Zacharias’s dad is standing further back in the hall. He doesn’t want to insult Amat but can’t help snorting, “It’s good of you to stand up for him, Amat, but playing computer games isn’t a real spo—”
Amat fixes his eyes on him. “All through our childhoods Zach and I have competed to see who could turn professional first. He’s going to win. If you aren’t there to see it happen, you’ll regret it for the rest of your lives.”
* * *
He turns and walks down the stairs before they have time to answer.
* * *
When Zacharias walks into the vast hall where the competition is taking place, several hours away from Beartown, Amat is there to watch. Not a big army, but an army nonetheless.
The floor where the computers are lined up is surrounded by tall banks of seating, full of spectators; there are screens hanging from the roof and music thundering from the loudspeakers.
“It’s . . . almost like hockey,” Zacharias’s father concedes in amazement.
He and Zacharias’s mother caught up with Amat at the railway station. They drove here together instead. The parents walked in reluctantly, not really understanding any of it, but before the competition is over the people around them will be cheering and applauding what Zacharias has done. When he wins, Amat will yell out loud, and his parents will follow his example. A stranger in the row in front will turn around and ask Zacharias’s mom, “Do you know him?”
“He’s my son!” Zacharias’s mom will exclaim.
The stranger will nod and look impressed and will say, “You must be incredibly proud of him!”
* * *
It’s not that important. It’s only a sport. A different sport.
* * *
Kira Andersson’s own mother once said to her, “The hardest thing about having a family is that you’re never finished.” Kira can’t quite forget that as she and her colleague furnish their office, chase clients and try to recruit staff, negotiate with the bank, and worry about money. Kira’s phone keeps ringing the whole time. She looks at the photograph of the children on her desk with the same silent questions as always: For whose sake do you have a career? Is it worth all the sacrifices? How are you supposed to know that in advance?
* * *
Peter Andersson comes home to an empty house. Kira is at work, the children are out with friends. Peter makes a meal for himself and eats it watching a hockey game on TV. His phone is silent. When he accepted the job of general manager all those years ago, he used to hate the sound of it ringing, because it never stopped, not even when he was on vacation. Now he misses it.
* * *
Maya Andersson puts the key into the lock and walks into the hall. Her dad gets up from the couch and tries to hide how happy he is not to have to be home alone. Maya is exhausted after her martial arts training, but when she sees the look on her dad’s face she goes to get her guitar. They play three songs together in the garage. Then the daughter asks, “Has Mom told you? About . . . music school?”
Peter looks surprised. Then embarrassed. “We . . . your mom and I . . . we haven’t had much time to talk lately.”
Maya fetches the letter. “I can start in January. It’s a long way away, I’d have to move and I’d need to borrow money, but . . . Mom said it was okay.”
Peter doesn’t succeed in his attempt not to fall apart. “I just want you to be . . . to be happy, Pumpkin . . . just happy!” he manages to say.
“You know what, Dad? That’s all I want for you, too,” his daughter whispers.
* * *
Leo Andersson is walking alone through Beartown. He isn’t going anywhere particular, has no plan, he’s just walking about. When he’s grown up, he’ll remember this as the winter when he was desperate for something to feel passionate about. Everyone else seems to have something they love unconditionally: his dad has his club, his mom her new business, and Maya her music. Leo wants something of his own. Perhaps he’ll find it. Perhaps that’s another story.
But this evening when he comes home, his mom is still at work and his big sister has gone to bed. His dad is sitting in the living room watching television. Leo hangs his coat up, considers going straight to his room, like anyone else who’s only just become a teenager, but this evening he goes into the living room instead. He sits down next to his dad. They watch a hockey game together.
“You . . . I . . . I hope you know how much I love you,” his dad says during one of the breaks.
“I know, Dad. I know.” Leo grins and yawns as if he takes that for granted.
Peter can’t help hoping that he might have done something right as a parent after all. They’re both asleep on the sofa when Kira comes home. She covers the pair of them with blankets.
* * *
You’re never finished with a family.
46
We’ll Say It Was a Road Accident
Have you ever seen a town fall? Ours did. Because sometimes it’s so easy to make people hate one another that it feels incomprehensible that we ever do anything else.
* * *
This has been a story about ice rinks and all the hearts that beat in and around them. About people and sports and how they sometimes take it in turns to carry each other. About us, dreaming and fighting. Some have fallen in love and some have been destroyed; we’ve had good days and some very bad ones. Beartown has cheered, but it has also started to smolder. Things were heading toward a terrible explosion.
* * *
A few girls made us proud, a few boys made us great. A car drove too fast through the night. We’ll say it was a road accident, but accidents are quirks of fate, and we will know that we could have prevented this one. This one will be someone’s fault. Many people’s fault. Our fault.
* * *
Hockey is hockey. A game. Make-believe.
* * *
When winter comes to Beartown and Hed, it’s dark when you set out for work and dark when you come home. The staff in the emergency room of the hospital in Hed pass the time the way everyone else does: they talk hockey.
