Britt-Marie Was Here (29 page)

Britt-Marie runs forward and stares at them. They stare up at her, suddenly silent and well aware of the trouble they have caused.

Kent tries to get on his feet first.

“Darling, you can see for yourself, can’t you? The bloke is a complete idiot!”

“He started it!” Sven protests at once, crawling to his feet next to Kent.

And that’s the point when Britt-Marie has had enough. Enough of the whole thing. She’s been shouted at and pushed and threatened with pistols and now she has to mop the floor one more time because of splinters of wood all over the pizzeria. Enough is enough.

They don’t hear her the first, second, or third time. But then she fills her lungs with air and says as emphatically as she can:

“I should like to ask you to leave.”

When they still don’t listen to her she does something she hasn’t done in twenty years, not since one of her flowers was blown off the balcony. She yells.

“Get out of here! The pair of you!”

The pizzeria grows more silent than it could possibly have been even if a new pistol-wielding robber had stepped inside. Kent and Sven are left standing with their mouths wide open, making noises that would probably have been words if they had closed their mouths between the syllables. Britt-Marie digs her heels even deeper into the floor and points at the broken door.

“Get out. At once.”

“But for God’s sake, darl—” Kent begins to say, but Britt-Marie chops her bandaged hand through the air in what could probably have qualified as a new form of martial arts and abruptly silences him.

“You might have asked how I hurt my hand, Kent. You might have asked, because then I might have believed that you actually cared.”

“I thought, oh, come on now, darling, I thought you’d got your
hand caught in the dishwasher or some shit like that . . . you know how it is. I didn’t think it was anything seri—”

“Because you didn’t ask!”

“But . . . darling . . . don’t get all piss—” stammers Kent.

Sven sticks out his chest towards him.

“Exactly! Exactly! Get out of here, you bloody yuppie, Britt-Marie doesn’t want you here! Don’t you underst—” he starts saying, brimming with self-confidence.

But Britt-Marie’s hand cleaves the air in front of him so that he staggers back at the draft.

“And you, Sven! Don’t tell me what I feel! You don’t know me! Not even I know myself, quite clearly, because this is certainly not normal behavior for me!”

Somewhere on the premises Somebody is trying not to laugh. Vega and Omar look as if they’d like to keep notes so they never forget any of the details. Britt-Marie collects herself and adjusts her hair and brushes some wooden splinters from her skirt and then places her bandaged hand neatly in the other, and clarifies in an altogether well-meaning, considerate way:

“Now I’m going to clean in here. Good afternoon to you both.”

The bell above the door tinkles dolefully and halfheartedly behind Kent and Sven. They stay outside for a good while yelling, “See what you’ve done?” at each other. Then everything goes silent.

Britt-Marie starts cleaning.

Somebody and the children hide in the kitchen until she has finished. They daren’t even laugh.

A
dmittedly it is not the two policemen’s fault, it really isn’t.

They’ve come to Borg from town and are just trying to do their jobs as best they can.

But Britt-Marie is possibly just slightly irascible. That is how you get when people shoot at you.

“We can appreciate that you’re in shock, but we need our questions answered,” one of the policemen tries to explain.

“I see you’re not at all concerned about stomping in with muddy shoes on a newly mopped floor, I see that. It must be very nice for you.”

“We’ve already said we’re sorry about that. Really sorry. But as we’ve already explained now several times we have to question all the witnesses on the scene,” the other policeman tries to say.

“My list has been destroyed.”

“What do you mean?”

“You asked for my testimony. My list is destroyed. None of this was on my list when I left home this morning, so now my entire list is in disarray.”

“That’s not quite what we meant,” says the first policeman.

“Aha. So now my testimony is wrong as well, is it?”

“We need to know if you got a good look at the perpetrator,” the other policeman attempts to say.

“I should like to inform you that I have perfectly good vision. I’ve spoken to my optometrist about it. He’s an excellent optician, you should understand. Very well brought up. He doesn’t walk around indoors with muddy shoes.”

The police emit synchronized sighs. Britt-Marie exhales very pointedly back.

“It would be a great help to us if you could describe the perpetrator,” one of the policemen asks.

“Of course I can do that,” hisses Britt-Marie.

“And how would you describe him?”

“He had a pistol!”

“But you really don’t remember anything else? Any distinguishing characteristics?”

“Isn’t a pistol a distinguishing characteristic?” wonders Britt-Marie.

This is the moment when the police decide to go back into town.

Britt-Marie mops the floor again. So hard that in the end Somebody has to stop her.

“Careful with mop, Britt-Marie, expensive mop for God’s sake!” She grins.

Britt-Marie does not think this is the best of days to roll about in your wheelchair, grinning at people, she certainly doesn’t. But Somebody makes sure she drinks her beer and eats a bit of pizza, and then she hands over her car keys.

“I was under the distinct impression that the car had not been repaired yet!” Britt-Marie bursts out.

