Beartown

  When Jeanette takes attendance, she looks out of the window and sees Benji light a cigarette in the schoolyard, get on his bicycle, and ride off. The teacher hesitates for a moment. Then she marks him as present anyway.

  * * *

  Ana turns up the brightness of the screen to maximum, opens all her apps, and starts a film before leaving her phone in her locker. She treats herself like an alcoholic emptying her home of bottles. She knows that before the morning is over she won’t be able to resist calling Maya any longer. She wants to make sure that the battery will be exhausted by then, making it impossible.

  * * *

  It doesn’t matter who sits together that day. Everyone eats lunch on their own.

  26

  Peter is sitting on a bench in the juniors’ empty locker room. One of the posters with a quote meant to inspire has fallen to the floor; it’s crumpled and marked with footprints. Peter reads it over and over again. He can remember when Sune pinned it up. Peter had only just learned to read.

  He had been a child heading straight into darkness when hockey found him. Sune dragged him to the surface and this team kept him afloat. With a mom who died when he was in primary school and a dad who was always teetering on the brink between happy drunk and cruel alcoholic, when Peter as a little boy found something to cling on to, he held on until his knuckles turned white. Sune was always there, through the wins and the losses, in Beartown and on the other side of the world. When the injuries piled up and his career came to an abrupt halt, when Peter buried his father and his son within the space of a year—it was Sune who called him then and told him there was a club here that needed help. And Peter needed to feel that he could keep something alive.

  He knows how quiet it gets when hockey tells you you’re finished. How quickly you start to miss the ice, the locker room, the guys, the bus trips, the gas-station sandwiches. He knows how as a seventeen-year-old he would look at the tragic former players in their forties who used to hang around the rink going on about their own achievements in front of an audience that got smaller and smaller each season. The job of GM gave him a chance to live on as part of a team, to build something bigger, something that could outlast him. But with that came responsibility: make the difficult decisions, live with the pain.

  He picks up the poster that’s fallen to the floor. Reads it one last time. A great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.

  Today he will persuade the man who dragged him to the surface to resign of his own free will. The sponsors and the board don’t even want to fire Sune, they don’t want to give him a redundancy pay-off. Peter is expected to tell him to leave in silence, because that would be best for the club.

  * * *

  Sune wakes early in the little row house where he’s always lived on his own. He rarely has visitors, but those who do come are often surprised by how tidy it is. No piles of clutter, newspapers, beer cans, and pizza boxes as some people might expect of an old man who has been a bachelor all his life. Neat, tidy, clean. Not even any hockey posters on the walls or trophies on the shelves. Sune has never been very fond of objects; he has his plants in the windows and during the summer recess he grows flowers in the narrow garden at the back. And the rest of the time he has hockey.

  He drinks his instant coffee and washes the cup straight afterward. He was once asked what the most important requirement was if you wanted to become a successful hockey coach. He replied: “Being able to drink really bad coffee.” All those early mornings and late nights in rinks with scorched coffeepots and cheap coffee machines, bus trips and isolated roadside cafés, camps and tournaments with school refectories—how could anyone with an expensive espresso machine at home ever put up with that? You want to be a hockey coach? Get used to not having the things other people have. Free time, a family life, decent coffee. Only the toughest of men can handle this sport. Men who can drink terrible coffee cold, if need be.

  He walks through the town. Says hello to almost all the men over thirty; at some point over the years he’s coached pretty much every single one of them. The teenagers are a different matter altogether, because each year he recognizes fewer and fewer of them. He no longer shares a language with the boys in this town, which makes him as obsolete as a fax machine. He doesn’t actually understand how he’s expected to believe that “children are the future” when more and more of them are choosing not to play hockey. How can you be a child and not want to play hockey?

  He takes the road leading up through the forest, and when he reaches the turning to the kennels he sees Benjamin. The boy stubs his cigarette out too late to avoid being seen, but Sune pretends not to have noticed. When he himself was a player his teammates used to smoke in the breaks between periods, and some of them would drink export-strength beer. Times change, but he isn’t sure that the game has actually changed quite as much as some coaches think.

  He stops by the fence and looks at the dogs rushing about. The long-haired boy stands beside him, uncomprehendingly, but doesn’t ask what he’s doing there. Sune pats him lightly on his shoulder.

  “Fantastic game on Saturday, Benjamin. Fantastic game.”

  Benji looks down at the ground and nods silently. Sune doesn’t know if it’s shyness or humility, so the old man points through the fence and adds:

  “You know, when David first became a coach I always used to say to him that the best hockey players are like the best hunting dogs. They’re born egotists; they always hunt for their own sake. So you need to nurture them and train them and love them until they start hunting for your sake too. For their teammates’ sake. Only then can they become really good. Truly great.”

  Benji brushes his bangs from his eyes.

  “Are you thinking of getting one, then?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it for years. But I always thought I didn’t have time for a puppy.”

  Benji puts his hands in his jacket pockets and stamps some snow from his shoes.

  “And now?”

  Sune starts laughing.