Everyone is looking forward to the next game. Some support the red team, some the green team: there are doctors and nurses who can barely talk to each other. As the season has progressed and both teams have won all their other games, the next encounter between Beartown Ice Hockey and Hed Hockey has become more and more important. The club that wins could get the chance of promotion to the next league. The one that loses may not even exist next season. Things can turn that quickly.
We try to tell ourselves that hockey is only hockey, but of course it never is. One doctor mutters that “money is ruining the sport.” One nurse gives a long speech in the staffroom about how “the fat cats in the association keep coming up with impossible financial demands on smaller clubs, agents are sucking the market dry, the sponsors are just playing around, and games are decided in boardrooms rather than on the ice!” Someone reads an article from a paper in which a sports commentator far from here predicts that teams such as Beartown and Hed will end up as feeder clubs for the bigger teams in a few years’ time. “Feeder clubs? As if we’re going to be slaves to the big cities!” Someone else snarls, “If only Beartown had shut down, we could have concentrated all our efforts on one club,” which prompts the reply “Why should we shut down? Why don’t you shut down?” The hospital staff start to argue and fall out, just like everyone else around here.
* * *
But then something happens, the way it always does where they work: an alarm comes in, there’s been an accident, injured people are on their way. They forget about hockey games and club loyalties. Everyone in the emergency room works together, fights together, comes together as a team.
* * *
They’ll do their utmost to save the lives of everyone brought in by the ambulances tonight. It won’t be enough.
* * *
If Ana and Vidar had been an ordinary love story, perhaps they could have lived their whole lives together. Perhaps they would have gott
en fed up with each other, broken up, or perhaps they would have kept on falling in love with the same person. An ordinary life is long if you live it together with someone else.
But the thing about being an unusual teenager is that sometimes you just want to be an ordinary teenager. Ana is lying in bed, Vidar is lying quietly beside her, she’s like Minecraft to him: he can concentrate when she’s with him.
“Do you want to go to a party with me?” she whispers.
“What?”
“You heard.”
“What sort of party?”
“There’s a party in one of the cabins at the campsite tonight. I heard about it at school. You don’t have to come. But I . . . I just want to go to a party and feel . . . normal. Just for a while.”
“Okay,” Vidar says.
“Okay?” Ana repeats.
He grins. “Are you deaf or something? Okay!”
She laughs. They kiss. It feels perfectly normal. Perfectly normal and perfectly wonderful.
* * *
They go to the party. It feels normal, at least for a while. But then Vidar goes to the toilet, and the guy who comes up to Ana at the bar is from Hed, so he doesn’t know who she is. Perhaps he doesn’t even know who Vidar is.
Ana tries to be pleasant; she turns down the drink the guy offers her and moves the hand he puts on her hip. The guy from Hed proudly shows her the tattoo of a bull on his arm and says he might be playing on the A-team next season. Ana pushes him away when he starts whispering in her ear. She tries to move away. He grabs hold of her arm and laughs. “Come on! Don’t be such a stiff! Live a little!”
He wraps his arms around her waist. He doesn’t even see Vidar walking across the room, he doesn’t see the black look in his eyes, the lowered brow as he pushes through the crowd. Vidar doesn’t notice who he pushes aside or shoves into the tables around him. But Ana sees. She knows how simple it ought to be to get out of the situation, let the guy from Hed know he’s touched the wrong girl, picked an argument with the wrong guy. It would be so easy. But Ana has never done anything the easy way in her life.
So she twists out of the guy’s grasp, leans her upper body back, and head butts him. She hears a crunch when her forehead hits his nose. He falls screaming to the floor. Ana feels blood drip down her face, doesn’t know whose it is.
The guy’s friends are standing a few feet away, they’re as shocked as everyone else, so Ana knows she has only a couple of seconds to act. She sees Vidar storm through the crowd with a murderous look in his eyes, and Ana does the only thing she can do, given that she is who she is and loves someone like him: she takes aim and punches Vidar right in the face.
The room falls silent. Ana hits him again, harder, and Vidar stumbles backward. Then she grabs him by the arm and runs for the door. She drags him into the forest with her and runs until no one at the party will be able to find them.
“WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM?” Vidar shouts when Ana finally stops among the trees.
She feels almost guilty when she sees the way his face is swelling up. But she snaps, “You know what my problem is? Guys! Goddamn guys! You’re my problem!”
“What have I done now, then?”
She’s sobbing with rage now. “You would have killed him! If I hadn’t got you out of there, you’d have beaten him to death and been sent to prison and I—”
She’s gasping with angry, pent-up tears. Vidar stands in front of her, with a split lip and an eye that’s swelling up a bit more with each breath he takes.
“I was just trying to . . . help you . . .”
“What is it with guys? Why do you think we want you to fight over us the whole time? Why do you think you have to do everything violently? What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know,” he admits.
