That’s what he tells himself.
* * *
David closes the door behind him, stands in front of the bed, and looks the boy right in the eye. All the tens of thousands of hours they’ve spent on the ice together, all the weekends on the team bus, driving up and down the country, all the gas station sandwiches and poker parties. He was a child until recently. Until very recently.
“Just look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t do it. I’m not asking for anything else,” David says.
And Kevin looks him straight in the eye. Shakes his head as he cries. Whispers with wet cheeks:
“I slept with her, because that’s what she wanted. She asked me to! Ask anyone who was at the party . . . Shit, Coach . . . really? You seriously think I could rape someone? Why would I do THAT!?”
All the “fathers against sons” days at the rink that David has spent down on the lake with Kevin and Benji. All that he’s taught them. All that they’ve shared. Next year they’ll be taking over the A-team, together. Who do you start with? If the water is freezing but you know the boat won’t be able to carry everyone to the shore? Who do you sacrifice first? Who do you protect unto the last? Kevin isn’t the only one who’ll suffer if he confesses. Everyone he loves will. That’s what David tells himself.
David sits on the boy’s bed and hugs him. Promises that everything will be okay. That he’ll never let him down. That he’s proud of him. The boat may be rocking, but it’s not letting in water. All the feet in the house are dry. Kevin turns to his coach and whispers, like he was a primary school pupil again:
“The team are training, today, aren’t they? Can I come?”
* * *
On a stool in her bedroom sits a mother, thinking about a childhood. How she and her husband used to come home from trips abroad when Kevin was ten or eleven and find the house in a complete mess. His father always swore, even though he never seemed to appreciate how calculated the chaos was, but his mom soon learned to understand the pattern. The same things had moved, the same pictures would be hanging crookedly, the bin full of prepared meals whose contents had obviously been opened at the same time.
When Kevin became a teenager and started having parties, his mother started to come home to a house where the boy had obviously done all he could to make it look like he hadn’t even been there. But before that, when he was little, when he proudly promised his dad that he wasn’t scared of being on his own, he always had to come back on that last evening and mess up the whole house so that no one would know he had slept at Benji’s the whole time.
* * *
On a chair in his kitchen sits a father, and all around him his friends and business partners are talking, but he no longer hears the words. He knows he occupies his position in this town, his status among this group of men, purely because of his money. None of these men play golf with poor guys, and he’s been poor. All his life he has strived for perfection, not out of vanity, but as a survival strategy. He has never been given anything for free, he’s never cut himself any slack, the way men who are born rich can. He’s convinced that’s the reason for his success: the fact that he’s been prepared to work harder and fight more ruthlessly than everyone else. And continuing to hunt perfection in all things means never being satisfied, never resting on your laurels. You can’t live that sort of life half the time, your work and private life become the same thing. Everything in his life has become a reflection of him as a person. Even his son. Any crack in the façade could lead to an avalanche.
He may have wanted to talk to Kevin when he picked him up from the police station, but every word came out as a roar. A man who takes great pride from the fact that he never loses his temper, never raises his voice, screaming so loudly that the car shook. He may have wanted to scream about what had happened, but it was easier to scream about why:
“HOW THE HELL COULD YOU LET YOURSELF GET DRUNK A WEEK BEFORE THE FINAL?”
It’s easier to talk about a cause rather than a problem. For a dad who works with numbers, mathematics provides a more bearable explanatory model: if only X hadn’t existed, Y would never have happened. If Kevin hadn’t had a party despite promising his parents that he wouldn’t, if he hadn’t gotten drunk, if he hadn’t take a girl up to his room, then they wouldn’t have had to deal with this problem.
But now the father has no choice. He can’t afford to let anyone tell lies about his son; he can’t accept the idea of anyone attacking his family. When the police became involved, when they dragged Kevin off the bus in front of the whole town, when the reporters from the local paper started to call, that was when things passed the point where there could have been a peaceful solution. Now it’s too late. The father has a business that consists of his name, and if that name gets sullied, it could destroy the entire life of the family. So he can’t let them win, he can’t even let them exist. It’s not enough merely to hurt them. He has to hunt them down with every weapon he can find.
There’s no right or wrong in this house anymore, just survival.
* * *
David and Kevin are still sitting on the bed when Kevin’s father opens the door. He stands in front of them, tired and pale, and explains in a very controlled voice:
“I understand that you only want to think about hockey right now, but if you want there even to be an A-team to coach and play in next season, you need to listen very carefully now. Either the two of you stay at the club, or Peter Andersson does. There’s no middle way. His daughter is lying, and there may be a thousand reasons for that. Maybe she had sex because she’s in love and when she discovered that her feelings weren’t reciprocated, she invented the story about rape. Maybe her dad found out and got angry, so she lied to protect herself, because she wants to go on being Daddy’s innocent little girl. Who knows? Fifteen-year-old girls aren’t rational.”
