Chapter 9 #2
“Can I ask why you don’t watch the soccer in the pizzeria or the car workshop or whatever it is, if it’s so important?” asks Britt-Marie in a polite and not at all confrontational manner.
Omar kicks his ball across the parking area and says in a quiet voice:
“They drink in there. If they lose.”
“Ha. And if they win?”
“Then they drink even more. So he always let us watch in here.”
“And I suppose in these parts you wouldn’t have homes of your own to go to, with televisions in them? Would you?”
“There isn’t space for the whole team at anyone’s house,” snaps Vega suddenly, “and besides, we watch the matches together. Like a team.”
Britt-Marie brushes some dust off her skirt.
“I was under the impression that you didn’t have a team anymore.”
“We have a team!” roars Vega and stamps back towards Britt-Marie.
“We’re here, aren’t we? We’re here! So we are a team! Even if they take our bloody pitch and our bloody club and our trainer has a bloody heart attack and goes and bloody dies on us we’re a team!”
Britt-Marie is practically shaking as the child’s furious eyes focus on her. This is certainly no suitable way for a human being to express herself. But tears are now running down Vega’s cheeks, and Britt-Marie can’t properly determine whether the child is going to give her a hug or a wallop.
Britt-Marie looks as if she would find either alternative similarly threatening.
“I have to ask you to wait here,” she says in a panic, and closes the door.
That’s how it all happens before everything begins in earnest.
Britt-Marie stands inside the door, breathing in the smell of wet potting soil and baking soda.
She remembers the smell of alcohol and the sound of Kent’s soccer matches.
He never went onto the balcony, so the balcony belonged to Britt-Marie and no one else, which was something quite unique.
She always lied and said she had bought the plants, because she knew he’d say something horrible if she told him she’d found them in the garbage room and sometimes in the street, left behind by some neighbors when they moved away.
Plants reminded her of Ingrid, because Ingrid loved things that were alive.
And for this reason Britt-Marie repeatedly saved homeless plants, to give her the strength to remember a sister whose life she was not even able to save once.
You couldn’t explain things like this to Kent.
Kent doesn’t believe in death, he believes in evolution.
“That’s evolution,” he said, nodding approvingly, on one occasion when he was watching a nature program in which a lion killed an injured zebra: “It’s sorting out the one that’s weak, right?
It’s about the survival of the species, you have to get that.
If you’re not the best from the start, you have to accept the consequences and leave space for someone stronger, right? ”
You can’t discuss balcony plants with a person like that.
Or the feeling of missing someone.
Britt-Marie’s fingertips are trembling slightly when she picks up the cell phone.
The girl from the unemployment office answers on the third attempt.
“Hello?” says the girl in a panting voice.
“Is that how you answer the phone? Out of breath?”
“Britt-Marie? I’m at the gym!”
“That must be very nice for you.”
“Has something happened?”
“There are some children here. They say they want to see some sort of match here.”
“Oh yeah, the match! I’m going to watch it as well!”
“I wasn’t notified that my range of duties included taking care of children. . . .”
The girl at the other end of the line groans in what is, to be honest, quite an uncalled-for way.
“Britt-Marie, sorry, but I’m not supposed to talk on the phone in the gym.”
Then she exclaims, without a thought:
“But . . . you know . . . it’s a good thing, isn’t it? If the children are there watching the soccer and you drop dead, they’ll know all about it!”
Britt-Marie laughs curtly. Then there’s a silence for a very, very long time.
The girl inhales grimly, and there’s a sound of a jogging machine stopping.
“Okay, sorry Britt-Marie, I was joking. It was a silly thing for me to say. I didn’t mean it that way . . . hello?”
Britt-Marie has already hung up. She opens the door half a minute later with the newly washed soccer jerseys neatly folded into a pile in her arms.
“But you’re not coming in with those muddy clothes, I have just mopped the floors!” she says to the children before she stops herself.
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.