Britt-Marie Was Here (3 page)

Faxin is Britt-Marie’s brand of window-cleaner. It’s even better than baking soda. She doesn’t feel like a fully fledged human being unless she has a more or less full bottle at the ready. No Faxin? Anything could happen in such a situation. So she wrote “Buy Faxin” on her shopping list this afternoon (she considered adding exclamation marks at the end, to really highlight the seriousness of it, but
managed to contain herself). Then she went to the supermarket that isn’t her usual, where nothing is arranged as usual. She asked a young person working there for Faxin. He didn’t even know what it was. When Britt-Marie explained that it’s her brand of window-cleaner, he just shrugged and suggested a different brand. At which point Britt-Marie got so angry that she got out her list and added an exclamation mark.

The shopping cart was acting up and she even ran over her own foot with it. She closed her eyes and sucked in her cheeks and missed Kent. She found some salmon on sale and got some potatoes and vegetables. From a little shelf marked “Stationery” she took a pencil and two pencil sharpeners and put them in her cart.

“Are you a member?” asked the young man when she reached the cashier.

“Of what?” Britt-Marie asked suspiciously.

“The salmon is only on sale for members,” he said.

Britt-Marie smiled patiently.

“This is not my usual supermarket, you see. In my usual supermarket my husband is a member.”

The young man held out a brochure.

“You can apply here, it only takes a sec. All you do is fill in your name and address here an—”

“Certainly not,” said Britt-Marie immediately. Because surely there’s some kind of limit? Do you really have to register and leave your name and address like some suspected terrorist just because you want to buy a bit of salmon?

“Well, in that case you have to pay full price for the salmon.”

“Ha.”

The young man looked unsure of himself.

“Look, if you don’t have enough money on you I ca—”

Britt-Marie gave him a wide-eyed stare. She wanted so badly to raise her voice, but her vocal cords wouldn’t cooperate.

“My dear little man, I have plenty of money. Absolutely plenty.” She tried to yell, and to slap down her wallet on the conveyor belt, but it was more like a whisper and a little pushing movement.

The young man shrugged and took her payment. Britt-Marie wanted to tell him that her husband was actually an entrepreneur, and that she was actually well able to pay the full price for some salmon. But the young man had already started serving the next customer. As if she didn’t make any difference.

At exactly 5:00 Britt-Marie knocks on the door of the girl’s office. When the girl opens the door, she’s wearing her coat.

“Where are you going?” asks Britt-Marie. The girl seems to pick up an incriminating note in her voice.

“I . . . well, we’re closing now . . . as I told you, I have t—”

“Are you coming back, then? What time should I expect you?”

“What?”

“I have to know when I’m supposed to put on the potatoes.”

The girl rubs her eyelids with her knuckles.

“Yes, yes, okay. I’m sorry, Britt-Marie. But as I tried to tell you, I don’t have the t—”

“These are for you,” says Britt-Marie, offering her the pencil. When the girl takes it, in some confusion, Britt-Marie also holds out a pair of pencil sharpeners, one of them blue and the other pink. She nods at these, and then she nods in a wholly unprejudicial way at the girl’s boyish hairstyle.

“You know, there’s no knowing what sort you people like nowadays. So I got both colors.”

The girl doesn’t seem quite sure who Britt-Marie is referring to by “you people.”

“Th . . . anks, I guess.”

“Now, I’d like to be shown to the kitchen, if it’s not too much bother to you, because otherwise I’ll be late with the potatoes.”

The girl very briefly looks as if she’s going to exclaim, “Kitchen?” but at the last moment she holds back and, like small children next to bathtubs, seems to understand that protesting will only prolong the process and make it more tortuous. She simply gives up, points to the staff kitchen, and takes the food bag from Britt-Marie, who follows her down the corridor. Britt-Marie decides to acknowledge her civility with some sort of compliment of her own.

“That’s a fine coat you have there,” she says at long last.

