The Winners, page 60
Ruth didn’t dare look around because she was so frightened someone would be able to tell what she had been through. She had turned the accusations of the police and her parents that she was nothing but a liar over and over in her mind so many times that she was starting to think they might be true. Perhaps it hadn’t been so bad? Perhaps it was all her own fault?
That night she read all the comments online about Maya. Everyone was saying she was a whore. That she was lying. That they hoped someone would kill her.
Ruth would be turning eighteen that spring, and it struck her that she had to disappear far, far away from here as soon as she possibly could. So she did.
100 Juice glasses
It’s Saturday morning. Kira has gone to her office so she can sit and look out of the window, so Maya almost frightens the life out of her when she suddenly calls from reception. When Kira comes running out, her daughter exclaims irritably:
“How big an office do you actually need? Talk about hubris. You could hold rock concerts in here!”
Kira is so pleased to be surprised and then declared an idiot by her daughter, today of all days, that she gives her an awkward hug, with the result that Maya gets annoyed because she almost drops the whole picnic. Ana had to drive her here so she could bring the flask of coffee, the freshly baked croissants from Peter, and most important of all: tiny glasses to drink orange juice from. She sits on the floor with her legs crossed and eats with her mom, the way she did when she was little and Kira agreed to go camping indoors because she felt guilty about working too much and Maya knew exactly how to exploit that.
“I have to go home after this weekend. Well… I mean… I need to get back to college,” Maya says, hating the fact that she accidentally said “home.”
Her mother just smiles understandingly.
“Does it feel tough?”
Maya nods a little pathetically, the way you only do in front of your mother.
“Yes. It feels like shit. I kind of burned all my bridges with everyone before I came up here. But I should probably go back and just fight. Maybe Benji was right: my songs are worse when I’m happy all the time.”
“I’m sorry it’s so tough, darling,” Kira whispers.
“It’s supposed to be hard, Mom,” Maya smiles.
“I know, I know, but I… I just want you to be happy all the time!”
“Don’t worry.”
“I’m your mother, you can’t stop me!”
Maya smiles in such a way that it’s impossible to know if she’s about to make a joke or start crying.
“I’m sorry that what Kevin did to me almost broke you and Dad.”
Now it’s Kira’s turn to look like she’s about to cry.
“Darling, it didn’t do…”
Maya nods, so grown-up and so strong, so honest and vulnerable.
“Yes, Mom. It did. Your love was like organ donation. You and Dad and Leo gave me pieces of your hearts and lungs and skeletons so I could put myself back together again. And now you hardly have the strength to stand up and keep breathing yourselves. I think about that so often, and I think about all the girls who don’t have you. I feel like I only just managed to survive this. How the hell does everyone who doesn’t have you as their mom even stand a chance?”
* * *
Good luck having a daughter and not going to pieces when you hear that.
101 Graves
Mumble heard everything. Remembered everything. He had stood outside the bedroom at that party while Ruth screamed no and begged Rodri to stop, but Mumble didn’t rush in. The last thing Rodri did before it happened was ask Mumble if he wanted to join in. “Come on! We can share her!” he declared exultantly, but Mumble shook his head in panic and Rodri could see in his eyes that he was on the brink of running off. So his eyes darkened in the space of a second, his fingers shot out and grabbed Mumble by the neck, and he snarled: “Stay and keep watch. If you leave I’ll kill you.”
Mumble just stood there and said nothing, but he heard everything. When Ruth came running out he stepped aside and she ran past and out and away. When Rodri came after her he stopped so close to Mumble that their foreheads touched, and he swore: “If you breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll say you were part of it!”
Mumble’s life continued in something of a daze for the following few months. He trained so hard that he collapsed with exhaustion each night, it was the only way to stop himself thinking, the only way he could sleep. Every time he woke up he hated the light. Hated all the images that came back to him. Hated his weak larynx and his feeble heart.
Rodri called and sent text messages all the time, when Mumble didn’t respond Rodri sent him all the pictures he had taken of Ruth. Mumble deleted them all, but he knew what it meant. It was Rodri’s way of making him his accomplice.
Sometimes Mumble went down to the lake at night and hoped the ice would break beneath him. He almost hanged himself twice but didn’t have the courage. The only thing that helped him forget was hockey, so that became the only thing he did, that was how he got so good at it.
When everything happened between Kevin Erdahl and Maya Andersson, obviously he heard the rumors, like everyone else. The way Kevin got suspended and the whole of Beartown protested. Mumble was a few years younger, his team in Hed was supposed to play a game against the Beartown boys the same age, but it got canceled because the coaches were worried there’d be trouble. Everyone just forgot to tell Mumble, as usual, so he was standing alone at the bus stop to go back home to Hed when Ruth came walking along the other side of the street. They were both equally shocked. Neither of them could breathe.
