Us Against You

  Vidar was only seventeen when he was arrested for assault and possession of narcotics, so he was sentenced to treatment in a secure clinic. Bureaucracies can be complicated things, mistakes can be made, and, hand on heart: Shouldn’t treatment requirements be reevaluated from time to time? Considering the acute shortage of places in treatment centers, wouldn’t it actually be politically irresponsible to leave a youngster in there any longer than necessary?

  In his statement, the new adviser declared that Vidar Rinnius had been a promising hockey player before he was sent to the clinic and that his rehabilitation to a “prosocial life” would be improved if “the youth in question was given the opportunity to resume meaningful occupation in a more open setting.” Normally his release would have been handled more gradually, via other facilities and homes, but such things can be reconsidered if he has access to a “secure, stable home.” So an apartment in the Hollow, owned by Beartown’s communal housing association, was found to be vacant. Naturally, Richard Theo had nothing to do with that, because that would have been corruption. And obviously the adviser on Vidar Rinnius’s case wasn’t from Beartown, because that would have looked suspicious. But the adviser’s mother-in-law, who passed away recently, was from there. The adviser’s wife has inherited a small lakeside property, and in a few months’ time an application may well, entirely coincidentally, be submitted to the council, requesting permission to build a number of small holiday cabins on the plot. Ordinarily applications of that sort are rejected out of hand, because construction so close to the water isn’t permitted, but on this occasion the adviser will be fortunate enough to have his application granted.

  * * *

  One signature on a sheet of paper in return for a signature on another one. Bureaucracy in action. Elisabeth Zackell gets her goalie, Teemu Rinnius gets his little brother back, and Peter Andersson will get dangerous enemies. And, last of all, Richard Theo will get everything he wants. Everyone wants to get paid; the only difference is the preferred currency.

  * * *

  When Peter leaves the row house, Sune and Zackell walk the little girl, Alicia, home.

  “Can I come back again tomorrow and do some more?” the four-and-a-half-year-old asks.

  Sune promises that she can. Zackell’s face is expressionless. Sune had to tell her not to smoke her cigar in front of the child. Zackell seemed to have difficulty understanding if that was because it was a bad thing in and of itself or if the child was trying to give up smoking and didn’t want to be tempted.

  Once Alicia runs into her house, Sune turns to Zackell with a frown. “Are you serious about bringing Vidar onto the team?”

  “He’s a good goalie, isn’t he? I saw the numbers from his last season. Were they wrong?”

  “Vidar may be the best goalie this town has ever had. But he’s also had . . . problems.”

  “Is he available to play or not?”

  “Availability isn’t the same thing as suitability,” Sune notes.

  Zackell’s lack of understanding is almost touching. “Hockey’s hockey. If he’s any good, then he’s suitable. Why is Peter so angry with him?”

  Sune does his best not to laugh. “Peter isn’t . . . angry.”

  “He seems angry.”

  “Vidar has problems with his . . . impulse control. He has difficulty restraining himself. And Peter doesn’t like . . . mess.”

  “Mess?”

  “Vidar . . . well, where do I start? His brother is . . .”

  “A hooligan. The leader of ‘the Pack.’ I’ve heard about that,” Zackell interrupts.

  Sune clears his throat. “Yes . . . well . . . there isn’t necessarily any ‘Pack’ here . . . it all got a bit exaggerated by the media. But . . . yes, well, once a fight did break out outside the rink between the fans after an A-team game. Teemu was involved. The juniors were going to play a game straight afterward, but when it was supposed to start Beartown didn’t have a goalie, because Vidar was sitting in a police car. He’d run outside and thrown himself into the fight, still wearing his skates. On another occasion he broke into the rink and drove his moped around the stands. He was . . . well, a bit drunk. Another time he heard that Peter Andersson had spoken out against ‘hooligans’ during a board meeting, so he spent all night going around collecting all the pucks. And I mean all the pucks. From the rink, from the pro shop, from people’s garages . . . we had to ask the spectators at a boys’ cup game the next day to go home to see if they had any pucks hidden away somewhere so we could play the game. And another time Vidar hit a referee in . . . a sensitive part of his body. In the middle of a game. Peter banned him from the club, so Vidar broke into the rink and took a shit on Peter’s desk.”

  Zackell nods, unconcerned. “And Peter doesn’t like mess?”

  Sune chuckles. “Peter has a breakdown if anyone spills coffee on his desk. He’s just having trouble forgiving the business with the shit. He won’t let you put Vidar on the team.”

  Zackell gives the distinct impression that she doesn’t understand how any of this hangs together. “Have you got a better goalie in Beartown than Vidar?”

  “No.”

  “I coach hockey teams. The only thing I know how to do is to treat everyone fairly, not treat them all the same. A good player is a good player.”

  Sune nods. “Bloody hell. Peter’s going to kick up one hell of a fuss.”

  “Is that bad?”

  Sune smiles. “No. A vibrant club needs to be full of people burning with passion, and you only get fire from friction.”

  “And forest fires,” Zackell points out.

  Sune sighs. “You’re spoiling my metaphor.”

