The Winners, page 34
“I heard you signed an extension to your contract as coach, congratulations!”
“For all the good that’ll do. All coaches get fired,” Zackell replies, and if she was the sort of person who made jokes, he would have assumed she was joking.
“Interesting reaction to a new contract,” Peter smiles.
A few young men in black jackets have started gathering up the chairs at the back of the church, but Zackell shows no sign of moving.
“What’s the best job you can imagine as a hockey coach?” she asks, and if she was the sort of person who teased people, he would have assumed she was teasing him.
“Coaching an NHL team,” he replies.
“And which team in the NHL is the best?”
“The team that wins the Stanley Cup,” he replies, a little more warily.
Zackell nods, showing a degree of patience that’s uncharacteristic.
“In the past twenty years, sixteen different coaches have won the Stanley Cup. Of those sixteen, three still had their job five years later. Two left of their own accord, one retired, one got ill. The other nine were fired, five of those within two years. So, out of the best coaches in the world, only three of sixteen managed to hold on to their job for five years after winning the biggest title in the world. Do you know how long I’ll have been at Beartown if I stay for the length of the contract I’ve just signed?”
“Five years?” Peter guesses.
“Five years! So obviously I’m going to get fired. Either we won’t win the league this year, and then I’ll get fired, or we’ll win and get promoted to a higher league and then not win that, and I’ll get fired for that instead. There’s always a reason to fire the coach. You should know that, you fired Sune so you could employ me just because I am a woman.”
“That was… hang on a minute… that ISN’T what…,” Peter starts to protest, but she just shrugs her shoulders.
“That was a mistake. Because the problem with employing a woman because it’s politically correct is that it’s extremely politically incorrect to fire a woman.”
“Fire you? The club hasn’t been this successful for years!” Peter groans, starting to understand why Ramona was always so drunk when she talked with Zackell in the Bearskin.
Then Zackell suddenly stands up and gets ready to leave, and says in passing:
“I’m going to look at a player tomorrow. Do you want to come?”
Peter tries to digest all this information at once.
“What? Tomorrow? Haven’t you got training with the team tomorrow?”
“They can cope. Coaches are overrated. All teams will win a third of their games and lose a third of their games, it’s the team that wins the remaining third that wins the league, and you know which team that is?”
“No?”
“The team with the best players. So I’m going to look at a player. Besides, I’m banned at the moment so I can’t attend the training session.”
“Sorry? Banned?”
“The committee received a complaint. I’ve broken one of the rules in that new declaration of values. If the players do that, they have to miss one training session, so I insisted that the same thing should apply to me. Do you want to come tomorrow or not?”
“What… hang on a minute… what were YOU reported for?”
Zackell sighs wearily:
“A woman contacted me to complain that one of the boys’ coaches had said all the players on her son’s team were useless, but that that could possibly have been excused if there had been any attractive mothers among the parents, only they were all ugly. And I replied that he definitely shouldn’t have said that, because not all the players are useless!”
“And she didn’t take that the way you intended, I imagine,” Peter concludes glumly.
“No. She got very angry. And then she said that the boys’ coach had said she was only angry because she hadn’t had sex for so long because she was so ugly, so I said maybe that wasn’t only because of her appearance but also her personality? So now I’m under ‘investigation’ by the committee because apparently that contravened the club’s ‘values.’ It would have been different if I was a man, of course.”
Peter wishes he had an aspirin.
“Hang on… do you mean that you wouldn’t be under investigation if you were a man?”
“I mean that if I were a man, I’d already have been fired. They fired the coach of the boys’ team instantly.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Shall I take that as a yes?”
“To what?”’
“To you coming with me tomorrow to look at that player?”
She looks at the time impatiently, like someone who has to be somewhere.
“Why me? You’ve got Bobo and…,” Peter wonders, and then she says something that would be hard for most people to argue against, and impossible for him:
“I need your help.”
* * *
“If you could choose, would you rather be important or loved?” the psychologist asked Kira not that long ago, and it’s still nagging away at her, driving her mad. She’s sitting in the car in the church parking lot thinking that she should have replied: “If you could choose, would you rather I paid your invoice or shoved it where the sun doesn’t shine?”
Leo is cycling home from the funeral, Maya is walking with Ana, so Kira is sitting here alone waiting for Peter while the whole town wants to talk to him inside the church. It feels like she’s stumbled into a wormhole and gone back in time, because now he’s someone again and she’s the one who just has to wait. She’d forgotten how much she used to hate herself for hating that so much.
She watches the people outside the car, many of them in Beartown Hockey tops as if this were a rally rather than a funeral, and thinks “stupid rednecks.” She feels instantly ashamed, even though she doesn’t say it out loud, because she knows this is what her mom always called “the worst kind of sickness: jealousy. Incurable!” Kira wishes she could be happy as quickly as these people. Explode with joy because someone manages to poke a puck into a goal in a game where all the rules are made up. She’s always wished she loved something so unthinkingly, it looks like such a wonderful little bubble to live in, that belief that you’re part of something much bigger than yourself. As if hockey cared. It doesn’t give a damn about us, about anyone, it just is.