* * *
Ruth had been to the mailbox in the center of town. She had found a church online that took in “young people with problems,” and needed to mail an application to go and stay there. She was walking past the ice rink and when she reached the bus stop she just froze, just like the night of the party. She hadn’t seen Mumble since then. She didn’t know what she wanted to say to him. She didn’t know if he even thought Rodri had done anything wrong. Maybe Mumble thought she deserved to be raped, like everyone else?
So she plucked up all her courage and shouted across the street: “Can you tell Rodri to leave me alone? He won! No one believed me! Can he just leave me alone?”
Mumble didn’t answer. He just disintegrated inside. Ruth went home and locked herself away, and two days later a woman called from the church. Ruth recited such a magnificent series of lies about her “problems” that the woman started to cry. It was all made up, because they would never have believed the truth.
So Ruth left town, but of course never arrived at that church. By the time everyone realized she had gone abroad, all she had to do was stay away until her eighteenth birthday, then she was free. She had stolen all her parents’ cash before she left home, that was one advantage of having a mother who thought banks were a conspiracy dreamed up by atheists and Devil worshippers, it wasn’t much but it was enough for train and ferry tickets and her first few stumbling steps out into the world. Ruth arrived in a different country, the first few nights were chaotic but she managed to make new friends, it turned out that she wasn’t so peculiar here as she was at home. Unless she was just peculiar in the right way now. She wished she could contact Matteo and tell him, but she didn’t dare, she just counted the months until he too was eighteen and she could go and get him. She met two girls who worked in a café and she borrowed their computer and plucked up the courage to go online once, and found that she had a message from Beatrice. Her old friend said she had made peace with her family but had left the church, met a guy, and got engaged. They were going to buy a little house. She had emerged from the other side of the darkness and was now happy, and Ruth thought then that perhaps it had all been worth it. If one of them was happy. She switched the computer off and never turned it on again. The girls at the café took her to a party. They danced. She had fun, undemanding, shameless fun, for the first time in ages. The world opened up. Everything was possible. For two and half years she actually laughed an awful lot, replacing every rotten little piece of herself like some mythical ship until she had become a new person. Her universe became so large that her childhood started to feel invented. She thought about writing to her little brother a million times but never did. She went to parties and danced, and one night the drugs took her. It happened so fast, in the middle of everything, her heart just stopped beneath the lights on the dance floor. She was dead before she hit the ground. The paramedics told her friends that it happened so fast that it probably didn’t even hurt.
* * *
Matteo will never think of it as his sister dying. Only as her being killed. When he found her diary and realized what had driven her away, realized the pain she was numbing with drugs and what had led to her overdose, he had already made up his mind. He once heard a woman in his parents’ church say: “If you’re planning revenge, prepare two graves.” Matteo’s mom told her off, that woman, because she thought the quote was from the Bible, but it wasn’t. Perhaps that’s why Matteo remembers it.
He’s not planning for two graves now. He’s planning for three. One for Rodri, for his crimes. One for Mumble, for not helping Ruth even though he could have. And one for himself.
* * *
Maya’s story could easily have ended the same way as Ruth’s story. The things that took everything in a completely different direction were so small. A mom who fought, a dad who loved, a brother who was there, a best friend who took on the whole damn world. An old witch who owned a pub, who went into a meeting at the hockey club and spoke in Maya’s defense. And, last of all, a witness who had seen everything and eventually dared to say so out loud.
* * *
That was all. No more than that.
* * *
Amat said what he had seen, and even if Kevin was never convicted or imprisoned for his crimes, the town could no longer close its eyes.
But every time we tell the story now we commit new sins, because we pretend that what Amat did is normal. It isn’t, of course. Hardly anyone does what he did. Mumble is the normal one. He’s the one who’s like the rest of us.
One morning there was a knock on his door in Hed. It was Rodri. There was nothing but recklessness in his eyes as he held a knife to Mumble’s throat and whispered:
“If you tell anyone what happened, I’ll come here and kill you and your mom! Understand?”
Mumble nodded, not even daring to breathe. His mother was doing the crossword in the next room. Rodri’s eyes fluttered for a few moments, then he ran off toward a motorbike out in the street and rode off. The next time Mumble heard anything about him was when someone said Rodri’s brother had ended up in prison and Rodri had moved away. He’d moved to a town several hours away to live in his brother’s apartment.
The last text message he sent Mumble said: Think about what happened to Kevin. No one will believe you. You’re just as guilty as me. We’d both end up in prison, and you’ll never play hockey again.
The following season Mumble got the chance to change clubs, from Hed to Beartown, when Beartown’s goalkeeper, Vidar, died. The first training session with Zackell as coach was the best time of the life Mumble had barely felt he was living. Zackell seemed to understand him. She saw what he could be rather than what he was. Mumble didn’t even know he had any real talent but she turned him into a star. He started to arrive at the ice rink first in the morning, and was last to leave it each night. He trained and he trained. He got real friends for the first time in his life. He got a complete life.
* * *
Does he deserve that? If he can’t be forgiven, can he be… given this? The chance to live a life? Play hockey. Laugh. Maybe even be happy, if only for a few moments. Can he be spared? Is that fair? Is that right?
