The Winners, page 4
“Watch what you say! That’s my kids’ team!”
“It’s not your kids’ fault you let them play on a piece of shit team,” Ana replies, completely nonplussed.
The midwife stares at her. Then she smiles reluctantly.
“So you like hockey?”
“I hate hockey, but I hate Hed more,” Ana replies.
“Our A-team’s probably going to beat yours this season,” the midwife says hopefully, grateful to have something to talk about to distract herself.
Ana snorts and slows down for a few seconds as she tries to get her bearings in the darkness.
“Your team couldn’t even beat a carpet. You’d need a calendar to measure the time it takes your backs to move from zone to zone…,” she mutters, squinting through the windshield.
The midwife rolls her eyes.
“My husband was right, there really isn’t anything as smug as Beartown smugness. It’s not that long since the whole club was on the brink of bankruptcy, but now you’re suddenly full of it? And you were only good last season because you found that guy Amat? Without him you probably won’t find winning so easy…”
“We’ve still got Amat,” Ana snorts, and lets the pickup roll forward slowly.
“He’s in the USA, isn’t he? Playing in the NHL? It felt like the local paper didn’t write about anything else all spring. How superior Beartown’s youth setup is, the talented players you’re producing, saying that you’re the new style of hockey and we’re the old…”
The midwife can hear her husband’s bitterness in her own voice, which surprises her, but that’s what life in Hed is like these days: you take everything personally. Every success for Beartown is a defeat on the other side of the town boundary.
“Amat never got drafted. He’s home again. I think he’s just injured…,” Ana begins, but falls silent when she spots what she’s been looking for: a narrow track through the trees, possibly not quite wide enough for a truck.
“For someone who doesn’t like hockey, you seem to know a lot about it.” The midwife smiles.
Ana brings the pickup to a halt, measures the gap with her eyes, then takes a deep breath. Then she says:
“It doesn’t matter if Amat plays or not, we’re still going to beat you. You know why?”
“No?”
Ana bites her bottom lip and slowly releases the clutch.
“Because you’re a shit team. HOLD TIGHT!”
Then she leaves the road fast enough not to get stuck in the ditch, and veers in among the trees. The gap is wide enough, but only just, and she can hear the trunks scrape the paintwork. The midwife loses her breath and stops babbling as they jolt over the uneven ground. She hits her head on the windshield, and it seems to go on and on for hours until Ana stops abruptly. She winds down the window and sticks her head out, then reverses a few yards so that they’re reasonably safe if a tree should happen to fall.
“Here!” she declares, nodding toward the midwife’s map, then out of the window.
The midwife can’t see her hand in front of her when they get out of the pickup, but Ana gestures with her jacket and the midwife grabs hold of it, and the girl leads her the last bit of the way through the forest, huddled up against the wind. It’s astonishing that she knows where she is, it’s as if she’s sniffing her way, then suddenly they reach the car and hear the woman inside screaming, then the man calling:
“THERE’S SOMEONE COMING NOW, DARLING! THE AMBULANCE IS HERE!”
He’s furious when he realizes that there isn’t an ambulance, fear turns some people into heroes but most of us only reveal our worst sides when we’re caught in its shadow. The midwife can’t help getting the distinct impression that the man probably isn’t just irritated by the nature of the vehicle they arrived in, but would above all have preferred male paramedics.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” he demands as Hannah climbs into the backseat and starts whispering to the woman.
“What’s your job?” the midwife asks in a controlled voice.
“Painter,” he replies, clearing his throat.
“How about I decide how we help your wife give birth, then you can make the decisions next time we paint a wall?” she says, nudging him gently out of the way.
Ana gets in the front seat, her eyes flitting about manically.
“What can I do?” she pants.
“Talk to her,” the midwife says.
“About what?”
“Anything.”
Ana nods, confused, then peers over the seat at the woman in labor and says:
“Hi!”
The woman manages to smile between contractions.
