He takes his shoes off, but that’s as far as he gets. He rushes into the toilet and slams the door shut behind him, but everyone can still hear him being sick. His eyes are streaming, and he clutches the edge of the toilet so hard that the fixtures start to creak. If he’d had a means of escape right then, he might well have taken it, but there’s only one way out of there. So who does he want to be? Everyone has moments when that’s decided. When we choose.
He wipes his face, unlocks the door, and steps back into the locker room. It’s the smallest of gestures, and all his teammates are still silent when he emerges, but when he gets back to his place, his shoes are full of shaving cream. Not just his. Everyone’s. Every pair of shoes under every bench. Because the men around him want him to know that he’s no different from anyone else. Not in here.
* * *
Benji sits down on the bench. Hesitantly pulls his shirt off. Suddenly a voice rises above the silence, from an unexpected direction opposite Benji, “How do you know if you’re sexy?” Amat asks.
Benji sits there bare-chested, his head tilted to one side. “What?”
Amat’s face is red. Everyone is staring at him, he’s never felt more embarrassed, but he persists, “I mean . . . how do you know what girls think is sexy about guys? Or what guys think is sexy about . . . guys?”
Benji’s eyebrows sink. “What the hell are you actually asking, Amat?”
Amat clears his throat. “You’ve showered with me, so you should be an expert. Am I sexy?”
Before Benji has time to answer, Amat grins. “I’m not asking for myself. I’m asking for my best friend.”
Beside him Bobo jerks as if someone had given him an electric shock. It’s a small thing for one young man to do for another one, but you can handle a lot of things in life if you have a best friend. Even more if you’re allowed to be someone else’s. So Bobo coughs and manages to say, “I, erm . . . Benji . . . I was just wondering how . . . you know. How you know if you know if you’re . . . hot?”
Benji looks at Bobo, then at Amat, then back at Bobo again. Then he shakes his head. “I’ve never once looked at either of you in the shower!”
The locker room erupts in laughter, but one of the older players remains serious and asks brusquely, “What about the rest of us, then? Are you seriously suggesting you haven’t checked out any of us in the shower?”
Benji frowns. “Christ, I’d rather look at girls than you guys.”
The older player’s shoulders sink slightly. “I can’t help feeling a bit hurt by that.”
“I’ve been doing my best to stay in shape,” another one mutters disappointedly.
Bobo and Amat grin. It’s almost the same as usual. But Benji is more serious, and he points at Bobo’s arm. “I want one of those, too. If that’s okay.”
Bobo writes “Ann-Katrin” on a strip of tape and fastens it around Benji’s arm. The letters are uneven because Bobo’s hand was shaking.
* * *
Elisabeth Zackell is standing outside the locker room with Peter. She grunts unhappily, but Peter gestures firmly that she has to say something to the team. So she groans, walks in, and whistles loudly to get the men to be quiet.
“Okay. I’ve been informed that coaches are expected to give inspirational speeches in situations like this. So . . . well . . . you’re 4–0 down.”
The men stare at her, and she stares back. Then she goes on, “I’m just checking that you know. Four-zip! More than that, you’re not just behind, you’ve also been playing really badly. So only a bunch of complete idiots would think you stand any chance of winning this game!”
The men remain silent. Zackell clears her throat. Then she adds, “Anyway. I just want to say that I’ve been involved with hockey my whole life. And I’ve never met such a bunch of idiots as you lot.”
Then she leaves them. Peter stands in the corridor and watches her as she walks toward the ice. He’s never heard a better locker room speech.
* * *
Inside the locker room they’re all sitting motionless. Benji looks at the clock on the wall; they ought to be out on the ice by now, but no one’s moving. In the end Amat kicks Benji’s skate and says, “They’re waiting.”
“What for?” Benji asks.
“You.”
Benji stands up. The others do the same.
* * *
Then the members of the Beartown hockey team follow their captain through the door. Benjamin Ovich doesn’t walk out onto the ice. He takes it by storm.
* * *
The three Ovich sisters arrive at the Hed arena with their mom. They walk in with the body language of women who have seen far worse things in even colder places. They’re not scared.
The hall is full, every seat taken, everyone knows who they are but most people pretend not to. People whisper and point, but no one looks them in the eye. Perhaps some of them are ashamed, while others just don’t know what to say. Perhaps a number of them would like to, but it’s hard to be the first people to stand up.
* * *
But then five people do.
* * *
The uncles. They’re wearing green BEARTOWN AGAINST THE REST T-shirts, and as they walk up the steps they tease each other about how damn old they’ve gotten. One of them takes Benjamin Ovich’s mother by the arm and leads her to his seat. The other uncles give up their seats to the sisters. When Adri passes one of them, the old man squeezes her hand and says, “Tell your brother that the people who shout the loudest may be the most noticeable. But they’re not the majority. We are.”
