英语小说网

She is neatly dressed, as is the man. The red car is extremely clean, notes Britt-Marie with an initial sense of approval from her old life, which is quickly replaced by an instinctual skepticism that she has picked up in Borg for all things that seem neat and clean.

When the woman and the man in the red car stop at the far end of the parking area, neither Britt-Marie nor the children react at first, because they're starting to get used to new players and spectators turning up at Borg soccer team's training sessions as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Only when Max points at them and says, "They're from town, aren't they? She's the head of the district soccer association. My dad knows her," does play stop and the players and coach wait suspiciously for the strangers to present themselves.

"I dropped off a document for you earlier today, have you had time to look through it?" asks the woman, with a gesture at the pizzeria.

"Are you Britt-Marie?" asks the woman as she comes closer.

"I am," answers Britt-Marie.

She says the word "team" in much the same way as Britt-Marie says "cup" when she's got a plastic mug in her hand.

"It's about the rules of the competition, the January Cup, for which this… team… has been entered."

"Ha. Ha. No, no, I haven't. I have been otherwise engaged."

"Ha," says Britt-Marie, picking up her notebook and pen, as if arming herself.

The woman looks at the children. Then at Britt-Marie.

"License," the woman repeats, pointing at the man beside her as if he was someone Britt-Marie ought to recognize: "The District Soccer Association and the County Council only allow teams to participate in the January Cup if they have a coach with a local authority coaching license."

"You are named as the soccer coach in the application. Do you have a license for that?"

"I beg your pardon?" says Britt-Marie, while at the same time writing "license" in her notebook.

Britt-Marie writes, "Acquire local authority coaching license" in her notebook.

"Ha. Might I trouble you to tell me how I can get my hands on such a license? I will immediately see to it that my contact at the unemployment office ensures th --"

Angrily he waves his hand over the parking area. "You're not a proper team! You don't even have a pitch to train on!"

"What?" says the old sod.

"But good Lord, it's not something you just pick up! You have to do an entire course in it!" the man next to the woman in front of the red car bursts out a touch hysterically.

At this stage Vega gets fed up, because Vega's patience is quite clearly of the very shortest kind, and she hisses back at him:

"Are you deaf? I said: are we playing bloody soccer here or are we bloody not?" roars Vega.

"Well?" says the old sod with a mocking smile, throwing out his arms.

"Hey, you miserable old sod, are we playing soccer here or not?"

"If we're playing soccer here then it is a bloody soccer pitch," Vega establishes.

The old sod looks at Britt-Marie in shock, as if he feels she ought to say something. Britt-Marie actually feels this would not be so appropriate, because just for once, apart from her use of language, she feels that Vega is absolutely right. So she stays silent. The woman next to the old sod clears her throat.

"We have an absolutely excellent soccer club here!" Vega interrupts.

"We have to have rules and regulations for the January Cup. Otherwise more or less anyone could turn up and play. That would be chaotic, you have to understand that. If you don't have an accredited trainer we can't let you participate, unfortunately; in that case you'll have to reapply next year and then we'll process the --"

"There's an absolutely excellent soccer club in town, I'm quite sure that --"

The woman is breathing spasmodically through her nostrils.

The voice that interrupts her, somewhere in the dark between the red car and Karl's truck, is hungover and in no mood to be talked back to, this much is amply clear.

The woman stares at Bank. All the others do the same. Where Bank is staring, without being at all prejudicial about it, is unclear. But the dog is at least looking at Britt-Marie. Britt-Marie peers back at it shiftily, as a conspiring criminal type might do.

"I have a license. Write my name on the paper if it's so damned important."

"I didn't even know you were back in Borg," the woman says with a cold smile.

"Shush!" shushes the woman.

Bank steps out of the shadows and waves her stick in the direction of the woman and the old codger, so that she accidentally strikes the old codger quite hard on his thigh. Twice.

"Put my name down. I suppose you haven't forgotten it," she says, and happens to strike the old codger fairly hard across one of his arms three or possibly four times.

"Oh, dear," Bank says apologetically, then points the stick at the woman.

"We… I mean… the regulations of the competition stipulate that…" the woman tries to say.

"Shut your mouth will you, Annika, just shut your mouth. The kids just want to play. There used to be a time when we also just wanted to play, and old blokes like this one tried to stop us."

Bank thrusts her stick in the direction of the old sod when she says that last bit, but this time he manages to jump out of the way. The woman stands there for a good while, and seems to be pondering a variety of answers. She looks younger and younger for every moment that passes. She opens her mouth, then closes it again. Finally, in a resigned sort of way, she writes down Bank's name in her papers. The old sod is still spitting and hissing when they get into the red car and leave Borg behind as they head back to town.

"Good God, is she back in Borg?" hisses the old codger to the woman as soon as he catches sight of Bank.

"Now you do."

Bank groans, loud and hungover.

"If you're not blind you must have noticed by now that I am, pretty well. But I have no need to watch you play to get the fact that you're useless. We have a few days until their idiotic cup, so we have to use that time as well as we can to make you as un-useless as possible."

Bank doesn't waste any time on superficialities. In her hungover condition, her patience seems comparable to Vega's. She waves her stick menacingly at the children and mutters:

She thinks about this for a moment and then adds:

"Shit! Fat chance we've got with a blind coach!"

"You should probably keep your expectations low."

"You're not supposed to say things like that, Omar. It's incredibly uncivilized."