  “I have a feeling that I might have a bit more free time than I’m used to fairly soon.” Benji nods and looks him in the eye for the first time in the conversation.

  “Just because we love David doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t have played for you.”

  “I know,” the old man replies, and pats the boy on the shoulder again.

  Sune doesn’t say what he’s thinking, because he isn’t sure if it would actually do Benjamin any favors. But the whole time David and Sune have been arguing about whether a seventeen-year-old could be ready to play in the A-team, they’ve really always been in total agreement. Just not about which of the seventeen-year-olds it should be. Kevin may have the natural talent, but Benjamin has all the rest. Sune has always been more interested in the length of the string than the size of the balloon.

  Adri comes out of the house, ruffles her little brother’s hair, and shakes Sune’s hand.

  “I’m Sune,” he says.

  “I know who you are,” Adri replies, then asks immediately: “What do you think about next season? Have we got a chance of going up? You need to get a couple of decent skaters into that team, surely? Get rid of the donkeys in the second and third lines.”

  It takes Sune a few moments to realize that she’s talking about the A-team and not the juniors. He’s so used to the juniors’ relatives only wanting to talk about the junior team that it catches him off guard.

  “There’s always a chance. But the puck doesn’t just glide . . . ,” Sune says.

  “It bounces as well!” Adri grins.

  When Sune looks bemused, Benji explains helpfully:

  “Adri used to play. In Hed. She was rough as hell, got more penalties than me.” Sune laughs appreciatively. Adri gestures toward the fence.

  “So what can we do for you?”

  “I’d like to buy a dog,” Sune says.

  Adri holds out her hand and presses his shoulder, with a stern face but a friendly smile.

  “I’m
afraid I can’t let you buy one, Sune. But I can give you one. For building up this club, and for saving my little brother’s life.”

  Benji is breathing through his nose and concentrating on the dogs. Sune’s lips quiver gently. When he’s composed himself he manages to say:

  “So . . . which puppy would you recommend for a retired old guy, then?”

  “That one,” Benji says, pointing at one without hesitation.

  “Why?”

  Now it’s the boy’s turn to pat the old man on the shoulder. “Because he’s a challenge.”

  * * *

  David is sitting on his own in the stands in the rink. For once he is looking up at the roof, not down at the ice.

  He’s got a migraine, is under more pressure than ever, can’t remember the last time he slept right through the night. His girlfriend can’t even be bothered to try communicating with him at home anymore seeing as she never gets any response. He’s living inside his own head, and in there he’s on the ice twenty-four hours a day. In spite of that, or perhaps precisely because of it, he can’t take his eyes off the worn old banner hanging above his head: “Culture, Values, Community.”

  He’s due to give an interview to the local paper today; the sponsors have arranged it. David protested but the club’s president just grinned: “You want the media to write less about you? Tell your team to play worse!” He can already imagine all the questions. “What is it that makes Kevin Erdahl so good?” they’ll ask, and David will reply the way he always replies: “Talent and training. Ten thousand little things that he’s repeated ten thousand times.” But that isn’t really true.

  He’ll never be able to explain it properly to a journalist, but when it really comes down to it, a coach can never create a player like that. Because what makes Kevin the best is his absolute desire to win. Not that he hates losing, but that he can’t even begin to conceive of trying to accept not winning. He’s merciless. You can’t teach someone that.

  How many hours do these guys put into it? How much did David himself sacrifice? Their whole lives up to the age of twenty, twenty-five, are nothing but training, training, training, and what do they get for that if it turns out that they’re not good enough? Nothing. No education, no safety net. A player who’s as good as Kevin is might turn professional. Might earn millions. And the players who are almost as good? They’ll end up in the factory just the other side of the trees from the rink.

  David looks at the banner. As long as his team carries on winning, he’ll have a job here, but if they lose? How many steps away from the factory is he? What can he do apart from hockey? Nothing.

  He was sitting in this precise spot when he was twenty-two, thinking exactly the same things. Sune was sitting beside him then. David asked about the banner, asked what it meant to Sune, and Sune replied: “Community is the fact that we work toward the same goal, that we accept our respective roles in order to reach it. Values is the fact that we trust each other. That we love each other.” David thought about that for a long while before asking: “What about culture, then?” Sune looked more serious, choosing his words carefully. In the end he said: “For me, culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit.”

  David asked what he meant by that, and Sune replied: “That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”

  David closes his eyes. Clears his throat. Then he stands up and walks down toward the ice. Doesn’t look up at the roof again. Banners have no meaning this week. Only results.

  * * *

  Peter passes the president’s office. It’s full of people even though it’s still morning. Enthusiastic sponsors and board members are abuzz. One of the board members, a man in his sixties who made his money in three different construction companies, is making wild, thrusting movements with his hips to illustrate what he thinks Beartown did to their opponents in the semifinal, then yelps:

  “And the whole third period was one big ORGASM! They came here thinking they were going to fuck US! They won’t be able to put their legs together for WEEKS!”

