“And as for you, David! What sort of leadership are you showing, making changes to the team before this of all games?”
David raises his eyebrows uncomprehendingly at her. William Lyt looks like he wants to die.
“What’s he doing here?” Maggan demands, pointing straight at Amat.
Amat looks like he shares William’s wish. David keeps his voice quiet on purpose, forcing all the other adults to shut up.
“I don’t justify my choice of team to anyone.”
The vein on Maggan’s forehead is throbbing like a church-bell.
“You’ll justify it to ME, I’ll have you know! These boys have played for you for ten years and for their biggest game ever you pick someone from the BOYS’ TEAM?”
She gestures expansively toward all the other adults in the room, and manages to get them to nod and grunt in agreement, before fixing her eyes on David and demanding:
“Do you have any idea how important this game is for us? For all of us? Do you know what we’ve had to sacrifice for this sport?”
Amat is squirming, and looks like he’d like to run off down the hall, leave the rink, and never come back. That’s not helped when David’s face turns red so quickly that even Maggan reverses straight into the wall.
“You want to talk to me about sacrifices?” David hisses, walking right up to her without giving her the slightest chance to reply.
“Look at him!” he says, pointing at Amat, and before Maggan has time to react he’s grabbed her by the arm and dragged her halfway across the floor until she’s standing right in front of the boy.
“Look at him! Are you seriously standing here saying that your son deserves this more than he does? Are you saying they trod the same path to get here? Are you telling me your family has worked harder than he has? Look at him!”
Maggan Lyt’s arm is shaking when he lets go of it. David simply gives Amat a quick pat on the shoulder, his thumb nudges the boy’s neck, and he looks him in the eye. Not a word. Just that.
Then the coach crosses the room, puts his hand on William Lyt’s cheek, and whispers:
“We play for ourselves, William. No one else. You and I, we play for ourselves. Because we got ourselves here. No one else did.”
William nods and wipes his eyes.
* * *
Bobo’s feet are drumming the floor relentlessly. He’s finding it impossible to sit still. When Lars throws out all the parents, including Maggan, the silence is so intense that it’s suffocating. And Bobo can’t keep quiet in situations like that; he’s never been able to. He isn’t Kevin or Benji, he’s always had to fight his way to the center of attention, to the middle of the locker room. As long as he can remember he’s been terrified of corners, of being forgotten, left unacknowledged. He can see all his best friends’ heads hanging on their chests now, and he would desperately love to stand up and give an inspirational speech, the sort you see in films, but he doesn’t have the words for it. Nor the voice. He just wants to kill the silence. So he stands up, clears his throat, and says:
“Hey, guys, what did one lesbian vampire say to the other lesbian vampire?”
The juniors look up at him in surprise. Bobo grins.
“See you in a month!”
Some of the team start to laugh, which is all the encouragement Bobo needs to carry on.
“Do you know what the usual cause of death is for lesbians?”
A few more are laughing now.
“Hairballs!” Bobo cries, before launching into his big finale.
“And do you know why lesbians get so many colds? LACK OF VITAMIN D!”
The whole locker room is laughing now. With him and at him, he doesn’t care which. As long as they laugh. In a moment of pride he turns to David, whose expression hasn’t changed, and bursts out:
“Have you got any good ones, coach?”
The locker room falls silent again. David sits there motionless. Bobo’s face turns first red, then white. In the end Lars both saves and destroys him by clearing his throat, getting to his feet, and saying:
“Do you know why Bobo always cries and his ears hurt after he’s had sex?”
Bobo squirms anxiously. Some of the guys start giggling in anticipation. Lars’s face cracks into an alarmingly wide grin.
“Because of the pepper spray and rape whistle!”
The storm of laughter from all the juniors makes the room shake. In the end even David smiles, and he’ll think back to that moment many times afterward: whether a joke is always only a joke, whether that particular one went too far, whether there are different rules inside and outside a locker room, whether it’s acceptable to cross the line in order to defuse tension and get rid of nerves before a game, or if he should have stopped Lars and intervened by saying something to the guys. But he does nothing. Just lets them all laugh. He’ll think about that when he gets home and looks his girlfriend in the eye.
In the meantime Amat is sitting in the corner, hearing himself laugh. Because it’s a release. Because it makes him feel part of the team. Because there’s something wonderful about making the same noise as everyone around him. He’ll feel ashamed of that forever.
* * *
Benji wakes up to find Kevin shaking him. Being able to sleep through both Maggan Lyt’s tactical talk and Lars’s sense of humor is one of his foremost talents, and getting a chance to do so is definitely a privilege. There have always been parents who have questioned Benji’s behavior, both on and off the ice, but David always says the same thing: “If the other players gave me even an ounce of what Benji gives me on the ice every time, I wouldn’t give a damn if they all slept on the team bench.”
When Bobo sits back down again, destroyed in the way that only a teenager can be by an adult in front of his best friends, another adult sits down next to him with his hand on his shoulder and his thumb against his neck. Bobo looks up. David is smiling at him.
