Britt-Marie locks the door of the recreation center and stands on her own in the parking area.

Her pockets are full of neatly folded toilet paper, because she did not find an envelope. The sign above the pizzeria is turned off, but she can make out the shadow of Somebody moving around inside. Something in Britt-Marie wants to go and talk to her, possibly to buy something. Another considerably more rational something orders her to do no such thing. It's dark outside. It's not civilized to walk into shops when it's dark outside.

People sometimes refer to darkness as something that falls, but in places like Borg it doesn't just fall, it collapses. It engulfs the streets in an instant. In cities there are so many people who don't want to sit at home all night that you can open dedicated premises and run entertainment industries that are open only at these times. But in Borg, life is encapsulated once darkness falls.

She stands by the door listening to the radio inside, which is playing some sort of pop music. Britt-Marie knows this because she's not at all unfamiliar with pop music. There are many crossword questions about it, and Britt-Marie likes to keep herself informed. But this particular song is new to her; a young man is singing in a cracked voice about how you can either be "someone" or "no one at all."

The young man keeps singing on the radio. As hard as he can. About nothing much.

Britt-Marie is still holding on to the carton of cigarettes covered in foreign letters. She doesn't know how much foreign cigarettes cost, but she gets out a considerably larger than reasonable amount of money from her handbag and folds it in the toilet paper until it looks like a small envelope with a phenomenal capacity for water absorption. Then she carefully tucks it under the door.

Then she walks by herself along a road that heads out of the community in two directions. As darkness collapses. Towards a bed and a balcony that are not her own.

"Love has no mercy," he sings. Again and again. Love has no mercy. Kent wells up in Britt-Marie's chest until she can't breathe.

The truck comes up on her right, from behind. Too close. Too fast.

That's why she throws herself across to the other side of the road. The human brain has a monstrous ability to re-create memories of such clarity that the rest of the body loses all sense of time. An approaching truck can make the ears believe they are hearing a mother screaming, can make the hands believe they are cutting themselves on glass, can make the lips taste blood. Deep inside, Britt-Marie has time to yell Ingrid's name a thousand times.

"Are you bloody senile or what, you old bat?! What are you doing walking in the middle of the fucking road! I almost killed you!"

The truck thunders by, so close that her heart can't tell whether it's been run over or not, in a rain of hard lumps of mud gouged out of the road surface. Britt-Marie takes a few tottering steps; her coat is wet and dirty, and there's a howling in her ears. Maybe a single second passes and maybe a hundred. She blinks at the headlights with a growing awareness that the howling is not coming from inside. There's actually a car sounding its horn. She hears someone yelling. She holds up her hand to shield her eyes from the headlights of the BMW. Fredrik, the man who came to the café earlier, is standing in front of her, shouting furiously.

"Can you hear what I'm saying or are you a spastic?"

The way he puts it, it's as if her death would have been an inconvenience to him more than anyone else. She doesn't know what to say. Her heart is racing so frantically that it's giving her a stitch. Fredrik throws out his arms.

He takes two steps towards her. She doesn't know why. Looking back on it, she's unsure whether he was intending to hit her, but neither of them ever find out because he's interrupted by another voice. A different kind of voice. Cold.

Fredrik turns around first, so that Britt-Marie has time to see his eyes register the danger before she has time to see what he's worried about. He swallows.

Sami is standing a few feet away, with his hands in his pockets. He is twenty years old at most, but judging by the suffocating grip of his presence in the darkness, you might describe him as a "spirit of violence." Britt-Marie wonders whether in a crossword this might be rendered as "God of aggression." Vertical, fifteen letters. People have time to think of all sorts of things while they face up to what they imagine is their imminent violent death, and this happens to be the first thing that comes to Britt-Marie's mind. Fredrik stutters indecipherably. Sami says nothing. Another young man is moving up behind him. He's taller. It's not at all difficult to guess why he's known as Psycho. His mouth is grinning, but it's not so much a grin as a display of teeth.

"Problem?"