She envies hockey supporters the way she envies deeply religious people: for their blind faith. She will never be as important to anything as these people are to one another every time they’re packed together in the stands.
“Kira?”
The man outside the car suddenly calling her name makes her jump so badly that she hits her head on the side window.
“Tails? What the…?” she snaps back, and he takes that as an invitation to squeeze into the passenger seat.
“Hello!” he says, as if this were perfectly normal behavior.
“Hello?” she says as he closes the door and glances warily in the rearview mirror to see if anyone has seen him.
“It’s such a shame,” he says sadly, and she misunderstands and says solemnly:
“Yes… yes, sorry… I’m sorry, Tails.”
He looks at her in surprise.
“Sorry about what?”
She blinks, feeling a little frustrated.
“I’m sorry… about Ramona. I know you were close.”
Tails’s head wobbles from side to side.
“Oh, I don’t know about that, she probably mostly thought I was just a clown who never stopped talking.”
Kira can’t help smiling.
“We all think that, Tailcoat, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t close.”
He brightens up so much that he could probably replace at least a hundred of those wind turbines the government wants to put up on every little hill around here. No one calls him by his real name, everyone calls him Tails, but very few are allowed to call him Tailcoat. He likes that best of all. As if there’s only ever been one guy with a tailcoat.
“Yes, well, I’d like to talk to you!” he goes on in a tone somewhere between all the worries of the world and not a single worry in the world.
“Is it about that new office you offered us? I don’t feel like talking about that, Tailcoat, God… my partner hates the fact that we don’t have an office in a bigger town farther away and Peter hates the fact that we don’t have an office in Beartown. Hed was a compromise, and I really…”
But Tails is already shaking his head defensively.
“No, no, it isn’t about the office. I mean… obviously the offer of the office is still open! It’s all sorted! But that isn’t what I want to talk about. This is about… well, it’s rather sensitive, you know… I don’t want to sound cold. But Ramona was on the committee of Beartown Hockey and… well. You know.”
Kira sighs so deeply that her rib cage never quite seems to settle again. Of course. Of course! It’s always about the hockey club, even now. Before Ramona has even been laid to rest, she has to be replaced.
“I see. But if you want Peter to take her place, you shouldn’t be talking to me. You’ll have to talk to him yourself, I can’t…”
So many images flit through her mind as she speaks, a thousand photographs of small moments, a whole life together with her husband. Her husband. Her husband. How much of him is there left to share? If she gives him back to hockey, will there be anything left for her? Can a marriage survive that, one more time? She feels like screaming out loud, venting all her frustration, but Tails merely shakes his head again:
“No. No. It isn’t about that. Actually, yes, maybe it is about that, but not in THAT way. Okay: we have a spare place on the committee. But we don’t want it to go to Peter. We want you to take it.”
* * *
At first there’s silence. Then the shock hits Kira so strongly that she almost slaps Tails across the face. Then she screams.
“What… seriously… what the f… what are you TALKING about? Why would you put ME on the committee?”
* * *
He’s desperately trying to hush her, and that rouses her suspicions, which aren’t exactly calmed when he says:
“Why not? Who knows this town and this club better than you?”
She stares at him for a long time, feeling confused, until the penny finally drops and she just feels stupid.
“You’ve done something stupid. You need a lawyer. That’s why you’ve come to me.”
Tails’s chin swings left and right in agitation as he retorts:
“Don’t insult me, and above all don’t insult yourself, Kira. A lawyer? Couldn’t I get hold of a hundred lawyers if I needed to? But we don’t need them. We need the best lawyer. And I don’t know anyone better than you.”
Flattery is harder to withstand than a storm. Kira blushes when, instead of telling him to shut up, she hears herself say:
“Why?”
“The media are poking about in our accounts,” he admits quietly, glancing in the rearview mirror again.
“The media? What for?”
“Nothing, nothing! It’s just the local paper, that new editor in chief, she’s full of big-city attitude, probably thinks she’ll get some damn prize or something if she uncovers ‘the hockey town’s secrets.’ You know how it is.”