* * *
He doesn’t know. He’ll never know.
* * *
During the night between Friday and Saturday, once the torch-lit processions are over and everyone has gone home and the towns are asleep, Matteo finds three hunting rifles in his neighbors’ gun cabinet. He searches everywhere for cartridges but can’t find any. So he closes the cabinet, climbs out through the window, and runs home, where he wraps the rifles in his sister’s old sweaters and hides them in his wardrobe. Then he looks online to see how he can get hold of ammunition. Instead he manages to find a forum where someone else has asked the question he’s wondering about: “Can you kill someone with a hunting rifle?” One of the quickest responses comes from an anonymous account: “Of course you can, if you’re an extremely good shot. But much better to get hold of a pistol, any idiot can kill someone with a pistol. Much more effective if you’re going to shoot yourself afterward too. If that’s what you want?” Matteo doesn’t know. He really doesn’t know. Is that what he wants?
After a lot of hesitation he creeps out of the house with his sweater-wrapped treasure under his arm and cycles through the forest, all the way to Hed, slipping over a hundred times but managing not to swear. He doesn’t feel pain anymore. He isn’t even angry. Emptiness consumes him now and that’s a blessing.
His legs are exhausted by the time he reaches Hed, but there are burned-out torches here and there on the ground and the snow has been compacted so much that he can cycle without falling over the whole time, and everything becomes a little easier. As he approaches the scrapyard he sees there are still lights on in the trailers, so he goes ahead and knocks. A bearded man in his twenties comes to the gate, but doesn’t have time to say anything before a voice behind Matteo says:
“We’re closed, yes?”
Matteo spins around and looks Lev in the eye. The man has a black-and-white dog beside him, which squints at Matteo and sniffs the air. Matteo forces his voice to stay steady and says:
“I have three hunting rifles. I’d like to know if you’d take them in exchange for a pistol.”
Lev’s eyebrows sink closer together, his lips narrow, his jaw tightens.
“Pistol? No pistols here.”
Matteo stands his ground with a child’s inability to realize the danger he’s in.
“I was at the game! I saw you in the ice rink! I saw that you had one! I just want… I want to buy one too! Come on! They’re good hunting rifles!”
Lev adjusts the gold chain around his neck and looks very thoughtful.
“And you want the pistol for… what? Hurting someone, yes? Bad idea, my friend. Very bad, little child, okay? Cycle home instead. Sleep. Go to school. Live good life.”
Matteo loses his temper so fast:
“I’M NOT A GODDAMN LITTLE KID! DO YOU WANT TO DO BUSINESS OR NOT?”
Lev stands in front of him perfectly calm, but the look in his eyes makes the fourteen-year-old stumble backward and fall over his bicycle.
“No business. We’re closed, yes?” Lev repeats, and gestures firmly toward the gate behind him, then he holds the palm of his hand in the air as if the next warning would be a slap.
Matteo is whimpering in despair. He yanks his bicycle out of the snow and hurries out through the gate, but slips on a patch of ice and drops all the rifles, and only just manages to stop himself from screaming and crying out loud. He’s thinking that if he didn’t already have a mission he’d have killed Lev too. Because he isn’t some fucking little kid. Everyone will see. Then he hears a different voice, younger than Lev’s, from farther along the fence.
“Psst. Friend? Come here.”
Lev might refuse to sell a pistol to a fourteen-year-old, but not all his employees have the same scruples. Matteo has to go home to Beartown again and fetch all his parents’ cash and his computer, then he exchanges them and the three old hunting rifles for a pistol that he can probably use to shoot his way in and out with.
Early on Saturday morning he finds a moped in the yard of a big detached house that some spoiled teenager couldn’t be bothered to put in the garage like his parents had made him promise to do. Matteo breaks in through a basement window, sneaks up to the hall, and finds the key on a hook. He drives far beyond Hed to the next town, slipping on the ice in the darkness and almost crashing several times. He comes so close to dying.
It’s dawn by the time he rides into the outskirts of a larger town. He waits outside a gray apartment block until he loses the feeling in his fingers and almost can’t feel the trigger. When Rodri comes out, sleepy and with bed-hair, Matteo waits until he’s sitting in his car. For a moment he thinks about holding back and following him, just to see where he’s going. Does he have a job? Friends? Does he have anyone in his life who loves him? Matteo will never know. He rubs his fingers together like crazy to get the circulation back in them, then he walks across the parking lot and waits until Rodri sees him through the windshield. Matteo wants to be sure that his sister’s killer recognizes him. Then he fires three shots through the windshield. He waits until Rodri slumps down and he’s sure that he’s dead. Then Matteo gets back on the moped and drives home to Beartown. It breaks down halfway. He stands at the side of the road waving at passing cars for help, but those who see him don’t stop, and those who might have stopped don’t see him. One of the vehicles that drives past in the other direction is a police car. How differently this story might have ended if it hadn’t just driven past on its way, because the police were hurrying to get to a reported gunfire incident at a parking lot in town. Then Rodri would have been the only person who died.