"No… she was wal --"

Britt-Marie has heard tell of this sort of thing on the natural history programs Kent used to watch when there was no soccer on the TV. Human beings are the only animals that smile as a gesture of peace, whereas other animals show their teeth as a threat. This is perfectly understandable now; she can see the animal inside the human being.

Psycho's smile grows wider. Sami doesn't take his hands out of his pockets. Doesn't even raise his voice.

"Don't you touch her," he says, nodding towards Britt-Marie while keeping his gaze fixed on Fredrik.

"Spastic! This whole bloody place is completely spastic!"

Fredrik totters back to his BMW. His self-confidence seems to grow with every step he takes towards it, as if the car is giving him superpowers. But he waits until he's standing right by the door before he hisses:

Psycho takes half a step forward. The BMW does a wheelspin in the mud and gravel and makes its escape in the rain. Britt-Marie has time to see the boy in the passenger seat, the one who's the same age as Ben and Vega and Omar, but taller and more grown up. Wearing the tracksuit top on which it says "Hockey." He looks scared.

"See you around, Coach!"

She's three hundred feet away when she finally has the courage to stop and catch her breath. When she turns around the two men have gone back to a group of other young men on a patch of asphalt between some apartment blocks and a cluster of trees. The black car is there, with its engine running and the headlights on. The young men are moving about in the beams of light. Sami yells something and surges forward, kicking his right leg into the air. Then he punches his fists up and cheers loudly at the sky.

Psycho looks at Britt-Marie. Displays his teeth. Britt-Marie turns around and does her absolute best to walk briskly without breaking into a run, because in the natural history programs they always say you shouldn't try to run away from wild animals. She hears Sami calling out behind her, without anger or menace, in fact almost softly:

The temperature drops below freezing in the night. Rain turns to snow.

It takes Britt-Marie a minute to understand what they are doing.

They're playing soccer.

Playing.

Britt-Marie stands on the balcony watching all this happening. She finds herself spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about sushi and how you make it.

The sun is already up when she wakes. She almost falls out of bed when she realizes. Waking up long after the late-rising January sun! What will people think? Still half asleep, she's making her way to her clothes when she realizes why she's woken up. Someone is knocking on the door. The whole thing is terribly vexatious, actually, waking up at an hour when people are actually quite entitled to knock on your door.

She cleans the mattress. Hangs up her coat. When she hears Bank coming back and closing the door downstairs, she paces around the room three times and thumps her feet as hard against the floor as she can. Just to clarify that she's there. Then she sleeps the dreamless sleep of exhaustion, because she couldn't even begin to say whose dreams she might have.

She fixes her hair as quickly as she can, then stumbles down almost the entire length of the stairs, very nearly breaking her neck. It's the sort of thing that happens every few minutes -- people falling down stairs and killing themselves. She just about manages to land on her two feet at the bottom, in the hall, and then sets about gathering her wits. After a certain amount of hesitation she rushes into the kitchen, which is obviously as dirty as you can possibly imagine, and then looks in all the drawers until she finds an apron.

"What are you doing?" asks Vega.

"Were you asleep?" asks Omar.

"That's not a crime, is it?"

She adjusts her apron, as you do when you are interrupted by someone knocking at your door while you are busy with the washing-up. Vega and Omar are standing there.

"I'm busy," Britt-Marie answers.

"Ha?" she says with raised eyebrows when she opens the door.

"Certainly not!" Britt-Marie protests, while adjusting both her hair and her apron.

"We were wondering if you wanted to eat with us tonight."

She puts this on.

"Cool it, will you? We only asked if you were asleep!"

"And then we're wondering if you want to be our new coach, for our team!"

Britt-Marie clasps her hands together.

"Did you have something you had to get up for?" asks Omar.

"It's possible that I may have overslept. It's not something that happens often."

Britt-Marie doesn't have a convincing answer to that one. There's a silence for a few moments, until Vega's patience runs out and she gets to the point with a frustrated groan:

"We heard you coming down the stairs," says Vega.

Omar nods energetically.