  Some of the men laugh, some don’t. If any of them is thinking anything, they don’t say it. Because it’s only a joke, after all, and the board members are like a team, you take the good with the bad.

  Later that day Peter will drive to the big supermarket owned by Tails. He’ll sit in his old friend’s office and talk rubbish about old matches, telling the same jokes they’ve told since they first met in skating class when they were five years old. Tails will want to offer whisky, Peter will decline, but before he leaves he’ll say:

  “Have you got any jobs in the warehouse?”

  Tails will scratch his stubble hesitantly and wonder:

  “Who for?”

  “Robbie.”

  “I’ve got a waiting list of a hundred people who want warehouse jobs. Which Robbie are you talking about?”

  Peter will stand up and cross Tails’s office to an old photograph hanging on the wall, a photograph of a hockey team from a small town in the forest who got to be second-best in the country. First Peter will point at himself in the photograph. Then at Tails. And then, in between the two of them, at Robbie Holts.

  “ ‘We look after each other,’ isn’t that what you said, Tails? ‘The bears from Beartown.’ ”

  Tails will look at the photograph and lower his chin in shamefaced agreement. “I’ll check with personnel.”

  Two men in their forties will shake hands in front of a picture of themselves in their twenties.

  * * *

  The locker room fills with juniors without filling with noise. They put their gear on in silence. Benji doesn’t show up. Everyone notices, no one says anything.

  Lyt makes a halfhearted attempt to break the silence by telling them how he got a blowjob from a girl at Kevin’s party, but when he won’t say who the girl was it becomes obvious that he’s lying. Everyone knows Lyt can’t keep a secret. Lyt looks as if he wants to say something else, but glances toward Kevin with an anxious look on his face and says nothing. The players move out toward the ice, Lyt tapes his pads and tears the loose scraps of tape and throws them on the floor. Bobo waits until almost all the others have left the locker room before bending over, picking them up, and dropping them in the garbage. He and Amat never talk about it.

  They’re halfway through the training session before Kevin finds a way to end up close enough to Amat during a break in play to be able to talk without being overheard. Amat is leaning forward on his stick, staring at his skates.

  “What you think you saw . . . ,” Kevin begins.

  He’s not threatening. Not hard or commanding. He’s almost whispering.

  “You know what women are like.”

  Amat wishes he knew what he is supposed to say. Wishes he had the courage. But his lips remain sealed. Kevin pats him gently on the back.

  “We’re going to make a fucking good team, you and me. In the A-team.”

  He glides away toward the bench when Lars blows his whistle. Amat follows, still staring at his skates but unable to look right at the ice. Frightened of seeing his reflection in it.

  27

  The lump in Kira’s stomach refuses to give up its grasp. She keeps telling herself that there’s nothing wrong with Maya, that she’s just a normal teenager, that it’s just a phase. She keeps telling herself to be the cool mom. It’s not working.

  So when her colleague blunders in through the door, Kira feels grateful rather than annoyed. Even though she’s got an ocean of work to drown herself in, she’s relieved to see her standing there shouting that she needs “help crushing these bastards!”

  “Didn’t this client agree to a settlement?” Kira asks as she scans the document her colleague tosses onto her desk.

  “That’s the problem. They want me to back down. Like some sort of coward. And do you know what the Badger says?”

  “Do as the client sa . . . ,” Kira suggests.

  “DO AS THE CLIENT SAYS! T
HAT’S WHAT HE SAYS! Can you believe that he’s in charge? IN CHARGE! What is it with men? Have they got a different density from women, or what? How come anyone with a dick always rises to the top of every single organization?”

  “Okay . . . but if your client accepts the terms, then . . .”

  “Then that’s my job? Go to hell! Isn’t it my job to look after my client’s best interests?”

  Kira’s colleague is bouncing up and down with anger, her heels leaving little marks in the floor of the office. Kira rubs her forehead.

  “Well, yes, but maybe not if the client doesn’t actually want you to . . .”

  “My clients have no idea what they want!”

  Kira looks at the document, sees the name of the firm representing the other party. And starts to laugh. Her colleague applied for a job there once, and didn’t get it.

  “Okay, but the fact that you want to win this particular case . . . that wouldn’t be because you just happen to hate this particular firm . . . ?” Kira mutters.

  Her colleague grabs her over the desk, her eyes flashing:

  “No, I don’t just want to win, Kira. I want to crush them! I want to give them an existential crisis. I want them to walk out of the negotiation room and think that they might like to move to the coast and renovate an old school and open a bed-and-breakfast. I want to hurt those bastards so badly that they start meditating and trying to FIND THEMSELVES! They’ll turn vegetarian and be wearing socks with sandals by the time I’m finished with them!”

  Kira sighs and laughs.

  “Okay, okay, okay . . . give me the rest of the file and let’s take a look . . .”

  “Socks with SANDALS, Kira! I want them to start growing their own tomatoes! I want to ruin their self-confidence until they stop being lawyers and try to be HAPPY and shit like that instead! Okay?”

  Kira promises. They close the door. They’re going to win. They always do.

  * * *