The Winners, page 48
Theo understands perfectly well what she’s doing, but like most men in positions of power he can’t resist the opportunity to lecture a woman, so he says:
“We’ve had a full-scale fight between the boys’ team players over in the ice rink in Beartown. Then one of the sponsors had his car vandalized here in Hed. And then there was the tragic accident at the factory that led to more violence, first in the parking lot at the hospital, then another vandalized car in Beartown. I’m concerned that this might be only the start if we don’t do something to pour water on these burning embers.”
“And you’re here with the water, I presume?” the editor in chief wonders skeptically.
He takes a demonstratively slow breath.
“I’ve heard that one of your reporters is digging into the accounts of one of the clubs. Your father, I believe? Naturally, he’s well known to us politicians. A legend, almost! So I want you to know that I have the utmost respect for the free media’s right to hold the powerful to account, in fact I wish you would hold the powerful a bit MORE to account in this district, because there really are one or two stones that could do with being looked under…”
“Feel free to get to the point,” the editor in chief suggests.
“I just want to reassure myself that you’re not starting a witch hunt unnecessarily. Stirring up people’s feelings until they do something violent. Because surely even the news media have a degree of social responsibility, don’t they?”
The editor in chief leans back in her chair. She would have felt more confident if this conversation had taken place a few days ago, but now she seems to be seeing ghosts in the middle of the day and black jackets everywhere at dusk, and in the end that does something to even the most thick-skinned of people.
“I don’t comment on investigations my reporters are working on, but I can assure you that regardless of whether it’s my father or anyone else working on them, they will be correct and fair…”
The politician almost leaps out of his chair with feigned despair at having been misunderstood.
“Of course! Of course! I wouldn’t dream of suggesting what you publish or don’t publish! No, never! I’m just here to point out the importance of… timing. At a time when so many people are worried about what’s going to happen to their hockey clubs, I’m sure neither you nor the newspaper’s proprietor would want to risk being perceived as having… picked a side?”
She notes the way he stresses “newspaper’s proprietor” as a subtle threat, but doesn’t remark upon it.
“No matter what we do, someone will think we’re taking sides. If we write something positive about Hed we get one hundred angry phone calls from Beartown, and vice versa. But as I said, everything we do will be correct and fair. I don’t want to comment further on any possible investigations to a politician, because THAT could definitely be seen as picking a side, couldn’t it?”
Richard Theo smiles contentedly, as if he hasn’t yet decided if they’re going to be best friends or the worst of enemies.
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
“No. But you already knew that.”
“I actually grew up in Beartown, not that you’d guess? I lost my accent when I lived abroad. I suppose I learned to see things as both an outsider and a native when I came back. May I give you some advice?”
“Can I stop you?” she asks with feigned toughness, even though she is actually a little shaken by how hard his expression is when he says:
“None of us should believe that we can cope with everything on our own. We live close to nature here. In the forest and on the lake, you need friends. Plenty of things can happen that we aren’t prepared for. Like recently during the storm, you really wouldn’t have wanted to be alone out there then. That would be foolhardy, not to say dangerous.”
He stands up before she has time to reply. Holds out his hand so fast that it doesn’t occur to her to refuse to shake it.
“Thanks for stopping by!” she says loudly, trying to sound confident.
He squeezes her hand tightly for a long time before nodding toward the letters page in the newspaper in his lap and declaring with a smile:
“That would never have happened when Peter Andersson was general manager of Beartown Hockey, I’m certain of that. He’s an honest man. Someone I and many others have the greatest respect for. The greatest respect.”
The editor in chief hates how obviously perplexed this leaves her, and the way he enjoys seeing it in her eyes. She was prepared that news of the investigation into Beartown Hockey would leak out, but she will never know how Richard Theo found out that she was targeting Peter Andersson. It could have been someone at the council who had noticed which documents her dad had requested, but it could just as easily have been someone here in the office who talked, they’re all reporters but some of them are, first and foremost, from Beartown. She’ll never quite understand how everything and everyone is connected. In that respect, sadly, Richard Theo is right.
You need to be from around here to do that.
78 Team dogs
Adri and Benji stop by Sune’s house. Adri wants to pick up an old set of training jerseys that she’s going to try on the girls’ team. It was never her intention to become a coach, but then very little of life is actually intended. She never planned to breed puppies either, it just turned out that way because she was good at it. Sune got his puppy from her several years ago when he retired, it was Benji who picked it for the old hockey coach, saying: “That one. Because he’s a challenge.” He really was, so now Adri is training Sune how to train a dog, and he’s training her how to train under-seven-year-old hockey girls. The pair of them started up the whole idea of a girls’ team, that was how they found Alicia, they went from door to door around the whole town asking if there were any girls who wanted to play. There’s never been anyone who wanted to play more than Alicia. Secretly, Adri has never felt prouder of any-thing.
“Coffee?” Sune asks, as if there was actually any doubt.