The girl’s hand slides in surprise over the fabric of her coat.

“Thanks!” She smiles sincerely, opening the door to the kitchen.

“It’s courageous of you to wear red at this time of year. Where are the cooking implements?”

With diminishing patience, the girl opens a drawer. One half is a jumble of cooking implements. The other holds a plastic compartment for cutlery.

A single compartment.

Forks, knives, spoons.

Together.

The girl’s irritation turns to genuine concern.

“Are . . . you . . . are you all right?” she asks Britt-Marie.

Britt-Marie has gone over to a chair to sit down, and looks on the verge of passing out.

“Barbarians,” she whispers, sucking in her cheeks.

The girl drops onto a chair opposite. Seems at a loss. Her gaze settles on Britt-Marie’s left hand. Britt-Marie’s fingertips are uncomfortably rubbing the white mark on her skin, like the scar of an amputated limb. When she notices the girl looking, she hides her hand under her handbag, looking as though she’s caught someone spying on her in the shower.

Gently, the girl raises her eyebrows.

“Can I just ask . . . sorry, but . . . I mean, what are you really doing here, Britt-Marie?”

“I want a job,” Britt-Marie replies, digging in her bag for a handkerchief so she can wipe the table down.

The girl moves about in a confused attempt to find a relaxed position.

“With all due respect, Britt-Marie, you haven’t had a job in forty years. Why is it so important now?”

“I have had a job for forty years. I’ve taken care of a home. That’s why it’s important now,” says Britt-Marie, and brushes some imaginary crumbs off the table.

When the girl doesn’t answer right away, she adds:

“I read in the newspaper about a woman who lay dead in her flat for several weeks, you see. They said the cause of death was ‘natural.’ Her dinner was still on the table. It’s actually not very natural at all. No one knew she was dead until her neighbors reacted to the smell.”

The girl fiddles with her hair.

“So . . . you . . . sort of want a job, so that . . .” she says, fumbling.

Britt-Marie exhales with great patience.

“She had no children and no husband and no job. No one knew she was there. If one has a job, people notice if one doesn’t show up.”

The girl, still at work long after her day should be over, sits looking for a long, long time at the woman who’s kept her here. Britt-Marie sits with a straight back, like she sits on the chair on the balcony when she’s waiting for Kent. She never wanted to go to bed when Kent wasn’t home, because she didn’t want to go to sleep unless someone knew she was there.

She sucks in her cheeks. Rubs the white mark.

“Ha. You believe it’s preposterous, of course. I’m certainly aware that conversation isn’t one of my strengths. My husband says I’m socially incompetent.”

The last words come out more quietly than the rest. The girl swallows and nods at the ring that is no longer on Britt-Marie’s finger.

“What happened to your husband?”

“He had a heart attack.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know he’d died.”

“He didn’t die,” whispers Britt-Marie.

“Oh, I th—”

Britt-Marie interrupts her by getting up and starting to sort the cutlery as if it has committed some kind of crime.

“I don’t use perfume, so I asked him to always put his shirt directly in the washing machine when he came home. He never did. Then he used to yell at me because the washing machine was so loud at night.”

She stops abruptly, and gives the oven a quick lecture about its buttons being the wrong way around. It looks ashamed of itself. Britt-Marie nods again and says:

“The other woman called me after he’d had his heart attack.”

The girl stands up to help, then sits down watchfully when Britt-Marie takes the filleting knife from the drawer.

“When Kent’s children were small and stayed with us every other week, I made a habit of reading to them. My favorite was
The Master Tailor.
It’s a fairy tale, you understand. The children wanted me to make up my own stories, but I can’t see the point of it when there are perfectly good ones already written by professionals. Kent said it was because I don’t have any imagination, but actually my imagination is excellent.”

The girl doesn’t answer. Britt-Marie sets the oven temperature. She puts the salmon in an oven dish. Then just stands there.

