are sitting on towels, because she doesn’t have enough baking soda to clean all the children. It goes without saying that they have coasters under their soft drinks. Admittedly there weren’t any proper coasters, so Britt-Marie has used two pieces of toilet paper folded over. Necessity has no rule, but even necessity has to understand that you can’t just put a soft-drink can on the table.

She also puts glasses in front of the children. One of them, the one that Britt-Marie would obviously never refer to as “overweight” but who looks as if he’s had quite a few soft drinks belonging to other children, tells her cheerfully that he’d “rather just drink straight from the can.”

“You certainly won’t, here we drink from glasses,” Britt-Marie interjects with uncompromising articulation.

“Why?”

“Because we’re not animals.”

The boy looks at his lemonade can, thinks about it, and then asks:

“What animal apart from human beings can drink from a can?”

Britt-Marie doesn’t answer. Instead she picks up the remote controls from the floor and puts them on the table. As soon as she’s done it she bounces back in terror when the until-now timid boys on the sofa all roar “Nooo!” as if she’s flung the remote controls in their faces.

“No remotes on the table!” hisses the lemonade boy fearfully.

“That’s the worst jinx! We’ll lose if you do that!” yells Omar and runs up to throw them back on the floor.

“What do you mean, ‘we’ll lose’?” asks Britt-Marie, as if he’s taken leave of his senses.

Omar points at the grown men on the TV, who quite clearly do not even know he exists.

“We will!” he repeats with conviction, as if this somehow explains anything.

Britt-Marie notes that he’s wearing his soccer jersey back to front.

“I don’t appreciate yelling indoors. I also don’t appreciate the wearing of clothes back to front like gangsters,” she points out, picking up the remotes from the floor.

“We’ll lose if we wear our shirts the right way around!”

Britt-Marie doesn’t even know how to respond to such nonsense, so she takes the remote controls and the children’s muddy clothes into the laundry. When she turns around after starting the washing machine, the ginger-haired boy is standing in front of her. He looks embarrassed. Britt-Marie cups one hand into the other and doesn’t look ready for more conversation.

“They’re superstitious, everything has to be the same as the last time we won,” says the boy, at the same time explanatory and defensive. He suddenly looks slightly nervous.

“I’m the one who shot the soccer ball at your head yesterday. I didn’t do it on purpose. I’m pants at aiming. I hope it didn’t ruin your hair,” he says. “Your hair is… nice,” he adds with a smile, then turns to go back to the sofa.

Britt-Marie keeps her eyes on him and by and large doesn’t entirely dislike him. He sits on the far side against the wall behind the boy with black hair and the boy who’s had the most soft drinks, so that he’s out of sight.

“We call him Pirate,” says Vega.

She has popped up next to Britt-Marie. Apparently it’s what she does: pops up, all the time. Her jersey is slightly too big. Or her body too small, possibly.

“Pirate,” echoes Britt-Marie, in the way that Britt-Marie echoes when she has to drum up all the well-meaning feelings she’s capable of in order not to have to explain that Pirate is not much of a name for anyone except an actual pirate.

Vega points to the other two children on the sofa.

“And that’s Toad. And that’s Dino.”

And there goes the limit of Britt-Marie’s well-meaningness.

“For goodness’ sake, those aren’t even proper names!”

Vega doesn’t look as if she understands what this is supposed to mean.

“It’s because he’s a Somalian,” she says, pointing at one of the boys, as if this explains everything.

When Britt-Marie doesn’t look as if it does explain everything, Vega sighs in a very bored sort of way and explains:

“When Dino moved to Borg and Omar heard that he was a Somalian he thought it sounded like a ‘sommelier,’ you know one of those people who drink wine on the TV. So we called him ‘Wino.’ And it rhymes with ‘Dino.’ So now we just call him ‘Dino.’ ”

Britt-Marie stares at Vega as if Vega had just fallen asleep drunk in Britt-Marie’s bed.

“So your real names weren’t good enough, I suppose, were they?”

Vega doesn’t seem to comprehend the difference.

“He can’t have the same name as us, can he? Or we wouldn’t know who to pass to when we’re playing.”

Britt-Marie snorts hard through her nose, because that’s how Britt-Marie’s irritation comes steaming out when it grows too large inside her head.

“Surely the boy has a proper name,” she fumes.

Vega shrugs.

“He didn’t do much talking when he moved here, so we didn’t know what his name was, but he laughed when we called him Dino and we liked it when he laughed. So he kept the name.

“Toad we called Toad because he can burp so loud that it’s just sick. And Pirate we call Pirate because we… I don’t know, we just do.”