“Is it scorched as usual?” Adri wonders.
“Apologies, your majesty, I didn’t know that such fine folk would be visiting, or I would obviously have chilled the champagne!” Sune replies.
Adri gives him a hug, and she hardly ever hugs anyone. He has no family left in the world, but he has so much family in this town these days that he almost doesn’t have time to shout at them all.
“Have you seen the newspaper?” he asks, nodding toward the open paper on the kitchen table, he and Adri must be two of the last people on the planet who still refuse to read their news on tablets and similar new-fangled nonsense.
“The letters page? Anonymous cowards as usual,” Adri snorts.
Yes, of course she’s seen it.
“What is it you usually say? ‘Just because you’re an idiot doesn’t mean that you’re wrong’?” Sune smiles.
Adri smiles weakly too. Everything the anonymous writer says is actually true: the endless arguments about resources, parents trying to influence team picks, coaches who express themselves like Stone Age men. Adri knows, because she knows what everyone says about the investment in the girls’ team, even though no one dares say it in front of her. When she and Sune set up the team there was no question of getting sponsorship for their equipment, they had to fight the rest of the club just to get time on the ice, but when it came to marketing Beartown Hockey, suddenly it suited everyone to have the girls on every glossy publicity brochure. The hypocrisy sickens her, but she still says:
“I don’t like the phrase ‘patriarchal culture.’ ”
Because there are plenty of men like Sune, the people who write these letters forget that, they forget whose shoulders clubs like this were built on in the first place.
“Just because you’re an old man doesn’t mean that you’re not an idiot,” Sune smiles.
The house is surprisingly quiet, Adri peers into the hall and realizes that’s because the dog is outside and Benji has already settled down in an armchair and fallen asleep. There are photographs hanging on all the walls around him, the really old ones of aging hockey guys have had to make way for all the pictures of Alicia and the dog. There’s even a framed cutting from the local paper about the “team dog” after it was included in the A-team’s photograph.
“Sugar?” Sune calls from the kitchen.
“Nope,” she replies.
“Did you hear that Tails’s car got vandalized in Hed?”
“Yes. And that fight in the rink too. Players from the boys’ teams. I don’t know what they expected when they let Hed train here.”
“Trouble at the factory after that accident too.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“And Hed’s thirteen-year-olds play Beartown’s thirteen-year-olds tomorrow.”
“So I heard.”
Sune says the next thing as if he’s just thought of it, but Adri knows him well enough to realize that the entire exchange has been innocently leading up to this:
“I heard that Teemu’s guys might show up. Things are tense between them and the guys in Hed after everything that’s happened.”
Adri raises her eyebrows above her coffee cup.
“Are those idiots really thinking of bringing their fight to a game between… thirteen-year-olds?”
Sune shrugs his shoulders resignedly.
“Same thing as usual, I suppose: young men and their territory. Oh, maybe I’m just an anxious old man. But I just wanted to mention it, in case you can talk some sense into any of them. Or in case you want to… keep anyone away from there.”
Adri nods firmly. She’s known Teemu Rinnius since they were little, no one can talk sense into him. But that isn’t who Sune means. He wants her to make sure that Benji doesn’t get caught up in the middle of it all. Because he has a tendency to do that, the donkey.
* * *
Bang.
* * *
Bang?
* * *
Bang? Bang?
* * *
Sune has always written things down. For many years it was mostly to do with hockey, of course, short phrases mixed with circles and triangles and lines pointing this way and that. Only when he started to get older did he start writing other things down. What he’s felt and how he feels. It started with physical things, because his doctor asked him to keep a diary of his aches and pains, but the words grew inward. Recently he has been writing a lot about death. He’s reached an age now where that has become unavoidable, not like youth when you can deny it or middle-age when you suppress it. Most of all, Sune writes lists. Instructions for how everything works in the house, which windows stick when the weather is bad and which plug sockets should be avoided if you don’t want an unforgettable experience. Which side of the yard floods in spring and which plants on the terrace have recently been repotted. And the dog, of course. Sune has a whole notebook full of nothing but his veterinary history, his favorite brands of liver pâté, and crystal-clear instructions for the day he dies and the dog has to be taken care of. He tried to give it to Adri not so long ago, but she lost her temper. “You’re not going to die, you miserable old sod!” she roared, then refused to discuss it for a second longer.
It was a declaration of love, as big as she could give.
* * *
Bang?
* * *
Sune has never tried to write about love. Perhaps he should have. Something about how much of it you can experience without ever getting married or having children of your own. How much of his own has been wordless, given to others and reciprocated without a single word of acknowledgment. Hockey can’t speak, of course, it just is. Dogs can’t speak either. They just love you.
* * *
Bang?
