Chapter 30 #2
By the time Britt-Marie and Bank have reached the section of the stairs where Toad came to a stop, the coach person is yelling with even greater indignation, for reasons already described.
The old codger and the woman and the papers are whirling about in a persistent rain of lemonade.
The coach person has such an amount of lemonade in his hair, on his face, and over his clothes that the amount of lemonade in the can must in some way have bypassed the natural laws of physics.
The coach person points at Bank and Britt-Marie, so angry by this stage that the pointing action is executed by both hands, which, at this kind of distance, makes it difficult to determine whether he’s actually pointing at all, or just demonstrating the approximate size of a badger.
“Are you the coach of this so-called team?”
He makes deranged quotation marks in the air when he says “coach” and “team.” Bank’s stick pokes at the coach person by accident the first time, and possibly a little less by accident the following five times.
The woman looks concerned. The old codger with the papers moves behind her and, chastened by experience, keeps his hand over his mouth.
“We’re the coaches,” Bank confirms.
The coach person grins and looks angry at the same time.
“An old biddy and a blind person, seeeriously? Is this a seeerious competition? Huh?”
The official shakes his head gravely. The woman, more concerned than ever, peers at Bank.
“One of the players in your team, this Patrik Ivars . . .”
“What about me?” Toad bursts out anxiously from the floor.
“What about him?” growls Bank.
“Yeah, what about Patrik?” asks a third voice.
Toad’s father is standing behind Britt-Marie now. He has combed his hair neatly, and dressed up. There’s a red tulip tucked into the lapel of his jacket. Kent stands next to him in a wrinkled shirt. He smiles at Britt-Marie, and she immediately wants to take him by the hand.
“Patrik is two years younger than the others. He’s too young to play in this competition without exemption being granted,” says the woman, coughing down at the floor.
“So organize the exemption then!” snorts Bank.
“Rules are rules!”
“Really? Really! Come here you little . . .” yells Bank, striking furiously at the coach person with her stick, whereupon the coach person tries to grab her stick in order to avoid falling, and at the same time manages to pull her with him down the stairs, whereupon they both lose their footing and drop over the ledge, before a big hand in a single, forcible movement closes like a handcuff around the tracksuited arm and stops their fall.
The coach person hovers, leaning backwards over the stairs, with eyes wide open as he looks at Kent, who keeps his implacable grip on his arm and leans forward and declares in that clear and straightforward way of his, which he makes use of when explaining to people that he’s actually going to do business with Germany:
“If you try to push a blind woman down a staircase I’ll sue you in the courts until your family is buried in debt for the next ten generations.”
The coach person stares at him. Bank regains her balance by happening to put her stick in the coach person’s stomach two or maybe three times. The concerned woman, trying a different tack, holds out a piece of paper.
“There has also been a protest from your opponents concerning this ‘Viga’ in your team. We can see by her social security number that . . .”
“My name is Vega!” snarls Vega from farther up the stairs.
The woman scratches her earlobe self-consciously. Then smiles, as if after a local anaesthetic. And turns to Britt-Marie, who by now seems to be the only reasonable person in the assembled company.
“You have to have an exemption before girls and younger players can take part.”
“So you’re going to ban Patrik and Vega, purely because this town team is too scared to play against a girl and a kid who’s two years younger!!” says Kent.
“You’re scared!” yells Bank and accidentally pokes her stick into the tracksuit top and a bit into the old codger with papers.
“We’re not bloody sc—” mumbles the coach person.
And that is how Vega and Patrik get their exemptions so they can play. Patrik goes down the stairs to the pitch with his dad’s arms around his shoulders, looking so happy you’d think he’d sprouted wings.
The other children run onto the pitch and start taking some warm-up shots at the goal, which admittedly looks as if they’re taking general warm-up shots at everything except the goal.
Britt-Marie and Kent stay there on the stairs, just the two of them. She picks up a hair from the shoulder of his shirt, and adjusts a crease on his arm so softly that it’s as if she never even touched him.
“How did you know to say that thing about them being scared?” she asks.
Kent laughs in a way that makes Britt-Marie also start laughing inside.
“I have an older brother. It always worked for me. You remember when I jumped off the balcony and broke my leg? All the dumbest things I ever did started with Alf telling me he didn’t think I had the guts to do them!”
“It was nice of you. And you were sweet to leave the tulips,” whispers Britt-Marie, without asking if she was also one of those dumb things he did.
Kent laughs again.
“I bought them off that Toad boy’s dad. He’s growing them in a greenhouse in the garden. What a lunatic, eh? He nagged the heck out of me about how I had to get the red ones instead because they’re ‘better,’ but I told him you like the purple ones.”
She brushes some invisible dust from his chest. Controls herself.
In a commonsense approach, she clasps one hand in the other and says:
“I have to go. They’ll be on soon.”