“H-hello… are you a midwife as well?”
The man interrupts in exasperation.
“Are you kidding darling? She’s, like, twelve years old!”
“So go and paint something, idiot!” Ana snaps back, and the midwife laughs out loud.
For a moment the man is so insulted that he gets out of the car and tries to slam the door behind him, but the wind spoils his dramatic gesture. He can barely manage to stand upright out there, but with the wind in his eyes it’s probably easier to persuade himself that the tears in his eyes are tears of fear.
“What’s your name?” the woman in the backseat pants.
“Ana.”
“Thanks… thanks for coming, Ana. I’m sorry my husband…”
“He’s just angry because he loves you and he thinks you and the baby are going to die and he can’t do anything about it,” Ana blurts out.
The midwife glares at her disapprovingly, so Ana mutters defensively:
“You told me to talk!”
The woman in the backseat smiles wearily.
“You know a lot about men for someone so young.”
“They just think we want them to protect us the whole goddamn time, as if we need their fucking protection,” Ana snorts.
The midwife and woman in the backseat both laugh quietly at this.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” the woman asks.
“No. Well, sort of. But he died!”
The woman stares at her. Ana lets out a regretful cough and adds:
“But look, I’m sure you’re not going to die!”
Then the midwife says, in a friendly but firm way, that perhaps a bit of silence wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. Then the woman screams and her husband races back into the car and takes hold of her hand, and then he starts screaming too when she almost breaks his fingers.
* * *
Johnny spends all night sitting by the kitchen window. It’s an unbearable position for a fireman to be in. All four children are asleep on mattresses on the floor around him. Ture, the youngest, in the arms of Tess, the eldest. Tobias and Ted, the two middle boys, start off farther away, but soon end up as close to the others as they can get. In a crisis we instinctively seek out the only thing that really matters, even in our sleep: the breath of others, a pulse for our own to keep time with. Every now and then their dad gently puts one hand on his sons’ and daughter’s backs, one at a time, to make sure they’re still breathing. There’s no good reason to suspect that they aren’t, but there’s nothing reasonable about being a parent. The only thing everyone said when he was about to become a father was: “Don’t worry.” What a meaningless thing to say. There’s an immensity of love that bursts from your chest the first time you hear your child cry, every emotion you’ve ever felt is amplified to the point of absurdity, children open floodgates inside us, upward as well as down. You’ve never felt so happy, and never felt so scared. Don’t say “don’t worry” to someone in that position. You can’t love someone like this without worrying about everything, forever. It hurts your chest at times, a real, physical pain that makes Johnny bend over and gasp for breath. His skeleton creaks, his body aches, love never has enough space. He should have known better than to have four children, he should have thought about it, but everyone said “don’t worry,” and he’s always been an easily persuaded idiot. Thank goodness. We fool ourselves that we can protect the people we love, because if we accepted the truth we’d never let them out of our sight.
Johnny spends the whole night by the kitchen window, and this is the first time he truly experiences what his wife has felt every hour of every night without him since they first fell in love: What am I going to do if you don’t come home again?
* * *
Hannah knows when something is wrong. It’s the result of training and experience, sure, but after enough years it’s also something else. If the midwife didn’t know better, she’d say it’s almost spiritual. It can be such tiny things, the slightest change in skin color, or a fragile little rib cage that’s rising and falling a fraction too slowly. She knows when it’s happening before it happens. Giving birth to a child ought to be impossible, the ocean is so vast and our vessel so fragile, none of us ought to stand a chance.
Even Ana is frightened now. When the wind snaps a tree a yard behind them it sounds like a pistol shot inside the car, and when it falls and misses the car by just a handsbreadth, the branches scrape the chassis with such a shriek that the sound echoes in her head for several minutes. The ground shakes and when the worst gusts of wind come they think plenty of times that more trees have fallen on them, then something comes flying and hits the windshield, it’s a miracle it doesn’t break, it was probably just a stone or a large stick, but the force is so great that it sounds like hitting an elk at a hundred miles an hour.
