Beartown Read online

  “There you are! I’m late for my meeting at the rink. Have you seen the keys to the Volvo?” he splutters.

  He’s tried to put on a jacket and tie, with mixed results, as usual. Kira’s outfit is impeccable, as if the fabric were in thrall to her body. She’s drinking coffee and pulling her coat on in the same fluid, one-handed gesture.

  “Yep.”

  He stands there red-faced, his hair on end, his socks smeared with smoothie, and asks: “Do you feel like telling me where they are?”

  “They’re in my pocket.”

  “What? Why?”

  Kira kisses his forehead.

  “That’s a very good question, sweetie. I suppose I thought they’d come in handy if I was going to drive the Volvo to work. Seeing as it might be thought a little inappropriate if my clients’ lawyer turned up in a hot-wired car.”

  Peter scratches at his hair with both hands.

  “But . . . what the . . . You can take the other car, can’t you?”

  “No, because you’re taking the other car to the garage. After you’ve dropped the kids off at school. We talked about it.”

  “We haven’t talked about it.”

  Instinctively, Peter wipes the bottom of her coffee cup with a piece of paper towel. She smiles.

  “Darling, it’s written on the calendar on the fridge.”

  “But you can’t just put things on there without talking to me.”

  She carefully raises one of her eyebrows.

  “We did talk. We’re talking now. We do nothing but talk. Listening, on the other hand . . .”

  “Please, Kira, I’ve got a meeting! If I’m late . . .”

  “Absolutely, darling. Absolutely. If I get to work late an innocent person might end up in prison. Sorry, I interrupted you. Tell me more about what happens if you’re late?”

  He breathes through his nose, as calmly as he can. “It’s the biggest game of the year tomorrow, darling.”

  “I know, darling. And tomorrow I’ll pretend that it’s important. But until then you’ll have to make do with the rest of the town thinking it is.”

  She’s hard to impress. That’s simultaneously what he finds most attractive and most irritating about her. He tries to find a stronger argument, but Kira just lets out a theatrical sigh, puts the keys to the Volvo on the table, and clenches her fist in front of her husband.

  “Okay. Rock-paper-scissors, then.”

  Peter shakes his head and tries to stop himself from laughing.

  “What are you? Eight years old?”

  Kira raises an eyebrow again.

  “What are you? A coward?”

  Peter’s smile vanishes in an instant as he fixes his eyes on her and clenches his own fist. Kira counts to three out loud, Peter does paper, Kira very blatantly waits half a second longer and then quickly forms her fingers into scissors. Peter yells at her, but by then she’s already snatched up the keys and is heading for the door.

  “But you cheated!”

  “Don’t be a sore loser, darling. Bye, kids, be nice to Dad. Or at least reasonably nice.”

  Peter stands where he is in the kitchen, shouting:

  “Don’t you dare leave! Cheat!”

  He turns to look at the calendar on the fridge.

  “There’s not even anything on here about taking the car . . .”

  The front door closes behind Kira. The Volvo starts up outside. Ana is standing in the kitchen, grinning, with a thick smoothie-moustache on her upper lip.

  “Have you ever got the better of her at anything, Peter?”

  Peter massages his scalp.

  “Would you mind fetching my son and daughter and telling them to put their clothes on and get in the car?”

  Ana nods eagerly.

  “Sure! I just need to clean up in here first!”

  Peter shakes his head imploringly and takes out a fresh roll of paper towels.

  “No . . . no, Ana . . . please don’t. I can’t help thinking that would only make things worse.”

  * * *

  Once the laughter in the office has subsided, one of the sponsors looks grimly at the club’s president, taps his knuckles on his desk and asks:

  “So? Is there going to be any problem with Peter?”

  The president mops his brow, shakes his head. “Peter does what’s best for the club. Always. You know that.”

  The sponsor stands up, buttons his jacket, and empties his cup.

