英语小说网

A few hours later some police from town come to the pizzeria to ask Britt-Marie if she can describe the young man, what he was wearing and whether he was short or tall and spoke with a dialect or accent. The only description she's able to give them is, "He was holding a pistol." One of the police explains she "mustn't take it personally" because a robbery is only about the money.

It's a very strange thing staring into the barrel of a gun. It embraces you. You fall into it.

This may be easy for the police to say, but it is actually extremely difficult to have a pistol pointed at one and not take it personally -- at least that is Britt-Marie's considered opinion.

"Open the fucking register then, for Christ's sake!" hisses the robber at her.

"Open it!" bellows the robber so that both Somebody and the men with caps instinctively cover their faces with their hands, as if this might help.

She will come to remember this afterwards, being addressed as if she's an instrument, not a person. Somebody tries to roll up to the register but Britt-Marie is in the way and seems frozen to the spot.

But Britt-Marie does not move. Her terror paralyzes her so she's not even capable of feeling afraid. Why she reacts the way she does is something she's incapable of understanding, but there are an awful lot of things you are not equipped to know about yourself until you have a pistol pointing at your face. And so, to Britt-Marie's own surprise and the consternation of Somebody and the men with caps, she hears some words coming out of her mouth:

But Britt-Marie doesn't move. She puts her bandaged hand into the other. Both hands are trembling, and Britt-Marie thinks briefly that surely there are limits, but in the final analysis it's been the sort of day that Britt-Marie feels has gone beyond the limit. So she replies in a wholly considerate way:

"You have to put in an amount before you can open the register, you see. Otherwise the receipt is wrong."

"Ooopen it!" howls the robber.

"Just bloody put in anything then!"

"First you have to buy something."

The pistol judders up and down in the robber's hand. Equal amounts of fury and surprise.

"I couldn't give a fuck about your fucking receipts, you old bag…!" screams the robber.

Britt-Marie changes her hands around. Her fingers are slippery with sweat. But something within her decides, against her most reasonably protesting common sense, that this is a good point in Britt-Marie's life to stand her ground a bit.

"You have to understand you can't just put anything in. Then the receipts aren't right."

"There's no need to raise your voice," Britt-Marie interrupts firmly, and then goes on to patiently tell him:

"And there's certainly no cause to use that sort of language!"

Somebody's wheelchair comes careering across the floor and tackles Britt-Marie at thigh-height, sending Somebody, the wheelchair, and Britt-Marie to the floor. The sound of the gunshot into the ceiling leaves a piercing ringing sound in Britt-Marie's ears that makes her lose all sense of direction. Fragments of glass from the fluorescent tube come snowing down and she doesn't know if she is lying on her back or her stomach, where the walls are, or where the floors are. She can feel Somebody's heavy breathing in her ear and far away something seems to be making a tinkling sound.

Then she hears Vega and Omar's voices.

"What the he --" Vega manages to say, and Britt-Marie instinctively gets to her feet at that point, even though her ears are still ringing and her common sense is telling her to sharpen up and stay there on the floor like a civilized person.

There's a lot you can't know about a person until you become one with her. What her capabilities are. The courage she has. The robber turns to Vega and Omar with his sense of shock radiating heatedly through the holes in his balaclava.

"Psycho?" whispers Omar.

"What are you doing here?"

"The hell you doing here? I waited until you'd gone! What you bloody doing here, fucking kids?"

"I forgot my jacket," Vega manages to say.

Psycho furiously waves his pistol at her, but Britt-Marie is already standing between the pistol barrel and the children. She stretches her arms out behind her to make sure she's covering the girl and the boy with her body, but she doesn't move an inch. She's frozen to the spot, held in place by a whole lifetime of thwarted ambitions.

She actually can't remember ever having done anything menacing in her entire life.

There's a slightly ambivalent atmosphere in the pizzeria after that; that is probably how you'd have to describe it. Psycho clearly doesn't quite know what to do with his pistol and, until he makes his decision, no one else in the pizzeria knows what to do about it either. Britt-Marie looks at his shoes with annoyance.

The bell on the door tinkles obediently and Britt-Marie's body starts melting onto the floor, although Vega and Omar are doing their best to hold her up with their trembling arms. Her coat is wet with tears, but she can't tell if they are hers or the children's, or exactly at what point she stops being in their arms and instead they are in hers. When she realizes that they are about to fall, she summons the strength to stand on her own two feet. Because that is what women like Britt-Marie do. They find the strength when they have to do something for others.

"I just mopped the floor."

"That's just about enough now!" she hisses menacingly.

"Shut your fucking mouth, motherfucker!"

"I certainly will not!"

Psycho has broken into a sweat, which drips from the holes in his balaclava. He spins his pistol two turns around the pizzeria at eye level, sending the men with caps down on the floor again. Then he stares hatefully at Britt-Marie one last time, and runs.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry," pants Vega.

"Sorry for calling you an old bat," sobs Vega.

"It's certainly nothing I haven't heard before," Britt-Marie says to calm her.

"Shhhh," whispers Britt-Marie and rocks both her and Omar in her arms.

Gently she sits the children down on two chairs. Wraps them in blankets and makes hot chocolate with real cocoa, because that was what Kent's children used to want when they woke in the night after having horrible nightmares. Admittedly the quality of the cocoa is a little dubious, because Somebody boasts that it's "almost cocoa, huh! From Asia!"-- but in any case the children are too shaken up to be concerned about it.

Omar keeps stammering about how they have to find Sami, and Vega repeatedly calls her older brother's cell phone. Britt-Marie tries to calm them by saying that she's quite certain Sami had nothing to do with the robbery, upon which the two children stare open-mouthed at her and Omar whispers:

"You don't get it. When Sami finds out that Psycho pointed a gun at us, he'll find him and kill him. We have to get hold of Sami!"

Crossword supplements.

When she's done with that she stands behind the register, holding on for all she's worth so that she doesn't pass out. Somebody gets her a headache tablet and another beer. The men with caps and beards get up from their table, bring their coffee cups to the counter, and silently put them down in front of Britt-Marie. Then they take off their caps, look down at their newspapers, and start rifling through them until they find what they are looking for and duly hand these over to Britt-Marie.

But Sami isn't picking up. The children get more and more frightened. Britt-Marie wraps them up even tighter in blankets and makes more hot chocolate. Then she does what she can. What she knows. She fetches a broom and a mop and baking soda and sweeps up the glass and swabs the floor.