David looks down at the floor. He can remember when Kevin was receiving offers from all the big teams but chose not to go, because he didn’t want to leave Benji and his home, because he was scared. It was David who persuaded Kevin’s dad to let him stay in Beartown. He promised that the boy would develop just as well here, would get to play on the A-team early, and would achieve even greater things once he did turn professional. His dad agreed because David was going to be A-team coach, and because the decision simultaneously made his company even more popular in the district. Kevin was a Beartown kid, his dad a Beartown man, and that looked good. His dad has invested a lot of money in that image. So now he points at Kevin and sternly says:
“This isn’t a game anymore. Peter Andersson waited a week before going to the police, because he wanted the police to drag you off that bus. He wanted everyone to see that. So either he forces us out of this club, or we force him out. Together. There are no other options.”
David says nothing. He’s thinking about his job. His team. All those hours. And one single memory refuses to leave him: he saw Peter in the parking lot when the police came to the bus. He saw him standing there waiting. Kevin’s dad is right. Peter wanted to see it happen.
Kevin lifts his head and snot and tears drip onto the floor when he says:
“Someone needs to talk to Amat. He . . . I didn’t do anything . . . you know I didn’t do anything . . . but maybe Amat thinks . . . He came into the room and saw us . . . She just got SCARED, okay? She rushed out, but maybe Amat thinks . . . you know.”
David doesn’t look up, because he doesn’t want to see the way the father is looking at the son.
38
There are damn few things in life that are harder than admitting to yourself that you’re a hypocrite.
* * *
Amat is walking along, half on the edge of the road and half in the ditch. He’s wet and cold and his brain went numb long before his feet. He’s halfway between Hed and Beartown when an old Saab drives past and stops ten yards ahead of him. It waits for him as he walks slowly toward it. There are two men in their late twenties or early thirties sitting in the front seats. Black jackets,
wary eyes. He knows who they are. He doesn’t know which is more dangerous: looking them in the eye or avoiding doing so.
A few months ago the local paper interviewed a player from a team that was due to play Beartown’s A-team. The player came from the south—he didn’t know any better—so when the reporter asked if he was frightened by the violent reputation of the Pack, the passionate supporters up in Beartown, he said he certainly wasn’t frightened of “a few forest gangsters from a dying town.”
When the team’s bus was driving through the forest the next day, they found the road in front of them blocked by a couple of vans. Out of the trees stepped thirty or forty masked men in black jackets, armed with tree branches. They stood there for ten minutes, let the team on board prepare themselves for the moment when the door was smashed in and the bus invaded, but nothing happened. Suddenly the forest swallowed the men up again, the vans reversed out of the way, and the bus was allowed through.
The player who had talked to the paper turned to an older player and gasped: “Why didn’t they do anything?” The older player replied: “They were just introducing themselves. They want you to think about what they could do when the bus is going back the other way.”
Beartown lost the match, but the player who had talked to the paper played his worst ever match. When he got back to his own town, someone had already been there and smashed the windows of his car, filled it with branches and leaves, and set fire to it.
“You’re Amat, right?” the man in the driver’s seat asks.
Amat nods. The driver nods toward the back door.
“Want a lift?”
Amat doesn’t know if it’s more dangerous to say yes or no. But in the end he shakes his head. The men don’t look insulted, the driver even smiles when he says:
“Nice to have a bit of a walk, yeah? We get it.”
He puts the car in gear, slowly releases the clutch, but before it starts to move he leans out of the window and adds:
“We saw you play in the semifinal, Amat. You’ve got heart. When you and the other juniors make it to the A-team, we can build something really good around here again. A real Beartown team made up of real Beartown guys. You get it? You, Benji, Filip, Lyt. Kevin.”
Amat knows that the expression on his face is being scrutinized by the men in the car when Kevin’s name is mentioned. That this was the whole reason why they stopped. His chin moves quickly up and down, their eyes meet very briefly. They know that he understands.
They wish him a pleasant walk and pull away.
* * *
Peter is sitting in his office staring at a black computer screen. He’s thinking about “the right sort of guy.” He’s said those words hundreds of times in hundreds of different rooms, and hundreds of men have nodded in agreement, even though he is certain that no one can explain exactly what they mean. It’s a pointless term to use in hockey, because it suggests that who you are off the ice says something about who you are on it. And that’s a difficult thing to acknowledge. Because if you love hockey, if you love anything, really, you’d really prefer it to exist inside a bubble, unaffected by anything happening outside. You want there to be one place, one single place, which will always be exactly the same, no matter how much the world outside might change.
That’s why Peter likes to say: “Hockey and politics don’t belong together.” When he said that during an argument with Kira a few years ago, his wife snorted and said: “No? What do you think gets rinks built, if not politics? Do you think it’s only people who like hockey who pay taxes, then?”