  “Well, then. I’ve got another meeting to go to, but I trust you’ll explain things to him. Remind him where the money for his wages comes from. We all know how he feels about Sune, but we can’t allow any leaks to the media about internal conflict here.”

  The club’s president doesn’t have to answer. No one knows more about the thickness of the walls than Peter. He’ll put the club first. Even today, when he’s going to be ordered to eject Sune from it.

  5

  Why does anyone care about hockey?

  * * *

  Perhaps that depends on who you are. And where.

  * * *

  No one really knows how old Sune is. He’s the sort of man who seems to have been seventy for at least twenty years, and not even he can remember exactly how many of those he’s been the A-team coach. Age has made him shorter, stress and diet have made him wider. Nowadays he has the proportions of a snowman. He’s at work earlier than usual today, but is standing hidden at the edge of the forest outside the rink when the group of men emerge from the door. He waits until they get in their cars and drive off. Not because he’s embarrassed, but because he doesn’t want them to feel embarrassed in front of him. He’s known most of them all their lives, even coached many of them. The fact that they want to fire him and replace him with the coach of the junior team is the worst-kept secret in town. There’s no need for anyone to tell Sune not to turn the matter into a public conflict; he’d never do that to the club, and he knows it’s about more than just hockey now.

  Beartown is in a poor part of a big forest, but there are still a few rich men here. They saved the club from bankruptcy, and now they want payback: the juniors are to lead the march back to elite level. Tomorrow they’re going to win their semifinal in the youth tournament, and next weekend the final. When the regional council decides the location of the new hockey-focused high school, they won’t be able to ignore the town with the best junior team in the country. The team will become the heart of the town’s plans for the future, and the high school will bring with it a new rink, and then a conference center and shopping mall. Hockey is becoming more than hockey, it’s becoming tourism, a trademark, capital. Survival.

  So the club is more than a club, it’s a kingdom over which the strongest men in the forest are fighting for power, and there’s no place for Sune there. He looks at the rink. He’s given his whole life to it. He has no family, no hobbies, not even a dog. Soon he’ll be unemployed; he doesn’t know what he’s going to live off then. Or for. Even so, he can’t blame anyone—not the president and not the junior coach, and definitely not Peter. Poor Peter probably doesn’t even know about it yet, but they’ll force him to carry out the firing, make him wield the axe and explain his actions in the local paper afterward. To make sure that the club stands united, and that the walls remain thick.

  Sooner or later any sports team has to decide what it really wants to achieve, and Beartown is no longer content merely to play. They’ll replace Sune with the coach of the junior team, for one simple reason: when Sune talks to his players before matches, he gives long speeches about them playing with their hearts. When the junior team coach stands in the locker room, he says just one word: “Win.” And the juniors win. They’ve done nothing else for ten years.

  It’s just that Sune is no longer sure that’s all a hockey team should consist of: boys who never lose.

  * * *

  The little car rolls along freshly plowed roads. Maya is leaning her head against the window like only a fifteen-year-old can. Farther south, spring has arrived, b
ut Beartown only seems to have two seasons, and winter is such an obvious fact of life here that summer always seems to catch everyone by surprise. No one has time to get used to the two or three months of sunlight that are granted to them before it is snatched away again, and for the rest of the year it can sometimes feel as if they might as well be living underground.

  Ana flicks Maya’s ear hard with her finger.

  “What the . . . ?” Maya exclaims, rubbing that whole side of her face.

  “I’m bored! Let’s play a game!” Ana pleads.

  Maya sighs but doesn’t protest. Because she loves the smoothie-slurping idiot, and because they’re fifteen and her mom is always telling her, “You never have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen ever again. Even if you keep them for the rest of your life, it’s never the same as it was then.”

  “Okay, how about this one: blind and brilliant at fighting, or deaf and brilliant at—” Ana says.

  “Blind,” Maya says without hesitation.

  This is Ana’s favorite game; they’ve played it ever since they were little. There’s a degree of reassurance in the fact that there are still some things they don’t grow out of.

