Us Against You Read online

  9

  He’s Going to Need Someone to Fight Tonight

  Everyone who loves sports knows that a game isn’t decided only by what happens but just as much by what doesn’t. The shot that hits the post, the bad call by the referee, the pass that didn’t quite connect. Every discussion about sports dissolves sooner or later into a thousand “ifs” and ten thousand “if only that hadn’ts.” Some people’s lives get stuck the same way, year after year passing by with the same story being repeated to strangers at an ever more deserted bar counter: a doomed relationship, a dishonest business partner, an unfair dismissal, ungrateful kids, an accident, a divorce. One single reason why everything went to hell.

  When it comes down to it, everyone has something to say about the life he should have had instead of this one. Cities and towns work the same way. So if you want to understand their biggest stories, first you have to listen to the smaller ones.

  * * *

  The council building is left almost empty after Midsummer as the politicians take their holidays or spend time at their regular jobs. If you want to understand how the local council is run, that’s where you have to start: politics here is a part-time occupation, and the salary of just a few thousand kronor a month makes it almost an act of charity when seen in relation to the number of hours worked. So most councillors are employed elsewhere or have their own businesses, meaning that they have customers and suppliers and bosses and colleagues. Naturally this makes it difficult to claim to be truly independent, but no man is an island, especially not this deep into the forest.

  One single councillor goes on working eighteen hours a day in the council building throughout the summer, and he doesn’t owe anything to anyone around here. His name is Richard Theo, and he sits in his office in a black suit, making a stream of phone calls. He is hated by some and feared by many, and soon he will change the direction of one hockey club and two towns.

  * * *

  Several days of rain follow, and Beartown becomes a different place: the town isn’t as used to this sort of precipitation as it is to snow. People stay indoors, quieter and more irritable than usual.

  The Jeep drives through the mud up into the forest, and the stranger stops outside a small garage beside a shabby-looking house. Cars are parked on the grass, waiting to be repaired. One of them is difficult to avoid: it has an ax sticking out of the hood.

  The stranger sees an eighteen-year-old youth with fists the size of piglets jump up onto the chassis and pull the ax out of the metal, his shoulders so tense that his neck seems to retract into his guts.

  A gruff-looking man in his forties, so similar to the young man that there’s no way the postman would ever have to take a paternity test, walks over to the Jeep and taps on the window. “Tires?” he grunts.

  The stranger winds the window down and repeats uncomprehendingly, “Tires?”

  The man kicks the front wheel. “They’re worn smooth, this one’s got grooves no deeper than an old LP, so I assume that’s why you’re here?”

  “Okay,” the stranger says.

  “ ‘Okay’? Do you want new tires or not?” the man wonders.

  “Okay,” the stranger says and shrugs as if the man was asking about ketchup on a burger.

  The man grunts something inaudible and yells, “Bobo! Have we got tires for this one?”

  The stranger obviously isn’t here to get the tires changed but to assess the quality of a defensive player. But if that’s going to require a change of tires, then so be it. So the stranger watches the eighteen-year-old, Bobo, whose efforts pulling the ax from the car hood remind the stranger of a cut-price King Arthur. He disappears into the workshop, where there are no pictures of scantily clad women in the walls, from which the stranger concludes that there’s a woman in the house whom the father and son are unwilling to cross. There are, however, pictures of ice hockey teams, new and old alike.

  The stranger nods to them, then at Bobo when he comes back with a tire under each arm, and asks the father, “That lad of yours, is he any good as a player?”

  The father suddenly lights up with the sort of pride you only have if you’ve been a defenseman yourself:

  “Bobo? Yes! Toughest defenseman in town!”

  His choice of the word “toughest” doesn’t surprise the stranger, because both father and son give the distinct impression of being the sort of men who can skate in only one direction. The father holds out a grease-stained hand, and the stranger shakes it with the enthusiasm of someone invited to take hold of a snake.

  “People call me Hog,” the father grins.

  “Zackell,” the stranger says.

  The stranger leaves the workshop with an improved set of secondhand tires for a little more than the going rate and a scrap of paper: “Bobo. If he can learn to skate.”

  * * *

  The sheet of paper isn’t just a list. It’s a team sheet.

  * * *

  Amat runs alone along the road with his shirt black with sweat until his eyes are streaming and his brain is empty of all thought.

  He’s one of the brightest hockey talents this town has ever seen, but no one realized it until this spring. He lives with his mom in one of the cheapest apartment blocks at the far end of the Hollow in the north of Beartown; he’s always played with secondhand equipment, and he’s been told he’s too small, but no one is faster on skates than he is. “Kill them!” his best friends usually say instead of “Good luck!” His speed is his weapon.

  Hockey is the sport of bears around here, but Amat taught himself to play it like a lion. The sport became his way into the community, and he thought it could be his ticket out as well. His mother works as a cleaner in the ice rink in the winter and in the hospital during the summer, but one day Amat hopes to turn professional and take her away from here. Back in the spring he got his chance, with the junior team. He grabbed it. He showed everyone in town that he was a winner, and the path to his dreams lay open. It was the best day and the worst night of his life. After the game he was invited to a party that Maya Andersson was also going to, and the only thing Amat had ever dreamed of more than playing was being allowed to kiss her.