  “Was that a metaphor? Sorry. I’m not good at—”

  “People? Feelings?” Sune guesses.

  “Pussyfooting around. I need players who . . . go for it.”

  “That’s why you need Peter. He motivates them, you coach them.”

  “Yes.”

  “He won’t even talk to Vidar. But I can talk to Vidar’s brother.”

  “His brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the other three? Benji, Bobo, and Amat? Will Peter talk to them?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “If you want him to motivate Benji, Bobo, and Amat, you don’t need him to talk to the boys. He needs to talk to their mothers and sisters.”

  “This is a very odd town,” Zackell declares.

  “So we’ve been told,” Sune says.

  16

  Beartown Against the Rest

  The news on the local paper’s website spreads quickly. Possibly because there isn’t much other news to talk about. Possibly because hockey is more important here than in a lot of other places. Or perhaps because the wind happened to change at that moment, without most people even realizing.

  * * *

  “Beartown Ice Hockey Saved by New Sponsor: General Manager Peter Andersson Engaged in Secret Talks,” the paper trumpets. A couple of lines farther down comes the next revelation: “Sources indicate that national women’s team player Elisabeth Zackell will be the new A-team coach, the first female coach in the history of Beartown Hockey.”

  * * *

  The newspaper doesn’t say where it got the information from, just that it was “a reliable source close to the club.”

  * * *

  Politicians need conflict to win elections, but they also need allies. Richard Theo knows only two ways of getting someone who doesn’t like you to fight on your side regardless: a shared enemy or a shared friend.

  * * *

  The same day Peter Andersson meets Elisabeth Zackell, a reporter from the local paper calls another politician in the council building. But Richard Theo answers the phone. “I’m afraid the person you’re trying to reach is on holiday, I was just passing in the corridor and heard the phone ringing,” he says amiably.

  “Oh . . . I got an email from his assistant asking me to call . . . something about a ‘tipoff about Beartown Ice
Hockey’?”

  Theo has an exceptional ability to play stupid. The fact that the other politician’s assistant has a password consisting of a swear word followed by “12345” as his email password is happy coincidence.

  “A tipoff about Beartown Ice Hockey? It could be about the new sponsor or the new coach, maybe?” Theo suggests helpfully.

  “What?” the reporter exclaims.

  Theo fakes hesitancy. “Sorry . . . I thought it was already common knowledge . . . silly of me . . . I’ve probably said more than I should have done. I’m really not the right person to be talking about this . . .”

  The reporter clears her throat. “Could you . . . say a little more?”

  “Can I trust you not to give my name in whatever you write?” Theo asks.

  The reporter promises, and Theo says magnanimously that he “just doesn’t want to steal Peter Andersson’s thunder, because he’s the one doing all the work!”

  When the news appears on the website, Theo sets off to the supermarket, asks for the owner, and is directed to the storeroom.

  * * *

  Tails is shifting stock, an old hockey giant driving a forklift, but dressed in a suit the same as usual. When he was younger, he had trouble attracting girls’ attention, so he started to dress up more than the other guys. When they wore T-shirts, he wore a smart jacket, and when they went to funerals in suits, he would show up wearing tails. Which is how he got his nickname.

  “My name is Richard Theo,” the politician says, unnecessarily.

  “I know who the hell you are, we were at school together,” Tails grunts and jumps down from the forklift.

  The politician holds out a large box. The supermarket owner takes it warily.

  “I want to help Beartown Ice Hockey,” Theo says.

  “People around here don’t want to give a politician any control of the club,” Tails replies.

  “A politician . . . or this politician?” Theo wonders ironically.

  Tails’s voice is wary but not unfriendly. “I daresay you know your own reputation. What do you want with me?”

  “I want us to help each other. Because you and I have a friend in common, Tails, and I think that’s more important than having enemies in common.”

  Tails opens the box, looks down into it, tries not to look shocked, but fails. “What . . . what am I supposed to do with these?”

  “Everyone says you’re the best salesman in Beartown. So sell them,” Theo says.

  He puts his hands into the pockets of his expensive trousers. He’s wearing a crisp white shirt beneath a gray waistcoat, a red silk tie, shiny, polished shoes. No one dresses like that in Beartown, apart from him and Tails. The supermarket owner looks down into the box again. He loves just two things apart from his family: his town and his hockey club. So as Richard Theo turns to walk away, he sees Tails smile.

  * * *

  The box is full of T-shirts. On them are the words BEARTOWN AGAINST THE REST. Tails sells all of them in less than an hour.

  * * *

  There’s a loser in every relationship. We may not like to admit it, but one of us always gets a little more and one of us always gives up a little more readily.

  Kira is sitting on the steps outside the house, breathing in through her nose, but her lungs never feel full. These forests can suffocate a person if she’s longing for something else, but how do you hold a family together if you think only about your own breathing? She’s been offered better jobs, far from Beartown. She’s been offered a managerial role in the firm she works at now, but it would have meant longer working days and being available on weekends. And that would be impossible, because weekends mean guitar lessons and training and hockey games. She has to sell programs and pour coffee and be a couple of kids’ mom and someone’s wife.

