* * *
One advantage of having a brother who works for the security company is that all her nocturnal outings as a result of false alarms have given Jeanette a specialist’s knowledge of the architecture of the school. For instance, she knows where on the top floor to find the small cubbyhole containing the narrow staircase that the chimney sweeps once used to reach the roof. And up there, behind an air vent just above the dining room, a teacher can have a cigarette without being spotted by either the headmaster or any students. And that’s needed more on some days than others.
That’s how Jeanette happens to see Benji walking across the schoolyard just after lunch. All the other players in the junior team are playing truant to be with Kevin, so the fact that Benji is here of his own volition can only mean that he’s looking for the opposite.
* * *
Ana is sitting alone in a classroom full of students who are talking about nothing but Maya and Kevin. Maya is sitting alone in another classroom where no one is talking at all. She sees the notes they pass across each other’s desks, the phones they conceal on their laps.
She will always be this to them now: at best the girl who got raped, at worst the girl who lied. They will never let her be anyone but that. In every room, on every street, in the supermarket and at the rink, she will walk in like an explosive device. They will be scared to touch her, even the ones who believe her, because they don’t want to risk getting hit by shrapnel when she detonates. They will back away in silence, turn in a different direction. They will wish that she would just disappear, that she had never been here. Not because they hate her, because they don’t, not all of them: they don’t all scrawl BITCH on her locker, they don’t all rape her, they aren’t all evil. But they’re all silent. Because that’s easier.
She gets up in the middle of the class and leaves the room without a word of protest from her teacher. She crosses an empty hallway, goes into a bathroom, stands in front of the mirror, and smashes her fist into it as hard as she can. The glass shatters and it takes a few seconds for the pain to reach her brain, and she has time to see the blood before it actually hurts.
* * *
Benji sees her go in. He does his best to persuade himself to go in the other direction. Keep quiet. Don’t get involved. But then he hears the crash and the tinkling sound as pieces of glass hit the porcelain sink, and he’s broken enough mirrors himself to recognize the noise.
He knocks on the door. When she doesn’t answer he says:
“I can kick it in, or you can unlock it, your choice.”
She’s standing there with toilet paper wrapped clumsily around her knuckles. It’s slowly turning red. Benji closes the door behind him, nods toward the mirror:
“Seven years’ bad luck.”
Perhaps Maya ought to be frightened, but she hasn’t got the energy. She can’t even be bothered to feel hate. She doesn’t feel anything at all.
“Hardly makes any difference to me now, does it?”
Benji sticks his hands in his pockets. They stand in silence, the victim and the best friend. The bitch and the brother. Maya clears her throat to stifle her sobs and says:
“I don’t care what you want. I get that you hate me. You think I’m lying to get your best friend in trouble. But you’re wrong. You’re fucking wrong.”
Benji takes his hands out of his pockets, carefully picks some pieces of glass out of the sink, and drops them, one by one, into the trash.
“You’re the one who’s wrong.”
“Screw you,” Maya hisses, and moves toward the door, and the boy slips nimbly out of the way so she doesn’t have to come into physical contact with him, and only much later will she realize what a considerate gesture that was.
Benji utters the words so quietly that at first she thinks she’s misheard:
“You’re the one who’s wrong, Maya. Because you think he’s still my best friend.”
* * *
Jeanette has an hour between lessons. She takes the opportunity to go to the bathroom to wash the smell of cigarettes off her fingers while the hallway is empty. She stops when she sees Maya come out, in tears and with her knuckles bleeding, as if she’s smashed something. The girl doesn’t see the teacher, just runs off in the other direction, toward the exit.
The next moment the washroom explodes with noise as a sink is torn from the wall and thrown to the floor, a toilet is kicked to pieces, a trash can thrown straight through the window. It doesn’t take long for the hallway to fill with adults and pupils, but by then everything inside the bathroom has already been systematically smashed and demolished. It takes one headmaster, one caretaker, and two gym teachers to grab hold of Benji and get him out of the bathroom.
The school will describe this later as “an emotional outburst from a student with a well-documented history of problems with aggression.” They will say that it is “understandable, considering his relationship to the boy who had been accused of . . . you know.”
Jeanette stands and stares at the wreckage, meets Benji’s gaze, and watches as he is led away. The boy smashed up an entire bathroom and accepted both suspension and liability for the cost of repairs without blinking, all because he didn’t want anyone to know that Maya had smashed a mirror. He decided that she had already bled enough. The only adult who will know this is Jeanette, and she will never say anything. She knows a thing or two about keeping secrets herself.
She goes back up onto the roof. Smokes the rest of the pack.
* * *
Kira is in her office, buried in printouts of previous judgments and precedents from sexual assault cases, in constant discussion with her colleagues, total mobilization for war. She is feeling everything all at the same time: rage, grief, impotence, a desire for vengeance, hatred, terror. Yet it still falls away from her in an instant when her phone vibrates and her daughter’s name illuminates the screen. Four little words. “Can you come home?” Never has a mother driven a car faster through that forest.
