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

But it just so happened that the girl at the unemployment office, who very much against her will ate salmon with Britt-Marie the day before yesterday, promised Britt-Marie that she would really try to find her a job. The next morning at 9:02, when Britt-Marie knocked on the girl’s door to learn how this was going, the girl tapped her computer for a while then eventually said: “There is one job. But it’s in the middle of nowhere and so badly paid that if you’re receiving unemployment benefits you’ll probably lose money on it.”

“I don’t get any benefits ,” said Britt-Marie, as if they were a disease.

The girl sighed again and tried to say something about “retraining courses” and “measures” that Britt-Marie might be eligible for, but Britt-Marie made it clear that she certainly wouldn’t welcome any of those measures.

“Please, Britt-Marie, this is just a job for three weeks, it’s not really the kind of thing you want to be applying for at your… age… plus you’d have to move all the way to this place….”

Now Britt-Marie is in Borg and her car has blown up. It’s hardly the best possible first day in her new job, one might say. She calls the girl back.

“Where can I expect to find the cleaning equipment?” asks Britt-Marie.

“What?” asks the girl.

“You said I should call if I had any questions about the job.”

The girl mutters something unintelligible, her voice sounding as if it’s coming from inside a tin can.

“Now you have to listen to me, my dear. I fully intend to find the post office you have informed me about and pick up the keys to the recreation center, but I am not putting one foot inside the recreation center until you inform me of the whereabouts of the cleaning equip—!” Once again she is interrupted by the ball rolling across the parking area. Britt-Marie dislikes this. It’s nothing personal, she hasn’t decided to pick on this ball in particular. It’s just that she just dislikes all soccer balls. Entirely without prejudice.

The ball is being pursued by two children. They are exceedingly dirty, all three of them if you include the ball.

The children’s jeans are all torn down their thighs. They catch up with the ball, kick it back in the opposite direction, and once again disappear behind the recreation center. One of them loses his balance and steadies himself by putting his hand against the window, where he leaves a black handprint.

“What’s happening?” asks the girl.

“Shouldn’t those children be at school?” Britt-Marie exclaims, reminding herself to put an extra exclamation mark after “Buy Faxin!” on her list. If this place even has a supermarket.

“What?” says the girl.

“My dear girl, you have to stop saying ‘what?’ all the time, it makes you sound so untalented.”

“What?”

“There are children here!”

“Okay, but please, Britt-Marie, I don’t know anything about Borg! I’ve never been there! And I’m not hearing you — I think you… are you sure you’re not holding the telephone upside down?”

Britt-Marie gives the telephone a scrutinizing look. Turns it around.

“Ha,” she says into the microphone, as if the fault lay with the person at the other end of the line.

“Okay, I can hear you at last,” says the girl encouragingly.

“I’ve never used this telephone. There are actually people who have other things to do than spending all day talking into their telephones, you understand.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m just the same when I have a new telephone!”

“I’m certainly not worrying! And this is absolutely not a new telephone, it’s five years old,” Britt-Marie corrects her. “I’ve never needed one before. I’ve had things to get on with, you see. I don’t call anyone except Kent, and I call him on the home telephone, like a civilized person.”

“But what if you’re out?” asks the girl, instinctually unable to process what the world looked like before one could get hold of anyone, at anytime of the day.

“My dear girl,” she explains patiently, “if I’m out, I’m with Kent.”

Britt-Marie was probably intending to say something else, but that’s the point at which she sees the rat, more or less as big as a normal-sized flowerpot, scampering across patches of ice in the parking area. Looking back, Britt-Marie is of the firm opinion that she wanted to scream very loudly. But unfortunately she did not have time for that, because everything abruptly went black and Britt-Marie’s body lay unconscious on the ground.

Britt-Marie’s first contact with soccer in Borg is when the soccer ball hits her very hard on the head.

Britt-Marie wakes up on a floor. Somebody is leaning over her, saying something, but Britt-Marie’s first thoughts are about the floor. She’s worried that it may be dirty, and that people might think she’s dead. These things happen all the time, people falling over and dying. It would be horrific, thinks Britt-Marie. To die on a dirty floor. What would people think?

“Hello, are you, what’s-it-called? Deceased?” Somebody asks, but Britt-Marie keeps focusing on the floor.

“Hello, lady? Are you, you know, dead?” Somebody repeats and makes a little whistling sound.

Britt-Marie dislikes whistling, and she has a headache.

The floor smells of pizza. It would be awful to die with a headache while smelling of pizza.

She’s not at all keen on pizza, because Kent smelled so much of pizza when he came home late from his meetings with Germany. Britt-Marie remembers all his smells. Most of all the smell of the hospital room. It was loaded with bouquets (it is common practice to receive flowers when you have a heart attack) but Britt-Marie can still remember that smell of perfume and pizza from the shirt by the side of his bed.

He was sleeping, snoring slightly. She held his hand a last time, without waking him. Then she folded up the shirt and put it in her handbag. When she came home she cleaned the collar with baking soda and vinegar and washed it twice before she hung it up. Then she polished the windows with Faxin and freshened up the mattress and brought in the balcony boxes and packed her bag and turned on her cell phone for the first time in her life. For the first time in their life together. She thought the children might call and ask how things were with Kent. They didn’t. They both sent a single text message.

There was a time just after their teenage years when they still promised to come to visit at Christmas. Then they started pretending to have reasons for canceling. After a year or two they stopped pretending to have reasons for canceling. In the end they stopped pretending that they were coming at all. That’s how life went.

Britt-Marie has always liked the theater, because she enjoys the way the actors get applauded at the end for their pretense. Kent’s heart attack and the voice of the young, beautiful thing meant there’d be no applause for her. You can’t keep pretending someone doesn’t exist when she speaks to you on the telephone. So Britt-Marie left the hospital room with a shirt smelling of perfume and a broken heart.

You don’t get any flowers for that.

“But, shit, are you… like… dead?” Somebody asks impatiently.

Britt-Marie finds it extremely impolite for Somebody to interrupt her in the midst of dying. Especially with such terrible language. There are certainly a good number of alternatives to “shit,” if you have a particular need to express such a feeling. She looks up at this Somebody standing over her, looking down.

“May I ask where I am?” asks Britt-Marie, in confusion.