  Naturally enough, her colleague, a fanatical antimonogamist, keeps telling her “not to put up with that shit!” But what is a marriage if you take away the infatuation? A negotiation. Dear Lord, it’s hard enough for two people to agree what TV program to watch, let alone fashion an entire life together. Someone has to sacrifice something.

  Peter gets out of the Volvo with a bunch of flowers in his hand. Kira has an extra wineglass on the steps beside her. White flags. In the end she smiles, mostly at the flowers.

  “Where did you find those at this time of day?”

  Peter blushes. “I picked them from a garden. In Hed.”

  He holds out his hand, touches her skin, and their fingertips touch tentatively.

  * * *

  It’s only a hockey club. Only a game. Only pretend. There will always be people who try to tell Alicia that, and obviously she’ll never listen to them, the little brat. She’s four and a half years old, and tomorrow she will knock on Sune’s door again. The old man will teach her to fire hockey pucks harder and harder at the wall of his house. The marks on the wall will be like the grandchildren’s drawings other old men pin up on their fridges: tiny etchings in time to prove that someone we love grew up here.

  “How are you getting on at preschool?” Sune asks.

  “The boys are stupid,” the four-and-a-half-year-old says.

  “Hit them in the face,” Sune advises.

  The four-and-a-half-year-old says she will. You have to keep your promises. But when Sune walks home with her later, he adds, “But you have to be a good friend to the kids who haven’t got any friends. And you have to defend the ones who are weaker. Even when it’s hard, even when you think it’s a nuisance, even when you’re scared. You always have to be a good friend.”

  “Why?” the girl asks.

  “Because one day you’re going to be the best. And then the coach will make you team captain. And then you have to remember that a great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.”

  The girl doesn’t know what that means yet, but she will remember every word. Every night until then she dreams of the same sound. Bang. Bang. Bang-bang-bang. Her club lives on. She’s blessed enough never to really understand what happened this summer, how close it came to dying, and how it came to survive. And at what cost.

  * * *

  If you live with the same person for long enough, you often discover that although you may have had a hundred conflicts at the start of the relationship, in the end you have only one. You keep slipping into the same argument, albeit in different guises.

  “There’s a new sponsor—” Peter begins.

  “The paper’s already written about it online, everyone’s talking about it,” Kira says.

  “I know what you want to say,” Peter says, standing at the bottom of the steps in front of their home.

  “No. Because you haven’t asked,” Kira replies, and drinks a sip of wine.

  He doesn’t ask now either. Instead he says, “I can save the club. I promised Maya that I’d—”

  Kira’s grip on his fingers is gentle, but her voice is merciless. “Don’t drag our daughter into this. You’re saving the club for your own sake. You want to prove to everyone in this town who doesn’t believe in you that they’re wrong. Again. You never get through having to prove that.

  Peter grinds his teeth. “What am I supposed to do? Let the club die while people around here . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter what people think,” she snaps, but he cuts her off in turn: “My death was announced in the paper! Someone threatened my life!”

  “Someone threatened our lives, Peter! Why the hell do you always get to choose when this family is a team or not?”

  His tears fall onto her hair. He squats down in front of her. “Sorry. I know I have no right to ask any more from you. I love you. You and the kids. More than anything . . .”

  She closes her eyes. “We know, darling.”

  “I know the sacrifices you’ve made for my hockey. I know.”

  Kira hides her despair behind her eyelids. Every autumn, winter, and spring the whole family lives according to the dictates of hockey, raised up to the heavens when the team wins and tumbling h
eadlong when it loses. Kira doesn’t know if she can bear to put herself through yet another season. But she still stands up and says, “What’s love if we aren’t prepared to make sacrifices?”

  “Darling, I . . . ,” Peter says, but tails off.

  Kira is wearing a green T-shirt. The words BEARTOWN AGAINST THE REST are printed on it. She bites her cheeks, broken by what she’s giving up but proud of her choice. “Tails called. He’s selling them in the store. Our neighbors were each wearing one when they got home. Christ, Peter, they’re both over ninety. What sort of ninety-year-olds wear T-shirts?”

  She smiles. Peter’s eyes dart about in embarrassment. “I didn’t know Tails . . .”

  Kira touches his cheek. “Tails loves you. Oh, how he loves you, darling. There may be people in this town who hate you, and you can’t do anything about that. But there are far more who worship you, and you can’t do anything about that, either. Sometimes I wish you weren’t indispensible to them, that I didn’t have to share you, but I knew when I married you that half your heart belongs to hockey.”

  “That’s not true . . . please . . . ask me to resign, and I’ll do it!”

  She doesn’t ask him. She spares him from having to reveal that he’s lying. You do that if you love someone. She says, “I’m one of the people who worship you. And I’m on your team, no matter what. Go and save your club.”

  His answer is barely audible. “Next year, darling, just give me one more season . . . next year . . .”

  Kira hands him the wineglass. It’s either half full or half empty. She kisses her husband on the lips, and he whispers “I love you,” his breath mingling with hers. She replies, “Win, darling. If you’re really going to do this . . . win!”