Somebody shrugs, ashamed of herself.

“Ah, you know. Been ready many days, huh, but . . . you know.”

“No. I absolutely don’t know at all.”

Somebody guiltily rubs her hands in her lap.

“The car is ready many days. But if Britt has no car: can’t drive off and leave Borg, huh?”

“So you pulled the wool over my eyes? You lied to my face?” Britt-Marie says in an injured tone of voice.

“Yes,” Somebody admits.

“Might I ask why you did that?”

Somebody shrugs. “I like you. You’re, what’s-it-called? A breath of fresh air! Borg is boring without Britt, huh?”

Britt-Marie doesn’t have a particularly good answer on hand for this, it has to be said. So Somebody fetches another beer and calls out, as if in passing:

“But Britt, you know, let me put question to you: how do you feel about blue car?”

“What do you mean by that?” pants Britt-Marie.

Then they spend a fairly lengthy amount of time on the soccer pitch, arguing about this, because Somebody is quite persistent about explaining that she could without any trouble respray Britt-Marie’s car the same color as the new blue door. It wouldn’t be any trouble at all. In fact, Somebody is almost a hundred percent sure that at some point she registered a paint-shop business with the local authority.

In the end Britt-Marie gets so worked up about this that she takes her notebook and tears out her list for the whole day, and starts one completely fresh. She has never done this in her whole life, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

She walks back through Borg with Vega and Omar, because Britt-Marie has by this point consumed half a can of beer, meaning it’s quite out of the question for her to get behind the wheel. Especially not in a car with a blue door. What would people think? Omar stays absolutely silent until they get home, which is more minutes of silence than Britt-Marie has ever heard from him since they first got to know each other.

Vega keeps calling Sami without getting an answer. Britt-Marie tries to convince her that Sami may not have heard news of the robbery, but Vega tells her that this is Borg. Everyone knows everything about everyone in Borg. So Sami knows and Sami isn’t answering because he’s busy tracking Psycho down and killing him.

Under these circumstances, Britt-Marie can’t bring herself to leave the children on their own, so she goes up to the flat with them and starts making dinner. They have it at exactly six o’clock. The children eat staring down at their plates, as children do who have learned to expect the worst. When Britt-Marie’s telephone rings the first time they bounce up, but it’s only Kent so Britt-Marie doesn’t answer. When Sven calls a minute later she doesn’t answer either, and when the girl from the unemployment office calls three times in a row she switches off the telephone.

Vega calls Sami again. Gets no answer. That’s when she starts washing up, without anyone having asked her, and then Britt-Marie realizes the situation is really serious.

“I’m sure nothing serious has happened,” says Britt-Marie.

“The hell you know about it?” Vega says.

Omar mumbles from the table:

“Sami is never late for dinner. He’s a dinner-Nazi.”

Then he picks up his plate in the dishwasher. Voluntarily. Which is the point at which Britt-Marie understands something extremely drastic has to be done, so she concentrates on breathing in and out half a dozen times, and then she hugs the children hard. When they burst into tears she does the same.

When the doorbell finally rings they’re stumbling over one another to get there. None of them gives a second thought to the fact that if this was Sami coming back he would just have opened the door
with his key, so when they tug at the door handle only to find the white dog sitting outside, Omar feels disappointed, Vega is angry, and Britt-Marie anxious. Because these seem to be their most basic emotions in life.

“You can’t come in with dirty paws,” Britt-Marie informs the dog.

The dog glances at its paws, and seems overwhelmed by a lack of self-confidence.

Next to it stands Bank, and next to her stand Max, Ben, Dino, and Toad.

Bank points her stick, gently poking Britt-Marie in the stomach.

“Hi there, Rambo!”

“How dare you!” protests Britt-Marie instinctively.

“You scared off the robber,” explains Toad. “Like Rambo. That means you’re an ice-cool motherfucker!”

Britt-Marie patiently puts her bandaged hand in the other and turns her eyes to Ben. He smiles and nods encouragingly.

“And that’s, like, good.”

Britt-Marie absorbs this information and then her eyes wander all the way back to Bank.

“Ha. Very nice of you to say so.”

“Don’t mention it,” mutters Bank impatiently and makes a gesture at her wrist, as if she was wearing a watch: “What about training?”

“What training?” asks Britt-Marie.

“The training!” answers Max, who’s wearing his national hockey team jersey and dancing up and down as if he needs the bathroom.

Britt-Marie uncomfortably rocks back and forth from her heels to her toes.

“I assumed it was self-evident that it had been canceled. In view of the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

“The robbery, my dear.”

Max looks as if he’s working his brain hard to bring clarity to what these two separate things could feasibly have to do with each other. Then he comes to the only possible logical conclusion: “Did the robber nick the ball?”

“I’m sorry?”

“If he didn’t nick the ball we can still play, can’t we?”