“You’re the least selfish player I’ve got on this team, you know that?”
Bobo presses his lips together. David leans closer to him.
“You’re going to be playing in the third defensive pair tonight, and I know that’s going to be a disappointment to you.”
Bobo fights back tears. Throughout his early childhood he was the best back in this team because of his size and strength, but in the past few years his poor skating has let him down. First he slipped into the second defensive pair. Now the third. David holds his hand gently on his neck and looks at him intently as he says:
“But I need you. Your team needs you. You’re important. So I want you to give me everything you’ve got tonight, at every changeover. I want every last drop of blood. And if you give me that, if you trust me, I promise I’ll never let you down.”
By the time David stands up Bobo’s feet are drumming against the floor again. If David had asked him to go out and kill someone at that moment, he would have done so without hesitation. When the coach stands in the middle of the room, after ten years with them, there isn’t a boy in there who doesn’t feel the same. He looks each of them in the eye in turn.
“I’m not going to say much. You know who you’re up against. I know you’re better than them. So I expect just one thing. I will only tolerate one thing. Don’t come back to this locker room until you’ve given it to me.”
He seeks out Kevin’s gaze and holds it like a vise:
“Win.”
“Win!” Kevin replies with dark eyes.
“WIN!” David repeats, punching his clenched fists in the air.
“WIN!!!” the whole locker room roars with one voice.
They fly up from their benches, a stamping, banging, panting horde, ready to be led out by their team captain. David walks past and slaps each of them hard on the helmet, then when he gets to the front and has his fingers on the door handle he whispers so that only boy number nine can hear:
“I’m proud of you, Kevin. No matter what happens this evening, if you play your best match ever or your worst, there isn’t a
nother player in the world I’d have picked over you.”
* * *
The door opens. Kevin doesn’t walk out onto the ice.
* * *
He takes it by storm.
18
Loneliness is an invisible ailment. Since Holger left her, Ramona has become like the animals in the wildlife documentaries she watches on the nature channels on the nights when the sleeping pills don’t work. The ones who have been held in captivity for so long that you can remove all the barriers without them making any attempt to escape. Any living thing that is kept behind bars for long enough eventually becomes more scared of the unknown than its own captivity. At the start she only stayed indoors because she could still hear his laughter in here, his voice, and the way he used to swear when he stubbed his toe on the low step behind the bar. A whole life together in this building, and he still couldn’t figure out where that damn step was. But isolating yourself happens faster than you might think: the days blur together when you live more on the inside than outside, and the years continued to pass by on the other side of the street while she desperately tried to make everything inside the Bearskin and the apartment above it carry on exactly as it was when he died. She was frightened she would forget him if she went out into the world, that she might go to the supermarket and come home to find that his laughter was no longer there. Then suddenly one morning, eleven years had passed and everyone but her boys thinks she’s lost her mind now. She became a time traveller trapped inside her own machine.
People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem. Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don’t heal, they die.
She is standing in the snow just outside the door, smoking. Three in a row. The roof of the rink is visible from here, the roar when the Beartown juniors make it 1–0 sounds like it’s going to blow every building along the main street apart, as if it’s going to pick the whole forest up and dump it in the lake. Ramona tries to take a step toward the street, just one step nearer the pavement. Her whole body is shaking uncontrollably as she fumbles for the wall behind her, sweat drenching her clothes in spite of the sub-zero temperature. She goes back into the warmth, closes the door, switches the lights off, and lies down on the floor in the bar with Holger’s photograph in her hands. Right next to the step.
People say she’s gone mad, because that’s what people who know nothing about loneliness call it.
* * *
Amat is terrified, even though he hasn’t played for a second. When he followed Kevin and the rest of the team out onto the ice, when the crowd stood up and the roar made his ears pop, he headed straight for the bench absolutely convinced he was about to throw up. One day he’ll look back on that moment and realize that the feeling never disappears. No matter how successful you become.
Kevin scores the first goal in the opening minute of the game. That’s no coincidence; in every game he seems to get a short window before the defense realizes just how good he is, exactly how fluid his wrist action, how swiftly he can skate around them. He does that with laser-like precision. They won’t make that mistake again; for the rest of the game they shut him down by shadowing him so closely they may as well be sharing the same pair of skates. The opposition turns the game around to 2–1. They deserve it, they’re astonishingly good, powerfully and methodically mounting attack after attack until Amat ends up surprised that they’re only leading by one goal every time he looks up at the scoreboard. They’re the strongest and most technically proficient team he’s seen; he’s pretty sure they could have beaten Beartown’s A-team. And everyone can see it. With every line change, the players around Amat slump more heavily on the bench, their sticks pound the boards less often and less aggressively, and even Lars is swearing more quietly. In the second intermission, on his way to the locker room, Amat hears some adults in the stands laugh forlornly: “Well, a semifinal’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’ll just have to hope for a better team next season.” He’s surprised at how angry that makes him. It rouses something inside him. By the time he enters the room he’s ready to smash something. David is the only person who notices.