The five uncles’ wives are sitting in the next seats along. One of them has a cooler by her feet. Obviously you’re not allowed to take things like that to a hockey game, but when the security guard on the door asked what she had in it, she said with deadly seriousness, “My cat.” When the guard started to protest, one of the other women leaned forward and whispered, “It’s dead, but don’t tell her, poor old thing.” The guard opened his mouth, but the third of the women grabbed his arm and asked, “Do you have fresh tomatoes? I don’t want those Belgian ones you usually have, I want proper ones! I have a coupon!” The fourth exclaimed cheerily, “What a lot of people there are tonight! What film are you showing, again? Is Sean Connery in it?” And before the fifth one could embark on her practiced “There’s going to be snow tonight, I can feel it in my knees!” routine, the guard had sighed, given up, and let them in, cooler and all. Now the women take some beers from it and share them with Benji’s mom and sisters, and then nine women from three generations drink a toast with each other. Five uncles stand on the steps alongside, like a guard of honor.
* * *
A cup of coffee is no big thing. Not really.
* * *
Everyone will remember the chanting from the Hed fans’ standing area: “Queers! Sluts! Rapists!” A lot of people will believe that that whole part of the stand was chanting, because it felt like it, and from a distance it’s hard to differentiate among people. So everyone in the standing area will be criticized, even though by no means all of them were chanting, because we’ll want scapegoats, and it’ll be easy for anyone wanting to moralize to say that “culture isn’t just what we encourage but what we allow to happen.”
But when everyone is shouting, it can be hard to hear the opposition, and once an avalanche of hate has started to roll, it can be hard to tell who is responsible for stopping it.
So when a young woman in a red shirt bearing a picture of a bull on the front leaves her place in the standing area, no one notices at first. But the woman loves Hed Hockey as much as the people shouting, she’s supported the team all her life, this part of the rink belongs to her, too. Going to stand among the seated fans, the hot dog brigade she’s always mocked, is her silent protest.
A man in a green shirt sitting a short distance away sees her and stands up. He goes to the cafeteria, buys two paper cups of coffee, then walks down and gives one of them to her. They stand there next to each other, one red, one green,
and drink in silence. A cup of coffee is no big thing. But sometimes it actually is.
Within a few minutes, more red shirts have walked out of the standing area. Soon the steps of the seated part of the rink are full. The chant of “Queers! Sluts! Rapists!” is still echoing loudly, but the people chanting are exposed now. So everyone can see that there aren’t as many of them as we think. There never are.
* * *
One of Hed Hockey’s players is named Filip. He’s the youngest on the team, but he’s on his way to becoming the best. This story isn’t about him; in fact, his involvement is so brief that we could easily have forgotten to mention him at all.
Just before the start of the third period, he leaves the ice. William Lyt and a few of the other players shout at him to stay, but Filip walks through the players’ tunnel, up the steps to the stands, and all the way over to the standing area. He’s still wearing his skates and clutching his stick. He marches straight up to the biggest, strongest, most tattooed Hed fan he can find, interrupts him in the middle of “QU—” grabs him by his top, and says, “If you shout that one more time, I’m not going to play.”
Filip is only seventeen years old, but anyone who knows anything about hockey can see how good he’s going to be. The Hed fan stares at him wildly, but Filip doesn’t back down. He points to the red-clad fans standing on the steps of the seated area and says, “If you shout that one more time, I’m going to stand over there for the rest of the game.”
* * *
He walks back to the ice, leaving a heavy silence behind him. Filip isn’t naive, the world hasn’t changed, he knows they’ll chant the same thing at other games. But not today. When he reaches the bench, someone yells, “Hed! Hed! Hed!”
“WIN! WIN! WIN!” the rest of the stand shouts.
* * *
That’s all they chant for the rest of the game. By the end the standing area is full again, singing loud enough to raise the roof.
* * *
Hockey is simple. It’s both the fairest and the most unfair sport in the world.
* * *
Beartown scores a goal. Then another. When they reduce the deficit to 4–3 and are just one goal behind with twenty seconds left on the clock, everyone already knows what’s going to happen. They can feel it in the air. This can only end one way. Like a fairy tale.
Benji gets the puck, rushes into the Hed zone, fakes a shot, and passes to Amat instead. All of Hed’s players think Benji’s going to take the shot himself, only one of the men in red knows that he isn’t that selfish.
* * *
William Lyt knows Benji.
* * *
Amat storms toward Hed’s net; his wrists feels supple, his balance is perfect when he fires the shot. It looks so simple, he should have been the hero, that would have been the perfect ending. But William has already read the situation. He throws himself down on the ice; the puck hits his helmet, then the post, before rebounding toward the boards. Filip retrieves the puck and lifts it out of the zone; it glides mockingly past the outstretched sticks of the Beartown players, and then it’s all over.
* * *
The final buzzer blares mercilessly. The red fans explode in a roar of delight, and William Lyt is buried under a heap of happy teammates. The green-clad players slump in despair, and in the stands people with bears on their chest sit numb with incomprehension.
* * *
Hed wins. Beartown loses.