* * *
Maya is sitting on the floor of the bathroom at home, rinsing the blood from her hand before finally collapsing altogether. Everything she has held back, everything she has tried to stifle, everything she has tried not to show in order to protect the people she loves, to stop them having to feel as much pain as her. She can’t bear their pain as well. She can’t handle the weight of other people’s sorrow on top of this.
“I didn’t want the bastards to see me bleed,” she whispers to her mother.
“Sometimes I’m afraid that they’re going to have to. To understand that you’re a real person,” her mother sobs, clutching her daughter so very, very tightly in her arms.
39
What is a community?
* * *
Amat sees it from a long way off. No one in the Hollow has such an expensive car, and no one who has such an expensive car drives to the Hollow voluntarily. The man gets out, self-assured and straight-backed.
“Hi there, Amat. Do you know who I am?”
Amat nods. “You’re Kevin’s dad.”
Kevin’s dad smiles. Looks at Amat. He sees the boy glance at his watch, and presumes that he’s trying to figure out how many months of his mom’s wages one like it would cost. The man remembers what he was like at that age, when he didn’t have a damn thing and hated anyone who did.
“Can we have a little chat, Amat? Just you and me . . . man to man?”
* * *
Tails is sitting in his office at one end of the supermarket. His chair creaks beneath his bulky frame as he rests his forehead on his palm. The voice on the phone is unhappy but not sympathetic.
“It’s nothing personal, Tails. But you must see that we can’t build a hockey academy in Beartown after all this. We can’t let the media make it look like we . . . you know.”
The man on the phone is a local councilor, Tails an entrepreneur, but they’re also two boys who used to play hockey together down on the lake. Sometimes their conversations are on the record, sometimes off, a
nd today’s is floating somewhere in between the two.
“I have a responsibility to the council, Tails. And to the party. You can understand that, surely?”
Tails understands. He’s always been a man who believed in difficult questions and simple answers. What’s a business? It’s an idea. What’s a town? A collection of individuals. What’s money? Possibilities. Behind his back, on the other side of the wall, someone is banging with a hammer. Tails is expanding his supermarket, because growth means survival. An entrepreneur who isn’t moving isn’t actually standing still, he’s going backward.
“I’ve got to go, Tails, I’ve got a meeting,” the voice on the phone says apologetically.
A phone hangs up. An idea is gone. A hockey academy no longer exists. What does that mean? When Tails was young there were three schools in Beartown, now there’s one. Once the hockey academy has been built in Hed, how long will it be before the council shuts the last school here? And when the best juniors from here train in the rink in Hed all day, it will be only natural for them to play in Hed’s A-team in the evenings. When Beartown’s A-team can’t recruit the best youngsters in the area, the club will collapse. The rink won’t be renovated, there won’t be any new employment opportunities, which would have been a natural step toward other developments: a conference center, a shopping mall, a new industrial estate, better links to the freeway, maybe even an airport.
What’s a hockey club? Maybe Tails is a hopeless romantic—his wife often says he is—but to him a hockey club is what makes everyone in this town remember, once a week, all the things they have in common instead of what divides them. The club is proof that they can work together to become something greater. It teaches them to dream.
He believes in difficult questions and simple answers. What happens to a town that doesn’t grow? It dies.
* * *
Peter comes into the store. Everyone sees him, but no one does. Staff and customers, young and old, his childhood friends and neighbors, they all slide away as he approaches. Disappear behind shelves and into aisles, pretending to be absorbed in their shopping lists and comparing prices. Only one man looks straight at him.
* * *
Tails stands in the doorway to his office. Meets Peter’s gaze. What is a GM? What is a team captain? What is a childhood friend? Tails puts one foot hesitantly in front of the other, opens his mouth as if to say something, but Peter merely shakes his head slowly. He will never know that his daughter shook her head at Ana in the school dining room because she didn’t want the hatred directed at her to hit her friend, but he does the same thing here.
And when he goes back inside his office and closes the door, Tails’s shame is the same shame all friends feel when they fall short. People are good at feeling shame in this town. They start training early.
* * *
Kevin’s dad doesn’t wait for an answer, just rubs his hands and chuckles.
“Still cold in March; I never get used to it. Shall we sit in the car?”
Amat sits in the seat in silence, closes the door as if he’s afraid it might break. The car smells of leather and perfume. Kevin’s dad looks at the blocks of apartments.
“I grew up in a block that looked almost exactly like these. I think maybe mine was one story smaller. Your dad doesn’t live with you, does he?”
He asks the questions directly, without any complication. The same way he conducts all his business.
“He died in the war, just after I was born,” Amat replies, blinking more quickly. The man notices even though he’s not facing him.
“My mom was on her own too. Me and three brothers. The hardest job on the planet, isn’t it? Your mom’s got trouble with her back, hasn’t she?”
Amat tries to hide it, but the man sees his eyebrows twitch. So he goes on sensitively:
“I know a good physiotherapist. I can arrange for her to get seen.”
“That would be very nice of you,” the boy murmurs, without making eye contact. The man holds out his hands briefly.
“I’m actually surprised that no one else has already helped her with that. Someone who works at the club ought to have asked how she was, surely, don’t you think? She’s been working there long enough, hasn’t she?”