* * *
Robbie Holts is standing alone in the street, hating himself. He wouldn’t have gone outside voluntarily today unless he’d run out of drink at home again. He looks at the roof of the rink, estimates in his head where they ought to be in the game now. It’s a peculiar sort of angst, the one he lives with, knowing that you had the greatest moment in your life at the age of seventeen. While he was growing up everyone kept telling him he was going to turn professional, and he believed them so intensely that when he didn’t make it, he took it to mean that everyone else had let him down, as if somehow it wasn’t his own fault. He wakes up in the mornings with the feeling that someone has stolen a better life from him, an unbearable phantom pain between what he should have been and what he actually became. Bitterness can be corrosive; it can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.
Robbie walks down the steps to the Bearskin but stops himself in surprise. The lights are off inside. Ramona is downing one last glass of whisky and yanking on her outside clothes.
“Good that you came,” she whispers.
“Why? Are you going somewhere?” he wonders, confused, because he knows as well as everyone else that the crazy old bag hasn’t been farther than a couple of paces from the pub in over a decade.
“I’m going to a hockey match,” she says.
Robbie starts to laugh, because there’s no other option.
“And you want me to mind the bar for you?”
“I want you to come with me.”
He stops laughing then. She has to promise to wipe out his tab for the last four months to get him to take a single step outside the door.
* * *
Tails is standing up even though he’s paid for a seat. No one in the row behind can be bothered to complain anymore.
“That fucking William Lyt, Christ, there are people in witness protection programs who are easier to find on the ice than that bastard!” he snarls to the other sponsors.
“I beg your pardon?” Maggan Lyt exclaims from two rows below.
“I said WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM, Maggan!” Tails repeats.
And everyone sitting between them wishes they could apply to join it.
* * *
Bobo is still sitting in complete silence on the bench when the third period begins, and he can count the number of minutes he’s played on one hand. He doesn’t know how you can be part of a team when you’re not part of the game. He’s trying to control himself, but he loves this team, he loves his jersey and his number. So when he sees something he can’t believe everyone else can’t see as well, he grabs hold of William Lyt on the bench and shouts:
“Their backs want you to try to cut inside them, can’t you see that? They want it to be so crowded in the center that Kevin doesn’t have any space. Pretend you’re heading in and then dart outside just once, and I promise you . . .”
William clamps his glove over Bobo’s mouth.
“Shut up, Bobo! Who do you think you are? You’re in the third defensive pair, you don’t tell the first line what to do. Go and get me my water bottle!”
The look in his eyes is so cold and patronizing that Bobo can hardly hear the mocking laughter from the other players. The most painful fall for anyone is tumbling down through a hierarchy. Bobo has known Lyt all his life, and the way his friend is looking at him now leaves marks, and gives rise to the sort of corrosive bitterness that never leaves some men, that can wake you in the middle of the night and make you think someone has stolen the life you should have had. Bobo goes and gets the
water bottle; Lyt takes it without a word. Bobo is the largest player on the team, but when he sits down he is the smallest player on the bench.
* * *
Ramona stops outside the rink. Stands in the snow shaking, and whispers:
“I’m . . . sorry, Robert, I can’t . . . I can’t . . . No farther than this.”
Robbie is holding her hand. She’s not supposed to be living this way. Holger ought to have been sitting in there, this should have been their moment. He puts his arm around her as only someone else who has been the victim of theft can.
“Let’s go back home, Ramona. It doesn’t matter.”
She shakes her head, fixes her eyes on him.
“The deal is that I wipe your tab if you go to the game, Robert. I want to know what happened immediately afterward. I’ll be standing here waiting.”
Robbie is many things. But brave enough to argue with Ramona isn’t one of them.
* * *
There’s a distinct moment in a player’s life when they find out exactly how good they are. William Lyt’s comes halfway through the third period. He’s never been quick enough for this level, but now it also becomes clear that he doesn’t have the stamina either. He can’t keep up, he hasn’t got the energy, their opponents can direct him without going anywhere near him. Kevin has two men marking him, four arms across his chest the whole time. Benji is a tornado, flying across the whole of the rink, but Beartown needs more space. Lyt gives all he has. It isn’t enough.
David has built his whole philosophy, this team’s entire unbelievable season, on not trusting to fate. They never just hope for the best. They don’t just dump the puck forward and go for it, they have a plan, a strategy, a purpose with each pattern, each movement. But as Sune, the old bastard, keeps saying, “The puck doesn’t just glide, it bounces as well.” It’s unpredictable.
Lyt is heading for the bench when he gets tripped. He falls to the ice and sees the puck bounce over the blade of one of their opponents and nudges it forward out of reflex. It jumps over another three sticks, Kevin reaches for it but is brought down by a big hit. There’s no way for anyone to get around the falling bodies, but as luck would have it, Benjamin Ovich isn’t a go-around person. He’s a go-through person. When the puck flies into the goal, Benji isn’t far behind it, and the crossbar hits him across the neck. You couldn’t have gotten him to admit that it hurt even if it had been a medieval broadsword.