Ana starts laughing. “I love you.”
“Is that why you hit me?”
“Yes!”
Vidar scratches his ear. “Do you have to love me quite so . . . hard?”
“I don’t want to be on some crappy pedestal!” she snaps.
“A what?”
“I don’t want you to fight for my sake! I don’t want you to do things for my sake! I just want you to believe in me. I don’t want you to take me places, I want you to back me up so I can get there myself!”
“Okay.”
“What do you mean, ‘okay’?”
“Okay . . . I . . . just okay. Okay. I . . . I love you too!”
“You’re so stupid!”
Her hand hurts so badly that she feels like curling up and howling. He leads her over to a snowdrift and makes her stick her hand in it. She screams. He tries to explain. “You shouldn’t hit someone like that, you need—” he begins, but she snaps, “Don’t you dare tell me how to punch you!”
“Okay.”
It’s just possible that there are more normal love stories.
* * *
The next day Vidar comes to Ana’s martial arts training. He doesn’t say anything, just drags six wooden pallets in from the yard and piles them on top of each other to form rough steps. Then he goes and stands on them.
“What’s that?” Ana wonders irritably.
“A pedestal,” Vidar tells her.
“Who for?” she asks.
“Me,” he replies.
She starts to laugh, but he’s serious.
“I’ll stand tall if you stand tall,” he says.
She stops laughing then and kisses him. Normal love stories have never held any appeal for her anyway.
* * *
How it started? We’re never going to stop arguing about that.
* * *
Perhaps it started with that guy from Hed who was trying it on at a party with a girl from Beartown and ended up with a broken nose. Perhaps he bore a grudge.
* * *
Or perhaps it began much earlier, at that first hockey game of the autumn where the Hed supporters chanted terrible things about Benjamin Ovich. Perhaps some people in Beartown were unable to let go of that, especially after Hed won the game.
* * *
Or perhaps it started one morning in early winter, when someone left a bloody bull’s horn outside the doors of the arena in Hed. It wasn’t even real blood, probably just a stupid joke by some drunk teenagers, but not everyone in Hed saw it that way.
One evening not long after that, a guy from Beartown was standing in line at a pizzeria in Hed—his girlfriend was from Hed and was waiting for him at home. Some guys from Hed were standing farther back in the line and started chanting those same words. One of them leaned forward and shouted them straight in his ear. Another yelled that he should “fuck off home” and “leave women from Hed the hell alone!” The guy from Beartown turned around and told them to go to hell, and the guys from Hed knocked the pizzas out of his hands. The staff managed to get between them before there was any serious trouble, but perhaps that was how it started.
Unless it started with all the rumors about the hospital and the factory, when everything became a fight over jobs. Once upon a time, people used to worry that the politicians would try to merge Hed and Beartown to form a single, larger town, but now they worry that there might not even be enough room for two small ones.
Soon after the incident with the bull’s horn outside the arena and the tussle in the pizzeria, Hed Hockey and Beartown Hockey’s nine-year-olds met at a tournament some distance away. The game was evenly matched, the boys were wound up, and when one of the nine-year-olds from Hed started to chant “Queers! Sluts! Rapists!,” a fight broke out among so many of the kids that their parents had to jump onto the ice to help the referee break them up. One father from Hed and another from Beartown tried to separate their sons, and one of the fathers thought the other grabbed his son a bit too hard. The dads started shouting, then jostling each other, and soon it was the kids who were trying to stop the adults fighting rather than the other way around.
Around the same time two older men started to squabble in the waiting room at Hed
Hospital, because one thought he was having to wait longer than the other. The second man muttered, “Bloody Beartown bastards, build your own hospital and stop coming here to use up our health service.”
* * *
Perhaps none of this would have mattered if it hadn’t all happened during the same autumn and winter. Perhaps it wouldn’t have escalated if there hadn’t been a natural opportunity for all those people to meet in the same ice rink again before the year was out. But of course there was: another hockey game between Hed and Beartown.
* * *
One morning not long before the game, two men drive from Hed to the factory in Beartown to apply for jobs. They’ve been unemployed for a long time, they both have children, and when the factory’s new owners offered them interviews it was like a gift from the gods. They park the car outside the factory. When they get back to it after their interviews, they find it’s been smashed to pieces. The doors have been kicked in, and a large tree branch has been shoved through the windshield. There aren’t any witnesses, of course, even though some men in black jackets are standing nearby. Among the broken glass on the driver’s seat is a note reading “Beartown jobs for Beartown people.”
* * *
Perhaps that was how it started.
* * *
Unless it started when a small group of men from Hed meet up soon after that to discuss how to get revenge. They want to hurt the Pack. They want to take something the men in the black jackets love away from them. “I want to set fire to their goddamn homes,” one of the men from Hed mutters at that meeting. Perhaps he doesn’t mean it literally. But one of his friends replies, “Then that’s what we’ll do.”