It's not an excellent pep talk, far from it. Possibly, Britt-Marie has a sense that she liked Bank better when she hardly did any talking. But of course Omar is the first of them to drum up enough courage to disagree with her, partly because he dares say what the whole team is thinking, and partly because he's dumb enough to do it.

Britt-Marie clasps her hands together.

"It's actually more a case of impaired vision," Britt-Marie points out, adding with a slight note of outrage: "It has nothing to do with corpulence."

Omar swears. Bank just nods calmly. She points her stick at the soccer ball with a precision that makes even Omar feel slightly caught out.

"She's blind! What can she know about soccer?"

Bank runs forward with a surprising turn of speed to claim the ball. At the same time the dog, behind Omar, places itself with its legs wide apart and starts peeing. The dog pee forms itself into a neat, round puddle in the gravel. Bank's foot caresses the leather soccer ball and makes a sudden movement as if about to kick it hard at Omar's head. He ducks and throws himself back, startled, stumbling over the dog and stepping neatly into the puddle.

"Give the ball here," she says, and at the same time whistles to her dog. The dog shuffles off at once and positions itself immediately behind Omar.

Omar's eyes flick nervously between the dog behind him and Bank in front of him.

"Right… what I… hold on, I didn't mean…"

Bank stops abruptly with her foot on the ball. Points with her stick at Omar and mutters:

Vega stands at the edge of the wee pool, fascinated by all this.

"At least I know what a dummy shot is. And even if I'm almost blind I'd bet quite a lot of money you're standing in dog pee right now. So maybe we could agree that at least I know more about soccer than you do?"

Bank whistles for the dog. Scratches its nose. Opens her jacket pocket and lets it have what's inside.

"How did you teach the dog to do that?"

When she comes back to the parking area, the children are playing soccer so you can hear it. It has to be experienced before you can understand it, the difference between silent and nonsilent soccer. Britt-Marie stops in the darkness and listens. Every time one of the children gets the ball, their teammates are shouting: "Here! I'm here!"

"The dog knows lots of tricks. I had it before I went blind. I know how to train things."

Britt-Marie is already on her way to the recreation center to fetch baking soda.

The children play. Call out. Explain where they are. Britt-Marie squeezes her container of baking soda until it has dents in it.

"If you can be heard then you exist," mutters hungover Bank, massaging her temples.

"I'm here," she whispers, wishing that Sven was here so she could tell him.

Back at the house, Bank opens the cellophane around the beer and drinks it straight from the bottle. Britt-Marie goes and fetches a glass and a coaster.

It's a remarkable club. A remarkable game.

They part ways at the end of the training session. Toad goes back with his dad in the truck, Sami picks up Vega, Omar, and Dino. Max wanders home on his own, along the road. Ben is met by his mother. She waves at Britt-Marie and Britt-Marie waves back. Bank doesn't say a word on the way home and Britt-Marie feels it's inappropriate to challenge destiny. Above all she does not believe it is appropriate to challenge a stick that has been both in the mud and inside at least one person's mouth this evening. So she makes do with silence.

"Many times," says Britt-Marie and, depending on what sort of system you are using, you could say that Britt-Marie finds her second real girlfriend tonight.

The corners of Bank's mouth bounce up.

Britt-Marie cups her uninjured hand over the bandage on the other. There's certainly an awful lot of unnecessary complication about liking soccer.

Bank drinks her beer from the glass. Slumps in her chair. The dog lays its head in her lap.

"If you support Tottenham you always give more love than you get back," she says.

"I assume what you mean by that is that it's a bad team."

"Tottenham is the worst kind of bad team, because they're almost good. They always promise that they're going to be fantastic. They make you hope. So you go on loving them and they carry on finding more and more innovative ways of disappointing you."

"You said your father supports Tottenham. If it's not too much trouble, what does that mean?"

"You're a bloody nag-bag, did anyone ever tell you that?"

On her way to the stairs, she changes her mind, turns around, and asks:

"Enough's enough, actually," she says firmly to Bank.

Britt-Marie sits on the edge of her bed for hours that evening. She stands on the balcony, waiting for a police car. Then back to the bed. She doesn't cry, isn't despondent; in fact it's almost the other way around. She's almost eager. Just doesn't know what to do with herself. Like a sort of restlessness. The windows are polished, the floors have been scoured, and the balcony furniture wiped down. She's poured baking soda into the flowerpots and onto the mattress. She rubs the fingers of her uninjured hand across the bandages that cover the white mark that used to be covered by the wedding ring. So in a way she did achieve the desired result of her visit to the tanning salon, even if not in the exact way she had thought. Nothing has gone as she thought it would since she came to Borg.

She puts the empty bottle on the kitchen counter and, without relying on the stick, walks past Britt-Marie into the living room.

Britt-Marie nods as if this sounded reasonable. Bank stands up and states:

"In that sense his daughter was always like his favorite team."

"The beer was nice. Thanks."

When she hears the knock at the front door she has been hoping for it for so long that at first she thinks it must be a figment of her imagination. But then there's another knock, and Britt-Marie jumps out of bed and stumbles down the stairs like a complete lunatic. It's obviously not at all like her, highly uncivilized in every possible way. She has not run down the stairs like this since she was a teenager, when your heart reaches the front door before your feet. For a moment she stops and summons all the common sense at her disposal, in order to fix her hair and adjust all the invisible creases in her skirt.

For the first time since she got here, she accepts it may not be something altogether bad.

"Sven! I…" she has time to say, holding on to the door handle.

"Hello, my darling," says Kent.

Then she just stands there. Trying, but failing, to breathe. She feels her legs giving way beneath her.