A few years ago there was an incident at one of the A-team’s away games. A Beartown player lost his temper and brought his stick down on the head of an opponent, a promising twenty-year-old. He was ejected for the rest of the game, but escaped a longer suspension. When he left the ice and was on his way to the locker room, he was confronted by two men: the assistant coach of the other team and one of their sponsors. An argument and a clumsy fight ensued. The player hit the coach in the face with his glove, and the sponsor pulled the player’s helmet off and tried to headbutt him, before the player smashed his stick into the sponsor’s knee and knocked him to the floor. No one suffered any serious injury, but the player was reported to the police and was fined several days’ wages. As for the player who got hit in the head while on the ice during the game, the resulting concussion and neck injury ended his career.
Peter remembers the incident because Kira brought it up again and again for the rest of the season. “So when someone gets into a fight three yards from the ice, it’s okay to report them to the police. But a minute and a half earlier when the same man hits a twenty-year-old over the head with a stick in the middle of a match, he just has to go and sit and feel embarrassed for a little while?”
Peter couldn’t win against her, because he didn’t want to say what he really felt: that he didn’t think what had happened in the players’ tunnel should have been reported to the police either. Not because he liked violence, and not because he was in any way trying to defend what the player had done, but because he wanted hockey to solve hockey’s problems. Inside the bubble.
He’s always felt that it’s impossible to explain that to anyone who doesn’t love hockey. Now he’s no longer sure he can even convince himself. And he doesn’t know what that says about him.
* * *
Hypocrisy is a damn hard thing to admit.
* * *
The club’s president wipes his hands on his pants and feels the sweat trickling down the base of his spine. He’s spent all day talking on the phone, trying to put this off as long as possible, but he no longer has a choice. The threats of withdrawn sponsors’ money and resigned memberships have grown too strong, and everyone is asking the same thing: “Whose side are you really on?”
As if a hockey club is supposed to choose a side. The president is proud to represent a popular movement that is independent of ideologies, religions, and other faiths. He doesn’t believe in God, but he does believe in hockey, and he believes in the unifying strength of a hockey club precisely because it only defines itself as a hockey club. The stands are unique—they contain rich and poor alike, high and low, right and left—and how many places like that does society have left? How many troublesome guys has hockey kept away from addiction and prison? How much money does hockey save society? How come everything bad that happens is “hockey’s problem,” but everything good is thanks to something else? It drives the president mad, that people don’t appreciate how much work goes on behind the scenes. You need more diplomacy here than in the headquarters of the United Nations.
The phone rings again. Again. Again. In the end he stands up and goes out into the hallway, where he tries to breathe normally in spite of the pressure in his chest. Then he goes and stands in the doorway to Peter’s office and says quietly:
“Maybe you should go home, Peter. Until this blows over.”
Peter sits on his chair without looking at him. He’s already packed his things away in boxes. Hasn’t even switched his computer on. He’s just been waiting.
“Is that what you think, or are you just scared about what other people think?”
The president frowns.
“For God’s sake, Peter, you know perfectly well that I think this whole . . . situation . . . is terrible! Just terrible! What . . . What . . . What your daughter is going through is . . .”
Peter stands up.
“Maya. You can say her name. You come to her birthday party every year. You taught her to ride a bike, do you remember? Right here, in front of the rink.”
“I’m just trying . . . Please, Peter . . . the board is just trying to handle this . . . responsibly.”
Peter’s eyebrows quiver; that’s the only physical sign of the unbearable firestorm raging inside him.
“Responsibly? Let me guess. The board would rather we had dealt with this ‘internally.’ That we hadn’t involved the police and the media, and just ‘looked each other in the eye and talked
about it.’ Is that more or less what people have been telling you over the phone today? It was RAPE! How do you deal with that INTERNALLY!?”
When Peter picks up his boxes and walks out into the hallway, the president gets out of the way, then clears his throat unhappily and says:
“It’s her word against his, Peter. We have to think of the team first. You of all people ought to understand that. The club can’t take a position on this.”
Peter doesn’t turn around when he replies:
“The club has taken a position. It just did.”
He dumps his boxes in the back of his car, but leaves it in the parking lot. He walks slowly through the town without knowing where he’s going.
* * *
The school headmaster hardly has time to put the phone down before it rings again. Voice after voice, parent after parent. What answers do they want? What do they expect? This is a police matter, let the courts decide, as if running a school isn’t hard enough. The girl’s mother is a lawyer, the boy’s father one of the most powerful men in the entire district, one person’s word against another’s. Who’d want to get in the middle of that? That can’t be the task of the school, surely? So the headmaster says the same thing again, over and over again, to everyone:
“Please, let’s not make this political. Whatever you do, don’t make this political!”