“It takes an excellent imagination to pretend one doesn’t understand anything year in, year out, even though one washes all his shirts and one doesn’t use perfume,” she whispers.

The girl stands up again. Puts her hand fumblingly on Britt-Marie’s shoulder.

“I . . . sorry, I . . .” she starts to say.

She stops although she hasn’t been interrupted. Britt-Marie clasps her hands together over her stomach and looks into the oven.

“I want a job because I actually don’t think it’s very edifying to disturb the neighbors with bad smells. I want someone to know I’m here.”

There’s nothing to say to that.

When the salmon is ready they sit at the table and eat it without looking at each other.

“She’s very beautiful. Young. I don’t blame him, I actually don’t,” says Britt-Marie at long last.

“She’s probably a slag,” the girl offers.

“What does that mean?” asks Britt-Marie, uncomfortable.

“It’s . . . I mean . . . it’s something bad.”

Britt-Marie looks down at her plate again.

“Ha. That was nice of you.”

She feels as though she should say something nice back, so, with a certain amount of strain, she manages to say, “You . . . I mean . . . your hair looks nice today.”

The girl smiles.

“Thanks!”

Britt-Marie nods.

“I’m not seeing as much of your forehead today, not like yesterday.”

The girl scratches her forehead, just under her fringe. Britt-Marie looks down at her plate and tries to resist the instinct to serve up a portion for Kent. The girl says something. Britt-Marie looks up and mumbles: “Pardon me?”

“It was very nice, this,” says the girl.

Without Britt-Marie even asking.

A
nd then Britt-Marie got herself a job. Which happened to be in a place called Borg. Two days after inviting the girl from the unemployment office to have some salmon, that’s where Britt-Marie heads off to in her car. So we should now say a few words about Borg.

Borg is a community built along a road. That’s really the kindest possible thing one can say about it. It’s not a place that could be described as one in a million, rather as one of millions of others. It has a closed-down soccer field and a closed-down school and a closed-down chemist’s and a closed-down liquor store and a closed-down health care center and a closed-down supermarket and a closed-down shopping center and a road that bears away in two directions.

There is a recreation center that admittedly has not been closed down, but only because they haven’t had time to do it yet. It takes time to close down an entire community, obviously, and the recreation center has had to wait its turn. Apart from that, the only two noticeable things in Borg are soccer and the pizzeria, because these tend to be the last things to abandon humanity.

Britt-Marie’s first contact with the pizzeria and the recreation center are on that day in January when she stops her white car
between them. Her first contact with soccer is when a soccer ball hits her, very hard, on the head.

This takes place just after her car has blown up.

You might sum it up by saying that Borg and Britt-Marie’s first impressions of each other are not wholly positive.

If one wants to be pedantic about it, the actual explosion happens while Britt-Marie is turning into the parking area. On the passenger side. Britt-Marie is very clear about that, and if she had to describe the sound she’d say it was a bit like a “ka-boom.” Understandably, she’s in a panic, and she abandons both brake and clutch pedals, whereupon the car splutters pathetically. After a few unduly dramatic deviations across the frozen January puddles, it comes to an abrupt stop outside a building with a partially broken sign, the neon lights of which spell the name “PizzRai.” Terrified, Britt-Marie jumps out of the car, expecting it (quite reasonably, under the circumstances) to be engulfed in flames at any moment. This does not happen. Instead, Britt-Marie is left standing on her own in the parking area, surrounded by the sort of silence that only exists in small, remote communities.

It’s a touch on the annoying side. She adjusts her skirt and grips her handbag firmly.

A soccer ball rolls in a leisurely manner across the gravel, away from Britt-Marie’s car and towards what Britt-Marie assumes must be the recreation center. After a moment there’s a disconcerting thumping noise. Determined not to be distracted from the tasks at hand, she gets out a list from her handbag. At the top it says, “Drive to Borg.” She ticks that point. The next item on the list is, “Pick up key from post office.”