He falls silent and looks embarrassed, just for a moment, but Kira can still hear what he’s almost saying. She heard it for years after she moved here with Peter, the way all the old men in the town wanted to know why the local paper “only writes negative stories about hockey?” when it was almost always cheering the team on. “Why is hockey always treated worst?” the old men would still complain, as if they were a persecuted minority. “Horse riding has fatal accidents, gymnastics has pedophile scandals, soccer clubs are owned by dictators… but in the eyes of the media, hockey is still always worst!” They’re forever the victims, those old men, always persecuted, always the victims of conspiracies. As if they themselves didn’t make the rules of this game, everywhere and always. Tails stopped saying things like that two years ago, or rather he stopped saying them in front of Kira, but he probably still complains when there are only old men in the room and the members of the club are preventing the sponsors from doing whatever they want. They’d probably prefer the league table at the end of the season to be decided by bank transactions. “You have to hit people like that where it hurts: in their wallet,” Ramona always said. That was actually one of the last things Kira remembers her saying. So it should be easy for her to despise Tails now. To dismiss him. But then he says:
“Kira, please, a lawyer on the committee would be good for us, that’s all I’m saying. We haven’t got problems, but now that the council is talking about merging the clubs or setting up an entirely new one, those damn journalists have started digging, and you know what it’s like: if they find the tiniest little lead they’ll concoct an entire labyrinth. We just think it would be good to have a lawyer on the committee. To have you look through the paperwork, just to be on the safe side. The club can’t employ you directly, that wouldn’t look good, but if money’s an issue I’ve already agreed with the other sponsors that your firm would deal with all the legal work related to the construction of Beartown Business Park over the next few years. That’s going to be lucrative, I promise! But perhaps we could meet at yours tomorrow, at your home? That would be better than your office, me coming to your house, then we’d just be two friends talking, so to speak. If anyone sees us.”
Kira doesn’t meet his gaze, because she’s too ashamed that she’s actually trying to persuade herself that she’s interested in what he’s saying because there might be a lucrative contract for the firm at the other end of it. Because that isn’t true. What gets her interested is what he says next:
“Obviously, this has to stay between us, Kira. Don’t tell anyone. Not even Peter.”
Kira is ashamed, of course, but it’s a bit intoxicating, the thought of knowing the innermost workings of the hockey club. For once, finding out the town’s secrets before everyone else. Perhaps she only wants to enjoy that for a very short while. Is that so wrong? Is she so terrible? She doesn’t even want to think about that. So she asks instead:
“ ‘If anyone sees us’? What do you mean by that? Who would see us?”
53 Pictures
The cell phone on the editor in chief’s desk vibrates as a message arrives from her dad. She leans forward and sees that he hasn’t written anything, just sent three photographs from the funeral. The first shows Peter Andersson going into the church with Beartown Hockey’s most notorious hooligan. The second is of Peter Andersson coming out of the church with the coach of Beartown Hockey. The third shows Tails getting out of Kira Andersson’s car.
Her dad didn’t need to write anything beneath the pictures, because his daughter already knows what he’s trying to say: How could the Andersson family claim not to have anything to do with Beartown Hockey now?
* * *
The Andersson family is Beartown Hockey.
54 Lies
“Are you going to be at home tomorrow?” Kira asks innocently.
In hindsight she’ll think that her and Peter’s biggest mistake when they argue is always the same: that they pull away when they ought to be reaching out, they raise their voices instead of lowering their guard, that they hold grudges rather than keep their ears open. But their worst sin, the very cruelest of all, is when they don’t tell the whole truth and then convince themselves that this isn’t the same as lying.
“How do you mean? Have you got something planned?” Peter asks, just as innocently.
They drove home from the funeral in silence, without holding each other’s hands, he kept all ten fingers on the wheel and she made herself busy with her phone. Now she’s made herself busy repotting the plants in the living room, and he’s baking bread in the kitchen, and if she told her psychologist that, he’d probably have a stroke from the excitement: Peter is obsessed with creating something, Kira is desperately trying to keep something alive. When she comes into the kitchen to get water, they pass each other near the sink, he has flour on his fingers, she has soil on hers, they ask innocent questions and receive innocent replies. That’s how easily one lie gets laid upon another:
“No, no, I was just wondering. I thought… I thought I’d work from home. So I can drive Leo to school if you’re busy!” she says.
“Really? Well, yes, that would be good. I have actually got something to do, I was going to say no, but… well, it’s so stupid, no big deal… but Elisabeth Zackell asked if I’d like to go and look at a player with her…,” he says tentatively, glancing at her.
“Really?”
“Yes? Is that stupid?”
“No, no, I didn’t mean that at all! I was just surprised, that’s all.”
Peter strews some more flour across the counter.
“Like I said, it’s just nonsense. It isn’t even the club asking, just Zackell herself, almost as if we were… friends.”
Kira holds a potted plant under the tap. She’s so good at acting nonchalant.
“Well, in that case, I think you should go.”
He kneads his dough. Is almost as good at it himself.
“You think?”
“Well, if she needs your help you don’t mind doing it, do you?”
“Hmm, yes, maybe. We’ll be driving there and back in a day, that’s all, so I’d be back again tomorrow evening. Is that okay? Or do you need me in the office?”
He’s a bit too eager to get her approval. She’s a bit too quick to grant it.
“No, no, we’ll manage. Go ahead. No worries.”
He nods hesitantly.
“Well, then.”
“Well, then,” she nods.
Peter convinces himself that he’s telling the truth, even though he isn’t telling the whole truth, because he hasn’t said how much he’s hoping that this might be a way back into the club. Hasn’t said that he’s dreaming of hockey again because this, whatever it is that they have, isn’t enough for him. Hasn’t admitted that he needs to be needed, that it’s important for him to be important. So he bakes his bread in silence and slides the trays into the oven. Bang, bang, bang, in they go.
