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

So they keep cleaning until morning comes again. Although not even baking soda can help against this.

It’s a Sunday in January. While Liverpool are playing Stoke six hundred miles away, Sami is buried next to his mother, sleeping softly under a carpet of red flowers. Mourned by two siblings, missed by a whole community. Omar leaves a scarf in the churchyard.

Britt-Marie serves coffee in the pizzeria and makes sure each of the mourners has a coaster. Everyone in Borg is there. The graveled parking area has lit candles around its boundary. White jerseys have been neatly hung up on the wooden plank fence next to it. Some of them are new, and some so old and faded that they’ve turned gray. But they all remember.

Vega stands in the doorway, in a freshly ironed dress and with her hair combed. She receives people’s condolences as if they have a greater right to mourn than she does. Mechanically shakes their hands. Her eyes are empty, as if someone has turned off a switch inside her. Something is making a thumping noise outside in the parking area but no one listens to it. Britt-Marie tries to get Vega to eat, but Vega doesn’t even answer when spoken to. She allows herself to be led to the table and lowered into a chair, but her body reacts as if it’s sleeping. It turns so that she faces the wall, as though she wants to avoid any possible physical contact. The thumping gets louder.

Britt-Marie’s despair intensifies. People have different ways of experiencing powerlessness and grief, but for Britt-Marie it’s never so strong as when she’s unable to get someone to eat.

The mumbling voices from the crowded pizzeria grow into a hurricane in her ears, her resigned hand fumbles for Vega’s shoulder as if it were reaching over the edge of a precipice. But the shoulder moves away. Glides towards the wall. And the eyes flee inwards. The plate remains untouched.

When the thumping from the parking area gets even louder, as if trying to prove something, Britt-Marie turns angrily towards the door with her hands clenched so tightly that the bandage comes loose from her fingers. She’s just about to scream when she feels the girl’s body pushing past her, through the throng of people.

Max is standing outside, leaning on his crutches. He suspends himself from his armpits, his whole weight swinging through the air, and then swings his uninjured leg at the soccer ball, firing it at a tight angle so it flies first against the wall of the recreation center, then at the wooden fence where the white jerseys are hanging, then back at him. Du-dunk-dunk , it sounds like. Du-dunk-dunk. Du-dunk-dunk.

Du-dunk-dunk.

Like a heartbeat.

When Vega gets close enough he lets the ball roll past him without turning around. It rolls up to her, and stops against her feet. Her toes touch it through her shoes. She leans over it and runs her fingertips over the stitched leather.

Then she cries without measure.

Six hundred miles away, Liverpool win 5–3.

Omar and Dino are the first to throw themselves into the game with Vega. At first they are guarded, as if every movement is made in sorrow, but before long they are playing as if it’s just another evening. They play without memory, because they don’t know any other way of doing it. More children turn up, first Toad and Ben but soon others too. Britt-Marie doesn’t recognize every one of them, but they all have jeans that are ripped over their thighs. They play as if they live in Borg.

“Britt-Marie?” says Sven in a formal tone that she’s not used to.

He’s standing beside her with a very tall man. Really astonishingly tall. Britt-Marie doesn’t even know how one could manage to have fully functional lighting at home with him around.

“Ha?” she says.

Sven presents Dino’s uncle in English marred by a heavy accent, but Britt-Marie doesn’t criticize; she’s not the sort of person that criticizes.

“Hello,” says Britt-Marie, this being about the long and short of the conversation for her part.

It’s not that Britt-Marie can’t speak English. It’s just that she doesn’t know how to speak it without feeling like an utter idiot. She wouldn’t even know how to say “utter idiot” in English. As far as she’s concerned this illustrates her point very well.

The very tall man, who really is quite unreasonably tall, points at Dino and explains that they lived in three countries and seven cities before they came to Borg. Sven helpfully translates. Britt-Marie understands English perfectly well, but she lets him go on, fearing that she might otherwise be expected to say something. The tall man’s mouth judders up and down in a melancholy way when he says that small children don’t remember things, which is a blessing. But Dino was old enough to see and hear and remember. He remembers everything they had to flee from.

“He’s saying he still hardly says anything. Only with them…” Sven explains, pointing out of the window.

Britt-Marie clasps one hand in the other. The tall man does the same.

“Sami,” he says with a sort of music in the way he pronounces the name, as if he’s nursing every nuance of sound. Her eyelashes grow heavy.

“He says that Sami saw a boy walking on his own in the road. Vega and the others called out and asked him if he wanted to play, but he didn’t understand. So Sami rolled a ball over to him, and then he kicked it,” says Sven.

Britt-Marie looks at the tall man and her common sense prevents her from saying that once when she and Kent were staying at a hotel and someone had left a foreign newspaper behind, she almost solved a crossword in English entirely on her own.

“Thank you,” says the tall man.

“He wants to thank you for coaching the team. It meant a lo—”

Britt-Marie interrupts him, because she understands:

“I’m the one who should say thank you.”

Sven starts translating to the tall man, but he stops him because he also understands. He presses Britt-Marie’s hand.

She goes back into the pizzeria, with Sven following, and helps Somebody clear glasses and plates from the tables.

“It was a beautiful funeral,” says Sven, because that’s what you say.

“Very beautiful,” says Britt-Marie, because you have to say that as well.

He gets something out of his pocket and hands it to her. The keys to her car. His eyes flicker. Through the window they see Kent’s BMW pulling into the parking area.

“I assume you’ll be going home now, you and Kent,” says Sven, his eyes remote.

“It’s best that way,” says Britt-Marie, sucking in her cheeks, but then a few more words slip out of her in spite of it all: “Unless I’m needed here with… Vega and Omar…”

Sven looks up and crumples in the brief instant between the first question and the realization that what she’s asking is whether the children need her. Not whether he does.

“I… I, of course, of course, I have contacted the social services. They have sent a girl to Borg,” he says with a grim expression, as if he’s already forgotten that it was actually several nights earlier that he first brought the girl to the children.

“Of course,” she says.

“She’s… you’ll like her. I’ve worked with her many times before. She’s a good person. She wants what’s best for them, she’s not like… like you imagine the social services could be.”

Britt-Marie mops the sweat from her brow with a handkerchief, so he doesn’t notice that she’s also mopping her eyes.