  “You haven’t even heard the alternative!” Ana protests.

  “I don’t give a shit about the alternative. I can’t live without music, but I can live without seeing your stupid face every day.”

  “Idiot,” Ana sighs.

  “Moron,” Maya grins.

  “Okay, this one, then: always have boogers in your own nose, or go out with a guy who always has boogers in his nose.”

  “Always have boogers in my nose.”

  “The fact that you picked that answer says so much about you.”

  Ana tries to hit Maya on the thigh but Maya swings away and punches her friend’s arm hard instead. Ana screams and they burst out laughing at each other. At themselves.

  In the front seat of the car, with an ability that has been finely tuned over the years to shut out the wavelength of his big sister and her best friend and sit isolated in his own thoughts, Leo turns to his dad and asks:

  “Are you coming to watch me train today?”

  “Yes . . . I’ll try . . . but Mom will be there!” Peter replies.

  “Mom’s always there,” Leo says.

  It’s a statement from a twelve-year-old boy, not an accusation. But it still feels like one to Peter. He’s checking his watch so frequently that he has to tap it to reassure himself it hasn’t stopped.

  “Are you stressing about something?” Ana says from the backseat in that tone that makes you want to start throwing things if you happen to be stressed.

  “I’ve just got a meeting, Ana. Thank you for asking.”

  “Who with?” Ana asks.

  “The club’s president. We’re going to talk about the junior team’s match tomorrow . . .”

  “God, everyone keeps going on about the junior team. You do know that it’s just a stupid game, don’t you? No one really cares!”

  She’s joking; she loves hockey. But Maya quickly hisses: “Don’t say that to him today!”

  “He’ll go crazy!” Leo agrees.

  “What do you mean, crazy? Who’ll go crazy?” Peter asks. Maya leans forward.

  “You don’t have to drive us all the way to school, Dad. You can drop us off here.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Peter insists.

  “Not a problem . . . not for you, maybe,” Maya groans.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you ashamed of me?”

  Ana interjects helpfully, “Yes!”

  Leo adds, “And she doesn’t want anyone to see you because then everyone in her class will come over and want to talk hockey.”

  “And what’s wrong with that? This is a hockey town!” Peter says, taken aback.

  “Yeah, but life doesn’t only have to be about stupid hockey because of that,” Maya can’t help retorting, and considers opening the door while the car is in motion and rolling out; the snow is still deep and she doesn’t think she’d break anything. It feels like it might be worth the risk.

  “Why do you say that? Why’s she saying that, Leo?” her dad demands.

  “Can you just stop the car? Or just slow down, you don’t even have to stop,” Maya pleads.

  Ana taps Leo on the shoulder.

  “Okay, Leo, try this one: Never play hockey again, or never play computer games again?”

  Leo glances at his dad. Emits a rather shamefaced little cough. Starts to undo his seatbelt and fumbles for the door handle. Peter shakes his head in despair.

  “Don’t you dare answer that, Leo. Don’t you dare.”

  * * *

  Kira is sitting in the Volvo, heading away from Beartown. She heard Peter throwing up in the bathroom this morning. If that’s what hockey does to grown men in this town, what on earth must it be doing to the seventeen-year-old juniors who are playing in the game tomorrow? There’s an old joke among the women of Beartown: “I just wish my husband would look at me the way he watches hockey.” It’s never made Kira laugh, because she understands it all too well.

  She knows what the men of the town say about her, knows she’s a long way from the loyal GM’s wife they were hoping for when they appointed Peter. They don’t think of the club as an employer, but as an army: the soldiers need to fall in whenever they’re summoned, their families standing proudly in the doorways, waving them off. The first time Kira met the club’s president was at a golf tournament organized by the sponsors, and while they were milling about having drinks before dinner he handed her his empty glass. So few women existed in his hockey world that when he saw one he didn’t recognize, he took it for granted that she must be a waitress.