* * *
Hockey is simple. Always fair. Always unfair.
41
If You Stand Tall
The Beartown Ice Hockey locker room is quiet. There are only two ways for losing teams to get changed: at once or not at all. Either it takes them five minutes to leave the rink, or it takes them several hours. This time no one can summon up the energy even to have a shower.
* * *
Peter Andersson walks in. He looks at them and knows exactly how they feel. He desperately wishes he had something inspirational to say, so he mutters, “Well, guys . . . that was a tough game. But you lost, and I want you to—”
One of the older players snorts and interrupts him: “With all due respect, Peter, don’t try telling us to ‘forget about it’ or some other tired cliché. If you haven’t got anything useful to say, it would be better if you did what you always do: keep quiet and go and hide in your office!”
It’s a direct challenge. They don’t respect him. Peter stands in the door with his hands in his pockets. At most times in his life he would have done as he’s been told: gone and hidden in his office. He would have told himself that he’s the general manager, not the coach, and that it’s not his job to be respected by the players. But today isn’t like those other days. So he clenches his fists in his pockets and blurts out, “Forget about it? Forget? Do you think I want you to forget this? I want you to remember this!”
He gets their astonished attention with that. He usually never so much as raises his voice, but now he points at each of the players, from the oldest all the way down to Benji, Bobo, Vidar, and Amat, and roars, “Today you’re losers. Today you almost made it. Remember exactly how this feels. So that you and I never have to feel like this again! Never!”
Perhaps he would have gone on to say more, but a monotonous banging sound is echoing through the walls of the arena, and everyone in the locker room looks up. At first it sounds like a drum, then like someone kicking a door, but soon it grows to a roar and only Peter knows where it’s coming from. He’s heard it before, but that was twenty years ago, during a magical season when an entire town lived and died with the victories and losses of a hockey team. Back then Peter heard that sound in every rink.
“Go back out onto the ice,” he tells the team.
They obey. Peter doesn’t go with them; he knows he’s not welcome.
* * *
The Beartown Ice Hockey players go back onto the ice. Almost all the stands are empty now, and the lights have been switched off. But at one end of the rink a group of men in black jackets are still standing, refusing to be quiet. They’re jumping up and down, their feet drumming on the wood beneath them. There aren’t even a hundred of them, but they’re singing like ten thousand. “We’ll stand tall if you stand tall! We’ll stand tall if you stand tall! We’ll stand tall if you stand tall!” they chant over and over again.
To let everyone know that they’re still there. To remind them what the club means. That it’s a privilege, not a right.
In the end the whole of the Beartown A-team is standing on the ice joining in. “WE’LL STAND TALL IF YOU STAND TALL! WE’LL STAND TALL IF YOU STAND TALL!” The rest of the rink is deserted and dark, but no one else would have been welcome anyway. This is between the team and their closest supporters: family.
* * *
Peter stands alone in the locker room with his hands in his pockets. Then he leaves the rink and walks the whole way home to Beartown through the forest, taking deep breaths of the winter that’s on its way and feeling more of a loser than ever. Everything is slipping away from him: his children, his marriage, his club.
* * *
Was it worth it? How are we supposed to know that in advance?
* * *
The coaches of the Beartown and Hed teams meet after the game in the referee’s room. They talk the way coaches do—politely, but not friendly.
“Good game,” says David, dressed in red.
“You won. So only you had a good game,” replies Zackell, dressed in green.
David smiles. They’re the same type, he and she.
“How are your guys getting on?” he asks.
“My guys in general or one in particular?” she counters.
David tries to find something to do with his hands. “Benjamin. I was wondering how Benjamin is getting on.”
“We’re playing you again in December. He’ll play the whole game then,” she replies.
David grins. That’s not an answer to his question, but it’s her way of saying she’s not planning to lose nex
t time they meet. She’s a hockey coach, first and foremost, just like David.
“Good game!” David repeats.
He holds out his hand, but she gives no indication at all that she’s thinking of shaking it.
“That Filip of yours, your defenseman, he could be very good indeed,” she says instead.
David feels himself standing tall with pride. Filip was the smallest, worst player throughout his childhood, but David continued to give him opportunities, and now he’s grown into a star.
“Yes. He just needs—” David begins, but Zackell interrupts, “Don’t let him go up into the stands again. Don’t let him get dragged into the politics.”
David nods in agreement. He and Zackell really are the same sort. They know that Filip has the potential to become the best but also that he has nothing to gain by picking fights with the supporters. Elite sports doesn’t tolerate that sort of distraction. Players should just play. Hockey should just be hockey.
“He was a bit slower than normal tonight, but he’s probably a bit stiff after the preseason training,” David says.
“He’s got a pain in his hip,” Zackell says without any trace of doubt.
“Sorry?”
“His right hip. He’s overcompensating; look at his back when he’s standing, and you’ll see it’s not straight. He hasn’t mentioned it to you because he’s worried about letting you down.”