But through the chaos and noise the midwife’s voice is still calm, intimate, promising that everything’s going to be fine. The man is sitting ashen-faced in the front seat beside Ana now. Then the baby cries for the first time and the world stops turning. The midwife smiles warmly to the mom and dad, and it isn’t until she glances at Ana that the girl realizes that something is wrong. The midwife leans forward from the backseat and whispers:
“How close can you get your dad’s truck?”
“Close!” Ana promises.
“What’s going on? Why are you whispering?” the man exclaims, panic-stricken, he grabs the midwife’s arm and the midwife lets out a cry, and Ana reacts instinctively and hits him in the jaw.
He tumbles back against the side window. The midwife stares at him, then at Ana. The girl is blinking in embarrassment.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to hit him so hard. I’ll get the truck.”
The man is huddled up in pain, half on the seat and half on the floor, blood trickling from his lip. The midwife’s voice is gentle, her words all the harsher:
“Your baby and your wife need to get to the hospital. Right away. I’m pretty sure you can’t paint us there. That kid out there is pretty crazy, sure, but she’s all we’ve got right now. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The man nods in despair.
“Will it… please, will the baby, will it…?”
“We need to get to the hospital,” the midwife whispers, looking him in the eye until his heart stops beating.
Ana rushes through the trees with her arms stretched out, so that her fingertips can memorize where they stand. Then she reverses her dad’s pickup blindly back between the trunks. Gently, gently the midwife and the new dad move the newborn baby and the new mother from one vehicle to the other. Then Ana drives on instinct through the darkness, she can only see a few yards in front of her, but that’s all she needs, a few yards at a time, then a few yards more. They don’t see the biggest tree sway and bend before it falls with terrible force over the car they have just left behind them in the darkness. Perhaps that’s just as well. It isn’t always a blessing to know how close to death you have been.
The mother in the backseat tries to whisper something, feeble and terrified, the midwife has to lean close to her mouth to hear.
“She wants you to know that she’s sorry about your boyfriend,” the midwife says, placing a gentle hand on Ana’s shoulder.
The man in the passenger seat has blood on his collar, and is beside himself with shame.
“What… happened to your boyfriend?”
“Well, he died, but it was two years ago so it’s okay, I mean, I loved him, but he was a right pain in the backside at times!” Ana blurts out.
She swerves between two tree trunks, and for a few seconds it feels as if all four wheels have left the ground, the man sees nothing but black outside the windshield, but suddenly Ana turns in to what seems to be a path.
“WHAT WAS HIS NAME? YOUR BOYFRIEND?” the man yells, mostly just so he could yell something.
“VIDAR!” Ana shouts, then accelerates, the others all grab hold of the doors in panic, so perhaps this isn’t the best moment for her to say:
“HE DIED IN A CAR ACCIDENT!”
8 Hunters
“LOOK OUT! FOR GOD’S…”
The car stops abruptly, the tires clutch desperately at the pavement, the man yells through the wound-down window and blows the horn hard. But the young woman in front of him calmly carries on crossing the street as if nothing has happened. It’s evening down here in the capital, almost no wind, no one knows anything about storms in the forests up to the north. Not even Maya Andersson. Do you want to understand Beartown? Then you need to understand her, the girl who moved away from there.
The driver of the car blows his horn again, more resigned than angry now, and at first Maya doesn’t even notice that it’s aimed at her. She crosses the road even though the light is red and skips up onto the pavement on the other side, weaving between the tower blocks and the roadworks. It took two years to become a different person. A big city person.
The driver of the car yells something at her, she doesn’t hear what, but she turns and notices the first half of the license plate.
* * *
SDS.