* * *
That damn animal. Unmanageable and impossible, wild and crazy, never gives him a moment’s peace, and there’s nothing Sune is more grateful for than that. He was never really prepared for the love he would feel for his dog. That’s what he says, my dog, even though the entire basis for what he feels when it looks at him is the exact opposite: that he belongs to it. That he is its human. It trusts him so much that it sometimes becomes too much for him, because he doesn’t know if he can handle the responsibility. He doesn’t know if he can cope with being so needed. So loved. No matter how many mornings he gets woken by those eager paws on the edge of the bed, that rough tongue on his face, he is still taken aback by its acceptance of him. Dogs are like hockey, a fresh chance every morning, everything is constantly beginning again.
“What are you going to call it?” Adri wondered the very first time he held the puppy, and Sune thought for a long time. He had never thought about a name. It suddenly felt like an immense responsibility, and the little scrap of a puppy could hardly tell him what it thought either. So in the end Sune didn’t chose a name at all, because all his loves have been wordless. He chose a sound. The one he loves most of all. The sound he has heard in the ice rink all his life, and hears against the wall of his house every afternoon now. The sound that tells him that there’s still life, that he’s still here, that he’s still needed by someone.
“Bang,” he said. “I might call him Bang.”
* * *
Bang?
* * *
He goes around the house shouting it now, breathless and with one hand on his chest. He always feels like he’s got indigestion these days. But the dog doesn’t come. After a while Adri senses that something’s wrong and follows him outside, calling as well, so loudly that Benji wakes up and comes running out. Bang may be a stubborn creature, but it’s time for food now and the greedy little dog never misses that.
* * *
BANG? BANG? BANG?
* * *
He’s lying deep in the bushes behind his favorite tree. He looks like he’s sleeping. But his little ears don’t react when Sune steps across the grass, his little paws don’t move, his little heart doesn’t beat. He doesn’t chew his slippers to pieces. He doesn’t bark so that Sune can tell him to shut up. He doesn’t lick his face. He’s no longer there.
79 Tears
The vet sits quietly by Sune’s side in the kitchen for more than an hour. Adri washes every plate and glass in the whole house even though there’s no need, just to keep her hands occupied so she doesn’t break everything in sight. Benji goes out into the forest with dark eyes and comes back with bloody knuckles and a stone large enough for a small grave. One of the neighbors fetches tools so they can carve the dog’s name and dates. Beneath them, Sune asks him to carve the only message he can bring himself to say:
You run on ahead.
Adri and Benji are waiting in the schoolyard when Alicia finishes school. She cries for hours, cries so much that it’s impossible to believe that so many tears could still be inside that little body, cries until the daylight has gone and she’s sitting curled up by Bang’s tree in the darkness, refusing to move no matter what anyone says. Cries until she’s lying exhausted in the snow and Benji has to go out and get her so she doesn’t freeze to death. He knows what death is like for a child, he knows what it’s like to be overwhelmed by emptiness, so he says nothing to console her. He makes no promises about Heaven and tells no lies about paradise. He just does the only thing he can do to help. He puts a stick in her hand and whispers:
“Come on. Let’s go and play.”
They reach the ice rink in the middle of the night. Adri has called ahead so the caretaker can leave a window open for them to climb through. Benji and Alicia play until they can hardly breathe. Then they lie on their backs in the center circle, above the painted image of the bear, and the girl who is almost seven years old asks the boy who is barely twenty:
“Do you hate God?”
“Yes,” Benji replies honestly.
“Me too,” she whispers.
He considers just how irresponsible it would be to tell the seven-year-old that these feelings will get easier to cope with when she gets old enough to smoke really good weed, but he imagines that Adri would break all his fingers very slowly, so he doesn’t. Instead he says:
“It’s going to hurt a hell of a lot for a hell of a long time, Alicia. There will be some grown-ups who tell you that time heals all wounds, but it never bloody does. You just get a bit damn tougher. And it only hurts a tiny bit fucking less.”
“You swear a lot,” she smiles, and that’s the first time the corners of her mouth have moved in that direction all day.
“I don’t fucking swear much at all, you fucking fucker!” he grins.
Then she laughs so much the sound echoes around the ice rink, and then there’s still hope of life. They lie on their backs on the ice and Benji tells her that Adri has a bitch up at the kennels who’s just had puppies, but instead of saying that Alicia can have one of them he just asks what she thinks they should be called. So instead of getting angry and screaming that she doesn’t want any other dog except Bang, she starts thinking. They come up with a hundred names, sillier and sillier, laughing so hard that they can’t breathe. The last fifty all have something to do with “shit,” and Alicia’s favorite is “Shit sandwich,” because that’s the most disgusting and cutest thing she’s ever heard. Benji’s looking forward to the telling-off he’s going to get from Adri when the kid yells that at the next training session.
“Were you scared when you used to play a game?” Alicia asks after a while.
“Always,” Benji admits.
“I sometimes get so nervous that I throw up,” she says.
He reaches one large fist carefully across the bear on the ice and takes hold of her little hand.