“Since we moved here,” Amat admits.
“We’re supposed to look after each other in this town, Amat, don’t you think? In our town and our club we take care of each other,” the man says, handing him a business card.
“Is this the physiotherapist’s number?” Amat asks.
“No. That’s the number of the personnel manager of a business in Hed. Tell your mom to call and arrange an interview. Office work, no cleaning. Light admin, filing, that sort of thing. She knows the language well enough?”
Amat nods a little too quickly, a little more eagerly than he would have liked.
“Yes! Yes . . . of course!”
“Well, then. Just call that number,” Kevin’s dad says.
Then he says nothing for a long time. As if that were the whole purpose of his visit.
* * *
What is a Pack? Nothing, if you ask its members. It doesn’t exist. The men sitting around the tables in the Bearskin have nothing in common apart from the fact that they’re men. The oldest are over forty, the youngest not even able to vote. Some have the bear tattooed on their necks, others on their arms, many not at all. Some have good jobs, others bad jobs, many no job at all. Some have families, children, mortgages, and go on package holidays, and some live alone and have never set foot outside Beartown. That is precisely the problem when the police try to identify them as “the Pack”: they only have something in common when you see them together. As soon as they’re a few feet away from each other, they’re just individuals.
And what is a club? If you ask them, it belongs to them. Not the old bastards, the men who wear smart jackets to games, the sponsors and board members and president and GM—they’re all the same. In a single season all those old bastards could disappear, but the club would still be there, the Pack too. It’s a thing that doesn’t exist and always exists.
They’re not always threatening. Rarely violent, unless it’s a match day and there are opposing fans in the vicinity. But they make a point of showing the old bastards who the club really belongs to, every now and then. And what happens if you jeopardize its survival.
* * *
Ramona is standing behind the bar. The men in black jackets are sitting at her tables. They’re the most considerate lads she knows. They buy her food and put in new bulbs up in the apartment without her even having to ask. When she once asked why they hate Peter so much, their eyes darkened and one of them replied: “Because that fucker never had to fight for hockey. He got it all on a plate. So he’s frightened. The sponsors have got him on a leash; he puts their fucking logos ahead of what’s best for the club. Everyone knows he grew up in the standing section, but when the sponsors want to drive out those of us standing there now and replace us with the fucking hot-dogs-and-Coke audience, he doesn’t say a word. Everyone knows he loves Sune like a father, and that he doesn’t want David to be A-team coach, but he just keeps his mouth shut. What sort of man is that? How can we let him be GM of our club?”
Ramona fixed her eyes on them and hissed: “And what about you, then? How many people in this town would dare to disagree with you? Do you think that means you’re right, every single fucking time?”
They fell silent then. Ramona could, perhaps, have been proud of that. If it weren’t for the fact that through the small windows facing the street she now sees Peter walking along. Slowly, as if he doesn’t know where he’s going. He stops and looks in through the window with a bag of groceries in his hand, hesitating.
Ramona could have gone out and gotten him. Offered him a cup of coffee. It would have been so simple. But she looks around her inside the Bearskin, at the men at the tables, and the only thing that is simpler than offering Peter coffee in this town right now is not doing so.
* * *
How big is the world when you’re twelve years old? Both infinite and infinitesimal. It’s all your wildest dreams, but it’s also a cramped locker room in an ice rink. Leo is sitting on a bench. The front of his jersey has a large bear on it. No one is looking at him, but everyone is. His best friends get up and move to another bench when he sits down. He doesn’t get a single pass all session. He wishes someone had checked him. He wishes they’d thrown his clothes in the shower. He almost wishes that they’d shouted something horrible about his sister.
* * *
Just to escape the silence.
* * *
Amat’s fingers can’t stop feeling the edge of the business card. Kevin’s dad looks at the time, as if he’s in a hurry to leave, and smiles at Amat as if they’re done. Amat even has time to reach for the door handle before the man pats him paternally on the shoulder and says, as if the thought has only just occurred to him:
“By the way . . . At the party, my son’s party, I know you think you might have seen something that night, Amat. But I think you also know that an awful lot of people saw how much alcohol you drank at that party, right?”
The quivering business card betrays how much he is shaking. Kevin’s dad puts his hand on his.
“You can get so many ideas in your head when you’ve been drinking, Amat, but that doesn’t mean that they’re true. People do stupid things when they’re drunk. Trust me, I’ve done plenty!”
The man laughs, warmly and self-deprecatingly. Amat is still staring at the business card. The name of a personnel manager, a big company, a different life.
“Are you in love with Maya?” the man asks so abruptly that Amat nods before he has time to think.
It’s the first time he’s admitted it to anyone. Tears are pricking the backs of his eyelids. The man is still holding his fingers gently and says:
“She’s put you in a terrible situation, you and Kevin. A goddamn terrible situation. And do you think she cares about you, Amat? Do you think she would have done this if she did? It’s hard for you to understand now, but girls need attention in a different way than boys. And they do goddamn weird things to get it. Little girls gossip and spread rumors, but men don’t. Men look each other in the eye and sort things out without involving everyone else. Don’t you think?”