Britt-Marie Was Here (28 page)

I
t’s a very strange thing staring into the barrel of a gun. It embraces you. You fall into it.

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.

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.

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.

“
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.

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:

“First you have to buy something.”

“
Ooopen it!
” howls the robber.

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.”

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

“Just bloody put in anything then!”

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.”

“I couldn’t give a fuck about your fucking receipts, you old bag. . . !”
screams the robber.

“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.

“What are you doing here?”

“Psycho?” whispers Omar.

“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.

“That’s just about enough now!” she hisses menacingly.

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.

“I just mopped the floor.”

“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.

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.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” pants Vega.

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

“Sorry for calling you an old bat,” sobs Vega.

“It’s certainly nothing I haven’t heard before,” Britt-Marie says to calm her.

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!”

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.

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.

Crossword supplements.

B
ritt-Marie doesn’t know if it’s Kent or Sven’s voice she hears first.

Sven comes because Vega has called him; Kent comes because Omar has called him.

The police car and the BMW both come plowing into the parking area. The two men come stumbling in, white-faced, standing crestfallen inside the door and looking at the shot-to-pieces fluorescent tube on the ceiling. Then they stare at Britt-Marie. She sees their fear. Sees how they are plagued by bad conscience because they weren’t here to protect her. She sees how much this pains them, this missed opportunity to be her hero. They gulp. They don’t seem to know which foot to stand on. Then they instinctively do what almost all men in that situation would do.

They start arguing with each other about whose fault this is.

“Is everyone okay?” Sven asks first of all, but he’s interrupted by Kent, who points across the premises with his whole arm and orders everyone:

“Now let’s take it easy until the police get here!”

Sven spins around like an offended mannequin.

“What do you think I’m wearing, you damned yuppie! A carnival outfit?”

“I mean the real police, the kind that can
stop
robberies!” splutters Kent.

Sven takes two small, angry steps forward and lifts his chin:

“Of course, of course, you would have stopped it with your
wallet
if you’d been here!”

Their white faces turn red in an instant. Britt-Marie has never seen Sven angry in this way before, and judging by the facial expressions of Vega, Omar, and Somebody, none of them have either. Kent, who immediately senses his leadership position in the room is under threat, tries to raise his voice even more to take command of the situation.

“Are you okay, kids?” he asks Omar and Vega.

“Don’t you ask them if they’re okay! You don’t even
know
these children!” Sven says, cutting him off and furiously pushing Kent’s pointing hand away, then turns to the children and points with his own whole arm. “Are you okay, kids?”

Vega and Omar nod, confused. Somebody tries to say something but she doesn’t have a chance. Kent pushes in front of Sven and waves the palms of his hands about.

“Everyone calm down now so we can call the police.”

“I’m
standing right here
!”

Britt-Marie’s ears are still ringing. She clears her throat and says:

“Please, Kent. Please, Sven. Can I just ask you to calm yourselves dow—”

But the men are not listening to her. They continue rowing and gesticulating as if she were something you could just switch off with a remote control.

Kent snorts something about how Sven couldn’t “protect a hand with a glove” and Sven snorts back that he’s sure Kent is “very brave inside his BMW with the doors locked.” Kent yells that Sven shouldn’t get ideas about himself because he’s nothing but “a copper in a little
crappy village,” and Sven yells back that Kent shouldn’t think he can just come here and “buy people’s admiration with business cards and shit like that!” Upon which Kent yells that “the kid wants to be a bloody entrepreneur, doesn’t he!” Upon which Sven yells that “being an entrepreneur is not a job!” Upon which Kent rails at him, “What, so you want him to be a cop instead, do you? Huh? What sort of pay does a policeman take home?” Upon which Sven flies into a rage: “We get a two and a half percent raise every year and I have very good yields on my pension funds! I’ve done a course in it!”

Britt-Marie tries to step between them, but they don’t notice her.

“I’ve done a
cooouuurse
,” Kent imitates disdainfully.

“Hey! It’s an offense to pull at a policeman’s uniform, damn it!” roars Sven and grabs hold of Kent’s shirt.

“Watch the shirt! Do you have any idea how much this cost?!”

“You vain ponce, no wonder Britt-Marie left you!”

“Left me?! You think she’ll be staying here with
you
, you glorified security guard?!”

Britt-Marie waves her arms as hard as she can in front of them, trying to make them see her.

“Please, Kent! Please, Sven! Stop at once! I just mopped this floor!”

But it’s useless, as each of the men has just employed their respective right arms to put the other in a headlock, and they have started tottering about doubled over in a swearing, panting dance, and seconds later, with a mighty crash, the front door of the pizzeria shatters into splintered wood when the two men tumble through it like drunken bears. They land in an indecorous pile in the gravel and, in so doing, seem to draw even more attention to their physical imperfections.