  When he realized his mistake he just laughed, as if Kira ought to find the situation funny too. When she didn’t, he sighed and said: “You mustn’t take things too seriously, eh?” When he heard that she was thinking of carrying on with her career in parallel with Peter’s, he exclaimed in surprise: “But who’s going to take care of the kids?” She really did try to keep quiet. Well, maybe not really, but in hindsight she thinks she did try, at least. Eventually she turned to the president and pointed at his greasy, sausagelike fingers, which were clutching a prawn sandwich, then at his stomach, which was straining against the buttons of his shirt, and said, “I thought maybe you could take care of them. You have got bigger breasts than me, after all.”

  The next time a golf tournament was organized, “plus one” had been removed from the invitations. The men’s hockey world expanded, the women’s shrank, and there has never been greater proof of Kira’s love for Peter than the fact that she didn’t go down to the rink that day and punch someone. She learned that you have to be thick-skinned in Beartown. That helps you deal with both the cold and the insults.

  Ten years have passed since then, and she has come to realize that things feel a whole lot better if you have a really good stereo in the car. So she turns up the volume. Plays Maya and Leo’s “louder-louder list,” not because she likes the music but because it makes her feel close to them. When children are young you think it will pass, the guilty feeling you get in your stomach when you leave home each morning. But it never does, it just gets worse. So she has their music collections on her phone, lists of songs that have been selected because each is the sort that makes one of the children shout “LOUDER! LOUDER!” when it comes on the radio. She plays them so loud that the bass makes the door panels vibrate, because sometimes the silence of the forest drives her mad. The early-afternoon sky hovers just above the trees almost all year round in these parts, and that can be hard to get used to for someone who grew up in a big city where nature was something used primarily as a screensaver.

  Naturally, everyone in Beartown hates the capital, and they’ve developed a permanent sense of resentment at the fact that the forest contains all the natural resources but all the money ends up somewhere else. Sometimes it feels as if the people of Beartown love the fact that the cl
imate is so inhospitable, because not everyone can handle it: that reminds them of their own strength and resilience. The first local saying Peter taught Kira was: “Bears shit in the woods, but everyone else shits on Beartown, so forest people have learned to take care of themselves!”

  She’s gotten used to a lot, living here, but there are some things she’ll never understand. Such as how a community where everyone fishes has precisely zero sushi restaurants. Or why people who are tough enough to live in a place with a climate wild animals can barely endure can never quite bring themselves to say what they mean. In Beartown silence always goes hand in hand with shame. Kira recalls how Peter explained it when she asked him why everyone seemed to hate people from the big cities so much: “People in the big cities don’t feel enough shame.” He’s always been worried about what people think. Whenever they get asked out to dinner, he goes to pieces if Kira buys a bottle of wine that’s too expensive. That’s why he refuses to live in one of the expensive houses in the Heights, even though Kira’s salary would allow them to. They carry on living in their little house in the middle of town out of sheer politeness. Peter wouldn’t budge, even when Kira tried to entice him saying, “More space for your record collection.”

  Ten years, and Kira still hasn’t learned to live with the town yet, only to coexist with it. And the silence still makes her want to buy a drum and march around the streets banging it. She turns the stereo up again. Drums the steering wheel. Sings along so animatedly to each song that she almost drives off the road when her hair gets caught on the rearview mirror.

  Why does Kira care about hockey? She doesn’t. She cares about a person who cares about hockey. And because she dreams of a summer—just one—when her husband can look his town in the eye without lowering his gaze.

  * * *

  Sune’s chest rises and falls below slouched shoulders as he starts to walk toward the entrance to the rink. For the first time in his life he feels his age, his body moving with slithery movements, as if someone’s tried to put a tracksuit on a bag of jellyfish. But when he opens the door a great calm still settles over him, the way it does every day. This is the only place in the world that he really understands. So he tries to remember what it’s given him rather than what they’re planning to take away from him. A lifetime in the service of the sport, which is more than most people can say. He’s been blessed with a few moments of magic, and has seen two immortal talents born.