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

“You repair cars, do you?”

Somebody shrugs.

“They shut down the car workshop, huh. We do what we can. But never bloody mind that now! I show you the recreation center, yeah?”

She holds up the envelope with the keys. Britt-Marie takes it, looks at Somebody’s bottle of vodka, and keeps a firm grip on her handbag.

Then she shakes her head.

“That’s perfectly all right, thank you. I don’t want to create any bother.”

“No bother for me,” says Somebody and nonchalantly rolls her wheelchair back and forth.

Britt-Marie smiles superbly.

“I wasn’t alluding to your bother.”

Then she briskly turns around and marches off across the graveled courtyard, in case Somebody gets the idea of trying to follow her. She lifts out her bags and flowerboxes from the car and drags them over to the recreation center. Unlocks the door and steps inside, and locks it behind her. Not that she dislikes this Somebody person. Not at all.

It’s just that the smell of vodka reminds her of Kent.

She looks around. The wall is thumping from the outside, and there are rat tracks in the dust on the floor. So Britt-Marie does what she always does when facing emergencies in life: she cleans. She polishes the windows with a rag dipped in baking soda and wipes them with newspaper dampened with vinegar. It’s almost as effective as Faxin, but doesn’t quite feel as good. She wipes the kitchen sink with baking soda and water and then mops all the floors, then mixes baking soda and lemon juice to clean the tiles and taps in the bathroom, and then mixes baking soda and toothpaste to polish the sink. Then she sprinkles baking soda over her balcony boxes, otherwise there’ll be snails.

The balcony boxes may look as if they only contain soil, but underneath there are flowers waiting for spring. The winter requires whoever is doing the watering to have a bit of faith, in order to believe that what looks empty has every potential. Britt-Marie no longer knows whether she has faith or just hope. Maybe neither.

The wallpaper of the recreation center looks indifferently at her. It’s covered in photos of people and soccer balls.

Everywhere, soccer balls. Every time Britt-Marie glimpses another one from the corner of her eye, she rubs things even more aggressively with her sponge. She keeps cleaning until the thumping against the wall stops and the children and the soccer ball have gone home. Only once the sun has gone down does Britt-Marie realize that the lights inside only work in the kitchen. So she stays in there, stranded on a little island of artificial, fluorescent light, in a soon-to-be-closed-down recreation center.

The kitchen is almost completely taken up by a dish rack, a refrigerator, and two wooden stools. She opens the refrigerator to find it empty apart from a packet of coffee. She curses herself for not bringing any vanilla extract. If you mix vanilla extract with baking soda, the refrigerator smells fresh.

She stands hesitantly in front of the coffee percolator. It looks modern. She hasn’t made coffee in many years, because Kent makes very good coffee, and Britt-Marie always finds it’s best to wait for him. But this percolator has an illuminated button, which strikes Britt-Marie as one of the most marvelous things she has seen in years, so she tries to open the lid where she assumes the coffee should be spooned in. It’s stuck. The button starts blinking angrily.

Britt-Marie feels deeply mortified by this. She tugs at the lid in frustration. The blinking intensifies, upon which Britt-Marie tugs at it with such insistence that the whole machine is knocked over. The lid snaps open and a mess of coffee grounds and water sprays all over Britt-Marie’s jacket.

They say people change when they go away, which is why Britt-Marie has always loathed traveling. She doesn’t want change.

So it must be on account of the traveling, she decides afterwards, that she now loses her self-possession as never before. Unless you count the time Kent walked across the parquet floor in his golf shoes soon after they were married.

She picks up the mop and starts beating the coffee machine with the handle as hard as she can. It blinks. Something smashes. It stops blinking. Britt-Marie keeps hitting it until her arms are trembling and her eyes can no longer make out the contours of the dish rack. Finally, out of breath, she fetches a towel from her handbag. Turns off the ceiling light in the kitchen. Sits down on one of the wooden stools in the darkness, and weeps into the towel.

She doesn’t want her tears to drip onto the floor. They could leave marks.

Britt-Marie stays awake all night. She’s used to that, as people are when they have lived their entire lives for someone else.

She sits in the dark, of course, otherwise what would people think if they walked by and saw the light left on as if there was some criminal inside?

But she doesn’t sleep, because she remembers the thick layer of dust on the floor of the recreation center before she started cleaning, and if she dies in her sleep she’s certainly not going to risk lying here until she starts smelling and gets all covered in dust. Sleeping on one of the sofas in the corner of the recreation center is not even worth thinking about, because they were so filthy that Britt-Marie had to wear double latex gloves when she covered them with baking soda. Maybe she could have slept in the car? Maybe, if she were an animal.

The girl at the unemployment office kept insisting that there was a hotel in the town twelve miles away, but Britt-Marie can’t even think of staying another night in a place where other people have made her bed. She knows that there are some people who do nothing else but dream of going away and experiencing something different, but Britt-Marie dreams of staying at home where everything is always the same. She wants to make her own bed.

Anytime she and Kent are staying at a hotel she always puts up the “Do Not Disturb” sign, and then makes the bed and cleans the room herself. It’s not because she judges people, not at all; it’s because she knows that the cleaning staff could very well be the sort of people who judge people, and Britt-Marie certainly doesn’t want to run the risk of the cleaning staff sitting in a meeting in the evening discussing the horrible state of Room 423.

Once, Kent made a mistake about the check-in time for the flight when they were going home after a hotel visit, although Kent still maintains that “those sods can’t even write the correct time on the sodding ticket,” and they had to run off in the middle of the night without even having time to take a shower. So, just before Britt-Marie rushed out of the door, she ran into the bathroom to turn on the shower for a few seconds so there would be water on the floor when the cleaning staff came, and they would therefore not come to the conclusion that the guests in Room 423 had set off wearing their own dirt.

Kent snorted at her and said she was always too bloody concerned about what people thought of her. Britt-Marie was screaming inside all the way to the airport. She had actually mainly been concerned about what people would think of Kent.

She doesn’t know when he stopped caring about what people thought of her.

She knows that once upon a time he did care. That was back in the days when he still looked at her as if he knew she was there. It’s difficult to know when love blooms; suddenly one day you wake up and it’s in full flower. It works the same way when it wilts — one day it is just too late. Love has a great deal in common with balcony plants in that way. Sometimes not even baking soda makes a difference.