* * *
It feels like a whole lifetime since Maya thought about those letters, she’s changed so much. The driver of the car gives up and accelerates demonstratively away and she realizes several seconds later that she’s standing in the middle of the pavement daydreaming, and people are having to elbow their way past. She doesn’t know what’s got into her today, she’s been in such a good mood all evening that she feels… light. She’s on her way to a party with her classmates at the College of Music, carried along on a gentle rush of anticipation, it feels like she’s only just learned not to feel guilty about that. She’s allowed to feel happy, she’s kept telling herself over and over again during the last few months, she’s allowed to have fun. She’ll hate herself for that a few hours from now. She’s always wondered how far her musical talent might be able to carry her, and this is the answer: far enough that she doesn’t even know that the whole of Beartown is on the brink of being blown to pieces while she goes to a party.
She has one missed call on her phone, from Ana, but she can call her later. They live so far apart these days that she doesn’t call her back at once. They’re no longer so closely connected.
She sets off again, quicker, when she first moved here she couldn’t understand why everyone walked so quickly, and now it drives her crazy when she goes back to Beartown and the whole world is so slow there. She’s already forgotten the man in the car, she’s become so good at living in a big city: you have to forget everyone you meet in an instant here, our brains don’t have room for so many impressions otherwise, no one is allowed to mean anything.
In the forests to the north where she grew up there’s a storm, but here she hasn’t even buttoned her thin coat, so blissfully unaware of winds tearing through houses and people. She gets a text from her classmates at the party, and realizes from the punctuation that everyone there is already drunk. She laughs, because every so often it strikes her how remarkable it is: in less than four college terms she has constructed a whole new life. The last time she was in Beartown she accidently said she was going “home” when she came back here. She saw how much that hurt her dad, and now there’s a sort of silence between them. He wasn’t ready to let go of her, parents never are, they just have no choice.
Maya knows that everyone thinks she moved here because she wanted to grow up, but it’s actually the reverse. Kevin took so much from her, far more than she can explain, for him the rape lasted a few minutes but for her it never stopped. He took all the bright summer mornings, all the crisp autumn air, the snow under her feet, laughter that makes your chest hurt, everything that was simple. Most people can’t pinpoint the exact moment when they stop being little children, but Maya can, Kevin took her childhood and when she moved here she tore and ripped and scratched out a little bit of it and reclaimed it. She taught herself to be naive again, because she doesn’t want to be grown-up yet, doesn’t want to live a life with no illusions. Doesn’t want to learn that one day she won’t be able to protect her own children. That all girls can be victims and all boys perpetrators.
In the end it felt as if only her mother really understood why she left. “I’m so angry with you for leaving me, but I’ll be even more angry if you stay,” Kira whispered in her daughter’s ear that last morning in Beartown. “Promise me that you’ll be careful, always, but also that you… oh… that you won’t be sometimes. But not too much!” Maya laughed and cried and hugged her second to last, and her dad last, because he didn’t let go until just before the train started to move. She jumped on board and the forest closed around the windows and then Beartown was no longer home.
She soon got used to the crowds and rush-hour traffic and the freedom offered by anonymity down here. It felt like the answer to everything. “If no one knows who you are, you can be whoever you want,” she told Ana over the phone that first spring. “I don’t give a shit, I like you the way you are already, what do you want to change for?” Ana snapped. Not such a small compliment from a girl who looked at Maya the first time she started to light a fire when they were little and said: “Several million sperm, and YOU managed to win? Unbelievable!!!” Ana will never leave the forest, her roots are deeper than the trees’, Maya finds that both incomprehensible and enviable. Truth be told, she probably doesn’t know where “home” is anymore, she’s even started using quotation marks when she thinks about it. She’s tried explaining to Ana that she feels more like a nomad now, but Ana can’t understand that, a nomad wouldn’t survive a winter in Beartown, if you can’t find a home there you’ll freeze to death before morning. In the end Maya told her: “Here I can be something that I’ve done, but in Beartown I’m just something that happened to me.” Ana understood that.