  He was drunk, but even so he will never forget every detail of how he stumbled through room after room of drunk and high teenagers singing and laughing, went upstairs, and heard Maya calling for help. Amat opened a door and saw the rape.

  When Kevin realized what Amat had seen, he and William Lyt and some of the other boys in the junior team offered Amat everything the boy had dreamed of—a place on the junior team, star status, a career—in exchange for keeping his mouth shut. Kevin’s father gave him money and promised to get his mother a better job. If anyone condemns Amat for giving the offer serious consideration, that person has lived a life where morality is easy. It never is. Morality is a luxury.

  Kevin’s parents and the club’s sponsors called a meeting and tried to force Maya’s father out of the club. In the end Amat went to the meeting, stood up at the front, and told everyone what he had seen Kevin do. Peter Andersson won the vote of confidence and kept his job.

  And then what? Amat is running faster now, his feet hurt more, because what the hell happened next? Kevin was never punished. Maya never got justice, and Amat left that meeting with hundreds of enemies. Lyt and his friends found him and beat him up, and if Bobo hadn’t changed sides at the last minute and defended Amat, they would have killed him.

  Neither Amat nor Bobo is welcome at Hed Hockey Club now. Amat is a snitch and Bobo a traitor. And Beartown Ice Hockey? Soon it won’t exist anymore. Amat is on his way to becoming one of those people who sits at a bar counter in thirty years’ time with a story full of “ifs” and “if only that hadn’ts.” He’s seen them in the rink, shabby men with three days’ worth of stubble and four days’ worth of hangover, whose lives peaked while they were still teenagers.

  * * *

  Amat could have turned professional, his life could have changed, but instead he’s on his way to becoming
a has-been at the age of sixteen.

  * * *

  His gaze is focused inward. He doesn’t even notice the Jeep behind him. When it passes him, he doesn’t know it was fifty yards behind him for several minutes, so that the stranger could make a note of how far he is from Beartown and how fast he’s running. The stranger writes, “Amat. If his heart is as big as his lungs.”

  * * *

  Benji is sitting with his back against his father’s headstone. His body is full of moonshine and grass, and the combination acts as a circuit breaker. He’s closing down. Can’t bear it otherwise.

  He has three older sisters, and you can tell the difference between them if you mention his name. Gaby has young children; she reads them bedtime stories, goes to bed early on Friday nights and still watches TV programs on TV instead of a computer. Katia is a bartender at the Barn in Hed; she spends her Friday nights pouring beer and shepherding three-hundred-pound drunks through the door when they decide to try to relieve other three-hundred-pound drunks of their front teeth. Adri is the eldest; she lives alone at her boarding kennels outside Beartown, she hunts and fishes and likes people who keep their mouths shut. So if you say “Benji,” Gaby will exclaim anxiously, “Has something happened to him?” Katia will sigh and wonder, “What’s he done now?” But Adri will force you up against a wall and demand, “What the hell do you want with my brother?” Gaby worries, Katia solves problems, Adri protects: that’s been the division of responsibilities since their father took his rifle and went out into the forest. They know they can’t teach a heart like Benji’s, but they might be able to tame it. So when he lives like a nomad, staying sometimes at his mother’s, sometimes out in the forest, sometimes with one of his sisters, they fall into their old roles. If he’s at Gaby’s, she still gets up at night to check that he’s breathing, even though he’s eighteen years old. When he sees Katia, she still spoils him, lets him get away with way too much shit, because she doesn’t want him to stop coming to her with his problems. And when he’s staying out at the kennels with Adri, she sleeps with the key to the gun cabinet under her pillow. To make sure her little brother doesn’t do the same thing as their father.

  There have always been adults in this town who have thought that Benji is a rebel. His sisters know that the exact opposite is true. He became precisely the person everyone wanted him to be, because a young boy carrying a huge secret soon learns that sometimes the best place to hide it is where everyone can see you.

  As a child Benji was the first person to recognize that Kevin could be a star. In Beartown players like that are called “cherry trees.” So Benji saw to it that Kevin got enough space on the ice to blossom. Benji could give and take so much rough treatment that men in the stands used to say, “Now, there’s a real hockey player. This isn’t a sport for fags and weaklings, it’s for guys like Benji!” The more he fought, the better they thought they knew him. Until he became the person they wanted him to be.

  He’s eighteen now. He gets up and leans on the headstone, kisses his father’s name. Then he takes a step back, clenches his fist as tightly as he can, and punches the same place with full force. Blood drips from his knuckles as he makes his way through the forest toward Hed. Tomorrow would have been Alain Ovich’s birthday, and this is the first time that Benji is celebrating it without Kevin. He’s going to need someone to fight tonight.

  He never sees the Jeep. It’s standing parked beneath a tree. The stranger walks through the rain to the grave, looks at the name engraved in the stone. Back in the Jeep a pen scratches on a sheet of paper, “Ovich. If he still wants to play.”