"There's this wicked knockout competition in town. The council is organizing it, and any team can take part, but you have to have a coach."

"You don't need to do anything, all you have to do is sign a bloody form and come to our bloody training sessions!" protests Vega.

"I'm not particularly taken with soccer," says Britt-Marie as politely as she can, which quite possibly is not very politely at all.

Then Omar shrieks, "Ouch!" and Vega hisses, "Idiot!" and tries to kick him again on the shin, but this time he gets out of the way.

"But we were thinking you don't have anything to do, sort of thing!" says Omar with a cheerful nod.

"There has to be someone else in Borg you could give this assignment to," says Britt-Marie and starts backing away into the hall.

"We wanted to invite you for dinner so we could ask you to be our coach. Sort of like when they offer a contract in proper soccer teams," says Vega sourly.

Adjusts her apron.

Britt-Marie pauses and looks thoroughly offended.

"No one else has time," says Vega.

"You bloody what?!" Omar exclaims.

"But I mean, God, this will hardly take anytime at all. You only have to be there when we're training in case one of the competition organizers comes by! So they can see we have a sodding coach!" Vega groans.

"We're training at six this evening in the parking area by the recreation center," says Omar with a nod.

"Like what?"

"I'll have you know I have a great deal to do."

"Nor does Omar, but we still let him play with us," says Vega.

"But I don't know anything about soccer!"

"I have a list!"

Britt-Marie has nothing to say to that. Vega starts going down the steps and makes an irritated gesture at Omar to come with her. Britt-Marie stays in the doorway, keeping her hands clasped together while opening and closing her mouth repeatedly, until at long last she calls out:

"Never bloody mind, then! We thought you had it in you to be decent about it. This is Borg, so it's not like there are so many other bloody adults to choose from. You're the only one."

Vega, apparently losing her patience, shakes her head at Britt-Marie.

"If you don't eat the tortillas it's like having salad."

"Okay. Come over to ours and have dinner at six, then, and we'll train afterwards."

"I can't at six o'clock!"

"Civilized people have their dinner at six. You actually can't play soccer in the middle of your dinner."

Of course it's not there and then that Britt-Marie becomes the coach of a soccer team. It's just the point at which someone tells her that's what she's become.

"We live in one of the high-rises, block two, second floor," says Omar and points down the road.

Vega turns around. Britt-Marie stares at her apron.

"What's tacos?"

Vega shrugs her shoulders again.

The children stare at her.

"I don't eat foreign food," says Britt-Marie, even though what she really means is, "Kent doesn't eat foreign food."

"Tacos," says Omar, as if the problem could only have been that she didn't hear him properly.

"We're having tacos!" says Omar, nodding with great satisfaction.

She closes the door. Removes her apron. Puts it back in the drawer. Then cleans the kitchen, because she doesn't know how not to. Then she goes upstairs and fetches her cell phone. The girl at the unemployment office picks up after a single ring.

Vega shrugs. As if it doesn't make any difference.

"A list?"

Britt-Marie has already hung up.

She may not know a lot about soccer, but even the gods know that no one is more skilled at lists than Britt-Marie.

"No… or what I mean is… what do you mean?" says the girl.

"Is that Britt-Marie?" asks the girl, although she should have learned by now.

"Do you know anything about soccer?"

"No… I've… or, I mean I assume their parents have to sign some letter to say they're allowed to play in the team," says the girl dubiously.

Britt-Marie makes a note of that on her list. Nods soberly to herself and asks:

"My dear, if for example you want to have your balcony glazed, you need a permit. I'm assuming the same thing applies to soccer teams. Surely they're not beyond the rule of law just because the players run about kicking things all over the place?"

"I'd say… but I don't know… the first thing you do at training… I mean, is to take the register?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Ha. So can I ask, what's the first thing you have to do at soccer practice?"

"You have a register. You tick off the people who are there," says the girl.

"I need to know how one trains a soccer team," Britt-Marie informs her. "Do you need a permit from the local authority for that type of thing?"

Britt-Marie exhales. But does not sigh.

"Yes…?"