“Good luck!” says Kent, leaning forward and kissing her on the cheek so warmly she has to grasp the metal banister to avoid falling down the stairs.
When he goes to sit in the last empty seat in the away section, she realizes that this is the first time Kent is somewhere for her sake. The first time in their lives that he has to present himself as being in her company, rather than the other way around.
In the seat next to him sits Sven. With his eyes fixed on the floor.
Britt-Marie breathes in deeply with each step. Bank and the dog are waiting for her on a bench next to the pitch. Somebody as well, with a particularly satisfied expression on her face.
“How did you get here?” asks Britt-Marie.
“Drove, you know,” Somebody answers casually.
“What about the pizzeria and the grocery store and the post office, then? What about the opening hours?”
Somebody shrugs.
“Who will come to shop, Britt? Everyone in Borg—here!”
Britt-Marie adjusts invisible creases in her skirt at such a speed that it looks as if she’s trying to start a fire. Somebody pats her calmingly.
“Nervous, huh? No problem, Britt, I said to that official, huh: I will sit on the sideline with Britt. Because I have one of those, what’s-it-called?
Calming effect on Britt, huh. The official just said ‘Forget it,’ so I said ‘Can’t see one of those disability areas here, illegal, huh.
’ I said: ‘Could sue you, you know.’ So now: I sit here. Best seat, isn’t it?”
Britt-Marie excuses herself, leaves the sideline, walks down a corridor and into a toilet, where she vomits.
When she comes back to the bench, Somebody is still talking, her fingers nervously drumming against anything within reach.
The dog sniffs in Britt-Marie’s direction. Bank offers her a pack of chewing gum.
“It’s normal. You often get food poisoning just before important games.”
Britt-Marie chews the gum with her hand covering her mouth, because people might come to the conclusion that she has tattoos (or something similar). Then the spectators burst into applause, the referee walks onto the pitch, and a team from Borg that does not even have its own pitch starts playing.
With vocal support from an entire community where just about everything has been closed down. But only just about.
The first thing that happens is that Dino gets tackled—or elbowed, to be more precise—by a large boy with a complicated haircut.
The next time Dino gets the ball, exactly the same thing happens, only even harder.
A few feet away from Britt-Marie the coach person bounces up and down in a soaking wet tracksuit jacket while yelling his encouragement:
“Exaaactly like that! Make them respeeect you!”
Britt-Marie is convinced she’s about to have a heart attack, but when she explains this to Bank, Bank says, “That’s how it’s meant to be when you’re watching soccer.
” Who on earth would want to watch soccer, then, Britt-Marie thinks to herself.
The third time Dino gets the ball the big boy accelerates from the other side of the pitch and runs at full speed with his elbow raised.
The next moment he’s lying on his back. Max stands over him with his chest out and his arms straightened.
He’s already walking back towards the bench before the referee has sent him off.
“Max! Huh! You’re such a, what’s-it-called?” Somebody says, overwhelmed with joy.
Bank taps her stick against Max’s shoes.
“He talks like one of them. But he plays like one of us.”
Max smiles and says something, but Britt-Marie can’t hear what.
The match resumes, and Britt-Marie finds, to her surprise, that she’s standing up.
Her mouth is hanging open and she doesn’t even know how.
On the pitch, three players have collided and the ball has bounced haphazardly towards the touchline, and suddenly it’s just lying there right at Ben’s feet with a clear shot at the goal.
He stares at it. The entire crowd in the sports hall stares at him.
“Shoot,” whispers Britt-Marie.
“Shoot!” yells a voice from the stand.
It’s Sami. Next to him stands a red-faced woman. It’s the first time Britt-Marie has ever seen her wearing anything but a nurse’s uniform.
“Shoooooooooooooot!!!” cries Bank, waving her stick to and fro in the air.
So Ben shoots. Britt-Marie hides her face in the palms of her hands; Bank almost overturns Somebody’s wheelchair while she yells:
“What’s happening? Tell me what’s happening!”
The stands are silent as if no one can quite believe how this has happened.
At first, Ben looks as if he’s going to burst into tears, then as if he’s looking for a hiding place.
And he doesn’t have time to do much more than that before he finds himself at the bottom of a screaming pile of arms and legs and white shirts.
Borg is in the lead by 1-0. Sami charges around in the stand with his arms held out, like an aircraft.
Kent and Sven bounce up from their seats so abruptly that they accidentally start hugging each other.
A red-faced woman makes her way out of the chaos and runs down the stairs.
A couple of officials try to get in her way when they see she’s going to run onto the pitch, but they can’t stop her.
They couldn’t have stopped her even if they were carrying guns.
Ben dances with his mum as if no one can take this away from him.
Borg lose the match 14-1. It makes no difference. They play as if it makes all the difference in the universe.
It does make a difference.