  * * *

  Benji. Amat. Bobo. Inside every large story there are always plenty of small ones. While three young men in Beartown thought they were in the process of losing their club, a stranger was already constructing a team with them.

  * * *

  Richard Theo, the politician, is alone in the council building when evening falls. He looks younger than his forty years, a genetic quirk he used to hate when he inspected his impassively hairless testicles as he waited for the onset of puberty but from which he is now reaping the rewards as his contemporaries pluck gray hairs from their beards and curse the law of gravity every time they pee. Theo is wearing a suit. At best his colleagues wear jeans and a jacket, so he’s used to being mocked for “looking like a government minister even though he’s just a nobody from the provinces.” It doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t dress for the job he’s got but for the one he wants.

  He grew up in Beartown but was never one of the popular kids, never played hockey. He went abroad to study, and no one noticed he was gone. He worked in a bank in London and was gone for years before he suddenly came home with expensive suits and political ambitions. He joined the smallest political party in the area. It isn’t the smallest anymore.

  Not long ago Theo was the sort of face that former classmates would see in old school photographs and not remember his name, but that changed when the local paper shone a negative light on his politics. But how they learned his name is unimportant to Theo. As long as they know it. Opinions can be changed.

  He wasn’t at the meeting where Peter was informed of the fate of Beartown Ice Hockey Club, because Richard Theo isn’t part of the establishment. All councils have a political elite that you either belong to or you don’t, and the establishment here has chosen to freeze Theo out. Naturally they claim it’s because of his politics, but he’s convinced that the real reason is that they fear him. He can get the people on his side. They call him a populist, but the only difference between him and the other parties is that he doesn’t need flags: they have their offices on the top floor of the council building and play golf with business leaders, whereas Richard Theo has his office on the ground floor. He collects his information from people who have lost their jobs rather than from the people firing them, from the people who are angry instead of the ones who are happy, so he doesn’t need flags to tell him which way the wind is blowing. While all the other politicians are running in the same direction, men like Richard Theo go the other way. And sometimes that’s how they win.

  There’s a knock on his office door. It’s late, no one has seen the stranger arrive.

  “There you are at last! Well? Have you finished thinking about it? Are you going to take the job?” Richard Theo asks without further ado.

  The stranger stands in the doorway with a pocket containing the sheet of paper with the names of the team players on it, but Zackell’s reply is so apathetic that it’s hard to tell if it’s because of a lack of enthusiasm about the job, or life in general. “When you called me, you offered me the job of coach of Beartown Ice Hockey’s A-team. But the club’s going into receivership. And even if it weren’t, it already has a coach. And even if it didn’t, you’re still a politician rather than the club’s general manager, so unless I’ve seriously misunderstood the democratic process, you can’t offer me a job as a coach any more than you can offer me a unicorn.”

  “Yet you’re still here,” Richard Theo says simply.

  “I happen to be very fond of unicorns,” Zackell confesses in a way that makes it impossible to tell if the remark is supposed to be funny or not.

  Theo tilts his head to one side. “Coffee?”

  “I don’t drink coffee. I don’t like hot drinks.”

  Theo jerks as if he’s trying to avoid a dagger. “You don’t drink coffee? You’re going to have trouble fitting into this town!”

  “This town isn’t alone in that,” Zackell replies.

  Theo chuckles. “You’re a very strange person, Zackell.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  Theo slaps his hands on his desk and stands up cheerfully. “I like that! The media will like it, too! The coaching job is yours; let me worry about the general manager. I look forward to the two of us working together.”

  He looks as though he’s considering attempting a high five. Zackell looks very much as though that isn’t going to happen. “My main ambition is t
hat you and I will never have to ‘work together.’ I’m here for the hockey, not politics.”

  Theo throws his arms out brightly. “I hate hockey; you can have that all to yourself!”

  Zackell’s hands are firmly embedded in the pockets of the tracksuit. “For someone who hates hockey, you seem to be very involved in it.”

  Theo’s eyes narrow contentedly. “That’s because when everyone else runs the same way, I go the other way, Zackell. That’s how I win.”

  10

  How Do You Tell Your Children?

  The lights in the law firm are switched off, except for in one office. Kira Andersson is working while her colleague is lying across two armchairs looking for package holidays on her computer.

  “A package holiday? You don’t even like taking time off,” Kira points out.

  Her colleague stretches like a cat that’s been told off. “I don’t. But with this body, Kira, it would be a crime against humanity if it didn’t get shown off in a bikini at least once a year!”

  Kira laughs. How wonderful that her colleague can still make her do that so easily. That she has a friend like her. “Tell me when you’ve booked so I can call and warn the country in question to keep all its husbands locked away.”

  Her colleague nods seriously. “And sons. And dads, if I’ve drunk enough Fernet.”

  Kira smiles. Then she blinks slowly and mutters, “Thanks for being here . . .”

  Her colleague shrugs her shoulders. “The Wi-Fi at home is bad.”

  Which is rubbish, of course. She’s still at work because she knows Kira doesn’t want to go home early tonight and sit in an empty house waiting for Peter. She doesn’t judge, she doesn’t go on about it, she just stays behind in the only office where the lights are still on.